The Cardboard Crown Read online

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  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.

  BRENDA NIALL lives in Melbourne. She is the author of a number of award-winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for services to Australian literature. Her most recent book is the best-selling True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack.

  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

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  Copyright © the estate of Martin Boyd 1952

  Introduction copyright © Brenda Niall 2004

  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 1952

  First published by The Text Publishing Company 2004

  This edition published 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079411

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921961717

  Author: Boyd, Martin, 1893-1972

  Title: The cardboard crown / by Martin Boyd ; introduction by Brenda Niall.

  Series: Text classics

  Dewey Number: A823.2

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Author

  About the introducer / Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Author’s note

  The Cardboard Crown

  Text Classics

  All History Is a Little False

  Brenda Niall

  It’s one of the set pieces of nineteenth-century fiction and painting: the exile’s return. A long-lost uncle, bearded and careworn after penitential years in Australia, is restored to a joyful family whose problems will all be solved by a sackful of nuggets from the goldfields.

  In some such tableau, its English setting transposed to mid twentieth-century Melbourne, Martin Boyd might have taken centre stage. Having led a nomadic life in England for twenty-seven years, making a meagre living as an author, he came home in 1948, aged fifty-five, with fame and money earned at last, eager to regain his place in the famous Boyd family of artists, restore an ancestral house and rescue his needy, talented nephews—painter Arthur, sculptor Guy, painter and potter David, architect and writer Robin. But ironic comedy, not melodrama, was Martin Boyd’s style and in that spirit he had to play his part. Nothing went to plan; nothing was as he had expected it.

  Yet the brief return of Martin Boyd had its reward. This was the splendid, witty, poignant series of novels known as The Langton Quartet. In The Cardboard Crown (1952), A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957) and When Blackbirds Sing (1962), Boyd reinterpreted a century of family history. His homecoming prompted the first in the series, The Cardboard Crown. The subtle shadings of light and dark in the interplay of his own childhood memories, and the perceptions of the middle-aged expatriate narrator Guy Langton, make this one of the finest Australian novels—as fresh and funny, sad and shrewd as when it was first published in 1952.

  Historical novels are often weighed down with period detail. Not this one. Martin Boyd knew his family so intimately that he did not need to persuade his readers, or himself, of the texture of life in Melbourne from the time of his grandparents’ marriage in 1855 to his own departure for service in World War I. The shock of return to an almost unrecognisable world gives The Cardboard Crown its sharp focus; it also sets the mood of rueful acceptance.

  The creative impulse often works mysteriously. For Coleridge it came in a dream. Tolstoy’s chance reading of a newspaper report suggested the tragedy of Anna Karenina. By contrast the catalyst for The Cardboard Crown was specific and immediate. A moment in time, a familiar place and a hoard of family papers prompted Boyd to write something quite unlike his earlier work, more accomplished in tone and more personal. Its narrator, Guy Langton, is a version of the author, seen with wry detachment as well as understanding.

  Martin Boyd’s Lucinda Brayford was published in 1946, while he was living in Cambridge. He was already an established author but nothing in his earlier work had prepared him for the rapturous reviews and astonishing sales of this novel, in which his experiences as a young officer in World War I, his pacifist leanings and his sense of cultural displacement, found their appropriate form. A bestseller in Britain and the United States, it was greeted by the influential critic Richard Church as one of the three great novels of the twentieth century.

  Martin Boyd had not wanted to return to Australia as a failure or an indifferent success. He had always been restless, and with the success of Lucinda Brayford he had the means to make a home wherever he pleased. He had no close personal ties and seems never to have contemplated marriage. Some of his friends were sure he was homosexual; others disagreed. A few discerned inner loneliness in this witty, sociable, generous man whose private life was closely guarded. In middle age he felt the need for permanence. He began to think of family life, imagining himself as a generous uncle, helping his young nephews to a start in their creative lives. Spinning a fantasy of homecoming he arranged to buy and restore The Grange, his maternal grandparents’ house at Harkaway, near Berwick, Victoria, and once again make it the family centre it had been in his childhood. It was a beguiling dream, but the homecoming was a failure.

/>   Lucinda Brayford, as Martin Boyd soon discovered, was unknown in Australia: few copies had reached Australian bookshops and no one had reviewed it. His Boyd nephews, then in their twenties, were better known than Martin himself. Robin Boyd was making his name as an architect and writer. Arthur’s paintings were critically acclaimed, even though they did not yet sell; and in Sydney, Guy and David Boyd had established a business which, without consulting their uncle, they called the Martin Boyd Pottery. There were no accolades for Lucinda Brayford. Instead, Martin Boyd was asked how he found time for writing as well as pottery.

