Читать книгу Hey Days - Alister Kershaw - Страница 8

Back in the Thirties and early Forties there were about fifty square yards at the top of Melbourne’s Little Collins Street where you could wear corduroy trousers without being taken for a poofter and where the sight of a beard didn’t provoke a display of popular indignation. You could even get away with sandals. The bewitching young artist Alannah Coleman could get away with more than that. Her costume was, as a rule, richly international. Once when we were having dinner together, she arrived wearing velvet trousers and a Breton fisherman’s striped shirt. A cape like those worn by officers of the Bersaglieri hung to her ankles. An Egyptian fez was perched becomingly on her long blonde hair. A quiver of arrows slung over her shoulders added a Robin Hood or Saxon touch. If she had anything on her feet at all, it can only have been a pair of Roman sandals. Anywhere else in the city, she might have been run in on a charge of disturbing the peace; here, she received no more attention than was due to an exceptionally attractive you ng woman.

There was a tremendously exotic cafe, the Petrushka, which was important to us. The Monte Carlo Ballet Company had settled more or less permanently in Melbourne and had gone straight to our heads. We were determined Slavophiles. Some of us learnt to say da svidanya and said it whenever we got a chance. When Sidney Nolan was commissioned to do the decor for a new ballet by Lichine, we ached with jealousy. It was as if he had been made an honorary cadet in the Preobrajensky Guards. The Petrushka was the only place where tea was served in glasses. We didn’t need any more than that to make us happy.

A seedy restaurant which we used to frequent laid on a memorably horrible meal for fifty cents. The solid citizens may have looked on us as an effete lot but I’d like to have seen them try to swallow the grisly morsels which were served up there. You had to be tough to manage it. The price included a small carafe of wine. That was what kept our custom. It came as close to being undrinkable as was permitted by the laws of God and man and we would have much preferred to drink beer anyway. But if tea in glasses was Old Saint Petersburg, wine on the table was Paris in the springtime and, as far as we were concerned, the next best thing to being Russian was being French.

There were a couple of art galleries in this Bohemian enclave and a couple of artists’ studios. With the sandals and corduroy trousers, the Petrushka and that carafe of wine on the table, it all added up to our own antipodean Chelsea, our Greenwich Village, our St Germain des Pres. Bang in the middle of it was Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Bookshop.

We venerated Gino. He was the boss. None of us really knew why. He had a number of engaging characteristics but charm has never been required of oracles, rather the contrary. He was prodigiously cultivated but there were several other bright boys in the neighbourhood. It certainly wasn’t an irresistible determination to dominate the scene which endowed him with his unaccountable authority. Nobody could have been less self-assertive. Still, there it was. We didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought of us but we candidly hankered after Gino’s good opinion. However much or however well you wrote or painted or sculpted or composed, unless you had Gino’s okay you didn’t qualify as any sort of artist, not even in your own eyes. Acceptance by Gino wasn’t signified by so much as a public pat on the back but somehow the news got around. From then on, you were taken seriously.

Initiates—Albert Tucker, say, or George Bell, or Adrian Lawlor—rarely let a week go by without visiting Gino at the Leonardo. They—we—went there to riffle through books in languages we couldn’t read and to look at reproductions of painters we’d never heard of. We went there to pore, goggle-eyed, over copies of transition and Minotaure and to spell our way through volumes of poems by Peret and Aragon. We went there for the delight of Gino’s urbane conversation. In fact, about the only thing we didn’t go there for was to buy books.

One or two local politicians had had the dotty idea that it would impress the electorate if they set themselves up as men of taste and they would sometimes drop in at the Leonardo. So would Melbourne’s solitary press lordling. So would a handful of well-heeled ‘professional men’. I hope they, at least, bought some things from time to time and, if they did, I hope Gino upped his prices. The rest of us were far too broke to think of buying the sumptuous goods he had to offer. We were strictly Penguin Books men. Gino never seemed to mind. I always had the impression that we were, if anything, rather more welcome than the paying customers.

Come to think of it, I did once buy a book from Gino—a lavish limited edition of a story by Richard Aldington printed at Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press. Gino hunched his shoulders miserably and groaned a bit when I asked the price, as if the mention of money occasioned him deep physical pain, which quite possibly it did. Finally, he named some absurdly low figure and then, evidently deciding that it was nonetheless too much, insisted on throwing in another Hours Press production, Samuel Beckett’s first published work, the poem Whoroscope.

