Over the summer, we’ve been re-upping previously pay-walled classic TPE columns for you to enjoy. This week, Sally Olds visits the Frank Moorhouse archive in Brisbane, originally published June 15, 2023. Your editors will be back next week with the first STARS for 2025.
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.
There are 160 boxes of Moorhouse materials at the Fryer Library. A week before visiting, in Melbourne, I combed through the Manuscript Finding Aid, a kind of contents page for the collection, in order to request the boxes I wanted. The descriptions of each item were brief, so it was difficult to make an educated choice. Some were easier than others. Box 16: “crushed Coke can,” “promotional underwear”? You bet. Box 15: “Business correspondence, 1986”? Pass. Boxes 209-210: “draft manuscript of erotic novel by FM, Sonny”? Are you kidding me? Box 69: ”Receipts, Europe, 1991 to 1992”? Tricky—I desperately wanted to see the mini-bar bills from Paris, but I would only have five or so hours on site. In the end I settled on ten boxes: a mix of drafts, letters, ephemera, and financial records. I had a plan. I was going to spend two hours idly rifling through the materials, letting whatever spirits haunt an archive guide my hand to the juiciest papers, and the other three hours manically photographing as much as I could with my phone. I also knew that the Fryer Library allowed no food or water on its premises. I was looking forward to the challenge. This is my Alone, I thought.
*
The boxes are neatly stacked on a metal trolley behind the archivists’ desk, pleasingly uniform, small and squat. The archivist takes out one box at a time for me to sort through, then when I’m done, I walk it back to the trolley and select the next box. Eventually, the archivist tells me to just take the whole thing. I trundle the load over to my desk.
All the boxes are made of cardboard, and sealed with snugly-fitted lids, which I have to tug a little to pull off. When I open the first box, selected more or less at random, my initial emotion is excitement, quickly followed by confusion. The folders inside are full of faded receipts and nonsensical notes. In one, there are graphs with columns of numbers, maybe something to do with tax. In another, as I leaf through the pages, a small, torn-off scrap of paper wafts out and lands in front of me. It reads “Ant’s pants.” Going through someone's archive, I’m quickly realising, is kind of like inheriting someone's old phone: the apps are in weird places, there are hundreds of unread messages, the photo albums titled according to no obvious convention, the organising principles obscure. I know there must be secrets in here, but surrounding them are hundreds of workaday files, totally banal, the dulling power of invoices and appointment reminders quashing any mystique (though one appointment letter was, intriguingly, for an Ultrasound of Moorhouse’s penis). The notebooks don't have an aura. I am not felled by seeing his handwriting. I didn't want to, like, throw all his papers on the ground and roll around in them naked.
I met the flesh-and-blood Frank twice, both times in Brisbane. The first was at a launch for Cold Light, in 2011. I was nineteen; he would have been in his early 70s. My friend and I came clutching our tattered second-hand copies of an early book, Tales of Mystery and Romance, and lined up for a signature. Up close, he was square-jawed, with a delicate, shapely brow and a slight pout. The second time I met him, at the Queensland Literary Awards a year or so later, which I had crashed with two friends, he advised me to join an overseas NGO to gain experience to draw on in my writing. I think he was projecting Edith—the protagonist of his League of Nations trilogy—onto me. But I hadn’t yet read the Edith novels. I didn’t even know what an NGO was. I was hung up on his risqué, dissipated, 1970s books, which follow youngish but ageing radicals carousing in inner-city pubs. At nineteen, fresh off the Tilt Train from Maryborough, all I wanted was to gain experience of, and write about, these racier matters.
Now, more than ten years later and a little more experienced in the matter of inner-city pubs, I still get excited by the way Moorhouse writes about adulthood. He is one of the few writers who makes me want to grow older. He also makes me want to attend nightclubs, go bushwalking, have anal sex, get married (unhappily), pad around hotel corridors at conferences, and prosecute endless political debates at dinner parties. In Moorhouse’s world, you get to keep on doing all the above, even, or especially, as you age. Or, maybe it’s that you can’t stop doing all the above, even if you want to or even if certain significant exes and former friends find your lifestyle immature. No straight line between love, marriage, children for Frank. He develops crow’s feet, wears a cowboy hat for a newspaper profile, begs his publisher for money, and goes to his rich friends’ beach houses for holidays.
Re-reading him now, I realise that, actually, there is no big split between the Moorhouse who would spruik an NGO and the Moorhouse who would bounce between nightclubs all evening. The carousing is just one side of the equation. Moorhouse also loved meetings, conferences, files, patterns, and rules. There are an uncanny number of passages in Moorhouse’s oeuvre where he or his narrator-proxy finds occasion to extoll the virtues of the committee meeting and the seminar, and in one instance, the manila folder (Moorhouse would have loved the Moorhouse archives). He’s written whole books in this mode—Conference-ville (1976), Lateshows (1990)—and the first instalment of his trilogy, Grand Days, begins with Edith applying arch conversational rules to her flirtation with a handsome stranger in a dining carriage on the train to Geneva.
