Rose review April 07

Alphabet box

Peter Rose

Brenda Niall
Life Class: The Education of a Biographer
MUP, $32.95 pb, 304pp, 0522853438

It is rare in Australia for a literary biographer, even one of distinction, to write at book length about her intellectual formation and biographical pursuits. A country so demonstrably forgetful of its best poetry and fiction is unlikely to foster a literature of this burgeoning genre, still emerging from its decorous constraints. Elsewhere, we have Richard Holmes’s seminal Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1995) and Leon Edel’s Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (1979), but Australian examples are few. So it is good to have Brenda Niall’s lucid account of her gradual transformation from academic to biographer.
Niall issues a prefatory warning that this will not be an autobiography, ‘scarcely even a memoir’, but Life Class: The Education of a Biographer takes in the whole life, from Niall’s warmly remembered and privileged childhood in Kew, Melbourne, to her latest biographical venture. The book opens in 1935, when Niall was five years old. Her parents had just built a salubrious house on Studley Park Road, near Kew Junction. Niall recalls this formative house in powerful, even reverent detail. Asthma kept her indoors, close to her mother. She missed a year of school because of illness, but she went on reading precociously, and the year at home seems to have sharpened her attachment to family. We meet the neighbours; follow the memoirist down Kew’s hilly streets. There are the Gobbos and the Derhams and the Galballys. Close to the white mansion that John Wren built is Raheen, still occupied by Daniel Mannix, halfway through his immensely long archbishopric, and a vivid presence in the book, walking daily from Raheen to St Patrick’s Cathedral in his frock coat and top hat. Nearby was Robert Menzies, still in Opposition, a mostly absent figure until his daughter chalked ‘HOOEY’ beneath an anti-Menzies graffito on the Nialls’ fence; he came round to apologise. The religious divide was unfordable. ‘The arrogance with which we divided the world into two blocs – Catholic and non-Catholic – is hard to imagine today,’ Niall observes.

In 1940 her parents bought a farm in Tallarook, partly because of Brenda’s health. She enjoyed her new physical freedom and wellness. Like most Catholic girls of her class, she went to school at Genazzano in Kew, a Gothic convent staffed by twenty nuns. Because of the stringencies of their order (the Faithful Companions of Jesus), theirs was hardly a vibrant intellectual climate, and young Brenda’s reading – including Graham Greene – soon intimidated the author-ities. The standard of teaching was patchy: ‘we were all destined to be nuns or mothers.’

Despite the insularity and pedagogical flaws, Niall did well at school and studied Arts at Melbourne University. Her world remained small, her manner diffident, but she relished the brilliance of teachers such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Joseph Burke. Just when she was getting into her stride and thinking of further studies at Oxford, her life changed forever: ‘collapsed’ is how she puts it. Niall’s father, a cardiologist, developed a brain tumour and died the following year, aged fifty-three. The brevity with which this is described bespeaks Niall’s abiding loss: it is the starkest example of her autobiographical resistance.

Death stalked the Niall family: several uncles died in quick succession, all young. Everything was changed, imperilled, numbed. Brenda’s social life ‘virtually stopped’. The grand house was sold up, and her studies suffered. She began a master’s degree but this foundered, ‘with almost nothing written’. She worked for a time in one of her uncle’s medical rooms. Then B.A. Santamaria, a family acquaintance, offered her the editorship of Rural Life (a phase of her life she wrote about in greater detail when reviewing Santamaria’s letters in the March issue of ABR). The timing was exquisite. This was just prior to Petrov’s defection, Dr Evatt’s denunciation of Santamaria’s Movement, and Menzies’ royal commission into communist activities in Australia.

Much of this was a mystery to the young editor, whose ignorance about Australian history and politics she attributes to her limited education. She stayed, though, helping Santamaria, feeding him clippings. Eventually, she became his research assistant on a biography of Archbishop Mannix. Back she went to Raheen, flattered and excited, only to be outfoxed by the wily Irish charmer, then ninety-five and giving nothing away.

When Niall became engaged, she expected to give up work (she is shocked by how casually she entertained this notion), but she broke the engagement and slowly put her academic career back together, enrolling in A.D. Hope’s young English Department in Canberra and writing her MA on Edith Wharton. She relished her first taste of independence, often thinking with great delight, ‘No one knows where I am at this moment, and no one knows who I am’.

Niall’s time at ANU led to a tutorship at an even newer university, Monash. ‘Latecomers can be lucky,’ she declares. Promotion was rapid, notwithstanding her aversion to public speaking. An indulgent professor spared her ‘the ordeal of the lecture theatre’. (This phobia will surprise those readers familiar with Niall’s fluent and illuminating talks at numerous literary festivals in later years.) She writes affectionately of her fellow teachers in the department, but she doesn’t touch on university politics, nor the immense schisms that were happening in English departments throughout Australia. Interestingly, there is no mention of her students – odd for someone who taught in a university for twenty-five years. In many ways, the solitary, focused life of a biographer and freelance author seems absolutely right for Brenda Niall.

