Autobiography of My Mother (34 page)

It took me years to learn how to work really hard. Now I have so much to do I can't bear to slow down.

‘Do the neighbours know what you do?' a young grandniece asked me once. ‘That Uncle Doug writes and you paint?'

‘It has dawned on them, I think, yes,' I replied, laughing.

But we were a bit of an oddity for the first few years at St Ives. The woman whose son sported the leopard-skin
underpants that Doug celebrated in a poem bought a book of Doug's poetry that included the very poem.

‘He's a deep one, Mr Stewart, isn't he?' she remarked to me afterwards. That was all she ever said.

When I was doing my duty at the school tuckshop, another woman told me that her daughter had reprimanded her for wanting to wear low-heeled shoes to tuckshop instead of high heels. I have to wear flat-heeled, sensible shoes on all occasions; my feet won't fit into anything else.

‘Why can't I wear sensible shoes?' the woman asked her daughter. ‘Mrs Stewart does.'

‘Yes, but that's different,' the daughter said. ‘Mrs Stewart's an artist.'

So be it.

My mother outlived my father by eight and a half years. She died early in the morning of 27 August 1993, aged eighty-four. The young tabby cat our household had recently acquired was asleep on the end of her bed; outside the three wild cats she'd tamed were curled in their baskets. I stood by, not knowing what to do or what was happening, as she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage at about 6 am.

The day before was warm and she had her lunch sitting in the front garden, the petals of the magnolia tree she had so often painted falling softly about her. It was the sort of day you long for in winter; the sort of day, with its yield of fragile blooms, that she'd waited for impatiently as a young artist; a fine day to remember her by. Fittingly, too, for one who had found spring flowers such a never-failing delight and source of inspiration, she was buried on 1 September.

Despite the great sadness that beset her when Dad died, and an ever-increasing number of hospital stays, the first – almost six – years she survived without him were good. The publication of
Autobiography of My Mother
at the end of 1985, the same year he had died, and the warm response it
received, were a distraction from grief. Similarly the appearance in print of his last book,
Garden of Friends,
which she illustrated with charcoal drawings of the garden, brought happiness. His death did not deter her from painting. The reverse was true. Even when she was reliant on a walking frame, she made her way to her painting table in the studio each day. Eyeshade in place and a lolly or two in her apron pocket for good measure, she painted resolutely on, always in watercolours.

In these good years she had a number of sell-out exhibitions. People queued up on the pavement outside the doors of the Wagner Gallery in Paddington before they opened. To look around the gallery and see a red spot beside every painting was an extraordinary thrill for her.

During this time she and I were particularly close. Although she missed Dad so much, she did not lose her sense of humour or practicality. I watched with amusement when, after a decent interval of several months had elapsed, she suddenly pulled out a blue and white printed wool dress from the wardrobe.

‘Doug never liked this dress, but I always did,' she remarked, and proceeded to wear it to a party.

Although she almost never went out of the house alone, she was always eager for an outing with me. As soon as it was decided we were going anywhere – be it to the beach to watch the waves breaking, with a rainbow's span over the ocean if we were lucky; the nursery to buy plants; the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see a Donald Friend retrospective, or some exhibition of Dutch flower paintings with black backgrounds that intrigued her – she would be out to the car in a flash and ready to go.

But then, after the opening of her 1990 Wagner Gallery
exhibition, she fell and broke her pelvis. She wasn't long in hospital but it marked the beginning of a decline. To welcome her home I had put a potted cyclamen at the foot of her bed. Despite her discomfort she was determined to get to work on its white flowers. The paintings that resulted, called
Cyclamen in Flight,
seemed to encapsulate everything about the movements of flowers she had always sought. They were also the last works she ever completed.

The Parkinson's disease from which she suffered, perhaps also the medication for this – the latter is purely a supposition on my part – and an associated mental deterioration, began to take over. I moved back to St Ives permanently. No longer painting, she drifted into a world away from the rest of us. Physically it was difficult. Although a hip replacement had given her pain-free mobility for a few years, her other leg now seized up. One day she just stopped walking.

