The Dressmaker's Daughter (26 page)

This next letter was written from Patrick and Barbara Pak Poy’s home at Norton Summit, which had a large
swimming pool looking from the side of the hill down onto the city. Caro often went to stay with Patrick and Babs and was a friend of Virginia’s, their third child. Babs used to say that finding Caro’s white hair in a hairbrush belonging to one of her black-haired girls was as if a silk worm had been nesting there.

Norton Summit

Dear Thomas,

I’ve just read yr book and am burning to talk to you about it. As I don’t see how we can have a talk for days, unless you are free to call on Tuesday before dinner, I decided to write. Also, Wednesday is the Women’s Rally in Vic Square and next day I’ll meet Sue Higgins [later she became Dr Susan Sheridan] as I’m sure she’ll want to go to the rally, and Friday I return here.

I must tell you I’ve never enjoyed a book on art as much as yours. It’s so exciting and interesting and goes in where few dare. I was able to see some things about my own writing from your book – for instance, things about style (or form) and matter. I’ve always thought the best works of art were those that best married form and matter (with the addition of all those extra qualities which make art). Oh well, I can explain it better when I show you my French pottery baking dish. [I meant by this
that the dish combined form and function perfectly.]

Now here comes the tough bit – I don’t know if you’ll be able to handle this, but I have to tell you or I can’t respect our relationship at all. On page 42 you made a sexist statement which I feel p’raps you may not make now, as the book was written in the 60s. Then you spoke of homosexuality being deviant – in a way that implied contempt. (I can’t see the quote just now.) These remarks of mine may hurt you and make you angry and yet I must say what I think to you.

Thomas, I really believe that in the next ten years the revolution that is at the moment occurring will be unmistakably here. In which event you will still be teaching and you’ll be judged. I can’t believe that with your care for equality you’ll fail to read about sexual politics very soon. However, you are busy and the world is full of books. But I do urge you with all the care I have to read widely on the subject very soon. No-one is free of being damaged by the sexist way we’re reared. And you are least of men I know, but it’s not enough.

I know the more you do, the more you might, and it’s precisely because you care that I feel so concerned and trouble to talk to you about this.

You may be wondering what you wrote on page 42 as you may not realise it’s sexist. ‘Effeminacy’ is a
word you use as disparagement. How would you view the person who wrote of a facet of art that had ‘masculine’ tendencies as being a form of contempt and meaning it to be derogatory to art? I don’t think you’d even take that writer seriously!

It makes me sad to think that these remarks may make you so angry that our relationship will end on a quarrel and that will be that.

I also wanted to ask you, in a purely curious way, what you mean by ‘Tennyson is “noble”, not for any nobility of sentiment, but for his mastery of that musicality on which poetic Beauty depends.’ I don’t understand that.

Pater [Walter Pater, the inventor of the term ‘Aestheticism’] sounds a lovely, wise man. What he says in the quote on page 70 about ‘great art being devoted to further the increase of men’s happiness, etc’ seems sensible but I can’t see how he can have been a true exponent of Aestheticism. Can you tell me?

That poem ‘Bridal Morning’ is enough to make you cry – it’s ravishing. As for that guy (was it Poe?) who wrote that we weep at beautiful poems because it makes us realise with a melancholy longing how unable we are to obtain and ‘to grasp, now, wholly, here on earth at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to brief, and undetermined glimpses’.

What rot! We don’t cry because we want more and see how little we are able to obtain – we cry because as laughter is the opposite to tears and as we laugh at the incongruous and unexpectedly silly or pretentious, so when we see forms of perfection we cry. Also, we cry, dammit, because our spirit shifts. Ianesco says we haven’t necessarily got spirit but I think we have because I know when my spirit rises (and so does everyone else, I suppose). I hope you don’t feel this is another bloody essay to read.

I was so glad to read that lovely thing Pater wrote about art: ‘By leading us to enter imaginatively into situations, it may awake that finer knowledge through love, on which true justice depends.’

I hope, dear man, you’ll take this in the manner in which it’s written, which is with love.

From Jill.

P.S. Come if you want to about 3 on Tues. and at least we could have a talk before dinner as I feel I really must have that meal with the children, as I haven’t seen Hugo for days. But perhaps you’re not free.