In fact, much of the humour in Moorhouse’s work comes from the friction between bureaucrat Frank and bon vivant Frank. At parties, in flirty conversation, in moments of high drama, his narrators and protagonists (usually the male ones) can’t help themselves from interjecting droningly boring remarks. Two paths for Moorhouse: if he hadn’t become a radical cosmopolitan bisexual writer, he would have been a lifelong member of the Nowra Rotary Club, speechifying at the family dinner table about arcane local disputes. Keep the attitude, but swap the kitchen table for the urbane lunch spot, and you’ve got a Moorhouse story in miniature. One column for The Bulletin, entitled “The Fishbone Incident” (1974), begins:
This is a cautionary tale for bon vivants and a test for cadet journalists. In the role of Francoise Blase, bon vivant and playboy writer, I was celebrating the day of publication of my book The Electrical Experience. I had gathered around me an ad hoc luncheon at the Balmain Volunteer…We were in a merry mood, the champagne was flowing, and I was making a fine speech when a schnapper bone caught in my throat—stopped me mid-flourish.
In his earlier writings set in activist and artist milieus, this mingling of tones suggests that his young, furious radicals—and later, his older bon vivants—are merely another iteration of Rotarians. In “The Girl who met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris” (The Americans, Baby, 1972), Moorhouse’s narrator is an intellectual who is also a kind of chauvinist pig, disturbed by the burgeoning feminist movement and stuck in his ways as much as any countrified father figure. In the story, he hounds a waitress for details about her meeting with Simone de Beauvoir, and works himself into a full-blown crisis of masculinity, chasing her through city streets, yelling about Scholl’s sandals (which seem to be a lesbian-coded ‘70s equivalent to Birkenstocks). It ends with him holed up in his friend’s study, terrified, as the girl and the narrator’s fed-up girlfriend pound on the door:
“The women have really got us holed up,” Cooper said grimly, looking through the curtain into the garden. “Is there a back way out?”
“Yes, there is a back passage,” Stockwell said with desperate hope.
In Tales of Mystery and Romance, which came five years later in 1977, the back passage is explored at length. Tales is probably my favourite Moorhouse book, and in Box 43, in a bulging folder, I find a typewritten manuscript marked up with the occasional hand-written correction (he used black biro, not red). Tales concerns the narrator’s relationship breakdown with the character Milton. Once a friend and ally in hedonistic pursuits, and an ambiguously romantic/sexual partner, Milton is now moving towards a New Age lifestyle, which the narrator takes personally as a slight against their relationship (it is personal). In “The Jack Kerouac Wake—the true story,” the pair cathect the doleful failure of a wake they held for Jack Kerouac (to which no one came) into an argument about anal sex. I flip through the pages of the manuscript and go straight to the following section:
Oh I know what was really getting at Milton. We had tried for a homosexual experience on a starless night earlier that week… He didn’t penetrate. He claims he did. I know damn well he didn’t. There is a sensation I know, which feels like penetration for the one doing the fucking, a pleasant lubricious feeling, but not penetration – down between the cheeks of the backside and legs, very nice, nice for the person taking it too, but not penetration.
What more is there to be said? As anyone who has tried it will tell you, anal penetration is no matter for dispute for the one who’s taking it.
What more is there to be said? Plenty, of course. It’s not just an abbreviated fuck, it’s a full-on epistemological impasse. The anal question continues to irritate the pair until, later in the book, Milton—now infuriatingly hippie and living in a commune—unleashes on the narrator, cataloguing his failings: his “clumsy energy,” his serving of KFC at parties, his “dabbling in effeminacy,” his love of carousing, his media consumption. Finally, the narrator interrupts with a non-sequitur: “‘You have always,’ I said, ‘envied me my bushmanship.’” Every time I get to this line, I laugh out loud. It’s perfect—the climactic moment of the ex-lover’s tiff punctured by this feeble, preening remark.
The bisexuality is one thing—a nice surprise for the queer reader—but there’s also, in all of his work, an unresolved question around gender. In Grand Days, Edith’s love interest Ambrose cross-dresses, initially for sex, and later, for days at a time. In “The Girl Who Met Simone de Beauvoir,” the chauvinist narrator has an enlightened Bob Katter moment, in which he yells: “And what does she mean by the second sex? — there are hundreds of sexes…” And in Tales, the narrator refers to a “femaleness, which straggles about my personality.” He’s not resistant to this straggling presence. He enjoys it.
