The compelling Mr Glaskin, a work in progress
Carolyn van Langenberg
Pub Talk
Thursdays at the Fremantle Hotel, corner Cliff & High Streets
Presentations start 6.30pm sharp.
5 September 2002
Abstract
The late G. M. Glaskin (1923-2000), was an Australian writer published in the UK most successfully in the fifties and sixties. Many of his titles were republished and translated into several European languages. Some received mild success in USA, but in Australia both sales and critical acknowledgment have been insignificant. Did this situation arise because he was published by a London publisher? Or were his novels, even those set in Australia, written by a detribalised intelligence, placing an Australian male protagonist in plots that twisted round a concern with relationships, abjuring themes self-consciously exploring national identity? In his novels, he did not repeat the dominant literary theme that Australians are a white tribe abandoned on a desert island surrounded on three sides by vast oceans and, to the north, the indescribable masses of the Other. Did Glaskin's sexual identity, the parochialism of the Australian literary scene that overlooked the West Australian as a maverick, or the fact that he had to make a living (during the sixties and seventies, the income he earned as a writer looks respectable) persuade his writing to travel along the borderless milieu of urbanity?
This paper, as its title suggests, is a working paper written by his biographer who is searching for him among those of his papers stored at Murdoch University Library under the auspices of GALAWA. The papers themselves have a story to tell, travelling from his various overseas' addresses to the Battye Library in Perth, only to be compelled to suffer more journeys from library to library as Glaskin contested the efficacy of librarianship. There are as many detours to his story as there are ways into his story. The biographer must choose. Which one should I follow?
Paper
I will begin with a brief discussion about writing biography. And then I shall discuss Glaskin himself.
Perhaps the most useful seminar I went to about the subject of biography was held at UTS (University of Technology Sydney). John Corner, a BBC documentarian for television, talked about the practical problems of making visual biography. Corner talked about the double yield of the factual story, which may appear slight, underpinned with frames that allow the subject to show what they felt about society. Society plus self overlaid with self and personal circumstance draws the viewer into a story that appears to have some depth to it. Cameras move from face to clothing, bodies walk across sets, voices suggest personality. Corner's biographer is advised to avoid the simple reductionist model of showing the subject's impact on society usually by repeating a single incident. Also Corner advised avoiding hagiography, the romanticisation of the subject achieved by a linear retrospective. Much pleasure must be taken in revelation rather than reputation.
For those of you who knew Gerry Glaskin, I think that proposition must be almost breathtaking. When I ask about Glaskin, admit to researching his biography, a lot of Perthians freeze. His reputation has foiled his special teleology of fame. With John Corner in my pocket, I have waded into Grant Stone's basement at Murdoch University intent on searching through Glaskin's papers for the revealed person, not the one who brought upon himself much ill-repute. Nevertheless, I have run some of my findings past a psychiatrist and a psychologist. With my data, they both concur that, at the end of his life, he may well have had Asperger's Syndrome, a condition that implies a narcissism and sociopathy combined with a kind of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Some workers in the field actually put it on the Autism spectrum. Those who have this disorder have problems with impulsivity and temper control. They are profoundly self-centred and are apparently unaware that other people also have feelings. In the past it wasn't diagnosed much because specialists hadn't cobbled together the signs and symptoms. It can also be "camouflaged" if these men marry capable, organised, dominant women.
But a psychiatrist's assessment lacks drama. And the biographer's problem is to write a dramatic story about someone's life from empirical data. A life has been lived, research has been done and nothing may be invented. In The Silent Woman : Sylvia Plath And Ted Hughes (1994), Janet Malcolm offers the very good advice that the biographer must not indulge in the conditional, must not surmise what might have happened if a set of circumstances had been different because the facts are there. The life has taken a particular course; therein lies the story. The biographer's interpretation of the story discovers the drama to keep the readers' interest alive, but nothing must be invented or, tangential to invention, surmised. David Marr had Patrick White sitting at his elbow controlling much of the enterprise as he undertook it. Nevertheless I like the way Marr kept himself out of the story, guiding his unfolding of the life by using the words from White's published novels. The tone, idiom and rhythm of a writer who is the subject of a biography are very interesting, even illuminating. In David Marr's biography, the result is an elegant testimony to an unusual man, reaffirming the dominant order by confirming the greatness of Patrick White's contribution to Australian writing and Australian understanding of who we are.
