Marriage, Melbourne And The Middle Class – Kate Legge

Issue 2 | 2 June 2009

Kate Legge is a multi award winning journalist who has covered federal politics out of Canberra and US presidential elections in Washington DC. She now writes on social affairs for The Australian.  Her first novel, The Unexpected Elements of Love, (2006) was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. With the publication of her second novel The Marriage Club, Kate Legge addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 2 June 2009.

MARRIAGE, MELBOURNE AND THE MIDDLE CLASS

KATE LEGGE

When Anne Henderson’s email arrived promoting tonight’s topic – what’s wrong with modern marriage, Melbourne and the middle class – one of my colleagues immediately shot back his riposte: Everyone knows what’s wrong with Melbourne … we need a ruckman and a full forward.

If, as Louis Nowra wrote at the weekend, Sydney is having a nervous breakdown, Melbourne’s been in therapy for years. Any city that has as it’s most famous export a man dressed as a woman is a strange place indeed.

As for the problems of modern marriage you need look no further than the made-for-television deathbed saga of cardboard box magnate Richard Pratt. If you think of Melbourne as the capital of style and sophistication, Jeanne Pratt’s thin-lipped stoicism reminds me of a well cut gaberdine suit while her Sydney rival, Shari Lee Hitchcock conjures up synthetic, pastel, fluttering in the breeze. Jeanne stood firm. No public dummy spit. She gracefully found a way of accommodating her late husband’s extra-nuptial child. Life, or death, carried on. School fees will be paid. The blue stone foundations of Pratt’s philanthropy, his position in society, trembled, momentarily. The really serious business of the ACCC investigation was a mere sideshow to the spectacle of his private life.

But you can’t call the Pratts middle-class. Despite the bloated expansion of this demographic mid-riff, no-one I know has a house the size of Raheen. Not even the Kremmers, the couple at the centre of my second novel, The Marriage Club.

I’m not going to talk tonight about my own middle class marriage because my husband’s declared a fatwa on the subject. However, if I hadn’t married my husband I wouldn’t have written this novel. Living in a house where the hallway sometimes seems like the fairway of the Royal Sydney Golf Club and the luck required as you enter a room unannounced, narrowly missing the head of a five ion as it swings through the air gave me the glimmer of an idea.

My husband’s rogue indoor swing, which in one house we were renting would set the glass pendants in a ceiling chandelier tinkling wildly, set me thinking. I checked to see whether the golf club had featured in any prior domestic homicides, or manslaughter cases, or perhaps an attack of golf rage as a pair tee-ed off at the 13^th hole, but the only deaths involving a golf club had occurred with the intervention of lightening.  So I had the makings of a plot, and plots can be a writer’s curse.

American author Anne Tyler says every time she delivers a new manuscript her publisher asks: Does anything happen in this book? Well things do happen in The Marriage Club. I think of the story as a domestic thriller and as the plot unravels, so do the relationships within a tight circle of women who belong to a book club, in particular the secret lives of one couple, Leith and George Kremmer, come undone.  I don’t want to spoil the happenings for any potential readers but believe it or not I won’t be giving everything away to reveal that George kills his wife Leith with his golf club. That still leaves open the question of his intent and many other mysteries besides.

Fiction springs from different places; a memory, an overheard conversation, a scene that lingers in the mind, a fear, a preoccupation, a single experience, or as in the case of this book, multiple sources that pluck away at the sinews of being until you have to play them on to the page. One of the prompts came from my exposure to a Melbourne middle class marriage that went horribly wrong. In 2003 former businessman Jamie Ramadge murdered his wife Julie in the kitchen of their Balwyn home. The city was glued to the court case.

I was as fascinated as the next gossip. Much of what we knew or thought we knew, holds true to everything Barry Humphries loved to parody about Melbourne’s white, Anglo Saxon Protestant pretensions. Jamie Ramadge lured his estranged wife Julie back to their English Tudor style house to look at the renovations he was ploughing ahead with. They argued, and then he killed her. After burying her body in the Kinglake National Park he drove back to Melbourne, arriving punctually for his 3pm appointment to choose a slab of granite for the kitchen bench. Wealth and respectability made this tragedy sizzle. We only have his account of what happened between them but tongues wagged as if we knew the both of them intimately.

I’ve always been fascinated by relationships. The most crimson of these are family ties. Playwright Sam Shepherd was asked once why he always writes about family. “What else is there?” he replied.

