The Cardboard Crown (2 page)
As everyone knew, the bounty which had sustained the Boyds and other family members was based on Melbourne city property acquired before the gold rushes. Known to
some, but seldom mentioned, was the story of Emma à Beckett’s father, John Mills, founder of Melbourne’s first brewery and owner of several public houses. Mills died in 1841, leaving these assets to his only child. Behind the shameful brewery fortune was the real family secret. John Mills came from a family of Gloucestershire labourers who had busily engaged themselves in burglary and theft. William Mills was hanged at Gloucester Gaol in 1826 while his brother, sixteen-year-old John Mills, was transported to Van Diemen’s Land where he served a seven-year sentence before sailing to Melbourne in 1837 to buy land and set up his brewery. Because Emma’s inheritance was contested by several Mills uncles as well as her disreputable stepfather, the story was common knowledge in the Melbourne law courts and therefore well known to her future father-in-law Chief Justice Sir William à Beckett. To add piquancy to the inevitable gossip when Emma married Sir William’s eldest son in 1855 was the fact that Sir William often railed in public about the evils of the liquor trade. With his imposing new house in East Melbourne not long completed, he resigned from the Supreme Court on the grounds of ill health and returned to England. There he resumed his crusade against the liquor trade.
If Martin Boyd did not know his convict heritage, the discovery of the diaries gave him the clues he needed. Some living witnesses—aunts and cousins—may have been indiscreet enough in old age to add their testimony. The
diaries offered Boyd a wonderful story, rich in irony, which he was perfectly equipped to tell. Yet, even half a century ago it was unthinkable for him to expose the convict stain. Social shame, clan loyalty, and reverence for his grandmother’s memory stayed his hand. Packing the fifty-odd volumes of diaries in his luggage, with the first pages of his novel, Boyd sailed for England in 1951. He never returned. The experiment of the old house had failed. It was exquisitely done but no one wanted to live in it.
How to rework the family story without using the convict element? How to do justice to Emma’s strength and independence without revealing the shameful burden she had carried into the cultured, upper-class à Beckett family? The diaries themselves offered an alternative dramatic centre. At the time of Martin’s birth in Lucerne in 1893, Emma left the family party and went alone to Munich. There she renewed a friendship with a Herr Weiger whom she had met in Paris.
He took her to the opera, sent golden roses to her hotel room, gave her small, expensive gifts. The lines of a wistful song, transcribed by Emma, suggest a sad acceptance of the impossibility of changing her life:
La vie est brève:
Un peu d’amour,
Un peu de rêve,
Et puis—Bonjour!
La vie est vaine:
Un peu d’espoir,
Un peu de peine,
Et puis—Bonsoir!
At fifty-five Emma was still beautiful, in love with art and Europe and perhaps with Herr Weiger too. But there was also her feckless husband Willie à Beckett, her six children and many grandchildren, all financially and emotionally dependent on her. Emma made her choice and returned to Australia. In her grandson’s novel, Alice Langton commmits herself to carrying the family burdens. Alice’s strength, clear-sightedness and generosity of spirit make her one of the great women of Australian fiction. She is never a victim.
To drive the plot of his novel Boyd had to devise a family scandal to take the place of the convict story. His answer was to develop Emma’s reticent diary entries into a strong and central love story, to which he added an imaginative element: an outrageous series of infidelities on his grandfather’s part. The story of rapacious Hetty, with whom Austin Langton, the fictional counterpart of W. A. C. à Beckett, has four sons is almost certainly Martin Boyd’s invention. This sustained betrayal sets Alice Langton free to contemplate divorce, as perhaps Emma à Beckett did. Emma’s diaries, however, are seldom reflective and although Martin Boyd reproduced many entries word for word, Alice’s confession of love belongs only to fiction.