Long afterwards, meeting Beckett in Paris, I mentioned that I had this booklet of his and told him where and how I’d acquired it. Beckett being Beckett, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the effect which the innocuous little anecdote had on him. That furrowed anguished face of his grew still more furrowed, still more anguished. He evinced signs of consternation, of positive alarm. Whoroscope consisted of a single folded sheet enclosed in a flimsy cardboard cover, the sort of thing that is easily lost or casually thrown away, especially when the author, as was Beckett’s case when the thing was published, is completely unknown. A large proportion of the tiny original edition must long since have disappeared. So how, asked Beckett, in a sort of panic, could one of the few survivors ever have got to Melbourne, of all places? There was, he insisted, something downright spooky about it. He himself hadn’t seen a copy in twenty years.

For a moment, I was tempted to show myself as princely as Gino had been and to make Beckett a present of Whoroscope. Only for a moment, though, and, in due course, when my financial situation was sicklier than usual, I sold it for enough to keep me going for a couple of months. It was somehow altogether natural that Gino’s friendly paw should have been extended like this, disregarding time and space, just when I needed it. There was always a touch of the necromancer about him.

Half the literary memoirs of the Twenties and Thirties contain some dewy-eyed recollections of those bookshops which were something more than merely commercial establishments where books are sold: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London, Orioli’s Lungarno in Florence. No doubt they were everything we’ve been told. But it seems unjust that a few of the rose petals scattered over them couldn’t have been set aside for the Leonardo. If it had been located anywhere except in Melbourne it would have topped the list.

The Leonardo didn’t even look like a bookshop. It looked like a rather untidy club. There was no counter, any more than there would be in a club. In the middle of the room there was a large table which, in a proper club, would have been bestrewn with copies of Country Life and the Army List. Here, such hearty literature had been replaced by those unwholesome transitions and Minotaures which awed us so deeply. Gino sat behind a smaller table in the corner. He was somewhat below average in height and distinctly above average in bulk. Years of unrestrained gobbling of pasta and risotto had given him an impressive belly and a round jowly face. With his head bent over a book or a portfolio of prints, as it invariably was, he looked, if such a thing can be imagined, like an Italianate Buddha meditating under the Bo Tree. Strangers were received with a polite but abstracted nod. For friends and acquaintances he would heave himself out of his chair and advance to shake hands in the European manner.

He must have been in Australia for ten years or more when I first knew him but he still retained a succulent al dente Italian accent. Sometimes, too, he would bring out a word into which he had introduced a slight and pleasing variation, not exactly Italian but rather pure Ginoan. To this day, for example, I can clearly hear his engaging pronunciation of ‘sword’, with no nonsense about eliding the ‘w’. Sword, in Gino’s mouth, was always flatly ‘sward’.

In spite of these minor idiosyncrasies, his vocabulary was notable for its range and precision. If the exact word he wanted momentarily eluded him, he would interrupt himself for as long as was needed in order to recapture it. When he did recall it, it unfailingly proved well worth waiting for. In an article about him which I read not long ago, Desmond O’Grady describes one such moment and avers that it occurred during a public lecture. I could have sworn that it was in the course of a conversation with a small group of us at the Leonardo. Not that it matters. O’Grady and I both have a memory of Gino discoursing fluently on some sculpture or other. All of a sudden—silence, right in the middle of a sentence. It was as though poor Gino had had a stroke. One never quite got used to these abrupt spasms of speechlessness. Nothing was to be heard but little gasps and grunts of frustration. His hands clawed tormentedly in the air in an effort to trace the shapes he had in mind. We did our best to help him out.

‘Spiral, Gino?’

‘No, no, is not spiral.’

More cabbalistic scrabblings.

‘Coiled?’

‘No, no, no.’

One of us tried a long shot: ‘Convoluted?’

‘No, no, no’ and then, exhaling with the vast relief of a man who has at last succeeded in dislodging a fishbone in his throat, ‘Helicoidal!’ We felt like applauding.

With no swards to worry about and with plenty of time to pick his way among the convolutions and helicoidals, Gino’s written English flowed smoothly. His style, however, remained unequivocally his own, and a splendidly rococo style it was. I seem to have preserved an article he published on El Greco and it abounds in characteristic Ginoan locutions. ‘He digested the fire and projected it with the same craving incandescence in his own direction ... phosphorescence wriggling along edges of contours ... climaxes of well interwoven dramas, without the auxilium of preliminary tests ...’

Myself, though, I preferred Gino’s prose as exemplified in his private correspondence. One particular letter I had from him has never ceased to enchant me. It was written from Rome, towards the end of Holy Week. As a stout anticlerical of the old school, Gino thought it desirable to warn me against visiting the city while the attendant ceremonies were going on. ‘The streets,’ he wrote, ‘are full of singing religious displaying the utmost zeal. It is truly dismaying.’