Strangely, I remember very little of the effort of looking after her during this time. I remember mostly the fun of before. Two years went by. She was now shrunken in size and her lack of interest in life became such that every meal had to be fed to her, either by myself or other kind carers. The last year she didn't talk much. Her days were spent gazing out at the garden's greenness from the front windows of the house. Otherwise, weather permitting, she was wheeled out into it.

She still knew my name. Her hand reached automatically to pat the new cat. Very occasionally her blue eyes sparked. But the mother I'd known all my life was gone.

In 1996, three years after my mother died, respected art critic and writer Joanna Mendelssohn's revelations concerning the
popularly held myths (which she shows to be mostly untrue) about Norman Lindsay and other artist members of the Lindsay family were published in her book
Letters & Liars.
And, as is so often the case after death, details of a secret purported love affair came to light.

Mendelssohn had written to me before the book's publication asking for permission to quote from letters written by my mother, which I had given. I thought no more about it. When the book came out I bought a copy. The same day I went out to lunch – a mushroom risotto at The Wharf Restaurant, which looks out on to sparkling Sydney Harbour. Afterwards, sitting in the car about to drive home, I skimmed through the text. I found myself reading a chapter headed ‘Mistress and Wife'.

The chapter is essentially about Rose Lindsay, herself for many years Norman's mistress before becoming his legal spouse. This was not new. What threw me was the disclosure that when Rose was his wife, the mistress was my mother.

As a daughter I felt distressed; as the biographer of my mother I felt – well – stricken. Temporarily, at least. I found the word ‘mistress' disturbing. ‘Mistress' conjured up images of a kept woman in a black nylon negligee; a femme fatale languishing in an apartment paid for by her married lover. It was an unfamiliar role to imagine my mother in. My mother was never a kept woman; she was never beholden (except perhaps to Beatrice McCaughey for her patronage). All through my childhood she had always had her own money earned from painting. An independence, even from my father, was essential to her.

In
Letters & Liars
Mendelssohn implied, or so I thought, that my mother's ‘adventurous past' had been deliberately kept under wraps to preserve her reputation as the wife of
Norman's close friend, Douglas Stewart.
¹
That stung too. I hadn't kept quiet about it to preserve my mother's image. She simply never mentioned any affair to me, or implied there had ever been one. I didn't think to question her about being Norman's lover because it would have been like asking if the world was flat instead of round. All the time I was growing up there were my parents and there was Norman. By the time I was born he was close to seventy and was like a grandfather to me. A tad detached perhaps, but the nicest of grandfathers. That's the way it was.

I do remember pressing and pressing Mum during one interview for more information about him because I knew people would be interested. ‘Do we have to have so much about Norman?' she responded plaintively.

So, what did happen back in the 1930s at Springwood and at 12 Bridge Street? Norman's daughter, Jane Lindsay (later Jane Glad), who was born in 1920 and died in 1999, was close friends with both my parents. Soon after I first read
Letters & Liars
Jane gave me her account of the affair in an affectionate letter: ‘Your mother was a very beautiful, gentle creature & my father fell in love with her,' the letter begins. ‘He was in a state of deep depression over his work being banned & newspaper attacks. She helped him get out of the gloom and interested in work again.

‘Certainly Pa [Norman] & Margaret became lovers and many of their contemporaries accepted them as a pair,' it continues. ‘They never lived together, and Pa never supported her. He had to share his
Bulletin
salary with Ma [Rose] & buy materials to paint with. He could not have afforded to help Margaret in that way.'

Jane adds a bit further on: ‘We all knew about it & Ma was very bitter.' Her last words on the affair are that despite all of
the above Mum and Norman ‘always pretended there was nothing between them'.
²

Mum's brother Jack didn't believe it was the case. When I shouted down the phone to him (Jack was deaf by this stage and his hearing aid wasn't always entirely successful) about Mum and Norman having a love affair he denied it vigorously. There are relatives of Mum alive now who believe that the suggestion of an affair is an example of gossip or rumour, and a misinterpretation of an artistic friendship.

