Mug Shots

by Barry Oakley

  Twenty-four Renny Street had quite a literary history. Tim Curnow was the manager of the Curtis Brown literary agency, and its office was here. At various times it was visited by Patrick White, Douglas Stewart, Ruth Park and Xavier Herbert. Curnow recalled his wedding party there in 1974, when White gave them a frying pan. Also present were Frank Hardy and Donald Horne. ‘They had an altercation outside the dunny, each threatening to stuff the other down the bowl.’ And when Xavier Herbert won the Miles Franklin Award for Poor Fellow My Country, ‘he arrived in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce hired by his publisher, Collins. I heard a car horn and there was Xavier sitting up in the back seat like royalty’.

  For a while we had calls from writers who thought Curtis Brown was still there. One morning Bob Brissenden was at the door, suited and briefcased. ‘I’ve finished it,’ he says. I don’t know who was more surprised. I was on a grant and he was chairman of the Literature Board. I explained that Curtis Brown had moved, but despite my pyjamas I was hard at work. ‘And I rise at five,’ I called after him as he headed for their new address with his crime-fiction manuscript.

  For a time, our social life consisted largely of seeing friends who came up from Melbourne, many of whom brought their political intensities with them. Also at this time, I was changing from being an automatic Labor voter to one who could at least entertain the possibility of voting Liberal. I had realised that it wasn’t much use having ideas about the redistribution of wealth unless you also have them about generating the wealth in the first place—the engine of capitalism had to be made to work better, investment had to be made more attractive, capital had to be seen as a friend and not an enemy.

  At a Darlinghurst restaurant I said these things to an incredulous circle of Melbourne diners: a leading comic actor, a Marxist playwright, and two of our closest friends, a theatrical producer and his then-wife. They attacked me, collectively and individually. It was like a tag wrestle, though I had no one to tag. I remember one of them getting up to go to the lavatory, and tagging his neighbour: ‘Give him a go on trade unions.’ Enterprise bargaining was a novelty even to the Liberal Party in those days, but I said it sounded a good idea—centralised wage-fixing discouraged investment in new business, and this made unemployment worse. They couldn’t believe it. They had an authentic enemy of the working classes trapped at last. When the evening and the shouting was over, the producer’s wife called from the door: ‘No wonder you moved to Sydney.’

  ‘To get away from Melbourne,’ I called back. (Memoirists always have the last word.)

  As we got to know people, there were dinner parties—blander Sydney ones. If there were battles, they were personal rather than ideological. At one, the writer Robert Drewe stormed out, saying he’d never speak to me again (he did, although guardedly). At another, one guest thanked me for sitting him next to what he called the most boring man in Sydney (who’d just left). I agreed with him and apologised. Neither of us ­realised that the most boring man in Sydney had returned to collect a coat and heard what we were saying.

  At another of our dinner parties, strange things seemed to be happening. The guests, after enjoying the first of Carmel’s delectable dishes, began to look embarrassed. Then, when a firm hand was put on my knee under the table, I looked embarrassed too. Was A touching up B, and C doing the same to D? Then it was the forthright E’s turn. Furious, she lifted the tablecloth, to reveal Kieran, touching knees and ankles as part of his own private game.

  The most abundant hospitality was provided by the Codys. John was a publisher, his wife Margaret an educationalist, and at their North Shore house we sometimes met Important People. We saw Clive James in the flesh (which he had then in abundance) as he sunned himself by the pool. Then, when social intercourse became unavoidable, we sat over a salad and white wine. His long comic poem about Prince Charles was doing famously, he confided, and the great German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger was going to run it in his literary magazine. Once the Germans think you’re funny, I attempted, shouldn’t one be worried? The sally bounced harmlessly off him. Soon he and his wife rose to go. Was it my fault? I said. Had I ruined the lunch? No, no, said the ever-genial Codys; but I certainly hadn’t helped.

  On another occasion, at the same house, the Canadian ­novelist Margaret Atwood put me in my place. I was sitting next to her on a couch. Conversation hummed all around, but between us there was silence. The Principle of Celebrity was operating: she was famous, so she was resting. It was up to me.

