A Letter from Paris Read online

  Aldington, by then in his late sixties, and battling a host of ailments, must have known he’d never live to see dad back in France again.

  In January 1955, as dad and Gisèle waited on their lost luggage and started the slow rebuild of life back in Australia, Aldington’s book Lawrence of Arabia was released.

  The book that had given dad his first research assignment. The research that led dad to exclaim, in the margins of his notebook, working here and writing is the only time I feel I shouldn’t be anywhere else, doing anything else. The writing that showed him what he was capable of, and what brought him the most joy. Aldington had appreciated his swift transcription and summaries of hundreds of letters over the Channel in London, for they’d helped him build the new ‘story’ of T.E. Lawrence and know it was based on fact.

  Lawrence of Arabia sold 30,000 copies in its first week, an instant bestseller on account of the scandalous new view it represented of the Lawrence legend. Aldington revealed Lawrence’s illegitimacy and his homosexuality, but, more importantly, argued that Lawrence had fabricated or exaggerated many of his wartime exploits. The methodical research dad had completed in 1951 at the British Library, examining and copying the correspondence between Lawrence and Charlotte Shaw, wife of George Bernard Shaw, letters that the public had never seen, had enabled Aldington to prove many of the assertions he made in the book.

  Aldington became notorious almost overnight, and was called up at and out of the pensione where he now lived in Montpellier to give radio and press interviews across the United Kingdom and Europe. Newspapers and radio went wild for the story, with Aldington counting over 200 newspaper clippings in the first month in one of his letters to dad.

  Aldington had lived as a writer for decades, and already published numerous books, including the bestselling novel Death of a Hero. But even as a well-known poet and author, he’d never had notoriety like this. It was one of those peculiar cluster bombs in publishing that can’t be predicted: the political and social attitudes of the time and the attachment the public had to the mythical legend of Lawrence meant that the book was met with furore.

  (Eventually, when the film Lawrence of Arabia was made in 1962, some of Aldington’s research and the references to Lawrence’s homosexuality in the book were used in the script. The film was nominated for ten Oscars, and the British Film Institute called it the third-greatest British film of all time.)

  And dad’s research in the British Library had been so important to the creation of the book. It burned me up to know dad and Gisèle were back in Australia by the time it came out.

  Wanting to share the spoils of publicity and knowing it would have raised dad’s profile in both French and London literary circles, Aldington’s letters show how devastated he was that dad was so far from the action. Three thousand miles away in Australia, living in a time when radio interviews could only take place in a studio, dad was cut off. The few Australian radio stations dad had to choose from paid no attention to his pitches, and he was met with apathy and rejection. Aldington was appalled, exclaiming that dad was the only one in Australia who knew the truth, because he’d been the first member of the public to view the letters from George Bernard Shaw.

  Dad wasn’t just physically far from Aldington, but a complete world away in the land of gum trees and wide vacant spaces in the mind, as he described it in his diaries. Dad’s copy of Lawrence of Arabia — which Aldington had generously fought for the publishers to send him, gratis — took three months to arrive, by boat. Bookshops in England and Europe were ordering the book by the hundreds; dad reported to Aldington that Collins Booksellers in Bourke Street, the biggest bookseller in Melbourne at the time, ordered a single copy, and only after he badgered them.

  If dad had only stayed in France a bit longer …

  Hundreds more reviews came out in England as the scandal was discussed and dissected. Sales continued to grow, and anyone affiliated with Aldington and the book was called up to write and speak on radio. Alister and Jacques Delarue (the ‘well-read police inspector’ who dad had befriended in his time at the Hotel Floridor) performed a number of radio talks. Radio France gave each man a forty-five-minute slot, and Alister was paid for a number of freelance newspaper features, launching his writing career in France.

  Aldington continually begged dad to pitch the story to the press in Melbourne — he’d done the research, and could argue its truth in detail. Aldington knew of dad’s financial struggles and search for journalism work, knew how much writing made him happy. But dad might as well have been on another planet. He pitched the story to ABC radio in Melbourne, who rejected it and sent him to write about a sewerage farm in Werribee instead.

