THE POLITICS OF FRANK MOORHOUSE

Moorhouse was also one of Australia’s foremost public intellectuals; his contribution to Australian cultural, social and political life was prolific, erudite and astoundingly broad. Throughout his career he moved between the roles of activist, author, advocate and scholar. Professor Catharine Lumby knew Frank Moorhouse well and was left his papers from which she produced Frank Moorhouse – A Life. To touch on something of Frank Moorhouse’s life and politics, Catharine Lumby addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 5 December 2023.

THE POLITICS OF FRANK MOORHOUSE 

CATHARINE LUMBY

We are living through an extremely heated debate about the alleged rights and wrongs of parties to the current Middle East conflict. It is a debate that all too often lacks nuance, empathy and, at times, any grasp of history.

I don’t plan to use this talk to offer my own inadequate views on Israel or Palestine, Netanyahu’s government or Hamas. But I do want to use the current viscerally ideological debates as a segue to talking about what originally drew me to Frank Moorhouse’s work and why I decided to spend ten years of my life researching a biography of him.

As an academic, as well as a writer, I have spent a lot of time on university campuses.  From my early 20s, when I was an Arts/Law student at Sydney University, I have been fascinated by the way political factions operate in student and academic politics and what issues become ideological shibboleths. I’ve always been naturally left leaning but I am equally suspicious of hard-line reactionary politics.  To put it bluntly, I’m not someone who buys the t-shirt and wears the badge.

At the moment, university campuses are awash with pro-Palestinian rallies and, as a non Jewish person, I have become alarmed by the rise in antisemitism.  I personally supported a Jewish student one evening not long after Hamas committed atrocities in southern Israel. I found her sobbing in a corridor. She told me she felt unsafe on campus. She was still grieving the events and had had to walk through a rally calling for the state of Israel to be abolished. To be erased from the river to the sea. The sensitivities on both sides – well the many sides – of the conflict are both ancient and not amenable to black and white thinking. But that, in my experience, is exactly what is happening on our campuses – and more broadly in some contemporary debates.

So how does this relate to Frank Moorhouse? Well, to back track a little, I first read Frank when I was a teenager in Newcastle, living in a working-class beachside town. My parents had his early works on their shelves and, being a curious teenager, I began reading them.

I loved Moorhouse’s writing because it gave me a glimpse of a sophisticated cosmopolitan world – of bohemia – a place I felt I belonged. As a scrawny brunette who spent her time writing derivative poetry, I was something of a misfit in Newcastle. I used to joke with friends that when I grew up I wanted to be Frank Moorhouse.

I met Frank years later in the mid 1990s when I was living in New York and we were both invited to an improbably titled talkfest in Washington – The Festival of Australian Ideas. After joking about whether we would discuss the invention of the Esky or the Hills Hoist on our panels, I asked him to describe his politics. To my delight he said: “I’m a left leaning democratic liberal anarchist.” Hashtag me too.

Despite being socially and culturally anchored on the left, Moorhouse had friends across the political spectrum, including conservatives such as Owen Harries and Christopher Pearson. His scepticism about ideological positions that are animated by a sense of self-righteousness – what is now called ‘virtue signalling’ – has its roots in his formative years as a member of the Sydney Push.

The Push was a loose alliance of intellectuals, writers, artists and self-styled bohemians who drank together and debated ideas at Sydney pubs such as the Newcastle and the Royal George. The Push had its origins in the late 1940s and the Free Thought Society founded by University of Sydney Professor of Philosophy John Anderson. It was not a formal political movement but a fluid group where the only qualifications to join were a commitment to free thinking, a willingness to debate social norms and a high tolerance for beer and casual sex. At the heart of the Push’s libertarian philosophy was a disrespect for authority and core institutions that bordered on anarchy, as well as a belief that ideas should not simply be debated but lived.

The Push had a big influence on Moorhouse who became part of it when he moved to Sydney from Nowra as a cadet journalist on the Daily Telegraph at the age of 17. In a deeply conservative society in the late 1950s, the Push offered a sensual as well as an intellectual education to a young man from country NSW embarking on a writing career.

