Pages

Thursday 25 December 2014

Poet of the Month 023: VICTOR HUGO



VICTOR HUGO
1853





 
 
 
EXILE


 
 
If I could see, oh my homeland,
Your almond trees and your lilacs,
And tread upon your verdant grass,
Alas !


 
If I could, –– but, oh my father,
oh my mother, I cannot, ––
Take for my bed your stone,
Alas !


 
In the cold coffin which encloses you,
If I could speak softly there,
My brother Abel, my brother Eugène,
Alas !


 
If I could, oh my dove,
And you, mother, who flew away,
If I could kneel on your tomb,
Alas !


 
Oh, towards the solitary star,
I would raise these arms of mine!
As I would kiss the earth,
Alas !


 
Far from you, oh deaths that I cry,
From the black waves I hear the knell;
I would like to flee, but here I remain,
Alas !


 
Still fate, hidden in the shadows,
Deceives itself if, counting my footsteps,
It believes this gloomy old walker
Is weary of life.


 
 
 
? 1855


 
 
 
Translated by 
 
BR





 

Victor Marie Hugo – the writer who, more than any other, would come to embody the republican spirit and political idealism of nineteenth century France was born in the city of Besançon, capital of the eastern Franche-Comté region, on 28 February 1802.  The son of a general who served unsuccessfully as a provincial governor in Italy and Spain under Napoleon I, Hugo grew up largely under the influence of his Catholic and staunchly Royalist mother, with much of his early work reflecting her beliefs in the teachings of the Church and the natural supremacy of France's dethroned Bourbon monarchy.  So great was the influence his mother exerted on Hugo that he waited a full year after she died to marry his 'secret' fiancée, a Parisian neighbor named Adèle Foucher whom he'd known since childhood and who would, in time, go on to bear him five children.  The 1843 death of his eldest daughter, nineteen year old Léopoldine, as the result of a boating accident in Normandy would haunt him for the rest of his life and inspire what are probably his two best-known poems, the elegies Demain dés l'aube [Tomorrow in the Dawn] and À Villequier [At Villequier, the town where his daughter died].

 

Hugo began his literary career as a poet, publishing his first volume of verse Odes et poésies diverses [Odes and Various Poems] in 1822.  While these early poems were impressive enough to secure their twenty year old author a pension from the newly-restored King Louis XVIII it was not until his fourth collection Odes et Ballades [Odes and Ballads] appeared in 1826 that he truly consolidated his position as the nation's leading lyric poet.  By this time Hugo had also published two novels, neither of which contained the strong political element that would become so evident in the works – Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862) among them – for which he's chiefly remembered today outside France

 

It would take the poet's 1841 election to L'Academie Française [The French Academy] to make a recognizable political figure of him, with his subsequent elevation to a peerage by King Louis-Philippe seeing him become an impassioned speaker in the French parliament on issues ranging from child welfare to education reform to the abolition of the death penalty.  Still a conservative monarchist at heart, it would take the December 1851 seizing of power by his one-time political ally Napoleon III to transform him into an anti-monarchist radical.  He called the new self-styled 'Emperor' a traitor to France and fled from Paris to Brussels (with the help of his lover, the renowned actress Juliette Drouet) in the hope of escaping arrest, soon relocating to the British-held island of Jersey when it became apparent that Belgian authorities were reluctant to displease their larger, more powerful neighbor by granting him permanent political asylum.  His stay in Jersey ended in 1856 when he signed his name to an article in an emigré newspaper which poked fun at a visit the reigning British monarch Queen Victoria had recently made to Paris.  After this, Hugo and his family were forced to flee again to the nearby Channel Island of Guernsey –– the island that would remain their home for the next fifteen years. 

