Mug Shots

by Barry Oakley

  The Australian National Playwrights’ Conference of 1981 spelt out what many knew implicitly: the days of censorship were back, but now they entered stage left.

  Writer disappears

  Meanwhile up north, at Griffith University, Brisbane, another kind of miasma was descending on literature, its sinister messages encrypted in impenetrable jargon. Try to get to the end of this: ‘It is useful to consider that the laborious accumulation of currently possible signs of verisimilitude is always undertaken within the operative criterion of a regime of signification, that is within historically determinate conditions of intelligibility of these signs. However, the notion of conceptual paradigms raises questions in its own right, given its possible representations both as a deep structure of biography and as a totalising principle identified with some general cultural unity or mindset.’

  This, and pages more like it, was written by David Saunders who, at the time, ‘lectured on text discourse’ at the university, and it was he who met me at Brisbane airport when I was invited to be writer-in-residence there. It is taken from a collection called Griffith Papers on Biography, which I regretted not having read before accepting the appointment. I was going to a place infested by semioticians and deconstructionists, where the word writer was put in inverted commas.

  Saunders, a tall and sombre South Londoner, explained to me as we drove to the campus that at Griffith they cut in sections across the disciplines, which seemed to suggest an absence of roots. Andrew Field (biographer and friend of Vladimir Nabokov) told me later the result was that there were no disciplines at all. The semioticians had left him isolated; the only communication between him and the rest (he was a professor there) was by notes left in pigeonholes. They theorised about biographies while he wrote them. He was working on one about the writer Djuna Barnes, and carried the manuscript around with him, hanging from his wrist by a leather strap, as if the semioticians might savage it.

  I was given a comfortable office, and left to puzzle over why they would invite someone to take up residence whose creative function they didn’t believe in. Field, whose isolation induced sensitivity to these things, warned me about the thinness of the office walls, and he was right. Frightening phrases from next door tutorials came through—frame analysis; proxemic behaviour; intransitivity—from my adenoidal English neighbour. I was trapped in a Malcolm Bradbury novel.

  I was here, to use their jargon, to provide epistemic difference: a fall-guy in residence. Innocent biographers were also invited, including the American scholar Deirdre Bair, whose Beckett biography had only recently appeared. In a seminar, she told us that in the course of her researches she’d met a niece of Beckett’s, who asked her if she’d clean out a cupboard, which was filled with rubbish she’d one day get round to burning. Bair unearthed a shoebox of Beckett’s letters to his friend Thomas McGreevy at a crucially unhappy time in his life, and was so affected she ‘went into the bathroom and vomited’.

  What were these Griffith kids being taught? I went to a lecture by the professor of philosophy, another American, and was appalled enough to take notes. His subject was Institutional Determinants of Text Production, in which we got a cartoon version of the conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church: ‘Galileo beat the pants off the Jesuit theologians, and then stuck his finger in the eye of Pope Urban VIII. So the Pope brought down the hammer quick smart … let me write some of those words up here for you—papacy, theologian, Jesuit …’

  At another lecture, Herbert Grierson’s famous Night Mail documentary was shown, with script by W.H. Auden (‘This is the night mail/ over the border/ bringing with it/ cheques and postal order’). The lecturer’s theme was neither the visual nor verbal language, but how the production patronised and exploited the working classes. In literature, nothing was studied before the early nineteenth century, because that marked the beginning of working-class awareness. When I asked one student why she didn’t do Shakespeare, ‘We don’t do ­eighteenth-century writers,’ was her reply.

  In the words of another visitor, an engaging professor of literature called Callahan, from Portland, Oregon: ‘Man, don’t talk to me about all this bullshit—I can’t take another word of it. These kids are being sold a bill of goods.’

  The students at the University of Queensland were luckier, and I escaped there as often as I could. The University of Queensland Press was my publisher at the time, and wanted Bernard Hickey, a visiting academic, to launch their edition of two of my plays. ‘Academic’ goes nowhere near describing Bernard. ‘Manic leprechaun’, Desmond O’Grady’s phrase for him, is closer.

