In his short story I So Do Not Want To Be Having This Conversation, Frank Moorhouse’s first person narrator says “I’m on the side of Lytton Strachey when he remarked that good biography should pass lightly over those performances and incidents which simply illustrate vulgar greatness in someone’s life and instead the writer should lead our thoughts into domestic privacies”.
By that standard, Catherine Lumby’s book FRANK MOORHOUSE A LIFE is a good biography.
Ten years before his death on June 26 last year, Frank Moorhouse requested Lumby to be his biographer and the result is not only an insightful biography but a primer to his work. That said, Lumby insists that the book is not a comprehensive guide to Moorhouse’s life and work nor is it a work of literary criticism, rather an attempt to connect the life and the work of an important Australian writer and to show how the two were inextricably linked.
The book certainly explores Moorhouse’s complex legacy as a writer, an activist and a person and how the social, political and cultural shifts he lived through influenced his writing and how, in turn, his writing influenced those shifts.
Lumby observes that “throughout his oeuvre, Moorhouse took simple objects and practices of everyday life and imbued them with extraordinary significance. Martinis, chairs, food, conferences, conversation, hotel room service, bar culture, overseas travel, bush walking, speech making. The topics that Moorhouse has interrogated in his work are eclectic, yet bound by his capacity to illuminate the quotidian and make it vibrate with cultural or political resonance.”
Moorhouse advocated throughout his life to end regressive censorship laws and affirm copyright protection for writers, a legacy which continues to benefit anyone who seeks to make a living from writing in Australia.
In the short story, I So Do Not Want To Be Having This Conversation, Moorehouse’s narrator ponders whether he is “a lost soul of the ‘70s floundering in the sea of the new inhibition.”
An exhibitor of inhibitions his whole writing life, Lumby presents a charming and scholarly work on the rise and rise of an emphatic literary figure.
FRANK MOORHOUSE A LIFE by Catherine Lumby is published by Allen & Unwin