Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  What we didn’t know that night, but would in the morning, was that back in Sydney the younger of his sons was spinning out in what would prove to be the first bipolar episode that would land him in hospital and cast a cloud across his and his father’s sky.

  One of the things Jeremy and I did well together was travel. Jeremy enjoyed the planning, the maps, the research, but when it came to the moment of packing and leaving the house, he baulked. I put it down to being sent away to school too young. Like my father, like the boys of our class and generation, he was sent to board at seven. A fastidious chap with no interest in sport, he was a target, as my father had been, for the bullies. The boys in Jeremy’s dormitory took to snatching the plug from the bath or the basin and turning off the taps, so that he would go for days, even weeks, without being able to wash. Yes, getting Jeremy out the door was taxing, but the odd thing was that as soon as we were on the plane he was cheerful again, looking ahead, and when we arrived wherever it was we were going, I’d be the one who’d think, What now? but Jeremy had it sorted, whatever it was that needed to be sorted. In Hong Kong the hotel room we’d booked through the travel agent was so unpleasant there was a spring sticking up through the mattress. I said we could make do, put towels over the spring, sleep around it, but the next morning Jeremy was up at dawn and before I’d surfaced had found a better deal in a much better hotel – close enough to wheel our bags − and a comfortable room with a view across a park. We had a fine breakfast that day. Between us, we made good travel companions, in Australia, in Europe, in the Pacific. Even as the skies darkened at home, travelling, elsewhere, was a realm we made our own.

  There is a lot I cannot say about the years I spent with Jeremy. Or rather a lot I will not say. If I were a Knausgaard I could write a thousand pages on living in proximity to mental illness, but there is a life outside the page for the young man, who is making his way to a clearer future – and that, as Jeremy would say when tensions rose, trumps everything. So travel, when we could, was our escape, our balm, and we could feel ourselves back on the road we’d thought we were travelling when we’d stood by the river in Adelaide, congratulating ourselves on our good fortune. I’d published Stravinsky’s Lunch by then, which I’d begun as Patrick was dying, part of my long quest to understand that vexed question of love and independence. Through the lens of two most different artists – Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith – the question had morphed into the conundrum of love and art. Could a woman have both? Must her art and her life of the heart be always in tension? The irony, I realise now, is that exactly as I finished Stravinsky’s Lunch, certain there was a way through the conundrum, I found myself up against it in a way I was not prepared for. I’d thought of it in terms of whether a woman could write – or paint – and have the support of a lover, a partner; an equal relationship. Well, Jeremy liked my work. He didn’t always agree: I could tone it down, make it less personal, which I didn’t; and we argued, amicably for the most part, and he kept abreast of my research. He read his way through the novels of Stella Bowen’s lover, Ford Madox Ford; he came with me to galleries and archives; he read my drafts paragraph by paragraph. And when his son fell down and Jeremy needed my support, loyalty switched his way as we did what needed to be done. At night he wept, and in the morning he was still filled with the thoughts that had kept him from sleep, lamenting for his son, loved and a stranger both. I cooked, and I fed them; I took Jeremy for walks; I read up on treatments and therapies not only for his son’s condition, but also for his, as the depression he’d held at bay, more or less, rose to crush him. And still I cooked, and still I made phone calls, and I did it willingly, certain we’d find a way through. Somehow, some way.

  For the first time in my writing life I was late for a deadline, a small piece of writing, and I had to ring up and apologise, the fee gone, and I was never asked to write again for that editor.

  Mornings, I said to Jeremy. That’s all I ask, uninterrupted mornings. For him it was another abandonment.

