Not So Marvellous Melbourne

Wild Bleak Bohemia
by Michael Wilding
Australian Scholarly, 2014, 580 pages, $39.95

In the second half of the nineteenth century Melbourne was the place to be, heady from the gold-rush years, bustling with energy and settling into its long boom. Everyone had a new career. Marcus Clarke wrote burlesque plays, but, obscured by the surface joviality, a literary disaster was being enacted, which lacked its contemporary tragedian. Now 150 years later Michael Wilding has resurrected that tragedy, with the script written in the words of the authors of the time. 

The material in this wonderful book forms itself around three intertwined biographies of Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall. The story opens in 1867, when Clarke begins writing, and ends in 1881, when he dies. But of its 500 pages, 350 cover the first four years, 1867 to 1870. Wilding has devised an unusual documentary format. He assembles an immense number of letters, newspaper articles, literature, reminiscences and contemporary commentary, and strings them together as a chronological narrative. The linkages are provided by Wilding, who acts more as guide and editor than author. As readers we are invited to a feast of raw material unmediated by an author’s intervention, so we can make our own assessments. The book is a kaleidoscope, not a panorama: we are presented with minute details of life seen from the inside, and built upwards from below. It’s a story told from a street-level perspective—we’re always looking down into the mess of things, there’s never a horizon in sight.

Michael Wilding first came to prominence around 1970 as a young academic all-rounder from England at the University of Sydney’s English Department, producing literary criticism, writing fiction, and founding the publishing house Wild & Woolley, whose name gives a hint of his own bohemian leanings at the time, in common with fellow writers like Frank Moorhouse and Howard Jacobson. After a successful career in which he became a Professor of English, he co-edited in 2009 a biography of Marcus Clarke written by Clarke’s school friend Cyril Hopkins, brother of Gerard Manley. That venture may have led to the present book.

With Wilding’s new way of approaching the three authors, we see clearly for the first time their similarities and differences. All affected a bohemian lifestyle while trying to live off part-time journalism in Melbourne. Kendall and Gordon were primarily poets and so less adept as journalists than the prose writer Clarke. Kendall was an Australian-born New South Welshman who came to Melbourne for only a short (and disastrous) period of this life, 1869 to 1870. In contrast Clarke and Gordon arrived from England and were removed from Melbourne only by their early deaths. They descended from wealthy professional backgrounds in the upper gentry in England, and suffered a marked decline in status here, whereas Kendall was working-class and making his way in the world until he came to Melbourne and fell among thieves. His son Frederick recalled: “He was not, like some other poets, a hearty, unashamed Bacchanalian.”  Kendall, who was guileless and likeable, had one talent, poetry. Gordon had two drives, horse riding and ballads, which gradually coalesced as “Galloping Rhymes”. He launched himself into life with a blinkered gusto which suited steeplechasing, but melted in the face of the more subtle challenges of life.

Clarke, the mercurial centre of this book, was a far more complex case—by turns magnetic, talented, hard-bitten and manipulative—with a variety of avocations: journalist, editor, librarian, bon vivant, chronicler of Australia’s early days, fiction writer and librarian, at all of which he was a gifted amateur with too many balls in the air at any one time. Clarke almost succeeded as a great man of lasting achievements, but collapsed and fell approaching the post due to certain self-destructive character flaws. His personality, which remains elusive, was perhaps best described by himself in a confessional letter to Cyril Hopkins:

I have a fatal facility for adapting myself to my company and am in hourly terror lest I fall into that most degrading of all states, the state of the man “who can be a gentleman when he likes”. The consequence of this state of things is that my mind is becoming cynical. I say bitter things, laugh uproariously and sigh despondingly … I am cool in manner, partly natural and partly artificial. I am egotistical because I see no one that I like better than myself.

Clarke had a chance to return to England with an offer of a London newspaper post, and Gordon had a chance to claim an ancestral Scottish property, but they had neither the money nor the willpower to make the break. Kendall had an easy means of escape from his Melbourne madness, back to Sydney and rural New South Wales to recover, but he remained permanently damaged by his bohemian stint which he bitterly regretted.

Wilding displays a wide range of reference, and a light touch. When the Western District squatter Learmonth appears on the scene, Wilding notes he shares a surname and an old Scots ancestry with the Russian writer Lermontov. Gordon’s Penola friendship with Fr Julian Tenison Woods means Wilding catches Mother Mary MacKillop in his capacious net. Myriad linkages of detail of this kind give his material a lattice-like density. Wilding has an eye for the telling anecdote which captures the flavour of scandalous Melbourne. Victoria’s Chief Commissioner of Police, Captain Standish, was a louche former Catholic bachelor living at the Melbourne Club. On one occasion he arranged a formal dinner for his cronies where naked ladies were seated on chairs of black velvet background in order to highlight the whiteness of their skin.

