Joyce came in, a thin nervous figure. He walked slowly and gave me a limp hand. I introduced Coralie. Very quietly he offered us seats and himself sat with his back to a window. ‘So you are from Australia? I don’t usually see people but you seemed to have come such a long way, I couldn’t very well refuse you. And you’re not journalists?’
We immediately felt like imposters. Joyce evidently thought we had just arrived in Europe. We hadn’t said we were not journalists but we had promised not to write articles. Joyce went on: ‘I’ve suffered so much from journalists. Scandal-sheet journalists, I mean.’ He followed this up by asking numerous quiet questions about Australia. ‘What is the Australian accent? It always bothers me when they talk about it.’ His own speech was the low-pitched Irish conversational manner with a quiet brogue. Joyce was then fifty-five years of age. He had shortish silver-grey hair brushed back from a low forehead. He had fine small hands and thinnish pointed knees, his small feet in slippers. He wore a red velvet jacket. His eyes – we could not see them. He wore one pair of glasses at a time and at intervals put another larger yellowish pair over the first pair.
I asked did he write every day?
He replied yes, if he was well enough. But of course … his eyes. He’d had nine operations, treatment from forty doctors. He said it was all due to the rheumatic fever he’d had years ago when one eye became infected. No one could do anything until he found a specialist in Zurich, Alfred Voight, who had saved his sight. Joyce said he went every year to see him. But he couldn’t see very well. ‘I cannot see you, sitting opposite me.’
His tone was factual, not self-pitying. With the inadequate empathy of the young and healthy, I asked: ‘How can you go on writing?’ We knew that he was then engaged on an enormous work later published as Finnegans Wake. Joyce told us he had special attachments for his spectacles and sat at a lighted table. ‘Can you dictate your work?’ I pressed.
Joyce’s reply was definitive: ‘No-one would stand for that.’ He seemed quietly conscious of his notoriety and wryly amused by it. He told us what he called his ‘book of so-called poetry’ (Pomes Pennyeach) had been published in a luxury edition with illustrated manuscript initials by his daughter. It was printed on Japanese incandescent paper. ‘One newspaper said it was printed on “indecent” paper. Probably influenced by me. Quite appropriate anyway.’
From a glass-fronted cabinet, he brought out a copy of this edition and showed it to us. The cabinet, so Joyce told us, contained copies of all the editions of Ulysses. We looked at some of the translations and at an edition illustrated by Matisse. I asked him questions about other modern Irish authors. He had read very little of them but, of course, it was hard for him to read and he found being read to ‘very unsatisfactory’.
I asked Joyce was he troubled by the censorship, banning and other ill-treatment of his books. (In America, editions of Ulysses had been burnt by order of the Post Office for alleged obscenity.) He said: ‘No, not bitter. Just bored. Ten years before Dubliners could be published, that little book. Well, well.’ It was clear he did not want to pursue the subject.
He seemed a man in eternal pain and, without complaining, he communicated his pain to us. We got ready to take our leave. In an unobtrusive way he helped me into my coat. A little reluctantly he agreed to autograph the copy of Ulysses we had brought with us – two thick paperbound volumes. When we left Paris for London by Hercules plane, I had the volumes deeply secreted in my overcoat pockets, hoping they would not be discovered by the British Customs Officers. Joyce died five years later. Only then did we permit ourselves to write about him.
Joyce was living an expatriate life and so were we. What determines a person’s loyalty to a particular country? Whatever self-indulgence or social justice says, the homing instinct is strong. Here we were, myself born of a Welsh father and an English ‘Geordie’ mother, Coralie born of German and English forebears and looking so German at times that French people insisted she was one! Well, such ancestry gave us excitement in the traditions of England, Wales and Germany but never for a moment identification with their peoples.
