Review: Catharine Lumby's biography of Frank Moorhouse

"He did live on the edge," Catharine Lumby, the author of a new biography, tells me. "I described him as a man at the cultural cliff edge, running his hands along the railing and looking with some anxiety, I think I said, at the jagged rocks below."

Moorhouse was born in Nowra - the NSW South Coast town he would leave but never truly escape - in 1938 to very respectable middle-class parents. He did well in school and started out as a cadet on The Daily Telegraph. He would work on and edit regional newspapers before joining the ABC. Then, at the age of 30, he went out alone, deciding to write full time; he had been publishing short stories for more than a decade already. This vocation-turned-career sustained him, with a little help from grants, film rights and patrons, until he died, aged 83, last year.

Journalist-turned-academic Catharine Lumby once profiled Moorhouse for The Bulletin; well-received, this led to the question of a biography. Theirs would be a friendship, as Lumby puts it, tempered by the biographer's task. "In a good way," she says.

Moorhouse's life is a vestige from a lost cultural age. Could such a man, who ate almost every meal out and sustained himself on a diet of words, exist now? Even Moorhouse, late in life, was unsure. The literary opportunities available to this Sydney harbourside resident and his milieu seem fantastical when "Balmain", "housing" and "affordable" are three words that would no longer appear together in a sentence.

Not everything was better then. Much of Moorhouse's time was spent fighting against the heavy-handed and often absurd system of literary censorship that was alive and well in Australia. And, don't forget, Moorhouse was exploring his bisexuality at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in NSW. The world was changing in leaps and shuddering starts, depending when and where you looked. From his first story collection, The Americans, Baby (1972), to his landmark Edith trilogy (1993 to 2011), with Edith Campbell Berry at its heart, Moorhouse's writing traversed questions of social change, contemporary good taste and the rules by which we live.

When Lumby got to work in Moorhouse's archive, she made the decision, in line with what she sees as the journalists' duty, to do no harm.

"Now there'd be journalists and writers who disagree with me and say, 'No, your job is to tell everything'. Well, there's a lot of stuff in the archives that are highly sexual and very personal and they involved people who did not ask to be in the archives," she says.

The result is a portrait of Moorhouse with a sometimes obscured supporting case. "One reviewer said, 'Oh, we don't really get an intimate portrait'," Lumby says. "That's fine by me."

Consider these three sentences: Frank Moorhouse was a bold leftist Australian author who pioneered daring new forms of the short story and served as an able mentor to a generation of writers who followed. Frank Moorhouse was a bisexual crossdresser who railed against censorship and lived outside the bounds of the heterosexual nuclear family, while carving out a career as a writer. Frank Moorhouse was obsessed with the rules which governed life, but would break them and hurt people he knew and loved by incorporating them into his fiction.

All of these sentences are true - but none in isolation is the truth of Moorhouse's character. Lumby's biography does well to show Moorhouse in all his phases.

Lumby tells me Moorhouse was always interested in the question of how many rules we need. It strikes me as a great contradiction between opposing some rules and respecting others. Moorhouse once lived, for a year, in a private members' club in Sydney, attracted, it seems, to the rule-based order of life there. "He wanted less rules," Lumby says. "But he also knew that we needed rules to live by."

There were rules by which one made martinis (Lumby says Moorhouse, a keen bushwalker, liked to say if you were ever lost in a forest, start marking a martini and someone would appear in a few minutes to say you were doing it wrong). And there were rules to govern the organisation of nations. Back to the martini for a moment, the drink which gave Moorhouse the title for a memoir: the drink is caught, Lumby says Moorhouse would say, somewhere between the poetic and the pedantic. I suggest to Lumby that Canberra is much like that, the city Moorhouse wrote about in the last of his big trilogy, Cold Light (2011). Lumby doesn't sound convinced but I'm thinking of the poetry of the Griffin plan coupled with the pedantry of an ordinance banning front fences.

Moorhouse's Edith Campbell Berry, perhaps his finest achievement in fiction, is "really interested in how could you use a city to design a nation?", as Lumby puts it.

"I think Edith is a cipher for Frank," Lumby says of the character who pushes the boundaries of her time. "This is my theory because she's both someone who is interested in how to break the rules, but she's also fascinated by how we make the rules ... And Frank in his public intellectual work was like this. He liked politics, he liked committees, he liked aesthetic detail."

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Lumby knows others will cover the same ground as her in years to come, combing through the same archives and perhaps reaching different conclusions about what to leave out. "So this is the thing: Frank was a contradiction in terms and this is why I focus the book because it's the first draft of his writing life, right?" she says. "There'll be many other books."

The biographers who follow, on their quest to understand one of Australian literature's key 20^th century figures, will have their task enriched for having Lumby's first impression of a writer's life so recently lived.

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