‘Well,’ said Caroline briskly, ‘shall we choose the book for next time?’ She paused, waiting for us to answer. When nobody did, she said, ‘What about something by – ooh – say, Virginia Woolf?’ Andree, Allison and I stared into our wine glasses. Jo, who was less polite, groaned.
‘Not a good idea?’ Caroline opened the third bottle, the verdelho Andree had brought, and carefully topped everybody up. ‘And why not? Allison?’ Put on the spot Allison, who liked to keep the peace whenever possible, shrivelled. ‘I’m not crazy about Virginia Woolf,’ she confessed almost in a whisper. ‘I know lots of people think she’s wonderful, but … whenever I read anything she wrote, I always feel as if someone’s going to make me write an essay about it.’
‘Nonsense!’ Caroline sipped her wine. ‘Virginia Woolf is a classic writer. She speaks to the female condition …’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ interrupted Jo. ‘Virginia Woolf only speaks to the female condition if you happen to be an overprivileged, neurotic woman who lived in England during the 1930s and spent time with a bunch of other literary neurotics.’ She’d said similar things before, though only to me, and perhaps a little more gently.
‘I won’t argue with you,’ said Caroline in a voice of steely graciousness. ‘I’ll only tell you that you’re wrong.’
‘Yeah?’
‘This is a really nice verdelho, Andree,’ said Allison quickly.
‘Just tell me why I’m wrong!’ Jo glard at Caroline, gulped her wine and refilled. Pointedly moving the bottle out of her reach, Caroline said, ‘Let’s not get upset, shall we?’
‘She was a bit neurotic, Virginia, I suppose,’ said Andree. ‘But a wonderful writer.’
‘Absolutely.’ Caroline added thoughtfully, ‘And such a lucky woman, too, in some ways. She had a really, really supportive husband.’
‘Here we go,’ said Jo to me under her breath.
‘Yep,’ said Caroline. ‘He really helped her. So she could do her work, write those brilliant books. He kept the house running.’
‘I see,’ said Jo. ‘So you reckon that, while old Virginia was working upstairs on her fabulous prose, Leonard was putting out the garbage without being told? Yep, makes sense. And I bet he knew his way round a chop at a barbecue, too.
‘Ha ha.’ Caroline took an angry gulp of wine. ‘All I’m saying is, not all of us are lucky in that respect.’ The rest of us tensed, avoiding looking at each other. We knew what was coming.
‘It’s not as if I ask Hugh to do much,’ said Caroline in what she clearly thought was a reasonable tone. ‘I know he works hard too.
It’s just … I wish he’d help me round the house. Just a bit more.’
‘But don’t you think most men are like that?’ asked Andree. ‘Or most men over thirty, anyway? I mean, Bob for instance …’
‘Bob is a saint compared with Hugh,’ declared Caroline. ‘Anybody is. Even David.’
‘Thanks,’ said Jo.
‘Hugh will never do anything off his own bat,’ said Caroline. ‘And he has to make a point about everything I ask him. He can’t just mow the lawn, paying attention to the borders, like normal people.
Oh, no. He has to get my nail scissors and a ruler and make sure I see him measuring every blade of grass …’ She finished her wine and poured another glass. ‘I think it’s true.
Men are from Mars. God knows I’ve learned to live with most of the weird things Hugh does, even the way he eats tomatoes, but …’
‘Speaking of weird,’ said Andree quickly, ‘have you ever noticed how men always know the latest sports results, even though you know they haven’t read the paper or watched TV or turned the radio on? They just know.’
‘Messages through the ether from Planet Sport,’ suggested Jo. We laughed, except Caroline.
‘Don’t talk to me about sport!’ she cried. ‘I just want Hugh to spend more time around the house. Is that too much to ask?’
‘You’re not serious,’ said Jo. ‘You really want him to stop earning squillions putting up office buildings and spend more time at home? You’re always telling us how much you like having your own space when you need it.’
‘Thass true,’ admitted Caroline. ‘But I’d just like him to take more of an interest in what I do, instead of going on about his boring sport, sport, sport all the time. He could be more interested in this book group, ‘frinstance. I tried to tell him about the last book we did, by that French writer, Col … Col …’ ‘Colette,’ said Allison.
‘Yup.’ Caroline waved her arm, narrowly missing Andree’s full glass. ‘How come French people only have one name? Mmm? Anyway, I liked that book. It’s sooooo romantic. And I told Hugh that she’s a writer who really knows the heart of a woman. The heart of a woman,’ she repeated, and her eyes went all misty. ‘And you know what he said?’ Pause for effect. ‘He said he thought Colette was a soccer player from Argentina.’
‘That really surprises me.’ Allison was beginning to have a little trouble with consonants. ‘Hugh’s an intelligent man.’
‘Ha!’ Caroline pulled the cork out of the fifth bottle with a vicious plok.
‘Well, he is,’ said Andree. ‘I mean, he reads, goes to movies …’
‘I’m sure he’s a romantic in his own way,’ added Allison.