The technique of allowing Glaskin's voice guide the writing may work, especially when looking at the first three novels : A WORLD OF OUR OWN; A MINOR PORTRAIT; and A CHANGE OF MIND. These three open a window backwards in time on Perth of 1930 and 1940. He writes of swimming at Cottesloe, of the pub scene and the cool houses slumped under date palms and fruit trees. Perhaps by taking extracts from his novels and short stories where the writing relaxes and the pleasure of simply being are allowed full expression personalises the subject.
Gerald Marcus Glaskin
He was born on 16th December, 1923, to Gilbert and Delia Glaskin. He was a bun in the oven so to speak at their wedding, born six months after they married in Perth. His father was a Secretary to the Road Board at Carnamah. In the various attempts at autobiography in Glaskin's papers, there are scribbled notes about the solitary house at Carnamah, hungry Aborigines and naked aboriginal children. According to other fragments, the family came to Perth when Gerry was 4. Glaskin Senior lost his job with the Road Board in 1927 and he became a cinematographic projectionist for the Hatfield cinemas at Claremont Picture Gardens behind the Princess (later Claremont) Theatre in Bay View Terrace, Claremont; Cottesloe Picture Gardens in Leake Street; and at Mosman Park Pictures. Llew Glaskin, the only one of the family I have spoken to and number 4 in the family of 7, remembers going to the pictures free. When Glaskin Senior joined the Army in 1940, Llew remembered old Arthur Hatfield tapping him on the shoulder and saying, 'You don't come here for nothing any more, m'boy!'
So Gerry, from an early age until he left school, got to see the big screen free. He helped his father set up the projectors. Sat in the twilight and watched stories about worlds vastly different from Perth. Did this visual world embellish fantasy or liberate imagination?
Until 1945, the ever-enlarging brood of Glaskins lived in Palmerston Street, Cottesloe, and Johnston Street in Peppermint Grove. Glaskin went to Perth Modern after a year at Fremantle Boys where he was top boy, the only one to win a scholarship in 1936, and his headmaster was very proud of him. So too were his parents. But Gerry was already shaping up to be a man in a hurry. He sat Standard 7 at Fremantle Boys so, rather than repeat it, he sat Standard 7 & 8 &9 at Perth Modern in 2 rather than 3 years. In 1938, he sat for his Junior Certificate at which he did not do so well, failing in History, Chemistry and German. A school report I have seen regarded him as unremarkable, fainting a lot, and one teacher said he was not 'bearing up' as well as other boys.
To give him his due, Glaskin's mother was sick a lot at this time. He took off periods from school to see her when she was in hospital. He adored his mother. He was not so fond of his father. Glaskin established a myth believed overseas that he left school because his family were so poor that even though he was on a scholarship to help pay his fees and educational expenses, he had to go to work to put shoes on his younger siblings' feet and the books in their bags. I am assured by Llew that this is nonsense. Like many families of the time, they were not well off but they ate well, having a vegetable garden and chooks that laid eggs. For those of you who aren't familiar with average Australian families of the time, one autobiography that gives a feeling for the period is by Jim McClelland, Stirring The Possum. Gerry took a few liberties to self-mythologise himself as the writer from destitute origins - for the purposes of advertising perhaps.
After he left school, Glaskin worked in a variety of jobs, beginning with Coulton & Meagher, a chartered accountants firm; then with Soap Distributors until he joined the Royal Australian Navy. He was on the HMS Kanimbla when he suffered a terrible accident. Coils of signal-halyard wire broke loose from winches and wrapped like a boa constrictor round him, pinioning his arms, cutting his flesh, then snapping, breaking both his arms. If he had been 21 at the time of the accident, the on-board navy surgeon would have amputated his right arm. As he was under 21, the surgeon needed his parents' permission to perform so serious an operation. He was held together until he was admitted to the Hollywood Hospital in Perth where doctors observed his broken bones were mending well. They left him in one piece.