When I first encountered Moorhouse, this “femaleness” seemed both way ahead of its time, and impossibly chic. It also raises the stakes on the Moorhouse-proxies’ sense of alienation. In all those boyish disputes and Rotarian posturings, Frank feels himself to be an interloper. He’s doing something we now take for granted; he’s looking at gender from the outside, as if his “maleness” is as peculiar as his “femaleness.” I wouldn’t care anywhere near as much about a self-congratulating Übermensch who likes nightclubs and enjoys the occasional untroubled fuck with his bros. But—a nebbish guy with Übermensch delusions, whose femininity intrudes on a delicately-calibrated homosocial scene? That, I can get behind. (Was Moorhouse a great male novelist? Well, yeah, but possibly not that male.)
*
There is one other person in the Fryer Library, a sandy-haired man in a blue linen shirt and cream chinos—a troublingly Brisbane aesthetic. He seems focussed and scholarly. Is he having a profound experience? Is he communing better than I am? On the way to the bathroom, I peek at the table and notice he’s looking through Peter Carey’s papers. I try to catch his eye, but he merely frowns down at a splayed folder. I sit back down with Frank.
From Box 16, I pull out the crushed Coke can (an authentically retro object) and the underwear. The jocks were a promo for a film adaptation of one of his books—The Everlasting Secret Family (1988). They are gleaming white and made of the kind of thick, stretchy, high-quality cotton that never made it past the ‘80s. On the bum is the phrase: “WHEN YOU’RE READY TO DELVE…(tesf film crew).” To my disappointment, they have clearly never been worn, by Frank or anyone else.
What do I learn from rifling through Moorhouse’s dirtier laundry? I learn a little about money. Because of his seemingly lavish lifestyle, I always figured Moorhouse was somehow independently wealthy—how else did he keep himself fed with caviar, watered with champagne? There’s no definitive answer in his papers, but as I learn all over again, most writers never have money and are always trying to get it. To his publisher in 1980: “An advance to contribute significantly to my living costs would permit this.” To his agent in 1997: “My financial situation is in crisis…I will have to borrow a significant sum of money to get through the next two months. How can I do that? From whom?” And it’s not just Moorhouse, either. Attached to his submission for Moorhouse’s edited collection, Days of Wine and Rage (1980), the poet John Forbes wrote:
Frank, will this do? If so, any cash attached? I’d love to live by writing prose. The poem Breakfast…won the Southerly young writing award but don’t print that, it’s a joke as then very few young writers contributed…
Yours, les delices, pas d'extase,
John Forbes.
For the same project, Moorhouse went over budget. “We have no option, I’m sorry to say, but to set this against royalties,” wrote his publisher.
I learn from a series of articles (which Frank photocopied from newspapers and filed away) that, in 2001, he almost had a windfall. He was announced as the winner of the fiction prize for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards—and then, two hours later, told there had been a mistake and that Peter Carey had won. He responded like a true diva, with litigious threats and a public spat. He said he vomited when he heard the news; he had been planning which debts to pay off. Of the mix-up, Carey, the ex-Geelong-Grammar-boy turned ad-man turned Booker-winning author, said: “It does seem that literature is rarely an important subject in this country and maybe it can only become a really important subject if Frank doesn't win something.” I glare at the Carey guy, sending psychic rays of disapproval his way. The archivist announces that the library is closing for an hour over lunch. I grab my backpack and let myself out. Whatever, I think. There’s really no competition. Frank could have done True History of the Kelly Gang, but Peter Carey could never have done Martini.
*
After lunch (bain-marie chicken on rice, $11.50, not the lunch of a bon vivant but fit for a humble researcher), I resume my wheely-chaired position and open Boxes 48 and 49. In Box 49, folders six and seven, I find flyers for strip clubs, private nightclubs, glossy catalogues, a business card for a male stripper, and ticket stubs from shows. I didn’t know much about this before coming in, but it turns out Frank was a columnist—Sydney’s own Carrie Bradshaw. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, while publishing his books, Moorhouse wrote prolifically for the now-defunct Australian periodical, The Bulletin. This may be one answer to the question of how he kept body and soul at the most fashionable clubs during this period in which he wrote full-time: by charging it all to the magazine. His columns included “Around the Laundromats,” in which he staged conversations about politics in inner-city laundromats, “From the terrace,” a varied commentary on bohemian Sydney life, and “After Midnight,” his nightlife reports. (And those are just the ones I’ve managed to find.) His finest work, though, were his dispatches from “Le Ghetto de Balmain,” written by his alter-ego, “Francoise Blase.” The column began in response to an article in the French newspaper Le Monde, which took note of the flourishing Balmain writing scene, also known as the Sydney Push, and which mentioned Moorhouse. Here’s one particularly sparkling example from “Blase”:
Dear Trevor,
I thought I should write to you and let you know how things are out here in Le Ghetto de Balmain (as the French newspaper Le Monde calls us). Spirits are low, Trevor. We have been getting a bad Press (except in France) and we here in the Ghetto, despite our cruel and clever front, and despite the opiates upon which we depend, are, underneath it all, sensitive people … We have been accused of being bludgers and phoneys because we get more cultural grant money than other suburbs (for godsakes, Trevor, we do more), of being grubby (Professor James McAuley), of liking pederasty (the Sydney Morning Herald), of writing in short sentences (National Times) and of running the country (George Slater).