 

It was during Hugo's time on Guernsey that he wrote, completed or published the majority of the works for which he's now chiefly celebrated, including the poetry collections Les Contemplations [Contemplations] (1856), Les Chansons des rues et des bois [Songs of the Streets and the Forests] (1865) and La Legende des siecles [The Legend of the Ages] (1877), the novels Les Misérables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la mer [The Workers of the Sea] (1866), L'Homme qui rit [The Man Who Laughed] (1869) and Quatre-Vingt-Treize [Ninety-Three] (1874) as well as the book-length literary study William Shakespeare (1864).  In addition to his literary work, Hugo also produced many political pamphlets among them the lacerating Napoleon le Petit [Napoleon the Small] (1852) – which continued his fierce criticism of the 'treacherous' behavior of Napoleon III.  These works were smuggled into France and secretly distributed to every city and town, their popularity confirming Hugo's status as the country's most beloved artist and most influential exile –– a status some believe may have prompted the Emperor to grant what became a general amnesty to all political exiles in 1859.  

 

Hugo, however, did not return to France until Napoleon III was deposed and the French Third Republic was officially proclaimed on 4 September 1870.  Upon his return to Paris, he was instantly elected to serve in the nation's newly-convened National Assembly as well as in its Senate, maintaining his seats in both throughout the ensuing Franco-Prussian War and the widespread hardship caused by Prussia's decision to blockade the capital.  Food became so scarce as the blockade continued that Hugo, along with his fellow citizens, was forced to eat the animals housed in the Paris Zoo and, when these ran out, to dine on what, in his diary, he enigmatically classified as 'the unknown.'  

 

Famous as he was, Hugo failed to regain his seat in the National Assembly when he stood for reelection to it in 1872.  This disappointment was quickly followed by the institutionalizing of his remaining daughter Adèle (his wife, for whom the girl had been named, had died in 1868) and the deaths of both his sons.  The writer himself lived for another thirteen years and, despite suffering a mild stroke in 1876, even served as a Senator again –– a term that was considered a failure due to his inability to make any serious headway on the issue of introducing practical and permanent social reform.  He died, from pneumonia, on 22 May 1885, his state funeral becoming one of the largest France has ever seen, with an estimated two million people following his casket through the streets of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to its final resting place in the Panthéon.  

 

In 1926, the poet was recognized as one of the three 'major saints' of what was then the newly-created Cao Dai religion of Vietnam.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to download many works by French poet, novelist and political activist VICTOR HUGO:

 

 

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/h#a85

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 
Poet of the Month 005: FRANÇOIS VILLON

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 017: CAASHA LUL MOHAMUD YUSUF

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 016: WB YEATS





 
 
 
EXIL

 
 
 
Si je pouvais voir, ô patrie,
Tes amandiers et tes lilas,
Et fouler ton herbe fleurie,
Hélas !


 
Si je pouvais, - mais, ô mon père,
O ma mère, je ne peux pas, –
Prendre pour chevet votre pierre,
Hélas !


 
Dans le froid cercueil qui vous gêne,
Si je pouvais vous parler bas,
Mon frère Abel, mon frère Eugène,
Hélas !


 
Si je pouvais, ô ma colombe,
Et toi, mère, qui t'envolas,
M'agenouiller sur votre tombe,
Hélas !


 
Oh ! vers l'étoile solitaire,
Comme je lèverais les bras !
Comme je baiserais la terre,
Hélas !


 
Loin de vous, ô morts que je pleure,
Des flots noirs j'écoute le glas ;
Je voudrais fuir, mais je demeure,
Hélas !


 
Pourtant le sort, caché dans l'ombre,
Se trompe si, comptant mes pas,
Il croit que le vieux marcheur sombre
Est las.


 
 
 
? 1855
 
 
 
 
 

Thursday 18 December 2014

Think About It 001: Rollo May


The old myths and symbols by which we oriented ourselves are gone, anxiety is rampant; we cling to each other and try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love; we do not will because we are afraid that if we choose one thing or one person we'll lose the other, and we are too insecure to take that chance.  The bottom then drops out of the conjunctive emotions and processes –– of which love and will are the two foremost examples.  The individual is forced to turn inward; he becomes obsessed with the new form of the problem of identity, namely, Even-if-I-know-who-I am, I-have-no-significance.  I am unable to influence others.  The next step is apathy.  And the step following that is violence.  For no human being can accept the perpetually numbing experience of his own powerlessness.

