The University of Queensland looks like an Ivy League gone troppo. Wedged into a fold of the Brisbane river—which is also known by its Turrbal name, Maiwar—the uni feels cut off and exclusive, a dark-academia private island. Most students enter the grounds either by bus or by ferry, or, more rarely, take the scenic route on foot through the cartoonishly Gothic cemetery that edges the far side of the campus (memento mori, undergrads). Once you reach the grounds, you walk up through a pastoral area of green hills and freshwater lakes, past the grimy student bar and food court, past the hairdressers, until you hit the campus proper: a large, sandstone, castle-like structure, set around a gigantic grass square. Some of the grass is yellowed and worn away at the edges, showing brown dirt underneath. There are riotous Jacaranda trees across the lawn. Sweat soaks your clothes at the slightest exertion. A fat Moreton Bay fig overhangs the cafe where the Arts students hang out. It looks a bit Secret History, but this isn’t Vermont, or even Melbourne. The professors are in jorts. This is Brisbane.
The Fryer Library, where the author Frank Moorhouse’s papers are held, is on level four of the main Arts library. It’s nondescript: a mid-size room with several blonde-timber desks, grey carpet, and a few friendly, middle-aged archivists. When I went to uni here, I didn’t even know it existed. I say this to one of the archivists, who replies morosely: “Not many people do.” This archivist turns out to be a Moorhouse fan; she was the one to go through all his papers and catalogue them. At the entrance, she has set up a small shrine in a glass display case: his typewriter, a martini glass, a coaster printed with his martini recipe, and a copy of one of his better known books, Martini: A Memoir (2005).
This is one iteration of Moorhouse—personality by way of martini. The martini is the sophisticated drink of the urban intelligentsia, evoking hotel bars, love affairs, and a kind of tasteful affluence (or the illusion of it, at least). Moorhouse seemed happy to cultivate this persona in public. He wrote the aforementioned memoir, as well as columns on the martini. (He preferred his dry, made with gin, and with two olives). All his obituaries mention the drink—he died, aged 83, in June last year—and the etiquette surrounding making and drinking them. So if you’ve heard of Moorhouse, you may think of him as a trifling figure, caught up in shallow social mores. If you’ve heard of him, you may not have read him. Or if you’ve read him, you may have picked up Grand Days in a bookstore and set it down after a few pages, finding its subject matter—a young woman acting as an Australian envoy for the League of Nations in Geneva in the 1920s—dowdily patriotic. Australia has its great white male novelists, and Frank Moorhouse is someone who often makes the shortlist but not the final cut. You may understand him to be a slightly retrograde figure, not as crucial to the culture as JM Coetzee or Peter Carey. If Coetzee has Disgrace and Carey has True History of the Kelly Gang, what did Moorhouse have?
There are his thick, sweeping, historical novels, of course—the trilogy made up of Grand Days (1993), Dark Palace (2000), and Cold Light (2011), published over two decades in his twilight years—and the serious works of nonfiction, both short- and long-form, most notably his book on ASIO, Australia Under Surveillance (2014). But for most of his life, Moorhouse produced resolutely minor literatures: columns that read like short stories, short stories that read like columns, comic memoirs, news articles, and slim, experimental, horny, always funny novels, set in adamantly specific milieus. Like Eve Babitz, he gets to greatness through triviality (hence the preoccupation with martinis). His writing, at least on the surface, is concerned with petty arguments, wining and dining, sex, and faltering romances. And like Babitz, the whole enterprise—all tallied, eighteen books, plus screenplays, essays, and more—feels effortless and charmed. I’ve had more fun reading Moorhouse than I have reading almost any other writer, Australian or otherwise. Greatness is besides the point. With Moorhouse, it’s all about pleasure.
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