A Difficult Young Man Read online

  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.

  SONYA HARNETT is the author of many books for children and adults, including Of a Boy and The Midnight Zoo. Her most recent novel is The Children of the King. She 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

  Outbreak of Love

  When Blackbirds Sing

  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

  Proudly supported by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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  The Text Publishing Company

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  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © the estate of Martin Boyd 1955

  Introduction © Sonya Hartnett 2012

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  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 by The Cresset Press London 1955

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by WH Chong & Susan Miller

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781921922121

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921921759

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Difficult Man by Sonya Hartnett

  A Difficult Young Man

  Few writers, it could be argued, have ever cannibalised life for their art as ruthlessly and consistently as did Martin Boyd; and few are born into situations which lend themselves so readily to art. Boyd’s working life—indeed, much of his entire existence—was spent trying to unite the past with the present, the old world with the new, himself with the man he might have been; and in committing his efforts to paper. To this end, he never shirked from using friends and relatives as material for his novels, as well as the real-life experiences of himself and of others. If he paid a price for this—which he occasionally did, for people often hanker to be preserved in print, only to resent the style of preservation—the consequences gave him little pause. By the time he wrote A Difficult Young Man, focusing the cool spotlight of his attention on his brother Merric as well as more sharply on himself, Boyd had form as a writer whose true gift lay not in the power of his imagination, but in the brilliance of his ancestral inheritance.

  Martin à Beckett Boyd was born on 10 June 1893, in Lucerne, Switzerland, where his wandering family was briefly waylaid. His lineage was illustrious, littered with soldiers, judges, landowners, lawyers and a convict, as well as with artists and architects. His parents, Arthur Boyd and Emma à Beckett, were painters who had met at art school. Both sides of the family history were racy with tales of crime, illicit love, canny business dealings, fortunes won and lost. There were fine estates, servants, and an appreciation for creativity and learning. It was a lavish, free-thinking, generous background, the romance of which would capture Boyd’s childhood imagination—and seem to forever imprison it. In a life of restless travel and precarious finances, he lingered long enough to expensively restore a childhood home. He carted in his wake an array of ancestral portraits. He commissioned his nephew, the sculptor Guy Boyd, to make a dinner service bearing the Boyd crest. He struggled to maintain the manners and ideals of the old world—he taught his toddler grand-niece to curtsy—and increasingly railed against the new. Most of all, he wrote of that place that entranced him: the small, rich, finely coloured world of his own and his family’s past. He came to A Difficult Young Man only after writing an autobiography—the first of an eventual pair—and at least four novels which drew heavily on real people, existing places, and actual events.

  One of these semi-biographical works was The Cardboard Crown: published in 1952, it was the first of what would become the Langton Quartet. The inspiration for the novel had come to Boyd while musing on the portraits of the ancestors: those old faces and older stories cried out, apparently, for the writer-as-cannibal treatment. A Difficult Young Man, which appeared three years later, is the second of the quartet, and its focus is Boyd’s own generation. This second book looks, appropriately, at a second son.

  William Merric Boyd was the second child and second son of Arthur and Emma, born in 1888, five years before his brother Martin, the fourth son. While still a boy Merric would prove to have a fiery streak, a darkness cast into even deeper shadow by the sunniness of Gilbert, the eldest child. When Gilbert was killed, aged nine, in a fall from a pony—an event, tweaked to fit, recounted in The Cardboard Crown— the always-demanding Merric became even more the centre of his parents’ attention. Merric was handsome and strong, prone to epilepsy and to fits of both depression and unpredictable rage: Martin, so much younger, physically
small, felt his brother’s proximity as dauntingly oppressive. That Merric knew his faults and tried to master them, to somehow negate them by extending an almost overbearing courtesy and kindness, did not lessen the shame and fear his behaviour provoked in Martin. To the prudish, anxious younger brother, Merric appeared deliberately selfish and wilful, his behaviour an insult to the family’s gentility, a spurning of all that Martin held dear. Merric was a blighted black sheep, and could be hard to like; life was never easy for him, yet Martin, pitiless as only a sibling can be, seems to have viewed him as an indulged rival, and something like an enemy. The farm in Yarra Glen, scene of Boyd’s happiest memories, was bought to provide a future for directionless Merric. Leaving school, Merric outrages Martin’s snobby sensibilities by taking a menial job. Merric dabbles in theology, a career path that the pious Martin contemplated for himself. Merric tries his hand at pottery, and discovers a raw and brilliant talent that nourishes him for the rest of his life; Martin, who worships art and beauty, finds no such skill in himself, and studies architecture without passion. Because flighty Merric can’t be a farmer, the much-loved Yarra Glen home must be sold; because Merric, a conscientious objector, initially refuses the 1914 call to fight, it is Martin who must unwillingly sign up to prevent a white-feather disgrace befalling the family. The third brother and Martin’s favourite, good-natured Penleigh, dies in a car crash, taking with him his flair for traditional painting, of which the conservative Martin approves, leaving Merric and Merric’s dramatic work, which Martin finds confronting. In its portrayal of Merric, from whom much—although far from all—of the character of Dominic Langton is drawn, A Difficult Young Man proves to have roots, as does so much that is worthy in the world, in something as lowly as sibling rivalry.

