Aunts Up the Cross

by Robin Dalton

  ROBIN DALTON was born Robin Eakin in Sydney in 1920, the only daughter of a respected doctor. She grew up in Kings Cross in a large house, with her parents, grandparents and a great aunt—an experience that formed the basis for her first published book, the much-loved Aunts Up the Cross, 1965. My Relations, an entirely fictitious account, was written when Robin was eight and first published eighty-six years later, in 2015.

  In 1946 Robin left Sydney for London. She married Emmet Dalton in 1953. The couple had two children, and Robin worked as an intelligence agent for the Thai government. When the children were still very young, Emmet died during heart surgery, aged thirty-three. Robin Dalton left the Thai diplomatic corps and lived for a time in Italy and Australia before returning to London. In 1963 she became a literary agent, and before long her list of clients included four Booker Prize winners—David Storey, Bernice Rubens, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Iris Murdoch—as well as Edna O’Brien, John Osborne, Margaret Drabble, playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and movie directors Peter Weir and Louis Malle. Dalton went on to become a successful film producer with credits to her name for Oscar and Lucinda and Madame Sousatzka among others.

  Dalton married writer and film director Bill Fairchild in 1992 after they had spent many years together. In 2013 she was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to writers and the film industry. Robin Dalton lives in London, and spends part of each year at her house in Biarritz, France.

  CLIVE JAMES is an Australian poet, memoirist, novelist, critic, journalist and broadcaster. He has written more than thirty books, including Unreliable Memoirs, Cultural Amnesia and his most recent work Sentenced to Life. Clive James was born in Sydney in 1939 and moved to the UK, where he now lives, in 1962.

  ALSO BY ROBIN DALTON

  An Incidental Memoir

  Dead is a 4-Letter Word (ebook)

  My Relations

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Robin Dalton 1965

  Introduction copyright © Clive James 1996

  Illustrations copyright © Anthony Blond 1965

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders. Where the attempt has been unsuccessful the publisher would be pleased to hear from the copyright owner so that any error can be rectified.

  First published by Anthony Blond Ltd, London, 1965

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2015

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Cover illustration by Dinah Dryhurst

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetting

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System Printer

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication

  Creator:

  Dalton, Robin, author.

  Title:

  Aunts up the cross / by Robin Dalton ; introduced by Clive James.

  ISBN:

  9781925240641 (paperback)

  ISBN:

  9781922253378 (ebook)

  Series:

  Text classics.

  Subjects:

  Dalton, Robin—Childhood and youth.

  Literary agents—New South Wales—Sydney—Biography.

  Kings Cross (Sydney, N.S.W.)—Biography.

  Kings Cross (N.S.W.)—Social life and customs.

  Other Creators/Contributors: James, Clive, 1939– writer of introduction.

  Dryhurst, Dinah, illustrator.

  Dewey Number: 070.52

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Clive James

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Aunts Up the Cross

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  INTRODUCTION

  By the time I at last met Robin Eakin personally, on the sable d’or of Biarritz in the early eighties, she was called Robin Dalton and had been one of the most influential literary agents in London for half her career. We were introduced by our mutual friend, Michael Blakemore, whose talents as a director extend to real life: wherever he is, the stage teems with creative people, and in those years, in Biarritz every summer, there was always enough prominent human material spilling out of his house and down to the beach for everyone present to have begun a roman-à-clef except the novelists, who were already writing about what happened the previous summer. John Cleese and Michael Frayn came to the house to work on films and scripts; Tim Piggot-Smith came there to be obscure for a while after starring as Merrick in The Jewel in the Crown; and that trim form under the big straw hat, watching the children play in the shallows of the advancing tide, belonged to the exquisite Nicola Pagett.

  But there was never any doubt who was the grande dame of the scene. It was Robin. She had a cut-glass accent that you would have sworn had been first turned and chiselled in the nurseries of Belgravia. I was relishing her company long before I realised that she was Australian, that she was Robin Eakin, and that she had once written a classic book. I had never even heard of Aunts Up the Cross, which sounded to me like a feminist tract about capital punishment in ancient Rome. When I read it, I realised that it was a prize example of a genre I had been looking for: the small Australian book that was better written than the big ones, the actual fragment of echt literature with a small ‘l’ that would make me feel less unpatriotic about all those behemoths of Literature with a capital ‘L’ which had been failing to convince me for so long. My party-piece recitative based on the opening page of The Aunt’s Story had been making me feel guilty for years. (I used to get a big laugh on the one-line paragraph ‘And stood breathing’ but I always felt ashamed: perhaps it only sounded ludicrous.) After I read Aunts Up the Cross the guilt vanished. Here at last was the living proof that a civilised, unpretentious, fully evocative prose style had been available in Australia ever since the young Robin Eakin handed in her first school essay. All we had ever needed to do was look in the wrong place. As so often happens, the true art was filed under entertainment.