‘Pig’s arse,’ said Caroline surprisingly. ‘Lemme tell you what he did the other night. We got out Casablanca on DVD, it’s my absolutely favourite movie in the whooooole world, it’s soooo romantic. And we got to the ending, and it’s the very best bit, and I always cry …’ Her voice wobbled. ‘And Hugh said, he actually said, he wished Ingrid Bergman’d get out of the way, so he could get a better look at the Lockheed Electra behind her.’ Jo and I burst out laughing, and kept laughing for a long time.
‘It’s not funny!’
“Yes it is,’ said Jo. ‘Come on, Caroline. Lighten up!’ But there was no stopping Caroline. Without taking breath, she launched into a long, passionate description of her husband as one of the ten worst people in human history, who hated Sunday night costume dramas on ABC television, always went to the bathroom just after she had announced dinner was on the table and would sleep in the same bedsheets for a year if she let him.
From time to time, one or other of us tried to deflect her. We might as well not have bothered. Hugh, she said bitterly, screamed with laughter over fart jokes, sang ‘Achy breaky heart’ in the shower without being able to remember past the first two lines. And when first introduced to Caroline’s parents, he had picked up two prawns from a platter, slid them under his top lip and pretended to be Dracula … On and on she went, the level in the bottle dropping steadily as she spoke. Allison was slumped in her chair, her head in her hands, stirring only long enough to open the next bottle and fill all our glasses. I found the wood grain of the table to be so beautiful I almost burst into tears. Next to me, Andree was in tears because she had decided she was turning into her mother. Jo, her cheek resting on her arm, was drawing little patterns on the table with a wine-dipped finger. After twenty minutes, the only person sitting straight in her chair was Caroline.

‘And … not … only … that,’ Caroline suddenly spoke very slowly with enormous emphasis. ‘I haven’t even told you what he’s like .. in … bed.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I said.
‘No!’ Caroline held up a regal hand. ‘You are my oldest friends.
You have A Right To Know!’
‘Please, Caroline,’ said Allison.
‘I bet you think he’s a sex machine. He thinks he’s a sex machine.
Well ha. And ha again.’ She glared at all of us in turn. ‘Ha!’
‘We don’t really want to hear this,’ pleaded Allison.
‘Yes, you do,’ said Caroline. ‘I wanna tell you …’ Jo suddenly sat up straight. She looked as bleary as the rest of us, but as she took a deep breath, I felt a sense of misgiving.
‘Look, said Jo,’ If you’re going to tell us what sex with Hugh is like you might as well not bother. We know.’
‘Whaddya mean, you know?’ Jo sighed. ‘We’ve all been there, Caroline.’ Andree and Allison both started to giggle.
‘Whaddya mean, you’ve all been there?’ Caroline suddenly sounded quite sober.
‘Do I have to spell it out?’ said Jo. ‘We all know, from personal experience, that Hugh is a dud in bed. Now, can we change the subject, please?’ In the terrible silence that followed, Allison poured Caroline another glass of wine.