‘All history is a little false.’ So the narrator of
The Cardboard Crown
, Guy Langton, warns his readers. The strategy by which Martin Boyd transformed his grandmother’s story into a work of art was his use of an unreliable narrator. Guy corresponds in many ways with Martin himself. The return from England, the old house, the young painter Julian (based on Arthur Boyd) are all instantly recognisable. So is the reckless old gossip Cousin Arthur—a version of the Boyds’ cousin Ted à Beckett. Some of the best comic scenes are those in which Arthur is torn between ribaldry and family piety. In his account of the first voyage to England, the ship is at times a version of the
Mayflower
, filled with grave, high-minded pilgrims. After an extra glass of burgundy it becomes ‘a kind of nautical brothel’.
Guy Langton never says ‘Trust me’. In countering one family voice with another to show the impossibility of ever knowing the truth of any human heart, he deliberately undermines his own authority. Self-characterised as a loner, an aesthete, probably homosexual, Guy shows the reader how he would be most inclined to interpret the story. The character of Aubrey Tunstall, with whom Guy and Arthur Langton have obvious affinities, is one example. We are told that if Guy’s brother Dominic had written the Alice-Aubrey romance, he would have had Aubrey tormented by conscience, spending his nights in prayer. It occurs to Guy, however, that Aubrey might not have relished the thought of half a dozen Australian stepchildren
sliding on the marble floors of his Rome apartment.
After a number of novels in which the point of view is conventionally omniscient, Boyd was prompted by the impossibility of truth-telling to write a modernist work. He would have agreed with William Faulkner that ‘the past is not dead. It’s not even past.’
The Cardboard Crown
is at one level a story of Melbourne’s colonial past and an exploration of the Anglo-Australian relationship. Unlike most novels set in this period it ignores bushrangers, bushfires and outback privations. The dramas of love, money and class in the new society are set against a landscape which Boyd evokes in loving detail, in the spirit of the Heidelberg School painters. His novel is also a finely shaped story about storytelling: a meditation on truth and memory.
Writing in the London
Observer
, David Paul compared
The Cardboard Crown
with Anthony Powell’s wonderful twelve-volume series of novels
A Dance to the Music of Time
. Paul and other English critics had a surer sense of its quality than the Australians who saw Boyd’s novel as an Antipodean
Forsyte Saga
. Published by Cresset Press, it was a 1952 Book Society Choice in Britain, where it had excellent sales. And in the United States the
New York Times
and the New York
Herald-Tribune
gave Boyd celebrity treatment, with his photograph beside the lead review. Yet, like Patrick White, whose 1955 novel
The Tree of Man
was misunderstood or derided by Australian critics on first publication, Boyd had to wait for serious attention in his own country. Not until 1971,
when Melbourne’s Lansdowne Press reissued
The Cardboard Crown
in a handsome new edition, was there widespread recognition of Boyd’s subtlety and narrative skill. Judah Waten’s review for the Melbourne
Age
acknowledges that Boyd’s novels ‘have won both praise here and abroad, perhaps more abroad than at home’, then adds that ‘the publication of this new edition of Martin Boyd’s four novels in Australia once again suggests that however limited the home base might be it is in the long run the Australian writer’s mainstay’.
The old house, The Grange, was sold to a quarry in the 1960s and later demolished. Attempts to salvage Arthur Boyd’s superb frescoes failed: they exist only in fragments. Emma à Beckett’s diaries survived many journeys with Martin Boyd, who died in Rome in 1972. No longer the rich uncle, he was helped financially in his last years by his nephews. The diaries came home to Australia in the 1990s, when Arthur Boyd gave Bundanon, his house and land on the Shoalhaven River, New South Wales, to the Australian people. Safely housed again, the fifty pocket-sized volumes are a permanent record of the life of a remarkable woman whose love of art and reverence for creativity transformed her legacy of convict gold into something far more enduring.
The Cardboard Crown
, and its successors in which Martin Boyd continued the story of the Langton family, are part of that legacy.
While the plot of this novel is founded on fact, the characters and certain episodes are fictitious. This is most particularly true of the characters of Hetty and her children, and her relationship with Austin.
Thanks are due to Messrs Chatto and Windus for permission to make the quotation from
The Captive
.
M.B.
1
‘When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were, and the souls of the dead from whom we spring, come and bestow upon us in handfuls their treasures and their calamities’.
