My Brother Jack Read online

  Dedication

  For my own brother Jack …

  Epigraph

  Fiction there is – and history. Certain critics of no little discernment have considered that fiction is history which might have taken place, and history fiction which has taken place. We are indeed forced to acknowledge that the novelist’s art often compels belief, just as reality sometimes defies it. Alas! There exists an order of minds so sceptical that they deny the possibility of any act as soon as it diverges from the commonplace. It is not for them that I write.

  André Gide

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Notes

  About A&R

  About the Author

  Other books by George Johnston

  Copyright

  Introduction

  As we know from Garry Kinnane’s fine biography, George Johnston was close to despair when, in the early sixties, he began writing the first tentative episodes that would become his greatest achievement, My Brother Jack. His health had collapsed, his marriage with Charmian Clift seemed in ruins and despite some intermittent relief their financial position since their return to the Greek island of Hydra in April 1961 remained chaotic. More importantly, as far as Johnston was concerned, genuine literary fame and reputation, not to mention fortune, had eluded him. There had been some successes: his 1960 novel, Closer to the Sun, the hero of which is a version of David Meredith, had reaped them a timely windfall when honoured by the New York Literary Guild; and his next book, The Far Road (1962), had also met with reasonable success. Both novels, though, are flawed by moments of gaucherie and structural faltering and, despite a very reasonable reception for each, neither made quite the impact Johnston had hoped for. Charmian Clift said of Closer to the Sun that it was ‘half-way honest’ and that it was ‘feeling out the ground for one that was to come so many years later …’

  She was referring to Clean Straw for Nothing, published after My Brother Jack, in 1969. But the painful honesty of that novel – reflected to some extent in a tortuously contrived structure – merely takes its cue from its 1964 predecessor. My Brother Jack is scarifyingly honest, partly in its fidelity to autobiographical detail (though Kinnane has convincingly demonstrated its many significant departures from the ‘true facts’ of Johnston’s life), but more so in its willingness to face up to certain emotional truths.

  This aspect of My Brother Jack has perhaps been overshadowed by continuing interest in it as an ‘autobiographical novel’ and, less frequently and more interestingly, as a novel seeking the ‘demythologising of the Australian type’. Both these approaches tend to overlook a theme that runs through most of the narrative and which provides probably the crucial turning point of the action. This is David Meredith’s gradual realization that he is somehow on the side of death and death-in-life; and that he may lack the fortitude, or emotional strength, to turn himself around and to espouse the affirmation that means facing up to life rather than withdrawing from or evading it.

  Death, deathliness or reminders of death are among David Meredith’s earliest memories:

  With me it [‘the first memory’] focuses most sharply around the small, rather fusty wallpapered hallway upon which the front door opened in that undistinguished house …

  The hallway itself, in fact, was far from undistinguished, because a souvenired German gas-mask hung on the tall hallstand … and the whole area of the hall was a clutter of walking-sticks with heavy grey rubber tips – the sort of tips on walking-sticks that relate to injury rather than elegance – and sets of crutches – the French type as well as the conventional shapes of bent wood – and there was always at least one invalid wheel-chair there and some artificial limbs propped in the corners.

  Meredith grows up amid constant reminders of the ‘mess’ that had to be ‘cleaned up in those years of 1919 and 1920 … the bodies of the dead to be located, the great cemeteries [to be] set up’. Though he hates it, he is required, as a small boy, to visit the maimed, the wounded and the dying in hospital every Sunday, gradually becoming, as a result of these experiences,

  … half aware of a formless shadow of disaster that I wanted to shout against or run away from: it existed in the unexpected sounds of pain or delirium that came from behind screened-off beds, it lay across the interminable recession of men’s profiles that were always lined and ward-pallid and set horizontally on white pillows, it clung to the changes in occupancy that one noticed from one Sunday to the next without ever knowing, or even daring to ask, whether it was death or healing that had effected the changes.

  Those years enduring a half-understood, half-submerged juvenile ‘terror’ constitute the substance of Meredith’s early memories – the ‘desperate Sunday feelings’, the atmosphere of a house ‘impregnated … with the very essence of some gigantic and sombre experience … no corner [of which] … was not littered with the inanimate props of that vast, dark experience’.

  These were the scenes Johnston wrote first, as he struggled with illness, failure and despair less than two years after the optimistic return to Hydra. No doubt his sense of catastrophe as he wrote infected the already sad picture he recalled.

  It is a melancholy opening to the book and a mostly melancholy childhood that is depicted. Nevertheless, this unwanted familiarity with death and the penumbra of deathliness is to remain a shaping factor in David Meredith’s life until he meets Cressida Morley in whom he immediately recognizes a ‘vital power’, a liveliness. She is ‘the youngest thing’ he has ‘ever seen’ in his life. She is full of what Dylan Thomas called ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, and in her he sees a kind of salvation.