Love and Will (1969)



 

Use the links below to read a short introduction to the theory and practice of Existential Psychotherapy and watch a 10 minute video that explains the work of North American Existential Psychotherapist ROLLO MAY:

 

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evil-deeds/201101/what-is-existential-psychotherapy

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wms_RXEta5c


 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
Think About It 010: ROLLO MAY

 
Poet of the Month 007: ESTHER GRANEK

 
The Write Advice 057: RICHARD YATES
 

Thursday 11 December 2014

The Write Advice 058: BRET EASTON ELLIS


Well, I start with a rough outline, an experimental, very free-form first draft that’s based on everything I want to include in the novel but that I also know won’t make it into the final draft.  And in that first draft there are exercises, samples of how I imagine the narrator might speak if describing something.  I ask questions like, 'Can I use metaphors with this narrator?  Will he be able to see something as something else?  No, Patrick Bateman won’t be able to do that.  Everything is all surface for him.'  There’s a scene early in Imperial Bedrooms where Clay takes an actress out to lunch.  The actress has auditioned for the movie Clay has written... They have lunch at this restaurant that I like to go to on Melrose.  There’s a really beautiful silver wall in this restaurant, and depending on what time of day you’re eating there, the sunlight falls on it and creates these patterns and shapes.  In my draft, Clay talked about the silver wall before turning his attention to the actress at hand.  I loved the language I used.  I loved how cool the description of the wall was, the subtle way the light kept changing it.  They were my favorite five lines in the book.  But I knew, after I wrote it, that it couldn’t go in the book.  It wasn’t Clay.  Clay was never going to notice the silver wall, and Clay was never going to talk about the silver wall.  The purpose of the scene is for him to concentrate on the actress, which is what he wants to do, and this silver wall is just the writer jerking off.


The Art of Fiction #216  [The Paris Review #200, Spring 2012]



Use the link below to visit the website of North American novelist BRET EASTON ELLIS:

 

http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/eastonellis/#/home

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
The Write Advice 055: JULIAN BARNES

 
The Write Advice 045: AMY HEMPEL

 
The Write Advice 033: TAMA JANOWITZ 

Thursday 4 December 2014

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–1929) by HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON

 


Penguin Books UK edition, c 1992


 

 

 

But a fig for what people thought of him!  Once away from here he would, he thanked God, never see any of them again.  No, it was Mary who was the real stumbling-block, the opponent he most feared.  Had he been less attached to her, the thing would have been easier; as it was, he shrank from hurting her.  And hurt and confuse her he must.  He knew Mary as well –– nay, better than he knew his own unreckonable self.  For Mary was not a creature of moods, did not change her mental envelope a dozen times a day.  And just his precise knowledge of her told him that he would never get her to see eye to eye with him.  Her clear, serene outlook was attuned to the plain and the practical; she would discover a thousand drawbacks to his scheme, but nary a one of the incorporeal benefits he dreamed of reaping from it.  There was his handling of money for one thing: she had come, he was aware, to regard him as incurably extravagant; and it would be no easy task to convince her that he could learn again to fit his expenses to a light purse.  She had a woman's instinctive distrust, too, of leaving the beaten track.  Another point made him still more dubious.  Mary's whole heart and happiness were bound up in this place where she had spent the flower-years of her life: who knew if she would thrive as well on other soil?  He found it intolerable to think that she might have to pay for his want of stability. ––Yes, reduced to essentials, it came to mean the pitting of one soul's welfare against that of another; was a toss-up between his happiness and hers.  One of them would have to yield.  Who would suffer more by doing so – he or she?  He believed that a sacrifice on his part would make the wreck of his life complete.  On hers –– well, thanks to her doughty habit of finding good everywhere, there was a chance of her coming out unscathed.


 
 
from Australia Felix (1917)



 

 

 

The Novel:  Does a man temperamentally disinclined to seek the favour of those he deems to be his intellectual and social inferiors, who deliberately chooses to set himself apart from humankind, refusing to heed any counsel but his own, have the right to make his wife continuously pay for his own lack of foresight?  Can this man, whose career as a physician depends entirely on his ability to obtain and maintain the good opinion of his patients, remain true to his lofty vision of himself and still hope to succeed in a restrictive colonial society where everybody knows everybody else's business and automatically condemns those who, by either accident or design, violate what are held to be its sacrosanct social norms?  Can such a man ever truly feel contented with what he has, what he does or where he lives?  Or is he perpetually doomed to strive to obtain the unobtainable, to realise a dream of happiness-as-undisturbed-solitude which is as chimerical as it is misguided if not subconsciously self-harming?
 