This accident and another one he sustained in Canada where he trained as a pilot for the Royal Australian Air Force left Glaskin with pain for the rest of his life. He suffered neck and lower back pain so badly that in 1955, after several years in Singapore where he worked, post-war, as a stockbroker, he returned to Perth for treatment at Hollywood Hospital. He explained to his partners in Lyall & Evatt that the prognosis for his back trouble was not good. He offered to dissolve his part of the partnership. And he went to see 'Martinovich, a wonder healer out at Kalgoorlie.' Martinovich 'has been able to replace [reset?] the three vertebrae that were out of alignment as well as adjust the two he discovered in the upper part of the spine.' Sadly, however, he was in so much pain that he said in a letter to his Singapore friend and partner dated 28th Dec 1955, that he couldn't sit or stand for long. From 1949, I found evidence that he was taking strong painkillers. I have found no mention of heroin, not even any discussion about its use for palliative care.
Despite the pain, he banged away at a typewriter and wrote huge manuscripts in triplicate, quadruplet, quintuplet - you name it. Copies were in multiples even before the photocopier. And he kept up a huge correspondence with literary agents, film agents, publishers, friends but rarely other writers.
After World War II, Glaskin worked at Fremantle Sports Depot and at the Ford Motor Company. In 1949 he left regular paid work to write the novel A World of Our Own about settling down to peace again after the civil disruption of war. He spent 6 months at his typewriter down at his Nan's house in Safety Bay, then he took off for Singapore with the manuscript using Perth connections to keep himself in work. He worked at Wearnes Ford Motor Company in Singapore, then McMullans advertising agency before finally settling in at Lyall & Evatt until 1956 when he dissolved his partnership as stated above. Glaskin signed the deed of partnership with John & Robert Donnell of Lyall & Evatt again in June 1958, only to dissolve it again just over twelve months later in July 1959.
While he was in Singapore, he tidied up the first novel before having it beautifully bound and sailing with it in 1953 to London. I haven't yet checked, but I am sure he had an introduction from Henrietta Drake-Brockman to her publishers, James Barrie Ltd. James Barrie wrote Peter Pan & Wendy, if you remember.
Now imagine fifties London - shrouded in smog, struggling out of postwar shock and coupons, dismal with rebuilding and restructuring, and frightened of the demise of its Empire. Imagine a room dark with varnished walls and bad lighting that helped conceal the once good and now frayed carpet where men from the age of mid-20 to mid-40 or more are rifling through manuscripts. The men are the editors, perhaps Oxford and Cambridge graduates, definitely graduates of the terrible war years.
There are no women in this scene. They are in another room seated in front of clattering typewriters.
The door of the editor's room opens to reveal Gerry. He loved water sports. He had been in Singapore. His mother was a Gugeri, he had inherited that Italian skin, velvet olive brown. His eyes are dark brown. His hair is dark brown. I put it you that he stood there, this handsome, under-educated, slightly insecure, brash, West Australian - a wild colonial boy - his manuscript bound by a Chinese leather worker under his arm, and he looked like a vision to those men. He represented to them everything positive that summed up Empire. Humphrey Hare - perhaps the grandfather of David Hare - took Gerry under his editorial wing. Over the next three years, Hare edited the novel, talking Glaskin around to removing six chapters and paring back sentences. Glaskin overwrote. Eventually, the edited novel won Glaskin one of three Commonwealth Literary Awards, a part of the very small subsidy the Menzies administration gave to the Arts in Australia. Glaskin left Singapore in 1959. His intention was to live in England, but he decided to live in Amsterdam after realising how punitive the British Tax Office could be. His beloved mother died in 1960. He continued to travel backwards and forwards from Amsterdam to Perth, finally settling in the latter in 1979 or thereabouts. By then he knew he could not afford Dutch medical care, that he was dependent on his Veteran Affairs pension and the free or subsidised medical care he received in Australia as Veteran. He died an ignominious death in 2000. Like so many writers before him, the years of twilight after a briefly stared period were long. Too long to sustain absolute equanimity.