But, of course, she hardly would have announced it to the family. Being the mistress of Norman Lindsay might well have given Grandma Coen and others of Mum's very Catholic family a great deal more than a lack of corsets to complain about. (Her immediate family were all quite keen on Norman, actually. Nan, my grandmother, made him her special Russian caramel; King, Mum's other brother, posed – clothed – for Norman at 12 Bridge Street; and Mollie, Mum's sister, asked his opinion of one or two of her short-story efforts.)

Lin Bloomfield, who has written and published numerous Lindsay art books, charts the progress of the love affair by what is revealed of Norman's emotions in his art. In her astonishingly detailed
The Complete Etchings of Norman Lindsay
, published in 1998, Bloomfield states directly that it was Norman's affair ‘with the beautiful young artist Margaret Coen' in the early 1930s that ‘revived and revitalised his creative facility'.
³
She also writes that, apart from the banning of his novel
Redheap
, the disintegration of his marriage to Rose and an attraction to my mother were among the factors that prompted Norman and Rose's trip to America in 1931.

There was definitely enough going wrong in Norman's
life as far as work was concerned at this time to make an escape from Australia desirable, regardless of any infatuation with my mother.

‘Norman had turned fifty in 1929 and the capacity to create had abandoned him,' Bloomfield expands in the etching book. ‘His distress during this phase (which lasted several years) is portrayed in
Self Portrait.
It was this etching that brought the criticism of Norman's work, which had been steadily growing over the years, to a head.'
⁴

Self Portrait
, in which Norman, with an etching needle between his manacled hands, cowers under an avalanche of lascivious nudes and other demonic creatures of his own creating, was reproduced in
Art in Australia
at the end of 1930. Six months later, when several thousand copies of the magazine had been sold, police raided the offices of the publication because of a complaint from a member of the public. All remaining copies, and the printing blocks, were seized.
Smith's Weekly
then ran a front-page story about Norman's possible arrest. It must have been a time of huge stress for both Norman and Rose.

Lin Bloomfield cites (as does Mendelssohn) the etching
Have Faith
, done in 1932 after Norman and Rose returned to Australia, as evidence of Norman's continuing desire – which he was still attempting to resist – for my mother.
⁵
The foreground of
Have Faith
shows Norman submissively kissing the hand of a clothed woman, said to be Rose, while a naked young woman with flowers in her hair (long before the days of hippies) – my mother, it would seem – lies temptingly beside them amid what appear to be hollyhocks. Behind these three figures is an assortment of amorous couples and a large black bull. Bloomfield and Mendelssohn both comment on the sexual overtones of this bull, especially its penis horn!

Bloomfield has the affair getting underway with another etching (of which a print was never finished) called
Surrender. Surrender
, she says, can be dated 1933 and depicts ‘Norman surrendering to Margaret while Rose looks on'.
⁶
Norman, who is not very recognisable since he is lying face down, appears here to have thrown himself at the feet of the flower-wearing young woman and has an arm twined possessively (or perhaps desperately) around her ankles. Mercifully, there is no black bull present this time.

A later unpublished etching,
Duality
, from around 1938, shows the conflicting emotions Rose and my mother (who looks rather startled in the work) came to represent for Norman. There is a mythical salamander twisted around the feet of both women and, as Bloomfield's text explains, a wise magician representing Creative Art sits in judgment between them, gripping them by the wrist, with an open book on his lap, which stands for the search for knowledge.
⁷

Discovering your mother's love life etching by etching definitely adds a whole new dimension to the old line, ‘Would you like to look at my etchings?'

In Bloomfield's equally comprehensive
Norman Lindsay Watercolours: 1897–1969
, published in 2003, she identifies my mother as ‘undoubtedly the model' for the watercolour
Happiness
and as the female figure representing Spring in
Spring's Retinue
.
⁸
Both works were painted in 1933. The delicate
Happiness
shows a naked young woman standing in a garden of mauve and blue flowers – more of those hollyhocks, or perhaps delphiniums. White doves perch on her hands, a silvery-mauve peacock leans towards her from a branch and another peacock stands with its tail swirled at her feet. In
Spring's Retinue
, she is miraculously blonde and accompanied again by doves and a peacock, as well as a
profusion of other animals led by a muscular satyr carrying a koala.