  To say that Aunts Up the Cross is beautifully written risks making the book sound like a filigree. It is anything but. Social information, moral judgment, comic action and tragic incident are all packed into sentences which have the density of uranium and would also have its weight, if they were not so proportionately constructed that they take off from the page like gliders picked up off a hill by a thermal from its face. Soon you, the lucky first-time reader of this marvellous little creation, will be in the light yet firm grip of its opening paragraph. Before that happens, let us analyse its first two sentences, because there will be no chance to do so once the third sentence reaches back to draw you on. Study this, you upcoming, unreliable memoirists: study this and weep.

  My Great-aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very
slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling fairly fast in the wrong direction.

  It’s the gift that money can’t buy and no amount of literary ambition can ever find a substitute for: the prose that sounds as if it is being spoken by the ideal speaker. Yet the spontaneity is all designed: ‘very slowly’ is exactly balanced against ‘fairly fast’, ‘right direction’ against ‘wrong direction’, and the impetus would be ruined if an editor—as almost any magazine editor nowadays would, especially if asked not to—were to insert an otiose comma after ‘right direction’. The whole book is as precisely calculated as that, with the result that calculation scarcely seems to enter into it. When you get to the end, however, you find that Aunt Juliet and the bus make contact again, and you realise that you have been led a dance—a dance in a circle that might have been choreographed by Poussin, if Poussin had ever lived in the Kings Cross area of Sydney.

  Robin Eakin did live there, in that unlikely Arcadia. When I was growing up after the war, Kings Cross was featured in the newspapers and magazines—not yet subsumed under the collective name of The Media—as Sydney’s Montmartre, Schwabing, Soho and Greenwich Village, a reputation which seemed mainly to be based on the occasional appearance in the streets of Rosaleen Norton weighed down by mascara, sometimes as late as 11.30 in the evening. When Robin Eakin was growing up there before the war, Kings Cross, for her family at any rate, spelt something more interesting than any Bohemia—gentility in reduced circumstances. She grew up in a house full of life; a house full of lives. In that nest of gentlefolk—Turgenev is one of the many names with whom she can be mentioned in the same breath—there was drama on every floor. The Madwoman of Chaillot was being staged on the mezzanine. Les monstres sacrés inhabited the verandah. No wonder she has spent so much of her time in and around theatres: she was born in one. She revelled in it. For her, Heaven was other people. She shames me in that regard. When I look back at my own book of memoirs, I see that its first critics were right: there is only one character in it, and everyone else is a walk-on. Aunts Up the Cross is just the opposite: its only half-realised character is the author herself.

  If the book has a fault, that’s it. When she casually lets slip that she had read all the major novels of Merdith before she was twelve years old, you want to know everything else about her education, and there is nothing like enough about the young love life of a woman so striking in her maturity. Though her evocation of Sydney in the war years ranks with the on-leave passages of T.A.G. Hungerford’s The Ridge and the River, you can’t help feeling that her American service personnel are miraculously well behaved. But the book was written in what was still an age of reticence, and the upside of that is better than the downside: where tact rules, frankness really startles, and no text of such brevity ever had so many flashpoints of shock. Aunt Juliet making contact with the bus is the very least of them. I mention no more because nothing should be allowed to dissipate the economy with which every telling vignette and intermezzo is prepared and resolved. I only say that the moment when the author’s mother causes the death of the plumber is one of the great throwaway paragraphs in modern Australian letters. Read it, and then imagine how Xavier Herbert would have thrown it away. He would have thrown it away like an old refrigerator full of house-bricks: it would have taken him a hundred pages plus.

  Aunts Up the Cross is all over in fewer than 150 pages. A fan’s foreword should show the same regard for brevity, so I will back out with one last unreliable memory before her reliable ones begin. I think it was while we were walking along the esplanade of the Côte des Basques (by which I mean we could equally have been in the drawing-room of her holiday-home maisonette, but I would rather you heard waves in the background) that I upbraided her for having written no more than this one perfect book. She fobbed me off with another drink—all right, it was the drawing-room—and politely neglected to state the obvious, which was that she had written something so sensitive to its own past, and so responsive to its own present, that it contained its own future. All the books she might have written later were already in it. What she was too modest even to think was that all the books the rest of us wrote later are in it too.

  Clive James, London, December 1996

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  My great-aunts, half of whom I never met in their lifetime, have sustained me throughout mine. In childhood with laughter, in adulthood with the recollections that gave birth to this book. Although only supporting characters in the fabric of those recollections, without them the singular nature of my family structure might have lacked the resonance that propelled me into recording it. So the four single aunts who never spoke to me during their lives are here still chattering on, and would not take kindly to the fact that they are doing so through the medium of this little memoir. In fact, they would hate it.

