Outbreak of Love

 

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Copyright © the estate of Martin Boyd 1957

Introduction copyright © Chris Womersley 2013

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in the United Kingdom by John Murray 1957

This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

Cover design by WH Chong

Page design by Text

Typeset by Midland Typesetters

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

Primary print ISBN: 9781922147073

Ebook ISBN: 9781922148155

Author: Boyd, Martin, 1893–1972.

Title: Outbreak of love / by Martin Boyd; introduced by Chris Womersley.

Series: Text classics.

Dewey Number: A823.2

 

IN 1913 the first volume of Marcel Proust's
À la recherche du temps perdu
was published, the Geiger counter was invented and Albert Camus was born in Algeria. Nationalist movements simmered across Eastern Europe, resulting in sporadic outbreaks of violence. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, the complicated saga of the Langtons, and their myriad familial and amorous entanglements, continued to unfold. In
Outbreak of Love
, the third volume of Martin Boyd's famed quartet, the Langtons, ever determined to maintain their social status, find it increasingly difficult to set themselves above the concerns of ordinary folk and are dragged into the fast-moving tide of world events.

In the preceding volume,
A Difficult Young Man
, the narrator Guy Langton observes with laconic precision that ‘the repeated patterns of heredity' are one of the defining aspects of his life. Indeed, the actions that propel the plot of
Outbreak of Love
have their antecedents in the adventures of Alice and Austin Langton in the late nineteenth century, recounted in the series' opening salvo,
The Cardboard Crown
, and continue with Guy's brother Dominic (the titular Difficult Young Man of the second volume) running away with another man's betrothed, ‘the greatest social fiasco Melbourne had ever known'.

The Langton Quartet is an indispensable glimpse of the social and political mores of upper-middle-class Melburnians in the years leading to World War I. The characters are conflicted about their origins, where they belong and against which yardstick they are to measure themselves. And such ambivalence extends to the novel itself. The quartet was published between 1952 and 1962. While the work bears the unmistakeable hallmarks of modernism, Guy Langton is sceptical of the worth of the artistic movement that defined the twentieth century. ‘At the risk of making this party as tiresomely elusive as Kafka's castle…' he begins one chapter.

Elsewhere, Le Corbusier's maxim that houses are machines for living is treated with derision. In yet another scene, a discussion of the painter Brian's latest work, Cynthia Langton urges the artist to experiment a little more. ‘It was surprising,' Guy notes sardonically of this exchange, ‘how soon in that remote place she had caught the atmosphere that was to corrode the soul of her generation.'

The place names are familiar (Collins Street, Fitzroy Gardens, Brighton) but the world of the Anglo-Australian upper-middle classes, and the complications that arise from their love affairs and quests for social advancement, today feel remote. Despite this, many of the observations that Martin Boyd gave his characters remain as wise and amusing a century later. And while it is a mistake to assume the words of fictional characters always reflect the thoughts of their creators, some of these seem irresistibly the result of Boyd's battle for recognition in Australia. (His 1946 novel,
Lucinda Brayford
, had sold handsomely overseas, but received scant attention at home.) ‘A single success is a mischievous thing,' Russell Lockwood warns, but ‘without repetition, it's worse than failure.'

Another of the recurring themes in the Langton novels is Anglo-Australians' suspicion of their inherent social inferiority to the old world of Great Britain and Europe. As noted in
A Difficult Young Man
, the Langtons, emblematic of their class, suffer the ‘family disease of always wanting to be somewhere else' and have inadvertently inflicted upon Guy the dilemma of not knowing where his true home might be.

Guy forgives the behaviours of certain characters by explaining that they had ‘no basic reality. They spent their time trying to fit their lives to a pattern which existed on the other side of the world, the original of which most of them had never seen.' It is no accident that A. A. Phillips' essay ‘The Cultural Cringe', in which he named and explicated this colonial inferiority complex, was published in 1950, two years before the first Langton novel appeared.

 

Published in 1957—two years after the preceding Langton volume,
A Difficult Young Man
—
Outbreak of Love
more or less adheres to the slightly awkward narrative model established by its predecessors. The story is told by Guy Langton, and once again it centres on key members of his large family. How Guy manages to access and record the intimate moments of his relatives is never explained, but we take the veracity of the account for granted.

Guy is articled to a Melbourne architect and lives with his unmarried Aunt Mildred, rather than with his parents at the ramshackle family estate at Westhill, some distance from the city. Mildred has an unhealthy, possessive relationship with young Guy. ‘Like most unmarried ladies,' Guy notes with the pomposity of youth, ‘she sought compensation in excessive loyalty to her family as a whole.'

Mildred's loyalty assumes a vaguely sinister complexion when threatened by Guy's potential relationships with girls, most notably with his caustic twin cousins, Sylvia and Anthea. ‘Now you're not to speak to the twins,' she warns Guy as they set out to a reception given for his Uncle Wolfie to perform his latest preludes, a party which—with its coy subterfuges, extramarital attractions and social anxieties—sounds the opening motifs for all that follows.

Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell's twelve-volume epic
A Dance to the Music of Time
(to which the Langton Quartet has been favourably compared), Guy Langton is content to remain in the shadows, revealing himself only to the extent that his observations of others mark him by default. In many ways he is a perfect guide: observant, droll, wise enough to understand and to forgive. The portrait he paints of his family and their milieu is clear-eyed, witty and always affectionate. ‘We can only satirise those things which part of us admires,' Aunt Mildred observes with an uncharacteristic bolt of insight.

Although Guy's romantic interest in his cousin Cynthia Langton is obvious,
Outbreak of Love
concerns not his own amorous adventures but mainly those of his Aunt Diana who, aged forty and for twenty-three years married to the lazy and boorish German émigré musician Wolfie von Flugel, falls for another man's charms. Russell Lockwood, also forty, is an Australian recently returned from many years abroad. He is on the lookout for someone ‘of his own appreciations', and the two begin a hesitant flirtation.

The situation Diana finds herself in—and the decisions she must make as a result—is similar to that in which her mother, Alice, found herself a generation earlier. In this manner the family disease makes itself apparent and articulates precisely the dominant theme of the quartet: where do one's loyalties really reside? Operating within such social strictures, love—as the title suggests—is akin to an undercover operation behind enemy lines or an illness that must be managed.

Diana and Russell conduct their delicate romance with care. There are discreet assignations and elaborate plans that are invariably frustrated. Love continues to break out in inconvenient places: Diana and Wolfie's daughter Josie becomes engaged, and the prospective wedding further disrupts the secret lovers' hopes for the future; Guy's affection for Cynthia grows, causing friction with Mildred.

Meanwhile, a world away in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated and the Great War—that blood-soaked cataclysm which eradicated any vestigial beliefs in the superiority of European ‘civilisation'—darkens the horizon. By the close of this sharp-witted historical drama Australia is at war with Germany, setting the scene for the quartet's final instalment, and Diana is forced to declare her romantic allegiances—for better or for worse.