Ian Britain

Loyalty and love she lavished free
On lowly friends and well-born,
Like Murdoch, Melba and like me,
She was marvellously Melbourne

The ‘she’ is actress Coral Browne (1913-1991); the ‘me’ is Barry Humphries; the quatrain is from Humphries’ eulogy – or elegy – A Chorale for Coral, which was ‘Very Privately Printed’ in 1992 after her funeral. In his memoirs More Please, which came out the same year, Humphries recalls listening to Browne ‘in the forties’ on the Lux Radio Theatre. In his subsequent autobiographical volume, My life as Me (2002), he recounts how she ‘had come to England to further her theatrical career in the early fifties ... and she was not only a marvellous actress but an infamous wit and the author of many legendary exchanges’.

My edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1979) defines ‘dictionary’ in two ways: ‘1. A book dealing with the individual words of a language … so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification and use … arranged, in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical …’; ‘2. By extension: A book of information or reference on any subject or branch of knowledge, the items of which are arranged in alphabetical order …: as a Dictionary of Architecture, Biography, Geography … etc.’ 

Angus Trumble, who died suddenly last October, was a towering figure with a slight sideways tilt to his head. In his famously dandyish attire he might have stepped out of a Max Beerbohm cartoon, and appropriately so given his expertise in Victorian and Edwardian art. Trumble’s latest, and last, subject also chimes with one of Beerbohm’s earliest literary ventures, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, published in 1894.

‘Call me Ismail,’ it could plausibly begin: a screenplay not of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick but of the real-life relationship between two filmmakers renowned for their adaptations of a string of other classic novels. Ismail Merchant first met James Ivory on the steps of the Indian consulate in Manhattan in 1961. ‘Call me by your name,’ the Ivory character might wittily retort in this imagined biopic. That, of course, was to be the title of the film scripted by Ivory nearly a decade and a half after Merchant’s death in 2005, but it captures something of the symbiotic nature of their partnership.

‘A voyage round my father’, to quote the title of John Mortimer’s autobiographical play of 1963, has been a popular form of personal memoir in Britain from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) to Michael Parkinson’s just-published Like Father, Like Son. The same form produced some of the best Australian writing in the twentieth century, with two assured classics in the case of Germaine Greer’s Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989) and Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father (1998). The tradition has continued into the present century with – to list some of the choicest plums – Richard Freadman’s Shadow of Doubt: My father and myself (2003), Sheila Fitzpatrick’s My Father’s Daughter (2010), Jim Davidson’s A Führer for a Father (2017), and Christopher Raja’s Into the Suburbs: A migrant’s story (2020). Mothers in such sagas are far from absent, and they can emerge, though not always, as the more obviously loveable or loving figures. As signalled by most of those titles, however, mothers loom less large over the unfolding narrative. Fathers may not always know or act best, but, partly because of their often tougher, commanding mien, they become irresistibly the centre of attention.

‘Absolutely charming – slim, handsome, nice speaking voice and manner, a super-gent’: it might be a line from an old-fashioned dalliance column, but it is from one of the letters published in this volume, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, writing to one of his most regular and lustrous correspondents, Debo Devonshire, youngest of the ...

‘He was a great bloke, a gentleman and a scholar,’ one of Scott Bevan’s interviewees says of his subject, the fêted and (at one stage) ill-fated painter, William Dobell. Like many others in the book, this interviewee got to know Dobell at Wangi Wangi, the little coastal township just south of Newcastle in New South Wales where the painter retreated for the last third of his life, following the unsuccessful but nonetheless wearing legal case mounted against him when he was awarded the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1943. (The plaintiffs had sought to claim that the prize-winning work was a caricature.)

‘Spellbinding’ is an apt word to sum up the effects created by Russian-born German artist Walter Spies in his phantasmagoric, darkly glowing landscapes and figure paintings, particularly those that he fashioned when living in Java and Bali between 1923 and 1941. Tropical luxuriance has other superlative renderers in art – Gauguin, ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau, Donald Friend – but none of their works has the eerie, mesmeric intensity of Spies’s. He deserves a full retrospective exhibition at that temple of early twentieth-century German art, the Neue Galerie, in New York (the last show of his work was in Holland back in 1980), but for the moment we can feast our eyes on the sumptuous illustrations in John Stowell’s biographical study of the artist – the first study in English of such substance, and a long-evolving project by an Australian scholar based at the University of Newcastle.

How lucky we were! My ‘baby boomer’ generation in Melbourne grew up on stories of the second Frank Thring (1926–94), which competed in outrageousness with the anecdotes we heard of Barry Humphries; and throughout the 1960s we had the opportunity – more so in the case of Thring, who had now settled back in Melbourne as a regular performer on stage and television, as Humphries began his lifelong commute to London – to catch both of these not-so-sacred monsters in the flesh and on their own home turf. (As I asked of the females of this species in a previous article in ABR – ‘Mordant Mots’, September 2007 – what is it about Melbourne that has produced such bizarre and brilliant creatures?)