In her book on the Push, Sex and Anarchy, Anne Coombs writes: “They were not like the Bloomsbury set. They were not rich or self-consciously elegant. They were not out to change the world, but to interpret it…They were tough, in a laconic fashion, opposed to Church, State, wowsers and censorship.”[i] Moorhouse recalled his time in the Push in his edited collection Days of Wine and Rage this way:

We met and drank most nights at the Newcastle Hotel, the Royal George, later at the Vanity Fair…On some nights we would eat together and perhaps go to someone’s house for what was called a “party”. We spent the time talking—or what Jim Baker, a libertarian philosophy lecturer, called critical drinking. Sometimes later in the night we danced rock’n’roll, although there was some opposition because the music interfered with the conversation.[ii]

The 1970s ushered in a very different era of political and intellectual activism. The traditional left’s wholistic revolutionary dream was fracturing and a host of new issues based political movements were emerging – women’s liberation, gay liberation, racial equality and land rights and environmentalism were pulling people into different camps.

Moorhouse was living in Balmain during this decade – much of it with Sandra Levy the film and TV producer and feminist. She remembers the Balmain years as:

An exhilarating time with an extraordinary group of people. So many people came to Balmain—David Williamson, Don Anderson, Elizabeth Wynhausen, Robert Adamson, Kate Jennings and so many more artists and academics. Drawn to the constant intellectual, social, sexual and emotional stimulation there. It was invigorating and bit dangerous.[iii]

Balmain was, at the time, still a deeply working-class suburb where young writers, filmmakers and artists could rent cheaply and gather to share their work at one of the 25 pubs. Balmain, it should be noted, is not a large suburb. When the chairperson of the Literature Board visited the regular Balmain Readings of Poetry and Verse she remarked: “What they’re spending on alcohol and drugs would publish a dozen books.”

Moorhouse had published his first book Futility and Other Animals in 1969. In it he wrote openly about homosexual desire. Frank was bisexual, a cross dresser and a writer who openly drew friends and lovers with sometimes thin disguise into his fiction. In the early part of his career he was writing about sexuality with an honesty that put him in peril of not only being censored but drawing himself to the attention of the police for engaging in homosexual sex.

Australia has a rich, enthusiastic and occasionally hilarious history of censorship. The banning of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1929 ushered in an orgy of censorship (orgy possibly being one of the words which was banned). In 1930, The NSW Collector of Customs mandated that the department’s censorship test was “whether the average householder would accept the book in question as reading matter for his family”. How many implicitly male heads of households had taken the time to vet Ulysses for their family remains a mystery.

The fight against censorship, in which Moorhouse was very active, was more than just a battle against parochial and paternalistic attitudes to sexuality, it was equally a battle to allow a new generation of short-story writers freedom to write in ways that broke with what writer Michael Wilding, a peer and friend of Moorhouse’s in the 1970s, called “the single mythic line of the outback story”. Writers of Moorhouse’s generation were breaking new ground by writing about what they saw around them: their social milieu and the political revolution that defined the decade when they began publishing.

At the time, many of them were publishing in what we would now quaintly call “girlie” magazines , including Playboy, Chance and Squire, because the reputable literary magazines would not print their work. Moorhouse’s opposition to censorship became a lifelong political concern. In a satirical essay, “The Urge to Censor”, written 30 years after the early censorship battles, he takes considered aim at the rationale underpinning pro-censorship rhetoric:

It was as if we had been in a deep after-lunch sleep and had awoken—not sometime in the future, but back in our more tumultuous past. Back in the seventies, no less. It was not an agreeable sensation: we are not up to returning to the seventies…This disagreeable sense of déjà vu was caused by growing evidence of the dreaded. Urge to Censor. The internet panic, the re-establishment of federal and state censorship, racial vilification acts—all show that the bitch is back on heat.[iv]

Moorhouse’s views on censorship were strongly libertarian. In my biography, I write at some length about an unpublished erotic novella he wrote which is the tale of a post pubescent teenage boy who is inducted into intercourse by both his mother and a male teacher at his boarding school. It is almost certainly unpublishable today. In a letter to his publisher in 2017, Moorhouse outlined a defence of the right of writers to explore taboo matters in erotic fiction:

