A Letter from Paris Read online

  London, 1949

  In my worst hours I think of any street in Paris, or of the Point at Saint Clair; and when I remember they are still there, I am content.

  It wasn’t just Aldington’s letters and dad’s notebook that were in the National Library. There were a number of other writer’s collections I suspected might have relevant information. I’d become obsessed with reading Ninette and Geoff Dutton’s extensive collections since finding Ninette’s memoir and wondering if she had any record of his appearance at the train station in Adelaide during the war. I also suspected some of dad’s letters to Geoff in those first London years would shed more light on his character, particularly the letters from 1949. Perhaps Michelle was in Canberra?

  Altogether, there were seven collections in Canberra that contained letters to, from, or about dad, and hundreds of letters from Saint Clair. I set myself the ludicrous goal of tearing through them all in two days.

  In all my library research, the letters from Saint Clair were always a treat — dad’s happiness in France seemed like a key to a hidden part of myself.

  I felt pulled by an invisible cord up the road to that library full of letters.

  Finally, I had a vague chronology.

  Dad left Australia for London in 1947, returning in December 1954 with Gisèle. Gisèle had returned to France sometime in early 1968, and dad had joined her for Christmas, returning to Australia in February to work at Monash University in the History Department. Mum was in her final year of studies. My sister was born in March 1970.

  In September 1970, dad returned to France with a writing grant to research French education for his book Education Under Six, as well as another book on education he was researching for the International Bureau of Education in Geneva, called Initiatives in Education. He took mum and Ayala, who was only six months old. Gisèle cleared out her apartment and went to live with her mother to let the three of them stay in her tiny little flat! In September 1973, my brother Declan was born in Oxford, England, when they’d all been living downstairs in Arthur Boyd’s Highgate house. In a congratulatory letter from Gisèle, she playfully implored dad to finalise their divorce because Gerard had joked that he was Dec’s grandfather.

  Dad had been working on Education Under Six in London in between trips back to France. In 1976, they all returned to Australia.

  I was born the next year.

  Why was his heart so trapped in France? Why was that country so bound up with his true identity?

  Perhaps Aldington would help me understand.

  One of the seven books I’d discovered since Coralie’s first message from Paris that referenced dad was a book of Aldington’s letters. Dedicated to the memory of former members of ‘The New Canterbury Literary Society’, dad’s name was listed above Lawrence Durrell.

  Inside the National Library of Australia, set up at one of the shiny formica benches on the top floor, I pulled out the folio of Aldington’s letters to dad. Unlike the scrambled documents in Melbourne, these were arranged chronologically, held in plastic sheets, and arranged in a book. The first letter was dated January 1949, and the last, some 300 pages later, 1959.

  What flowed through in those letters was too much to take in.

  You wanted answers, here are your answers, dad whispered, or perhaps it was Aldington, as I sat entranced by this world of France, after the war.

  First, and most disconcertingly, I saw a reference to my sister’s name, Ayala.

  Aldington was writing to dad about Alister Kershaw’s new baby in 1956. Her name was Martine, but Aldington, inexplicably, insisted on calling her Ayala. I quickly texted a photo to my sister. Just as reading dad’s name in a Facebook message had been such a shock and a surprise, seeing my sister’s name in a letter dated 1956 was unsettling.

  Later, chewing over the day’s discoveries in my hotel room, my sister and I talked about how and why dad must have chosen the name. As though he’d repeated the name in homage to his literary hero. Perhaps he’d forgotten where he even first heard it …

  From Ayala’s name, I moved across to an unpublished letter from D.H. Lawrence to his wife, Frieda, written in 1927. The contents were fairly banal: something about a bottle of beer and cordial greetings, but still — it was a letter from D.H. Lawrence. Dad had come to own the original, it seemed, in the course of his research work for Aldington.

  Chapter Twelve

  L’écrivain

  The 300 or so letters from Aldington to dad chronicled the highs and lows of the writing life in 1940s and 1950s France and England.

  Aldington was intimate, affectionate, detailed and forthcoming. He was endlessly cheering dad on, congratulating him on any moves forward, confiding literary facts and details that implied a relationship built on mutual trust and deep companionship. The years they spent in Saint Clair were so beautiful that when dad returned to Australia, almost every letter from Aldington contained a reference to something in Saint Clair.

  Aldington hadn’t just loved dad’s company as a friend and companion. He’d seen dad’s potential as a writer and a creative. And that’s what transformed dad’s perception of himself.

  As I read the letters, I realised that just as dad had unintentionally found a mentor on that first trip to Saint Clair, I had found the same kind of guidance when I first lived in Sydney.

  In my twenties and working at a women’s magazine, I wrote an email to a writer whose website I loved. Though her website was technically about astrology, her wild tangents were grounded in a background as a journalist, and she had the ability to pull facts and figures from history and psychology to twist funny tales that somehow related to pop culture and the news. Reading her sometimes made me laugh out loud.