  Bernard lectured in Australian literature at the University of Venice and approached his task like an evangelist. Everything, and everyone, was wonderful. There were the wonderful Oakleys, the wonderful Fosters, Tranters, O’Gradys, and anyone else connected with the subject.

  Bernard’s Venetian hospitality was indeed wonderful, as we discovered in 1975. He’d found us a pensione, taken us to regional restaurants and once to a party at a palazzo, where he’d rushed at various notables as if to attack them, and then finally cornered the hostess—‘The Countess Loredana,’ he shouted at us, emitting a delighted giggle, ‘translator of Patrick White!’ He was unfailingly kind to visiting Australian writers, who sometimes rewarded him by putting him into their fiction (or in my case, a play). He was irresistible material.

  Bernard agreed to launch the book of plays, and didn’t let us down. Dressed in an outfit of belted denim with flaps and buckles at the breast pockets, he resembled a portly package. He pronounced the slim volume unequivocally wonderful, and likened its author to the Latin satirist Juvenal.

  Andrew Field, the author, and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland bemused by Bernard Hickey’s garment.

  Bernard, a man whom it was impossible to dislike, had developed an Italian attitude to what he called ‘the authorities’, and made regular visits to Australia to cultivate them. He told me after the launch ‘it was of particular moment’ that I’d had a conversation with the university’s vice-chancellor, and that this at all costs should be followed up. Was it about your work? he asked. I told him that it wasn’t. I’d learned that the vice-chancellor had flown in one of the ancient Swordfish biplanes that crippled the battleship Bismarck in the face of withering fire. His regard for me was as nothing compared with mine for him.

  There had to be a confrontation with the Griffith semioticians, and it came near the end of my stay, when John O, another staff member, gave me a goodbye dinner. Mike Harris, my office neighbour, was there with his wife, one or two others and, fortunately, Callahan, so I wasn’t totally outnumbered. We were three drinks in before hostilities commenced.

  It was up to me to open the bowling. ‘These kids you’re supposed to be teaching—they don’t even know about the Renaissance—and one of them thought Shakespeare was an eighteenth-century writer.’ Mike shook his head wearily and gave me a patronising smile. ‘We look at structures, not periods. It’s not who did the writing—it’s how it’s constructed.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Callahan, ‘constructed. Are we talking building sites or what?’ Mike was still smiling, but now it was an irritated smile. What tiny teeth he had!

  ‘Social forces construct the writer, and therefore the work. You’re way out of date on theory.’

  Callahan was getting angry too. ‘So tell me this—this writer here. Why’d you invite him, when you don’t believe in writers?’

  ‘Yes, we do. Who’s better equipped to explain the forces that shape him than the writer himself?’

  The table had gone quiet, and they now looked at me. ‘You’ve got it all arse-up,’ I said. ‘A good writer is exactly the opposite—someone who transcends these forces.’

  Mike looked at me pityingly. ‘Bourgeois individualism I’m afraid.’

  The bourgeois individualists left shortly afterwards. As we went back to our college rooms in a taxi, both of us a little the worse for wear from alcohol and argument, Callahan
told me he’d had enough.

  ‘I’m getting out of here,’ he said. ‘Man, you want to hole up in your room then do the same. Get out. Before you think and talk like they do.’ (I survived, did my nine weeks, and came home.)

  The glass house

  Leon Fink, investor, patron of the arts and property developer, had bought Kinselas Funeral Parlour in Darlinghurst, and there was a party to celebrate. I wasn’t invited, but tagged along with people who were. As the invitees were urged to wear something black, it was obvious from my Gold Coast white trousers that I wasn’t one.

  The central feature of Kinselas was an art-deco chapel with a non-denominational altar, backed by a fresco of ducks winging into the sunset. Behind the altar someone had found a cross and a Star of David on long sticks, which could be mounted according to the religion of the deceased. In front of it a band was playing. Many of the guests wore frangipani on their necks or ears, and spent much of the time rushing at one another for an embrace. It was all very Sydney, and after a few free drinks I felt more and more Melbourne and went home.

