Biography

I once had a vague fantasy that Martin Amis and I should get married. He was cool and handsome, and we had so much in common. We were about the same age; we had both read English at Oxford. My father worked as a cartoonist at the New Statesman when Martin was literary editor. I was mad about books and writing; Martin, in his early twenties, was already a famous novelist. Perfect match.

The ‘good’ biographer always opts for a nuanced portrait, and this is what Peter McPhee has given us in his well-written, reflective, sympathetic account of one of the most enigmatic, complex leaders of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94). McPhee had his work cut out for him. Those familiar with the period may come to this book, as I did, with somewhat preconceived ideas. Robespierre conjures up a rather distasteful character, a revolutionary with all the negative connotations that word can conjure: a zealot, cold, calculating, idealistic, paranoid, the prototype of the totalitarian bureaucrat capable of sending friends and colleagues to the guillotine for the ‘cause’. So I was curious as to what McPhee, a leading historian of the French Revolution, made of the man, and how he accounted for Robespierre’s condemnation to death of so many people.

Although William Baillieu was not the founder of the Baillieu dynasty in Australia – that honour belonged to his father and mother, who produced sixteen children after he jumped ship and settled in Queenscliff – it was through him that the family name became a dominant one among the Melbourne Establishment. Six of the sixteen Baillieu siblings were involved in what Peter Yule describes as Australia’s greatest business empire, centred on the Collins House group. William Baillieu was its founder, builder, and leader.

Here are some of the interesting things you may learn if you read John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists:

↓ that James Fenimore Cooper was expelled from Yale for training a donkey to sit in the professor’s chair

↓ that Evelyn Waugh once attempted suicide but was prevented from drowning by a passing shoal of jellyfish

↓ that Fanny Burney underwent a double mastectomy without anaesthetic and lived to write a toe-curling description of what it felt like

In April 1934 sisters Mary and Elizabeth Durack joined their eldest brother, Reg, at Argyle Downs Station in the Kimberley. Mary was twenty-one, her sister eighteen. Educated at Loreto Convent in Perth, they had been reared on a diet of stories about life in the north told by their father, Michael Patrick Durack (known as ‘MPD’), when he returned from the family’s pastoral holdings every wet season to spend time with his wife and six children. Both girls had spent time up north with their parents, and loved the place. This time, however, they were on their own. At Argyle, ‘they were paid union wages for helping in the kitchen, where they learned to make bread for the homestead and for the twenty or more Aborigines on the station’, and later they took up duties at another Durack company station, Ivanhoe. They stayed up north for eighteen months, saving up for a trip to Europe, for even the Durack family fortunes had been hit by the Great Depression.

If his biographer and editor of his Journals is to be believed, by the early 1960s the Brooklyn-born Alfred Kazin was ‘arguably the most sought-after and widely published critic’ in the United States. Kazin (1915–98) claimed that 1956–61 was ‘the greatest period in my life’. Having returned from a teaching post in Amherst to New York City, he succeeded in making a living as a freelance literary critic and essayist, assisted by the occasional visiting professorship (a form of assistance unavailable to his predecessor of sorts, the hero of George Gissing’s New Grub Street). Kazin’s reviews and essays appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, American Scholar, the New York Times Book Review, Commentary, Partisan Review, Reporter, and Playboy. He would publish eighty-two articles in the New York Review of Books, of which he observed, possibly biting one of the hands that fed him: ‘Critic for NY Review of Books – someone who argues brilliantly on behalf of the most arbitrary personal prejudices.’

On the morning of 17 September 1820, a consumptive John Keats and his travelling companion and nurse, the artist Joseph Severn, boarded the 127-ton brigantine Maria Crowther bound for Italy. Ahead of them lay thirty-four days of foul weather, fouler food, and close quarters shared with another consumptive (a young girl) and a horrified matron; thirty-four days, for Keats, of agonising regret and mortal fear. It was the first stage of what he called his ‘posthumous existence’: the twenty-five-year-old poet was sailing out to die. And because Keats was prevented by the well-meaning Severn from swallowing the phial of euthanasian opium he had bought before leaving England, this posthumous existence would drag on until nearly midnight on Wednesday, 21 February 1821, when Keats died in Severn’s arms in an apartment in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome.

This is how Claire Tomalin closes her Dickens biography: ‘He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens’, followed by a long list of types. I consider Dickens the surrealist, or the sentimentalist, but then I pick Dickens the tireless walker. And I concede, with Tomalin, that regarding his life and work, ‘a great many questions hang in the air, unanswered and mostly unanswerable’.

In August 1999 the Melbourne art collective DAMP staged an argument that turned into a glass-smashing fight at an exhibition opening of its work at 200 Gertrude Street. Peter Timms, writing in The Age, described this event, which in former times might have been called a ‘Happening’ and today would be recognised as a ‘Pop-up project’:

According to the summary on the inside of Women of Note’sattractive jacket, being a female composer in the twentieth century was a ‘dangerous game’ – strong words indeed, but not without justification. Rosalind Appleby notes her own initial surprise to discover how many women composers there actually were in Australia. My own experience while writing a PhD about four Australian composing mothers is consistent with this perception. I have lost count of the number of times I described my topic to polite questioners and, on explaining that it was about Australian women composers, was asked, ‘Are there any?’ Well, yes – in 2011 the Australian Music Centre recorded that twenty-five per cent of Australian composers are women.