  Mystic Medusa wasn’t just an astrologer, she was a poet, an educator, and an entertainer. Her irreverent writing style had the ability to polarise and dismay; it was incredibly unique. She even formed a few new words of her own language, which her fans soon took into their own lexicons. Her blog, I often thought, was one of the best parts of the internet. Openly encouraging the discussion of ideas women once would have been burned at the stake for considering, her online presence was a portal of learning.

  Like Alister writing a fan letter to Aldington from La Coupole in Paris, I wrote Mystic an email praising her blog, and she responded with a surprisingly generous commission to contribute a piece, posted me a copy of her newly published book as thanks, and encouraged me in my writing.

  But that wasn’t what inspired me the most. Mystic Medusa was the first writer I’d ever known to make an actual living as a freelancer writing on things she wanted to write about — not bound to an office or a company or someone else’s dictates. This was as distant and magical an idea to me, in those early days, as someone having the ability to travel to the moon. The fact that she made a living from her freelance writing, with a house and family, was even more impressive.

  Years later, when I was in New York, sending her regular email updates on my antics, she forwarded one of my emails to her then-publisher, pitching my rambling emails as the ‘possible beginnings of a book’. The publisher had written directly to me expressing interest in the idea.

  Mystic’s generosity, openness, and finger on the pulse of digital media were the impetus for so many developments in my career. She implored me to come back to Sydney, time and again, connecting me with key people who would go on to influence my life and loves. Without anyone in my family or Melbourne circle from whom I could seek help for my writing dreams, Mystic became my biggest mentor.

  I don’t think she realised how much she inspired me. When I first went full-time freelance — after giving it two half-hearted cracks before heading back to pound the floors of restaurants — she gave me an actual, real-life model for a life and lifestyle I wanted.

  Editing pays better than waitressing, she wrote. Get your mindset right … send out a pile of story pitches and go
Louisa!

  Because she so easily invited me into her circle, I assumed I had a place there. Just as Aldington had tuned the piano and invited dad to stay in Saint Clair, then suggested some writing jobs and made introductions (where dad had always been the one in Melbourne making introductions for others).

  Though both dad and Aldington had been damaged by war and the diseases of the time, it was Aldington’s crack-hardy attitude of not letting it affect his creative work that dad imitated, instead using it as fuel and fodder for publication.

  Mystic, likewise, refused to ever play the victim. When she suddenly lost one of her highest-paid weekly columns, when Australian newspapers haemorrhaged advertising dollars in the switch to digital media, she never whinged. She just looked for a new way, quickly, to continue to do her work — upgrading her website and trying new subscription methods to replace the archaic old newspaper model of payment, where money usually arrived months after submission of an invoice to some anonymous accountant.

  Aldington described the hackwork he’d once done in London for a pittance to build up his repertoire, exactly how much he was paid for his first poem, what he was paid for writing and when, who in which country was looking for certain types of translation, and ideas for stories he thought dad could pitch. He advised dad on living costs, as though making the writing life work had to be the first priority — and that’s how you made your choice about where to live.

  Mystic had written to me in similarly detailed ways, encouraging me to set myself up in a cheap studio flat rather than share a house that might be too distracting, and even to rent a computer when my own had blown up. It’s a business cost and you can write it off at tax time, she wrote. When I was hired for my first editing job, she told me exactly how to set up an email contract and invoice the publisher.

  As I read the Aldington letters, I remembered how I once didn’t know a single other person who even wanted to be a freelance writer. To be able to count someone like Mystic as a confidante and a friend was a privilege and a gift, so I understood how important Aldington was to dad. Yet at important as meaningful connections were, Mystic and Aldington also understood the necessity of ‘critical distance’ from distractions. Much as Aldington preferred the peaceful obscurity of French provincial life to the literary establishment of London, Mystic insisted on remaining anonymous despite the enormous number of subscribers to her blog. The writing had to came first.

  Sometimes bossy, always informative, Mystic was the first person who really understood and encouraged the part of me that knew — from childhood, when I was obsessed with letters — that I wanted to be a writer. In that first year I went freelance, I had dozens of confounding experiences where I’d be met with radio silence or bizarre feedback from an editor, and her swift replies with her own stories ‘from the field’ made my frustrations pale in comparison.

  She had at least a decade more experience than me. I’d shake my head after receiving one of her emails filled with data and details that helped me make sense of a somewhat bizarre industry. She helped me find new ways to make it work, the way she had, opening herself up to a global model and not constraining herself to an Australian market. (In Australia, where the shift to digital came almost a decade after the British and American newspapers had already switched to user-pays, subscriber-based models, her subscription-led blog was actually revolutionary.)

  Aldington, too, was encouraging and kind, with a global viewpoint and knowledge founded in experience. He believed in dad, but he wasn’t unrealistic, and he definitely cracked the whip. The details in these letters were incredibly romantic and intimate, and I loved the two men’s open affection, wondering if it came from living in France, where masculinity didn’t involve that Australian way of men jokingly putting each other down.

