Older And Wiser – Remembering Frank Devine – Miranda Devine

Growing old is an aspect of human experience only thinly covered in literature. Frank Devine was a columnist and long-time newspaper man for News Limited. When Frank reached 70, he decided to write all about it – about being home alone when his wife was hospitalised, on being a grandparent, long-term marriage and so on. His columns have now been published by Quadrant as a book – Older and Wiser (2009). Miranda Devine, Frank’s daughter, is a columnist with Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald. On Tuesday, 16 February Miranda Devine addressed The Sydney Institute and looked back on her father, and shared some of her memories of his world and his views.

OLDER AND WISER – REMEMBERING FRANK DEVINE

Miranda Devine

This is a tough gig and, to be honest, awkwardly personal, to talk about a beloved father who died just seven months ago, and who was such a remarkable and charismatic person who has left a great hole in the lives of those who loved him. But Anne assured me we would sell lots of copies of his book, Older and Wiser. So in a ruthless, hardnosed spirit of enterprise that would have made him proud, I took up the Henderson challenge. And here I am.

We are lucky my father Frank Devine was a writer and such a good writer because he really does live on in his words. When we read his books and articles and letters, we can hear his voice, laugh at his humour and be moved by his insights. Words were his gift, his escape, his pleasure and his solace.

As a brilliantly clever boy in the New Zealand country town of Blenheim, which he once described as “hopelessly circumscribing”, he used to read John O’Hara novels he borrowed from the library, and dream of an exciting world out there he couldn’t wait to be part of. He was a precocious reader, reading fluently from the age of four. The nuns thought he was so clever he might be a priest and so he used to get a lot of special tuition from them, which he said was pleasant and useful. By 10 or 11 he said that reading had made him “obsessively excited by the outside world”. America was the most “dazzling wonderful place” for him, he said. Books and printed words were always a part of his life, from his earliest memory. By the age of 10, he had decided he wanted to be a writer and really never considered anything else, apart from, fleetingly, acting. In a video interview made by his friend Bill McCartney four years ago for a business Bill has recording people’s life stories, he talked about what journalism meant to him:

I have a knack. It’s a drudge thing because I’m not a fast or easy writer … But the idea you can amuse a few hundred or a few thousand complete strangers or tell them things they don’t know or twist their minds in some small way is very exciting. To have something you enjoy doing and know you’re good at affect other people is a great adventure; it never ceases to be an excitement.

Frank started writing for his local newspaper the Marlborough express as soon as he finished school. He stopped in Australia on his way to the rest of the world and met my mother Jacqueline Magee, a fellow journalist on the West Australian. They embarked on their 50-year marriage just as his career took him where he had always dreamed of going.

Journalism took him to New York in the early 1960s where he recorded history in the making, as a foreign correspondent for the Herald and Weekly Times. The civil rights movement he regarded as the greatest assignment of his career. Next were six years in Tokyo, a stint in Sydney, as editor of The Readers Digest, back to New York again, to Chappaqua and the last heroic days of empire at the Digest. And then, in his 50s and as enthusiastic and energetic as ever, to a new career as a daily newspaper editor for Rupert Murdoch in Chicago and New York. Then it was back to Australia to edit The Australian, an appointment cut short after 15 months by a sacking he took in his stride as he did every setback.

Frank wrote about his sacking in his book Older and Wiser published by Quadrant books last year, only a few month after his death, in a chapter titled: “That pest the editor”:

One of the enduring mysteries of Australian journalism – although the number of memories in which it endures is not large – is why I was fired in December 1989 as editor of the Australian after less than 15 months on the job.

He clears up the mystery in the book.

Dad once said his Catholic faith gave him a great bolstering of confidence by accepting that “shit happens” in life. You expect it, so you deal with it. The expectation of an imperfect world on earth and a perfect world in the future, which I believe, is part of my Catholic shaping. Also, a faith in absolutes, that there is such a thing as absolute truth, absolute right, absolute wrong, with all the nuances that come with that. His faith he described as the “essence of my life. It was never not there”.

Dad was a wonderful father, always devoting Saturdays to his three daughters when we were growing up. He’d take us to movies and when we were younger and new to Sydney; he’d take us down to Double Bay to browse in a bookstore. Then we’d buy hamburgers and chips and cokes, which our mother would not have allowed, and go to Centennial Park to picnic under a tree and read our books.