This new life began with a book about Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce, whose novels (‘all seventy-eight of them’) she had read as a girl. The idea of a life of Edith Wharton still beckoned, and Norman Holmes Pearson invited her to Yale to study the papers, but the grand old literary scholar died the very day she reached New Haven. The untimely death of another supporter – editor and scholar Grahame Johnston – finally closed the door on Wharton. ‘Small world, big world. What did I really want?’
A short early book on Martin Boyd led to a full-blown biography of the patrician novelist. By then Niall was alert to the perils of biographies (those ‘border-crossings into other lives’): the moral scruples, the legal risks, the curse of good taste, the tenuous access to papers. Quickly she became adept at reading people: the descendants, the fretters, the keepers of the flame. There is a funny moment when she visits the Nolans in England, keen to gather Mary Boyd Perceval Nolan’s memories of her uncle Martin Boyd, but thwarted by Sidney Nolan, voluble and egotistical, steering the conversation round to Dostoyevsky. Niall’s task was further complicated by her discovery that the source of the Boyd family’s immense wealth, John Mills, whose sole child and heiress married the son of a Victorian chief justice, had spent seven years as a convict in Van Diemen’s Land. Martin Boyd’s denial that there was anything unseemly in his pedigree had scotched an earlier book on the Boyds, by Geoffrey Dutton. ‘Every corner had its memories – and Martin had swept them all away with his fastidious neo-Georgian broom.’ Yet Niall proceeded, shrewdly, taking her time, mollifying the younger Boyds.

When Martin Boyd appeared in 1988, it earned prizes and reprints, but Niall was accused of undue reticence about Boyd’s ‘presumed homosexuality’. It is an issue to which she devotes several pages. While acknowledging that ‘[p]rotectiveness for Martin Boyd’s reserve probably had its effect on my discussion of his sexuality’, she maintains that Boyd ‘repressed and aestheticised his sexuality’, and argues that like the great Jamesian scholar Leon Edel, whom she had met at a Monash conference, she was writing ‘pre-revolutionary stuff’.

Although these early books enjoyed considerable success, Niall was conscious of biography’s marginal status in the academy. She smarts at the late John Iremonger’s misgivings about her biography of McCrae (1994) and at the paltry first print-run. She argues that biography was neglected in both editions of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1985 and 1994), and regrets that her name only appears under ‘Turner’, ‘Bruce’ and ‘Boyd’. It is the only insistent moment in the book.
Of course, the situation has changed immeasurably in the years since then. Biography, as Ian Donaldson showed in his essay ‘Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography’ (ABR, November 2006), is now a plastic, responsive, democratic and, yes, reputable art, capable of all sorts of liberties and latitude. After her biography of McCrae, Niall began to contemplate writing a book on all the Boyds, including Arthur and Robin. She recalled a conversation with Leon Edel, who talked about stringing the lives of his Bloomsberries together ‘as one strings beads’. Her string of beads would be a sequence of houses, she decided, struck by the Boyds’ rather bizarre attachment to ancestral and childhood homes. From this came The Boyds: A Family Biography (2002).

Niall is candid about the process of choosing her subjects. Seduction comes into it – biographer, subject, copyright holders, the inevitable widows and grandsons – but so too do all sorts of subjective factors: stamina, availability, finances, sheer interest. At one point, she considers writing a book about the Palmer marriage. Manning Clark encourages her: ‘I must tell you, Brenda. I am in love with Nettie Palmer.’ The idea has a certain appeal, but not for long. ‘[Vance] Palmer’s novels – there were so many of them, and all of them dull.’

Niall had never thought to write the biography of a living person, because of its especial hazards, but a chance encounter with Judy Cassab led to what Niall describes as one of the most impulsive telephone calls of her life: an invitation to the painter to ‘sit’ for her (as Niall had sat for Cassab previously). This led to her fourth biography. In the process, Niall was almost overwhelmed by her subject, a vol-uminous diarist. ‘I knew that as fast as I wrote, Judy would be writing too. You cannot catch up with a living subject.’

Here, for the first time, politics becomes overt. As she considers Cassab’s life story (migration to Australia in 1951, having lost her mother, grandmother, uncle and other family members in Auschwitz), and those of a generation of Holocaust refugees, Niall is acutely aware of the human cost of the Howard government’s policy on detention centres and shocked by its ‘scant respect for the rights of refugees’. ‘Squalid’ is her word for it all.

Almost three decades after her initial work on Martin Boyd, Niall’s choice of subjects seems more unexpected and her sense of biography’s possibilities more liberal than those of the young Monash academic. After initial and characteristic reservations, she is now writing the life of William Hackett, an Irish Jesuit who spent thirty years in Australia. He is forgotten but full of human interest. His archive is vast and untouched; he knew Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins; he endured interminable summer holidays at Portsea as Archbishop Mannix’s companion; he knew the Wrens and was astonished by Ellen Wren’s calmness after the publication of Power Without Glory (1950). Better still, Niall knew him as a child. She looked forward to Hackett’s visits to Studley Park Road, partly because her father would offer him one of his Havana cigars and she coveted the decorative cigar box, which she knew would make a fine pencil case.

This leads to a closing image of great delicacy in which her father lifts her up to admire a set of studio portraits. The two-year-old Brenda in the photographs is studying an alphabet box. The box, possibly introduced to pacify the infant subject, had worked: art, depiction, commemoration could proceed. It was a beginning, as Brenda Niall knows. The gift of words would indeed last her well.