ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Ten years ago I read Edwina Preston’s debut novel The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer and enjoyed it as a lively mystery with a social heart.  Preston, however, is a multi-talented writer and musician with many irons in the fire so it’s been a while between novels, but Bad Art Mother was worth the wait.  I loved this book.

The characters are loosely based on well-known Melbourne identities from the mid C20th century Heidi Circle. This milieu included the art dealer and restaurateur Georges Mora and his artist wife Mirka; the artist Joy Hester; and the art patrons John and Sunday Reed.  Owen’, the ‘bad mother’s’ son in the novel, is based on Sweeney Reed, who was the child of Joy Hester and the artist Albert Tucker but he was adopted by the childless John and Sunday Reed.  Readers do not need to know the emotional and sexual entanglements of this Bohemian milieu to enjoy the novel, though it is nice to know the art of Mirka Mora so that you can imagine the mural that makes an appearance on the walls of a restaurant. (See here for the one she did for Melbourne’s iconic Flinders St Station.)

This is the blurb:

Good mothers are expected to be selfless. Artists are seen as selfish. So what does this mean for a mother with artistic ambitions?

Enter: frustrated poet Veda Gray, who is offered a Faustian bargain when a wealthy childless couple, the Parishes, invite her to exchange her young son Owen for time to write.

Veda’s story unfolds as an adult Owen reflects on his boyhood in the Melbourne suburbs, and in the vibrant bohemian inner-city art world where his restaurateur father was a king. Meanwhile, the talented women in his orbit – Veda; Mrs Parish, wife of an influential poet; muralist and restaurant worker Rosa – push against gender expectations to be recognised as legitimate artists, by their intimates and the wider world. And almost-aunt Ornella, who declares herself without an artistic bone in her body, is perhaps the closest thing Owen has to a traditional mother. As Owen is encouraged to ‘be a man’, he loses something of himself, too.

Blending wit and pathos, love and fury, ambition and loss, this is an extraordinary novel of love and art, set in the Melbourne milieu of Georges and Mirka Mora, Joy Hester, and John and Sunday Reed.

Owen narrates most of the story, acknowledging right at the start that his memory may not be reliable.  He claims to remember his birth, and addressing ‘almost-aunt’ Ornella, he admits that she doesn’t think it’s possible to recall things from such an early age. (My earliest memory is from between 14 and 18 months old. This is apparently early: research shows that the average for recall of memories start at about two and a half.)

But Owen remembers that he became his mother Veda’s enemy when he was mobile enough to rip pages out of books left on a couch or stored on the bottom shelf of a bookcase.  And we see from the other narrative strand — Veda’s letters to her sister Tilda — that needing to be alert to Owen’s whereabouts limits her to writing only a word or two and it hampers her reading.

The ‘wild’ of Park Orchards is beneficial for Owen, who totters in from the outdoors, tumbleweeded and sunburnt, to eat large portions of bread, dripping, apples from their own trees &c.  And that is before lunch! I am not quite so blasé, however, as to forget ponds, dams, disused mineshafts… In fact, I cannot even read contentedly, for I must look up and spot Owen continually, and then put things down (pages flutter, place is lost) to run over and check he is indeed behind that tree and hasn’t crossed some boundary line, past which reside snakes, bunyips, men with shotguns… (p. 36)

Yes, she exaggerates, but all parents know how small children sap concentration even on mundane tasks.  How much more exasperating it is for anything requiring thought and imagination.  Veda, no longer needed at her husband Jo’s restaurant now that it’s a going concern, misses the company of a working life… and when the childless Parishes offer to have Owen, she accepts not only because she’s trapped into it by Mr Parish’s offer to be principal investor in Jo’s new art gallery next to his restaurant, but also because the deal gives her time to work on her poetry.

Veda confesses this only to her sister in her letters, but these letters are now in the public domain since they were published posthumously by Owen’s girlfriend.

You are right when you say that mothers get too caught up in their children.  You are probably right too when you say that, when I have more children, I will be less anxious.  But I am not sure I will have more children.  And Owen is so small.  And what sort of a mother gives her child away to another woman?  I feel sure that, were I to confide in anyone other than you — if I were to tell any woman of this arrangement — I would become a very suspect creature indeed.

And yet, there is another part of me that feels guiltily, horribly relieved. Because for two days I will be spared the grizzling, the whingeing, the feeding, the playing, the interruptions, the soiled clothes and the soiled floor and the soiled table, the crying — the endless endless crying — when I just want to slam the door on the room but must sit and rock and pat and soothe and meanwhile the clock ticking ticking ticking… (pp.49-50)

Owen does have two parents, but Papa is a workaholic who is never home because he’s busy with his restaurant.  Gender expectations of that era mean that it’s his wife who’s supposed to manage the home and look after any children.  And any career aspirations she might have are always going to be subordinate to the needs of the family.

Mr Parish is a poet, and is influential in the Bohemian arts world, including publishing.  Veda is so underconfident about the merit of her poetry that she hesitates even to mention it.  He is an intimidating man.  Owen describes Mrs Parish as a browbeaten housewife who eventually finds her niche in Japanese flower-arranging, and he is delighted when she goes to Japan to learn to be a master.  Besides Ornella, who despite her gruff personality, provides routine, clean clothes, proper meals and bedtime stories, the other important person in Owen’s life is Rosa, who paints the mural in Papa’s restaurant in St Kilda so that it becomes famous.  This was in the sixties, when these ideas were new, and a mural on a wall could attract customers.  But the sixties were not then a good time for women.  Veda fights a long and draining battle to have her poetry published.  While Papa encourages her by supporting her financially, he doesn’t understand her work or take any interest in it.

The publishing world isn’t interested in women’s poetry either.

The poems seem to be about things poetry shouldn’t bother with.  Small things, domestic things.  (p.56)

Veda’s frustration erupts in a transgressive poem that expresses her disdain for publishers: it’s an allusion to an acrostic sonnet by Gwen Harwood and it causes a massive scandal, the financial collapse of the bookshop that published her book, and the tragedy that haunts Owen’s life.  But Veda’s struggle for time to write and for recognition for her work didn’t make me think of Gwen Harwood, mentioned only in a note at the end of the book, it made me think of Anne Elder whose poetry I discovered in her posthumous collection The Bright and the Cold, and whose bio, The Heart’s Ground I reviewed here.

Bad Art Mother is excellent reading, witty and clever and wise.  Highly recommended.

The Heide Museum of Modern Art features most of the artists of the period, and occasionally, for some exhibitions it opens the private rooms  where the Reeds lived. The modernist building — designed as a gallery to be lived in — was designed by David McGlashan in 1963 to replace the original weatherboard farmhouse which they had renovated in French provincial style.  The gardens are open all year round.

Author: Edwina Preston
Title: Bad Art Mother
Cover design by Duncan Blachford
Cover art: Die Hämische (The Malicious) by Egon Schiele, Wien Museum
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2022
ISBN: 9781743059012, pbk., 317 pages, also available as an eBook.
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press