INFLUENCING CLIVE JAMES AND ROBERT HUGHES – THE POET CHESTER GRAHAM – GEOFFREY LEHMANN

Geoffrey Lehmann, prize winning poet, author and tax lawyer, was a Chester Graham admirer from afar having started at Sydney University around the same time as Clive James. Writes Lehmann, “How did this bisexual, apolitical, anti-academic young ironist and perfectionist suddenly appear in bourgeois, wholesome Australia?” Unlike Robert Hughes and Clive James who were influenced by Chester, this talented bohemian did not go on to become a publicly acclaimed contributor to the arts. He remains an enigma but in a volume of rescued Chester poems – I’ve been called away­ – for which Geoffrey Lehmann has written a memoir of introduction something of Chester’s legacy has been preserved. On Monday 24 June 2024, Geoffrey Lehmann addressed The Sydney Institute to recall the days of bohemia and the University of Sydney in the 1950s as seen from the likes of Chester Graham, Clive James and Robert Hughes.

INFLUENCING CLIVE JAMES AND ROBERT HUGHES – THE POET CHESTER GRAHAM

GEOFFREY LEHMANN

Imagine you are a rather tall, gangly bisexual, with reddish crewcut hair walking along a beach at dawn. Probably Bondi Beach. You lope rather than walk across the sand. Jerkily.

It’s the late 1950s. Perhaps 1960. You are in your early twenties. Your father is a senior RAAF officer. Your mother is active in Sydney society, perhaps a friend of Nola Dekyvere, and she’s a devotee of the Black and White charity balls. You have failed Arts I at Sydney University several times and your parents are not happy about what you are doing with your life. But it is an exciting life.

Large waves are breaking on the beach. Usually in groups of three.

Perhaps you are already renting a small flat at Sydney’s Kings Cross where you’ve installed some paperbacks to impress your Libertarian friend, the philosopher, gambler and holocaust survivor George Molnar – no relation to the famous SMH cartoonist. You are writing highbrow scripts for Sydney University revues, acting in them and directing them.

In previous years you used to subedit the student newspaper Honi Soit. In fact, you sometimes slept overnight in the Honi Soit office. And your nom-de-plume is “Chester”, the Honi Soit cat’s name. The cat politely disappeared, so you’re the sole owner of the name. All cats are polite. That’s why you like them – perhaps better than many people.

But you like and approve of some people. As you walk along the beach you think about the long table in the Manning House coffee shop and cafeteria at Sydney University, where your friends assemble after attending their first lecture for the day. You don’t bother attending lectures, except one or two each year, rather ceremoniously. So, you can say you have been to a lecture.

One of these friends who sometimes drifts in to sit at the table in Manning House is John Cummings, or “Jonjon”, who started at Sydney University in 1952 and has become a librarian.

In that year – 1952 – you were a boarder at a Jesuit School St Ignatius, known as “Riverview”. You kick at the sand as you think about Riverview. Sometimes you tried to run away from school. You hated morning Mass. You despised how the priests delivered thrashings to the boys – each with his personalised technique. But they gave you a good classical education. At the end of the year, you won a Commonwealth scholarship.

In 1953, you started Arts I at Sydney University and you met John or “Jonjon”. You have told him your secret – that you are attracted to boys as well as girls. In fact, Jonjon is Katherine, but you don’t know this. She has guarded her secret from you and all her friends – that she was born into the wrong body.  At present she secretly cross-dresses in front of a mirror and photographs herself. But she doesn’t tell you this. In 1989, with the help of surgery, the person you know as John will become Katherine Cummings and call herself a lesbian.

In 1953 Katherine’s love of theatre and revues opened a door for you. For three years you collaborated with her, writing revue scripts, and subediting Honi Soit together. Sometimes you turned up at Katherine’s parents’ house at night. You tossed gravel at her window and she let you in. She gave you a sleeping bag on the floor. There was no hanky-panky. John, as she was then, is attracted only to women. But for three years – 1953 to 1955 – you and Katherine were a duo.

Then in 1956 something extraordinary happened. A dashing young man with blond, swept back hair started Arts at Sydney University. Like you, a Riverview old boy. But far more extraverted. He captained the Riverview debating team. He came 5th in the state in the Leaving Certificate, and first in English. He can recite the whole of T S Eliot’s Wasteland off by heart. Also, a couple of Shakespeare plays from Act I to Act V. He’s brilliant. His name is Robert Hughes. The duo became a trio.