  ‘I was one of the judges of the Canada/Australia Literary Award,’ I offered. She sat on, pale, freckled and unmoved. I blundered on. ‘We’ve chosen the novelist Leon Rooke.’

  She turned her head in my direction without actually looking at me. ‘A good choice, considering he was born in South Carolina.’

  ‘But surely he’s regarded as Canadian by now.’

  ‘He is regarded by very few people at all. If being known as Canadian was measured in points out of ten, Leon Rooke would rate about four.’ A pause, a sip of her drink, some salted peanuts. ‘And I’d rate ten.’

  Now that we’ve integrated into Sydney literary life, I’m invited, with two of our larger sons, Miles and Eugene, to play in the annual Actors Versus Writers cricket match. It’s organised by Alex Buzo, who takes his captaincy of our team extremely seriously. He’s in pressed whites, but his team declines to a motley of browns and greys.

  Alex loses the toss and places his troops carefully. I’m in slips, but after refusing to put out my cigarette, exiled to the outfield. Bob Ellis has a toothbrush in his shirt pocket which falls to the ground every time he stoops to gather a ball (a slow process, with the actor–batsmen happily running). Bob has an unusual running action. Only his legs move. The top half of his body is reluctant to do so—it’s as if it belongs to someone else.

  When it’s our turn to bat Alex gives us a solid foundation, but the rest, listless from sun and alcohol, fall away. We lose. He’s not pleased. ‘You people,’ he says, looking at Bob and me, ‘treat it as a joke. You wouldn’t do that in the theatre.’ We protest that it’s a bad analogy, but he won’t be placated. He’s in a bad mood. One of his plays has had a poor reception in Adelaide—a city he hates—and he blames it on ‘the frigid Adelaide Establishment and the Carlton Marxists’.

  Refuses to get off butt

  Here we go again: the Melbourne Theatre Company decides to do my latest effort—Marsupials, a four-hander, with Carol Burns, Sean Scully and Max Gillies, with Matthew King condemned to the kind of role actors hate—a walk-on part as an estate agent near the end of the play.

  The quartet sit at a trestle table in the rehearsal room and read the script, while there’s frantic thumps and shouts from next door—John Bell’s directing Shakespeare, and their ranting invades our humble space. I time the reading. To my horror it only lasts sixty minutes. ‘Business, old chap,’ says Bruce Myles, the director, ‘stage business. We’ll plump it up.’

  A month later, there’s a technical rehearsal at the theatre in Russell Street. The lighting designer, a legendary figure, sits slumped and abstracted, a finger deep in a nostril—then becomes suddenly alert, barking instructions to a nervous assistant. Larry Eastwood’s swinging wall panels are too heavy, and threaten to revolve unstoppably when the actors push them to enter or exit. Myles curses and blames the production manager, a large, balding man who trips over a briefcase each time he comes down the aisle.

  On the Tuesday Marsupials opens, I ask Carmel if she’d mind if I sat alone up the back. She’s pleased, having had to sit next to my neuroses all her married life. Will the jaded first-night audience laugh at the punchlines? They do. Do they notice the pale backstage arm that sneaks out at every entrance, to stop the revolving wall in its tracks? They don’t.

  Afterward is always the hardest, enduring the half-truths of family and friends (‘loved it’), but this time praise is drowned out by drama. Barry Dickins rushes into the foyer and lunges at me with an upraised bottle of wine. ‘You put me in y
our bloody play!’ he shouts. But no way is ‘the gummy little poet with the pudding-basin haircut’, I insist, him. He’s calmed down, lowers the bottle from over my head, I buy him a drink, and we all move on to a supper at Clare and Cameron Forbes’s.

  But what of Len Radic, Mr Weights and Measures? In the Age, Len puts Marsupials on his beam balance and finds it lacking in avoirdupois, but audiences didn’t agree with him. Then, halfway through the season, when box offices sometimes flag, a gift: ‘Denizens of “the end of the world” savage playwright’, ran the headline in the Age. ‘In his latest play’, the report continues, ‘Barry Oakley calls Carnegie “outer Mongolia”, and, in a slightly more charitable moment, “a mean little wooden suburb”.’ The reporter makes the journey to the end of the world herself and interviews a few unhappy locals. A local real-estate agent is pointed: ‘Oakley might have seen more if his nose had not been in the air. Maybe he never got off his butt and made the effort.’