  A Difficult Young Man—its dreary title does the novel no favours with contemporary readers, and even in his lifetime Boyd’s work suffered from being deemed unfashionable—continues, in clear, conversational style, the story of the Anglo-Australian Langton family at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was written in England in 1953; experience had taught Boyd that with distance came freedom, that the further he was from Australia, the better he could write of those nearest to him. As does The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man draws on numerous monumental and microscopic real-life events including the death of Boyd’s grandmother, the family’s unifying centre, and the subsequent break-up of her household and of life as Boyd had known it. Dominic Langton, a secondary character in The Cardboard Crown but the dark heart of A Difficult Young Man, continues his painful struggle for acceptance, his fight to navigate a world he only imprecisely understands.

  According to Guy, the novel’s narrator, Dominic’s ‘soul-mixture’ is ‘very black to match his face’. Sombrely beautiful, admired by women who sympathise with him and despised by those who do not, Dominic’s personality is a cross he carries from birth. Weighed down by ‘spiritual perception’, a sensitivity to suffering both real and imagined, he is burdened with a compassion that isn’t always welcomed by those who receive it. Dominic feels all things deeply—affection, anger, guilt, pride; harshly judged by those around him, his life is an ongoing struggle with the ugly aftermaths of his ‘dark waves of feeling’. Those who cannot see past his faults call him ‘wicked’, but Dominic is rather a fallen angel, constitutionally incapable of reaching the heights of goodness to which he aspires. There seems no place for someone so erratic within the mannered sphere to which he is born, but—in this second of the quartet at least—Dominic is young, with a young man’s touching determination to conquer his failings, to find the proper way to be.

  That much of Dominic is drawn from Merric Boyd is obvious: but if Martin predicted for his brother the sad fate met by the character in the early pages of The Cardboard Crown—to rave and wander and finally perish in a psychiatric hospital—Merric evaded it. Merric Boyd died in 1959 at the age of seventy-one, by which time he had survived poverty and disaster to establish himself as the nation’s revered ‘father of studio pottery’; more than that, he was the father of children who would raise the Boyd name to greatness in the history of Australian art. His pioneering pottery influenced younger artists who paid him appropriate homage; and though he grew reclusive in his later years, Merric’s life, rarely easy, was undeniably full.

  Martin Boyd died in 1972, aged seventy-eight, in Italy. He had lived most of his life as an expatriate, far from the Australia of his crowded and sunny childhood, and frequently isolated from his family. He had never married or had children, and as a writer he had never achieved great or lasting success. At the time of his death he was impoverished and essentially alone, the ancestral portraits unhung, the restored house long gone. He had wandered for decades, unable to settle anywhere; on his deathbed his thoughts returned to the farm at Yarra Glen, the one place where he might have wished to stay.

  If there is something of Merric Boyd in the young Dominic Langton, there is much of Martin in the adult Dominic who goes to war, watches the complexities of life move beyond his ability to cope, and trails off, a dying star, to a wretched end. Born despairing of the future and hungering hopelessly for the past, Martin Boyd, the autobiographer and essayist, the novelist notorious for filling his fiction with the facts of others, never looked at any life more closely than he looked at his own. The lonely destiny of Dominic was one Boyd long foresaw for himself. The difficulties, in the end, were all his.

  CHARACTERS IN THIS STORY

  AUSTIN LANGTON.

  ALICE LANGTON, his wife.

  Their children –

  STEVEN, married to LAURA BYNGHAM.

  GEORGE, married to BABA STANGER.

  MAYSIE, married to ALBERT CRAIG.