  I had first encountered Stella Bowen at an exhibition in Melbourne.58 It was 1993 and I was there visiting Helen and Murray, who were married by then and had moved to Helen’s home town. Murray came with me to the exhibition, maybe Helen too, I don’t recall; the significance of the memory is that standing in front of Stella Bowen’s 1928 Self-Portrait, Murray said, You should write about her. Born – like him – in Adelaide, Stella Bowen had gone to England just before the First World War began, and during those dark days she’d begun a ‘long intimacy’ with the writer Ford Madox Ford. She’d painted the self-portrait ten years after the war ended – as she and Ford separated. It was an image of herself, I’d write, ‘that acknowledges the pain of parting but refuses to be reduced to it’. Ford was an H. G. Wells figure, and to a modern eye even less attractive, his mouth slack in photos, the result of being gassed in the war. Like Wells with Rebecca West, Ford took Stella seriously, this young Australian woman fresh from art school in Adelaide. And like Wells, he treated her badly. But that was not the story she told. True, though she bore him a child, she could not marry him – there was a past wife and no divorce; true, she was wounded when he moved on to another, and by the affair that preceded the final break. Yet she refused to speak ill of him, or to regret an intimacy with a man who listened, she said, and from whom she learned a great deal and by whose side she became the artist she was. ‘Her eyes,’ I wrote, ‘tinged red, meet ours in a challenge which invites not the admiration of the world but its attention. This, they say, is the condition of the woman as artist. Woman? Lover? Mother? Artist? The distinctions are false. A woman is all of these, and reduced to none. To be an artist is not a matter of surmounting, or refusing, or even of juggling, but of bringing the values and knowledge of heart and belly into the work, into the image, into the paint.’59

  I wrote that during the early years of my life with Jeremy. In retrospect it seems naïve in its confidence, yet at the time it was a realisation that had been hard to reach. Do you hear the echo of Dorothy Green? I do. She died in 1993, the year I first saw Stella Bowen’s self-portrait. I went with Hilary to the funeral that was held at the chapel at Duntroon, the military academy in Canberra where Dorothy had taught after many years of teaching at ANU. When I knew her well enough to ask why she’d made that move, she’d said that it was work that mattered, teaching literature – the humanity of reading – to young men who’d go on to lead our forces and make military decisions. Her funeral was on the day American ground troops went into Iraq in the first Bush war – one of those strange synchronicities that are no more than coincidental, but can carry the weight of a life. Her coffin left the chapel on the shoulders of uniformed cadets, and I’d swear, and so would Hilary, that one of them was close to tears. Afterwards, after the wake and the speeches that spoke of her as poet and teacher, writer and mentor, Hilary and I went to the National Gallery. We were sparing in the paintings we saw, choosing those that resonated with Dorothy; among them was Grace Cossington Smith’s Interior with Yellow (1962), the artist’s bedroom with a single bed and wardrobe mirror. Then we sat in the café, looking out into the trees, talking about Dorothy and the lives of women who’d gone before us, and whom we could glimpse only through the legacy of their work.

  Looking back, I sometimes think I wrote Stravinsky’s Lunch in answer to Dorothy’s challenge when I was fortifying myself with all those anecdotes for my city of women. If so, it was there that I answered – or had a go at answering – her question about what matters when we tell the lives of women. What matters in their lives? What matters in our telling, our reading? In the work they bequeath to us?

  There were some who thought Grace Cossington Smith was mismatched with Stella Bowen; to me she was the perfect complement, exactly because she was such a very different woman, and artist. Unmarried and with no children, Grace Cossington Smith had lived, or so it was said, without love. But such a notion is, or can be, and in her case was, more a matter of blindness, seeing only the spinster, and not
the lived experience of loves which come, as we should know but mostly forget, in many and unexpected forms. She did, however, paint one of the great paintings of a woman living with the absence of love. It is The Sock Knitter, painted while she was still at art school in 1915, the year of Gallipoli and that particular wartime slaughter of young Australian men.60 The sitter was Grace’s sister Madge, knitting socks for soldiers, not for the babies she’d never have, a retrospective observation, I know, but Madge, even then, was suffering the fate of a young middle-class woman constrained by circumstances, both domestic and world-political. She would become one of those ‘superfluous women’ Vera Brittain wrote of; unlike her sister Grace, there was no redemption, no art, no grace, nothing but a curate in England to attach her hopes to, and he married elsewhere.

