autobiography
David McCooey
Dulcie Deamer
Robin Dalton
The Queen of Bohemia: The Autobiography
of Dulcie Deamer
UQP $29.95pb, 239pp, 0 7022 2726 9
An Incidental Memoir
Viking $29.95hb, 368pp, 0 670 88187 2
It's interesting how many comic autobiographers are theatrical,
like Barry Humphries, Clive James, Hal Porter, and Robin Eakin,
whose Aunts up the Cross (1965) is a minor masterpiece and very
funny. Eakin's belated follow up, An Incidental Memoir, published
under her married name of Dalton, compares interestingly with
Dulcie Deamer's posthumously-published The Queen of Bohemia.
By her death in 1972 Deamer had become a personification of the
swinging bohemian days of 1920s Sydney. Like many famous
Australians, Deamer was born in New Zealand. In The Queen of
Bohemia Deamer affects indifference to her early life, telling
the reader to skip the long `Personal Prologue' if interested in
her bohemian tales. But this section is most like what we expect
of an autobiography, and it's not surprising that readers of the
unpublished manuscript thought it the better part of the book.
Deamer's account of childhood is refreshingly matter of fact:
killing rats and then giving them a funeral and tombstone (her
father -- more endearingly -- liked warming the cats' cushions by
the fire); experiencing early twentieth-century paganism by
feeling a 'Presence' in a Wellington garden; and having a liking
for nude sun-bathing. She emerged from obscurity by winning a
story competition at the age of seventeen with a tale set
in the stone age. Soon after, she married Albert Goldie, a
feckless journalist, whom she eventually discarded for the
delights of Sydney, a lifetime of freelance journalism, and the
bohemian camaraderie of 'the Noble Order of I Felici, Letterati,
Conoscenti e Lunatici '.
Before that, though, Deamer's literary prize brought her
sufficient fame for her to join a pioneering repertory company
which is presented as simultaneously seedy and morally
upstanding. Moral conservatism is also central to her account of
bohemian Sydney, and Deamer is keen to refute Jack Lindsay's
alcohol-soaked picture in The Roaring Twenties (1960),
presenting instead a playful, theatrical and innocent picture:
'everybody played', she writes.
The text is illuminated through notes by Peter Kirkpatrick, whose
extensive knowledge of bohemian Sydney is also seen in The Sea
Coast of Bohemia (in which Deamer figures largely). Kirkpatrick
gives amusingly straight-faced synopses of Deamer's impossibly
dated fiction, and many concise, but telling, biographical entries on the heterodox of Sydney, like John Norton, the rowdy
parliamentarian, once ejected for urinating in the House of
Representatives.
When it comes to autobiography the Upper House can block bills,
but not say why. Certainly, Deamer presents many significant
gaps, such as her breakdowns, and her children whom she left with
her mother. Her account of Sydney is less compelling than the
'Personal Prologue', perhaps because it is so resolutely
cheerful, and therefore a little unconvincing. Nevertheless, she
gives many interesting vignettes of figures such as Christopher
Brennan, David McKee Wright, and the extraordinary Mrs Lala
Fisher. Such cultural history is the work's raison d'être, and we
should be pleased that Deamer's autobiography has been published
in so sympathetic a way.
One wonders what Deamer and Dalton would have made of each other.
Their histrionic flair would no doubt have smoothed things along.
But Dalton's milieu, while artistic and theatrical, is utterly
different from Deamer's. Dalton, who left Australia for London
just after the War, came from -- and largely remained in -- a world
of privilege and good connections, and of savoir faire in the
face of royalty, or primitive living conditions in Italian
towers, or the boundless unreliability of movie financiers.
Dalton begins with a 'society' divorce; becomes engaged to a
Marquis (who was to be Prince Philip's best man); hangs out with
European royalty and a youthful JFK; becomes a spy for the Thai
government; is widowed with two small children, and becomes a
literary agent, with a late career as a film producer.
Affecting a lack of interest in name dropping, Dalton drops names
thick and fast. 'I met the Windsors only twice', she writes,
referring to the Duke and Duchess. Dalton presents her younger
self as brash, pleasure-seeking and innocent. Interestingly, both
she and Deamer present their lifestyles in terms of innocence: as
a joie de vivre, a 'divine frivolity'. Dalton even says of her
spy boss that the subsequent discovery of his involvement in
organized crime 'still emerges from the memory of his
benign despotism as a sort of innocence'. It is very easy to feel
like a Marxist when reading this book.
But Dalton is not just one of those superannuated bright young
things who turns out quite dull. Her sense of humour, and genius
for comic anecdotes is too pronounced for that. One can see many
of the features that made Aunts up the Cross such a memorable
book. But one key feature, brevity, is conspicuously absent.
Being the soul of wit after all, brevity is the missing deity of
this work, which is woefully under-edited. Dalton's apparent
desire to include almost every anecdote of her repertoire may
have been bearable if an editor had seen to the excessive detail:
of a minor hurt occasioned by Hal Porter, or the absurdly large
set-up for a small joke about a litigious agent, or the minutiae
of raising finance for a film. Such things make the work
painfully copious