*
The realisation that I had reached this age came upon me one night in 1949. It was after midnight, and I was driving through pouring rain from a dinner party in Toorak up to Westhill, my home in the country, thirty miles from Melbourne. My thoughts were accompanied by the dreary whining of the windscreen wiper, and occasionally and dangerously interrupted by the blinding lights of a timber lorry, driven presumably by a drunkard or a criminal.
Not that my thoughts were very coherent. It had been a rather dull party, with the champagne more stimulating than the conversation, so that one’s mind was buzzing like a motor engine that is pulling nothing, except for one incident, when a fashionable doctor made an outrageous reference to Dominic, my poor dead, mad brother, who had been his patient. I shall not repeat it, at any rate not yet, as although an incident may be true, it is not necessarily credible, and I do not want to give at the outset an impression that I am not telling the truth. Nor shall I give my retort, which was brief, impersonal and very restrained, but which shocked the millionaires and their wives as much as if I had used an obscene word, because of its preference to a standard of values of which they did not seem to have heard.
At last I left the Princes Highway, and roared up the hill, where my grandfather eighty years earlier had driven his four-in-hand and blown his coaching horn. I passed the smart new gate of Burns the dairy farmer, and came to my own, which was removed from its posts, one of which was knocked askew, while the gate itself, old and weather-stained, leaned against the stump of a fallen tree. At this height I was above the rain and I could see only too clearly, as I bumped up the stony drive, the general disorder of this property which I had inherited from Dominic a year ago, and which it would take at least another two years to put straight. The naked white branches of the gum trees, broken and hanging at strange cubist angles, were illuminated eerily by the headlights, while tangles of blackberries and fallen fencing made my back ache at the thought that even if I could find labourers, the heaviest and dirtiest jobs would still be left to me.
I drove through the tall brick gateposts, from which the gates made by my father had also gone, into the stable yard, and left the car in the dilapidated coach house. My labrador retriever raced from the house, like a lion roaring after its prey, and leapt against me with such force that my foot slipped on a cobble and I fell over. He was delighted to find me prone at his mercy. He put his foot on my shirtfront and joyfully licked my ear. I put my arm round the soft golden neck of this noble and beautiful creature, partly to lift myself up, but also to embrace him, for nowadays when we are hardened to endure so many evil things, the sight of the innocent melts and disarms us. My dog seemed to me a higher order of creation than the fashionable doctor, or than the smart lady who sniggered at the tale of Dominic delirious, and wandering lost in the back passages of a hospital. With the superb integrity of animals he decided his demonstration was adequate, and drew away until I stood up, when proudly waving the banner of his tail, he led me into the house.
In the lobby by the side-door I found Julian Byngham, one of my young cousins, who is a painter.
‘Hullo, Julian,’ I said. ‘When did you arrive?’
He said that he had come up after dinner, and was just leaving. This was a polite fiction, to provoke an invitation to stay, which I gave, though I knew that it was almost certain that Mrs Briar had insisted on his staying and that his pyjamas were already laid out on the bed. His family are like that. Words have little relation to reality. It was even possible that Mrs Briar had given him dinner, and that he had drunk the rest of the liqueur brandy which I was keeping for a bishop who was coming up to luncheon the next day. But
it was probably true that he had arrived after the dinner hour, and only speculating on a meal, and therefore from a vague delicacy wished me to understand that he had not deliberately dined in my house in my absence.
‘I’m sorry I’m so late,’ I said, becoming affected by this polite, quasi-Chinese divorce from reality, as there was no need for me to apologise, seeing that I had no idea that Julian would be here, ‘but I’ve been to a dreary dinner party. At least it wasn’t dreary, as it was very well done and everyone was very nice except a doctor who said a frightful thing about Dominic.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Julian.
‘I won’t tell you, as you wouldn’t believe it. I might tell you my reply, as it seemed to shock everyone, more than what the doctor said, and you can tell me if you think it in very bad taste.’
‘But I shan’t be able to judge unless I know what the doctor said,’ Julian objected.
