Derek Drinkwater review of Catharine Lumby, Frank Moorhouse: A Life; and Matthew Lamb, Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths

(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2023), 304 pp., PB $36.99, ISBN 9781742372242

(Sydney: Knopf Australia, 2023), 480 pp., HB $45.00, ISBN 9780143786122

Frank Moorhouse the man was an intriguing amalgam of the bohemian and the conventional. Throughout his six decades as a writer, however, he remained an unrepentant modernist and innovator from start to finish. Moorhouse was a prolific wordsmith who would have winced at being described as a ‘man of letters’, a longstanding fixture of mainstream British and Australian literary culture. Nevertheless, within John Gross’s broad definition set out in his classic study of the species—a novelist, critic and accomplished freelance writer in several genres who toiled mainly outside academe—it remains an accurate description of Moorhouse’s vocation.¹

With some 18 fiction and non-fiction books to his name, including historical novels, short stories, essays, satirical and comic pieces, several screenplays and anthologies, as well as a plethora of journalism, Moorhouse established a place for himself as a leading Australian literary figure. He was also a prominent public intellectual, a vocal social activist, a dogged anti-censorship champion and a spirited advocate for authors. Such rich pickings have been used to good effect by both of Moorhouse’s biographers, Catharine Lumby, a veteran journalist and media studies academic, and Matthew Lamb, a literary editor and historian. Each was a member of Moorhouse’s wide circle, though this has not diminished their resolve to tell his story as they see it in two books that differ in ambition and scope but do their subject justice as man and writer. Lumby’s biography is a single-volume study, and Lamb’s the first of two tomes. Strange Paths covers Moorhouse’s life between 1938 and 1974; Ways of Going will deal with the years from 1975 until his death in 2022.

By any measure, Moorhouse led an unusual life. Born in the then small New South Wales south coast town of Nowra, the youngest of three sons (there were no daughters) of Frank Moorhouse Snr, a highly successful inventor-businessman, and his formidable wife Purthanry,² Moorhouse excelled at school in the classroom and on the sports field but, unlike his brothers, had no desire to enter the family business. Although bookish and self-contained, young Frank was not unadventurous, developing as a teenager a taste for cycling odysseys and bushwalking. At 14, Moorhouse decided on a career in journalism; by 18 he was a copyboy (later promoted to cadet journalist and court reporter) on Sydney’s Daily Telegraph; and at 19 he began a stint as a C-grade journalist on two Wagga Wagga newspapers, before editing another rural paper with his wife and returning to Sydney in 1960 to tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association (a lifelong regret was having to drop his tertiary humanities and journalism studies in order to earn a living and pursue his imaginative writing after hours). Moorhouse’s three-year marriage collapsed in 1961 owing to his infidelity with women and tensions arising from his bisexuality. Journalistic work on country New South Wales newspapers and for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) kept the financial wolf from the door throughout the 1960s and, at 30, he published his first book, Futility and Other Animals (1969), a foray into the non-linear ‘discontinuous narrative’ form of which he became a leading Australian practitioner.³

During the 1970s and 1980s, Moorhouse lived in the inner-Sydney bohemian but fast-gentrifying suburb of Balmain, an ideal locale for this social and intellectual non-conformist now committed to the full-time writer’s life. Fringe dweller participation in the activities of the Sydney Push combined with paid-up membership of that city’s Libertarian Society, and its Left Club, were major factors in Moorhouse becoming an advocate for women’s and gay liberation at this time. He also realised a longstanding goal of writing screenplays for feature films, among the best-known being Between Wars (1974) and The Coca-Cola Kid (1985); became prominent in campaigns aimed at improving authors’ intellectual property rights and incomes; and was at the forefront of opposition to punitive censorship laws and overzealous political surveillance of writers and journalists.

While deriving a meagre income from journalism, Moorhouse kept up a cracking pace with his books. Two more ‘discontinuous narrative’ short story collections appeared, The Americans, Baby (1972) and The Electrical Experience (1974), along with a duo of more conventional (less unconventional?) short story gatherings, Tales of Mystery & Romance (1977) and The Everlasting Secret Family and Other Secrets (1980). Two quirky fictional works, Conference-ville and Forty-Seventeen, came out in 1976 and 1988, respectively, and an unusual mix of essays, Lateshows, was published in 1990. Moorhouse, whose favourite hostelries included the gentlemen’s club, also penned a number of memorable primers on what he regarded as the elements of gracious living or the ‘good life’. These encompassed paeans to quality hotels and interesting bars, good restaurants and witty conversation: Room Service (1985),⁴Loose Living (1995), The Inspector-General of Misconception: The Ultimate Compendium to Sorting Things Out (2002), and Martini: A Memoir (2005), the summum bonum of his philosophy in which he expounded on his fondness for food and drink, with the martini being ‘a metaphor for his life and friendships’ (A Life, p. 125)—to which one could add the oyster, a prominent presence at his table and in his books.⁵