Gerald Marcus Glaskin was a prolific writer with 21 or so titles to his credit. Panther, Arrow, Four Square, and other imprints altered some of the hardback titles for publication in paperback editions. His first book, A World of Our Own, published in the UK by James Barrie in 1955, was praised by C. P Snow as 'One of the most interesting manuscripts that has come into my hands for a long time.'
A Lion In the Sun is his fourth novel set in Singapore during the time of the Hertogh race riots in December 1950 . The Beach of Passionate Love, set in post-war Kelantan, Malaya, is his fifth. Taken as examples of Australian consciousness as it was developing in the post-war period, both novels show a willingness to take a friendly step north of the coastal cities of Australia to establish links with the Federated States of Malaya and the Crown Colony of Singapore. The novels were published in 1960 and 1961 respectively, several years after 1957 when the Federation of Malaya was granted Independence from the British Colonial government. (The related but separate history of Singapore negotiating Independence from Britain during the fifties is turbulent and complicated.)
The novels are not particularly literary, and they are not self-consciously Australian. The principal characters or personas, like Glaskin himself, were curious and urbane men who settled for an indefinite period of time in Singapore to do business, eventually to move on. The writing is marked by the confidence of someone who has shared his social and commensal habits with Chinese and Malays and to a lesser extent the Indian peoples of the archipelago. Glaskin engages with both setting and language, writing as someone with a zest for life and not a regressive character or an agonising superego; nor, indeed, as a bronzed country boy who heroically survived the Second World War and the dreaded un-like-us. It was as if Malaya and Singapore contained places and social milieus Glaskin thoroughly enjoyed being in.
Early Australian reviewers tended to be cursory, only noting his existence in composite reviews. In fact, my researches have yet to reveal a thorough review of any of Glaskin's titles by an Australian critic. The tendency of his contemporaries has been to be cursory, only noting his existence in composite reviews. John Ewers said his writing was uneven, the novels plot driven. Glaskin was mentioned in lists in Bruce Bennett's The Literature of Western Australia - as the writer of the prize winning novel, A World Of Our Own; as a short story writer whose work appeared in some editions of Coast to Coast and as a contributor since 1965 to Westerly. Dame Leonie Kramer's Oxford History of Australian Literature makes no reference to him at all. John Hetherington in Forty-Two Faces, published in 1962 and Elizabeth Riddell in an article in The Australian in 1969 praised both him and his work.
Recent scholars writing about Australian Literary Perspectives on Asia have yet to write a history of the development of that focus that would necessarily include his work.
Yet there he is, a writer of some success, several of whose novels have been translated into European languages. According to Hetherington, the hard-back edition of A World Of Our Own sold fifteen thousand copies in Norwegian, and a further thirty thousand in paperback.
In 1961, Glaskin published The Land That Sleeps, a commissioned travel book about Australia, for Doubleday in New York, and Barrie & Rockliff, London. In Flight To Landfall, the few aboriginal characters were not invested with preternatural powers. This adventure story, translated into the Scandinavian languages, was well received. The short stories were published widely in newspapers and magazines , especially during the forties. The Return is a touching story about a relationship that is wearing itself out on routine and boredom. And the one that may reveal something of Glaskin himself was the title story of a collection of short stories, The Road To Nowhere. In this story, a man and a woman drive around a barren and arid part of WA looking for her family's abandoned homestead. They were adults dependent on each other in a hostile environment. Other short stories were written about his experiences during World War II. But he wrote about being on leave, the problems young men had with loneliness, companionship and alcoholism. I have not come across stories of heroism, but many about adult vulnerability, boys in uniform who weren't coping. Glaskin wrote about relationships. Was this slant unappealing to our critics?
