A Fine and Private Place

By Brian Matthews, Pan Macmillian: 2000, , paperback, $28.00. Reviewed by Richard Freadman in the September 2001 issue.

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Ever tried facing fast bowling with a baguette? This is how Brian Matthews felt when trying to make the case for literature to his gloomily disbelieving Uncle Mannie, one of the many memorable people who figure in Brian Matthews' autobiography. The cricketing analogy says a lot about the book. It refers to a time when Brian, a working class boy from St Kilda and East Brighton, began to study English at the University of Melbourne. Although he spent a lot of his childhood on the streets of St Kilda, books, indeed high culture more generally, have also played their part. Another uncle, Jim, became an important mentor for Brian, talking books with him and taking him to galleries. Brian's father is a reader too.

This is a book about growing up in various worlds; about how those worlds meet, collide, sometimes fuse, and about the creative difficulty involved in cajoling the often disparate bits of the past to talk to one another. For many Australian males, this reader included (my childhood heroes were Picasso and Ron Barassi), A Fine andPrivate Place will seem quintessentially a boys' Melbourne. How to flatten blokes and yet still feel deeply -- that is the problem.

For much of the book Matthews is the larrikin raconteur. At one level the narrative is beautifully delivered and includes hilarious grass-roots yarns. Home from school on sickies the young Brian gets to see -- more to the point, to hear --a St Kilda council worker whose progress up Havelock Street as he clears the gutters is 'often marked by the emission of a firecracker fusillade of stupendous farts.' Reporting this to mates, Brian at first encounters scepticism, but then derives real kudos when the finding is corroborated by the mates in question. 'This', Matthews, now a seasoned academic, observes, 'was empiricism at its best.'

At another level, the book is about the masculine ethos that shapes the larrikin life of the streets and beyond. Matthews' writing has a superb feel for the speech rhythms of this boy's and man's world and for the fickle and often ferocious feelings that are so deeply implicated in its colour and humour. Of a friend he says: 'He was a bit slow, Dougie, and for a lot of reasons he did not have a chance.' The placement of'Dougie' in the sentence is just right. In this world, where the mateship is warm and outsiderdom correspondingly wintry, the placing of deceivingly laconic adjectival stuff before a proper name can betoken one of two things: either Dougie is a tremendous bloke, or he's a deadshit. Nothing in-between. Matthews expertly simulates the intentness of the cold eye of peer appraisal as it looks Dougie over. There's relief in the second half of the sentence, because it shows that the narrator at least is on Dougie's side; but we know that for one a bit 'slow' like Dougie, life won't be easy. And it isn't.

Dougie shares with the young Brian a'soft, fearful streak'. On the streets this is a major liability, and Brian for one goes to inordinate lengths to prove his masculine bona fides. Elsewhere, though, it's a different story. It's that 'soft' streak -- or,to put it less pejoratively, the capacity to feel with real sensitivity -- that enables Brian to form deep, loving and life-long attachments to people (both men and women), places (both city and bush), and to the ways of the imagination. Here the larrikin raconteur gives way -- as he must if the narrative isn't to degenerate into adolescent tedium -- to a more sober, ruminative, even regretful voice: 'We inhabited a fragile cocoon of romance and fantasy that was always on the verge of cracking apart if concentration flagged or disbelief became suddenly unsuspended.'

The book's title, from Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress', is presumably intended to allude to the fragility of the human bonds, imaginings and commitments that make up the Matthewsian family world. 'The grave's a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace.' Matthews writes beautifully about the bonds. He is in the best sense a sentimental autobiographer: one who cherishes and records the ties that have shaped and nurtured him. But like all such life-writers he must concede that memorialisation can only partially resist the loss that occurs as the present, and those who people it, succumb to 'the indeterminate and unyielding past'. Death haunts this often good-humoured book and its tribute to 'the fascinating dance of life.'Two deaths in particular: those of Genevieve, the daughter of Matthews' first marriage who dies in early infancy, and ofhis father. The writing here is intensely moving.

Matthews' account of the father-son relationship contrasts strikingly with the pattern of failure that characterises this 'bond' in the autobiographies of Patrick White, David Malouf, Manning Clark and many other prominent Australian autobiographers. Matthews writes openly about 'our love for one another'; about his father's fundamental decency, his often thwarted creativity, his modesty, diffidence and other fine qualities -- all of which amount to a complex but cherished emotional patrimony for the son. The loving candour of this dimension of the book takes us beyond the macho phoniness of the streets and into regions of feeling that are too often left unstoried in our current accounts of Australian mateship-patriarchy. It's here, in the loving if occasionally hurtful companionability between father and son, that the disparate worlds of manhood and the emotions seem to meet and to fuse, and to offer real possibilities for male authenticity.

Yet, even here things don't cohere forever. Threading its way through the narrative is the St Kilda Football club, for so long the recipient of 'serial drubbings of astronomical proportions'. At times the family's fortunes are mirrored by the fate of the club; and powerful bonds -- not least between father and son -- are fostered in the 'outer'. Finally, in 1966, the Big Day comes: the Saints win their first flag. Brian and a friend are there, but his father, whom Brian soon realises is seriously ill, stays home. The long awaited premiership heralds a disastrous downturn in family fortunes. The father and daughter die; Matthews' first marriage goes into decline. Yet the book ends on a moment of moving affirmation between Matthews and his own son, and for this reader at least affirmation, delight in the yarn-worthy strangeness and profundity of life, is the dominant note. My one reservation about this lovely book is that neither the title nor the wintry Tom Roberts cover quite capture what lies within.

Citation

• Richard Freadman. 'Review: A Fine and Private Place by Brian Matthews' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2001. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 06 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• This is a sometimes funny, sometimes intensely moving but never sentimental account of a working-class upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks in St Kilda. The book ranges across many of Brian Matthews' deepest passions and explores relentlessly some of his most insistent memories through the extraordinary prism of wartime and post-war St Kilda. A Fine and Private Place uses at its core the themes of graves, deaths and disappearances, families, relationships between fathers and sons; but throughout the memoir is the recurring theme of living for the moment, working-class joys, the frustrations of putting all your hopes on your football team. At times heartbreakingly sad; at other times wonderfully witty, A Fine and Private Place is one of the most rewarding memoirs of recent years.

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