Next day I turned up at the honi soit office bright and early, several times tripping adroitly on the short flight of steps. I was wearing my new brothel-creepers, bought on the way up the hill from Central Station. My old ox-blood quilt-tops were in my briefcase. I had chosen a pair of brothel-creepers with very long toes. They must have looked, to the independent observer, rather like the footwear of a peculiarly unsubtle clown. Certainly it was hard to climb stairs in them without turning sideways, so my arrival in the office proper was somewhat crablike. The Flying Saucer crew were all in there, plus a few more I was seeing for the first time. Wanda was still smoking no hands. Spencer was sitting at a typewriter. A tall man looking like an illustration of a kindly young history master in an English public school was standing beside him.
‘Good morning,’ said Spencer without ceasing to type. ‘This is Keith Cameron.’ The tall man said, ‘How do you do. Sandwich?’ ‘You aren’t expected to take one,’ said Spencer. ‘Cameron is merely being polite. Wanda you already know. The man in the suit is John Bottomley.’ Bottomley was conservatively tailored for the year 1908. He wore spats. ‘The man in the other suit is Jim Howie.’ Howie was dressed and groomed for the grouse moors. ‘Wanda will show you how to edit copy. Meanwhile Cameron and I will get on with this diverting lampoon for the next issue. On behalf of us all Howie and Bottomley are hatching a plot to unseat the editor, who is an idiot. For a blessing he is not present. A no-confidence motion concerning the editorship will be put at a special meeting in the Wallace Theatre this afternoon at three o’clock. Here is Maurice Grogan.’
Grogan swung into the office by one hand, which was reverse-gripped around the upper door-frame. He wore nothing on his superbly muscular body except a Speedo the size of a G-string, a pair of the kind of sandals known as Hong Kong thongs and a beard. He jumped up on a desk and crouched, gibbering and snickering. Nobody seemed to notice. I sedulously copied everybody else’s indifference while Wanda showed me how to sub-edit the readers’ letters. To do this she had to use her hands – my first evidence that they were not paralysed. When she pointed things out she did not always point to the right place because her eyes were screwed up. Ash fell from her cigarette, which she allowed to grow remarkably short during the course of her lesson. I was afraid her face would catch fire. Meanwhile the conspirators conspired and the creators created, both colloquies being punctuated by low growls and high-pitched squeals from Grogan. As they worked, Cameron and Spencer kept up an exchange of allusive wit that I found at once daunting and exhilarating. Spencer called something Firbankian. Who, what or where was Firbankian? I was lost, yet not in the usual way of feeling that I ought to be somewhere else. Somehow I knew that I was in exactly the right spot.
‘Shall we lunch at Manning or the Forest Lodge?’ asked Spencer. ‘Let’s remember,’ said Cameron, ‘the importance of remaining sober.’ ‘Not as important as having a drink,’ said Bottomley. ‘And besides, we’ll never get the fool out anyway. A gesture is the most we can hope to achieve.’ With me attached, the whole caravan moved across Parramatta Road, up a flight of steps and along the street to a pub called the Forest Lodge, which during opening hours was the daytime headquarters of the artistic set. We all trooped through the back gate while Grogan swarmed over the wall. Again nobody took any notice. I was later to learn that Grogan was Spencer’s steady date. Spencer was bisexual but least unhappy with Grogan. The same applied to Grogan vis-à-vis Spencer. For a long time I was incapable of grasping any of these facts, being under the impression that homosexuality was some kind of rare disease. I am glad to say that incomprehension gave way to tolerance without any intervening period of bigotry. But enlightenment lay far in the future, and for the time being I was as innocent as Queen Victoria when young.