It was ‘The Edith Trilogy’, however, that secured for Moorhouse’s fiction an enduring place in Australian literature. Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000) chart the interwar heyday and eclipse of the League of Nations through the experiences of one of its Australian-born junior functionaries, Edith Campbell Berry, a character sharing many traits with Moorhouse’s redoubtable mother ‘Purth’. Another recurring character is T. George McDowell (earlier encountered in The Americans, Baby and The Electrical Experience), a practical Australian man of business and former Berry suitor based in part on Frank Moorhouse Snr. Cold Light (2011) continues Edith’s story in the less glamorous setting of post–World War II Canberra.⁶

Lumby, the seasoned journalist, is, perhaps understandably, more skilful than Lamb at bringing into relief Moorhouse’s persona in her ‘selective’ (A Life, p. 5) study, whereas Lamb, the literary historian, provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Moorhouse’s interior life and the ‘strange paths’ (Strange Paths, p. 311) he forged in shaping the terrain of Australian culture in his ‘cultural biography’ (Strange Paths, p. xi). How do these books compare in doing Moorhouse justice? Comparison across five themes may provide a useful vehicle for such evaluation: background, writing, activism, relationships and the man.

Moorhouse early rejected the social conformity of his parents and siblings and what to him seemed the suffocating provincialism of 1950s Australian life. However, he would come to acknowledge the value of this inheritance: ‘everything I’ve written is really about Nowra’ (A Life, p. 8).⁷ Lumby opens by providing a perceptive and straightforward account of the origins of this process of conformity and rebellion and its lifelong implications for Moorhouse as man and author. In contrast, Lamb begins with a 45-page ‘prehistory’ (Strange Paths, p. 2) of the Moorhouse and Cutts family stories interwoven with detailed descriptions of Australia’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary and publishing landscapes, the latter perhaps better suited to an appendix.

By his early 30s, Moorhouse was disillusioned with the traditional model of journalism, averring that the juggernaut of news rested on flawed assumptions about its influence on readers’ thinking and behaviour (Strange Paths, pp. 318–19). Moorhouse aspired, he told his parents at 33, to be ‘an honest craftsman’ writing with ‘integrity’ in the tradition of ‘naturalism’ (Strange Paths, p. 365). As Lamb argues, the works of John Steinbeck, among many literary influences, would prove to be the most significant in enabling Moorhouse to balance lyricism and social realism in his writing (Strange Paths, pp. 84–5). Also important were the writings on sexuality and psychology of thinkers such as the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and the American ethnographer George A. Dorsey, which helped Moorhouse crystallise his views on bisexuality and cross-dressing—elements germane to his life and literary work (Strange Paths, pp. 91–2, 196).

During the 1960s Sydney libertarian debates, in which most of his confreres dismissed art and letters as bases for rigorous thinking or radical reform inferior to philosophic reason (Strange Paths, pp. 212–13), Moorhouse was a steadfast advocate of reading, chiefly ‘literary fiction’, as a powerful form of imaginative inquiry and a foundation for intellectual and societal change (Strange Paths, p. 374). His writings reflect wariness of received opinion; reliance on synthesising theory and experience as a guide to action; and disdain for unthinking adherence to convention—though, in his observance of, and insistence on, rules, order and etiquette in life and letters, Moorhouse, the urbane clubman, could be quite conformist on occasion. As Matthew Lamb points out, his oeuvre is evidence of ‘a single-minded dedication to the craft of writing narrative fiction’ (Strange Paths, p. 444).⁸ However, pace Lamb, Moorhouse’s rendering of the ‘discontinuous narrative’ form was an ambitious variation on it rather than a reinvention of the device. He was almost certainly its most important twentieth-century Australian exponent. Lumby is strongest on the vicissitudes of Moorhouse’s literary life with Lamb at his best as critic and cultural analyst of his writing.

