More bonds

Last night I dreamed I was having a lively discussion with someone about the merits of the graphic work of Saul Steinberg. Dad was much intrigued by Steinberg’s fine covers for The New Yorker and I rather think his own line drawings were at times influenced by him, though not quite as much as they followed the prompts of Daumier’s gens de justice series, with a dash of Doré and even Goya thrown in for good measure. Certainly there were large-format, lavishly-illustrated books about Steinberg at 18 Denham Place, and I remember as a child poring over them with real fascination, and trying my best to imitate his style. Only now do I realize that Steinberg must have played an important part in steering me towards art in the first place, thanks above all to our wonderful father, and maybe also latterly towards old bond certificates. For in the frigid light of this morning it struck me with sudden force that Steinberg must have studied them closely. Throughout The Passport (1954) for example, he paraphrased portions of their stylistic vocabulary with rare wit, capturing that overinflated Neronian pomposity and plutocratic flamboyance in controlled fits of high Modernist, steel-nibbed satire. There is the neurotically minuscule “small print,” the showy signatures, the cartouches, sunburst striations, the trophies, the armorial bearings, the banner-swoop arabesques, and the flutter of all those intricate marginalia. The bonds were not his only source, however, for Steinberg threw in the posturing habits of more recent forms of official documentation. This portion of his restless mindscape embraced the certified public accountant, the university registrar, the consular section, and rubber-stamp customs and excise officials with every bit of the enthusiasm with which he took aim at the banks and brokers responsible for pumping up the Gilded Age bond market. Still, this is a source and, now, an essentially Edwardian residue, that I never recognized before this morning, thanks to that strange dream. Visual memory is evanescent, but apparently jogged powerfully by sleep. Come to think of it, there is something tangibly Edwardian about that too.

The accident

One of my father’s more eccentric habits was whenever possible to photograph the relatively minor childhood illnesses and injuries sustained by his sons—a slightly scarifying suite of mumps, measles, playground scrapes, cuts, bruises, splinters, casts and bandages. I am not quite sure what lay behind this curious habit, but it has certainly left us with a powerful resource for memory-jogging. I suppose he must have felt that no record of an essentially happy childhood is complete without including at least a few of its less comfortable moments. The others are better able to date this photograph than me, but I think Dad must have taken it in the drive at 18 Denham Place while Simon was building the catamaran, ca. 1969, when I was about five. I am standing between the twin hulls of that fine, handmade work-in-progress. Some days earlier Mum took me to watch Hamish playing football on the oval at Grimwade House, and, in a moment of genuine joie de vivre—ignoring the football—I scampered along a low parapet in the direction of Orrong Road, tripped, fell headlong into a blocky brick quoin, and smashed my little nose to smithereens. I can see the spot, not too far from an enormous Moreton Bay fig that rises next to the dark blue scoreboard, but the subsequent images are but flashes of vague recollection. I remember the first aid room in the old house, along dark corridors, then staring into the white enameled kidney-shaped dish in my lap with spots of blood dripping down and rapidly accumulating in it. A large and sensible nurse is there in a white apron and starched cap. Mum is on an old black bakelite telephone. I remember the ward at St. George’s Hospital in Kew, at the end of another very long corridor, then bravely waving goodbye to Mum and Dad when in due course they had to leave me there. I remember the kindly old men in the adjacent beds, set at right angles to mine, who I imagine did their best to divert me, and the kindly nurse who, the next morning, after my operation, showed me my bandages and my two purple black eyes in the mirror and told me that I looked just like Batman. There is a bright shaft of light slanting in from the window next to my bed. The tears came fast and strong, for I had no idea who Batman was. The operation was performed by Mr. Ham, the ear nose and throat surgeon; not our general practitioner, Dr. Richard Ham, but Mr. Ham the specialist. In that old-fashioned locution, the medical specialists of Collins Street still went by the slightly superior “Mr.,” or, in the case of the surgeon who removed my appendix some years later, “Sir Edward” (Hughes). Lady Hughes—Alison—is still alive, and a loyal member of the 8.00 a.m. congregation at St. George’s Church of England, Malvern. I have a strong feeling that the basis upon which both surgeons were engaged was that they were golfing cronies of my father’s, but that is neither here nor there. Certainly my little nose was never quite the same afterwards, and to this day it lacks an underlying bone structure extending far past the uppermost portion of the bridge. My brothers have rather elegant, straight Roman noses, but mine was from then on different, broader, and a little spongier. This vaguely bothers me. Still, it has served me well, and shows no other outward signs of trauma. It is a matter of conjecture whether any lingering inward trauma is helped or hindered by a close perusal of Dad’s slightly weird photograph. Look at the posture: little hands clasped behind my back, gently biting the bottom lip, gazing up quizzically, feet firmly planted, delightful little knees—rather formal. Obviously I have never since scampered along anything remotely resembling a parapet, and much less one punctuated by squat brick quoins.