  But that is to anticipate. As David grows up and the Meredith family gradually sheds its burden of crippled and dying veterans, the reminders of that ‘sombre experience’ and its baleful influence recede from view. Yet Meredith seems fatally afflicted. He develops a habit of withdrawal, of avoiding or hiding or cringing away from the raw lineaments of day-to-day existence. As if appalled, despite himself, by the sad and terrible vision he has pieced together from his contemplation of horrors real, imagined and pictured, he develops a ‘pattern of evasion’ and retreats into a private world in preference to the chaotic external reality which he ‘didn’t have the courage to face’. Freed from the too insistent and too explicit reminders of death, he now tries to turn his back on life.

  David Meredith’s account of his childhood and adolescence constantly draws subtle attention to his disengagement from the robust processes of life. It is the hurly-burly of existence, the prolific, chaotic eventfulness of it, that he can’t cope with – either as a child or as a young man. What George Orwell refers to in his novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, as ‘the bundle of life’ frightens Meredith as it frightens Orwell’s somewhat similar hero, Gordon Comstock. Both shrink away from commitment to the life around them; for both, a nondescript plant – Meredith’s Dollicus creeper, Comstock’s tawdry Aspidistra – stands as an obscure and unlikely symbol of loss; and for both in the end, the love for a woman of superior life force seems to offer hope of salvation.

  Locked into a home life of disruption and withdrawal, the young Meredith finds in work not solace but escape. The craftsmanship o
f his new trade does not engage him, though he tries to make a fair fist of it, and he is reduced to stealing his fellow apprentice’s work in order to cheat his way through the final examinations. Meredith’s account of his colleagues at the Klebendorf and Hardt studio makes them seem a little quaint at times, but he is never condescending. On the contrary: he describes his leaving them as a ‘defection’ and, without comment, details their vigorous engagement with ordinary life outside the demands of the craft to which, at first sight, they seem fanatically and myopically addicted:

  All of them balanced their work with other interests. Old Joe Denton grew exhibition dahlias, Tom Middleton played the cello in a string quartet. Barney Druce was an amateur photographer and secretary of a canoeing club on the River Yarra, Paul Klein painted water-colours for a commercial gallery and made ship models for his own joy … [and] every one of them was a fanatical Savoyard …

  The mute and unenforced contrast here is with David himself who has no such connection with the crowded outside world of passionate interests, pastimes and common pleasures. And, even though he soon after discovers the way out of his ‘wilderness’ to take his first steps as a writer, his habit of reclusion makes it a matter of ‘blushing shame’. He is ‘lonely and secretive and desperately anonymous, but still a writer’.

  The most important and the most obvious way in which David Meredith emphasizes his own disengagement from the brimming though often oppressive world around him is by detailing the behaviour of his brother Jack. While David, by his own account, is linked with or in the shadow of images of death, lifelessness, escape and reclusion, Jack in contrast is a life figure:

  The first brief homily I ever remember [Jack] giving me went something like this: ‘Listen nipper’, he said … ‘you got to have a go at it. Even if you know you can’t bloody win you still got to have a go. You’ll always be pissin’ into the wind, but that don’t mean it isn’t worth givin’ it a burl …’

  … Anything he tackled was tackled with immense gusto, almost as if he had to eat life in huge gulps … while his appetite was strong … or before they cleared away the table. He seemed to meet everything full on; side-stepping was something he kept for the boxing ring.

  To some extent, by means of fleeting glimpses, the portrait of David Meredith’s childhood, adolescence and young manhood is also the portrait of an age in Australia, and especially in Melbourne between the wars. It is a time of disintegration and eroding certainties when ‘everything seemed so hopelessly unorganized [and] you just grew up and took pot luck on your chances’. Confronted with this disorganization – the fact that most likely ‘you can’t bloody win’ – Jack runs with the momentum of the times, as if intuitively recognizing that to do so was the most positive of a bad lot of options.

  … the city was fiercely generating a life of its own that was exactly in key with his wild, gay, rebellious outlook. The Jazz Age had reached its crescendo: the wail and boop of saxophones, the twanging of ukeleles, and the mad jumping of the Charleston had even begun to invade the hitherto inviolate stuffiness of our suburbs. Beyond our neat hedged perimeters, the world seemed suddenly transformed into a jungle of iniquities, of violence, sex, flaunted revolt, alarming uncertainties … Swaggering through it all, with their heads held high, went the slim, flat-chested, emancipated waistless girls wearing rouge and lipstick and with shingled hair – or, worse, the Eton crop – their skirts above their knees and their stockings rolled below. And in eager, effervescent pursuit, went my brother Jack, with brilliantine on his hair.

  Jack, as a young man, is an amiable larrikin – a ‘leader of the push’ but without the malice and evil associated with the Australian city gangs in their pre-war heyday, as memorably portrayed by Louis Stone in Jonah (1911). David – introspective, shy of the world, acutely conscious of the disintegration around him, and timorously embarking on a pseudonymous and secretive writing career – belongs more to a European version of the world entre deux guerres, a world increasingly seen to be without meaning, bereft of its traditional props and comprehensible contours. He lives amid what he later recognizes as the ‘horrible flatness of it all … the unmitigated melancholy of those suburban streets’.

  What was so terrifying about these suburbs was that they accepted their mediocrity. They were worse than slums. They betrayed nothing of anger or revolt or resentment; they lacked the grim adventure of true poverty; they had no suffering, because they had mortgaged this right simply to secure a sad acceptance of a suburban respectability that ranked them socially a step or two higher than the true, dangerous slums of Fitzroy or Collingwood.