To the end, Moorhouse remained an intellectual gadfly—‘a sceptical leftist’—wary of grand schemes, rhetoric, politics and ideological groupthink of the right and left (A Life, p. 205; Strange Paths, p. 255). Both authors explore in detail the causes Moorhouse championed, with Lumby focusing at greater length on the minutiae of his practical involvement as a campaigner and Lamb engaging in more incisive intellectual scrutiny of the sources of Moorhouse’s dissent and advocacy. These include his rejection of Australians’ embrace of ‘a mimic culture’ in several spheres: for instance, late 1960s attempts to improve land rights solutions for Aboriginal Australians, which, to Moorhouse, overly relied on the language of United States’ civil rights at the expense of approaches tailored to local conditions (Strange Paths, pp. 307–8); and a preference for North American folk and protest songs over a vibrant and long-established homegrown folk music tradition (Strange Paths, pp. 172–3, 305–9).

From early adulthood, Moorhouse chose to compartmentalise his personal and professional relationships. Whether with family, friends, literary agents or publishers, he relished the role of ringmaster in orchestrating such interactions. Both Lumby and Lamb supply valuable testimony as to why he did so. Lumby is stronger on the reasons for this in his literary life, one characterised by generosity to aspiring authors but circumspection in his dealings with successful writer-contemporaries; in this context, she deploys an insightful interview with the playwright David Williamson who regarded Moorhouse as a ‘highly competitive’ but, at root, ‘insecure’ person (A Life, pp. 115–16). Lamb is more adept at tracing the often-thorny relations between this self-described ‘wayward son’ (Strange Paths, p. 311) and his family, citing, for example, affecting correspondence between Frank Snr and Jnr and ‘Purth’ during a torrid period of family estrangement (Strange Paths, pp. 310–12).

The contrast between these studies of Moorhouse is most apparent in their authors’ treatment of his character and personality. Lamb’s book, though replete with penetrating critiques of literary works and cultural milieu, is short on vivid evocation of the man. Lumby, on the other hand, deftly describes the torments arising from Moorhouse’s personal and literary reversals, and what it was like to spend time with him when the going was good. The many hilarious situations Lumby recounts include the story of Moorhouse’s tortuous (but ultimately successful) attempts to persuade a foreign film director to take on The Coca-Cola Kid, with Moorhouse ignoring his lack of interest in regional Australia and dragooning the increasingly disgruntled movie maker into visiting Nowra to absorb atmosphere for the film (A Life, pp. 117–19). Among the most memorable Moorhousian fancies are a self-satirical take on his habit of eating out, in which he and a restaurateur-friend embark on a tour of Europe’s 1,000 greatest restaurants, their riotous gastronomic excesses landing them before the European Court (A Life, pp. 136–7); and a half-serious (?) proposal to establish the Cape Mythical National Park, an Australian adventure playground replete with animatronic ‘Ti-kangaroos’ featuring exhibits such as ‘The Dog in the Back of a Ute’ (A Life, pp. 193–6). Despite these vignettes and her illuminating descriptions of Moorhouse’s ups and downs, Lumby—unlike Lamb who deals with the subject in the depth it warrants given its importance to Moorhouse as youth, man and scribe—has little to say about the effects of a stranger’s sexual abuse of the teenage Moorhouse or its lifelong sexual and emotional repercussions.

Lumby’s is a well-researched and fluently written study complemented by exhaustive and accessible endnotes in lieu of a bibliography. However, a list of Moorhouse’s major works by genre and in order of publication would have been helpful. There is also a comprehensive index. The carefully chosen photographs enhance the book’s appeal considerably. Nonetheless, some gremlins have found their way through: the ‘Angry Penguins/Ern Malley’ controversy took place in 1944 not 1930 (A Life, p. 80); and, although Moorhouse either worked for, or contributed as a freelance to, the Boorowa News in the mid-1960s, Lumby provides no evidence in support of the caption to the News building photograph opposite p. 152 that Moorhouse edited that paper in 1966.⁹

Lamb’s book displays impressive levels of exposition and interpretation pertaining to Moorhouse’s personal life, writings and their cultural context. There is an excellent bibliography. Inexplicably, however, it is without an index or illustrations and the author’s name is absent from the title page. The book also contains a number of easily avoidable factual mistakes: Anthony Eden was British prime minister from 1955 until 1957, not in the mid-1930s (Strange Paths, p. 35); and the literary critic quoted was Leslie A. Fiedler not Fielder (Strange Paths, p. 246). Some inconsistencies of literary characterisation also occur, for example, D. H. Lawrence being described incorrectly as a member of the Bloomsbury Group (Strange Paths, p. 32) and accurately as a Bloomsbury acolyte (Strange Paths, p. 99). Lamb also has little of substance to say about Moorhouse’s sojourn in Boorowa in 1966 (why uproot himself to this isolated small town?), other than that he worked there as a journalist for the ABC (Strange Paths, p. 251).