  Months later, the place emerged transformed, with a bar and two restaurants—a theatre one on the top level, and a proper one on the ground floor. Graeme Blundell brought in classy cabaret acts for the former, and Tony Bilson ran the latter, with the chapel—now a dazzling miniature cathedral of glass—at its heart. Kinselas soon became Sydney’s most popular rendezvous.

  When we could afford it, we drank or dined there, and when we couldn’t, which was most of the time, John Timlin, friend and now my agent, would celebrate his winnings on the track by shouting. Eventually the whole building became a ­performance space where people liked to be seen.

  Sometimes you didn’t have to leave your seat: theatre would come to you. Once, while I was dining, probably at Timlin’s expense, Max Gillies, made up as a posthumous Bob Menzies for an upstairs revue, waddled over to us, his angel’s wings shaking as he walked, and addressed me in lordly fashion, suggesting it might be wise if I left, since I wasn’t going to pay. Ripostes were useless. Actors in costume were invulnerable.

  Publishers were more generous then, and the University of Queensland Press launched Scribbling in the Dark, a collection of my articles and reviews, in the Kinselas sanctum. In keeping with the theatricality of the place, my friend Dick Hughes did the job in a black Christian Brothers habit, and threatened anyone who tried to slip out without buying a copy with an impressively large strap. ‘Horne,’ he said, ‘face the front.’ (Had Donald ever been spoken to like that before, except by Frank Packer?) Amongst the bemused crowd watching all this was George Melly, the English jazz identity and friend of Hughes’s, dazzling in a pixilated suit. Was this how books were launched in this country?

  More theatre: the Australia Council was dining one evening in the crystalline temple, and we were urged to peep in. Its director at the time, Timothy Pascoe, was being farewelled. He was lying on the table, blissfully smiling, eyes closed, perfectly dressed as always, with a lighted candle on his chest, as if he were being prepared for the mortuary rather than retirement.

  Occasionally, when the writer Judah Waten and his wife Hirell were up from Melbourne, we’d eat with them there. The last time we saw them, the doorman, a large body under a top hat, was having trouble with a drunk, who kept making runs at the entrance, which were forcefully repelled. On his final run, Oddjob grabbed the drunk, slammed him into a post, then swept his top hat off and bowed us in.

  Judah, though looking as always like a member of the Politburo in his sombre suit, had lost his hearty ruddiness and didn’t seem well. Diabetes, Hirell said. ‘My doctor told me I was not to drink, smoke or have much to eat,’ added Judah. ‘He said even then you may not live longer—but it will seem longer.’

  He then began an anecdote which I’ve forgotten, and as it turned out, he had too. He built up to the climax, then came to a stop. There was an awkward pause, during which the abused and abusive drunk staggered up to the window behind him and let loose a huge chunder against the glass. Neither Waten saw it, and, not wanting to interrupt, we listened as Hirell finished the story for him. Soon after, the Kinselas’ windows had a half-curtain of velvet to shield the in from the out-crowd, and not long after that Judah died and Kinselas did too, sold by Leon. The great days were over.

  Meets someone else

  Late in 1981, after so many good times—conferences, workshops, residencies, so much drinking and discussing what was literature and what was not (and actually doing so little of it), something happened that made it all seem of no consequence. Carmel, whom I’d so often left behind with the children while I was off pondering more serious matters, decided she’d had enough. She returned from Melbourne (where she’d been researching the life of the painter and teacher Dattilo Rubbo for her university thesis) and announced she’d ‘met someone else’, and was leaving me.

  Writers are the world’s greatest recyclers, and since I’ve gone over it elsewhere, there’ll be only brief reference to it here.

  In depression, one becomes susceptible to portents. I had a powerful attack when I went to the Australian Writers’ Guild Christmas party at The Stables Theatre. Friends were sympathetic. ‘Get yourself a new outfit,’ said one. ‘Could be a play in it,’ offered another. ‘You’re looking fine,’ lied a third, peering in at me, the bags under my eyes pendulous from sleeplessness.

