Читать книгу The Five Walking Sticks - Henry R Lew - Страница 17

I like to think of Richard Birnie, J.F. Archibald and myself as a triumvirate. We all believed in the axiom ” the pen is mightier than the sword”. I lived with Birnie at 16 Brascher’s Terrace, Princes Street, Fitzroy for more than half of the eighteen seventies and Archibald, although he arrived there after me and left before me, was together with us a considerable while. We were in some ways like a family. Birnie was born in 1808, I was born in 1850, and Archibald in 1856. Birnie played the role of a father figure to both of us; perhaps a wise old grandfather figure is even more appropriate; and I found myself in an inadvertent supporting role as JF’s adopted older brother. I say this because JF, a Catholic of Scottish and Irish descent, who was baptised John Feltham, after meeting me, Frenchy Brodzky, the former Jewish medical student from the Sorbonne, decided to recreate himself. He became a Frenchman named Jules Francois, his mother Charlotte Jane Madden he fantasised into a French Jewess, and he expressed a desire to study medicine in Edinburgh. He even went so far as to eventually marry a Jewess. Forgive me for thinking he found me quite exotic.

Richard Birnie had been born in London. His father, Sir Richard Birnie, the Chief Magistrate of the Bow Street Police Court, was well known in connection with the arrest and prosecution of the Cato Street conspirators. This was a plot to murder Foreign Secretary Castlereagh and the rest of the cabinet, at a dinner party given by Lord Harrowby on February 23^rd 1820. An informer told the police about it and all ten ringleaders were arrested. Five were hanged and the other five were transported for life.

Birnie junior was particularly well educated. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge with Tennyson and Thackeray and graduated BA in 1830. He was admitted to the Inner Temple Bar in 1833; received his MA in 1837; and also took an “ad eundem” (the same degree) from Oxford University in 1848. His MA from Oxford was awarded in recognition of a series of lectures he delivered under the auspices of the historian James Anthony Froude. He then left academia and returned to London to continue as a barrister at the Central Criminal Court. In 1853 the Duke of Newcastle appointed him Advocate-General of Western Australia. He arrived in Perth in January 1854 and held this posting for five years. Next he was Chief Justice for a year, but resigned after a dispute with the Governor Sir Arthur Kennedy in 1859, and then moved to Melbourne to resume his career as a barrister. This proved disastrous. Local barristers, such as Charles James Dawson, Richard Davies Ireland, Archibald Michie and Butler Cole Aspinall were very able, much more practical than Birnie, and made mincemeat of him in the courtroom. A standing joke amongst them was that Birnie was the caricature, as distinct from character, who by ridiculously quoting Shakespeare and Scott to juries, confused rather than convinced, and bewildered rather than befriended. These jibes made him a laughing stock with solicitors as well. Briefs became less frequent, and he was soon obliged to prosecute for the Crown, in faraway places, where others would not go, such as Sandhurst (now Bendigo) in 1861 and Portland in 1862. Eventually he fled this succession of failures by quitting the law. His great passion had always been the dissemination of knowledge and he decided to indulge himself by becoming a public speaker on historical and literary subjects. In no time he was keenly sought after to deliver lectures in most of the principal towns of Victoria. But, more often than not, he did this gratis to raise money for charities, or for churches and schools, and his lot became a non-ending struggle to eke out a living by writing literary reviews and theatre critiques. One such review - that of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “Ashtaroth” in the “Colonial Monthly” of November 1867 - merits special attention. It so moved Gordon that he commented, “Birnie has found out beauties of which I myself was unaware.” It proved the start of a close friendship between the two that ended tragically when the unfortunate poet killed himself in 1870. By this time Birnie had his own problems and seemed destined for the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum. Then, at the eleventh hour, a reprieve! He got an article published in the “Australasian” which totally changed his life. He was paid two pounds and given a regular contract for a series of twice-weekly miscellaneous essays, which created such a continuous interest amongst his readership as to sustain the author for the last eighteen years of his life. It was during this period that I shared digs with him. I loved him. He was a friend of liberty, a promoter of culture, and a strong supporter of increased leisure time for the working classes. He described himself as a very liberal Anglican who strongly opposed religious fanaticism. A staunch anti-Sabbatarian he argued strongly, both in the press and from the platform, for opening the Library and the Picture Gallery on a Sunday. Although in his eighty-first year, the circumstances of his death were particularly sad, given his great intellect. He suffered an acute dementia syndrome, which fortunately progressed rapidly to death in two quick months. The journalist Frank Myers described it as follows. “He died on top first, poor Birnie, and they took him out to Yarra Bend (the mental asylum) to get ready for the undertakers”. I think I was more sympathetic.