Books are part of a lot of my memories of my father. One of my earliest is from New York’s Flushing Meadow park, when I must have been about two years old, sitting on the grass next to a duck pond, with my father and mother stretched out nearby in the sun, reading their books.

Our family moved a lot, dropping daughters off in various cities along the way, from New York to London, to Tokyo, to Perth, to Sydney, to New York, to Chicago, back to New York and finally to Sydney. Every time we moved it was the books that were the logistical challenge. They had to be culled and packed and the bookcases dismantled and room to be found at the other end. House hunting was always done with books in mind.

One of my sisters once spent a week sorting all the books in the house out alphabetically and by theme, with neat little stickers telling you where you were. Daddy didn’t say anything negative about this labour of love, but he never put the books where they were supposed to go and they soon resumed a random order. But for someone with an imperfect sense of direction, he had the knack of being able to locate a book in any room of the house. He had a perfect real time map of all our books in his head. And he could locate a passage or a quote remarkably quickly in any one of them.

Another early book-related memory was when my younger sister Ros was born in Tokyo, when I was five. My mother was in hospital for a few days with the new baby and, as he did with most things, Daddy turned our fending for ourselves into a festive event. Each night we would sit down to a candlelit dinner of caviar and toast and champagne for him, coke for me, and companionably read our books.

He was an early adopter of technology, despite being very right brained. He embraced email early on, firing off witty two-line missives to friends around the world every day, all in lower case. I miss his emailed one line critiques of my columns, always generous. The worst he would say is solid. He would always find the best in us. He did the same with each of his six grandchildren, finding in each one a special thing to share, and would divine unique and exceptional qualities in each which he would share at lunch with exasperated friends like Paddy McGuinness.

He taught my 10-year son Frank how to cook barramundi on a BBQ, uncork a bottle of wine and play poker. I once arrived after work to pick him up and found the two of them playing a high stakes hand with $500 in cash spread on the table between them.

A mad cricket tragic, with a bookcase full of dog eared Wisdens, his only success at passing on the bug was with my 14 year old son, Tom, with whom he spent hours in the back yard on bowling practice and whom he once took to all five days of the Ashes at the SCG.

When Tom became fed up with English classes in which he was being told to add adjectives to his sentences, my father urged him to read Shakespeare, specifically Henry’s speech on the night before the battle of Agincourt in Henry V and Prospero’s final speech in The Tempest and “consider what marvellous eloquence can be achieved with minimal use of qualifiers”.

He emailed the concluding lines of the Agincourt speech, with the observation that they contained just two adjectives:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers./ For he today that sheds his blood with me/ shall be my brother, be he ne’er so vile,/this day shall gentle his condition,/ and gentlemen of England now abed /shall think themselves accursed /that they were not here/ and hold their manhood cheap while any speaks/ that fought with us upon St  Crispin’s day…

He told me he put the St Crispin’s day speech on the notice board of the New York Post newsroom when it looked as if the paper might fold and job offers were being made to its better operators. Only one bailed out, he said proudly.

I don’t think Frank ever wrote a trivial thing. Every word was crafted. When we were going though some of my father’s papers from his time in Tokyo, we found a copy of the minutes he wrote for the 5 October 1967 board meeting of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. While they were a concise and informative record of the times, they also build up, subtly and without you realising, into a comedic tour de force. You begin smiling about half way through, when the subject of children being allowed in the club arose.

A Adams suggested that string quartet … be engaged for dancing once a month and that a place be set aside in the club for members to bring their children on Sunday evenings.

D Conde recalled that regular members had children.

J Cohn declared himself opposed to children. He said a step such as that proposed by Mr Adams would turn the place into an American Club.

F Devine said that a club didn’t become an American Club just because it let children in. Many people who were not Americans had children.

In the club history, “Foreign Correspondents in Japan”, my father was remembered as “entirely a cool-headed man”. He loved Tokyo but America was always boundlessly exciting to him.