I feel that literature is evolving towards, taking on, the description of sexual behaviour with the same creative detail that writers might describe a cathedral, the landscape, falling in love, a wedding, the commission of a crime, or the progress of a battle…The erotic is the most under-developed and inhibited literary genre in the English language – the unfinished business of English literature.[v]

I won’t go into my thoughts on his defence here as I do in detail in my book. I raise them because I think it sheds light on Moorhouse’s broader reflections on the rise of what has become known as “cancel culture”. I discussed the latter on a number of occasions with Frank. Throughout his life he erred on the side of countering offensive or wrong-headed speech with more speech. Not with censoring it. He disliked, to the point of contempt, self-righteous moral posturing. He deplored the lack of nuance and the moral vanity he observed in some leftist politics and countered these tendencies with satire and irony. His sense of humour did not make him many friends on the hard left.

An example of this is his response to a widely circulated feminist pamphlet in the early 1970s written by the radical US feminist Anne Koedt titled “The Myth of The Vaginal Orgasm” – female orgasms being a hot topic of political conversation in those days. In it, she argues that the notion that all women orgasm as a result of penetration was a myth that ignored the fact that, for most women, orgasms were related to clitoral stimulation. It says a lot about Moorhouse’s appetite for frankness, regardless of the potential for serious conflict, that only two years after Koedt’s essay appeared he wrote a piece in the independent magazine Thor titled “The Myth of the Male Orgasm”.

Moorhouse’s reply was not, as his title might suggest, a flippant dismissal of feminist interrogations of what sexual liberation might actually look like for women. Rather, it was a genuine reflection on the way male pleasure is an assumed rather than interrogated category in its own right. Moorhouse was always supportive of the women’s liberation movement, but like all movements he was prepared to call out and satirise the tendency to self-righteousness and moral vanity.

And he was always prepared to send himself and his social cohort up. I have a particular fondness for his comic essays. In Lateshows, he writes about the problem of the “political litany at dinner parties”.

A political litany is where the host of one of the dominant guests begins the evening with a curse against an enemy, usually a political enemy—not as an opening of discussion but as an ignition of the other dinner guests into some sort of passionate political bonding through a cursing of an assumed political enemy. It is taken as inconceivable that anyone would dissent from the litany. We are all expected to curse the enemy. As it goes around the table each guest is required to bring to the table a curse of the enemy or to bring bad news of the enemy.[vi]

Frank avoided dinner parties. He preferred restaurants because he didn’t like feeling he couldn’t leave when he wanted to. Indeed, he had a fondness for good food and wine and what can only be described as an obsession with martinis. He imbues his most important protagonist Edith Campbell Berry with a similar interest in aesthetics and the good life.

In Grand Days, when Edith Campbell Berry boards the train to Geneva to work at the League of Nations, she is self-consciously aware that her knowledge of the culinary and social arts may be lacking – coming as she does from Jasper’s Brush on the south coast of NSW. She is, however, well defended against embarrassment. She has practiced “Her Ways”. Ways that include “Going” and “Dining”. She makes her way carefully down the train corridor to the dining car and has her first encounter with Ambrose – her future lover and mentor. She is wary of ordering the soup and tells her dining companion.

“It is not so much to do with the soup in the plate, I am told, but more to do with the soup in its spoon on the way to the mouth. That is where the difficulty lies…Further, I am told that it has to do with the unexpected stopping of the train – that’s the incontestable danger point. It jerks. The train jerks”.[vii]

Like Edith, Moorhouse accumulated and designed rules for living well – including rules for avoiding the bears that lurk in the woods of excess. Rituals were always important in his life. Some of his friends joke about what they call The Moorhouse Method. When asked, and often when not asked, he was always happy to advise on the correct protocols for given situations: for when to order a martini, how it should be made, when to start festivities, and – importantly – when to cease them. Etiquette, or the rules of social engagement, was a subject of endless fascination to him. He was not a rigid person. Rules interested Moorhouse because he liked toying with boundaries, worrying rather than exceeding their limits. He was our man at the social cliff face, peering down with slight horror and intense fascination at the rocks below.