Moonrise Kingdom

Last week in London we went to see Wes Anderson’s glorious new film Moonrise Kingdom. I didn’t really want to go, because I had so much work to do that evening, but he insisted. Resistance would have been futile had I persisted in it. Thank goodness I did not, because no film has so charmed or inspired me for many years, rather like the man himself. Partly this is because at Grimwade House, when I was around the same age as those kids, we too mounted a production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde. I gather the director Wes Anderson also played in it once. I fancy the late and much lamented Geoffrey Joachim must have had a part to play in staging our Melbourne production, though it must have been realized by the then director of music David Byrne, or was it Ian Harrison? All of this came back to me in a powerful surge, a torrent of pretty difficult nostalgia. At some point we must also have sung “Cuckoo!” from Britten’s Songs from Friday Afternoons (Opus 7), because it too crashed over me like an ocean breaker of memory, mingling unhelpfully with the smell of the floor polish they used in the old Memorial Hall, and the ghastly hot-pheromone wall of airlessness that adolescent boys seem to generate. I could also hear the rapid-fire clatter and clunk of all those folding seats in hideous, moveable batches of four. I want to say they were blue. Never have I been gladder to have his hand to hold—except last February when we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I was shaking like a leaf. But there were in the film many other echoes of my Australian childhood: the fishing basket, especially, exactly the same as the one we had at Metung (though in a far better state of preservation; that seemed just right: ours was heavily perfumed with whitebait). And then there are the sailing and the canoeing and the inlets and the beaches and the colors. On the whole I am glad they resisted the temptation to dispatch Tilda Swinton’s wonderfully officious “Social Services” in a sea-plane accident, but all of the performances were good, especially I think those of Frances McDormand and Bill Murray. My man told me beforehand that every frame was technically perfect—he is a brilliant photographer, as is Anderson’s director of photography Robert Yeoman—which one naturally grasped at once, but to this I would add and underline artistically perfect too. Chromatically so rich and nuanced: every shot a composition of painterly sophistication, and delight. Watteau for the screen, with a dash of Richard Dadd, and maybe the paleness of a Puvis or, much further back, the artful symmetry of a canvas at least as large as Veronese’s The Feast in the House of Levi. The film was evidently shot around Narragansett, Rhode Island, not all that far from where I now live. I suspect love makes a big, big difference, but I am so very glad I saw Moonrise Kingdom.

The fairy ring

Mum again, at around the age of eight or nine:

We always went for a walk with the governess in the afternoon, usually along the railway line which ran in front of Raeshaw. There was only one train a day. Sometimes we would see some rail gangers on a push-me-pull-you trolley riding along the track to check the sleepers. In the spring it was a good place for wildflowers: bachelors’ buttons, egg and bacon, bluebells, etc. If we walked back towards Melbourne we would come to wattle and sheoak trees planted by Dad I think to where I was convinced there was a fairy ring. I was very fairy ring-minded right up to the time we left Gippsland and went to live in Geelong. I used to write letters to them and leave them at the ring and some kind person (probably Mongie) would leave replies written on gum leaves on the step outside the sleepout where we younger ones slept. David had his own room in a small hut outside the house, approached through the vegetable garden I think. The smell of Cootamundra wattle still takes me back to those walks. The ring was formed by toadstools spreading spoor ever outwards and had a mossy floor. Very authentic to my way of thinking!