In my journalism I’ve been drawn to the fraught precincts of the Family Court where couples haggle over money, property, but mostly flesh and blood, often with spectacularly tragic results. Because I have chronicled several of these dramas, I frequently get calls from husbands or wives reporting more trivial disputes as if their particular stalemate is news, headlined presumably with the words: “Husband disputes wife’s version of events”.

I have lived and worked at a time when private lives have become central to public discourse. We do not yet have cameras mounted on brackets in people’s bedrooms but the urge to tell and talk about what goes on there has been gathering an unstoppable momentum for the past 20 years. I left Canberra in the 1980s when no journalist would have dared stray too far into Bob Hawke’s private life and I arrived in Washington D.C when the media was gorging on Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart’s shenanigans aboard a pleasure craft called Monkey Business.

In a century when the geography of the world can be Google mapped, we have turned to the frontiers of psychology and character, the topography of the mind and the heart. Despite a welter of privacy legislation, private lives have never been so public.  But all this talk, all this white noise, doesn’t necessarily make us any wiser to the truth, and this is the nub of my book.

In Barak Obama’s memoir Dreams of My Father he travels to Kenya to meet his African relatives and they sit around listening to an elderly grandmother recount the story of his grandfather’s choice of bride in a society where marriages were arranged by male elders. Once a groom pays a dowry, the chosen woman must not seem too eager. The bride pretends to refuse him. This was part of the ritual.

Obama’s cousin wonders whether the newly weds slept together on the first night and the elderly woman replied: “No-one knew what went on in a man’s hut.”  One of the younger members of the audience asked why women put up with it. The grandmother said: “If one is a fish, one does not try to fly – one swims with other fish. One only knows what one knows. Perhaps if I were young today I would not have accepted these things. Perhaps I would only care about my feelings, and falling in love. But that’s not the world I was raised in.”

We are all for the most part, creatures of the customs and fashions adopted by the society we live in and the families that nurture us. The marriages in my novel were made 30 years ago. The women were not dragged to a hut by their hair after the men made good on offers of livestock. Nonetheless some of these partners struck bargains that were influenced by the world they lived in. No-one more so than the character of George Kremmer, who had to survive in a conservative family and succeed in his father’s profession. Family law with its gable of respectability on the frontier of social change offered him a halfway house. His choice of speciality was a limp slap at his father Sir Arthur Kremmer, a High Court judge, who thought the new jurisdiction soft and squishy beside the ramrod discipline of commercial or constitutional practice.

We meet George Kremmer in his chambers, practising his short game with his favourite putter before he gowns up to take his seat on the bench, where this Monday morning he’s presiding over an appeal by a young father who wants to spend more time with his daughter. We observe George trying to peer inside the heart and the head of this 28 year old man, who is around the same age as George’s and Leith’s youngest son. Misfortune has shaped the young petitioner. He’s been rattled by an absent father, a deceased mother, patchy experience of family, and his story is entwined with the central narrative as a reminder of why George and Leith stuck together through the thinnest of times.

If you’ve seen my book, or read reviews, you might be wondering whether we are talking about one and the same. Isn’t The Marriage Club about the relationships of married women? Isn’t it exceptionally pink, the colour of Chick Lit?  Well yes it is. But this is a tale of misunderstood men. It surveys the interior of one man who erected a wall between his two selves much as Germany was once divided between East and West.

George Kremmer took Leith Davies to be his wife in a conservative Melbourne when marriage offered a sanctuary, a hearth, a home, a place where one could park behind a substantial grey stone fence in a solid suburb. He stuck with convention at that fork in his road.

People get married for the oddest reasons. They marry their mothers, they marry their fathers, they marry for security, upward mobility, they marry on the rebound, or because all their friends are getting married. Once I interviewed a woman who told me she married because her mother hated her boyfriend. Barry Humphries thinks he chose his first wife because he hadn’t wanted to become a perpetual undergraduate. “This may have been why I decided to get married, although it would be wrong to describe this impetuous and dramatic event as a decision since at the time I did not feel as though I had much of a say in it. It was all rather sudden and unfair on both parties but it did enable me to leave home,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Marriages are rarely what they seem. Most of us behave ourselves in public. We edit appearances for our friends and family, and random strangers, staying an argument while we collect a handful of coins for the Red Shield appeal door knocker who has interrupted an unholy conflagration on a Sunday afternoon. In the privacy of our home, within the intimate space of shared bedrooms, the opportunity for deceit and cover-up enables extraordinary concealment. Extra-marital children, affairs, addictions to gambling, drugs, internet porn, a first wife, bisexuality, mental illness – you can be ambushed anytime.