As in all Australian pubs at the time, the beer came in two kinds, New and Old. New was made yesterday and Old was made the day before. I asked for a schooner of New, manfully not betraying the fact that it was the second drink of my life. It differed from the first drink in that I was able to sip it without gagging. It still tasted like camel’s pee. I closed my eyes so that nobody would notice they were crossed. But my ears were functioning perfectly. They had never had so much to listen to. The brain between them could process only the odd scrap of the information that was streaming in through the aural receptors. I had never heard such conversation. What kind of car, I wondered, was a Ford Madox Ford? What sort of conflict was an Evelyn War? At the mention of Decline and Fall, I advanced the name of Gibbon. Cameron gently explained that the book in question was written by the aforesaid War, spelt Waugh. Had I not read anything by him? Who was my idea of a good modern novelist? I said Nicholas Monsarrat. There were snorts all round at this. All present snorted audibly. Wanda snorted visibly. Spencer cast his eyes to the sky. But Cameron saved my face by insisting that there were good reasons for admiring Monsarrat, especially in his less famous works such as HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour. I would find, however, Cameron assured me, that Waugh’s early novels were unbeatable for comic invention. ‘How can you talk about Waugh when I’m reading Firbank?’ Spencer asked a cloud. ‘Here’s Huggins.’
Through the gate walked the most artistic-looking young man I had ever seen in my two days’ experience of artistic young men. He was all pale suede and corduroy. The ends of a loosely knit scarf dangled almost to the ground. He had a folio under his arm. Surrounding a face so handsome it was like a cartoon, his hair was blond and abundant. He was smoking a cigarette about two feet long. Within seconds he was seated, sipping at a beer glass held in one hand while he sketched with the other. He did a group sketch of everybody present. I was staggered – by the speed of his hand, by the quality of what it produced, and by the fact that I was included in the result, which I was allowed to keep. That night I pasted it onto my wall at home, airily explaining to my mother that it was the work of my friend Huggins, whom I knew quite well, since he was a close acquaintance of mine, and had in fact sat beside me during the vitally important meeting in which the editor of honi soit had retained his position only by a hair’s breadth. Actually, I now realize, any condemnation emanating from my new acquaintances had the effect of vociferous advocacy, just as anything they favoured was automatically doomed. Spencer’s speech had clinched the issue. He mentioned Cocteau, Kleist and Lord Alfred Douglas. The chairman imposed a gag and put the motion to a vote. It was lost by five hundred and sixty votes to eight. I was one of the eight.
From that day my university career proceeded on two separate paths, one of them curricular and the other not. In my new desert boots, but still retaining my Fellowship badge, I attended lectures in my four first-year subjects, English I, Modern History I, Psychology I and Anthropology I. One among hundreds, I sat taking elaborate notes. I see no reason to mock myself in retrospect for so slavishly writing everything down: nearly all of it was news to me, and some of it was to prove permanently useful. The lectures on phonetics, for example, were a painless way for a writer to pick up essential knowledge about what sounds really rhyme even when they look as if they don’t, and what sounds really don’t rhyme even when they look as if they do. Twenty years later I am still drawing on that knowledge every day. Nor was I in any position to scorn elementary lectures on the time shift in A Passage to India, since I was not yet fully divested of the impression that E. M. Forster’s principal creation had been Horatio Hornblower. As for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I certainly needed help there, having been only dimly aware that Ireland was a Catholic country.
Modern History helped to make me less clueless on such points. The English component of the History course was occupied mainly with Tudor constitutional documents. To the suitably unprepared student it could not have been duller. But the European side of things introduced me to the Anabaptists, the Medici, the Habsburgs and a charming group of bankers called the Fuggers. Even here, though, I had trouble establishing a perspective. What had been so wonderful about the Renaissance? Why had Burckhardt bothered even
to the extent of being wrong about it? But my pen raced on, unhampered by the mind’s doubts. I didn’t even know enough to know that what I now knew meant nothing without the knowledge that was meant to go around it.
Anthropology lectures were full of references to Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown and Margaret Mead. The set books had titles like Growing Up in New Guinea, Structure and Function in Primitive Pago-Pago and Having It Off In Hawaii. Every time evolution got a mention, the girls in the audience who belonged to Sancta Sophia College would put a conscience-saving mark at the top of the page and discreetly cross themselves. Since they ran to angora twin-sets, this last move would involve a gentle but tangible-looking self-inflicted pressure on their cosily enclosed bosoms, which in several cases were of notable size and shape. Watching one especially pretty Catholic girl called Noeleen Syms thus delicately caressing her own breasts, I sucked so thoughtfully on my biro that I was favoured with a sudden, solid mouthful of black ink. For the next week I had lips like a silent-movie star and teeth like the Mikado.