And again:

I used to write letters to the fairies and leave them presents of cups made out of silver paper. They used to write back on gum leaves which was terribly exciting. I remember clearly finding one such note outside our sleepout door on the step one morning. It said that the fairies were going away for a holiday but would return some day. Funnily enough our dearest aunt (Mongie) who had been staying with us, left that day too, but I never twigged.

There is a reason for these two versions. Twice Mum went through the exercise of committing her childhood recollections to paper, beginning in the early 1990s. Because she mislaid the original notebook, with characteristic patience and determination she sat down not so long before she died and wrote it all again. The two books are remarkably alike, in both content and arrangement. She must have had a very clear memory of what she wrote the first time, or else she followed similar processes of retrieval that led her in essentially the same directions. Still, there are telling differences. The second book contains much that was prompted by conversations with Uncle John, who was by then living back in Melbourne and ailing. It is also more squarely addressed to Nick, who supplied the new notebook. And there are occasional hints that by then Mum was aware that she did not have much time left. The arthritis in her hands was giving her trouble, so the entries are briefer. When the family went for the interment of Uncle John’s ashes under a tree on the edge of the oval at Geelong College, Mum was reluctantly persuaded to take that opportunity to re-visit Raith and 188 Noble Street, the two Borthwick family homes in Geelong:

The day was very successful and I felt that John would have felt at home where he was buried. I hope so. On the whole, though, the hunt through what is now suburbia to find Raith confirmed my belief that, on the whole, it is better not to go back. 188 Noble Street was bad enough, but Raith was quite depressing. It looked so different to what I remember. It was no use asking me for street names as there were very few streets and our address was simply Raith, Herne Hill, Newtown, Geelong. The cypress hedge was intact to protect the house and garden from the tearing westerlies. The cement works at Fyansford was very much smaller and invisible from the garden.

Poor old Mum. She was quite right. It is better not to go back, yet despite her better judgment I usually do.

Lost

I have just now had a childhood recollection of almost stupefying vividness. What do these mean, and where do they reside for so long in some backwater of the brain before they jump out and scare us silly? One afternoon more than thirty-five years ago I took the tram home from Grimwade House as usual, but became so absorbed in reading a book that I failed to notice that instead of turning left from Balaclava Road into Hawthorn Road, my tram continued straight ahead into the completely unknown territory of deepest Caulfield, where I had never before ventured. I had evidently taken the number 3 tram without realizing it, instead of the number 69 (as it was then known). It would be useful to know what book induced in me such complete absorption, possibly Finn Family Moomintroll or Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson? (I recall having a soft spot for the Hemulen.) I cannot remember what I did, other than to scramble off at the next tram stop, which was a considerable, panic-inducing distance farther ahead, and to run with my schoolbag slung over my little shoulder all the way back to the junction of Hawthorn and Balaclava Roads to wait patiently for the next 69. However, what I do remember with a shudder and much clamminess in the palms of my hands is the fright, the awful terror of looking up and out at a Melbourne streetscape that was completely alien to me—and the feeling, not entirely momentary either, of being horribly lost and alone. The afternoon was hot, dry, and dusty. There were no pedestrians, few cars on the road, and a couple of drunks lounging at the Balaclava junction. In a way, it now seems extraordinary that our parents entrusted us to the care of Melbourne public transportation when we were barely nine or ten, but nothing too dreadful ever seems to have happened to me whilst traveling on it other than this.