  Dad must have felt he’d left his career behind in France. Everything he’d learned about the world and himself, all the connections that had taken eight years to create, was now in the past. Australia was so very far from France. He’d returned to a Melbourne that boasted rows of new ‘suburbs’ of identical houses, talked more of money than anything else, and showed little-to-no interest in what was going on in Europe, let alone France.

  When Albert Tucker returned a few years later, dad wrote that they shared the same sense of the spiritual poverty of Australia, which was an intellectually and culturally arid wasteland in the 1950s.

  The French-Australian Association ran a fete for Bastille Day in Melbourne, and dad and Gisèle went along, hoping for some sort of Gallic reunion with like-minded kin. They served beer and sausages, dad wrote in his diary. We returned home, depressed.

  Barry Humphries was one of the first to make light of this sense of Australian complacency and insularity in his comedy sketches. Dad was thrilled when he discovered Humphries’ work, feeling an affinity with Humphries’ entertaining theatrics and digs at Australian inertia: both had played similar surrealist pranks on Melbourne trams.

  In 1958, when Humphries brought his comic characters to a wider audience on the Wild Life in Suburbia EP (a collaboration with Arthur Boyd’s cousin, Robin Boyd), dad played the record to all who would listen. Geoff Dutton, returned to Australia by then and editing the literary magazine Australian Letters, listened to the recording with dad and Gisèle over dinner, and commissioned dad to interview Humphries. Dad’s interview with Humphries about Dame Edna was published in 1959, the first article to explore this unique act. Until then, most Australians had seen Humphries as someone who ‘dressed in drag’.

  When I took a break from the Dutton and Aldington letters to make my way across from the library to the National Portrait Gallery for lunch, I caught sight of a giant portrait of Humphries in the gallery’s main area. That same portrait, by Clifton Pugh, had run alongside dad’s article.

  I already knew about dad’s connection with Barry Humphries. I’d discovered it while travelling around Australia in 2006. I had just seen his show in Perth, and I’d been so awestruck I pitched an interview to Sunday Life magazine, not knowing how or if I could even get to talk to him. But within forty-eight hours I was on the phone to him, and the first thing he asked was if I was any relation to Denison Deasey.

  Aware that we had limited phone time, I didn’t want to press him, but the question gave me a surge of emotion. I told him that dad had died when I was very young, so I didn’t know much about him.

  ‘You must look into it,’ he said, emphatic. ‘It’s your history.’

  I was living in Fremantle at the time, far from dad’s boxes in the library, and it was only a year or so after that awful first attempt to read his papers. Humphries talked about dad for another few minutes, about how he’d made some introductions in his life that had proved important, before giving me what I needed for the magazine story in our remaining ten minutes: his impressions of arriving back in Australia after three years in England.

  ‘My assaults on suburbia were my only defence against the creeping boredom that Melbourne in the fifties seemed to exude,’ he said, echoing reams of dad’s
diary entries.

  I worked my way through the remainder of the Aldington letters, forming a clearer picture of dad and Gisèle’s return to Australia.

  Returning in early 1955, dad and Gisèle moved onto land in the scenic country town of Warburton that dad had bought back in the war years. His sister Kathleen invited them to live in her suburban Armadale house the following year. Kathleen travelled regularly during this time, living in the USA on a Ford Foundation grant and teaching as a fellow at New York University in 1958. After returning to Australia herself, she secured a position at the University of Adelaide, leaving her Armadale house for dad and Gisèle to make their own.

  In 1955, dad took thirty-three ‘sixth-forms’ in his first teaching class. On Saturdays, he’d go to his history lectures and work his way through the remainder of his unfinished degree. Gisèle sat a librarian exam at the State Library and then worked as a French correspondent for Radio Australia’s telecasts to Paris. Dad continued his role as black sheep of the family by allowing Gisèle to occasionally work on the sabbath. Neither were deeply religious.