Hughes draws cartoons for Honi Soit. He deftly illustrates your stories and poems. He does theatrical sets for the revues you and Katherine stage. He sometimes acts in them. He was intoxicated by all of this, failed Arts I in 1956, and lost his Commonwealth scholarship. Just as you did in 1953. His mother and siblings must think you’re a bad influence.

As you lope along Bondi Beach at dawn, you’re thinking about this, and how in 1957 the cosy trio of Jonjon, Hughes and you became a more complicated quartet. It happened like this.

It was Orientation Week at Sydney University. You were standing inside the Honi Soit flying saucer, which was a temporary stand in Science Road. A “fresher”, as 1st year university students are called, walked past. He stopped to talk. He looked a bit lost and nonplussed. But something about him – a raw energy – attracted you. So, you engaged in some repartee that seemed to dazzle him. You persuaded him to come into the Honi Soit office that week.

The new member of the quartet is a disciple – mmm – your disciple. It makes you uncomfortable. Hughes was never your disciple. He didn’t need you. But this new person does. He’s from a technical high school. His exposure to literature is limited. His name is Clive James.

Many years from now Robert Hughes will refer to this quartet of friends in his memoir Things I Didn’t Know  as “a groupuscule of wits whose mannerisms had to be imitated”. Clive will call you “Spencer” in his Unreliable Memoirs. He will admit blatantly: “I copied Spencer’s walk, talk and gestures. I copied the way he wrote.”

You don’t want to be imitated. You want to hide – behind the name of a cat.

As you lope along Bondi Beach at dawn you’re aware that Clive has borrowed your persona, the way you write, your love of cabaret. His drive and ambition alarm you. Recently you and Clive co-authored a truly brilliant revue script. About the Romanovs. They fascinate you. This script – “Rasputin; or Ten Days that Dimmed the Lights” – ends with Rasputin dying on stage from arsenic poisoning, as a fire is starting, a ball is beginning, and the ice-cream is melting upstairs.

But you’re not on stage now. You’re on Bondi Beach. Restless, as you often are. Foam is melting on the sand. It’s dawn. The sun is coming up – a red eye – when something strange catches your attention. There’s another red eye you notice – light red or perhaps you imagine it.

A girl is bathing in the surf. She has a pale straw hat, and she’s wearing white stockings and a white blouse, which billows green as it fills with water. Three friends are supporting her in the surf, and laughing. She is an albino. That’s why she’s surfing at sunrise – before the sun can damage her skin. It’s novel and slightly alarming for her. She splutters. The dazzle of foam around her seems empty. Yet she’s excited. As the sun’s yellow light spreads across the water, her friends lead her out of the waves, back up the beach. It’s becoming too bright for her. The reef, the sand and blue tide, your hands darkening as they absorb sunlight, all have colour. Only the girl has none.

Back in your Kings Cross flat that night, you can’t stop thinking about the albino girl – her alarm and rapture about the emptiness and beauty of the ocean. Her three laughing friends. Her lack of colour. Her fragility. You are drawn to her. She’s you, and a poem starts to form.

Albino Girl Bathing

The sunrise finds her light red eye

Her pale straw hat should hide.

She brings no colours to the sea

That fills her blouse with green.

Her white stocking kicks a rising wave

That lightens and runs back.

Her laughing friends who pull each sleeve

Dip three faces down and up.

She splutters. Empty dazzle stars

The space between the sky and her.

From her silver eyebrows streams

The water that they lead her from.

The sun spreads yellow on the brown reef,

The tan sand, the blue tide, my darkening hands.

I’ve pretended for too many paragraphs to be Chester walking along Bondi Beach. I’ll switch to my own voice.

Not long after he wrote “Albino Girl Bathing”, Chester left Australia. He stopped writing poetry. Another beach was to be important in his life. He lost his first novel to the incoming tide on a beach in Portugal. Only one chapter of The Pikers survives. Chapter 18, “The Mother of the Deceased”, published in Hermes (1960), is as dark as anything in Samuel Beckett. What the rest of the novel was like, we can only guess.

After Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974 Chester moved to Brazil. He became a translator for big business, fluent in Portuguese and English. His second wife was Portuguese. When the Brazilian economy collapsed, he sold his house in Brazil to pay his taxes and came back to Australia on the last day of 1999. Alone and, I suspect, emotionally exhausted. He had been away for almost 40 years.

His two famous friends – Hughes and James – had given up on him. But Katherine, who had now revealed her true sex to Chester, was faithful to the memory of those long ago days when they were students. They could be a duo again.

