The Most Wonderful Thing

Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John
by Helen Trinca
Text, 2013, 280 pages, $32.99

Madeleine St John was “pickled in love” as a small child, but her life was marred by unresolved grief. She died alone in a London hospital at the age of sixty-four, just a few years after one of her novels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

It all began so well. The elder daughter of Sydney barrister Edward (Ted) St John and his French wife Sylvette Carghier, Madeleine was a war baby, born in Sydney in 1941 while her father was serving with the AIF in Palestine. Ted St John was raised in hardship in the large family of a Church of England canon, acquiring a strong sense of duty and a puritanical streak. Sylvette’s parents, originally Romanian Jews, spent many years in Paris before migrating to Sydney. Madeleine’s sister Colette was born in late 1944. For a time the young family lived in cramped but fashionable quarters at Merioola, the Edgecliff mansion where most tenants were artists, dancers and designers.

Within a few years the St Johns had moved to Castlecrag, a suburb that, like Merioola, enjoyed a bohemian reputation. Bush gardens, water views and quiet streets provided an environment where children could roam free. The St John girls enjoyed local friendships and Madeleine showed talent at the piano.

The situation was less enviable than it might appear. There were strains in the St John marriage. Madeleine’s maternal grandparents, who lived in Watson’s Bay, had been frequent visitors at Merioola, but could give less support now. Ted worked long hours and Sylvette grew lonely. She drank too much. There were frequent quarrels. The girls, aged only eight and eleven, were packed off to board at St Catherine’s, Waverley, which Madeleine later likened to Lowood in Jane Eyre.

Sylvette St John was admitted to psychiatric care after attempting suicide. “Care” is too kind a word: the doctor in charge wrote of his patient in breathtakingly hostile terms: 

vain, self-centred, lime-lighting woman with a marked sense of inferiority masquerading under a superficially vivacious, witty social manner … Mrs St John has always been a demanding, dissatisfied woman, feeling she has never had a good deal … The husband would like to have his wife confined under the Inebriates’ Act …

Ted St John may have tried to do his best for his wife, but as her illness worsened he switched off emotionally. He was unable to give his daughters the warmth, reassurance or explanations that they needed.

Then the worst happened. Sylvette St John died of an overdose of sleeping pills and it was left to the school principal to announce to the girls that “something very hard” had occurred. Their father visited them briefly, remote and almost wordless. After that they were supposed to resume their school routine as if nothing had happened.

Madeleine was twelve. She clung to the belief that her mother’s death was accidental. She had, after all, been told next to nothing about it. All her life she would bear a deep grudge against her father and yearn for her lost mother. This tragedy underlies the complex story of her life.

Helen Trinca spoke to scores of people who knew Madeleine St John. Her task was complicated by the scarcity of personal documents and by the divided loyalties of many of her informants. Many friendships had frayed amid misunderstandings and accusations. Trinca concludes that Madeleine St John set impossible tests of loyalty for anyone who came too close to her.

Late in her life, Madeleine taped detailed reminiscences of her childhood, her love for Sylvette and her Carghier grandparents. She expressed deep resentment of her father and his second wife, who, at twenty-seven, had become the unwelcome stepmother of two grieving girls. These tapes are a key source for Trinca, who shows empathy for Madeleine St John but takes care to include contrasting points of view.

At Sydney University Madeleine joined the Sydney University Dramatic Society and the student newspaper, Honi Soit. She was one of “the Octopus”, eight lively, talented young women who hoped to make careers in theatre, journalism or broadcasting. Madeleine enjoyed brief success on stage as Lola Montez in a student production. In her second year she met Chris Tillam, whom she would marry in 1965.

Tillam had a scholarship to study documentary film-making at Stanford, so the young couple set off for California. From the start there were clashes. In Boston the following year Madeleine had a breakdown and sought psychiatric help. Her husband asked her father for help with the cost, but Ted St John, now reduced to a modest parliamentary salary and with younger children to support, refused. He added that his daughter’s condition was inevitable, given her mother’s history. Madeleine saw this devastating reply.

In 1968 the couple separated, Madeleine going to London where she was to spend the rest of her life, exaggerating her already cultivated accent and trying to forget that she was ever Australian.

Despite her intelligence, contacts and talents, Madeleine always held tenuous, low-paid “jobettes” (her word), selling books or antiques, or cleaning rich people’s houses. She went to operas, rock concerts and parties, smoked pot and enjoyed the London scene of the 1970s. She became a follower of an Indian-Mauritian mystic, Swami Ambikananda. Swami-ji, as he was known, allowed his followers to maintain previous religious loyalties: dancing and meditation could co-exist with Christian beliefs. This was a healing time for Madeleine, who continued to find life tough. Love affairs did not last and friendships often ended in tears.

In her forties Madeleine St John, now living in council housing, worked on a biography of Madame Blavatsky. After years of research, the manuscript was pronounced well done but not quite publishable.

Madeleine secured a better council flat, on the fourth floor of a pleasantly located building in Notting Hill. Just across the square was an Anglican church, which she joined. The previous decade had sharpened her writing skills, so she turned to fiction, producing The Women in Black in six months.

Set in the Sydney of about 1960, The Women in Black is an upbeat coming-of-age story about a school-leaver, Lesley, who renames herself Lisa when she takes a job at the big department store, Goodes, in the Christmas rush. The novel is a sheer delight, evoking a changing Australia with a very light touch. Re-reading it recently, I came upon a dazzling description of the deserted city streets on a Saturday afternoon. I had quite forgotten how eerily deserted the city felt when all the shops closed at lunchtime. The novel focuses on “the women in black” who sell cocktail dresses on the sixth floor. In an inner sanctum Magda, the glamorous Slovenian-Hungarian “Continental”, sells imported designer gowns. Magda inducts Lisa into fashion retail, but also introduces her to a more cosmopolitan lifestyle. Although working at Goodes is only a stop-gap before university for Lisa, it provides her with life-changing oppor­tunities. “A clever girl is the most wonderful thing in all Creation,” a store executive says. Lisa is not the only woman in black whose life is changed by Magda. Bruce Beresford bought the rights to this deservedly popular book, but sadly, has never secured funding to make the film.

Three London novels followed, but they lack the exuberance of The Women in Black. Slim and polished, they seem to me a late-century reversion to the dry, devastating style of Ivy Compton Burnett, where most of the plot is conveyed through snappy conversations. The Essence of the Thing, regarded by many as her masterwork, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997.

Journalists immediately referred to Madeleine St John as Australian, to her great annoyance. However, she enjoyed the renown, sales and royalties that her brief moment of fame brought her.

Forty years of smoking roll-your-own cigarettes had led to advanced emphysema. Madeleine was increasingly isolated in her last years. She kept an oxygen machine in her flat, and the four flights of stairs became literally insurmountable. She relied on a handful of friends for errands and groceries.

Trinca has been chided by one reviewer for focusing on the life rather than the texts, but there is nothing to prevent literary scholars from examining the four novels in more depth. This is a compassionate portrait of one of our most talented expatriates.

Penelope Nelson is a Sydney poet and novelist