I picked up a novel by Lawson Glassop, one of the writers who was given more space than Glaskin, and refered to quite often, in the abovementioned compendiums. Glassop published the wartime novel, We Were The Rats, in 1944. Both Glaskin and Glassop shared a Hollywood burlesque style of writing dialogue, (rather vaudevillian, the actor Mickey Rooney being an example) and that I found interesting. But there the comparison ends and the contrast begins. Glassop's fairly appalling attitudes towards women put me off reading past page 80. I didn't get to the heroics. Women were either on pedestals as lovely mothers or the girl to marry, the others stupidly available, the subject of embarrassingly awful jokes or fictional mirrors to enlarge the central male character's ego. I suppose it was from reading these pages by Glassop that I realised how absent in Glaskin's writing were these attitudes of unsubtle hostility to women. I have found evidence in his papers that he had a dreadful attitude to women. But in the novels women are clothes props, long suffering mothers, stiff and middle-class, unresisting anima in the style of Fritz Weiss, but never a moll put up to bring down to size.
So Patrick might have been a whinging asthmatic and spoilt brat whose family wealth made it possible for him to explore the cadences of Australian speech, and Glassop might have been a man successful within the sub-culture of hunky journalism. What of Glaskin?
White makes a good contrast to Glaskin. In White's work, doors open and close on and over secrets as his characters reveal and conceal flaws. So in The Twyborn Affair, White's treatment of gayness is curiously celluloid and coy. Not so Glaskin's gay novel, said to be the first written by an Australian about gay men trying to establish a relationship. No End To The Way is frank. Nothing coy about it at all. It is sad in a credible and unsentimental way, revealing of the subterfuge and boiling of concealed emotions that controlled outlawed homosexuality during the sixties in Perth. Elizabeth Riddell conjectured that Glaskin's long years in Amsterdam may have made him seem too European, his interest in sexuality unsettling, for Australian publishers. This novel was never offered to Australian publishers.
Whatever the vicissitudes, Glaskin appears to have been relegated outside mainstream Australian thinking that continues to perpetuate the binary of 'them' and 'us', 'hetero' and 'queer', 'white' and 'non-white'.
I am inclined to investigate along lines other than the problem of not being published by Australian houses. I am still putting the story together. The emerging points are :
1] British editors and agents wanted stories rather than novels of ideas; 2] Glaskin was constrained by his inadequate education to explore the themes of identity he wanted to investigate; and 3] he was a fantasist and, lacking imagination, he drew on those pictures he watched in the garden cinemas for his story lines.
1] British editors and agents implored him to stick to storytelling. As late as 1978 from agent David Bolt viz; 'What I take exception to - as you must know - is this nonsense about having an agent "who believes in one's work". If you want someone to flatter you uncritically no matter what you write, you've got the wrong bloke. I can't believe you do. What I am always trying to do, is to advise you as best I know how on what I (or anybody) can sell here, now, and what I can't. Sometimes, not always, this coincides with what I think is good and bad. It is because I have a very considerable longstanding admiration of your work, Gerry, that I tell you when I think you've dropped below the Glaskin standard (doesn't everybody drop standards sometimes?). Nothing will convince me that CARNAL ASSAULT is - for all its professionalism and fine moments - in the same class of storytelling as, on the one hand FLIGHT TO LANDFALL, and on the other, O LOVE (two very different novels). Okay; if I thought CARNAL ASSAULT was all the same good commercial stuff, obviously my personal reservations would no wise stand in the way of my going all out for a good price. (Probably the reverse.) But I'm caught both ways. Even so, I have still been trying hard to find the right slot for it, because you are entitled to that from me. And if I still succeed, I'll cheerfully eat my own words, and maybe learn something in the process.'
Thus, the British wanted more Flight to Landfall. That was a book he dedicated to Mary Durack. Thanking him for the book, she politely and carefully pointed out errors the British would know nothing about - such as the fact that Australia has no vultures, where certain plants do and do not grow, and that the indigenous people in the part of Australia he set his story in don't do bark paintings.