  I admit to the reporter that I might have been jaundiced by the fact that my wife and I spent years there bringing up five kids in a cold-water weatherboard, but the publicity is priceless.

  Monster escapes

  One January day in 1981 Angela Wales, director of the Australian Writers’ Guild, rings to say she’s worried no one’s going to turn up to meet a visiting Yugoslav playwright—could I help? So I go in to the Guild office: a handful of us around the table, with cheese and cask white. The guest is a worn-looking man with a large ginger moustache. With him are two apparatchiks—one suited and smooth, the other with a boxer’s face.

  The phrase ‘cultural exchange’ comes into play a lot and our local Marxist playwright is all over them, telling them what a boring middle-class theatre we have here—‘a cash transaction, nothing more’. The apparatchiks nod approvingly, but not the man they’re minding, whom I’ll call Victor, who gets more and more irritated: ‘Don’t you think you pay to go in in Yugoslavia?’ The local Marxist playwright, taken by surprise, digs himself deeper. ‘The law of competition dominates everything in this country. We’ve got to get rid of the operators and the bureaucrats and get to the people. Get them on side! Show them the realities! Help create socialism!’

  ‘Listen!’—Victor is angry now—‘Socialism is operators! Socialism is bureaucrats! I live under it!’

  ‘That is not necessarily the case,’ says the smooth one. ‘Victor is getting excited.’

  ‘I am not excited!’ shouts Victor. ‘What I say is true!’

  ‘Every society has its faults,’ says the smoothie, now getting to his feet. ‘You must forgive us, but it is time to go home.’

  There was more to come on the international front. Soon after, the Goethe Institute, Germany’s cultural arm, announced that there were to be ‘German–Australian Writer Meetings’. Some German ones, including the patrician Hans Magnus Enzensberger, would be joining their Australian equivalents ‘in a live-in symposium in Kallista, in the Dandenong Ranges, to discuss common problems’.

  There were nine of us facing six of them across a huge table. Alarmingly, a microphone was set up in front of each speaker. Every banality was to be recorded. At the warm-up drinks, one of our group asked Professor Reinhard Lettau, a myopic blinker in gold-rimmed glasses, if he’d met any poets during his recent stay in California. ‘Perverts?’ he said. ‘Did I meet any perverts?’

  This sounded promising, but it didn’t last long. Soon a ­novelist was inflicting on us a long monologue (translated by Beate Josephi, one of the organisers) about the treachery of writers who give us gratuitous consolation by offering the illusion of order in a chaotic world, which we should be trying to change.

  This had been preceded by a frightening morning where each of us had to explain, to the tape and the table, what we do and in what context we do it. Context was the big German thing, so if one wrote novels one was expected to give a brief history of Australian fiction. Since drama sounded easier, I focused on that, because there wasn’t all that much of it.

  The next day we were permitted to stop worrying about literature and go on a bush walk instead—though this was objected to by a tubby, bearded anarchist playwright called Federspiel, who seemed to be here on sufferance. ‘Fuck Nature!’ he shouted, and stayed behind and sulked. The rest of us set off into Sherbrooke Forest in search of lyrebirds. The Germans, their well-cut overcoats draped over their shoulders, proceed carefully (snakes? spiders?) in a blue haze of Gauloise smoke, and relish the crystalline purity of the air. Our guide creeps forward through the bush, holds up a hand, and we pause—to take in, right on cue, a lyrebird’s lilts, leaps, cascades and gurgles, as every bush bird is mimicked.

  That night, songs around the piano, with the poet Fay Zwicky at the keyboard, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is played and sung, and its status as Australia’s unofficial national anthem explained. ‘Now it’s our turn,’ says Lettau, whose complexion has become inflamed after a couple of drinks, and he sits down and plays ‘Deutschland Über Alles’.

  ‘That is ours,’ he says.

  ‘Many people’—I had also drink taken—‘don’t like that song.’