  MILDRED, unmarried.

  DIANA, married to WOLFIE VON FLUGEL.

  ARTHUR LANGTON, brother of Austin, formerly married to Damaris Tunstall.

  WALTER LANGTON, brother of Austin.

  HETTY MAYHEW, married to Owen Dell, and the former mistress of Austin.

  DELL boys, grandchildren of Hetty and Austin.

  SARAH, sister of Hetty.

  DOMINIC, BRIAN and GUY LANGTON, sons of Steven and Laura.

  HELENA CRAIG, daughter of Albert and Maysie.

  Other GRANDCHILDREN of Austin and Alice.

  COLONEL RODGERS.

  LORD and LADY DILTON.

  SYLVIA and DICK TUNSTALL, children of the Diltons.

  ARIADNE DANE, sister of Damaris, aunt of Lord Dilton, and cousin of Laura.

  DOLLY POTTS, formerly engaged to George.

  Various BYNGHAMS, relations of Laura.

  CHAPTER I

  WHEN I told Julian that I would write this book, the first intention was that it should be about my grandparents, but we agreed that it should also be an exploration of Dominic’s immediate forbears to discover what influences had made him what he was, and above all to discover what in fact he was. We realized that to do this it might be necessary to empty all the cupboards to see which of the skeletons were worth reclothing, if possible, with flesh. This may bring an accusation of ancestor-worship, or at least of family obsession, but if one has been brought up in the thick of a large clan of slightly eccentric habits, it is difficult not to be obsessed with it, if only in the effort to disentangle oneself and to reach some normal viewpoint, if such a thing exists. It would be as reasonable to accuse the passengers in a lumbering Spanish galleon, with the gorgeous sails in tatters, the guns rusty, and the gilt falling off the poop, of being self-conscious of their means of transport when they arce surrounded by submarines and speedboats. Their situation is even worse when the Spanish galleon is only a frame of mind. Also nearly everyone between the ages of eighteen and thirty turns against his family and wants to escape from it. When he is sixty he wants to creep back to the nursery fireside, but it is no longer there.

  In my g
randmother, Alice Langton’s diaries, which are my chief source of information about what happened before I was born, there was not much reference to Dominic. He was then overshadowed by Bobby, our eldest brother, who was all sparkling sunlight and mercurial wit, and this may have further darkened the gloomy recesses of his nature. When Bobby was killed at the age of nine, Dominic may have thought that he was not only going to step into his position as the eldest son, but would also bestow, as Bobby had done, laughter, hope and joy about the family, and then he found that he had not the equipment for this, and so was filled with resentment. However, the first recorded reference to him shows that he had not an easy temperament. It is in Alice’s diary for a day in 1892, when the family were still living at Waterpark:

  ‘Drove with Laura and Dominic into Frome to buy him some gaiters. On the way back he threw his gaiters out of the window and lay on the floor of the landau and screamed. Steven thrown out hunting, but not seriously hurt. A cold, unpleasant day. Very old pheasants for dinner.’

  After this brief glimpse of his English childhood we have to follow Dominic to Australia. It may be worth recalling that on the way out he spent nearly eighteen months in France and Italy, where he was taken regularly to Mass in great cathedrals and historic churches by Annie, our redheaded nurse, and often by Alice, who an unquestioning Protestant, was unable to resist anything which evoked the splendours of European culture. He was then five or six years of age, and it is hard to know how much, if at all, this experience coloured his imagination.

  In Australia we lived at Westhill, the one-storied family house in the hills, about thirty miles from Melbourne, but we were very often at Beaumanoir, our grandparents’ house at Brighton, one of the suburbs on Port Philip Bay. It is this house which may have suggested the Spanish galleon. It was bogus Elizabethan, and when on summer evenings the hot sun, slanting across the bay and over the parterres of red geranium, flashed in the oriel windows, and flooded with rosy light the red brick façade and the little green copper cupolas with their gilded tin flags, it did resemble some great ship on fire, about to sink in sunset splendour. Inside the elaborate plaster ceilings and the baronial staircase were given, by the old portraits and furniture brought out from Water-park, a more authentic appearance than they deserved. The occasional remarks of our parents made us feel that we lived only in a kind of demi-monde of civilization, but this house corrected the impression, as it was for us the very hub of culture and rich living. As Dominic imagined that he was the heir to all this, the partly imitation but partly genuine dynastic atmosphere of the house may have affected his character.