The Americans tended to find this sort of novel phoney. They baulked at Waltz Through the Hills. You may well ask why that title. I have seen no correspondence suggesting another. Glaskin wrote screenplay after screenplay of that novel. He wanted it to be a musical. Glaskin believed that readers and viewers would be entranced by the fantasy of an half-caste Aboriginal prison escapee waltzing through the hills singing and playing his mouth organ as he helped a couple of white kids find home. Significantly, home is England. Significantly, Glaskin read it twice for the BBC Home Service and they paid him very well.
2] O LOVE was part of a trilogy called O LOVE, O LONELINESS and O LIFE. After a lot of argument, the then editor at Barrie & Rockliff, John Bunting, convinced Glaskin to put O LOVE, O LONELINESS together as two novellas under one jacket and rename O LIFE. He also wanted it edited. Eventually, after much fury, Glaskin complied. The novel became NO END TO THE WAY under the pseudonym Neville Jackson. Bunting was pleased with the edit, notably for deleting the preaching lectures and the hysteria. The novel was reduced by about half.
NO END TO THE WAY is a novel that exposes a truth rather than tells a rollicking tale. But its success seemed to convince Glaskin that he should write in order to be shocking. He wanted to write PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, MYRA BRECKINRIDGE ... never is a William Burroughs or a Georges Bataille title mentioned. His motive tangled him up with being combative, which was the way he dealt with most people. Glaskin was no stylist. He didn't seem to have any idea about the poetics of language that explored a truth. He knew about grammar and spelling, how to use language vituperatively to impose and preach and intimidate. While he had editors to control that tendency, he did well. John Bunting of Barrie & Rockliff was eventually moved to the non-fiction list. The younger editor MacElhose, after apologising to Glaskin for being 'cavalier' that is to say summarily rejecting TURN ON THE HEAT, was dismissed by Glaskin who grumpily withdrew himself from the Barrie Group.
3] Earlier I asked the question did the visual world of the cinema embellish fantasy or liberate imagination? The furniture of Glaskin's mind was cast in an Edwardian moralist mould that, despite shocking people about homosexuality, was old-fashioned. For example, the long short story THE ICE YACHT is as Jamesian a story about loss of innocence as you can believe a man might write in 1960s. The cinema-based story-lines were the first plank in his philosophy, a shaky deck on which to proceed with convincing integrity. He later developed a fixed admiration for Graham Greene whose Catholic agnosticism appealed to him.
Glaskin could never do a Potter. Whilst he increasingly drew from himself, referring to his letters for details, scenes and attitudes to use in his novels, he was incapable of looking at himself objectively as a subject. He never 'saw' the shadowed silhouette of himself as a twelve year old boy sitting near the bougainvillea in one of Perth's garden cinemas, an ice cream melting over his hand as in wonder he watched the magically white Statue of Liberty fill the screen. Columbia! the boy flowing in and out of the fantasy that followed as if in a vast ocean of dream. And he could not with imagination play games with the music, the images, the dramas. No. He was no Potter. And he was no Manuel Puig, that other great writer who turned into literature the magic that the movies can make. Glaskin absorbed the cinema story lines, later to use them, but never to spin them with the power of A KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN.
Glaskin struck me when I first read A LION IN THE SUN as a writer with a story line but without the poetry and particularly the philosophy that he longed to think and write. Almost all the work has been written too quickly, without thinking ideas through, always pursuing the story and I suspect the money he needed to make. By contrast, Patrick White could be cranky and spend a year or two feeding the goats and the schnauzers and, most tragically one year, hand watering the orchard. Like PW's orchard, GMG's story is tragic, all the more so because he had no privileges, not even the capital from a successful used car business (Peter Carey). Those last years of his life were terrible. The Man Who Didn't Count was one of his titles. He seemed to have made the title come true.
(I acknowledge that the Glaskin Biography project is funded by a grant
from the Literature Board of the Australia Council.) Bio: New: 16 August, 2002 | Now: 1 April, 2023
Carolyn van Langenberg holds a Doctorate in Communication &
Media from the University of Western Sydney, Nepean. Her novel, fish
lips (Indra Publishing, 2001), the first in a trilogy set in both Australia
and Malaysia from the forties to the beginning of the twenty-first
century, is about angles on love and history. The second, the
teetotaller's wake, will be released soon.