  We’re drinking and smoking and talking when the allegory attack begins. A derelict comes into the foyer and slumps against one of the sofas. His jacket is half over his head, his back is bare, and he has a cut lip. Angela Wales, director of the Guild, tells me it’s William D, a writer and Guild member, in the grip of the alcoholic horrors. When the playwright Clem Gorman later led a group of stayers towards King Cross, D tried to follow. He reeled, fell across a planter box, got to his feet and did his best to keep up, as though fearing if we got out of his sight he’d die. Depressed, narcissistic, I thought that would soon be me.

  By March I was running out of spirits and money. Max Suich (I hope not out of pity) gave me regular book reviewing for the National Times, and Vic Carroll (looking, but certainly not sounding, a little like Billy McMahon) offered me a fortnightly theatre piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

  For my first effort for the Herald, I interviewed the bellicose Miriam Hampson, who’d been running the New Theatre in Sydney’s Newtown since 1948. Miriam was tiny and tough—her steel-grey hair seemed like an extension of her personality. She swore like a wharfie, with a voice almost as deep.

  She led me into the shabby little auditorium, and we squeaked into old cinema seats. They were doing yet another production of Reedy River, Dick Diamond’s folk musical from the 1950s. The coolabahs up on stage looked tired. Miriam was already talking: ‘When in doubt, do Reedy River. Frankly, I’m sick of it, but we need the fucking moolah—don’t print that.’ She paused for breath. I darted in to ask how she managed running an amateur theatre for so long.

  ‘Later, later. I was just thinking of the time Les Tanner—or was it Keith Gow?—got his foot stuck in a chamberpot in The Lion on the Square. Clumped around the stage trying to shake the fucking thing off while the audience fell out of their seats. Or the time whatsisname, that fat actor, stamped his foot, broke the boards, fell into the rostrum he was standing on and gave the rest of the fucking speech from inside the bloody thing.’

  ‘But wha—’

  (Raising her hands.) ‘Later, later. What was that fucking play we did in 1968? America Hurrah. There’s a man and a woman inside these huge dolls, and they, if you’ll forgive the expression, copulate. We knew there’d be police in the audience, so we had all these fucking big wharfies lounging round the exit. At the end the actors waddle off and out the exit to get away, ripping their dolls off as they run. The cops get up to go after them, but the wharfies block the fuckers.’

  ‘And wha—’

  ‘Are you interviewing me or am I interviewing you? We scrounge, dear, that’s how we do it. Laundromat does our cos
tumes for nothing, hardware lends us doors, poke about Reverse Garbage for props. We’re not rich enough to go broke. I’ll show you last year’s figures if I can find the bloody book. Memory’s fucked ever since I got mugged—don’t print that.’

  ‘Here in Newtown?’

  ‘In fucking Bellevue Hill, thanks very much. A guy goes for my purse, I hang on, and I hit my fucking head—don’t print that. Where you from?’

  ‘Paddington.’

  ‘I knew it.’

  Shirtsong

  Everyone has a special shirt. Mine, a slightly regrettable pink, had buttoned shoulder flaps and breast pockets for maps, which is why its mail-order makers called it the Airline Pilot. It was a man-of-action shirt. My wife, now back with me after a separation of five months, said it suited me. I shaped it and it shaped me.

  So when in June 1982 the screenwriter Keith Thompson suggested I apply for the position he was leaving—head of the Writing Workshop at the Film and Television School—I wore it for the interview.

  Thus shirted, I found the confidence to tell the panel the truth—that I’d written only four screenplays in my life, and only one had made it to the screen: an adaptation of my play Bedfellows. Another CV plus, I added, was that I did not write the screenplay for my novel The Great McCarthy, which David Baker had turned into a total turkey.

  Subtly, pinkly luminescent, I was so self-deprecating that the panel came to my defence, reminding me of my achievement in other writing fields. I nodded, but doubted that made me suitable for the job. Here was a man, they must have thought, so confident in his abilities that he’d spent the entire time diminishing their importance (and he looks as if he can fly an aeroplane as well). They gave me the job.

  I wore my magic shirt when I first met the students, and self-deprecated even more. They listened, trying to conceal their bewilderment, while I told them I rarely went to movies—give me books any time.