 

These are just some of the questions raised by Henry Handel Richardson the nom de plume of Australian-born author Ethel Florence Richardson –– in her three part sequence of historical novels Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925) and Ultima Thule (1929), published in one volume as The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by the English firm of Heinemann and Company in 1930.  Reissued in 2012 in a newly-annotated edition by Text Publishing, Richardson's longest and arguably greatest work remains a damning evocation of colonial Australia and a penetrating psychological study of a marriage which, despite the love which engenders it and the strong sense of loyalty which both drives and sustains it, remains at best a compromise which leaves neither party satisfied nor any wiser in terms of understanding their partner's 'unreckonable' personality.

 

Australia Felix opens in the gold rush of 1851, an event which brought men and women of every type and character flooding into what was then known as the Colony of Victoria.  Many made the journey seeking to escape the overcrowded slums of London, Dublin, Peking and the Continent, while others arrived with the idea of ending the poverty of their formerly well-to-do families who, due to bad management or bad luck or a disastrous combination of both, had fallen on hard financial times.  Most, of course, failed to find the gold they had been duped by the English press into believing would be waiting for them under every stone and shrub.  What they found in Victoria were crude, hastily improvised mining towns like Ballarat, pockmarked with the shafts of dozens of played out or recently abandoned mines, where the only certainties were mud, fatal and near-fatal accidents and a life of unrelenting and, for the vast majority of these dewy-eyed newcomers, unrewarding toil.

 

Richard Townshend-Mahony is one of these gold rush immigrants, a doctor of Anglo-Irish descent who impulsively abandoned his yet-to-be established medical career to seek his fortune in the antipodes.  Mahony is also one of the genteel poor, a cultured and erudite individual who soon swaps the grubby life of the 'digger' for the slightly easier if only marginally more prosperous life of the goldfield shopkeeper.  He hates Australia, finding its barren brown landscape ugly, its climate unforgiving and the company of his fellow diggers vexing to say the least.  His only goal is to earn enough to pay his way 'home' to England –– a place he began to idealize the same moment he left it, forgetting how eager he had been to bid farewell to its lack of opportunity as well as to his uncommunicative mother and equally taciturn sisters.

 

 

Angus & Robertson Ltd Australia, 1983

 

 

 

Mahony's life on the diggings is enlivened only by the companionship of his boyhood chum Purdy Smith –– another unlucky prospector who, unlike him, is blessed with more than his share of personal charm and the social gifts required to make the most of it.  Purdy also has a way with the fairer sex, especially with a young lady by the name of Tilly Beamish whose parents run a hotel in the far-off seaside resort town of Geelong.  Tilly and her sister Jinny –– easygoing girls who are ' "always on for a lark" ' as Purdy happily describes them –– share their home and bedroom with a sixteen year old companion-cum-servant nicknamed Polly whose company has been thrust upon the Beamish clan by her brother John Turnham, another former immigrant who is now an up-and-coming businessman in Melbourne, the colony's rapidly growing capital.  Mahony, curious to meet Purdy's longtime sweetheart, finds himself smitten with the shy demure Polly (whose real name, it turns out, is Mary) and, a few weeks and several carefully worded letters later, takes the bold step of returning to Geelong to propose to her.  Mary accepts his proposal and, after gaining the permission of the wealthy and initially disapproving John, Mahony marries her and takes her 'home' to Ballarat with him –– setting in motion a train of events which will see them rise to the uppermost heights of colonial society, only to see them forced to start from the bottom again after their stockbroker runs off to North America, taking nearly all their money with him. 

