When Blackbirds Sing 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.

  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

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  The Text Publishing Company

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  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  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

  INTRODUCTION

  A Moral Young Man

  by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

  When Blackbirds Sing

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Text Classics

  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 an
d 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.

  When Blackbirds Sing

  . . . death on the earth, in the sea, in the air –

  Yet oh, it is a single soul always in the midst.

  LAURENCE BINYON

  . . . each is a single soul, a human being of feeling,

  with ties of love and affection binding him to other

  human beings. And each human being, each single soul

  is a miracle, a forever incomprehensible mystery, a

  fragment of the vast mystery of life itself.

  DALLAS KENMARE The Nature of Genius

  CHAPTER ONE

  All the way home on the ship Dominic thought of Helena. For the first week he had not so much thought of her as felt her, or felt the loss of her. It was as if part of his body had been torn off, and his life was pouring out of the wound. He had so often been unhappy; though for brief periods, an afternoon or a day when on a horse or in a boat, the rhythm of riding or sailing had brought him into harmony with his surroundings, and he had felt an intense joy of living, which, while it lasted, enabled him to forget his inability to make any real contact with his fellows. When he tried to make it, he generally did something that infuriated them. At last, when he married Helena this obsession had left him; though his marriage had infuriated everybody, especially the way he did it, carrying her off while another man was waiting for her at the altar steps. Since then he had experienced nearly four years of at first bewildering happiness, which soon he came to regard as normal existence. His deep feeling for the natural world and his longing for complete human fellowship were satisfied on the farm where they lived in New South Wales.

  And now he was separated from her for no one knew how long. It might be for ever if he were killed, for he was on his way to the war. He had very simple ideas of honour, as had Helena. If he had not gone to the war they might not have continued to be happy, knowing that their honour stood rooted in dishonour. Also Dominic had originally been intended for the army, but he had failed in his examinations, and he thought that now he had the opportunity to remedy this disgrace, which had overwhelmed him at the time. Again, with his inability to achieve a balanced relationship, either with people or between different facts, he did not realize, not in its full sharp meaning, what separation from his wife would involve.

  In the anguish of this first week on the ship he was back again, a misfit new boy at school. It was partly to avoid these sensations that he was going home to join an English regiment, not so much from his own choice as on his father’s advice. He had been going to enlist in the Australian Light Horse, but Steven had pointed out that Dominic’s peculiar temperament, judging by his experience at school and at an agricultural college, appeared to arouse more hostility, or at any rate brutal ridicule, in the young Australian than in the young Englishman. So here he was on the ship, feeling again like the new boy; and ships in those days were very like small public schools. Committees were formed to organize games, and the members came round like prefects, forcing passengers to play. Cricket was almost compulsory for the men, and those crossing the line for the first time were forced to undergo the rites of Neptune.

  It was very rough in the Great Australian Bight, and the public school spirit did not take control until the ship left Fremantle, so that for the first week Dominic was left alone in a deathly anguish which was almost physical. When he awoke in the night, and turned to touch the source of his life and peace, she was not there. She was hundreds of miles from him, and every hour the heaving ship took him further away. Not till then did he know how much she had given him. She had kept him serene, contained within himself, other than her, yet one with her in perfect harmony. He had lost all that tortured longing to escape his loneliness by meeting another person in the intimacy of anger. When he awoke in the morning and put his lips on her neck, her skin was full of cool, peaceful life. It was like dew. And she did not give him only physical peace. She calmed his mind. When, in spite of his general happiness, at times he thought that she did not really understand him and he felt his old impulse towards violent anger, which he had been told was an inherited taint in his blood, she did not meet it in any way, either in fear or repulsion, and it left him.

  In the mornings he came into the saloon with his dark El Greco face looking haggard. A man at his table chaffed him about sea-sickness. Dominic did not answer. The man was one of that vast mass of people outside his comprehension, from whom formerly he had suffered so much in trying to win their friendship.

  This was the first stage of the voyage when the other passengers either thought that he was seasick or were themselves too sick to notice him. In this stage he did not think, but only felt. He felt the loss of the integrity that Helena had given him, felt himself disintegrating, turning back into the bewildered perennial new boy.

  The second stage began after Fremantle when the sports committee began to function. The sea was calm and he sat in his chair thinking of Helena. His feeling had become numbed with its own intensity and only gave him intermittent pangs. He filled his mind with pictures of her, in the dairy skimming the cream, or doing things with plums and apricots and tomatoes, drying them in the sun to use in the winter, or shaking the seeds from the pods of poppies. She was always engaged in country activities of this kind. Sometimes she was waiting for him, leaning over the gate when he came in from riding, or even sitting on the flat top of the gate post, which made him laugh. She also did this for him. He did not laugh easily and she released his laughter. He thought of her after their baby was born. He remembered his emotion, how thro
ugh this she had brought him into the human fellowship from which he had always felt excluded, and had related him to the natural world which was his home.

  One of the men organizing the games came up to him and told him that he was putting him down for the eleven against the ship’s officers. Dominic said that he did not play cricket. The man laughed and said: “You can’t get out of it with that one.”

  This was one of his difficulties in life. People so often could not believe the simplest facts when he told them. It was true that owing to his somewhat erratic education he had played hardly any cricket, and he did not like a game that was a sort of moral commitment and was even a substitute for a moral code. He thought games should be entirely for pleasure. He was not unathletic. He could break-in a colt and jump a five-barred gate. He was a strong swimmer and had dodged bulls in the arena at Arles.

  He explained politely to the man that he saw no need to get out of it. The man gave him a curious look and after that left him alone. He explained to his committee that Dominic was a queer fish. Because of his dark, slightly foreign appearance, one of the passengers suggested that he might be a German spy. A Mrs Heseltine from Melbourne said that was nonsense, and that she knew his family quite well. She admitted that he was a bit of a black sheep, chiefly because he had run off with his first cousin, the bride of Wentworth McLeish, one of the richest squatters in the Western District, on the very day of the wedding.

  Seeing him so lonely, and also attracted by his looks, she made herself known to him. He was longing for something or somebody familiar and he was always responsive to kindness and never questioned its sincerity. The numbness which succeeded his anguish was beginning to thaw. This friendly, pretty, rather frizzy woman who knew Aunt Mildred, though she was eighteen years older than himself, sent a warmth along his veins. For the first time since he left, his sombre face suddenly lighted up in a smile. He brought her deck chair and put it beside his own and they sat together for the rest of the voyage, the subject of a good deal of half-amused, half-malicious gossip.