Psychology was taught by a faculty composed exclusively of mechanists, behaviourists and logical-positivists. They would have made Pavlov sound like a mystic had he been foolish enough to show up. He must have heard about how boring they were, since he never appeared, but it was not for want of having his name invoked. The whole faculty salivated en masse at the mere mention of him. As so often happens, dogmatic contempt for the very idea of the human soul was accompanied by limitless belief in the quantifiability of human personality. On the one hand we were informed that there was no ghost in the machine. On the other we were taught how to administer tests which would measure whether children were well adjusted. But quite a lot of solid information was embedded in the pulp. Since there was nothing I did not write down and memorize, the real information was still there years later, when all the theoretical blubber surrounding it had rotted away. A synapse, after all, remains a synapse, even after some clod has tried to convince you that Michelangelo’s talent can be explained in terms of the number and intensity of electrical impulses travelling across it. Or do I mean a ganglion?
Thus I applied myself. At that time a genuinely important man, Professor John Anderson, was head of the Philosophy Faculty and still delivering his famous lectures on logic to first-year classes, but typically I had failed to set my name down for the only subject that might have stimulated a mental component more intricate than mere memory. As it was, I did not sustain the full impact of Anderson’s realism until some years later. For the time being it was taxing enough to absorb elementary information about palatal fricatives, gametes, Dyak kinship patterns and the theological significance of Zwingli. Walled in behind a stack of books with titles like We of the Wee-Wee and Dropping Your Lunch in the Desert, I sat at the back of the Wallace Theatre with a fairly steady set of companions. Most of them had already graduated out of school blazers into sports coats, but it was plain that in their case raffishness would go no further. Less square than the out-and-out exam-passers, they were still not bohemians. They were ex-GPS and lived in fashionable harbourside suburbs like Bellevue Hill and Rose Bay. Without exception they were on their way to becoming lawyers. For them, Arts was a couple of easy years before the real work started. Some of them drove MG TCs. Their real life happened away from the university, but they talked about it while they were there. Admiring their relaxation, I was glad to be in with them and vaguely hoped that some of their ease would rub off on me.
On the way to lectures, during lectures and after lectures they all watched girls, awarding points for prettiness of face, size of chest, etc. Twenty years later they are probably still talking the same way and doing the same things. They were lucky enough to get set in their ways early. I warmed to them because they knew exactly what they were and liked being it. Their self-assurance, I need hardly add, was no virtue in itself, and to admire it was an admission of inadequacy on my part. Doubtless I would have warmed to the Waffen-SS for the same reason. Luckily the group in question happened to be harmless. Gilbert Bolt was the ringleader, mainly through being even less energetic than the rest of them. Leading from behind was a technique I had not previously encountered. Somehow, without lifting a finger, he made ordinary things amusing. He looked half asleep most of the time. Raising an eyebrow about a millimetre was his way of advising me to calm down.
Perhaps the Bellevue Hill mob were my anchor to windward, because simultaneously I was becoming more and more involved with the aesthetes. Except for the Film Society, I soon came to have no other extracurricular activity. Nor did I last long as an active member of the Film Society. Their screenings took place at lunch-time in the Union Hall, a highly atmospheric neo-Gothic nightmare of a place which was unforgivably pulled down a few years later. Everybody was there. Members of the Film Society sat in the minstrel gallery while the common herd sat in the hall proper. Before the house lights dimmed an old 78 of Bunk Johnson and George Lewis performing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ was played over the public-address system. I was proud to be among those in the gallery but it was fated that I should join the majority below. There were two full-sized 35mm projectors. We manned them with a crew of two, stripped to the waist because of the heat. I found it hard to keep the carbon arc burning at the right intensity. When the picture got dark, I overdid it with the readjustment, so that the picture got too bright. I never noticed a stoppage until the film melted. On the screen, Alan Ladd and Virginia Mayo would turn to stone and be suddenly overwhelmed by bubbling gravy. A junior member was supposed never to be left alone in the box but in practice the senior crew member was often outside in the gallery palpating his girlfriend.
