ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I’m making steady progress with reading Strange Paths, Matthew Lamb’s new biography of Frank Moorhouse — which has as a bonus excerpts from Frank’s youthful poetry.

Youthful poetry is mostly adolescent angst, and if mine was anything to go by, it’s a good thing that most of it never sees the light of day.  But some of Frank’s poetry has stood the test of time.

This one comes from the time when his girlfriend Wendy turned out not to be pregnant, and it shows the tension between being fond of his girl and the desire to be in control of his life:

she said she was a little relieved
but sorry in another way
because it would have meant marriage
i felt relieved
but not very sorry
being a person who likes to decide when i am going to do things
having been pushed around my circumstance
quite a bit
now i have a job in the country
which i applied for when we thought wendy was
and it looks as if circumstance will push me into. (p.146)

When Frank was still a junior reporter, he was called home to Nowra because his father’s business was in trouble.  It’s a pointer to the way he lived his life, without ever owning property or amassing wealth:

it seems
that there is one thing
far stronger than the family
and that is
the business
it shows that the family
is somehow built on the business
and it is shameful
that so much importance
should be placed
on the making and spending
of money (p.144)

The last line of this one raises a smile, until one thinks of all the other hopefuls who never found a way to realise their dreams.

On the first night, he sat at his old desk, just as he had done during his high-school years, the desk at which he’d taught himself to type, writing his first short stories and essays.

is my writing
worth the time
and the concentration?
have i a place
in the world of writing?
here i sit at my old school desk
where i wrote many
to-be-world-shattering short stories
which lie in the folders
marked
1954
1955
carefully preserved to assist
those who want
my old work
when i am famous (p.147)

This one, at a time when we are all thinking about forms of masculinity which have led to the tragic deaths of too many women this year, isn’t just about male drinking culture, but also about acquiescing into toxic behaviour:

Frank arrived in Wagga on Christmas Eve, moving into a room at the Pastoral Hotel.  He stopped by the newsroom, where he met the editor, Eric Irwin, and the chief of staff, a woman named Alex Garner.  By Boxing Day he had already hit a low point.  ‘I felt like quitting today.’ he wrote in his journal.

But over the next week he wrote a few news stories and ‘friendly-met’ a few people.  He worried about falling back on old habits.  ‘I’ve met two reporters and both are alcoholics,’ he wrote to Wendy.  ‘Thought I could get away from drinking…’ On 30 December, in the final entry of his writing journal before he abandoned it for good, he wrote:

i realised today that i have been drinking
to become accepted by the group
i drank all night
and did not collapse
and the group recognised me
and i am now invited to their parties
and am treated as a friend
and can joke about drinking sessions
and hangovers
but i did not enjoy the drinking so very much
i had to drink to become accepted. (pp.152-3)

More to come later…

Author: Matthew Lamb
Title: Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths
Publisher: Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), 2023
Cover design: Adam Laszczuk
ISBN: 9780143786122, hbk., 462 pages including An Author’s Note, Sources, and Acknowledgements.  (The Index will be in Volume 2.)
Review copy courtesy of Penguin Random House