Leeward: A memoir by Geoffrey Lehmann

The poet James McAuley once told a group of Sydney university students – ‘forcefully’, as Geoffrey Lehmann recalls – that poets should have a career unconnected with literature. Lehmann had already imbibed a related injunction from his mother: ‘One day she told me I should become a lawyer and a writer. From the age of twelve I no longer had to think about what I would become.’ Leeward, this formidable memoir, is Lehmann’s account of what he did become in the mid-twentieth-century working-class and academically aspirant Sydney world that swirled around him. His mother was prescient, and perhaps Lehmann was obedient, in his complex way. She was also ambitious, unfulfilled, and an avid reader who put the wherewithal of a literary life in her son’s way, even as he ‘fell out of love’ with her: ‘I was hard on my mother, with the intolerance of youth. In many ways, I was her embodiment.’ And whether he thought about it and chose or not (a lot simply happens to Lehmann), he did become both poet and lawyer (and tax consultant and accountancy lecturer and advisor to government). The two aspects of his life don’t just run parallel – they mesh in quite an extraordinary way. In his poem ‘Self Portrait at 62’, the mature lawyer/accountant turns his labour into poetry: I’m absorbed in formattingthe analysis of facts,the cadences of reassurance. And years before, the young poet gleaned from James McAuley’s rules of prosody some of the dispassion and discipline that his lawyerly life would require: ‘I was beginning to realise McAuley’s theory of prosody had a larger context. When I was writing a poem within prescribed rules, I had to think about the form rather than my emotions. Adherence to conventions freed me from solipsism. It can liberate emotion in a way formlessness cannot. Perhaps that is what Yeats meant by “the ceremony of innocence” – if you are intent on the ceremony you regain your innocence.’ Geoffrey Lehmann with his mother Iris in 1968 (photograph by Diana Lehmann) Innocence? I kept wondering about innocence as I read this long, densely populated, fiercely intelligent, selective, and strangely vulnerable, self-scouring memoir. Lehmann’s vignettes – of himself, his family, his intellectual and professional worlds – are given with the graphic precision of a poet. They have epigrammatic sting – and a pulsing afterlife. But as Lehmann himself remarks about the epigrams of Timothy Suttor, another writer, they can oversimplify. The vivid, initial sketches in Leeward are so incised that they lodge in memory even in the unfolding, overlapping structure of this long memoir. It is very tempting to see his people as fixed characters, almost Dickensian in their containedness. How, for example, can one go on to appreciate the complexity of his parents’ marriage when Lehmann introduces it like this: ‘When I was in my twenties my father would say: “Son, I got married too young – the older you are when you get married, the shorter time you have to put up with it.”’ And how can one penetrate the humanity of his paternal aunt Agnes, when her opening scene is so stark? ‘“Leo, there’s always a bed for you in Walker Street, if you want to move back”, Agnes told the newly married couple “in her stentorian squawk”.’ Lehmann is not a historian. And this is his memoir, with its own imperatives, his own selection, his own patterning – so one takes what comes. And wonders. Sometimes with acute pleasure and gratitude (it is teeming, like a Brueghel landscape), sometimes with downright puzzlement. With his deep etching goes a narrative habit that sometimes reminds me of the abrupt juxtapositions of Norse sagas – incompatibles butted up against one another. No connective tissue, no resolution – just the energy generated out of matters kept in tension. What, for example, is a reader to make of the following passage about Lehmann and his complicated bond with Les Murray: ‘Despite different temperaments, our friendship lasted for more than twenty-five years. After we drifted apart, he said to my daughter Julia, “You know, I have Asperger’s syndrome. And your father has too.”’ Lehmann is now in his late seventies. So Leeward (the name of his first childhood home, in Lavender Bay) captures five generations (at least) of Australian life – and Sydney life most vividly. Much of it is familiar, although slipping poignantly into the past: ice chests, sawdust on butchers’ floors, mint sauce made with sugar and brown vinegar, harbour launches, legendary Sydney cafés. The writing, bringing all that back to mind, is of a piece with his poetry – limpid, evocative. The early sections set around Lavender Bay made me think of the landscapes of Lloyd Rees, probably no accident, given Lehmann’s intimacy with the artist’s work. Lehmann’s Sydney was, in some ways, a small town, and a place where the classes were shifting and mixing long before ‘social mobility’ became a buzzword. It is one of the book’s great strengths, this panoramic yet very particular embrace of the players in all their social groupings with the landscape shimmering behind. There are agonising chapters, like the ‘Ten Years’ of Lehmann’s marriage – ‘an optical illusion’ is his rueful phrase for it – to Sally McInerney, which collapses in wake of Sally’s ‘impossible and desperate’ feelings for Peter Porter, after her fateful introduction to the Australian poet, visiting from the United Kingdom, at the Adelaide Festival in 1974, an acquaintance initially sought by Lehmann himself (‘Peter Porter was the person I was interested to meet’). But there is also the leaven of Lehmann’s long creative association with McInerney’s father, Ross, and its poetic yield in the poems Lehmann wrote in Ross’s persona. Other chapters, particularly the one that focuses – with some helpless sympathy – on the women who did not survive the Sydney Push, leave one wordless with rage. Geoffrey Lehmann in the early 1960s (photograph by Diana Lehmann) I often speculated, while reading, what the poets, artists, sisters, children, former lovers, politicians, novelists, judges, accountants, friends, lost friends, and the occasional flâneurs would think about the way Lehmann has presented them. But that is for them to say. Lehmann has no memory of living in the house called ‘Leeward’, but he is too much of a poet to let its metaphorical resonance escape him. The final chapters of the memoir, particularly those that detail his long marriage to his second wife, Gail, and the gentleness of his final days with his sister Diana, are days of calm, of happiness, often, as he says, unexpected. Ithaca days. Ithaca ‘is quotidian, and difficult to write about’, he admits. So he has a poet’s recourse to Shakespeare: it is strangely moving, this late commitment, after such tumult, to hope and to Caliban’s assurance: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,Sounds and sweet airs, that give delightand hurt not.

Morag Fraser

From the New Issue

Tremor by Teju Cole

Pursuit of the New: Louise Hanson-Dyer, publisher and collector edited by Kerry Murphy and Jennifer Hill

‘When we talk about the Middle Ages: Revisiting the power of periodisation’ by G. Geltner

No Church in the Wild by Murray Middleton

You May Also Like

Lesbian for a Year by Brooke Hemphill

Love this Life: Lyrics, 1978–2001 by Neil Finn

The Night We Ate the Sparrow: A memoir and fourteen stories by Morris Lurie

Saving Lieutenant Kennedy: The heroic story of the Australian who helped rescue JFK by Brett Mason