We’d been born in Australia, our first score of years spent there, absorbing with our mother’s milk the shapes, colours, tastes, smells, sounds and feel of those environments, the timbre of voices, the look of faces, the taste of grass and sweat and the slant of light on buildings. And Australia was the place of a thousand early growing pains, emergent curiosities and joys, of friendships, family stresses and laughter, adolescent ambitions, dejections and dreams. If we lived a century and stayed seventy of those years abroad, Australia would still be our psychological matrix, calling us back to its warmth and light and expanses as it did every exiled Australian we met in Britain.
If we went back, we’d have the reward of merging with a community where we had a right to be, where our kind of work needed to be done, where the emphasis was not on the storied past of the few, where an entrenched hierarchical form of society did not exist, at least in the same degree as in England. The ordinary man had a definitely larger say and larger place in the sun, tasks of planning and building things were going on despite the Depression and a hundred other setbacks – just as it would for the whole of our lives to come.
There were other pressing emotional needs. Coral and I had been together through thick and thin but true homemaking lay in the future. Babies had hardly been in our minds – except how not to have them. But parenthood was another buried urge that would not be endlessly denied. We had given up our plans to drive our tiny car all the way across Europe, through Asia Minor to India and on to Burma and Malaya where it could be shipped to Australia. The Automobile Association had strongly warned against border troubles as well as shocking roads.
In London there’d been goodbye parties and lunches and the last horrific sleepless all-night final packing up. For sentiment’s sake we decided to devote our last evening to a play. And what more appropriate than John Gielgud’s lyrical mounting of Romeo and Juliet with himself and Peggy Ashcroft in the leading roles. Parting is such sweet sorrow, indeed. But even before interval we could no longer keep our attention on the play. There was so much to do before a friend was calling in the early morning to take us to the station.
The bleary dawn light smeared the window. Our friend, Buck, was waiting below with the car. Half an hour later we were meeting Eileen Joyce, the Australian concert pianist, on the grimy platform and being farewelled by a group of her friends and a few of ours. We were travelling with Eileen to Fremantle on the other side of the world, three West Australians sailing home.
Returning exiles: we were a mixture of confusions – glorious anticipation of seeing familiar faces and places but also eroding doubts about whether we could stand up to the unspoken Australian challenge: Come on, show us what you’re worth.
Well, we’d take the chance and see.
12
Coming Home with Eileen
Those years in London (from 1930 to 1936) were central to my parents’ lives. They honed their craft – Coralie established her name as a journalist, Les his as a drama critic – and they made the miraculous discovery that they could support themselves by writing. They learnt, too, that they could live on very little money and still have a rich and interesting life. They also found that, no matter how stimulated they were by the culture and history of Europe, their own faraway country and their families always tugged at the heartstrings. In her years overseas, Miles Franklin used to greet other Australians with, ‘Smell the gum leaves!’ Coralie declared: ‘I never identified with England, and never felt I belonged to it or it belonged to me.’ Australia remained, as Les described it, their ‘intrinsic psychological centre, of the future as well as the past,’ calling them back to its physical light and colour, its different lifestyle, its challenges as well as satisfactions.
However, there is no denying that their separate and shared experiences were invaluable. Les attended hundreds of theat
re performances as a full-time dramatic critic, usually reviewing three or four plays a week. And, a rare experience in the journalistic world: his copy was never edited.
West End theatre was at its zenith with actors of high calibre – Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Sybil Thorndike and Peggy Ashcroft – working there. Les met them all as a representative of his paper. Paul Robeson came into his office one day seeking someone to write him a new play, as roles for Afro-Americans, even a singer as famous as him, hardly existed. He had already played a season as Othello.
With his work in theatre, Les rubbed shoulders with famous playwrights, too. He sat next to WB Yeats at the premiere of TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. He met Eliot on another occasion when he was talking about his poetry. Les was able to ask him a few key questions. Eliot told him: ‘It takes a robust character to be a poet – to survive either over-adulation or over-neglect.’