Martini is the title of Moorhouse’s semi-fictional memoir, first published in 2005, in which he used the drink as a metaphor for his life and friendships. There are people, and I have met them in the writing of this biography, who find it strange that Moorhouse would choose a cocktail as a lens to view his life. Some find it affected. Others inexplicable. They are clearly not martini drinkers.

The martini appeals to Moorhouse precisely because it is a drink poised between the poetic and the pedantic. It is, on one hand, merely a glass of spirits – and a strong one at that. Yet, it is also a drink that can only be appreciated in moderation when made well. It needs to be made in precise proportions, which are always in dispute, and served icy cold. It is a drink that should only be ordered in particular places and ordered with care. It is a toast to a life lived with attention to aesthetic detail and well-tempered pleasures.

An interest in aesthetics is often seen as suspect on the left of politics – as superficial at best and corrupt at worst. Taking an overt interest in beauty, fashion or gastronomy has sometimes been denigrated as being at odds with broader struggles for human equality. When Moorhouse wrote about aesthetics, he often did so with an ironic and even self-mocking tone. His humorous stories and essays revolve around the anxieties and pretensions that shadow bourgeois aspirations and manners. But there was a deeper side to his fascination with the rules of refined living. Moorhouse was very conscious of the way we invent and reinvent ourselves. Aesthetics were a core part of persona for him – a pathway to trying on masks, a way of trying on new selves, of playing with alternate ways of being in the world.

In his League of Nations trilogy, Moorhouse takes his fascination with the rules of civilised living to a global canvas. The League of Nations was of course a grand experiment in making rules for civilised global living. It was also tragically a grand scheme that collapsed under the weight of its ambitions.

The heroine of his League trilogy, Edith Campbell Berry, is Moorhouse’s most fully realised character, though interestingly one whose physical attributes remain sketchy. It is not until halfway through the first book Grand Days that we learn she has the vestiges of girlish freckles. We know less about her figure, her smile or the colour of her eyes than we do about her clothing or lingerie. Indeed, we get to know a lot about her lingerie.

This lacuna allows the author to play more fully and promiscuously with her symbolic function in narrative terms as well as allowing each reader the freedom to imagine their own Edith. One of her symbolic functions is as a cipher for the League itself. Edith, like the League, has embarked on an idealistic journey to become a citizen of the globe, one that involves her in uncertain reflections on the relevance of national identity in an increasingly international world. Her careful and constant internal testing of her comportment in meetings and social gatherings is an echo of the League’s high-minded attention to the detail of international agreements—sometimes to the point of absurdity. And sadly, ultimately to the point of futility.

Asked why he chose the League as his subject matter Moorhouse said:

I am writing about the League of Nations because it is a trunk in the attic of history which has not been properly opened. It contains haunted, bitter, and embarrassing moments for the world, but it was also a human experiment of grandeur. Its stories deserve more space in our cultural imagination[viii]

The League embodies many of the themes that traverse Moorhouse’s work: the question of how many rules are necessary to maintain civility; how we might live respectfully with difference; the relationship between nationalism and internationalism; and the balance between private rights and public accountability.

To read Moorhouse’s account of the League is to revisit a tragically failed experiment in global diplomacy and geopolitical peacekeeping. It is an experiment that haunts us. And particularly so at times like these.

ENDNOTES

[i] Coombs, A., Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push, Penguin, Melbourne, 1996, p. viii.

[ii] Moorhouse, F., Days of Wine and Rage, Penguin, Melbourne, 1980, p. 134.

[iii] Lumby, C., Frank Moorhouse: A Life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2023, p.43.

[iv] Moorhouse, F., The Inspector-General of Misconception: The Ultimate Compendium to Sorting Things Out, Vintage, Random House, Sydney, 2002, pp. 265-266.

[v] Lumby, C., Frank Moorhouse: A Life, p. 162.

[vi] Moorhouse, F., Lateshows, Picador, Sydney, 1990, p.28.

[vii] Moorhouse, Grand Days, 1993, p. 8

[viii] Lumby, C., Frank Moorhouse: A Life, p. 178.

BIO

Catharine Lumby is a Professor of Media at the University of Sydney and a former print and television journalist. Frank Moorhouse: A Life is her 11^th book.