It's difficult to write well about rites of passage. The awful business of ceasing to be one thing and starting to be another is at once universal and fiendishly difficult to capture. Possibly, the second phenomenon is a direct result of the first.
But Frank Moorhouse — the Nowra-born writer who died three weeks ago aged 83 and is today remembered at the State Library of NSW — was a wizard at it. Awkwardness was his metier.
Over his unique career as a novelist, essayist and tender custodian of this nation's unmentionables drawer, he was drawn ineluctably to things that others avoided.
His specialities: The naivete of youth, both in humans and in nations. The unbearable vulnerability of the over-confident. The fascinating territory that lay between maleness and femaleness, qualities that in his own youth were viewed by most Australians as unquestionable absolutes.
As a novelist, Moorhouse's great gift was his curiosity. It infuses his work with a subtle warmth whose source is gloriously elusive; Moorhouse wrote humans like Vermeer painted light.
Having grown up in the regional town of Nowra in the 40s, Moorhouse was alive to the syncopated rhythms of rural communities and the characters of which they are typically composed.
The complex hierarchies of rural townships; the way they somehow calibrate a balance of leaders, followers and outliers. The way it can all be rearranged in an instant. The miracle whereby a seemingly staid collection of people can make room for a truly ornate arrival. The brutal, Darwinian spectacle when things go the other way. The fads and obsessions that can seize a town.
(A personal note: I'm writing this on — and will submit it from, Internet gods willing — the farm where I grew up in regional SA. It's where I first read Moorhouse, borrowing The Electrical Experience and The Americans, Baby from my local library, some 1,300km from Nowra, and feeling the fizz of recognition. Some of it I read in a haystack. I did not learn about the death of literalism until some time later)
Moorhouse noticed everything but judged nothing
His eye was at once merciless and forgiving. He noticed everything, but he judged nothing; even his most pompous characters were rendered with a fondness of which only a truly open-minded person could ever be capable.
How does a person get an eye like that? How does a person learn curiosity? Was it the time he spent bedbound after an accident in his early adolescence that made him such a good observer? Was there something about that stint, in the sensitive interregnum between childhood and adulthood, that drove him out into the world hungry?
Perhaps. But there was nothing of the fractious invalid in the way he wrote about the world, no matter how far into it he ventured from Nowra.
His was a generous curiosity; it made room. It would happily come home with you, even if your shoes were all wrong or your parents were embarrassing.
Moorhouse travelled widely, lived elaborately, made trouble, became famous, and yet managed not to gather the routine accretions of superiority, narrowness, or — it must be said — wealth.
He died, in his ninth decade, literally without baggage.
Everywhere in his novels, his hard work is evident
Moorhouse's most magnificent work — the Grand Days trilogy — is nominally the story of Edith Campbell Berry, a country girl full of awkwardness and ambition who journeys off to work at the League Of Nations.
But more deeply it is the story of our young federation, in the post-war era a callow and flawed outfit, courageous, incomplete, self-conscious, anxious for inclusion in the grand unfolding of global history but yet to understand the first thing about its own land-mass.
In the trilogy's third book, Cold Light, Moorhouse has Edith moving back to Canberra as a bureaucrat. She and her gender-fluid partner Ambrose edge into the social scene in a city that is being built around them, the landscape booby-trapped with anti-Communist sentiment, sexual politics, and politics of the ordinary kind.
Moorhouse's rendering of Ben Chifley's death — announced, famously, by Robert Menzies at a grand party in the King's Hall to celebrate the jubilee of federation — is superb.
Historians can give us practical detail about such rites of passage experienced by that young federation. But in the hands of Moorhouse, these events acquired blood and sinew, and tears. Everywhere in these novels, his hard work is evident.
Like da Vinci, who illegally dissected cadavers in order to understand how the human body functioned so he could draw it better, Moorhouse conducted years of intensive investigation before attempting a depiction of our democracy in its adolescence.
Moorhouse was bad at asking for money
Canberra itself is a city which physically demonstrates one of Moorhouse's great recurrent themes — the gap between idealism and reality.
The elaborate plans of the Burley Griffins were only half-realised, after all, as were Edith's ambitions for herself by the end of the trilogy. Moorhouse's eye for disappointment is as solicitous and tender as his eye for human absurdity, and in the pettifogging bureaucracy of Cold Light's Canberra, one can clearly discern the same patterns he detected in the NSW south coastal town of his earlier work. Humans succeed and fail in the same way, no matter whether they gather in groups large or small.
Moorhouse received an Australia Council grant (dubbed a "Keating", for the prime minister who installed the Creative Nation programme) to research the trilogy in the early 1990s. At around $100,000, it was a spectacularly good investment. The rigour of Moorhouse's work is precisely what gives these three books their power. You can feel the value of the stuff between your fingers; it is high thread-count writing.
They are not works of history; they're works of imagination and curiosity, powered by research, and while you can't exactly buy this gear off the shelf, you can absolutely create an environment in which people who are bad at asking for money (as Moorhouse so demonstrably was, for his whole life) are nonetheless able to create something extraordinary that will live for ever.
These books could not have been written without public funding. They are — not just simply, but exponentially — worth the money we spent. Among the multitudinous beacons pulsed back at us by the life of Frank Moorhouse, this should be the most penetrating. Books are public art. Writers are worth investment.
Moorhouse may not have been very good at money himself, but he made extraordinary inroads for future generations of writers. His role in the establishment of Australian copyright law, and The Copyright Agency, helped to put a value on what writers do.
To this day, the Copyright Agency delivers, to penurious wordsmiths, the occasional throb of delight when a notification arrives advising that their work has been copied. Included in a syllabus. Deployed to bring joy or enlightenment to others. For those in a line of work that sometimes feels like screaming into a padded room, this is a rich gift indeed.
The gifts we didn't know we needed
Frank Moorhouse gave us — moreover — gifts we didn't know we needed. An entire book on how to make a perfect Martini, for example.
Another gift, more significant: He wrote about gender fluidity long before it was a widely-accepted phenomenon. And did so in a characteristic way, full of curiosity and honesty. For some, the blurring of genders is a threatening development, as was the prospect of same sex unions not so many years ago. For Moorhouse, these possibilities were not frightening, but exciting — an opportunity for wider human experience, for more joy.
Writing a convincing female character was a work of difficulty that tested even Tolstoy, and yet Moorhouse managed to create Edith Campbell Berry: no feckless Becky Sharp, nor some Philip Roth nympho. She's a character who becomes, if anything, more relevant every day. Ambitious, clever, brave, foolish, horrified by herself, Edith is a creature of the modern age; she would have loved the Internet, though its roving gangs of moral police would have troubled her.
It has been suggested that Moorhouse's affection for Edith was drawn from his admiration for his mother, the magically-named Purthanry Thanes Mary Moorhouse (nee Cutts), who was a significant figure in Nowra alongside her husband Frank, an inventor of farm machinery.
As we reflect on the life of this extraordinary Australian artist, perhaps it's wise to acknowledge too the woman who gave him life, not knowing — how could she have? — how this child would change Australia.