If I had had help, the fourth reel of Simba would probably never have got away from me. The take-up reel fell off its spindle, leaving me a clear choice of shutting down the projector or else letting the film pile up on the floor. I chose the second course, unaware of just how much volume a reel of film occupies when unwound. When it was time for the next reel change, my senior colleague, whose name was Pratt and who was sitting outside in the gallery, retrieved his hand from his girlfriend’s blouse and opened the door to the box. He was expecting to see me and the projectors. Instead he was confronted with a pulsing, writhing wall of celluloid. I was somewhere inside it. It was at least half his fault. But screening Tales of Ugetsu with its reels in the wrong order was entirely my responsibility, since I was in charge of film preparation that day. I suppose I marked the reels wrongly. Hardly anybody noticed the difference, but I realized that it was time to dismiss myself from the Film Society and join its public.
Anyway, I had started to begrudge any of my spare time that was not spent with the bohemians. The Union Revue would have been enough on its own to win my allegiance to their cause. By some act of folly Spencer and Cameron had been placed in charge of the revue for that year. They called it Flying Saucers. Between them they wrote all the scripts. They also appeared in most of the songs and sketches. The decor, by Huggins, was brilliant when you could see it. Spencer, however, had designed the lighting. Little would have been visible even if those Film Society members who were operating the dimmers had contrived to stay sober. There was great emphasis on dry ice, so that slow billows of mist crept from the stage into the auditorium, which gradually came to resemble a polar landscape in which people had been embedded up to the neck. Ultraviolet light made the actors’ teeth glow green through the white fog. Instrumental music came from an electronic synthesizer played by Pratt. Vocal music was by Palestrina. There were at least two sketches about Virginia Woolf. A third sketch might have been about her, but was more probably about Gertrude Stein. Grogan played Alice B. Toklas, or it could have been Vita Sackville-West. Wanda was either in the cast or kept crossing the stage for some other reason. Bottomley and Howie, sharing the one pair of large trousers, purported to be a mutation. They mouthed abstract dialogue, partly as a forecast of how language might deteriorate in the aftermath of an atomic war, partly in deference to the fact that nobody
had got around to actually writing the sketch. A tall, beautiful girl called Penelope White came on wearing a gown composed of shaving mirrors. She announced, in a voice like a chainsaw hitting granite, that her song had not been written yet, but that Spencer had asked her to recite a poem. She recited it. I subsequently learned that it was by John Crowe Ransom. During her recitative, Spencer stood on one leg in the background, softly tapping a gong.
Interval was longer than the first half, which in turn was longer than the second half, although it was hard to tell when that was over. The audience, except for myself and my companion, had left long before. My companion was a girl from Kogarah Presbyterian Church Fellowship called Robin Warne. Afterwards I took her home to Carlton, telling her, during the long train trip, that Spencer and Cameron believed in pitching their work at a level which would force the audience either to confess itself inadequate or else translate its prejudices into violence. I quoted Spencer to the effect that an audience should be challenged, not coddled. When Robin announced that she hadn’t understood or enjoyed a single moment of the evening from start to finish, I countered with Spencer’s favourite word: ‘Precisely.’
She burst out laughing when I tried to kiss her and didn’t speak to me the following Sunday, but I didn’t notice. I was too busy planning that year’s Kogarah Fellowship revue, which I called Unidentified Flying Objects. As producer and director I appointed myself sole scriptwriter and cast myself in every sketch. Lacking adequate supplies of dry ice, I set fire to some rags in a plastic bucket. Graham Truscott, decorated with a joke moustache of his own devising, was in charge of sound, which consisted of a jewel from my recently begun modern-jazz collection – an EP record featuring Maynard Ferguson and Clark Terry engaged in a long attempt to damage each other’s hearing. I had tested this particular disc a few hundred times on my mother and could vouch for its challenging effect. As the trumpeters interminably wailed and shrieked, I improvised monologues in which such names as Ford Madox Ford and Ronald Firbank figured prominently. The audience stormed the exits.