The many friends of Mr. Richard Birnie, essayist and barrister-at-law, will learn with regret that the severest calamity which can befall a human being has overtaken him on the verge of eighty years of age. His cultivated intellect has given way. As in the case of Swift, the venerable tree has begun to wither at the summit. Ten days ago he complained to the writer, who casually met him in Collins Street, that he felt quite at a loss for a subject for his next essay in the Australasian. Soon afterwards it was painfully apparent that this was the premonition of disorder of the brain. Only his wonderful memory, so capacious and retentive, seemed to be still struggling against eclipse; and freely asserting itself by quotations from favourite authors and references to familiar persons. But it bore a pathetic resemblance to the last flutter of life in the pulse of poor Le Fevre, in that beautiful episode by Sterne; and like him, I ask, “Shall I go on” - but with the same answer “No!”

My biographer tells me that J. F. Archibald is best remembered today as founding the “Bulletin” magazine, and as the benefactor who bequeathed one tenth of his assets to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in order to establish the Archibald Prize. This perpetual annual award was donated for “the best portrait preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics”. JF was born at Kildare, near Geelong, but grew up in Warrnambool.

His father, Joseph Archibald, was a sergeant of police, who lost his wife in childbirth before JF was five years old and then went to work as a mounted policeman on the goldfields. JF and his two surviving younger siblings remained in the family home in Warrnambool in the care of their grandmother and a spinster aunt.

As a small boy JF attended the local Roman Catholic and National Schools. But Joseph Archibald, in 1868, finding his son’s education somewhat deficient in Latin, had him transferred to Henry Kemmis’ new Grammar School, which prepared more privileged boys for university entrance or a career in commerce. JF quit school in 1870 to be apprenticed to “Fairfax and Laurie”, the printers and lessees of the Warrnambool Examiner, and two years later, when that firm founded the Warrnambool Standard, he moved on with them. It was after a couple of years at the Standard that J.F. first considered journalism as a permanent career and he decided to try his luck out in the big city. So in January 1875, JF, young and confident, went to Melbourne, in the hope of one day becoming the editor of the Argus, his favourite newspaper. To his dismay his services weren’t wanted there. After weeks of searching, and despite his dual skills of reporter and compositor, the best he could find was a temporary position as an extra hand in the composing room of the Evening Herald. The Editor, Sam Winter, tried to encourage him with some casual police-court reporting, but JF found this boring and transferred in quick succession to the Echo and then to the Daily Telegraph, hoping to find more interesting work. He liked Howard Willoughby, the Editor of the Telegraph, but his new job as a court reporter and parliamentary roundsman was no less tedious. Worse now he resented being overworked, up to seventeen hours a day, and underpaid. By April 1876 JF found himself totally disillusioned with newspapers and took a job as a clerk with the Victorian Education Department instead. This lasted two years until he was dismissed in a staff cutback. Initially he had lodged with a Breton couple, the Vengeons, who ran a boarding house in Emerald Hill, but later moved to our place in Princes Street, Fitzroy. In 1878 he went to Maryborough in Queensland to work as a clerk for an engineering firm. That too wasn’t to his liking. By 1879 he was in Sydney on the staff of the Evening News where he met John Haynes with whom he founded “The Bulletin” in January 1880.

Birnie gave JF and myself a really good time. His column “The Essayist” had lifted him out of the doldrums and made him one of Melbourne’s best-known literary figures. An eccentric, his courtly manners even then were described as belonging to an English gentleman of a former age. Slightly lame with a wicked eye, a ruddy complexion, and witty conversation, he was genial and keenly intelligent. JF was staggered to hear us converse in English, French and German and then branch off into Hebrew as well. Birnie told us about his wife Ellen who had died barren in 1858. She had been an actress of whom his family had disapproved and he now reluctantly admitted that she was difficult to live with. He would proudly boast that “she had the highest pitched voice of any English soprano” and then laughingly joke that she used it for screaming more than singing. Birnie was truly remarkable, a veritable walking encyclopaedia of literature, possessed of a prodigious memory. He could recite by heart for hours at a time, Scott, Byron, Shelley or anything else he had read. His mind was a plethora of anecdotes and stories. He coped well with old age. I remember a letter he showed me that he wrote to Georgiana McCrae in 1877. “To the infirmities of age or any other cause I plead not guilty. Head, stomach, liver, biceps and instep are in fettle to control a whiskey-toddy or digest a haggis, and to certainly still confront life’s troubles and cads, with spirits that brave adversity.” Perhaps we helped keep him young. When we three dined out together he would frequently clean us out of money by drinking us under the table. The next morning we were hung over but he would rise totally sober at dawn and lecture us on the evils of drink. Then he would don his gloves, light his pipe (a beautifully coloured cutty of Barrett’s twist) and leave for the Treasury Gardens with a volume of Catullus’ poems in his pocket.