I met Chester briefly in the early 2000s. He told me his daughter was studying marine biology at James Cook University. He seemed proud of this. I next saw him at a reunion of the old Sydney Libertarian Push in early 2016. I asked how his daughter was. His reply: “She was murdered.” (I found out later this happened when Aniela went back to Brazil.) I asked about his poetry. I urged him to publish a book. We exchanged emails. He sent me 22 poems – a few of them well-crafted vers d’occasion written after his return to Australia. The publishers I contacted told me this was too few.

In early 2021 he died of prostate cancer, having been cared for by his partner Michael Aaronson. Chester had given up on publishing his writings. But not Katherine. After his death, she published his second novel It’s the Culture, an Evelyn Waugh style extravaganza about big business and corruption in Brazil.

She was planning to publish his poems. On Sunday, 15 January 2022 Katherine sent this email:

Dear Geoff,

Sorry to have been so silent but I’ve been sick; currently in the San Op next Wednesday, which I may not survive.

In that case, will you take back Chester’s book of poetry, please? Sorry to ask but needs must.

My daughter Pip is my contact . . . She’ll be in touch.

Hope I’ll be in contact myself after recovering.

Regards,

Kate

I emailed Katherine back next day, hoping “all goes well, and in case it doesn’t” I promised that I’d have Chester’s poems published.

Katherine died later that week. Pip and I spoke on the phone. Each weekend she was at her father’s house. She was yet to locate where Katherine had stored Chester’s poems – possibly on her main computer. Pip added – I could hear the emotion in her voice – “I was with Kate when she sent you the email.”  A few weeks later Kate’s main computer died in the La Niña rains. I was eventually able to assemble 40 Chester poems with help from Pip and Michael Aaronson.

Clive James and Robert Hughes both wrote wonderful memoirs. It’s a pity Chester didn’t. He toyed with the idea. George Molnar died a few months before Chester came back to Australia. George’s partner, Carlotta McIntosh, asked Chester to contribute to a festschrift George Molnar: Politics and Passions of a Sydney Philosopher. Chester’s surname was Graham. He now called himself “Chester Graham” – less pretentious than the one word nom-de-plume “Chester”. He wrote about his friendship with George in the mid-1950s, in prose that’s a mixture of cryptic crossword and Gertrude Stein:

Molnar György by Chester Graham December, 2001

George had a book of photographs of the massacres of the Jews. Although the photographs were blue, and the book in Hungarian, he made it all immediate for me. He had seen his aunt gunned down against the cellar wall of their house in Buda. “So you see Chester. Because.”

Buda was all around us. You could stand a spoon up in his mother’s coffee, the typewriter had double accents, Bartók was on the record player, and I got the dog’s name right after a while.

Not always Bartók. Sometimes we got who I liked then, Varèse. George would be up and down, switching discs of the Columbia History of Music. A few bars of something different, and he mightn’t have time to come to rest, but crouch standing, between up and down.

He liked to see Jonjon and me play the fool. I was supposed to be seventeen at the time, but nobody was taken in. George had been schooled by Horthy, Hitler, and Stalin. “Because you see, Chester. So.” Totalitarians have to have it all; your sex, your death, your living. You are to be their product. There are no better teachers of the value of clowning. Put Octandre on again. Let’s hear it right through this time.

Our attitude paid off at Sydney University. George submitted his term paper. On utopias, I imagine. Utopias were on our minds in 1953. The Philosophy academic thanked him, but found it short weight. Jonjon and I recast it. In what would later become a rigorous linguistics tradition, we rewrote phrases:

 and à Added to this is the fact that

 but à It might, however, on the other hand, be argued

 if à Should, accordingly, the hypothesis be pertinent that.

This was heady. It went beyond schoolchildren’s jokey translations. It embraced translation:

relevant to the human condition à relevant to the human condition (La Condition Humaine).

There is a verb in Hungarian that means “to take the cabbage out of”. We reversed the process, to the glee of George’s academic. He praised the term paper, now with added fibre.

When I rented my first room at the Cross, I spent all my money on paperbacks, to fill the width under the window. To show George. No record player, but a radio and cigarettes and booze. “So, Chester. So many books. Mmm. All fiction.” Fiction sounded Fixion. He lent me Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “Can I trust it, George?” “The references, yes. The references are sound.”

The Philosophy that he taught may not have been sound; Philosophy is not sound the way that references can be, the way that Bartók is. I would trust it to be light on cabbage, though. Because.George never actually got to pronounce the word Because. You heard it as Beak Hose. I saw, though. Mmm. So.