  Stubbornly, but with growing unease, he began to transform the old house. Nostalgia for his Australian childhood mingled with a yearning for the English country life he had left; and in an oddly contradictory act of reclamation he turned his grandparents’ unpretentious house into an English gentleman’s residence, furnishing it with elegant eighteenth-century furniture ill-matched with the overgrown garden and neglected paddocks. Even the verandah, which gave the house its authentic Australian character as well as much-needed shade, was removed to give the facade a Georgian look. In the Australian bush it seemed very odd; and although the nephews were too polite to say so, they thought it was absurd.

  The house needed an heir and Martin needed company. Arthur Boyd was invited to bring his wife Yvonne and their two young children to live at The Grange, and to paint biblical frescoes in the dining room for a substantial fee. Arthur, however, was too independent to be woven into his uncle’s design. The frescoes, a brilliant artistic achievement, seemed likely to be the only gain from an ill-advised venture.

  The house itself saved the day. Stored in one of the outhouses, forgotten for half a century, the diaries of his grandmother Emma à Beckett were discovered. From the time of her marriage in 1855 until her death in 1906, Emma had recorded the life of the family. Martin read the entry on his own birth in 1893, and the sad, stoic words written three years later when his oldest brother Gilbert was killed in a riding accident. The diaries took him back in time to discover much that was unexpected. Urged on by Arthur (who was always saying ‘Why don’t you?’ to his uncle), Martin saw the makings of a novel in his grandmother’s diaries.

  If he had merely turned the diaries into narrative, The Cardboard Crown might well have been an unremarkable period piece. But as Martin read Emma’s daily entries he reflected on the family stories he had been told as a child, which were sometimes sharply contradicted by the diaries. His grandparents—the amusing, terrifying and eccentric W. A. C. à Beckett, and the serene, beloved Emma—were not easily reconciled with the images of the young Willie and Emma and the circumstances of their marriage, which once rattled the teacups of polite Melbourne and caused Willie’s father, Chief Justice Sir William à Beckett, the deepest embarrassment.

  The diaries confronted Martin Boyd with the truth of his grandmother’s parentage and the source of the prodigious wealth she had inherited from her father, John Mills. Even after huge losses in the financial crash of the 1890s, and the division of the remaining assets into smaller shares as the family increased, there had still been enough to keep Martin’s artist parents Emma Minnie (nee à Beckett) and Arthur Merric Boyd in modest comfort, with no urgent need to sell their paintings. It was the Boyds who helped the impoverished Arthur Streeton by taking his now famous canvas Golden Summer: Eaglemont to London. They entered it in the Royal Academy show of 1891, where it was accepted, as were two works of their own. Returning to Australia they brought up their children in a ‘golden summer’ landscape at Sandringham, on Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay, and at rural Yarra Glen. The Boyds gave small allowances to their sons Penleigh and Martin, and they supported Merric in his financially unrewarding pottery. The family’s roller-coaster ride from riches to poverty reached bottom in the 1920s depression. When Martin returned to Australia, Merric’s sons, Arthur, Guy and David, were beginning again, inheritors of nothing except their talent and the certainties of art.

  As everyone knew, the bounty which had sustained the Boyds and other family members was based on Melbourne city property acquired before the gold rushes. Known to some, but seldom mentioned, was the story of Emma à Beckett’s father, John Mills, founder of Melbourne’s first brewery and owner of several public houses. Mills died in 1841, leaving these assets to his only child. Behind the shameful brewery fortune was the real family secret. John Mills came from a family of Gloucestershire labourers who had busily engaged themselves in burglary and theft. William Mills was hanged at Gloucester Gaol in 1826 while his brother, sixteen-year-old John Mills, was transported to Van Diemen’s Land where he served a seven-year sentence before sailing to Melbourne in 1837 to buy land and set up his brewery. Because Emma’s inheritance was contested by several Mills uncles as well as her disreputable stepfather, the story was common knowledge in the Melbourne law courts and therefore well known to her future father-in-law Chief Justice Sir William à Beckett. To add piquancy to the inevitable gossip when Emma married Sir William’s eldest son in 1855 was the fact that Sir William often railed in public about the evils of the liquor trade. With his imposing new house in East Melbourne not long completed, he resigned from the Supreme Court on the grounds of ill health and returned to England. There he resumed his crusade against the liquor trade.