Marcus Clarke and his bohemian circle had snubbed Birnie when founding the Yorick Club in 1868. Now Clarke honoured him, called him the ‘Noble Captain’ of our band and sought his company two or three times a week. The wheel of fortune had turned full circle. It was now Clarke experiencing financial difficulties, despite being in receipt of a sinecure, 450 pounds per annum as second in-charge of the Public Library. ” I dined with Marcus last night,” Burnie would remark. “The little imp likes to suck my brains”. On such evenings Clarke would have Birnie to himself, from 6 till 10 p.m., either at the Albion Hotel or Aaron’s. Then they would move on to either The Bushman’s or Anderson’s Argus Hotel where two different sets of bohemians congregated. In such a crowd Clarke is reported as having said to Birnie, “You have ‘cacoethes scribendi’ (scribbling-mania) to which Birnie replied, “I have not. I’ve got fever and measles and cancer and leprosy and paralysis, and other things if you like. But I haven’t got that!”

Marcus Clarke is famous for being the author of “For the Term of His Natural Life” which some critics say is Australia’s most outstanding nineteenth century novel. Mark Twain when he visited Australia in 1895 referred to Clarke as our “only literary genius and the likes of which we will not see again for many a year.” I disagree. I first met Clarke in 1872. We had both been to Highgate Grammar School (I might vaguely remember him from there), we were both bilingual in English and French, and we both had arrived here hoping to farm the land; but despite these similarities there was little else we had in common. At times he could be quite amusing in company but I could never bring myself to like him. This was because I was Jewish and he was a patronising anti-Semite.

In an article for the Argus on the 1867 Melbourne Cup Clarke had written, “Young ladies, oily as to their hair, pulpy as to their lips, and heavy as to their noses, were alternatively watching the course and casting stolen glances at the magnificent attire of Anonyma”. Anonyma, Synonyma and Abomyna were names that he had given to ladies whose dresses were fresher than their jaded, painted faces. He then went on to add, “Round the judge’s corner the ladies mustered and the air was darkened with the shadows of the noses of the daughters of Judah”.

On the building of the Jewish alms-houses he commented, “When the Jewish community undertook the erection of Jewish alms-houses, the game was one I could not understand. The idea of an impoverished and really necessitous Jew in Melbourne was a thing I could not realise. The Jews are far too clever to be poor. They can’t afford the luxury of woe. They leave simple pleasures of that kind to their Christian brethren. However they built three alms-houses- that is, three highly ornamental cottages in coloured brick; and though completed a year, after superhuman exertions, they have only been able to discover one Jew in Victoria poor enough to occupy a cottage. There may be others but they won’t own up. They are afraid of injuring their credit. Even the one Jew referred to is reported to have a banking account and to be in receipt of a small income”.

Marcus Clarke wrote bitingly of a dispute that H. J. Hart, a Jewish member of the board of the Melbourne Hospital, had with the medical officer Hinchcliffe. In a letter to the “Warrnambool Examiner”, Clarke commended the newspaper for having “morally pulled the nose of the impertinent little Hebrew. Does the length of the Jewish nose result from the frequent pulling which the organ has received from Christians? Only if the Red Sea had rolled the other way”. The Herald, the Advocate and the Age unanimously attacked Clarke for this article. Like the true foolish anti-Semite that he was, he defended himself by saying, “Some poor Melbourne Jews think that I hate their race, whereas it is only the scum of Van Dieman’s Land Jail, the money-lending, usurious, ignorant portion of it, to which they belong, that I dislike.”

In one of his major short stories Clarke articulated the essence of his hostility towards Jews through its principal character, a Jewish moneylender. “Do you ever see a Jew dig, or beg, or do menial service? Did you ever have a Jew servant? Did you ever know a Jew, however poor, who hadn’t a sovereign to lend at interest?….we Jews rule the world….when we were turned out of…. Jerusalem, we made a vow to take possession of the Universe - and we’ve done it too….By sticking together….All Jewry….is one great firm - a huge bank-which keeps the table against all Christendom”.