Well, the sun’s out and I’m going to have my umpteenth swim for the day. What heaven it is here and how sane swimming amongst the trees and hilltops.

Later in 1976, I went to stay with my nursing friend Paula Dorrington in Victoria at Mornington. Because Paula had guests, I stayed for a few days with Joanna and Roberts Dunstan at Mount Eliza.

Both Roberts and Joanna died a few years ago. They had the most volatile marriage I ever saw. Joanna was legendary for many things, among which was having thrown a television set downstairs in a quarrel with Roberts. Paula often regaled me with stories of their actions, which we green girls found hilarious. Roberts was a war hero, and Member of the Victorian Parliament, and walked with crutches, having lost a leg when the plane in which he was a gunner was shot down in North Africa.

Mirrachana,

Mt. Eliza, Vic.

Dear Thomas,

Here at Mirrachana I laugh to myself so much I felt like telling you some of the events. Joanna speaks in a way that has Beverley her house-helper and myself listening unabashed to her phone calls and laughing. For example, she said to her sister, ‘Well, darling, you only want J back because he’s such a good lover. Why do you think I stay with Roberts?’

‘No, Diane,’ (she pronounces it Dee-an) ‘the room burnt, but Roberts saved the house even though he was drunk. He turned the hose on the velvet curtains.’

She discusses the Greek derivations of fuck with Beverley (who is mentally disabled) and me as we three drink coffee from cups so lovely they have to be seen. She says, ‘Now, Jilly, the Elizabethans were after the Greeks; don’t you know that?’ I say, ‘Yes, I do, Joanna.’

Roberts arrived home from Parliament at midnight and flung open my door, lurched in with his crutches and voice and said, ‘Now, Jilly, welcome to Mirrachana. I want to discuss poetry with you. I think you are influenced by T.S. Eliot’s beat.’ (I think he meant meter.) I said I thought it unlikely. He read me one of his own poems, so full of single lines and words that rhymed, which was so romantic and primitive I was touched.

He said he’d like to drink tea so he made some and then more of his rave. He talked about my poetry and, although he was a film critic for years for the Melbourne Herald, he doesn’t understand it, but he is so old-fashioned and crazy I sit and feel warm towards his good nature and madness.

Joanna said on the phone today, ‘I certainly am not a radical, Diane; I’m not even an anarchist! Tulip [her dog] has eaten Jilly’s diretis.’ (She meant diuretics). She then broke into French and, if her French is anything like her English, it must be hilarious. She is endlessly kind and is taking me to a kitsch show today and also to shop. I’m going to buy clothes.

Later: Well, I did. We drove all day (in rain this evening which is beautiful and with the views of cliffs and Pt. Phillip Bay. People can’t live up to it all and so drink like fishes).

I am cooking for a dinner party and I’ve been drinking. Yes, it’s true. Joanna had two bottles of Pewsey Vale riesling especially for me. ‘Your State,’ as she calls it.

Roberts is at Parliament tonight so she has claret opened.

I saw a fox! Yes, in the garden among the wild, windy pines, which are so sad and Japanese looking. As we drove in, he slunk back into the dark.

Joanna and I fed possums last night – one held its paws folded across its pale furry stomach bulging like a satisfied matron after her pavlova. And watched us with his fish-eye-camera-lensed eyes. I hope you’re not saying, ‘Let’s have some sentences, shall we?’ I love you for that. I feel like a child in her cotton pinafore with frills over the shoulders, plaits with green ribbons and so eager to please. Well, I want you to be proud. I love you, Pisspot.

Jill.

P.S. I go to Paula’s tomorrow so use that address if you write, but don’t feel you should.

I guess, wringing my hands, I’m inevitably going to fail English. I can’t do it. Probably it is because of lack of skill and I must face the truth about it. Oh, but I want to do it. I feel like a cripple and all my friends dancing.

What is this invisible stone I can’t dislodge?

J.

