When Blackbirds Sing
MARTIN À BECKETT BOYD was born in Switzerland in 1893 into a family that was to achieve fame in the Australian arts. His brothers Merric and Penleigh, as well as Merric’s sons Arthur, Guy and David, were all to become renowned artists, while Penleigh’s son Robin became an influential architect, widely known for his book
The Australian Ugliness
.
After leaving school, Martin Boyd enrolled in a seminary, but he abandoned this vocation and began to train as an architect. With the outbreak of World War I, he sailed for England where he served in the Royal East Kent Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps.
Boyd eventually settled in England after the war. His first novel,
Love Gods
, was published in 1925, followed by
The Montforts
three years later.
After the international success of
Lucinda Brayford
in 1946 Boyd decided to return to Australia, but by 1951 he was back in London. In the coming decade he was to write the Langton Quartet:
The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man, Outbreak of Love
and
When Blackbirds Sing
. In 1957 he went to Rome, where he lived and continued to write until his death in 1972.
CHRIS WALLACE-CRABBE is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, as well as works of criticism and a novel,
Splinters
. In 2011, he was awarded the Order of Australia. Founding director of the Australian Centre at Melbourne University, he has taught at Harvard and Yale universities. He lives in Melbourne.
ALSO BY MARTIN BOYD
Fiction
Scandal of Spring
The Lemon Farm
The Picnic
Night of the Party
Nuns in Jeopardy
Lucinda Brayford
Such Pleasure
The Cardboard Crown
A Difficult Young Man
The Outbreak of Love
The Tea-Time of Love: The Clarification of Miss Stilby
Under the pseudonym ‘Martin Mills’
Love Gods
Brangane: A Memoir
The Montforts
Under the pseudonym ‘Walter Beckett’
Dearest Idol
Non-fiction
Much Else in Italy: A Subjective Travel Book
Why They Walk Out: An Essay in Seven Parts
Autobiography
A Single Flame
Day of My Delight: An Anglo-Australian Memoir
The Text Publishing Company
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Australia
Copyright © the estate of Martin Boyd 1962
Introduction copyright © Chris Wallace-Crabbe 2014
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in 1962 by Landsdowne Press
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2014
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Primary print ISBN: 9781922147998
Ebook ISBN: 9781922148995
Author: Boyd, Martin, 1893–1972.
Title: When blackbirds sing / by Martin Boyd; introduced by Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.2
CONTENTS
A Moral Young Man
by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
A Moral Young Man
by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
MARTIN Boyd’s
When Blackbirds Sing
, first published in 1962, is the final part of his quartet of novels about the Anglo-Australian Langton family, modelled on the Boyd and à Beckett cultural dynasty. Yet this novel threatens to break open the fabric of the quartet, even offering the implicit promise of a fifth book which was never to arrive. Any pat conclusion would have made a difference, but a final meaning is here left in the hands of its readers.
Boyd’s life was an interesting, oblique one. He was a member of one of Australia’s outstanding cultural families, which included painters, potters, and the distinguished modernist architect and critic Robin Boyd. His nephew Arthur, one of our greatest painters, found himself represented in the role by the walk-on
figure of Julian early in this tetralogy; other Boyds are easily identifiable throughout the books.
The arts have flowed in the family’s veins for generations, along with courtesy. In Martin’s case, the art was fiction. Obsessed with his family, he adhered closely to them as material for his novels. You could say that he did so thrice: first of all in
The Montforts
of 1928, and then in 1946 with
Lucinda Brayford
, which was an international bestseller—indeed, his one great commercial success. The sales of that book enabled Boyd to return to Australia for a short time and attempt the gracious rural life here. And, no doubt, to put the pained memories of his service in World War I behind him.
He only stayed for three years in the restored home of his grandparents near Harkaway, Victoria, before returning to the England that we see in
When Blackbirds Sing
. But it was during this period that he happened upon documents—the diaries of his grandmother Emma à Beckett, and the secret of his family’s convict heritage they revealed—that would get the Langton Quartet going, with its ever-narrowing focus on the troubled Dominic, brother of Guy. This pivotal character was based partly on Martin Boyd’s eccentric brother Merric, and partly on himself.
