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Paul
Hetherington (ed.)
The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 3
NLA, $59.95 hb, 712 pp, 0642276021
WITH
THE GREATEST NOVELS, you can plunge
into them anywhere and still savour
their greatness; it is recognisable
on every page. You won’t need to
have read the two earlier volumes of
these edited diaries to recognise that
same quality throughout the third —
and I mean novelistic greatness, of
which all the great diaries (from Samuel
Pepys’s to James Lees-Milne’s)
partake in important ways.
Greatness in this respect is partly
a matter of range or scope; books possessed
of that quality, however specific their
titles or restricted their settings,
prove to be about pretty well everything
under the sun and often including the
kitchen sink. Compare War and Peace
and Pride and Prejudice: their respective
emphases and scale are obviously different,
but to neither of the authors of these
works are world-historical events, individual
human passions and domestic minutiae
ever above or beneath their consideration,
let alone beyond their imaginative capacities
to recreate in vividly suggestive ways.
Donald Friend’s diaries are packed
with richly evocative vignettes of war
and peace, pride and prejudice, and
a whole range of other public concerns
or private emotions as they pertain
to himself or those he observes throughout
most of his life (in this volume from
1949, when he had just turned thirty-four,
to 1966, on the eve of his fifty-second
birthday).
As one of Australia’s most celebrated
artists of the day, Friend might have
been expected to concentrate on the
contemporary art scene and its other
leading figures; and, sure, we are treated
here to many deft, wry, sharp, succinct
summations of fellow painters, from
Russell (‘Tas’) Drysdale,
one of his oldest friends, to new wunderkinder
on the block, such as Brett Whiteley.
There are also some penetratingly respectful
or witheringly dismissive accounts of
dealers, models, patrons, gallery groupies
and art critics (including another wunderkind,
Robert Hughes, who in 1965 chose Friend
as the subject of his dazzling publishing
début). But Friend’s gaze
is all-encompassing, promiscuous in
the broader, as well as the narrower,
sexual sense, and his recording instinct
compulsively catholic and democratic:
the most menial of tradesmen and servants
(and not just his kept — or not
so easily kept — boys) can earn
as detailed attention from him, affectionate
or scathing and sometimes both at once,
as the millionaire businessmen, suave
diplomats and glamorous socialites who
also cross his daily path. Human complexity,
however ordinary or extraordinary the
talents of the individuals concerned,
is an abiding motif in these pages.
And he’s as apt to read the multilayered
human world around him in expressly
novelistic terms (‘Proustian’,
‘Firbankian’) as through the
eyes of favourite painters, such as
Bosch or Tiepolo.
The omniverous compulsions on display
in these diaries are clearly an associated
symptom of what drives him as a painter,
and in whichever more or less exotic
location we find him in this particular
volume (Italy, London, Sydney, his beloved
cottage at Hill End in New South Wales,
far north Queensland, Ceylon), the studio
or its makeshift equivalent forms a
ubiquitous backdrop. But so do the garden,
where he can labour zealously with his
own hands, and the kitchen —at
the stove, if not quite the sink. When
the painting muse deserts him on one
occasion, he happily confesses to devoting
‘more time and ingenuity to …
cooking’ and to gaining a greater
sense of satisfaction from this. On
another occasion, observing his ‘adopted’
family in the Torres Strait, the Sailors,
he sees no need to discriminate between
the ‘classical dignity’ of
their unsung daily labours and that
exemplified by ‘great art’.
The greatness of great literary art
is only partly a matter of the range
of human behaviour that it is capable
of capturing and representing; this
needs to be married with, so as to appear
inseparable from, an appropriate mode
or style of representation. Friend puts
it less clumsily when he ascribes to
his favourite kinds of novel, ‘a
style which can enfold past and present,
dream, fancy, fact, satire, folklore,
all easily lying together without boundaries’.
Though he doesn’t intend it as
such, this is as crisp a summary as
we might find of his own accomplishments
as a diarist. The diary form lends itself
to such a free, ‘picaresque’
mode — a style of life as well
as a style of liter-ature that Friend
also explicitly commends at various
points. The only boundaries of the form
are chronological ones, though the otherwise
inescapable plod through linear time
allows for all manner of ruminative
rambles into the past along the way.
(A week of breakfast feasting on honey
from a comb, which Friend records on
16 January 1955, prompts a very Proustian
cadenza on ‘the remembered porridgy
smell of the nursery’ in his childhood
nearly forty years earlier.) And while
there may be a far higher proportion
of ‘real-life’ characters
in a diary than in a regular novel,
there’s no more obligation on the
diarist than on the novelist —
or the painter — to stick to what
Friend calls at one point ‘the
unsatisfactory skin of visible facts’.
The distinctive triumph of the Friend
diaries, in their original manuscript
form, is the way they palpably break
down the boundaries between the writer
and the painter, the visual and the
verbal artist. For throughout great
stretches of them, the confidently handwritten
text (with its blots here and there,
but few crossings-out) is accompanied
by, sometimes inscribed onto, a ravishing
succession of drawings and sketches
of the people, buildings, landscapes
and artifacts being described. Many
of these illustrations, if that word
is sufficient to convey their ‘organic’
connection to the narrative, are in
ebullient colour. If I have any reservation
about the edited volumes to date (aside
from minor concerns over a few possible
mis-transcriptions in the printed text
or missed allusions in the otherwise
extremely helpful endnotes), it is that
they don’t sufficiently register
this triumphant achievement. There is
something a bit chaste, lapidary, about
their format. At least this third volume
represents a marked improvement in this
respect, with more of a sense conveyed
of the original through a few colour
reproductions of its luminous, animated
pages. But not enough of a sense, clearly,
to dispel the curious logic of the blurb-writer
— no less an authority than Robert
Hughes — when he says of Friend
and his diaries that ‘though he
was such a gifted artist, I think they
are his real masterpiece’ (emphasis
mine).
Maybe nothing short of a facsimile edition
could convey the full achievement of
this meta-diary, this prototypical ‘graphic
novel’. And who today could afford
to produce or purchase such an item?
Until future technologies provide the
means for such, we should remain very
grateful to the National Library for
finding a practical way of making one
of its archival jewels common property,
and for giving many more of us than
before the opportunity of sharing the
company of its brilliant fabricator.
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