Ultima Thule is illuminated by his voice. His shame at his father and his desperate blind pity for him which co-exists with his red-faced horror and confusion and loathing are beyond praise. So too is the moment when the old German professor realises he is a musical prodigy like his creator.
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is an all but lost continent of a book. It is a fiery, fierce lament for the destruction that rides over human life and it is also (in an incidental way) a book that spits in the face of every cliché about the ease of Australian life. It is a novel about poverty and worldly failure and the grind and nightmare of a life that is ruled by money which does its best to ride roughshod over every impulse towards simplicity and delicacy and truth. It is a book written in defiance of materialism and complacency, full of hatred of the vision of Australia summed up by James McAuley’s words: ‘The people are kindly with nothing inside them.’
And it is also—because it is a great book, a book full of grace and truth— a critique of precisely that attitude. Richard Mahony has everything inside him. Every scorpion and sensitivity which the mind can use to destroy itself, together with the people and places it loved, is on show, seething and sympathetic. And so are those things which nurture and resist: a woman’s love, a child’s fear, the tears that make the world cherishable even as it all runs down.
Henry Handel Richardson, this self-consciously compulsive, self-loathing Australian had drunk deep of her Dostoyevsky and her Strindberg, even of her Freud, long before the world had. That is neither here nor there except that they add an extra worldliness, a tang of subtlety to this big, blind, stumbling block of a novel, this love letter written in blood and bile to a vanished Australia and the father whose ghost would always be heard.
I think of William Empson saying that he imagined the Book of Ecclesiastes had been written by a not very successful man. Richard Mahony is a dark impassioned homage to every vanity that sparkled like dew in the life of a terribly unsuccessful man. It might as easily, this long unwieldy variation on Zolaesque schematism, have been called An Australian Tragedy. But the brightness that falls from the air in Mahony’s mind deserves the silver and the descant of a Redgrave voice.
More than any other novel in our literature, more than Voss, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel. It’s a delusion, of course, a quest for the golden boomerang doomed to futility because only the Australian cult of success could make such a grail seem worth the candle. Still, it is a mighty and moving work, this bursting-at-the-seams anti-epic to the muse of a vanity which sees every golden bowl broken and every silver cord loosed. The last thing Henry Handel Richardson wanted was Australian success. She aspired to be part of European literature. Should we imagine The Fortunes of Richard Mahony as the work of a not very successful woman?
PROEM
In a shaft on the Gravel Pits, a man had been buried alive. At work in a deep wet hole, he had recklessly omitted to slab the walls of a drive; uprights and tailors yielded under the lateral pressure, and the rotten earth collapsed, bringing down the roof in its train. The digger fell forward on his face, his ribs jammed across his pick, his arms pinned to his sides, nose and mouth pressed into the sticky mud as into a mask; and over his defenceless body, with a roar that burst his ear-drums, broke stupendous masses of earth.
His mates at the windlass went staggering back from the belch of violently discharged air: it tore the wind-sail to strips, sent stones and gravel flying, loosened planks and props. Their shouts drawing no response, the younger and nimbler of the two—he was a mere boy, for all his amazing growth of beard—put his foot in the bucket and went down on the rope, kicking off the sides of the shaft with his free foot. A group of diggers, gathering round the pit-head, waited for the tug at the rope. It was quick in coming; and the lad was hauled to the surface. No hope: both drives had fallen in; the bottom of the shaft was blocked. The crowd melted with a “Poor Bill—God rest his soul!” or with a silent shrug. Such accidents were not infrequent; each man might thank his stars it was not he who lay cooling down below. And so, since no more washdirt would be raised from this hole, the party that worked it made off for the nearest grog-shop, to wet their throats to the memory of the dead, and to discuss future plans.
All but one: a lean and haggard-looking man of some five and forty, who was known to his comrades as Long Jim. On hearing his mate’s report he had sunk heavily down on a log, and there he sat, a pannikin of raw spirit in his hand, the tears coursing ruts down cheeks scabby with yellow mud, his eyes glassy as marbles with those that had still to fall.
He wept, not for the dead man, but for himself. This accident was the last link in a chain of ill-luck that had been forging ever since he first followed the diggings.
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