He wrote about his early curiosity in his book Older and Wiser:

One morning when I was 12, my father woke me shortly after daybreak to tell me that the American president Franklin Roosevelt had died. My eyes stayed open long enough to note tear stains on my father’s cheeks before I fell effortlessly back to sleep. However, my father’s distress over the death of a politician at the far ends of the earth may have subliminally reorganised my brain while I slept. I awoke with an intense curiosity about American politics…

Covering the American civil rights movement, as a foreign correspondent in New York in the early 1960s my father thought was the greatest assignment of his life. He wrote a piece recalling those days for the Chicago Sun Times in 1986 while he was editor:

Martin Luther King Jr. was a wily and political man, like his exemplar, Mohandas K. Gandhi. And, like the mahatma, who won freedom for India, King had the capacity to be inspired by people who followed him and this, on occasion, enabled him to transcend politics. The cunning politician and the inspired leader were both in evidence during King’s confrontation with Eugene “Bull” Connor, police chief of Birmingham, Alabama, in the late spring of 1963.

A cynical and egotistical man, Connor was part of a lame-duck city administration with only a few weeks of its term to run. The local black community believed it could negotiate with the incoming administration for an end to Birmingham’s iniquitous Jim Crow regulations and customs.

King came to town, however, and persuaded Birmingham’s blacks to take to the street in nonviolent protest against segregation – in effect, to step up the pressure in a battle a number of local blacks felt they had already won.

Was King deliberately seeking to provoke white extremists, in particular the impulsive and theatrical Connor? Many observers thought so.

In any case, Connor responded with a flourish. His high-pressure hoses knocking down well-dressed black men and women and his snarling police dogs menacing them are among the most enduring images of the ’60s.

I think Connor knew he was being finessed, but the realization just made him more ornery. He took to holding impromptu press conferences each afternoon in Kelly Ingram Park, on the edge of Birmingham’s downtown black quarter, barking out racist nonsense in a perverse parody of redneck bigotry.

Thus, “Bull” Connor became America’s arch-villain and King a super-hero. Before Birmingham, King had a number of rivals for leadership of the black civil rights movement. After Birmingham, he was its leader supreme.

But it was the people King led who made the clash more than an exercise in political manipulation and inspired King to a moment of high drama.

These black men and women of Birmingham came to each frightening encounter with fire hoses and dogs in a spirit of . . . gift-bearing. That is something hard to explain in these less-giving ’80s, but, as a young reporter in the early ’60s, it seemed to me that black Americans were not so much demanding rights as offering their country, in proof of their trust in it, a gift of a rich and special culture. In effect, they were saying: Until now our lives have been hidden from you. But look at how much we have to offer.

He writes of the “a terrible and marvellous thing” King did some time later when:

Very deliberately, he stepped into the street and began to walk toward the armed troopers.”

Neither he nor his followers showed the slightest fear as they advanced toward the barricade and the observer on the sidelines found himself both stirred by their courage and fearful that a calamity was in the making. This march was not against fire hoses, but against guns.

A tubby man in trooper’s uniform stepped around the barricade and, atching courage with courage, walked toward King. When they stood chest to chest, the trooper said, “Mr. King, you must go back.”

For a long, breathless moment King made no response. Then he turned to face his followers, raised his arms and began to sing: “We are not afraid …”

Haltingly, others took up the melody. King gestured vigorously: Go back.  The crowd turned and began to walk away, in triumph, from the temptation to violence, singing: “Deep in my heart, Lord, I do believe . . .”  It was a desolate feeling to be just an observer, to be left out of such a moment of giving.

While working for the Digest in America in the 1980s, he was simultaneously approached by Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch. Rupert won and my father was appointed editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. He loved Chicago, and our apartment downtown on East Cedar street became a convivial hub of dinner parties for journalists and other Chicagoans my parents found interesting. He would invite people home for dinner and my mother, a West Australian country girl used to feeding shearers, would cater seemingly effortlessly and with great good cheer for the extra guests.

He set his reporters the task of aggressively chasing local stories of the kind that had made Chicago “a great newspaper town” as one reporter said. His proudest achievement was a campaign the paper ran for a year to get a new public library for Chicago after the old library had collapsed and the books were being stored unsuitably in an old warehouse. The Harold Washington library is now one of the finest public libraries in the country.

The rapid improvement of the Sun Times had Newsweek write about Murdoch’s “surprise success” an article which enraged rival editor Jim Squires of the Chicago Tribune, who marched all over town denouncing Newsweek and the Sun Times. My father enjoyed the combat. He fired off this letter to the Northwestern Review:

In the runaway growth of his self importance Jim Squires reminds me of the gourmand who exploded at the table in Monty Python and the Meaning of Life. I am astonished by his claim to your interviewer that I came to Chicago (to edit the Sun-Times) and said to him I am going to get me some local issue and pick a fight with you on it. No such saying was ever said by me. In the first place I never speak in the Dogpatch patois alleged.