  For Grace, not marrying was as much a matter of choice as circumstance. It wasn’t that she made the best of it, or that her art was the compensation of a woman who found herself superfluous. She found a way of living a rich life of art and work and friendship in what has too often been seen as the narrow confines of a house on the northern edge of Sydney; a full life that paid attention to what lies beyond consciousness and convention – a life revealed in an image of a jug, a vase, a window opening onto trees. It was not a life without love, or without passion, and while we can’t know – and don’t need to know – what that meant in the sex-conscious terms of our world, I made the argument from letters and paintings that her emotional orientation was towards women rather than men. Preposterous was the response from more than one critic. Jeremy was not surprised; he, too, thought I’d overreached. But actually nothing about Grace Cossington Smith is preposterous except for a view of her that insists on her spinsterhood. Dreadful word.

  ‘Emotion without knowledge is the mother of all sentimentality,’ Grace wrote and I quoted. ‘Knowledge without emotion is cold and sterile.’ It is a way of speaking against the split, the many splits, that Stella Bowen also spoke against: thinking and feeling, inner and outer, public and private. Again the echo of Dorothy Green, and of Poppy, too. Both long dead, I mentioned neither in my three pages of acknowledgements. But I did thank Jeremy, ‘who barely knew me before this book grew to become a presence in both our lives, and who showed me that there need not always be a conflict’. It’s a foolish woman, I’ve heard it said, who boasts of her happiness.

  Towards the end of the editing, when there was much to check, pages to be reconsidered, Jeremy, himself an editor, had been helping me for days when his sons came home early from a trip away visiting their mother in the country. His kitchen table was covered in piles of pages that couldn’t be easily moved without losing track of where we were. By the fridge was a table brought in from outside and on it reference books lay open in precarious piles. ‘Books suck,’ one of the boys said as we cleared the table, as fast as we could, but still too slow from their point of view, hungry, of course, from a long train journey. By then I was living nearby, along a laneway lined on one side by the wheelie bins of the houses on the street below, and on the other a high bank up to the back gardens of the houses on the street above. When I first moved there, in 2001, to that small house at the end of the lane where I still live, the bank was a tangle of lantana with old tyres and other junk thrown into it. Since then it’s been cleared by a woman from one of the houses above, and replanted into a garden of frangipani, lime and lemon trees; lavender, lilies, bottlebrush; salvia, pumpkin and parsley. Early on I helped her plant out a row of small rosemary plants – what a border they’d make, full and bushy so that one day everyone would be able to pick a sprig. But no, we lost almost all of them in a single night – gone, dug up, stolen. Another neighbour made a sign asking for RESPECT, for the community and for the plants. I said it’d do no good, this hippy-dippy respect business; if you were into stealing plants you’d just scoff. I wanted a sign that said THIS BANK IS LAND MINED. It was taken as a joke, which it was, I suppose. Sort of. Now, a decade later, everything’s well enough established to be safely rooted into the ground; we don’t have thefts like that, though drivers have been seen getting out of huge shiny cars and hacking off a branch from an overhanging frangipani or soft, whispery bottlebrush.

  The first time Jeremy came with me to the Pacific was in September 2001, just after 9/11. His pipe knife, a blunt object for scraping out the pipes he insisted on smoking, was taken off him for the flight to Fiji – our first experience of the new security regimes. We were going not on holiday but to visit old friends from PNG days, to collect diaries and research materials I was being loaned, and to visit the University of the South Pacific’s Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture on the hill above the campus. Poet and writer Epeli Hau’ofa, who’d been a tutor at the University of Papua New Guinea with Nick, was the centre’s founding director, a large Tongan with a smile to match. It was he who’d shifted thinking about the Pacific, Oceania, from a view that saw specks of land as islands separated by a vast ocean, to a way of seeing the encompassing ocean as shared, holding the people of its islands together.61 The same shift of perspective could, of course, apply to the rainforest with its scattered villages, but that was a thought for later when I tried to conceive of Ömie not as separated but conjoined by their mighty forests. At the Oceania Centre, Jeremy and I spent many hours sitting at the edge of its wide, open-sided studio, watching a choreographer at work with his dancers, talking to singers and musicians, artists and writers: a new generation of Islanders reinterpreting their world, as Epeli had done in his youth thirty years before. There was the sophistication of those who’d travelled and studied in Auckland, or Sydney, or New York, and yet the sensibility, the power of everything we saw, was based in a history and culture that were entirely of the Pacific, that resilient ocean of islands. For me, it was the first move towards a return that would take me back to PNG, and it was good, very good, to have Jeremy there, responding with a full heart to the strong island rhythm of music and poetry.