‘Well you must promise to believe me if I tell you. It is extremely improbable.’ He promised and I went on. ‘They were talking about good-looking men, and a Mrs Vane, who did not seem to know about Dominic’s last years, or even that he was dead, said that he looked very distinguished. He had, you know, a kind of El Greco gloom about him and obviously “une hérédité très chargée”. The doctor burst out laughing and exclaimed: “Distinguished! He looked very distinguished when I met him in the hospital, a hundred yards from his room and carrying an armful of bed-pans. He thought he was helping the nurses. Distinguished!” and he laughed again.’
‘And what did you say?’ asked Julian.
‘I said, sounding I hope as cold as death: “He doubtless thought that he was St. Simon of Cyrene, helping our Lord to carry the Cross.”’
‘Didn’t they like it?’
‘No. I feel that I’ve blotted my copy-book.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Julian, and he turned to some pictures he had been examining when I came in.
‘Who painted these?’ he asked.
‘Arthur Langton,’ I told him. ‘They’re not very good. I only hung them there out of piety, using the word in the Roman sense. I found them out in the stables.’
‘Who is this man in the pink coat?’
I was a little startled. The hungry generations had at last trodden into oblivion my grandfather, whose forceful and highly-coloured personality, even after his death had dominated the scenes of my earliest childhood.
‘Your great-grandfather,’ I said.
‘He looks very important, but not quite at ease with himself.’
I was more startled. If when I was Julian’s age I had spoken of my grandfather in that detached and critical tone, my father, easygoing as he was, would have been angry. It is disconcerting to find a younger generation assuming, with justifiable impunity, critical privileges which were not allowed to oneself. My grandfather Langton died when I was about six. For fifty years his image had remained immense in my mind, but fading, like those gods of whom Aldous Huxley writes, who have actual existence, but who die when men no longer worship them. At Julian’s remark the faint balloon-like
ghost of my grandfather suddenly shrank to its proper size in history. With the collapse of the bubble, I felt that I began to see him as he really was, and that in his shrunken image I began to perceive the nature of the treasures and calamities he had left us. But I was still shocked at Julian’s unawareness of his identity.
‘Creation only comes from an inner tension,’ I said, ‘and in a way he lived creatively. He tried to make his outer things accord with those which were within. The difficulty was that he was not sure what was within.’
‘Is this his wife?’ asked Julian, turning to the portrait of my grandmother. ‘She has a good face, kind and strong.’
‘She was very kind, and she certainly was not weakminded. I should think that she was not at all an easy person to lie to.’
‘You wouldn’t think she was his wife,’ said Julian. ‘Their faces don’t seem related to each other.’
Again I felt like a fundamentalist listening to higher criticism.
‘I have an idea that she didn’t lead a very happy life,’ I said. I was so used to this portrait, having known it since my earliest childhood, that I had not given it close attention. I saw now how clearly it revealed those qualities which I had remembered in, or heard attributed to, my grandmother. Her sense of justice and her kindness were shown in the broad forehead, the gentle, well-placed eyes, and the firm but pleasure-loving mouth. ‘She not only had to endure her husband’s eccentricities,’ I went on, ‘but to act as banker to the whole family. She was rather like Baron Corvo’s onion woman.’
‘Who was she?’
‘A woman who had lived a life of unrelieved wickedness, except that once she gave an onion to a beggar. She died and went to Hell. As the mercy of God is infinite, an angel let down an onion and told the woman in torment to grab it, which she did, and was pulled up towards Heaven. But a lot of other damned souls hung on to her skirts. This is the only part that is applicable to Grannie. She always had this weight on her skirts. The onion woman kicked them off, so the angel let go of the onion and they all flopped back into Hell. But Grannie never kicked them off, and it’s the remains of her fortune, divided up, that still keeps us more or less out of the gutter. Her life might make a novel.’
‘Why don’t you write it?’ suggested Julian.
‘Make a novel about the sorrows of my grandmother!’ I exclaimed. ‘It wouldn’t be decent.’
‘How long has she been dead?’
‘About fifty years.’
