Other contemporaries from that remarkable year at Sydney University included Germaine Greer, Clive James, the film director Bruce Beresford, the poet Les Murray, the historian Robert Hughes, and John Bell, Australia’s foremost Shakespearean actor. It was at the university dramatic society that Beresford first met St John. (He is her literary executor.) ‘I remember being very struck by her verbal ripostes and observations about our associates.’
Honi Soit, the student paper, described her performance as the whip-cracking courtesan Lola Montez as a ‘roly-poly barrel of fun’, a description that would amaze anyone who only knew the older St John, but, as a friend of hers recently observed, ‘You should have seen her when she was young.’
For all her wit and brilliance—Richard Walsh remembers her as the first person he knew who had read Proust—St John had few close friends at university. She said later that she had the ‘somewhat laughable idea that university was a place where nothing happened but a devotion to the truth and an attempt to understand it’. She was unusual amongst that libertarian society for being an avid churchgoer, a lifelong habit, and for having a famous father.
Soon after graduating, St John married a fellow student, Christopher Tillam, who became a filmmaker. They lived in California briefl y, before she went on ahead to England, where her husband was to join her. He never arrived and divorce followed. St John never remarried.
As an outsider, St John was fascinated by the English. She said that England ‘was everything one had hoped for and has continued to be so’:
‘I was brought up on the idea that England was where I came from, in a deep sense where I belonged. Australia was a deviation of one’s essence.’
Though she never had much money, she found the pre-Thatch-er years suited her well enough:
‘I had a succession of little jobs in bookshops and offices. There were plenty of jobs if you got bored.’
But the jobs eventually dried up—except for a couple of days a week working in an antique shop in Church Street, Kensington— and St John realised that her CV ‘looked like a nightmare’. She spent the next eight years attempting to write a biography of Madame Blavatsky, a manuscript she ultimately destroyed.
Her first novel came more easily. She wrote it, in long hand, in six months. The Women in Black is a perfect-pitch comedy of manners set in the ladies’ cocktail section of F.G. Goode’s, a department store in 1950s Sydney. Though St John claimed she could never ‘pull off’ anything autobiographical, it is hard not to see some of her in the protagonist Lesley Miles, the clever girl (‘“A clever girl is the most wonderful thing in all Creation”, said Miss Jacobs’) hoping to go up to university, and who changes her name to Lisa.
A Pure Clear Light followed in 1996 and A Stairway to Paradise in 1999. But her third novel, The Essence of the Thing, is probably her masterwork: ‘a further chapter’, as one of the characters remarks, ‘in the gruesome, yet frequently hilarious saga of the island people who had given the planet its common language and virtually all its games’.
Christopher Potter, 2006
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
MADELEINE AND ME
THE WOMEN IN BLACK
MADELEINE ST JOHN
The Women in Black Page 17