  In one letter, Aldington echoed advice Mystic had given me, warning him to have a clear commission before he worked for too long on writing a particular story. He shifted, just as Mystic had shifted, from encouragement to detail to diary-like entries on word counts and book sales to ideas for what dad could try to work on next that might interest publishers in different markets. He wrote about life as an artist, how things had changed since he’d lived in a garret in Paris in the twenties and thirties, details of life in rural France in the 1950s, and what was happening in the publishing world in England and the USA and how that might be affecting dad’s story pitches. From Mystic, such expansive information always blew my mind wide open and dusted out the cobwebs of clichéd thinking. I was immensely grateful for her generosity, just as in reading Aldington I saw a similar generosity of knowledge and connection.

  In between Aldington’s descriptions of the changing seasons in France, gossip about mutual friends, bizarre health complaints (with what sounded like medieval treatments), and, always, talk of which books to read and why, he would offer news of the latest poetry anthology he was compiling, a quick request for dad to do some paid research or translation work, and sentimental sign-offs begging dad to return or visit.

  And Gisèle, Gisèle, so many references to Gisèle.

  She had met Aldington, too.

  I learned that dad was supposed to drive with Gisèle to Montpellier to spend the Christmas of 1953 with Aldington, but couldn’t come because petrol was too expensive to leave Paris. Aldington implored him to look for a place to live in rural France — that way, he could live, and write, without having to take another soul-sucking job in an office, which he knew dad loathed. Dad had just completed a year’s work as a Special Press Analyst in the Paris office of the US Special Representative while living with Gisèle in the 7th arrondissement; he quit to finish writing a book. He was thirty-two.

  Did he ever finish that book? I was thirty-two when my first book came out.

  I kept reading the letters.

  In 1954, Aldington had started the search for a place for dad and Gisèle to live. He wrote that with a car, and with the cost of good food in rural France a fraction of what it cost in Paris, dad could live as a writer ‘for fifty pounds a year’. How much Aldington had wanted dad to stay. How close they had been.

  A community of expat writers in France. How idyllic it all sounded!

  I remembered leaving Sydney that awful first time I’d tried to make it work as a writer. In the space of a week, I’d been sacked from my magazine job, my car had blown up on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and I’d fallen off my bicycle (on the Bridge, again) and broken my tooth. I was back in Melbourne before the stitches were even out of my chin.

  Mystic wrote to me, calling me back, telling me not to give up, calculating different costs, encouraging me to replace waitressing with sub-editing because it paid better — and because there was more work available in magazines in Sydney.

  Anyway, you’re not a real writer until you’ve been sacked from a magazine. Ruth Park was sacked from her first magazine job. It’s a rite of passage in this city. Truly Louisa.

  Dad almost stayed in France. But a car accident took the last of his savings. The letters from Aldington, particularly those dated 1954 and 1955, when dad returned to Australia after eight years abroad, showed just how close a call it was. The car cost somewhere between 20,000 and 48,000 francs to fix.

  In June 1953, dad had written:

  Yesterday I received my final pay — 59 000 francs. After paying the doctor, the rent, the food and laundry, and the telephone, I have the enormous sum of 6000 francs to show for my year’s work. We have survived, we have eaten, I have bought G some material for dressmaking and a book of Chinese paintings. I have a good reference coming to me and experience in guile. Nothing more.

  After the car accident in January 1954, they also, it seemed, had to look for a new apartment. It was an awful winter in Paris, and the pipes in their kitchen in the Rue Las Cases froze over. They had to boil all their meals, and Paris had run out of coal to heat the place. Months of rejected job applications for work as a writer or translator
soon followed — for a job at UNESCO, French correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, Paris correspondent for the BBC, translator for Australia House in London, translator for Air France … Gisèle had even started to search for translation work, to keep them in Paris. She spoke fluent English, too.

  But no dice.

  In July 1954, they left Paris for London, marrying in a quiet registry ceremony before their slow journey back to Australia.

  Of course: the eternal juggle of money, time, chance, love, and place …

  Aldington had done all he could to encourage them to stay in France. He had found a nice town where dad and Gisèle could live nearby — Alès, in his beloved South. With food prices ‘a fraction’ of the prices in Paris, which were already very little, and all dad needed was to get his car fixed to be comfortable. Dad had even asked Aldington to drive around and sign a year-long lease on his and Gisèle’s behalf.

  But then — the money ran out and they left. Dad and Gisèle returned to Australia, and Aldington’s hopes of having his protégé close by were dashed. Dad and Gisèle made the long journey back to Melbourne via Ceylon in December 1954. When they arrived back in late January, the liner had lost all their luggage.

  Dad went back to finish his history degree at Melbourne University on Saturday mornings, and soon got full-time work as a French teacher in Toorak, planning his first lesson around the word Chez. But he was depressed.

  No Aldington, no spirit, no aesthetic, he wrote in his diary back in Australia. Money isn’t a means of exchange, here. It’s an infection.

  Aldington’s letters became more and more intimate and affectionate after dad’s return to Australia. He dreamt of dad; he heard locals calling to each other and mistook them for dad. In one letter, he wrote that dad had belonged in Europe and he couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. He seemed to be calling dad back.