When Leith dies suddenly, her secrets lie exposed. Left alone in the Victorian mansion that George shared with his wife and their two sons, now living interstate, he begins to conduct his own post-mortem, searching for objects his wife treasured, and through their absence he pieces together her state of mind and shrivelled heart. Obama’s grandmother is right. No-one knows what goes on inside a marriage, not even those living it.

In the May edition of the Australian Book Review, Rosaleen Love, the wife of the late literature professor, Harold Love, unpicks the secrets he took with him to the grave, secrets she stumbled across during the last weeks of his life as she sat caring for the man she’d been married to for over 30 years. His death from cancer was painful and slow, not sudden like Leith’s. Although he had time to confess, he didn’t. As he lay in palliative care, Rosaleen became aware of visits from a teenage boy, strikingly like her husband.

Her essay, written after his death, describes being hit by the thought that: “I do not know the man who is my husband. I may have known the man he once was, perhaps, but I do not know the man he has become…” So she goes on a quest, inside the walls of her house, searching for someone who has gone and will never come back. She makes clever use of her husband’s library, notably writings by Montaigne a French philosopher who valued reparation over the high price of keeping secrets. She writes:

I embarked on a treasure hunt finding first one thing and then another. The final discovery marks the end of the chase and the beginning of something new. By the time I made it I knew what I was seeing. On top of a row of tall books, packed tightly so their tops nearly reached the shelf above, I found a sheet of A4 paper slid in, invisible to the casual glance. Two photos were printed on it, rather fuzzily; two people posed in such a way to show their likeness. One is Harold, the other is his extra-nuptial son….this child was kept hidden from our family. He was a clandestine child.

Her postscript returns to the words of Montaigne who described secrets, as diseases of the soul. “Those who hide their vice from others,” he wrote, “ordinarily hide it from themselves.”

Rosa is an acquaintance of mine. We walk our dogs in the same park. She’s older than me. Her children are married. She’d not told me this story until she’d read The Marriage Club, where the experience of George, rifling through Leith’s possessions, mirrored her own. Rosa is having the last word on her husband’s deceit. That is her revenge or perhaps her right.

In America, lawyer and author Elizabeth Edwards is promoting her new book Resilience which traverses her marriage to former Democratic high flyer John Edwards, whose adultery was exposed on the eve of his bid for the White House. She says she was motivated by the desire to leave her version of the truth for their children. She is dying from cancer. The shadow of death affords an opportunity to make peace.

British laureate, Ted Hughes, took this path when he published a lifetime’s poems about his wife Sylvia Plath as he went to the grave, answering everyone who’d filled in the gaps for themselves. His collection, Birthday Letters, each poem grimly wrought in his wife’s memory, was another source for my interest in the public, private spheres, how we shape perceptions and how complicated the truth of relationships can be. Leith’s book club meets to discuss Hughes’ poems in the opening chapters of The Marriage Club.

Leith has done her research, reading a volume of letters Sylvia had penned to her mother, chronicling her rapture for Ted, their travels, their mutual struggle for literary success, her desperation near the end. She’s struck by the distance between Sylvia’s chatty accounting of their marriage and the bitterness of Hughes’ recall. In July 1956, Sylvia wrote to her mother of how she’d fallen for Spain:

“If only you could see me now, sitting in halter and shorts seven stories high above the modern tooting city of Madrid on our large, private balcony with gay blue and yellow tiles on the floor, pots of geraniums and ivy….Anyway, I have never felt so native to a country as I do to Spain.”

His poem about their sojourn:

“You Hated Spain. Spain frightened you. Spain

Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light, The oiled anchovy faces, the African

Black edges to everything, frightened you. Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.”

Penguin, my publishers, asked the Hughes estate for permission to quote from Hughes’ collection but the executor refused permission on the grounds that my novel told the story of a man who’d murdered his wife.

So much has been written by Hughes and Plath, and about them, but are we any wiser as to what went on between them? Here was a natural topic for Leith’s book club to savour on the night of her death. Did Hughes kill his wife? Did they love each other? Marion, who belongs to Leith’s circle, points to the poem Hughes wrote 10 years after his wife’s death as he sat reading the pages of Plath’s diary, “It is only a story,” he concludes. “Your story. My story.” The discussion between the women throws into relief the assumptions, presumptions, flimsy impressions that influence their view of George’s culpability in the following days as each character pieces together the crime on their doorstep.