  Lettau looked up at me, face and gold rims gleaming. ‘I yam sick of professional anti-Germans.’

  ‘I don’t like the words.’

  ‘You don’t know what they mean.’

  ‘A lot of people in the last war,’—it’s out! It’s mentioned!—‘knew only too well what they meant.’

  Beate taps me under the table to desist, and I do, but the monster has been released, and I feel as if I’m dragging the whole conference down around me, though we shake hands and the subject is changed.

  Then it’s open day, and people come up from Melbourne and gather on the lawn in the sun, including the reporter Jan McGuiness who, to my horror (the monster has escaped the building!) puts the little upset in her Age diary the next morning. It has become The Incident. Then a man called Benno comes up and says, ‘I hear you are an outspoken Australian writer. Can you answer zeez questions please for ze German press agency?’ (The monster has left the country and is heading home!) I tell him there’s no story—simply a misunderstanding—a nothing.

  ‘A mountain, how you say, out of a dunghill?’

  ‘Quite.’

  On the last morning, I apologise to the gathering. ‘A misunderstanding,’ says the novelist Judah Waten, repository of Jewish wisdom.

  Judah Waten ponders a takeover at the German–Australian Writers’ Meeting. (Photograph John Tranter)

  ‘No, no,’ says Hans Magnus, the prince in the cream linen suit. ‘You took us from the said to the unsaid, which is where these conferences should go.’ Enzensberger, who’s deferred to by his colleagues in a way unimaginable in this country, has spoken, and that’s that. Federspiel, the fat anarchist, who’s been bored the whole time, is now more bored than ever. ‘I haff a question,’ he says. ‘Ven iz lunch?’

  Censorship is back

  Can you discuss literature out of existence? Workshop plays to death? Soon after this Teutonic talkfest, there’s a playwrights’ conference in Canberra, where promising plays are workshopped, with professional actors, directors, and curmudgeons called dramaturgs, whose job it is to make script suggestions that the writer almost certainly won’t like.

  As a dramaturg I scored, amongst others, The Butterflies of Kalamantan. The problem was that its author, Jennifer Clare, was a highly experienced actor who knew more about the ­business than we did, and didn’t hesitate to let the actors, the director Alison Summers, and me know it. During the first rehearsal she leans over to me and says, in a stage whisper, ‘That’s not the way I want it done, darling.’

  The deficiencies in the script seem obvious, but Clare can’t see them. Alison Summers—‘you’re obviously new to the business, darling’—becomes upset and leaves the room afterwards in tears. A reconciliation meeting is arranged in the bar, but Clare, in black top, black slacks, dark glasses and resplendent silverware, represents unanswerable experience, against which both Alison and
I seem powerless, and the play’s problems are never sorted out. Give me a theatrical naif any time.

  Boozing, backbiting and occasional bonking are normal at playwrights’ conferences. What made this one special was a seminar on children’s theatre, in which the woman representing Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre formalised political correctness into commandments: you shall not show racism, sexism or classism in a favourable light; you may not reinforce stereotypes; you are not to write about issues (uranium mining, the killing of whales) unless you search for the causes behind them; you must not use outdated forms unless in a novel way. Worse, all this nonsense was corroborated by Alan John, Nimrod’s reader of plays for adults, who warned that an author might be required to draw out the implications of his or her work.

  The listeners, many of them writers, sat there and took it, which provoked me to launch an attack. Neither of you, I said, seem to understand the nature of imaginative writing: good plays tend to work by implication—bad ones are didactic. You object to censorship from the right, while applying it yourselves from the left. Ron Blair got to his feet and backed me up, but the rest remained mute. Maybe they were stunned (or wanted their work performed).

  It got worse. We witnessed a performance of Sex and Violets, by a dapper and elderly Bob Herbert, which featured a ­skeleton, subtly called Deadie. Halfway through the interminable work, Deadie suddenly drooped forward, as if it too, like the audience, was falling asleep. It wasn’t a success, but there was no need for what followed in the discussion. Neil Armfield announced that ‘the play embodied attitudes that were offensive and distasteful’, which left poor Bob, up on stage, blinking under his black eyeshade. Then Armfield administers the coup de grace: ‘It should never have been put on.’