Like many anti-semites Clarke adhered to the euphemism, “some of my best friends are Jewish”. He wrote kindly of Joseph Aarons, the owner of the Bijou Theatre, and of “poor Moten Moss,” a businessman, in obituaries in the Leader. Perhaps he thought a dead Jew was a good Jew. On one occasion he even wrote favourably of the Jewish Bazaar. “It is remarkable that whenever any charitable call is made by Christians the Hebrew population of this city are the first to respond.”

Marcus Clarke’s anti-semitism had as its basis a flame that was his own inferiority complex and this was further fuelled when, as a hopeless manager, he was forced to borrow funds from the Jewish moneylender, businessman and financier, Aaron Waxman. It must be pointed out in fairness to Waxman that he was good-natured, extremely proud to have the clever literary man as his client, and always tried his best to be patient and lenient with Clarke in request of a favour. Clarke’s inferiority complex arose out of a defective left arm and a stutter. The arm had been operated on, apparently for anchylosis, when Marcus was a small child, but never grew properly and remained shrunken. I discovered the cause of his stutter when I bought a book at the sale of Dr. Patrick Maloney’s library. In it I found a note in pencil in the doctor’s handwriting. It read, “Marcus Clarke stuttered. In his youth a horse kicked him on the head.” Above all Clarke loved to shine in intellectual company and at times this impediment in his speech was detrimental to his conversation and very painful for his friends. On occasions he became so unintelligible as to be incapable of carrying on a consecutive argument. He carried the same fault into his writings. He had very little imagination and was unable to construct on a preconceived plan. He never impressed me either as a serious student of literature or as a man in love with his art. Rather he loved the so-called good things of life, namely fine clothes, an elegant home and plenty of leisure time. Clarke always broke down in the midst of his work. In his novel “Long Odds,” his friend George Arthur Walstab wrote the best two chapters. This was no secret at the time. If you get a copy of the first edition published by Clarson, Massina & Co., printers and publishers of 72 Little Collins Street, Melbourne in 1869, you will find a dedication that says, “To G.A.W. in grateful remembrance of the months of July and August 1868.”

Walstab, the first editor of the “Australian Journal,” was far more interesting a man than Clarke. He was a striking, swashbuckling figure in Melbourne’s bohemian circles. Born in Demerara, Trinidad, in 1834, the son of a planter, he received his education in London at the famous Merchant Taylor’s School, graduating as dux in 1850. At eighteen he was already a veteran of the coup-d’etat of December 1851, which instated Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the President of the French Republic, as Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. He arrived in Melbourne at the height of the gold rush, became a police cadet, and served on many escorts that guarded consignments of gold from the diggings. Later he went to India and served as a cavalryman throughout the Mutiny. A leg wound ended his soldiering days and he was forced to exchange his skilful sword for a pen. He joined the Calcutta Englishman and by his mid-twenties was editor of the paper. He then returned to Melbourne. He wrote “Harcourt Darrell,” a historical novel, which he serialised in the “Australian Journal,” and also translated a number of French works to high praise from contemporary critics. Together with Clarke he was one of the foundation members of the Yorick Club. He also worked at various times for the Lands Department, the Castlemaine Reporter and as an older man, before his death in 1908, in several capacities for the Melbourne Herald.

It has been suggested that Walstab wrote a portion of “For the Term of His Natural Life”, but I have it from his own mouth that this is not so. I do believe that Richard Birnie wrote several chapters of “For the Term of His Natural Life”. He told me he did and I have no reason to doubt him. What makes Birnie’s claim possible is that Clarke’s works were written as installments for the “Australian Journal” and not as a completed novel. A. H. Massina, the journal’s proprietor, often complained of Clarke’s inability to meet a deadline. On one occasion he went to press with an apology for a missed installment and on another he substituted a short story. He even locked Clarke up in a room to try to force him to write. It is very conceivable that Clarke, disorganised and unreliable, would, at times, enlist the help of his comrade Birnie to fulfil a tardy obligation.

There is one story of Marcus Clarke’s anti-Semitism that relates directly to myself. I had already met Clarke and he knew I was Jewish. I was a habitual visitor to the Melbourne Public Library where Clarke, as Sub-Librarian, was second in charge. On this particular occasion I had just crushed my big toe. I limped into the reading-room, removed my boot and lay it empty on the floor. I then elevated the felon, ‘my obscene sock clad foot,’ on an opposite chair. Clarke was informed of this manoeuvre by one of his underlings and approached me. “Brodzky,” he taunted, “it behoves not a Christian gentleman to thus comport himself”. To which I gave the following reply. “Alas dear Clarke, I am neither a Christian nor a gentleman.”