  I came to record them and the rest of the family because of my husband’s death at thirty-three while undergoing one of the first open-heart operations. A doctor, he had published one book under a pseudonym and was at the time halfway through an autobiographical novel based on our marriage. ‘If I die having this operation,’ he said, ‘will you finish the book?’ This seemed logical to me, and easy, so I made the promise.

  After his death I fled wintry England with my two small children, fourteen months and three years, to a calm haven in Italy. I failed to finish Emmet’s book but managed to write a diary for my children should I, too, die young. This is that diary.

  It sat, yellowing in a drawer and forgotten, for seven years. One night, by then an established literary agent in London, I was at a cocktail party sharing a drink with publisher Anthony Blond. ‘Why do you never send me anything?’ he asked.

  Mellowed by champagne, searching my mind for an unencumbered manuscript, I told him I didn’t have any books. ‘All I can think of is a fragment, which could be a play, I think, written by a dotty woman I went to school with.’

  Anthony drove me home, demanded the pages before he left and after finding them and handing them over, I forgot them.

  Two days later Anthony rang. ‘Where is this woman? She’s got to finish this book.’ Panic set in. ‘Oh, Anthony. She’ll never do that. She’ll never write another word. She’s Australian. She’s mad.’ We argued for some minutes, Anthony accusing me of odd behaviour for a literary agent, and finally announcing his intention to publish it as it stood—stands still today—hedging his bets with large margins, illustrations and thick paper, hopefully giving it the illusion of substance; I protesting that he couldn’t possibly publish 22,000 words as a book.

  Eventually, I gave in and signed a deal over a delightful lunch in the garden of his office. Anthony asked me at last for the name of this untraceable, intractable, mad woman. I confessed. I became a reluctant Blond author. I changed no identities, not thinking a copy would ever reach Australia, in my mind carelessly consigning it to the equivalent of a publisher’s bottom drawer.

  I am happy, though, that it was a success for Anthony—it remained in print for a respectable time—did not, I hope, offend too many people, except for the remaining aunts, and that I managed to hide under my maiden name, Robin Eakin, so that all the wonderful writers who seemed to value my opinions as their agent would never see me exposed.

  Fifteen years passed. I began, with some timidity, to confess to a very few people that I had written a book. Safely out of print, my exposure could not be too widespread.

  Among my clients was the dramatist Ben Travers, then in his nineties—three plays running in the West End of London, and still standing on his head for Michael Parkinson in TV interviews—a companion in laughter at our weekly dinners. He asked me about my Australian childhood. I gave him the old book, and he became its devotee. Many London publishers were vying for his autobiography, which I was urging him to write. He reluctantly agreed to do so on one condition—that whoever published his book must also re-issue mine.

  I did not mention, nor c
onsider, this when extracting bids from publishers for Ben’s book and when the best bid came in from Jeffrey Symmons of WH Allen, Ben and I were taken to a clinching and celebratory lunch by Jeffrey. When we rose from the table at its jolly close, flushed with wine and achievement, Ben clutched my hand. ‘You’ve told him the condition?’

  Jeffrey’s glow diminished somewhat. ‘Condition?’ he asked nervously. As Ben disclosed it, his glow disappeared entirely. Poor Jeffrey, desperately embarrassed and in the kindest tone he could muster, said, ‘Robin, I didn’t know you had written a book.’ He saw the Travers manuscript drifting away from him; or encumbered by a nasty adjunct.

  But, miraculously, it appeared that Aunts had been Jeffrey’s snatched bedside reading for some years. Glow back, we all three strolled back to the WH Allen offices for a conference with the marketing manager—Jeffrey now with not one, but two prospective authors. I was asked if I thought the book would have any sales potential in Australia. I had been sent, in addition to a steady trickle of ‘fan’ letters over the intervening years since publication, a copy of an advertisement from an Australian newspaper placed by one Max Harris, seemingly the proprietor of a chain of bookshops, proudly announcing a coup. He had unearthed fifty copies of Aunts Up the Cross—one copy per person only; first come, first served. This appeared ample proof of demand.

  The marketing manager was delighted. Max Harris was not only known to him but was something of a literary guru in Australia and his endorsement would influence the number of copies printed. A letter was dispatched asking him for this. Ben was sent home to write a preface to the new edition, and I to update it in minor details.

  Two weeks later came the reply from Max Harris: ‘Aunts Up the Cross was a good little book in its day but no one would buy a copy now.’ Apologies and embarrassment from Jeffrey; indignation from Ben; a shrug of shoulders from me; and abandonment of publication from the marketing division.