Clive James once warned me in an email not to write a memoir. He said they’d caused him no end of trouble. His unforgettable Unreliable Memoirs is at its most vivid when writing about Chester or “Spencer”.

Here is how Clive introduces Chester. He is describing the temporary Honi Soit stand called the Flying Saucer, which was set up in Science Road during his first week of university (Orientation Week):

. . . it was crammed with these exotic creatures, the like of which I had never seen . . . I had turned up in my school blazer, but in order to indicate that I was a man of parts I had pinned my Presbyterian Fellowship badge to the lapel, alongside the Boys’ Brigade badge in my buttonhole . . .

Clive’s rough brio (despite his Christian indicia) seems to have immediately attracted Chester, as he later attracted many women. Chester welcomes Clive with a line of passive aggressive patter:

“My God . . . it’s a Christian! Come and work for honi soit. We need a broad spectrum of opinion. You could offset the influence of Wanda here. She’s a witch.. . .

Chester signs Clive up to join the Honi Soit staff next day, then makes oxymoronic remarks about his jacket:

“Those badges are distorting the shape of what could be a perfectly good jacket, if it were a different colour and cut.”

Chester hands Clive a copy of Honi Soit. Clive finds a poem by Chester in it – about Rimbaud’s cigar. Although the existence of such a poem is “unreliable”, Clive describes more reliably his reaction:

The vividness of the language was extraordinary. Even when crammed into symmetrical verse forms every sentence sounded like speech. I can’t say that my future course was set there and then, but neither can I say that it wasn’t. I was so excited that my badges rattled. There were sparks coming off my lapel.

Next day in the Honi Soit office Clive listens to chitchat between “Spencer” (who is Chester) and “Keith Cameron” (John, later Katherine Cummings):

As they worked, Cameron and Spencer kept up an exchange of allusive wit that I found at once daunting and exhilarating. Spencer called something Firbankian. Who, what or where was Firbankian? I was lost, yet not in the usual way of feeling that I ought to be somewhere else. Somehow, I knew that I was in exactly the right spot.

Unreliable Memoirs describes (again unreliably) the first University Revue Clive attended. Spencer and Cameron were in charge and wrote all the scripts. “The décor by Huggins” (Robert Hughes) was “brilliant” – when you could actually see it. Spencer’s love of ultraviolet lighting and mist from dry ice didn’t add to its visibility. There were two sketches about Virginia Woolf and a third may have been about Gertrude Stein. A willowy girl wearing a gown of shaving mirrors seemed disappointed that a torch song had not been written for her, and instead had to read a poem by John Crowe Ransom while “Spencer stood on one leg in the background, softly tapping a gong.” (The reading of a poem by Ransom, the elegant, academic formalist from Tennessee, is truly bizarre – e. e. cummings yes, but Ransom?)

Unreliable Memoirs summarises (more reliably) Clive’s first exposure to high culture:

I suppose that first year of university was just about the most ridiculous phase of my life. It was love again, of course, but this time I was in love with all of them. I copied Spencer’s walk, talk and gestures. I copied the way he wrote. I copied the way Keith Cameron read . . .

Cameron’s way of reading directed Clive back to a more traditional mainstream. As a lifelong fan of traditional jazz, Clive seems never to have shared Chester’s interest in avant-garde composers such as Varèse. Or the avant-garde in general. He became uncomfortable with some aspects of Chester:

Spencer lost in the toils of a fully bisexual love life and a chronic deficiency of funds, hardly ever read anything except science fiction. I soon realised that his pronunciamentos on literature in general were based on the most evanescent acquaintance with its individual products.

It seems most of all, Clive was comfortable with Huggins (Hughes). Huggins smoked cigarettes “two feet long” and “had a face so handsome it was like a cartoon, his hair blond and abundant”. Clive admired “his grace, ease, creative fertility and . . . beautiful girlfriends”. Clive’s combination of serious literary ability and showmanship is unusual. This basic formula came from Chester. Clive took it and made it an international brand.

You will recall that in Unreliable Memoirs Clive James claims that in his first week of university he read an exciting poem by “Spencer” (who is Chester) about Rimbaud’s cigar. The Honi Soit for March 4, 1957 – Clive’s first week at Sydney University, and mine as well – has a confusing science fiction story by Chester, “The Electronic Lavatory”, about a John Pilgrim, with an illustration by Robert Hughes showing Pilgrim standing in what seems to be a dunny hole and threatened by attacking hands rising out of dunny holes.