  If Martin Boyd did not know his convict heritage, the discovery of the diaries gave him the clues he needed. Some living witnesses—aunts and cousins—may have been indiscreet enough in old age to add their testimony. The diaries offered Boyd a wonderful story, rich in irony, which he was perfectly equipped to tell. Yet, even half a century ago it was unthinkable for him to expose the convict stain. Social shame, clan loyalty, and reverence for his grandmother’s memory stayed his hand. Packing the fifty-odd volumes of diaries in his luggage, with the first pages of his novel, Boyd sailed for England in 1951. He never returned. The experiment of the old house had failed. It was exquisitely done but no one wanted to live in it.

  How to rework the family story without using the convict element? How to do justice to Emma’s strength and independence without revealing the shameful burden she had carried into the cultured, upper-class à Beckett family? The diaries themselves offered an alternative dramatic centre. At the time of Martin’s birth in Lucerne in 1893, Emma left the family party and went alone to Munich. There she renewed a friendship with a Herr Weiger whom she had met in Paris.

  He took her to the opera, sent golden roses to her hotel room, gave her small, expensive gifts. The lines of a wistful song, transcribed by Emma, suggest a sad acceptance of the impossibility of changing her life:

  La vie est brève:

  Un peu d’amour,

  Un peu de rêve,

  Et puis—Bonjour!

  La vie est vaine:

  Un peu d’espoir,

  Un peu de peine,

  Et puis—Bonsoir!

  At fifty-five Emma was still beautiful, in love with art and Europe and perhaps with Herr Weiger too. But there was also her feckless husband Willie à Beckett, her six children and many grandchildren, all financially and emotionally dependent on her. Emma made her choice and returned to Australia. In her grandson’s novel, Alice Langton commmits herself to carrying the family burdens. Alice’s strength, clear-sightedness and generosity of spirit make her one of the great women of Australian fiction. She is never a victim.

  To drive the plot of his novel Boyd had to devise a family scandal to take the place of the convict story. His answer was to develop Emma’s reticent diary entries into a strong and central love story, to which he added an imaginative element: an outrageous series of infidelities on his grandfather’s part. The story of rapacious Hetty, with whom Austin Langton, the fictional counterpart of W. A. C. à Beckett, has four sons is almost certainly Martin Boyd’s invention. This sustained betrayal sets Alice Langton free to contemplate divorce, as perhaps Emma à Beckett did. Emma’s diaries, however, are seldom reflective and although Martin Boyd reproduced many entries word for word, Alice’s confes
sion of love belongs only to fiction.

  ‘All history is a little false.’ So the narrator of The Cardboard Crown, Guy Langton, warns his readers. The strategy by which Martin Boyd transformed his grandmother’s story into a work of art was his use of an unreliable narrator. Guy corresponds in many ways with Martin himself. The return from England, the old house, the young painter Julian (based on Arthur Boyd) are all instantly recognisable. So is the reckless old gossip Cousin Arthur—a version of the Boyds’ cousin Ted à Beckett. Some of the best comic scenes are those in which Arthur is torn between ribaldry and family piety. In his account of the first voyage to England, the ship is at times a version of the Mayflower, filled with grave, high-minded pilgrims. After an extra glass of burgundy it becomes ‘a kind of nautical brothel’.

  Guy Langton never says ‘Trust me’. In countering one family voice with another to show the impossibility of ever knowing the truth of any human heart, he deliberately undermines his own authority. Self-characterised as a loner, an aesthete, probably homosexual, Guy shows the reader how he would be most inclined to interpret the story. The character of Aubrey Tunstall, with whom Guy and Arthur Langton have obvious affinities, is one example. We are told that if Guy’s brother Dominic had written the Alice-Aubrey romance, he would have had Aubrey tormented by conscience, spending his nights in prayer. It occurs to Guy, however, that Aubrey might not have relished the thought of half a dozen Australian stepchildren sliding on the marble floors of his Rome apartment.

  After a number of novels in which the point of view is conventionally omniscient, Boyd was prompted by the impossibility of truth-telling to write a modernist work. He would have agreed with William Faulkner that ‘the past is not dead. It’s not even past.’ The Cardboard Crown is at one level a story of Melbourne’s colonial past and an exploration of the Anglo-Australian relationship. Unlike most novels set in this period it ignores bushrangers, bushfires and outback privations. The dramas of love, money and class in the new society are set against a landscape which Boyd evokes in loving detail, in the spirit of the Heidelberg School painters. His novel is also a finely shaped story about storytelling: a meditation on truth and memory.