More importantly, no action in my entire life has been even faintly motivated by the desire to prompt a reaction of any kind from Jim Squires. In this I am pleased to observe I appear to be at one with the universe.

He could eviscerate people with words so gently they barely knew what was happening. He collapsed in the newsroom one day from a brain embolism and was revived with CPR by two reporters before being taken to hospital by ambulance, with local TV stations demanding to know his time of death, one of several close calls with death. When asked afterwards by a Chicago news magazine if he were a lucky man, he said: “Yeah, but I expect to be. I’m a Sagittarian. I once read the distinctive qualities of Sagittarians are that they are lucky, charming and unscrupulous so I would not be surprised if the clot missed my brain and hit somebody else’s.”

The reporter Suzy Shultz who helped revive him said at the time, “He was a gentleman throughout the whole thing. You don’t lose your character. The first things he said [when he came to] were I’m very sorry.”  His managing editor Ken Towers said that he peppered them with ideas when he got back to work. “He’d been reading and thinking the whole time in hospital. It’s impossible to keep him down for any length of time.”

His first book in 1998, unfortunately out of print or I would urge it upon you, was published by Michael Duffy. Called The Quick Brown Fox, it was a compendium of columns on language he wrote for The Australian after he ceased being editor. He wrote about all sorts of things to do with English language, such as EAI or Excessive Acronym Infliction – “A modern syndrome with bureaucrats chiefly to blame.”  He also wrote a column for the Australian‘s opinion page until his supposed retirement at 70.

In 2003 he was “ordered back to light duties” as he described it, by the editor of the Australian Chris Mitchell, with a smaller weekly column on the features page, which was topical and often prescient. Last February, for instance, he wrote about Kevin Rudd’s essay in the Monthly:

While identifying the motives of our tightly stitched PM is a Sisyphean task, The Monthly “essay” has attributes of a false trail designed to lure critics away from practical consideration of his policies and actions, and draw them into a purposeless ideological debate.

It is also radiant with the grandiosity that has marked Rudd’s first year in office: from his pretence of harnessing to our governance of Australia’s thousand finest minds, through his plan to lead the world to nuclear disarmament and Asia into an economic community, to his rapidly fading scheme for combating global warming….

The cloudiness of the Prime Minister’s verbal statements is becoming an Australian cultural signpost. I have often heard people more generous spirited than I ask with sincere puzzlement after listening to a Rudd broadcast: “But what did he say?”

Given the effort he has put into linguistic achievement, I sometimes wonder if the Prime Minister thinks in Mandarin and has trouble translating.

He also continued writing a monthly essay for Quadrant. His book Older and Wiser is a collection of those essays. One of our favourite essays in the book is “Popping Fifty Corks”, written on the 50th anniversary of my parents’ marriage. It’s a warts and all treatment of two people he describes as battling control freaks. He ends on a characteristically optimistic note:

My experience is that intimacy is there from the start in a long happy marriage. Reticence falls away quite quickly. Trust builds progressively. We over-reached once to the edge of financial ruin. There were opportunities for finger pointing and blame laying, of which neither of us even considered availing ourselves. Instead we comforted each other and together made plans for recovery. The locking stone of total trust fell into place.

As a fifty-year veteran I find great pleasure in watching youngish couples in marriages that have the spark respond to each other after short separations, getting back from soccer practice, for instance, or after foraging at opposite ends of the mall. Their faces light up and their movements almost imperceptibly quicken. A special vitality is restored by their coming together.

Sometimes I have to make an effort to restrain myself from telling them: “With luck, it will get even better.”

My father was a literary journalist, and his essays contain gems of observation and character. He saw a story in everything. Even in the weeks before he died when he was in the Greenwich palliative care unit, he found out that his doctor was the son of a former Afghan president and his nurse has escaped from Zimbabwe with her grandchildren. He was excited by his conversations with them and said he wished he had a bit more time so he could write a book about the wonderful people he had met there.

He died last July, of prostate cancer, with his boots on, having only a couple of months before hung up his pen, on his own terms, at peace with God and the world. He had only two regrets, that he didn’t get to see the Ashes or hold his last book Older and Wiser, which was published soon afterwards.

The first edition sold out in weeks.

Did I mention his book is for sale up the back?!

He would have loved nothing better than a best seller.