There is no poem about Rimbaud’s cigar. But Clive James’s reference to Rimbaud was spot on. After Rimbaud left France to become a businessman in the Middle East, he never wrote another poem. In a similar way, aged about 25, Chester stopped writing poetry – except for some vers d’occasion late in his life.

“Albino Girl Bathing” is one of the great Imagist poems in our language, as well as being profoundly moving at a human level. Take the first unrhymed couplet:

The sunrise finds her light red eye

Her pale straw hat should hide.

These two lines have a breathtaking concision. It’s implicit that the sun is also a red eye – ferocious and intense – while the girl’s eye is light red. And her hat is flimsy protection. The couplets which follow are just as good.

St Ignatius had been a soldier. As well as giving boys an outstanding literary education, the Jesuits gave them a fighting creed predicated on absolute certainty. It was crippling for sensitive boys if they lost that certainty. Chester was one of those boys. He seems to have been interested in Bishop Berkeley who died in 1753. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: “In the Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley laments the doubt and uncertainty found in philosophical discussions.”

One of Chester’s most remarkable poems is called “Cogito Ergo Sit”. Descartes is famous for the statement “Cogito Ergo Sum” – “I think therefore I am.” Chester’s title “Cogito Ergo Sit” means “I think therefore it should be”. “Sit” is the third person singular subjunctive of “esse” meaning “to be”. Chester’s title also alludes, I’m sure, to Rodin’s famous sitting thinker.

“Cogito Ergo Sit” is written in a vaudeville metre and could have been sung by Marlene Dietrich in a Berlin night-club in the early 1930s. Dietrich would have known about Descartes, but possibly not Bishop Berkeley.

Cogito Ergo Sit

Certain is a word I like

I’d like to get the rights of

Space is a place to put the Jews

Time, something Eliot writes of.

Talk of planets in their courses

Inexorable forces

Or a million laws of motion

Idle notions, wasted breath.

You can not bring it back for me

That existential certainty

The universe that ceased to be

At Bishop Berkeley’s death.

Another poem in which Chester interrogates his Christian heritage is “Provincial Report”.

Provincial Report

From Pilate, to Caesar :- If it please Your

Omnipotent Godhead

There’s an impenitent hothead

Questioning You. The native king

Won’t do anything but pass the buck

Just like a Jew.

Here I am in the East with a legion or two

In a palace of pink mud among the subject Hebrew.

An oriental people, luxurious and cruel

With customs such as I and You

Wouldn’t know the half of: punishments for minor crime

Barbaric and behind the times

As the Tarquin never knew.

Through our desert house the wind blows in and out

Sand is swept from the hallways hourly.

Native women entertain with primitive dancing

And in reward demand their lovers’ heads.

At night we turn in our alien beds

With the heat, and the hopeless chanting.

The religious lead sad parades of heavy veiled ladies

Children from the age of three are trained to weep

The tears of mourners are all there is to lay the dust

And only the dead get any sleep.

My maniple, warmed by ancient winds

Hangs unused on my soiled sleeve

Useless to cool or clean a distressed brow

The weariest of foreheads.

Yet no one remembers a Roman governor

But for what he omits to do.

Begging Your pardon, by Your leave

What do I do with this Jew?

This marvellous poem inspired a hundred or so poems I wrote through Roman voices, including a whole book Nero’s Poems. Like Clive, I owe Chester an incalculable debt.

A Chester poem that puzzled me for a long time was his strangely compelling “Evening Below”. I simply could not understand it. Rereading some of his emails provided a clue. He wrote about how he imagined his dead friends, one of them being George Molnar, the Holocaust survivor, looking down on him and judging what he did.

“Evening Below” seems to be addressed to dead friends. They’re looking down on the evening below, a street after rain and people retreating in overcoats.

Evening Below

Evening below

Do you like it now?

Gravely know

Overcoats go.

People below

Do you care, at all?

Pavement washed

And policemen slow.

Strangers around

Do you like it yet?

Lamp posts lose

Nothing below.

So overcoats hunch

Over the slow street

Retreating below

Do you like it now?

Meaning is expressed through omissions – a poetic shorthand. Looking down from a great height, the dead “gravely know”. They see people below. Orderly in overcoats.  The pavement washed. Policemen slow. The people are “strangers”. The “lamp posts lose”. They light “nothing below”. People “hunch”. “Retreating”. Their lives meaningless. But long. “Over the slow street”. The poet asks the dead: “Do you care, at all?” “Do you like it yet?” Twice he asks: “Do you like it now?” No answer.