At the end of second year, Thomas took me to dinner and we discussed which subjects I would study for the final year. In my mind, one of them had to be English as I was still hell-bent on understanding Literary Criticism. On that night, I was given one of the best pieces of advice I’d ever had. Thomas said again, as he had said the year before, ‘Why don’t you give up English? It costs you so much. You can do the other subjects easily and English will harm you.’ Once again I said that I felt it was my business and that I must go on with it. (I felt like Christ at the temple arguing with the priests when his parents had returned to find him after discovering he was not with their friends on the way home from the journey to the temple. He had said, ‘I am about my Father’s business.’) Then, listening to Thomas, I thought, ‘This man loves me. He is a poet himself. He has taught English for many years. So he understands it. He is not jealous of my writing but wants me to succeed. He is
giving me advice that I would be a fool to reject.’ So I said, ‘I will give it up.’ Then I went outside and vomited into the gutter.

Third year began on a happy note, as I was doing the two subjects I loved, History and Classical Studies. However I continued in my last-minute way, giving dinner parties for ten, going to meetings of the Town and Country Planning Association at lunchtime, typing up the minutes (I was the secretary rather against my will because, as is common, there was nobody else who wanted to be secretary), going to Amnesty International meetings, and a thousand other things. I also had friends to stay who had broken hearts, waiting on them with trays in bed while they learned to stand again. It is an odd thing but rejection can take your feet from under you.

My close friend Wendy was one such person. We had been at the Adult Matriculation School a year apart. Therese, one of the history teachers, had said to me, ‘There is one like you every year. Last year it was a girl called Wendy McBeath. You will meet her when you go to university. Try to find her, as I think you will get on.’

I had looked for Wendy with no luck for a term or two. But then towards the end of first year, I saw a letterbox in the Anthropology Department with her name on it. I put a note inside saying that Therese had said we should meet
and I left her my telephone number. When Wendy rang, we arranged to meet for lunch, but then I remembered we did not know what we each looked like. She said, when I asked, ‘I’ve got red hair.’ I said, ‘I will be wearing a scarf around my head.’ We met at a Greek restaurant and we had much in common, not the least that our ex-husbands had been at the same school and in the same form, we had trained at the same hospital, and each of us had a daughter and a son whom we were rearing on our own. From that day, we have been friends. Wendy lived at Stirling in the Adelaide Hills and was a gardener. At that time to me, gardens were something you walked through.

I nursed Wendy over the long, drawn-out affair with J, and she, in turn, cared for me when later it was my turn to be rejected and I took to the bed and the bottle.

My final year seemed easier, two subjects meant fewer lectures and whatever my faults, I had almost always showed up for lectures. But
The Oresteia
almost brought me down. Three days before a mid-year exam, I went to a lecturer and asked, ‘Could you tell me where I can buy this book
The Oresteia
?’ He said, with a raised eyebrow, ‘It is not one book. It is three. What is your name?’ I said that I was not going to tell him my name because if I did he would know when reading my exam paper that I had only begun to read just before the exam. So I walked to the bookshop, bought the books, rode home and began to read.

Gleaning what I could from these texts, I wrote the exam and must have passed, but more than this I can’t remember. But the lecturer’s face, when he found all those words of his about
The Oresteia
had fallen on such stony ground, stays with me. And yet his name does not. But he and I smiled at each other when later I told him he had passed me. I think he understood that strange things are possible; ardour is effective and terror is a spur.

It was now 1978 and Wendy, Sylvia, Ghilly and I sat exams. Some of us were doing Honours and Ghilly was at the Conservatorium while singing Gilbert and Sullivan at night down in the Festival Hall. She was cleaning in a hospital for a living and Wendy and I were living on the widow’s pension. Sylvia, I think, had a scholarship and was soon to write her Masters degree on circuses. Except for Ghilly, we smoked and we all drank litres of house wine and got upset about men in a shattering way, with the regularity of the beat of a Mozart symphony.

I knew my enormous good fortune in having in Thomas a man who understood much more than I about poetry, its history and its meaning, its mystique and its terror, and yet who never tried to sway me. He did not try to influence the way I wrote but merely let me be and praised me. This gift was so great that even now, years later, I am flummoxed and grateful that he could have had the discipline and lack of ego to maintain it over many years. By the time we parted in 1980, in a swagger
of distress and grief on my part because he went back to his wife (in fact, he had never left her), I had my own footing in the world of writing. But I owe him much.