autobiography

RUNNING MESSAGES

Gerard Windsor

Brian Matthews
A Fine and Private Place
Picador $21.88pb, 279pp
033 036 2259

THE BEST LINE IN A Fine and Private Place is one Brian Matthews claims he came out with when he was six. 'I was born to run messages,' he told a neighbourhood mate. Mind you, there's a welter of good lines in this book, but none more succinct and vocationally self-aware than this. If a writer is such a personal identity on the literary and literary/academic scene, and has chosen to write an autobiographical memoir, I don't think he can be treated as the faceless author in such an industry journal as ABR. Brian Matthews is a nice man. In his own words this description includes the notion of 'a good bloke and a decent human being', but it's wider. The boy born to run messages is obliging and a link betwen separate parties and a conduit for news and gossip and of course an evangelist. And he's caught between stabilities, not to say hard places, and he has to balance. In a lovely piece of self-analysis Matthews traces to an early childhood in a house full solely of women and then to his returned father's extreme diffidence, a tendency to avoid confrontations and to trying to make everybody happy.
      I find this self-exposure illuminating of the writer. First Brian Matthews writes on Henry Lawson, then many years later, and slightly apologetically, he writes on Lawson's mother. For my money Brian Matthews is one of the best half dozen of Australian literary commentators and reviewers -- insightful, comprehensive, so authentically Australian and colloquial, yet Latinate and syntactically rich (all qualities on display in his new book). But I've always been niggled by a sense that he's too ready to give obeisance to prevailing winds. Ah yes, the messenger.
      Yet A Fine and Private Place is least of all a book about the literary Brian Matthews. This is a personalities and anecdotes collection, of childhood, of boyhood, and, fleetingly, of man's estate. 54 Havelock Street, St Kilda, during the late 1930s and 1940s is the centre of it, and the portrayal of Matthews's host of an extended family is one of the book's great distinctions -- penetrating and colourful and humorous, yet done with widely embracing sympathy and kindness. Except for Auntie Annette -- what was it about her? Matthews never tells.
      Recreated this way it was a very rich life. Part of the book's sophistication is that scenes and characters who in the hands of other writers would be milked for their bizarre and outlandish effects are given a low-key treatment that makes them resonate all the more authentically and dramatically. A boy, for example, comes striding into Brian's new East Brighton backyard in pursuit of imaginary killer ants. The two boys come face to face; there's a laconic but immediately conversational ease between them and the newcomer tells Brian he'll come to play Test cricket with him on the following Monday. Then he turns on his heel and he's off.
      It's quietly reminiscent of the first encounter between Pip and Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations. The subsequent 'Tests' are tours de force of the imaginative and improvisatory life, but Brian Matthews takes them quietly and analytically, and the effect echoes away. The literary craftsman is at work here, but he's not the subject. Nor, except intermittently, is Brian the scholar, nor Brian the sexual being, nor Brian the parent. More than in any other role the light is on him as the St Kilda fan. At one point Matthews remarks, as a reason for his not dwelling on them, that 'too much has been written about Catholic school experiences already'. True enough, but I feel the same about VFL reminiscences, and even in this book I came close to skipping the footie bits -- and there are plenty of them. The 1966 grand final plays on over several chapters, and Matthews artfully marks quarter time, half-time and three quarter time with reversions to his father's decline and final illness -- neatly productive of tension for both of these life highlights.
      Strangely however A Fine and Private Place is not the artful artefact that we might expect from the author of Louisa. Much more a portrait of Brian's people and of the barracker as a young yelper than any portrait of the artist, it nevertheless signs off with a flourish -- 'London -- Melbourne -- Little River 1995-2000'. A straight Ulysses mimic ('Trieste -- Zurich -- Paris 1914-1921'), this seems to me a pretension, a false note, in a book otherwise singularly lacking in airs. The title is rather a puzzle too. I scratch my head looking for the irony, as both the Matthews homes and St Kilda might be fine places, but hardly private -- young Brian shared a bedroom with his two uncles and the sense we get of him in any case is that of a wholly gregarious being. As a pull from Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' where 'the grave's a fine and private place' I can't make a great deal of sense of it either. There's a hefty quota of deaths and a marked number of absolute disappearances from Brian's life, but this is not a book about cemeteries or good riddances.

Complete:

RUNNING MESSAGES

Gerard Windsor

Gerard Windsor's I Asked Cathleen to Dance has just been published in paperback.