Both my parents determined to meet as many notable literary figures as possible. No doubt my father’s role as a theatre critic gave him the added cachet to gain entrance to writers’ homes – for this was their preferred way of conducting interviews. Maybe what tipped the balance was that they were two keen young journalists from a distant colonial outpost, a rarity in the upper echelons of the literary world, and so much more appealing than some cynical hack from a London newspaper. There were occasions when their subject was just as interested in interviewing them. When Leslie met sixty-year-old Somerset Maugham for ‘a two-hour chat’ and at the end of it asked him to inscribe one of his books, the famous playwright wrote in it To Leslie Rees, in recollection of a heart-to-heart talk. Although Virginia Woolf ignored my mother’s entreaties for a meeting, Coralie scored a long interview with the renowned actress Merle Oberon. They also met Bertrand Russell, HG Wells, JB Priestley, JM Barrie and Cecil Day-Lewis.
Coralie Clarke Rees’s newspaper writings had always shone a spotlight on any Australians making their names abroad. She’d written feature articles on expatriate writers Henry Handel Richardson and Mary Grant Bruce after visiting them in their homes for long conversations.
Then there was Eileen Joyce – ‘the most important pianist whom Australia has given to the world for a generation. In London her name is now coupled with those of Horowitz and Solomon, Myra Hess and Rubinstein.’ My mother had at least twice interviewed Eileen Joyce, a prodigy pianist who had left her home in Western Australia as a teenager and, without knowing any of the language, had studied in Germany for four years.
Success in London
From Coralie Clarke-Rees
The Western Mail of 8 February 1934
LONDON, Jan. 4. – Seven years ago a young girl between fourteen and fifteen years of age left Perth for Europe to carve herself a career as a pianist. After a lot of solid concert and broadcasting work in England during the past three years, she has at last leapt into what seems the beginnings of fame with the making of two gramophone records a few months ago.
Eileen Joyce attributes the crisp individuality of her finger work which seems her outstanding trait as a pianist to Teichmüller, the master under whom she studied in Leipzig for four years after leaving Perth. ‘He gave me my fingers,’ she said. For her age, she is easily one of the most brilliant pianists at the moment in England, Myra Hess and others of established reputation being nearly twice her age.
Her chief points of advice to other young musicians who are hoping to leave Australia for further study in Europe are: ‘Do not go to a foreign country, like Germany, without knowing something of the language. Do not leave home un-chaperoned (particularly if the student is a girl under the age of twenty). Bring plenty of letters of introduction with you; and don’t forget that your Conservatorium fees are only a small part of the expense of launching oneself abroad as a musician.’
In 1935, a full-page feature article in The Broadcaster (Perth) announced:
EILEEN JOYCE ‘will return still unspoiled’
by Air Mail from Coralie Clarke Rees
LONDON, Dec. 21. – In the two years that have elapsed since I last met this brilliant West Australian pianist, Eileen Joyce has scaled many more dizzy rungs on the ladder of musical reputation. Few of her achievements, however, had given her greater pleasure than her recently signed contract with the Australian Broadcasting Commission for a tour of her home continent during the middle months of 1936. She leaves London at the end of February, will arrive in Perth at the end of March and will give her West Australian broadcasts and concert performances during the first weeks of April.
She was wearing a pair of grey flannel slacks and a navy blue woollen jumper when she welcomed me into the ‘workroom’ of her Hampstead flat last night. ‘Excuse the trousers,’ she said. ‘They look a bit “arty” but actually I wear them for warmth. My knees get so cold as I sit practising hour after hour.’
‘Do you still practise seven hours a day?’ I asked.
She nodded and went on to tell me the life of a concert pianist, particularly a successful concert pianist, is by no means ‘jam’. ‘People scarcely realise,’ said Eileen Joyce, ‘that it’s a terrifically hard life – at the moment I feel that it’s too hard for a young girl. I feel tired out. I’m giving the first performance in England of a Shostakovich Concerto at a Promenade Concert under Sir Henry Wood on January 4, I’m scheduled to make twelve records during January, there are my visits to leading public schools all over the country and there’s my Australian tour for which I have to prepare twenty different programmes.’
She is looking forward to her Australian tour with just a modicum of delicious apprehension. ‘Do they know much about me?’ she asked. ‘And will they like me?’