From Great Australian Drinking Stories, ed Jim Haynes, ABC Books, Sydney, 2003

Jacqueline Kent, reviewer June 19, 2007

It is good to say “welcome back” to this, the life story of Australian artist Margaret Coen.

It is good to say “welcome back” to this, the life story of Australian artist Margaret Coen as told to, and by, her daughter Meg Stewart. First published by Penguin in 1985 – I happened to edit the manuscript – it has now been reissued by Random House. This is a revised edition, with new material that has come to light since Coen’s death in 1993.

Born in Yass in 1909, Margaret Coen had both the luck to be talented and the talent to be lucky. From her early youth she knew she wanted to be an artist, and she singlemindedly set about achieving her ambition. At Kincoppal Convent in Elizabeth Bay she studied drawing with the flamboyant Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo, who urged his students to “work, work, work!” while attacking their charcoal drawings with a feather duster. Coen left school for drawing classes four nights a week at the Royal Art Society in Pitt Street, convincing her strict Catholic family that drawing from the nude was not immoral.

During the Depression, work for young artists was very scarce. Coen was forced into a series of dead-end, commercial art jobs, which she mostly loathed: her goal of being an artist seemed unattainable. Her luck and her life changed when a family friend offered to pay her rent on a studio, first in Margaret Street and later in Pitt Street. This was Coen’s great opportunity and she grabbed it, working hard at drawing and painting: soon she began selling her work, mainly still lifes and paintings of flowers.

Artistic Sydney was a very small world in the 1930s, centred on the Royal Art Society, Julian Ashton’s art school and various sketch clubs around Circular Quay. Coen’s friends and associates included Arthur Murch, George Finey, Rah Fizelle, Grace Crowley and the very elegant Thea Proctor. Coen also knew Ray and Percy Lindsay, and greatly admired the work of their brother Norman. In 1930, she visited him at his home in Springwood, discovering a man who was “tremendously alive … like quicksilver, constantly moving, with an extraordinary lightness about him”.

Norman Lindsay became Margaret Coen’s great friend and artistic mentor for many years. The 1985 edition of this book describes their relationship mostly in straightforward teacher-pupil terms, though certainly leaving scope for the reader to wonder whether there was more to it. Clearly there was. Meg Stewart has added a chapter in her own voice explaining what she had never known while her mother was alive: Margaret Coen and Norman Lindsay had been lovers.

Stewart was told that her mother had been Lindsay’s mistress, a wholly inappropriate term since they never lived together and Lindsay never supported her. She found tantalising clues about their relationship in their letters to each other and also in Lindsay’s work.

But facts about how and when and where were difficult to come by and Stewart admits the “perennially teasing dilemma of attempting to ascertain the truth between two people”.
However the affair was resolved, Norman Lindsay remained a beloved friend of Coen’s until the end of his life. It says something for the quality of their friendship that Lindsay also became a great friend of Coen’s husband, the poet and literary editor Douglas Stewart; Lindsay also became “a sort of grandfather” to Meg Stewart.

Autobiography of My Mother is written without stylistic flourishes or idiosyncrasies: sometimes the writing is a little flat. What makes it so lively and fresh is the level of evocative detail, especially about Sydney in the 1930s. Margaret Coen painted in a maritime city, with Circular Quay smelling of tar and salt air. Bridge Street had a row of palm trees running down the middle, city buildings were honeycombed by artists’ studios and you could get a slap-up roast dinner very cheaply at Usher’s or Aaron’s pubs or coffee at Mockbell’s.

This is also a book that delights in the details, large and small, of the natural world, from orchids to caterpillars to horses. Above all, it is the self-portrait of a woman with a great sense of fun and adventure as well as a serene, implacable will. Margaret Coen’s vitality and clear eye are obvious in her work, too. Indeed, the only disappointing feature of this book is the reproduction of Coen’s paintings.