 

It is Mary –– pretty, slightly-built, highly competent and always anxious to make a favourable impression on people – who dominates her husband's life, first as a source of inspiration (it is she who persuades him, out of sheer financial necessity, to face facts and start practicing medicine again) and later as his sometimes self-confessed antagonist, serving as a solid 'sensible' barrier between him and the implementation of his latest ill-considered scheme to attain his personal nirvana –– which consists, he believes, of a quiet, out of the way place where he can devote himself to reading the latest works of science, religion and philosophy while publishing the occasional essay or journal article on the side.  For much of the time, Mary patiently resigns herself to playing the role of the dutiful and obedient wife, humouring her husband's whims and following him back to the small English village of Buddlecombe where, as she rightly predicted, he finds the weather atrocious, patients unforthcoming and ready money extremely hard to come by.  In the end she has no choice but to consent to his plan to return to Australia where, thanks to an unsuspected windfall in the form of some suddenly valuable mining shares and her skills as a hostess and born social networker, they soon regain the wealth and position that Mahony's idealized longing for 'the old country' so capriciously deprived them of.

 

Much of The Way Home, the second volume of the trilogy, is taken up with Mahony's adjustment to his new life as a gentleman of leisure and Mary's struggle to establish them in their newly-built home, named 'Ultima Thule,' in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton.  Their lives are complicated by the appearance of guests like Mary's garrulous sister Sarah, whose insistence on being called 'Zara' threatens to drive the pretention-despising Mahony round the twist, and old friends like Tilly, newly married to the aged father of Henry Ocock, their shrewd and wily lawyer.  (It was Henry Ocock who persuaded Mahony to buy the shares which made him rich.)  Life is further complicated by the arrival of a 'late' child named Cuthbert, known as 'Cuffy' to his doting if often distracted parents, and twin daughters, Lallie and Lucie, affectionately known as 'The Dumplings' due to their chubbiness and endearing if as yet unformed personalities.  

 

But the arrival of his children does not make Mahony any less restless or any less prone to the fancies he now possesses the wealth and time to indulge any time he feels the urge to do so.  Soon growing bored of his prosperous new life, he decides to take his young family to Europe so they can take in the sights and be exposed to the art and culture he believes to be so patently lacking in a 'young country' like Australia.  It is while they're visiting Venice – a city which, unlike most of the other European cities they've visited, seems to suit the fastidious and perpetually dissatisfied doctor to a tee –– that they receive the news that their stockbroker has absconded to North America, taking the bulk of what they possess in cash and securities with him.

 

It is here that the final volume Ultima Thule begins.  Mahony puts aside his shock and disbelief and returns immediately to Melbourne, only to find the situation awaiting him there even bleaker than anticipated.  'He was a ruined man; and at the age of forty-nine, with a wife and children dependent on him, must needs start life over again.'  This he is thankfully able to do with the loyal, uncomplaining support of Mary who, as usual, throws herself heart and soul into the task of making them a new home in the 'pretty little suburb of Hawthorn.'  

 

It is in Hawthorn that Mahony attempts to restore his fortune by practicing medicine again –– a plan contingent, as he is painfully aware, on his ability to attract and keep patients who are now spoilt for choice when it comes to seeking medical advice in the lively modern city the Victorian capital has become.  His age is another factor that works against him.  Visibly weakened by his financial setbacks and the associated stress-related illnesses he has suffered as a direct result of them, Mahony finds himself becoming more cantankerous than ever, locking himself away from his family and friends in his ever-pressing quest to find at least a moment or two of the long-desired 'peace' he craves.  But this behaviour does not pay the bills or help to clothe and feed his family.  As one patient after another is lost and the prospect of finding new patients to replace them diminishes by the day, Mary is finally obliged to suggest that they start taking in boarders to help meet their expenses –– a suggestion met with angry disapproval by her husband and one which gives rise to yet another wild scheme to take over what he has duped himself into believing will become a 'thriving' practice in the remote mining community of Barambogie.  He sets off, against Mary's not very strenuous objections, to look the town over and decide if they can make a new life for themselves there.

