ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I don’t often write about books I haven’t finished, but it’s warranted when it comes to books by the late Frank Moorhouse…

Like many, I ‘discovered’ Frank Moorhouse through his Edith Trilogy, and though only Cold Light (2011) is reviewed here, obviously I liked its predecessors Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2001) more than enough to buy and read my way through those very long books. (Both of those are 678 pages long; Cold Light is 719 pages. And you can read more about them at Brona’s Edith Readalong pages.)  So when Moorhouse died, I had a spending spree to buy up as many of his earlier books as I could find, and when there was news of two (!) forthcoming biographies, I set my Moorhouse books aside to read my way through them.

I read and enjoyed The Electrical Experience (1974), but had some misgivings about Forty-Seventeen (1988). By then I had a copy of Frank Moorhouse, A Life (2023) by Catharine Lumby and had learned from that that his work and life were, in some of his stories, clearly entangled, and that the novella Forty-Seventeen was one of those where his life and work were juxtaposed. As I wrote in my review, it felt transgressive to read a narrative about a man turning forty who is having a sexual relationship with a girl of seventeen.

That is, a semi-autobiographical narrative about an older man and a teenager…

Well, The Everlasting Secret Family made me feel more uneasy, so much so that I have read only the first of its four short stories: ‘Pacific City’; ‘The Dutch Letters’, ‘Imogene Continued’, and ‘The Everlasting Secret Family’.  ‘Pacific City’ is about a cinema proprietor in a country town whose secret is that he is attracted to children, and acts on it.  It’s not explicit but it is more than distasteful.  It mocks the parents who come to complain about teenagers necking in the cinema darkness while the proprietor wonders which of their children he has ‘pleasured’.

I now also have a copy of Matthew Lamb’s Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths (2023), so I got that out only to discover that it doesn’t have an index! (Bizarre! What kind of LitBio doesn’t have an index so that we can come back to it any time to find references to the books??) I only scanned through its 460 pages for content about TESF so I can’t be sure, but I didn’t find anything because it’s only Vol 1 of two volumes and it stops at 1975…

So, back to Catharine Lumby’s bio, where I read about an academic’s enthusiasm for TESF despite it being ‘deeply unsettling’ which she usually associates with ‘the really extraordinary female writers’…

[Who? Who are these ‘deeply unsettling’ female writers? Annie Ernaux? Elfride Jelinek? (See my thoughts about her 1983 novel The Piano Teacher. Elizabeth Jolley, maybe? I can’t think who else.]

Even when [Moorhouse’s writing] goes into either very sad or really, really confronting places, there’s always just this humane curiosity there. (Meaghan Morris, quoted in Frank Moorhouse, A Life, p.66)

In the chapter called ‘Border Crossings’ which tackles Moorhouse’s writing that feels transgressive, I learned from Lumby that TESF was in 1988 made into a film which did woefully at the box office but did become something of a gay cult classic. More to the point in terms of my unease about ‘Pacific City’ and where the other stories might lead me, she discusses how, in an article about the Henson controversy (see my review of The Henson Case (2008), by David Marr), Moorhouse writes about how the transgressive elements in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet could lead to its classification as ‘adult’ because it contains mutilation, rape, suicide, [and] incest’ and he says that some art is meant to be offensive and challenging.

Lumby goes on to write about how times have changed since TESF was published.  She references Fiona Giles who highlights the profound ethical differences between the libertarianism of the mid to late 20th century and mainstream thinking of the 2020s.  

Fiona Giles observed in a discussion we had about The Everlasting Secret Family how anachronistic—indeed abhorrent—sections of it seem now.  That the portrayal of the children as innately corruptible by adult sexuality is at odds with the contemporary reckoning with the imbalance of power between the perpetrator and a child. (p.168)

I think it’s fair to say that Catharine Lumby is uncomfortable with some of Moorhouse’s writing. She acknowledges Giles’s view that attitudes were different during those libertarian years when writers, artists and filmmakers were rebelling against what they perceived as the puritanical mores of mainstream Australia and were strongly influenced by thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich, who saw sexual repression as the root of human discontent, but…

Since the 1990s, however, there has been widespread exposure of the endemic nature of child sexual abuse in institutions and in the family, and an increased understanding of its traumatising effects, including the lifelong suffering such abuse can cause.  In this context, The Everlasting Secret Family rightly reads very differently. (p.168)

Indeed it does.

This issue reminded me of an odd little anthology called The Eleven Deadly Sins, edited by Ross Fitzgerald (William Heinemann, 1993). The only one I remember now, 30 years after I read it, was Blanche D’Alpuget’s contribution addressing the sin of ‘Lust’.  She writes about how a much older neighbour introduced her to lust in 1956 when she was 16, and about her subsequent teenage experiences with a judge. And she writes that far from being traumatised, she enjoyed these experiences which occurred at her will and with her willing consent. She was indignant about another teenager who did not welcome this judge’s advances, because it was a betrayal of her relationship with him and it was an abuse of power because the boy’s mother would lose her job if he complained. But clearly, from what she writes, she rejoices in her own experiences.  I didn’t know what to make of that back in 1993, and I’m even more nonplussed re-reading it now.

Can we imagine D’Alpuget’s chapter being written now, much less published?

Times have changed, and I don’t really know what I’ve let myself in for with my small remaining stash of Moorhouse books…

Update 6/2/24 See here for a guest post by Matthew Lamb, biographer of Frank Moorhouse.  It explains some aspects of The Everlasting Secret Family that I had not understood when I wrote about my reaction to it.

Author: Frank Moorhouse
Title: The Everlasting Secret Family
Publisher: Angus & Robertson, 1980
Cover illustration by Patrice Guilbert
ISBN: 0207142831, pbk., 213 pages
Source: personal library, $5.00 secondhand from Bendigo Bookmark