  In one letter to Geoff Dutton, dad described a visit from George Bailey, the American journalist he’d befriended through Aldington in Saint Clair, and spent many years visiting in Vienna and Berlin. Dad was devastated that he couldn’t shout him to dinner — his teaching wage unable to stretch that far. The cost of living, particularly the cost of ‘treats of culture’ such as fine wine and theatre, was comparatively high in 1950s Australia. He returned to drinking beer over wine, purchasing Gisèle small bottles of champagne so she could have a glass by the fire when they met with friends.

  Meanwhile, Adrian Lawlor, the artist whose book dad had published when he’d been flush with funds, unexpectedly turned on dad, demanding dad return all the unsold copies. Dad had lost thousands publishing the book due to printing costs, mostly because Lawlor had aggressively resisted any edits on the manuscript, which was way too long, over 500 pages. Of a limited print run of 300 hardbacks, dad had managed to sell less than a hundred, and most of those went to a small group of artist friends. Despite taking out a paid advertisement in the literary journal Meanjin, it seemed no one in Australia wanted to read about other Australians, artistic, bohemian, or not. Lawlor’s demand that dad return the books wasn’t just ungrateful, it bordered on the insane.

  At the same time Lawlor was demanding his book be returned, dad was searching for a publisher for his own book, a travel book about France, apparently. Where was this travel book? Aldington kept referring to it while he consoled dad over the Lawlor situation.

  Dilettante, failure … The words were becoming less significant, for I saw they were factually untrue. Dad was a battler. He didn’t just work hard, he was a generous friend, though not everyone reciprocated or appreciated it. And through it all — the full-time teaching work, the lectures on Saturdays, pitching and writing articles at night, clearing the land and building his Warburton house on weekends — he was also very often sick with sinusitis and painful arthritis. Aged thirty-four, he probably still had remnants of the tuberculosis.

  The details in Aldington’s letters helped me to form a picture of dad and Gisèle, their life together. How close to France dad would have still felt, with her by his side. Although Aldington clearly missed dad, he approved of how happy Gisèle made him, affectionately offering to post her the French magazines, while imploring dad to use his newfound sense of calm from their relationship to keep writing consistently.

  After settling in back in Australia, things seemed to be looking up for dad. He’d sold a radio play to Melbourne station 3AR’s Armchair Chat show, The Koepenik Affair (after the famous German imposter Hauptmann von Köpenick), and a biography — a translation and study of the nineteenth-century artist Vivant Denon — had some publisher interest.

  Every few weeks, there would be another letter from Aldington, detailing how many words dad should write each day to finish the ‘travel’ book, after the Denon biography. But what was this book? I’d found the Australian memoir, which talked of his family background and those early years back in Melbourne, but it had read much like a first draft, and couldn’t have been longer than 40,000 words. Certainly it wasn’t something you’d send to a publisher, which was what Aldington was referring to. It wasn’t a ‘travel’ book, and it wasn’t 90,000 words, which Aldington had written might be too long and need to be cut.

  In April 1955, Aldington wrote with pride at dad’s literary career being about to launch: the situation was ‘licked’ because dad’s ‘travel’ book was about to be launched to the world. The Denon book had been rejected, but Aldington said he might have better luck pitching it after his ‘travel’ book came out. (A piece of Aldington’s advice was an exact parallel to something Mystic had written to me: Send a new story out the day you get a rejection … Let them know that’s not your only idea.)

  Alister Kershaw and Geoff Dutton were about to have their first books published, so it must have seemed like the Australian contingent of those summers at Saint Clair were all launching their literary careers. Aldington’s tone was that of a proud father.

  Another letter appeared dated 1955, giving dad some feedback on the ‘travel’ book, all complimentary. Three more letters were dated April 1955, commiserating over shared money troubles and bolstering him like a father: Work, my boy, work.