Next, he turns to the poets:
It will dismay you to learn that the poets are fighting amongst themselves again. Yes. Sad. This time it is over who is a “real poet.” You would think that those who take up the job of being a poet and thus claiming a superior sensibility, special insight, etc, would find this easy. They don’t. And the language they use against each other—“vermin,” “petty desire to wound.” The little magazines are full of accusations. A lot of it comes about because poets have nothing to do in the afternoons.
Then, after taking pot-shots at the “the anti-Labor Government magazine Quadrant, financed by the Labor Government’s Australia Council,” Fay Zwicky, and the Literature Board, he signs off:
Love and peace, etc (as we say here),
Francoise Blase
Ghetto Correspondent
Blase is the fully resolved Moorhouse—Frank on steroids. He is a full-time aesthete, living on champagne lunches and arts grants, also a rugged and capable bushman, also a ladies man, also a seasoned world-traveller. In other columns, Moorhouse is mentioned as Blase’s faithful assistant, delivering and translating Blase’s dispatches. He sometimes appears as a character in Moorhouse-authored works, as in one column on a camping trip, which begins: “There was movement at the restaurant when the word passed around that Francoise Blase, the Balmain bushman, was going to Lake Eyre.” Sometimes, the pair team up, as in the Moorhouse-Blase investigation into Pears Soap. In this column, a photograph of a concerned-looking Moorhouse holding a cake of soap up to his nose is captioned: “Moorhouse is distressed to find that Pears is scented.”
Where does Frank end and Francoise begin? Does Francoise ventriloquise Frank’s inner-most thoughts, or is Francoise merely a smokescreen? Going into the archives is a way of seeing behind the facade. Full access. In theory, it’s what any fan wants. But with access, you risk going against the ethos of Moorhouse’s entire project. It seems that whenever he had an opinion to make in public, he spoke it through a dramatis personae. This is much more dignified than what writers do today—reserving their art for their novels, then writing po-faced Guardian op-eds on the side. It also yields an unexpected blurring of genres. The fiction is always partly based on Frank. The nonfiction resembles life, but it’s life in drag—exaggerated, histrionic, camp. It’s more fun than autofiction, and far less musty than the pomo stylings of metafiction. It’s also, often, very moving. You can tell sometimes that Frank is putting on a show to keep his own spirits up while trouble encroaches in the form of debts, depressions, loneliness, and the slow shut-down of the bon vivant’s ageing body. It would be gauche to look too closely, like peeking behind the curtain at intermission.
Near the end of Tales, the narrator mounts “A Spirited Defence of the Manilla Folder.” He claims that files are “the trowel of the shaped life” and “a housing for the useful remnants of effort.” He admits that he doesn’t tend to his own with enough care, that “things protrude tattily from the folders.” But the virtue of files has little to do with their physical qualities. He thinks of them as a kind of oracle, offering both “sought-for answers” and “answers to unasked questions.”
I look at the papers in front of me. The edges are indeed protruding tattily. I lay my hands on the folder encasing them. My palm vibrates as it passes over the slight roughness of the cardboard. Up until now, I’ve been a little underwhelmed by the archive. Now, I think, this is the point. The archive is underwhelming. It’s like a slight drizzle on your commitment ceremony day, or a martini with not enough vermouth. It’s very Moorhouse. Despite the theatrics, his writing feels real because it understands disappointment. You want something and just when you’re about to get it, it slides between the cheeks of your desire. Moorhouse doesn’t ignore these moments but makes art from them. The whole of his work amounts to a form of enchantment in the face of these big and mostly small deflations. Cheers, Frank, or Francoise. I’ll drink to that.
The materials cited can be found at the following locations in the Frank Moorhouse Papers, UQFL231, at the Fryer Library, University of Queensland:
—Crushed coke can and promotional underwear, Box 15, Items 6, 7
—Draft letter from Frank Moorhouse to Penguin Books re: advance, not dated, Box 43
—Letter from Jackie Yowell re: royalties for Days of Wine and Rage, 9 January, 1981, Box 43
—Letter from John Forbes to Frank Moorhouse, circa 1980, for preparation Days of Wine and Rage, Box 43, Folder 1
—Fax to Rosemary Cresswell re: personal finances, Box 167, Papers 1994-1997