Did he, I often wondered, find Australia equally dismaying? He admitted to a sense of nostalgia whenever he was away from it but in private he would also admit that the place now and again surprised him. I don’t doubt it. Setting aside pasta and risotto, Gino’s solitary enthusiasm was for the arts, and in Australia, in his day, that could be a suicidal taste. No singing religious ever displayed more zeal than the Australian authorities when it came to looking after the moral well-being of their little chicks. For them, every week was Holy Week. I don’t say they would have gone so far as to nail an offender’s ears to the church door but it’s quite on the cards that they had a pillory tucked away somewhere for use in an emergency. Writers wrote and painters painted at their peril and, as Gino was to find out, booksellers led a pretty risky life, too.

Which particular official was responsible for choosing our reading matter for us? A mystery. I have an idea it was the Postmaster-General but it may just as easily have been the Minister for Agriculture, or the Chairman of the State Railways, or the Secretary of the Wharf Labourers’ Union. After all, the view was, anyone can recognise dirt when it’s shoved under his nose. Whoever he may have been—Minister, Chairman or Secretary—he stood out from the mass of politico-bureaucratic pests by being the only one who incontestably earned every cent of his pay. No-one could accuse him of lying down on the job. He was tireless. If there was one thing he did know, it was that books were made for banning and he was the man to ban them. It goes without saying that he outlawed Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover but he didn’t overlook Beardsley’s Under the Hill or George Moore’s Storyteller’s Holiday or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or the Satyricon or Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And of course he sniffed long and hard at anything in French, whether it was Le Roi Pausole or Bossuet’s funeral orations. Gino was really sticking his neck out by having those Aragons and Perets on his shelves. If you’d wanted to build up a fine library back then, you could have dispensed with those lists of The Hundred Best Books or The World’s Great Masterpieces. A list of The Best Books Banned in Australia would have given you all the guidance you needed. The catch was that you couldn’t have discovered what books were, in fact, banned. We weren’t allowed, the point is, to know what it was that we weren’t allowed to read. The only way of finding out was to try and buy this or that book and be told that you couldn’t. My recollection is (unless perhaps I’m having an opium dream) that it was an offence in itself to possess a copy of the Commonwealth’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I suppose the idea was that we might become overexcited merely by seeing the titles spelt out.

Gino’s little bit of trouble, as it happens, had nothing to do with the books he stocked, even if they were in languages suspected of loitering with intent to commit a felony. Where he made his mistake was in consorting with Renoir. Innocent Gino had taken it into his head to enliven Leonardo’s window with a reproduction of a Renoir nude, breasts and all. Our bureaucratic nannies had never been able to take breasts, so to speak, in their stride. They once clamped down on a book of Norman Lindsay’s because the jacket depicted a lady with one bare breast. The Renoir reproduction, with two, had them deary-meing and goodness-graciousing and whatnexting as if they’d been brought face to face with the Kama Sutra. Prompt and energetic action was called for. And taken. Gino had scarcely placed the Renoir in his window when, with a cop watching his every move, he was taking it out again.

I would have given a lot to see Gino’s face on learning that Renoir was a misdemeanour. And I would have liked to be around, too, when he was prevented in the nick of time from turning us all into rapists by importing some Modigliani reproductions. I wonder if he ever realised how lucky he was as a second offender, almost an habitual criminal, not to be manacled and carted off to clink.

That was what happened to Robert Close when he published his novel, Love Me, Sailor. The nannies were in a terrible state. They’d been so sure, the dear old things, that no-one could be dirtier than Renoir, except perhaps Modigliani, and here was Close, worse than either. Whether the nannies had ever considered trying to extradite Renoir and Modigliani to face trial I couldn’t say although it wouldn’t surprise me if they had, but putting Close in the dock presented no such problem. He was right to hand, waiting to be nabbed. And nabbed he was, hauled before the court on a charge of obscenity, found guilty (what else?) and refused bail. The judge wanted to spend a leisurely weekend deciding just how tough a sentence he could pronounce. Meantime, Close was handcuffed (presumably to make sure that he didn’t start writing another book) and borne off to prison in the Black Maria. ‘A man who is responsible for this work,’ observed the judge in a giant eructation of forensic reasoning, ‘cannot quibble if he is sent to gaol.’ Gino would have admired the happy choice of the word ‘quibble’.