 

Mahony's decision to remove Mary and the children from the familiar world of Melbourne and the company of their friends proves to be his financial, social and psychological undoing.  His expectations, after he takes the irrevocable steps of buying the practice and bringing his loved ones to Barambogie, turn out to have been as groundless as ever, based on little more than wishful thinking and the exaggerations of the incumbent physician who wished to offload the practice on to anyone gullible enough to make him an offer for it.  The townsfolk who should be his loyal and grateful patients dislike the proud Dr Mahony and he soon earns himself an unwelcome reputation as the local eccentric, ready to scold when he should heal, criticize where his cause would be much better served by demonstrating a little kindness and compassion.  The work and the vast distances he must cover each day in the doing of it, combined with the inability of most of his patients to pay his far from outrageous fees, soon take their toll on his already frazzled nerves –– a situation made no easier by the close proximity of a factory to his newly-rented home and the serious illness and unpreventable death of his daughter Lallie.  The surviving children are devastated and so is the grief-stricken Mary, who nevertheless seizes the opportunity to spend the hottest part of the summer in Geelong with her old friend Tilly, recently widowed and feeling rather lonely.  (Tilly later marries her childhood sweetheart Purdy who, after decades of failure, becomes a rich man overnight thanks to what she inherited following the death of her first husband.)  

 

Mary's abandonment of the physically and emotionally drained Mahony –– temporary though it is and also necessary to protect the health of her two surviving children – sees him sink ever deeper into eccentricity with what, in the end, are calamitous if not entirely unforeseen results.  Exhausted and depressed, fretting constantly about money and Mary's ongoing absence, he fails to set a broken leg properly, resulting in the threat of legal action from the injured party and the loss of his reputation as a reliable physician.  Mary returns to Barambogie to find him an almost shattered man, a mere shadow of the once-proud doctor she married as a girl and has stood by so loyally –– and sometimes inexplicably –– for so many years.  There is, of course, no question of them staying in the despised town that has all but broken Mahony's spirit and stolen their beloved Lallie from them.  A new situation must be found for the family and it must be found immediately.

 

Once again, the Mahonys are on the move, this time to the small seaside village of Shortlands where it is hoped the air will revive the all-but-moribund Richard, allowing him to reestablish himself as the sort of physician in whom his patients –– Melbourne-based tourists for the most part, who make the trip across Port Philip Bay to enjoy the breezes during the hottest days of summer –– might legitimately place their trust.  But the tourists, so long expected and so eagerly counted on to become the family's saviours, fail to arrive –– at least not in sufficient numbers for the town's new doctor to make any kind of steady living from treating them.  Mahony also begins to suffer from dizzy spells which leave him feeling enervated and disoriented –– so much so that he becomes a figure of fun to most people, a kind of stooped-over scarecrow who stalks the bluffs gesticulating and muttering to himself, embarrassing his son and daughter each time they're forced by an increasingly alarmed Mary to accompany him to ensure he 'behaves himself' in public.  His father's odd behaviour – which now includes many a hateful outburst hurled unthinkingly at the anxious and understandably impatient Mary – becomes an intense source of shame for the sensitive and self-conscious Cuffy, who fears that his parents' inability to pay their debts will see them both sent to prison some day.  But what happens is, in fact, far worse than that.  Returning home from the local sea baths, where she has left her children to enjoy themselves in the water, Mary is met by their servant girl, who hysterically informs her that 'the doctor's bin [sic] and lighted a fire on the surgery table!  He's burning the house down!'

 

 

 

The Text Publishing Company, 2012

 

 

 

Thus begins the saddest part of Richard Mahony's long and tragic story.  Diagnosed as being incurably mad by both the local doctor he replaced and a prominent Melbourne psychiatrist, he is sent to a Benevolent Asylum where, in his own room and treated with understanding rather than scorn, his condition gradually improves.  But his departure –– strongly resisted by Mary even though she knows he must live in quiet, well-supervised surroundings to stand any chance of making even a partial recovery –– leaves her alone for the first time since their marriage as well as virtually penniless, obliging her to train as a postmistress and eventually accept a job as one in Gymgurra, another remote bush town located two hundred miles northwest of the city.  This job, which forces everyone in the family to abandon the idea that some 'miracle' will occur and magically restore their long-lost fortune, allows Mary to earn enough to pay for what she thinks, mistakenly, is a private room in the asylum where her 'dear, dear Richard' is supposedly being cared for and treated like the gentleman he is.  

