Finding Herself in Fiction: Henry Handel Richardson 1896-1910. (Books: a precursor of modernism).(Poem)(Review)

Finding Herself in Fiction: Henry Handel Richardson 1896-1910, by Axel Clark; Australian Scholarly Publishing/Arcadia (PO Box 299, Kew, Vic 3101), 2001, $49.50.

IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE circles The Getting of Wisdom and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony are the most discussed of Henry Handel Richardson's novels, for the obvious reason that both are set in Australia. However, the second volume of Axel Clark's biography of Richardson has the effect of putting her first novel, Maurice Guest, at centre stage. This novel focuses on the lives Of students attending a European conservatorium of music around 1900, based on Richardson's time studying music at Leipzig. By relating the novel to the main currents of European thought at the time, Clark is able to demonstrate just how innovative it was.

Richardson spent the 1890s in Germany. Late romanticism was in vogue, but the first wave of revolutionary modernism; inspired by thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, whom Richardson read, was posing a threat to established modes of thinking. At the centre of her novel is a dramatic tension between the two. Clark shows that Richardson systematically read the avant-garde novelists at the time, and listened to composers like Richard Strauss--she attended some of his performances, and mentions him in Maurice Guest. So when it was published in 1908 her novel was at the cutting edge, as we now say, not just of Australian writing, but of literature in general. It was a portrait of the development of an artist; The Getting of Wisdom was a portrait of growing up. James Joyce combined both in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914).

Richardson's Australian contemporaries Christopher Brennan and Percy Grainger also had a blending of late romanticism and early modernism in their make-up, but for various reasons, explored in their biographies by Axel Clark and John Bird, they weren't able to harmonise these elements in the sustained way Richardson did in Maurice Guest. Australian fiction took a long while to take modernism on board, being diverted for many decades, as Patrick White pointed out, by the "dreary dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism". In his novel Voss fifty years later we see similar Nietzschean strains emerging in the Australian novel.

Axel Clark specialises in biographies of Australian writers. His first work was the life of Christopher Brennan, in which he blended Brennan's personality, ideas, love of Sydney, literary influences and creative output into a natural and sympathetic whole. Brennan was preoccupied with contemporary European literature, especially French and German, and so was Richardson, so it seems natural that she would be Clark's next subject. The first volume of his Richardson biography combined a range of disparate interests: itinerant rural life in Victoria, schooling in Melbourne, music training in Leipzig, plus an exploration of her prickly and dominant personality.

This second volume of the biography opens after two setbacks for Richardson--her failure as a musician in Leipzig and her mother's death, compensated for by her marriage to the German literature scholar George Robertson. This book tells the story of their life in Germany and England, her transition from music to literature, and the writing of her first two major works, Maurice Guest and The Getting of Wisdom. These were the most important years in her career.

MAURICE GUEST has been at the forefront of interest since Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele published the full text of the novel, with the suppressed parts restored, in the University of Queensland Press Academy edition in 1998. Clark provides insights into the more passive, romantic characters in the novel, like Maurice and Madeleine, and the more daring but destructive Nietzschean ones, like Shilsky, Louise Dufrayer and Kraft. The latter, believing themselves to be operating on a plane beyond good and evil, have devastating ...