March08 Niall review

One more falling body

Brenda Niall

In September 1985 , when I visited the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome to see the room in which Martin Boyd died, I never thought to check the height of the windows, nor to cross-examine the calm and affable Sister Raphael Myers, with whom I looked at Boyd’s last view of the city. If anything was fully documented in my biography (Martin Boyd: A Life, 1988) it was his final illness and death.

It was midday, so my diary reminds me: the only time when the room would be empty before the next admission. The hospital was a cool, quiet place, air-conditioned, I think, with windows closed against Rome’s heat. Sister Raphael remembered Boyd, but she hadn’t been on duty when he died. She could tell me nothing that I didn’t already know from Boyd’s diaries or from the testimony of the friends who had visited him. ‘A difficult patient?’ ‘All patients are a little difficult; one expects that.’ I went on to lunch in the Borghese Gardens, feeling that I had done a biographer’s duty on my last day in Rome.

Now, confronted with an extraordinary claim in Darleen Bungey’s biography of Arthur Boyd, I could regret that my notes are not more detailed. According to Bungey, the death of Arthur’s uncle Martin was suicide. The 78-year-old novelist, dying of cancer in June 1972, had thrown himself out of his hospital window. His ‘broken body’ was found in the garden (Bungey, page 480). In a biography replete with the word ‘perhaps’, there is no suggestion of doubt. Broken in spirit, broken body: that’s the way it went.

But did it? The source is an unnamed person who told Boyd’s niece Mary Perceval that ‘the belief was that Martin Boyd had committed suicide’ (Bungey, page 600). On the flight to Rome to arrange the funeral, Mary passed on this report to her sister-in-law Yvonne, wife of Arthur Boyd (who was travelling overland from London to join them).

To get a clearer picture, I telephoned Yvonne Boyd. She said that Mary had been very upset; they did not discuss the matter. They went to the hospital, where ‘the nuns gave us a lovely lunch and asked if we would like to see the body’. This offer (remarkably nonchalant, if there had been a suicidal leap) was refused. Yvonne and Mary shrank from seeing what they assumed would be a badly smashed body.

Why was there no talk, within the Boyd family or outside it, about the manner of Martin’s death? Today, younger members are astonished by the story. ‘Perhaps Mary managed to “unsee” it.’ Yvonne suggested, in a reference to the Christian Science faith in which Mary and her brothers and sister were brought up. But what if she and Mary were needlessly distressed by misinformation from that unnamed person in Rome?

Could Martin Boyd have thrown himself out? It is almost beyond belief that he could have opened a window, or climbed onto a sill. Could he have walked or stumbled into air? If there had been French windows, left open, perhaps he might, but there were not. A recent e-mail from writer Desmond O’Grady in Rome established that the window sills would have been about waist-high on Boyd, who was nearly six feet in his prime.

Geoffrey Dutton, who visited Boyd’s pensione on 10 May 1972, recorded his frailty: ‘so thin and tufted and white as if he were made from pipe cleaners, yet with such a bright eye.’ Two maids helped him from a chair in the sitting room back to his bed. Squeezing teabags with a spoon was beyond his strength: Dutton did it for him (Out in the Open, 1994, pages 393–94).

‘I get weaker & weaker and can only hope to die soon,’ Boyd wrote on May 27. Bungey offers these words as evidence of his ‘crushed spirit’, ignoring the rest of the diary entry for the same day. It records his being given absolution and a blessing by Father John Guidera of the Church of San Silvestro, who then received him into the Catholic Church. On May 30 he told his ‘RC friends’ who were ‘very pleased’ about his conversion. On May 31 the Anglican Nuncio to the Holy See called in and they had a ‘wonderfully helpful talk’. A ‘wise and good’ nun sat with Boyd during a ‘dreadful night’; ‘and she restored my peace’, he wrote on June 1. He died two days later.

An independent man who never gave anyone any trouble, would Martin Boyd have chosen a death which would distress his friends, leave his family the stigma of suicide, and perhaps endanger the Christian burial he had planned for himself? The broken bodies he had seen during his World War I service left him with an abhorrence of violence of any kind. Suicide, which he would have seen as the denial of God’s goodness, was against his deepest beliefs, just reaffirmed by his profession of faith.

An accidental death? Confused patients, under the effects of medication, do get out of bed, wander, fall down fire escapes, even fall from windows. I would not call that suicide, and it is suicide that Bungey claims. She is sure that Boyd’s spirit was ‘broken’; she even knows that he was found below ‘his window’.

Assuming a fatal fall, why was there no inquest? A cover-up, involving a falsified death certificate, would be difficult and risky in this busy hospital. The private diaries and letters of close friends such as the former Australian ambassador to Italy, the astute and well-informed Sir Walter Crocker (who advanced Boyd’s hospital payments in 1971) and the Anglican Church Times editor Alan Shadwick, have nothing to say about suicide or accident. Desmond O’Grady, who knew Boyd well and was helpful to Mary Perceval, sent the news of his death ‘from stomach cancer’ to the Sydney Morning Herald and later wrote about his burial as a Catholic in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. Would an experienced journalist like O’Grady have missed the suicide story? Why didn’t Bungey ask him? Why, during our many conversations, didn’t she ask me?

Puzzling over all this, I made a lucky guess and found a deathbed witness. Father John Guidera wrote to Canberra academic Dorothy Green on 14 June 1972: ‘Poor old Martin passed away very peacefully and quite suddenly in the end. I was with him a couple of hours before he died’ (Papers of Dorothy Green, National Library of Australia).

Every life has its mysteries. Every biography has gaps. Biography depends on the assessment of evidence, and on empathy and imagination. But a leap of the imagination can get the biographer into trouble. This one gets Martin Boyd an unearned place in his painter nephew’s iconography (‘Icarus, Hinkler and Uncle Martin’, Bungey, page 487) as one more falling body.

How much do they matter, Martin Boyd’s last moments? It is of course the life that is important. But Bungey’s account is misleading in more than one way. Because she has this presumed suicide in mind, she con-structs a matching figure. In a bizarre comparison with Keats – ‘another sickly, lonely, self-exiled writer’ – she forgets a few differences between the frail poet who died from tuberculosis at twenty-six and Martin Boyd, healthy and vigorous to the age of seventy-eight, when struck by cancer.

Elsewhere in the biography (pages 45–46), Bungey makes Boyd, most improbably, a Wicked Uncle, whose ‘machinations’ at the time of his mother’s death in 1936 cruelly disadvantaged the Merric Boyd family. Not a shred of evidence is produced to show how this was done. Bungey has misread the will of Emma Minnie Boyd, forgotten two of the five beneficiaries, and not considered the fact that in 1936 Martin Boyd was living in a Sussex village, with no telephone and little chance of plotting with anyone in Melbourne. In the 1950s, as Bungey shows, he acted with great generosity towards the same nieces and nephews.

As wicked uncle, kind uncle and sickly despairing uncle, Martin Boyd’s characterisation in Bungey’s text bears out the truth of Janet Malcolm’s comment in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007) on the fate of minor characters in biography. They are often victims of‘a kind of narcissism on behalf of the subject which blinds the biographer to the full humanity of anyone else’. Once they have performed their function of advancing the narrative, they are ‘carelessly dropped’.

Brenda Niall’s memoir, Life Class: The Education of a Biographer, was published in 2007. Her previous publications include Martin Boyd: A Life (1988) and The Boyds: A Family Biography (2002).