  In this wilderness, like many another literary hero of that period, David finds himself adrift and directionless, disjoined from the life around him, already showing signs of the deracination that would become an important issue for him later on:

  The world then … was poised exactly midway between two disastrous wars: I see now that I, too, stood in a kind of self-created vacuum exactly in the middle of two balanced points of experience. The First World War had ended ten years before, and ten years later the Second would begin. I had been born seventeen years before; it would be exactly another seventeen years, and I would be thirty-four, before I would be able to even partially disentangle myself from the toils which, all unwittingly, I was already beginning to fashion for myself.

  I was not prepared for it. In a special sense I was not prepared for anything … My familiarities extended beyond the reach of true time and I was intimate with shadows …

  Like the young Orwell, though with less choice, Meredith flirts with the life of the down-and-out. In his briefly close association with Burlington, he experiences at first hand the bohemians’ answer – the life of art and hedonism pragmatically juggled – to what became known in the northern hemisphere as the malaise of the times; or what Orwell called the ‘dreadful ennui that lies in wait for every modern soul’.

  The difference between the two brothers is especially visible in their encounter with Sam Burlington. To Jack, after an initial wariness and suspicion, Burlington seems a good bloke, a worthy drinking companion and an impressive drunk. When he hears of Burlington’s arrest on suspicion of murder, he is automatically on his side:

  … [Burlington] struck me as a rather peculiar young fellow [Jack writes to David] but he was decent enough and he was very kind to you on that occasion when you were up against it and both of us know he is not the sort of chap who could do a dirty thing like that … I know you will be seeing him to cheer him up and give him moral support …

  There are two ironies here. The first is that Jack’s well-intentioned sentiments show considerable ignorance of the kind of world Sam Burlington inhabited: Burlington would certainly not ‘do a dirty thing like that’ but in other ways he is quite outside the morality Jack assumes for him. The second irony is that David, in his usual evasive and arguably cowardly manner, is not supporting Burlington. He is making every effort to distance himself from his hapless friend and he goes to visit him only much later, when Burlington ‘had dropped out of interest’ because of new evidence that seemed to exonerate him.

  But in any case, David’s reaction is entirely unlike his brother’s straight-down-the-line, though misguided, mateship approach. As seen by David, the mystery of Jessica Wray’s murder is like a modernist cause célèbre. He sees his connection with the affair not as something fortuitous and self-evidently innocent, but as a ‘shadowy sense of involvement’; he feels ‘invaded from outside by dangerous forces of association’ and his panicky, rather craven efforts to deal with these insidious reactions mark the beginning, as he puts it, of his moral corruption. His interrogation by the police becomes a curious cat-and-mouse affair in which constant assurances that he is not under suspicion seem to be continually undercut. When he finally does visit Burlington, the apparent change in the man himself and in his once gaudy and seductive surroundings is, as Meredith sees it, ‘appalling’. However, it is not entirely clear how much of this transformation
is observable reality, and how much Meredith is projecting impressionistically on to what he sees as part of his own profound trauma.

  Meredith’s account of his reaction to the Jessica Wray episode is like a mirage, from which familiar shapes seem about to emerge but never quite assemble themselves. The resolution of these vague impressions comes when Meredith concludes his account of the affair:

  It was after that week of the Jessica Wray case that I began to become a master of dissimulation. Among his aphorisms Kafka quoted a phrase that seems to have greatly haunted and intrigued him – ‘but then he returned to work as if nothing had happened’ – and I suppose that can be applied to me. Kafka was acutely aware, of course, of the boundless field of conjecture and implication involved in the statement.

  The reference to Kafka reflects back on Meredith’s description of his ordeal throughout the ‘week of the Jessica Wray case’. The body-blow of fear and surprise that Meredith experienced on opening the newspaper report of the murder; his feeling of being ‘invaded’ by forces he did not understand and could not pin down (‘dangerous forces of association’); his strange interrogation by the detectives who alternate between the compassionate and the sinister; Burlington’s appallingly changed appearance and circumstances, and his uneasiness (‘as if my knock on the door had frightened him’): all these moments and references powerfully recall the plight of Kafka’s Joseph K in The Trial, once Meredith’s curious allusion to Kafka at the start of Chapter Nine gives us the retrospective clue.

  On reflection, this should not surprise us. So many of Meredith’s guises – as beetle man seeking dark corners and concealing spaces; as wearer of masks; as shunner of raw life and living; as hollow man; as scapegoat of the between-wars vacuum and confusion; as, in retrospect, an appalled, dwarfed figure in the ‘terrifying’ suburban desert – are reminiscent of those to be found in many modernist texts and are the subjects of some modernist art. Here is perhaps the crucial way in which the novel can usefully be referred to as ‘autobiographical’; not in some arguably felicitous reproduction of what actually happened to Johnston-disguised-as-Meredith, but in its portrayal of a narrator who does not acquire but is born with some version of the modern malaise. This is the bequest of the author, honestly and painfully looking back on himself and those times.