Australian Studies Review

Lusting for London: Australian expatriate writers at the hub of Empire, 1870-1950 by Peter Morton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. x + 284, US $90.00 Hardback, ISBN: 0230338887.

It was not until I was approaching the end of this book that I discovered that I was ‘yet another of Australia’s obscure, expatriate walking wounded’. That is how the author, generalising a figure in a book by Randolph Bedford, characterises expatriates whose modest achievements fail to bring them fame. Many are glimpsed in the earlier chapters of this thorough investigation of a recurrent topic in Australian culture. As far as I know it is the first book to provide a detailed account of the early phase of expatriation, from the nineteenth century, up to the middle of the twentieth. It ends in 1950, just when the phenomenon became interesting, especially for me, for that was about the time I began contemplating life somewhere else than the Australia in which I was growing up, though it was over decade before I departed.

This study is limited to literary expatriation, firmly placed in an Imperial and Commonwealth context, and confined to writers who headed for London. A mass of evidence, from various sources, is presented, to demonstrate literary expatriation along this axis, but this is not the whole story. It is a special case which can lead to false assumptions about the interesting subject of expatriation (if generalisations can be made about it at all) and it slightly surprised me because I have never felt the slightest throb of lust for London and I do not think I would experience displacement within the range of my mother tongue as expatriation. I admit that it is conventional to consider Australians who make careers in Britain as expatriates, but linguistic factors, and the various, complex ways in which they influence writers, might be taken into account. Translocating to another version of English is, implicitly, a rejection of the possibility of moving into a different language. It cannot be straightforwardly compared with the fate of Ovid in Tomis, or, closer to our own time, Conrad among the English, Joyce in Trieste or Zurich, Beckett in Paris, Nabokov’s European and American wanderings, or W.G. Sebald in East Anglia, among other such cases. English-speakers enjoy an unusual advantage in being able to move to another country without learning another language, which is a good reason why writers expatriating from Australia might converge on London or New York, rather than Athens or Beijing.

The relatively narrow range of expatriation investigated in this book is never defined in relation to broader notions of the concept, though the reader is generally in no doubt as to how the term is being used. The formal aspects of the topic – the identification of Australian expatriates, their movements, activities and productions – are impressively researched, and in addition the author explores the emotive responses often provoked by expatriation. Towards the end of the book, it is suggested that its ‘temperature’ dropped as 1950 approached. My memory of a heated discussion of the topic among a handful of writers at an official session of the first Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1960 suggests this was not the case, or that the temperature had risen again. This is, admittedly, merely anecdotal, though Geoffrey Dutton also alludes to it in his autobiography.

The focus of the book is sometimes blurred by incidental and haphazard references to expatriates other than writers, and to those whose course was not directed toward London, but there is no attempt to analyse their implications for how they might modify the idea of expatriation presented in the book. This weakens its frame of reference, and undermines its value as a general study of the subject.

The early chapters in this book cover the beginning of literary expatriation from the Australian colonies in detail, and bring to light, briefly, Australian writers in London who have been forgotten, in many cases deservedly. Implicitly, the process is connected with the development of an Australian literary culture, since expatriation presupposes a ‘patria’. This is complicated by the fact that the first European colonies in Australia were deliberately chosen as places of exile, and their settlers were expatriates from European culture. An examination of how and when the notion of expatriation was inverted might throw light on the development of culture in Australia and raise doubts about whether ‘lusting for London’ can be called ‘expatriation’ at all, but this remains implicit, and is not pursued far in this book. This does not, however, impair its value as primary research which documents a previously unexamined aspect of Australian literary history.

There is an abrupt change of approach, in the central chapters, to a comparative analysis of three novels of expatriation by authors who were expatriates: The Way Home, by Henry Handel Richardson, For Love Alone, by Christina Stead and Lucinda Brayford, by Martin Boyd. These chapters, mainly based on secondary sources, are primarily aimed at bringing out their resemblances as novels embodying themes of expatriation and creations of expatriate writers. Differences among the three examples are noticed, but there is no explicit discussion of how they relate to the main thesis of the book. For Love Alone stands out as the example that best illustrates the arguments presented in Lusting for London. The other two novels are not so much inspired by that lust, as by ambivalent homing instincts. Indeed, in might be argued that Lucinda Brayford is not a novel of expatriation, but of oscillation, in an extended habitat, embracing familiar locations in England and Australia. There is a similar narrative oscillation in The Way Home, but homing impulses at both ends of the arc are frustrated. The novel may reflect an expatriate perspective, and its author may have been living a secluded life in London when she wrote it, but the alluring imperial hub plays no part in it. Nor does Richardson’s career conform to the patterns described in Lusting for London. Expatriation took her to Leipzig, and into another language, and as a result her work as a novelist was influenced by reading and translating literature in German and the Scandinavian languages. This is noticed in Lusting for London (where it is even suggested that certain stylistic infelicities in Richardson’s novel may derive from German idioms), but this does not lead to any analysis or modification of the basic thesis of the book, to accommodate deviant examples.

Lusting for London is almost entirely devoted to the work of prose writers, apart from incidental references to some of them writing occasional verses. The interesting question of why there is an apparent absence of poets among Australian literary expatriates is not examined. This is puzzling, because waiting at the terminus ad quem of the book is a major poet, Peter Porter: an expatriate whose full career evolved in London. An examination of the implicit and explicit dialogue between Porter and his contemporaries who stayed at home would almost certainly illuminate a crucial period in the development of Australian poetry, as well enhance understanding of the idea of expatriation. It can only be supposed that Lusting for London closes just as Porter’s career was beginning because the book is the prelude to another which will take up the promising topic of expatriation after 1950.

The two poets who receive more than a mention are W.J. Turner (reportedly admired by Yeats, but more widely known for his books on music), and Anna Wickham, dismissed in half a page, which retells an abbreviated version of Germaine Greer’s scornful critique (in Slipshod Sybils) of Anna Wickham’s poems as ‘versicles’. There is no evidence of independent research on Anna Wickham’s publications and surviving manuscripts, and more seriously, an inexplicable failure to take into account the full scale biography by Jennifer Vaughan Jones, published in 2003, and the important critical essay on Wickham’s poetry by Anne Pender, which directly challenges Greer’s views, published in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, Oct 2005.

This exposes the main weakness of Lusting for London. While it presents useful historical research on the otherwise obscure careers of early Australian writers in London, this does not lead to any original or independent literary analysis. This may be deliberate, but it nevertheless restricts the interest of the book. The problem is particularly apparent in the closing chapters, which calculate the negative consequences of expatriation for the development of Australian literary culture, and speculate about expatriation and repatriation in the period after 1950. It cannot, however, simply be assumed that a culture diminished by expatriation is the poorer for it. Literary developments are more complex than this. The best examples of this complexity are probably to be found in the period just after this study comes to an end, but the speculations in the final chapter do not trace these far enough, and that the reader closes the book with the feeling that it stops just at the point when it is becoming interesting.

In any case, in order to maintain an argument about expatriation and the development of Australian literature in the period covered by the book, it would be necessary to examine developments in Australia, and when some of these are taken into account (for example, the poetic career of Kenneth Slessor), the assumption that expatriation was a cultural diminishment becomes questionable and calls for a more complex treatment that it receives in this book.

Perhaps, however, the book was never intended as a literary study. It remains a useful source of information on early expatriation on which to base future literary analysis and argument.

BRUCE CLUNIES ROSS

University of Copenhagen

Published in Australian Studies 6:3 (2012).