These nervous little questions at the end of the interview gave some clue to the fragile nature of Joyce’s self-confidence and portended some of the problems that would emerge on the tour. Apparently Joyce suffered some sort of breakdown after the Shostakovich performance and there was a flurry of telegrams between Australia and London about the likelihood of cancelling her impending Australian tour. According to her Australian biographer, Richard Davis:
the sea voyage, the thought of being reunited with her family and friends and the prospect of a triumphant tour of her homeland (which the ABC was already tipping) dispelled memories of her recent illness and raised Eileen’s spirits but what she did not realise was she was sailing into a storm.
How Coralie came to be engaged as Joyce’s secretary and troubleshooter for the Australian ‘storm’ and how much she was privy to the dramas that preceded it has remained untold. Did these two twenty-eight-year-olds negotiate a deal at the time Coralie went to Eileen’s home for that interview in December, just months before both were leaving the country? Though very different personalities they had plenty of common ground as West Australians triumphing home after carving out success abroad. Privately, each was driven by longing for family and the prospect of that joyous balm – endless sunshine.
But while other encounters with notable people in London and Europe were told and retold by Coral and Les – both within the family and for the wider public, every rich detail mined and mined again for broadcasts, lectures, articles and eventually books – some aspects of this saga remain a mystery. Besides a few published articles before and during the tour, little mileage was made of my mother’s unique contract to escort and organise Eileen Joyce as she displayed her virtuosic technique and prodigious musical memory around the country.
Coralie was at Eileen’s side on land and sea: for the four-week voyage from London to Fremantle, for the four Perth concerts plus a flurry of engagements, then as she toured across the nation. The red-haired Eileen and the blonde Coralie, both remarkable for their beauty, caused quite a stir wherever they travelled and were constantly written up in the papers as well as in The Australian Women’s Weekly. But why the blanket of secrecy afterwards?
Imagine my delight when, just a few years ago, I unearth
ed from a dusty old manila envelope among my parents’ papers a pile of letters in my mother’s baroque hand. They were still in their envelopes with postmarks from three Australian cities, all in the months of April and May 1936, and all addressed to Les at ‘The Commodore’, his temporary Sydney digs in inner-city Darlinghurst. I hoped these missives would shine a torch on the dark corners of the Eileen Joyce tour. Carefully opening them (it seemed they had not been touched for nearly eighty years and could easily disintegrate) and piecing together their sequence with the aid of a 1936 calendar, I was not disappointed.
My mother’s letters reveal how much she was challenged by working with the unpredictable Joyce. Her revelations to my father show a brave, practical and determined young woman, sometimes raw with the pain of loneliness but using all her resources to fulfil a challenging assignment. The correspondence also explains the need for her steadfast discretion about Eileen Joyce.
Eventually I located my father’s bundle of letters to her during that period and found they documented his meetings with the literati of Sydney. They also record his immense frustration in working for The Sydney Morning Herald, a comedown after the heady literary and journalistic life of London. He relates these experiences to Coral with ebullient style and places them in counterpoint to his own loneliness. He could not bear to be alone. At the same time, he abhorred his dependence on her. It surprised me to find how insecure he was about their relationship, how jealous and possessive in their first long separation after six years.
The letters between Coral and Les are the intimate accounts of two young writers, separated but ‘together, alone against the others’. They span the period 17 April to 2 June 1936.
~
It was 27 March 1936. The SS Moreton Bay was about to arrive at Fremantle docks. The sun was bouncing off the water. For the homing trio on the deck, Coralie, Eileen and Leslie, watching their familiar coast loom into focus was a beautiful sight. Waiting on the wharf, Mary Elizabeth Rees, a usually restrained woman, could not contain her excitement. Her boy, her youngest, was coming home. He had left as a twenty-four-year-old journalist on The West Australian. Now he was returning as a thirty-year-old, an accredited member of the London Critic’s Circle. Even better, Les was to be under her roof again, if only for a short while.
A Paper Inheritance Page 10