In their quest to understand and explain Frank Moorhouse and his times to themselves and readers, have Lumby and Lamb—as their subject was fond of saying—been able successfully ‘to carry a message to Garcia’?¹⁰ For this reviewer, they have, and it was a pleasure to get to know this complex and elusive man of letters, with more of the same doubtless to come in Lamb’s concluding volume. Lumby delivers a lively portrayal of Moorhouse, and Lamb—in part assisted by having a two-book canvas to work on—provides a more trenchant account of the factors that shaped his life and writings. On a solitary bush hike in 2007, Moorhouse retreated to his tent to escape the heat and swarming insects. Catharine Lumby admits to her surprise that to pass the time he had on hand ‘of all things’ a copy of the patrician English art historian Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation.¹¹ Moorhouse continues to confound people’s perceptions of him.

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1. 1 John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), xiii–xiv. The quest by two brothers to preserve the records of a long defunct scholarly guild known as the ‘Men of Letters’, depicted in the science fiction television series Supernatural, would likely have piqued Moorhouse’s interest and found its way into one of his ‘discontinuous narratives’ (of which more later).

2. 2 Frank Moorhouse Snr (1904–1994) and Purthanry (née Cutts) (1901–1996), prominent residents of Nowra for seven decades, numbered among their many interests Rotary and Boy Scouts (Frank Snr) and the CWA and Girl Guides (‘Purth’).

3. 3 Moorhouse’s early experiments with the ‘discontinuous narrative’ device owed much to the thinking of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the fiction of John Dos Passos.

4. 4 Moorhouse agreed with the British novelist-critic Cyril Connolly that an author’s ‘rightful place of composition’ is the hotel bedroom away from the pressures produced by ‘the pram in the hall’. He would also have drawn some comfort from Connolly’s conviction that late literary success favours the childless writer. See Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938) in The Selected Works of Cyril Connolly: Volume One: The Modern Movement, ed. Matthew Connolly (London: Picador, 2002), 119, 120.

5. 5 Moorhouse’s nightly tasks as a Daily Telegraph copyboy in the 1950s had included collecting oyster sandwiches from a local restaurant for the newspaper’s owner, (Sir) Frank Packer. By now a reporter, Moorhouse was sacked from the paper in 1957 after being arrested for hooliganism. He made a personal plea to Packer for reinstatement, which was granted, but only after a dressing-down from Packer and a week’s suspension (Lumby, A Life, p. 144; Lamb, Strange Paths, pp. 140–1).

6. 6 Moorhouse’s three-volume magnum opus, though linear in structure, nevertheless displays mature features of the ‘discontinuous narrative’ form whereby ‘plausible continuities and discontinuities within the past’ are established (Farge), due largely to his skill at balancing ‘honest negotiation with the facts and the power of the informed imagination’ (Mantel), and because of his capacity (as the historical novelist William Boyd has put it of his own approach) to effectively ‘colonize the world of the real’ by devising realistic characters and allowing them agency within the ‘fictional’ real world (Boyd). See Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 96, doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300176735.001.0001; Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing, ed. Nicholas Pearson (London: John Murray, 2023), 275; William Boyd, The Mirror and the Road: Conversations with William Boyd, ed. Alistair Owen (London: Penguin Random House, 2023), 43.

7. 7 ‘Moorhouse lived and wrote in negotiation with his upbringing’ (A Life, 38).

8. 8 Moorhouse had much in common with the British novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965). Both were bisexual outsiders who nevertheless trusted literature to vouchsafe them the financial independence they needed to write, and each regarded well-crafted prose as a form of politesse akin to cultivated conversation. Accordingly, both devised a ‘pattern’ for their writing lives in which Maugham became rich through his pen during a career resembling ‘a masterpiece of literary strategy’, and Moorhouse, who cared little for making money and owned no property, remained relatively poor. See Anthony Curtis, The Pattern of Maugham: A Critical Portrait (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974), 1, 4.

9. 9 The veteran proprietor (and almost certainly editor) of the Boorowa News until his death in 1976 was Gregory Grey O’Hara (the reviewer is grateful to Mrs Helen McGrath, research officer, Boorowa Museum, for supplying this information). In a 1979 interview, Moorhouse revealed that he had worked for the News (though he did not say as its editor or when). See Canberra Times, 2 August 1979, 3.

10. 10 A phrase meaning to achieve what one has set out to do. Moorhouse wove a story around it. Lamb, Strange Paths, 400–1.

11. 11 Lumby, A Life, 251.