 

But a visit to the institution, undertaken as a surprise for her husband and at great personal expense, reveals that Mahony has been admitted to the general ward, where he ia roughly treated and sometimes even beaten by its male warders.  Horrified to discover this and deeply ashamed of herself for abandoning him, Mary appeals to their former friend Henry Ocock to help her raise the funds needed to take her husband back to Gymgurra.  Ocock, mindful of the kindness Mary showed towards his alcoholic and long-dead second wife, helps her arrange for Mahony's discharge from the asylum and subsequent journey to what will become his new home.  Here, watched over by Mary and his two surviving children, Mahony lives out the remainder of his days in a state of calm if childlike dependence, gaining his first real taste of the peace and serenity that has so consistently eluded him throughout his troubled life.  Everything he and Mary have been to each other, everything they have experienced and endured together, seems to be summed up in the final words the mad and crippled Mahony says to her on the night he finally dies –– 'Dear wife!  Dear wife!'
 

 

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is not easy or uplifting reading for a variety of reasons.  It is long, occasionally repetitive and filled with clichés of the sentimental nineteenth century variety, composed in a style that critic Brian Macfarlane, reviewing a scholarly reprint of the novel published in 2007, rightly suggested might possess the ability to 'stun a horse.'  But it is also a masterpiece that, as Macfarlane and other critics agree, can give books like Patrick White's Voss (1957) and Tim Winton's Cloudstreet (1991) a serious run for their money in the contest (pointless though such contests are) to be considered 'The Great Australian Novel.'  Its greatness –– and it is a great work of art, there is no denying that despite its many flaws –– lies in Richardson's excoriating honesty and her ability to make Richard and Mary sympathetic figures while never attempting to disguise or minimize what are their obvious and all-too-human failings as individuals, as a couple and, perhaps more damningly, as parents.  While some of her other characterizations –– those of Tilly and her Cockney paramour Purdy, for example –– have a tendency to veer towards Dickensian pastiche, this is never the case with the doctor and his wife or, just as significantly, with their son Cuffy.  Cuffy's becomes an increasingly important voice as the trilogy progresses, throwing additional light on his father's behaviour and its unexpected and, from his point of view, ruinous consequences.  The boy is very much the son of his father – highly-strung and easily hurt, conscious of his family's encroaching poverty and all that losing its formerly exalted social position implies in terms of determining his own, far from certain future.  Sadly, Cuffy never comes to know his father except as a remote and isolated figure whose crankiness only serves to perplex and humiliate him. 

 
It is this unknowable quality –– the inability to connect with his son, wife or anybody else in any truly lasting or even temporary way –– that epitomizes Mahony's tragedy and costs him the chance to regain his hastily abandoned comfort and happiness.  The phrase 'Physician, heal thyself!' would have made a perfect epigraph for these novels because it is Mahony's chronic inability to examine his own behaviour with any form of objective honesty –– combined with his wife's unwillingness to upset him by confronting him with the truth about himself and his pursuit of the ever elusive 'better life' he has in mind for them – that makes them two of the most memorable, most realistically drawn characters in all of Australian literature.  Their story allows Richardson to create a vision of colonial Australia that becomes all the more powerful for being ruthlessly stripped of its thinly applied, never very convincing veneer of 'romance.'  There is nothing romantic about Richard Mahony and the shabby genteel world he so resentfully inhabits.  He strives to defy and conquer it, only to find himself misunderstood, abused and finally crushed by it.  
 
 



HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON, c 1917


 

 

 

The Writer'Henry Handel Richardson' was the pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesday Richardson, the daughter of a doctor, who was born in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy on 3 January 1870.  Like Richard Mahony, William Richardson came to Australia in 1852, hoping to make his fortune in the colony's goldfields.  He too abandoned prospecting for shopkeeping, married a much younger woman and set himself up as a general practitioner in Ballarat where, along with his wife Mary, he eventually became one of the city's most prominent and respected citizens.  Again like Mahony, he gained and lost a fortune, suffered a breakdown that saw him committed for a time to Melbourne's Yarra Bend Asylum, and died in the care of his wife in the remote town of Koroit where she had taken the first of what would be several jobs as a government-employed postmistress.  William Richardson's eldest daughter –– a sister, named Lilian, had followed Ethel into the world in 1871 –– was nine years old at the time of his death, the cause of which is now believed to have been 'general paralysis of the insane,' a disease linked to the terminal stages of syphilis in which the patient suffers from severe vertigo, episodes of erratic and nonsensical behaviour and worsening dementia.  Despite this, Ethel Richardson's husband once declared that in drawing Richard Mahony's portrait his wife was 'really drawing her own.'