Through neat connections a huge cast of friends and supporting characters are assembled around the three principal writers. Among them are George Gordon McCrae, Dr. J.E. Neild, James Smith, George Walstab (who co-authored a novel with Clarke), Henry Gyles Turner, Sir Redmond Barry, J.J. Shillinglaw, Richard Birnie and Dr Patrick Moloney. For each of them Wilding provides a brief biography and character sketch. A full social tapestry is created, but from a different social stratum than that in Martin Boyd’s Langton novels.

The daily routine of the three principal characters was to work at their writing, mainly journalism, in the morning, then to go into town to hand in their copy at newspaper offices and look up material for further articles. In late afternoon the long evening’s revelry began by repairing to the Yorick Club or the Cave of Adullam (both founded by Clarke), dinner perhaps at the Café de Paris, attendance at a theatre, and descent into the demi-monde. They often then staggered home in the small hours, woozy with grog and drugs, to their lodgings outside the city’s centre. The human constitution couldn’t keep up this daily pattern—a permanent weariness set in.

Social life was based on clubs, particularly the Yorick, which in our age amalgamated with the Savage Club in 1966. Clarke’s flat-mate Arthur Telo brought back from New Caledonia for the Yorick “an enormous assortment of clubs, bows and savage weapons of war”, which are presumably those which decorate the main room of the Savage Club today. The clubmen enjoyed juvenile pranks, like removing business signs and brass door-knockers in the dead of night. It’s hard for us to realise the three writers were so young, in their late twenties or early thirties in the 1870s. Wilding might have mined Clarke’s novel ’Twixt Shadow and Shine more thoroughly, as its characters are thinly disguised portraits of Clarke’s club-land cronies.

Such people were part of Upper Bohemia, the part-time leisure occupation of the better-off classes, in contrast to Lower Bohemia, the involuntary scramble for existence of the destitute, which Clarke wrote about so memorably in the press, and into which the three writers themselves descended at times. In writing on this theme Clarke was, as Wilding wisely suggests, “writing as much for himself as for his audience, warning himself of his own possible fate”.

Clarke’s best journalism has been collected in the volume A Colonial City, edited by Laurie Hergenhan. Wilding’s book appeared at the same time as an exhibition on Melbourne Bohemia at the State Library of Victoria, where Clarke was deputy librarian.

The fulcrum on which Wild Bleak Bohemia turns occurs halfway through—Gordon’s death in June 1870 at the age of thirty-six on the day his Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes was to be published. Kendall left Melbourne a few months later. Gordon walked into the coastal scrub and sand dunes at Brighton beach and shot himself through the head. One immediate reason was he couldn’t pay the printing bill. From this time on things get worse and the reader, put through the wringer in tandem with the victims, wilts as the agony is piled on.

The three were all very gifted but fragile personalities, so bohemia was not the answer to their troubles. Australia’s culture was too young and thin to buoy them up. Clarke lamented in a letter home: “I was sent to the land of radicals and mob-law. I was fond of art and literature; I came where both are unknown.” For a while bonhomie kept up a front, but as the poet Robert Lowell, himself no stranger to these problems, memorably wrote of certain mental patients: “These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.”

The three writers declined because of the combined effects of addiction (alcohol and readily available drugs), poverty, an inability to manage their lives and pay their bills, and depressive temperaments sometimes close to madness, noticeable also in their parents. Gordon had many premonitions of his eventual suicide. They borrowed money from their friends, which demolished their self-respect, and often didn’t pay it back, which in turn deepened their guilt. They weren’t people who were comfortable in their own skins, as we now say. Clarke died at thirty-five, mired in debt after two bankruptcies and suffering a complete bodily collapse.

In a timeless critique of the bohemian way of life, George Orwell wrote in a book review of a typical English literary layabout enjoying life in the south of France between the wars:

Before long he is drinking, cadging and lechering exactly like the rest of them, and on the last page he is left gazing at the world through a mist of Pernod but dimly feeling that his present degradation is better than respectable life in England.

Similarly, Frank Moorhouse published a short story in Quadrant in 1974 titled “The Commune Does Not Want You”, in which the bohemian counter-culture of the time is revealed as authoritarian as the mainstream society it despises.

The three writers married lower-class wives much younger than themselves, some in their late teens, to whom literary circles were foreign. They were helpmates, nurses and comforters to their husbands, long-suffering and admirable backstops, who have our sympathy, but they remained understandably helpless in the face of terrible events, like the death of the Kendalls’ young daughter, caused partly by starvation. The wives were not strong enough in personality to stand up as equals to their husbands, and to have an effective say. But these writers were never going to marry strong impressive women of the stamp of Annie Baxter Dawbin or Caroline Chisholm, preferring to while away their time in the male world of the club.

Australian colonial literature has been on the back burner for quite a while as the critical literacy brigade have foregrounded their contemporary fixations. Lovers of older literature like Laurie Hergenhan, John Barnes and Victor Crittenden have valiantly soldiered on against the tide. In history Geoffrey Blainey, Paul de Serville and many others have kept the nineteenth century alive for us. This outstanding, original documentary created by Michael Wilding might revive interest in our more distant literary heritage.

Patrick Morgan has contributed to Quadrant on literary and political matters since the 1960s