Sydney Bohemian eludes biographer

Axel Clark’s is the first full-length biography of Christopher Brennan, and its publication has drawn attention to what was a lamentable deficiency in Australian literary studies. Clark has assembled a veritable goldmine of interesting material, and I found the details of Brennan’s life made compelling reading. In particular, what Clark’s book does for me and other readers of the book I’ve spoken to recently is to demystify the shadowy, aloof figure of Brennan – one which might have been constructed as an extension of the obscure, symbolist, incantatory poetry. And speaking of the poetry, one debt any reader of this work will owe to Axel Clark will be on account of his fearless and utterly convincing demonstration of the relationship between events in Brennan’s life and the subject material of the poetry. He also, as anybody following Brennan’s career must, provides a lot of fascinating information about the life of Sydney’s intellectual demi-monde in the first half of this century. Sydney has a distinctive libertarian, somewhat aesthetic, continental European tradition, the rump of which those of us at university in the early sixties could still find lingering in the one or two surviving city wine-bars. While Clark himself hasn’t explicitly drawn all the historical threads together, any life of Brennan must also involve an account of Catholic education in Sydney, and Clark’s efforts to relate Brennan’s early parish school training and later secondary education under the Jesuits at St Aloysius and Riverview to the eventual complex and recognisably Catholic personality of the grown adult, provide the kind of social analysis badly needed in Australian cultural studies. For all that, I find that the book has serious flaws as a biography, and since we are likely to see many more attempts at definitive work of this sort in what is virtually the open field of Australian literary biography, it is perhaps doubly important to make the objections now. The book has already received two or three favourable reviews, but no scrupulous reader can have failed to notice how for Clark this literally is a work of hagiography, and not an exercise in which he intends to locate precisely and objectively, either in his own mind or that of the reader, the exact man that was Christopher Brennan. It lacks a sense of attachment, and this is not a request for academic earnestness, but for precisely the reverse. This book amply illustrates the difficulties inherent in publishing what has already been used as academic thesis material. The whole work suffers from a nervous inability to extract from the very rich primary material any kind of lasting perception or observation of Brennan the man. Too much silent deference is paid to the presumed significance of Brennan’s life and work. The first half of the book constantly alludes to a ‘genius’ that is never explained or qualified, while the second half of the book laments the failure of that genius ever to flower. The chapter titles themselves might suggest the kind of frustration a reader is in for: ‘Single in his kind’; ‘Just a rollicking, carefree chap’; ‘Berlin’; ‘Waiting and dreaming’; ‘The crucial years’, ‘Drifting’; ‘A mask of suffering hate’; ‘The one woman’; ‘Ordeal and release’. This biographer lacks a sense of humour; he cannot see Brennan’s friends, contemporaries, and adversaries as anything but inferior to or threats to his subject. More seriously, he is prevented by his own earnestness from drawing the obvious conclusions before he draws the less obvious. For example, when he reports that, as a student, Brennan had doodled in such a way on his copy of Baudelaire as to link his own name by association of initials with Cesare Borgia, Charles Baudelaire, and Charles Badham, Clark makes a clumsy effort to apologise for Brennan when the obvious fact is that Brennan, like all of us in adolescence, indulged in totemistic fantasies. The same lack of what I'm calling a ‘sense of humour’ prevents Clark from seeing that a youthful lapsed Catholic classics graduate would obviously have all kinds of hilarious collisions with authority when he goes teaching in a Catholic school, as we all did; or that perhaps there’s nothing to be proud of in the spectacle of Brennan, in his early twenties, indulging his high romanticism by not only falling in love with his landlady’s daughter in Berlin, but actually bringing her to the antipodes for marriage. There’s barely a kind word for the wife, nor do we find any disinterested sense of the suffering Brennan’s stupidity had caused her. Clark’s lack of detachment also seems to make it difficult for him to question his own biographical strategy. The imaginative structure and logic of the book has it that for the first half of his life Brennan was destined for fame and high office; this becomes co-terminous in the book with a post at Sydney University, and all impediments to the appointment are given tragic stature. Life is bigger than the Arts Faculty at Sydney, but this doesn’t seem to have occurred to Clark. And when the appointment does come, largely because of what the reader can see, but Clark can’t, is the fairmindedness of Mungo MacCallum, Clark is already telling us that Brennan’s most productive days are over! What becomes so frustrating in this book is that time and time again Brennan is failing to behave in a way that his friends, his peers, and his biographer might have expected, yet nothing is made of it. In his recent review of her book on the Stenhouse Circle, Cecil Hadgraft gently chided Ann-Mari Jordens for her use of the expression ‘was comprised of’; the complaint against Axel Clark could be that he’s too fond of the word ‘perhaps’. Clark even makes it clear that he thinks the poetic achievement itself was limited, so that in the end the question this reader, at least, is left with is ‘What is the subject, or the object, of this biography?’ I must say quite candidly that were I to rely on Axel Clark’s biography, which is implicitly defensive from beginning to end of a man who, in human terms, the biographer doesn’t seem to understand at all, I might have concluded that Brennan was an alcoholic oaf. I certainly wish that Axel Clark had left himself free to draw such conclusions. For my part, the frustrations I’ve talked about sent me back to A. R. Chisholm's 1944 lectures on Brennan, which do give a sense of why his peers might have put up with Brennan’s oafishness. It is also clear that Clark’s treatment doesn't really go beyond the boundaries first mapped out by Chisholm. On the matter of sources, it should also be noted that while some of the incidental documentation, for example in letters, is very solid, there are two or three major sources that Clark uses over and over again – an occupational hazard of biography. One single visit to Brennan at Woolloomooloo, described by Pennington in his recollections, is split by Clark and used in two separate chapters. Indeed there is a confusing chronological fragmentation in the book, in spite of the fact that chapters are arranged by period. One hardly dare say so in the light of the legal action taking place in Sydney, but my judgement is that this book needs further editing. Good editing would create one of the two books made necessary by the appearance of this one – an unapologetic, explanatory, authoritative life of Brennan. The other book yet to be written is one that Axel Clark’s work on Brennan has laid the foundations for, and that’s a thorough treatment of Australian Catholic education and the ‘sense of the self’ in educated Australian Catholics.

David English

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