‘If you can’t write freely about someone who has been dead for fifty years, you can never write the truth at all,’ declared Julian. ‘Fifty years is just the right distance. It’s near enough to know what they were like, and far enough off not to hurt anyone by what you say.’
‘I should be cut by everyone.’
‘By whom? By the people you dined with tonight?’
‘One has to know somebody,’ I replied. ‘It’s no use sitting down in the Australian bush and waiting for a beautiful genius with perfect manners to come along. Anyhow the people I dined with tonight are quite nice. I’ve never known them be unkind to anyone, unless of course he had no money.’
Julian was not to be side-tracked. ‘It’s better to write a good book,’ he said, ‘than to know a lot of rich people.’
‘Of course it is,’ I agreed. ‘But it is not only a question of knowing rich people. One has other friends, people like Aunt Maysie, who may hold the old-fashioned views of their generation—one can’t expect them not to—but who are kind good honourable people. I don’t want to offend them. Suppose that I went to Aunt Maysie and said to her: I want to write a book about Grannie. If it is to be truthful, either literally or artistically, I may have to put in it things which you will think unpardonable. But please don’t mind. If we are to have any writing that is worthwhile we must ignore these objections. Surely it is better to be held up even to ridicule, and be crystallised eternally in a work of art, than just to keep your skeleton respectably in a cupboard? What would Aunt Maysie say?’
‘If she’s any sense, she’d say go ahead.’
‘And then supposing I sacrificed all my friends and the book didn’t turn out to be a work of art after all?’
‘You have to take risks,’ said Julian, and turned again to the portrait of my grandfather. ‘At a first glance you would think that a brutal arrogant face, a sort of Prussian general, but when you look into it you see that it’s really sensitive, with an almost guilty look. I’m sure he’s the subject for a novel.’
‘I’ll leave it to you then,’ I said, ‘as you feel the inspiration.’
‘I’m not a writer.’
‘Everyone can write one book. At least, so they say.’
All this time Dudley, the labrador, had his nose pressed against the door into the passage, while he looked at me sideways with an affectation of pathos.
‘Let us get something to drink,’ I said, and opened the door. Dudley, waving his tail, trotted before us into the dining-room. It was as I had thought. There was half an inch of brandy left in the decanter, and the pineapple had been cut. Julian, though he stood with me at the sideboard, was not at all embarrassed, but he seemed satisfied when I offered him only lemon squash. I had had enough alcohol for that evening, and so, judging by the decanters, had he. We took our drinks and some biscuits and went into the little drawing-room.
‘This is a lovely room,’ said Julian, and my annoyance about the brandy evaporated, as I had painted the walls myself. They were pale grey, with ivory rococo panels. Compared with Julian’s own painting they were trivial, which made his praise more welcome. There was nothing here later than 1780, and in the soft light from the chandelier its beauty was a little deathly, the grey walls only relieved by the velvet and satin in bewigged portraits, and the rusty pink and pale gold of the aubusson carpet, on which Dudley now sat, dribbling horribly at the biscuits, but looking as if the whole room had been designed only as a setting for his golden coat. Julian pointed this out, and Dudley, at the mention of his name, put his wet chin on my knee. I lifted his brown plush ear and stroked it.
Julian looked about him, at the smug faces on the wall, whose blood was mingled in his own, at the stylised decorations, and he smiled faintly, a little amused, a little mystified at the almost surrealist incongruity of this room, set down in the midst of a derelict garden in the Australian bush. I began the restoration of Westhill with the inside of the house,
so that I could continue operations from a base of comfort and order. Now at night, with the curtains drawn, we might have been in a room in an English manor house, or a French
gentilhommière
. Julian’s smile was his response to the atmosphere of the past, of which this was his first experience, as he had never been out of Australia.
‘You could bring this house into the novel, too,’ he said. ‘They lived here, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, but apart from everything else, I don’t know enough about them.’
‘You saw them when you were quite young. If you set your adult experience to work on your youthful memory, you would know what they were like. Or if you looked at those portraits long enough you could imagine it. Besides, there must be other things, photographs and letters and things, poked away in old cupboards?’