 

 

ETHEL RICHARDSON (rear right), 1885

 

 

 

Richardson was sent to the Protestant Ladies' College in Melbourne at the age of thirteen where it was soon discovered that she possessed a prodigious gift for music.  Convinced by her daughter's headmistress to allow young Ethel to study the piano 'properly'  abroad, the Richardsons set sail for Europe in 1888, with the girl successfully auditioning for and being accepted as a pupil at the Leipzig Conservatory one year later.  Intent on becoming a concert pianist, she studied in Germany for the next three years, only to abandon this ambition when she became engaged to the renowned Scottish philologist John George Robertson.  (Apparently she also loathed performing in public, a considerable drawback for a would-be virtuoso musician.)  She and Robertson were married in 1895 and spent the first years of their married life in Strasbourg where he had obtained a teaching post at that city's university.  Richardson read widely in English and European literature and began working on a novel while considering the prospect of becoming a translator.  The couple remained in Strasbourg until 1904, when JG Robertson –– now the famous author of an internationally published work on philology –– was offered a new teaching post at London University.  Although she and her husband continued to visit the Continent regularly until the outbreak of war in August 1914, England was to remain Richardson's home for the remainder of her life.  Apart from one brief fact-finding trip, undertaken in 1912 while she was gathering material for Australia Felix, she would never again return to or reside in the land of her birth.

 

Richardson found the transition to life in England difficult –– she always viewed herself as a square peg unable to fit into a round hole and had done so since childhood – and, with limited social skills and a shy depressive temperament, devoted herself to her husband, her writing and a small circle of close but trusted friends with whom she travelled, swam, played tennis and discussed the latest works of spiritualism (a lifelong interest, just as it is of Richard Mahony's), psychical research and Freudian psychiatry.  Her debut novel Maurice Guest, set in Leipzig and dealing realistically and honestly with the taboo subject of homosexuality, was published in 1908 and received positive reviews, as did her second novel The Getting of Wisdom which appeared two years later and was based on her own unhappy experiences as an Australian schoolgirl.  She began working on Australia Felix in 1912, but the outbreak of World War One delayed its publication by five years.  By the time her next novel, The Way Home, was ready for publication in 1925 she and her husband had been sharing their London home for four years with a young woman named Olga Ronconi whom they had first befriended in 1919. 

 

 

Australia Post stamp, 1975

 
 
 
 
Olga would become, at the request of JG Robertson, Richardson's permanent companion following his death in 1933, eventually moving with her from London to the town of Fairlight (near Hastings) when Lüftwaffe bombing raids made it unsafe for them to continue living in the capital.  The 1929 appearance of Ultima Thule, the final volume of the Mahony saga, set the seal on Richardson's reputation as a writer of profound and inexorable power, winning her the gold medal from the Australian Literary Society and seeing her nominated for, but not winning, that year's Nobel Prize for Literature.  These honours, however, were no compensation for the loss of her husband and she struggled to write again following his death, producing only two more books –– a story collection titled The End of a Childhood published in 1934 and The Young Cosima, a poorly received final novel which appeared five years later before succumbing to colon cancer on 20 March 1946.  An incomplete and, in the estimation of some scholars, highly unreliable memoir titled Myself When Young was published posthumously in 1948.
 
 


 
Use the link below to visit THE HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON SOCIETY, an Australian-based organisation dedicated to discussing, promoting and preserving the author's works:
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by
GEORGE MEREDITH

 

 
The Actor-Manager (1898) by
LEONARD MERRICK

  

 
The Glass Canoe (1976) by
DAVID IRELAND

 

 

 

 

Last updated 19 April 2021