  Mike Monsell-Davis, the friend who was lending me his diaries, had also been at the university in Port Moresby when Nick and I were there, but unlike most anthropologists – who base themselves away, returning for research and conferences – Mike had lived in PNG for the better part of thirty years, keeping a diary that tracked not only events in his life, but the profound changes that came with Independence. For someone like me, who wanted to write about that place and that time but had lived thirty years away, the diaries were an invaluable and generous loan.62 There was serious talk to be had between Mike and me, about the terms of this loan, and there was a lot to catch up on, a lot for me to learn that took me way past the urge simply to reminisce. As dusk fell and we talked on into the night, the conversation would shift into the banter of friends. It turned out that Mike and Epeli, like Jeremy, had been born at the start of the Second World War, which meant they could remember the planes. Jeremy had watched for German bombers above Newbury, while Epeli had run along the beach at Samarai – an island off south-eastern Papua where his father was a missionary – watching fighters tumble out of the sky in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Mike wasn’t into the insignia of aircraft, but the other two, literary men both, advocates of culture, were laughing with pleasure as they outdid each other with the names and makes of war planes they’d seen as children.

  It was a good trip for all that it’d been more than usually exasperating getting Jeremy on the plane, not so much because of 9/11 as his stubborn prejudice against palm trees. He hated the way they were planted in the centre of Sydney roundabouts, and the way the ones in a neighbouring garden dropped branches onto the roof of his kitchen. As prejudices go, I suppose it was minor, and the intimacy between us was sufficient to accommodate it; I could laugh when I saw him see them in place, where they belonged, liking them as I’d hoped he would. He drank beer with Mike and Epeli under them, and when we weren’t at the university he sat beneath them outside our hotel room – where at night we listened to news from the BBC World Service – and read William Trevor and Robert Lo
uis Stevenson.

  The second time Jeremy visited a land of palm trees was when he flew up to Moresby in 2004 to meet me after the Ömie trip, and never had I been so pleased to see him. He came through from customs and I leaned into him, his hand on my head as I breathed him in. Safe. I’d spoken to him from Popondetta while he was still in Sydney so he knew that our walk down the mountain had run us into trouble that had come in the shape of an arrest. We spoke briefly, given the distance and the dollars ticking over, and apart from anything else, of which there was a lot, I was concerned about him coming to join me, especially as Oliver, his elder son, was coming too, with his girlfriend of the time. We were going to Tufiin the fjords of Cape Nelson – different people, different history, different ways – but still I was unnerved. Endangering Jeremy was one thing, but endangering the young – that wasn’t on. What do you mean arrested? Jeremy asked. By police? How? Why? It makes no sense, he said, as I tried to condense what had happened into a few short sentences; it wasn’t until he was there with me that I could tell him the whole complicated story.

  After the meeting of the duvahe and another round of dancing, though not all night this time, we’d walked down to the village where Grahame and I had spent our peaceful interlude. People from every clan and every village came with us, a long line of us snaking through the forest, Thompson and me at the rear, patient Pauline walking with us. The forest seemed particularly rich that day, the canopy protecting us from the sun, intact spider webs beside the path telling us, Pauline said, that no enemies had been this way. When we arrived back at the village, a journey that was only slightly easier coming down, the guesthouse had the familiarity of home. Frogs were croaking, smoke drifting up from the cookhouse roof, children running ahead to call out that we were there. Thompson settled into position on the veranda, and after a meal of yams and pumpkin tops, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the virtuous. All was well; I’d squared up to the rigours, hadn’t died on the climb; I was at ease with the women around me, and with my two travelling companions. The task was done, and as to whether we’d made the right decision, what other path could have been taken with the build-up of the last weeks? Whether we would meet the expectations was another matter. There would be nights back in Sydney when that anxiety would keep me awake, but that night in the village I slept easy.