One reviewer ticked me off for using the cliché of a book club as a means of binding my female characters together. Another lamented that in Leggeland, kettles are boiled, cups of tea made, the quotidian details of life are unfurled. Book clubs are a peculiarly Melbourne phenomenon. It’s cold, we read lot.

Most of the new publishing houses are based in this city. During post war years, the Council for Adult Education used to box up books and send them out by rail to provincial Victorian towns. In an age of virtual chat rooms, the idea of people meeting face to face in each others homes to discuss words on a printed page has the patina of a Quaker prayer meeting. I love attending book clubs as an author, hearing my characters come alive as if they might walk into the room at any moment, puzzling over motivation. The Marriage Club has stirred revelations, like the child hidden by Harold Love. There is talk too of discontent in relationships. One woman ventured that she guessed there’d be no point in writing about happy marriages.

We are drawn to other people’s emotional entanglements as we try and make sense of our own. Women talk. It is both unscientific and a sweeping generalisation but nonetheless true women talk in a way that men do not. One of my friends was cleaning up a cupboard recently where she found caches of letters from her first husband. We poured over their contents, the language – words conceived in love with darker resonances hinting at what was to come.

Women confide. Bombshells may be dropped in a quick conversation to arrange a movie date. Snippets are released into the air like dandelion clocks as we stand watching our children play sport, or as we lean over the hand basins in the ladies during interval. Once a complete stranger sitting next to me in the theatre told me the story of her marriage as we waited for the lights to dim. I’m always amazed by what I hear, often forgetting to remind myself that this is one side only, a notoriously unreliable guide, and if there was ever an arena where the two participants can disagree diametrically over who said what or the sequence of events as well as who left the butter out all night on the kitchen bench it’s a couple who live together.

Journalism schools you in sifting through the different recollections of eye witnesses, often contradictory, their viewpoints dependent on proximity, frame of mind, the opinions brought to bear. When Melbourne solicitor Brendan Keilar was shot by a violent man abusing his girlfriend at a city intersection, the descriptions of what happened by those who watched the shooting unfold from a tram window, an office block, a street kerb, are all a jumble. Some say Keilar was deliberate, intent on tackling the gunman, others insist he had just turned to look at the commotion like everyone else, an unfortunate bystander on whom we bestowed the laurel of hero to make sense of his death.

Under suspicion after Leith’s death, George tells the detective investigating the case, that the truth is a wily slip of prey neither of them could wrestle to the ground even if she were here to help them.  What would she choose to say?

Last year, the Australian writer Blanche D’Alpuget revealed how she and Bob Hawke had kept their affair secret while she was writing his biography, a book that persuaded many kingmakers of his substance. Her portrait, published over 20 years ago, outed his drinking which he’d dealt with, but glossed over the intimate details of his adultery, finessing the truth skilfully as she did the rounds promoting her picture of a man on the cusp of political success.

In 2008 she furnished another view of what ostensibly happened between them. She wrote how Hawke had fretted that divorce could cost Labor at least 3 per cent as they’d lain in bed together before his bid for the Prime Ministership. As a result of this calculation he stuck with his wife, Hazel. Towards the end of his reign Bob reignited his liaison with Blanche under the cover of loyal friends and courtiers. In relaunching a writing career that had fallen quiet since marrying Hawke, D’Alpuget decided to reveal all. But how truthful has she been in her essay On Longing? What has she left out this time?

His side, her side, his story, her story: rich pickings for a novelist. We craft our profiles for public consumption, from Facebook to book club, we nip and tuck. When I was writing the acknowledgements to this book I thanked my husband and our children for binding us together. My father read these lines and harrumphed: “Sounds like your marriage is on the rocks. You better change that.” So I did. Instead, I thanked my husband, who I said, “was still swinging his golf club in the hall way, and one day might just get lucky.” Next my publisher at Penguin rang. “I’m a bit worried about the reference to your husband. It looks like your marriage is wobbly.” I refused to buckle. Black humour has sustained us; it’s part of our schtick.

The other day I heard the thud of his club as I entered the hall way. Life better not imitate fiction, I joked. He retorted wryly that my death from his wayward golf club might at least send book sales rocketing upwards, royalties which he would inherit. Twice lucky in love! I told him. That’s too much to ask.