It is a demonstrable fact that Australia, where a rough masculinity rules the roost, has never really known what to do with its fiction writers.
For decades after the continent was colonised, the only printed fiction available was imported from England. Settlers who dared to write novels soon discovered that unsympathetic copyright laws and pitiful royalties made it near impossible to find an audience and make a living. Little has changed since, despite the best efforts of a handful of brave people determined that this country – despite and because of its burdens – deserves a literature of its own. Until his death last year at the age of 83, Frank Moorhouse was one of those people.
Now, in the space of only a few months, there are two biographies of the man. Some may well ask: does any Australian writer deserve such attention?
Moorhouse, the youngest of three brothers, was born in Nowra on the coast just south of Sydney. His father was a manufacturer of farming equipment (the family business was known as Moorhouse the Machinery Men), his mother a leading light in the Country Women’s Association; both parents were involved with Rotary.
Despite a patchy academic record, Moorhouse always wanted to become a writer. In a typed letter to himself dated 4 April 1958, the 16-year-old Moorhouse declared: “To become a writer of the highest standard, it is necessary to study. Study is hard, tiring and distasteful but its rewards are great … Remember that knowledge is a power; it demands respect … It is the enemy of bias and prejudice – the two sores that have festered upon the body of the world.”
Moorhouse would go on to write seven short story collections, some of which were banned for obscenity, while some individual stories would be turned into films. His crowning achievement would be his Edith Trilogy, centring on Edith Campbell Berry, a young Australian from the New South Wales south coast who gets a job with the League of Nations in Geneva before, in the final volume, returning to Australia to work in Canberra.
The first volume, Grand Days – a truly masterful and inventive piece of fiction – was deemed ineligible for the Miles Franklin literary award because it was not sufficiently “Australian”. The second volume, Dark Palace, won the prize in 2001.
Meanwhile, Moorhouse actively opposed censorship of all kinds and was instrumental in helping to establish more reasonable censorship laws.
His private life could be said to have been passionate and varied: he had relationships with women and men, and he appeared to have had a decades-long commitment to cross-dressing. He was also a devoted gastronome, and his memoir, Martini, was in part a celebration of his favourite cocktail.
In Frank Moorhouse: A Life, the former journalist and now academic Catharine Lumby states her mission: “This is a selective biography. It’s written from a subjective point of view. I’ve written it with an eye to exploring the relationship between Moorhouse’s life and writing.” The book’s relative brevity means it does not, and cannot, elucidate all the complexities and contradictions of the man but there is enough to reveal what made Moorhouse tick.
Lumby is especially good at drawing out the parallels between Moorhouse and the “bush poet” Henry Lawson, which were alcohol dependency (though the former’s was not as destructive as the latter’s), trouble maintaining domestic relationships with women, and challenges with money; Lawson also acknowledged his effeminate nature. Lumby quotes Moorhouse: “But more curiously, as with Lawson, I know the feeling of apartness, if not alienation, from some of the mainstream masculine cultures.”
Lumby also excels at revealing Moorhouse’s love of the natural environment, and that his making peace with the bush was also about “making peace with himself … specifically with his struggles with his ambivalence about his gender.”
Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths by Matthew Lamb, a former editor of the now-defunct Review of Australian Fiction is, by design, a more substantial work, and the first in a projected two-volume series. It focuses on his subject’s childhood and early writings, comprising short stories and journalism, much of which concerned life in regional New South Wales.
Both biographies explore Moorhouse’s involvement in “the Push”, a Sydney-based (actually “le ghetto de Balmain”) movement that emerged in the 70s to prosecute a libertarian agenda. Lumby suggests that Moorhouse was an unquestioning participant but Lamb argues he was more open-minded, if not critical, of the group’s agenda. Either way, Moorhouse was an early and vocal supporter of First Nations land rights, gay liberation and feminism.
If it is the job of the biographer to evoke both the spirit of the age and the spirit of the person, Lamb acquits himself admirably. Strange Paths contains chapters with titles such as “Fuck Father Christmas”, “Is this you, Moorhouse?” and “The stories aren’t dirty enough”. Lamb, bravely and necessarily, takes his readers into some tricky terrain.
Across at least four decades, Moorhouse was in a relationship with the same man, who agreed to be interviewed by Lamb on the condition of anonymity. He tells of how Moorhouse, drunk, once revealed that he was in possession of a rifle, before telling his lover to dare to be shot. Wisely, the lover declined. This is not to suggest that Moorhouse was a troubled soul, even if at times he may have been. In Lamb’s hands, Moorhouse was someone who would live the creative life no matter what, finding and raising his voice without constraint, all the while exposing the faultlines in Australian society. He enjoyed looking at life from different perspectives and was also a man of action: he wanted change, even if that involved being arrested.
Lamb ends Strange Paths on a poignant note. It is still the mid-70s and Moorhouse has achieved a great deal with the short story form but he is yet to write a novel. His father, that founder of Moorhouse and the Machinery Men, writes to him: “It is always difficult, in life, to know when you achieve success. It is slow in coming – but what looks like success today might be only a minor achievement compared with the success you are yet to attain.”
Lumby’s biography provides an accessible and engaging introduction to Moorhouse, while Lamb has laid the foundation of a cumulative work that may well reach, even exceed, David Marr’s Patrick White: A Life, which many consider the high-water mark of Australian biography. What Moorhouse would make of that is anyone’s guess, though, at the very least, he’d probably pour himself a martini.
Frank Moorhouse: A Life by Catharine Lumby is out through Allen & Unwin. Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths by Matthew Lamb is out through Penguin Random House