  But by September 1955, something had happened. The publisher had either pulled out of the deal or rejected the ‘travel’ book; it was hard to understand.

  Aldington’s letter was full of consolation and commiseration. Fear not, there will always be France, he wrote, saying he missed dad more than ever. He wrote that if dad had still been in France they would laugh all night like they had years before in Saint Clair.

  But where — and what — was this travel book?

  The letters from Aldington produced a sort of revolution in how I saw dad.

  He wasn’t a failure.

  He had completed not just one, but two books in his early thirties, just as he’d promised to do when he quit the job in Paris. The Denon biography and the travel book. Along with all the articles and plays. As well as the two books he had written in the 1970s — that made four complete books.

  Dad wasn’t a failure.

  He’d also translated an entire book to French as a ‘favour’ to an Englishman, I later discovered. He’d pitched radio scripts and stories — and more. But the tyranny of distance and timing, and the casino wheel of fortune that is the publishing game, had seen him take a few knockbacks. How could he consider that he’d failed?

  I thought of my own wheel of fortune. Of pursuing publication with the zeal of a bloodhound in my late twenties. Would I have done that if I’d known dad wasn’t a failure? That he had, in fact, finished things? By thirty I had to have a book published. Like it was a test I needed to pass as single-mindedly as Dec had passed SAS selection. Be ashamed for the rest of your life if you don’t finish this, some cruel part of me whispered, a ghost I thought publication would vanquish.

  Not just any book, but a book on travel, on love, on the risks we take in life. How I poured myself into that book — setting myself insane deadlines, like a first draft in six weeks, because I felt I was surfing an uncommon wave of publisher interest after what Mystic had done for me and I needed to make the most of it, to thank her for her generosity by succeeding.

  I was obsessed with making the most of it. Of extending all opportunities. I’d fly to Sydney at a moment’s notice just to have a face-to-face coffee with Mystic’s publisher friend. Just as dad had apparently flown to Sydney to meet the publisher from the Richard’s Press who was interested in his travel book.

  Then, after I had drafted and redrafted my manuscript and thought it was acceptable enough to submit, I found the publisher had contracted cancer and left the company. The publisher who’d encouraged a whole book out of me — who’d had me thinking I had it made. And now, just
as quickly, was gone.

  Mum made me dinner that night back in Melbourne. She looked sadly at the minted peas and muttered, not for the faint-hearted, like I was fighting a losing battle from the start. I didn’t realise she was talking more about her own views of life than my pursuit of writing. For some reason, her belief that getting published was impossible made me even more determined to prove her wrong.

  So I rewrote the entire book after feedback from a different publisher — one I’d found on my own. I moved into a share house so that I wouldn’t have to get a day job and could live on my few freelance articles a month, marking down the calendar with Xs for every day of redrafting, along with the page and word counts, like I was training for a marathon.

  How I wanted to prove mum wrong. Prove that I wasn’t a dilettante, and that maybe what I’d inherited from dad wasn’t inherently failure. I knew, when she looked at me — especially with the way I lived freelance — she saw dad.

  The determination seemed to come from outside of me — a family story I hated and needed to change. I had to finish it. I wanted mum to see my success and change her mind about writing, perhaps about dad. I visualised the publishing house announcing my book as an acquisition on their website, and I even saw the dress I would wear at the launch.

  By winter, I’d flown to Sydney, subletting a different room in a Surry Hills flat from a friend I’d met on a travel story to Tahiti. Tahiti! Even that trip hadn’t seemed to convince mum that a writing career could be something good.

  I had to be in Sydney. I went to dinner at Mystic’s house, and she gave me more advice and loaded me up with books before I left. These opportunities and connections — they don’t come along twice in your life — like a lightning strike. I worked nights in a bar and spent days walking the beaches or writing in libraries, waiting on a response to the redraft I’d sent to a woman at yet another publishing house, also in Sydney, who’d promised to look at it.