Judges have to endure their little disappointments like the rest of us and it must have caused quite a pang to His Lordship when he realised that the maximum penalty he could impose was a lousy three months. And I don’t doubt that his golf game went all to hell when a higher court reduced the penalty to a mere fine. One can only hope that he was slightly consoled when Close announced that he had had enough of Australia’s prissy view of life (not to mention its ready use of handcuffs) and would henceforward live abroad. So there was that much gained. One writer less.

I didn’t know Close well but we’d met occasionally in Melbourne and I recall being struck by a mildness of manner which was, to say the least, unexpected in a man who’d sailed before the mast for some years and whose life had been a hard one even after he left the sea. That was before the hullabaloo over Love Me, Sailor. Later we had a drink together when he came to France (where his book was published without any significant increase in sex crimes) and he had changed very considerably. He was an angry man. There was nothing remotely mild about his remarks on his own experience and on the Australian attitude towards artists in general. God knows what would have happened to him if the judge and the Crown Prosecutor had overheard his conversation. They would have clapped the darbies on his wrists in a flash.

If Ionesco thought he’d invented the theatre of the absurd he was much mistaken. Australia’s courts were miles ahead of him. Especially in the obscenity trials (and there were plenty of them going on at that time), judges and learned counsel and witnesses for the prosecution regularly made themselves into stupendous figures of fun. Close’s trial was different. The clowns had turned nasty. There wasn’t a laugh in the whole performance.

When Max Harris had his run-in with the law it was good clean family entertainment from start to finish. To begin with, Max always had a romantic and rather touching love of publicity. During his trial, he did a good deal of magniloquent snorting about freedom of speech and artistic integrity and the insanity of censorship (and of course he was absolutely right). But nobody is ever going to persuade me that he didn’t enjoy himself one hundred per cent. Besides, there was never any danger of his being shoved into a cell and, finally, the chief witness for the prosecution revealed himself to be one of the most hilarious slapstick artists of the day.

The poems responsible for Max’s ordeal (although, as I say, I’m willing to bet that it was no ordeal to Max) were the work of the ersatz poet Ern Malley. They were about as sexually arousing as Hymns Ancient and Modern but when Max published them in his Angry Penguins magazine they gave a terrible jolt to at least one reader. Detective Vogelsang could see depravity that was hidden from everyone else. You couldn’t, as he himself would probably have put it, pull the wool over his eyes.

A detective who appeared in another obscenity case readily acknowledged, when asked if he was familiar with Shelley, that he had indeed come across someone of that name, a bloke who lived in Woolloomooloo. In the matter of Lord Byron he wasn’t so sure. On the spur of the moment, he confessed with a manly frankness which well became him, he couldn’t recollect whether Lord Byron had been on Admiral Mountbatten’s staff during the war or not.

These two crime-busters may have been one and the same, but if they weren’t, it ought to be recorded that Detective Vogelsang hadn’t got a thing to learn from his colleague when it came to knockabout comedy. One of Ern’s poems, for instance, was set in a park, a park at night, and the detective was on to the significance of that like a shot. ‘I have found,’ he said, ‘that people who go into parks at night go there for an immoral purpose.’ Fair-minded though, he conceded that possibly ‘my experience as a police officer might tinge my appreciation of poetry’. Who would have thought that judges and cops had such a delicate feeling for words? ‘Tinge’, ‘quibble’—I’m not sure that Flaubert could have done any better. And how about the sort of verbal sixth sense which enabled the detective to affirm that while he didn’t know what ‘incestuous’ actually meant, it had an unmistakable whiff of indecency about it?

I hate to think of Detective Vogelsang and his peers being forgotten. They gave so much pleasure to so many people. When will some sedulous anthologist come along and produce a monumental sottisier to preserve their solemn inanities? It mightn’t be a bad idea at the same time, I must admit, to envisage a second volume of excerpts from the literature some of us were turning out at that time. In our own way, we avant-garde sophisticates could, and now and again did, show ourselves right up there in the same class as Detective Vogelsang when it came to inanity.

Australian bookshops used to be overloaded with imported literature, no argument about that. Not any more. What. hits you now is the Shenandoah-like flow of remorselessly nationalistic compilations: Historic Australian Shearing Sheds, The Bumper Book of Australian Cockroaches, Everybody’s Album of Australian Barbed-Wire Fences, Whither Australian Bottle Tops? Go into an Australian bookshop nowadays and you may not find the book you’re looking for but you’re certainly left in no doubt as to what country you’re in.

It’s extraordinary that nobody so far has undertaken what I’m confident would be a runaway best-seller—The Australian Treasury of Unabashed Cretinisms.