Here is an Australian novel which both documents a bygone age of tea-and-good-manners and features a sensitive spirit trying to make some moral sense out
of the horrors of a war. The mode of this quartet is unusual in Australian fiction, especially from a male author.
When Blackbirds Sing
has something in common with Tasma’s
Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill
(1889), but Jessie Couvreur’s social narrative was not rooted in her family’s generational web. What they share is the matter of manners, with so much of their narratives set in drawing rooms and gardens. It is a social environment which one of Boyd’s narrators dubs ‘the Resurrection Morning with sherry’. But its author had served in a monstrous war: the pukka sahib was at odds with a conscientious objector.
Tensions between Australian and England were established earlier, in
The Cardboard Crown
, when Guy Langton, the narrator, declares, ‘My family were captive seagulls, both at Waterpark, and even more, as time went on, in Australia.’ Dominic was born in the alien English winter, not in the pastoral Australia in which his wife, Helena, is so at ease and ‘where nearly all the good food they ate was grown by themselves’. His author, furthermore, was born in Switzerland, not in this country; ill at ease wherever he chose to live, Martin Boyd was above all a loner.
Where the first three Langton novels make play with a brisk wit, and are largely viewed through the eyes of Guy, here we contemplate the ‘difficult young man’, Dominic. What’s more, the pitch is queered for our
protagonist by the mention of him at the start of the quartet as Guy’s ‘poor dead, mad brother’. Such is narrative framing, and the problems it can throw up for readers.
When Blackbirds Sing
is a book about war and its cost. The novel is not so much focused on the front line in France as on its effects on Dominic and those around him in England and, finally, in Australia. Two young men play their parts in his self-discovery: one a fellow soldier and the other a young German whom Dominic confronts, and has to shoot. The pointlessness of killing proves to be Dominic’s moral wound, his destiny. This is a novel of psychological insight rather than of blood and mud.
The young German soldier’s opposite, or double, is the nineteen-year-old Hollis, with whom Dominic becomes close. Colleagues and friends, their relationship is almost erotic. Far from the trenches, they strip in a French orchard and, for a moment, ‘The two young men stood naked, restored to innocence in the stillness of the natural world.’ What these innocents have to face can be judged by this passage:
Colonel Rogers, frustrated by his failure at the War Office, had become the incarnation of a small war in himself. There was anger in every movement, in every tone of his staccato voice. In a tight old-fashioned dinner jacket he looked more than ever like a large ant. During the
whole of dinner he was angry, about the larger strategy of the war, and about subalterns who took the stiffening out of their army caps and wore pale yellow collars.
Dominic is ‘difficult’ in large part because he is intensely moral. Profoundly conservative, he has to find living space within ‘his native Toryism’. In a late chapter, when an Australian complains of how ‘those horrible Labour people’ have managed to defeat the conscription referendum, Dominic adroitly points out that the servicemen themselves had voted against the proposal.
As a rule, successful stories turn on dichotomies, on the interplay of opposites. Just as two young men are pivotal to Dominic’s experience, so are two women. His wife, Helena, remains at home in Australia with their son, on their fruitful farmland. But his former fiancée, the soignée Sylvia, is near at hand in England, married yet fashionably seductive. What’s more, neither woman can understand Dominic’s hostility to the war.
Nor can Martin Boyd respond in full to the England from which he has derived his conservative values, or to a woman’s direct patriotism in the apparently more open Australia to which Dominic returns. He is, we might say, on a moral pilgrimage. Every bit as much as its predecessor, this book could have been called
A Difficult Young Man
.
Ironically, even fortunately, for all the pain and personal cost to Dominic, readers never get to the tragic end that was signalled four books earlier. Far from his going mad, Boyd’s hero has come to some kind of painful understanding. And Martin Boyd has laid down his pen.