
Burnett Cross (1914–1996)
Close-up photograph of Percy Grainger’s eyes 1950
chromogenic print
Grainger Collection, the University of Melbourne

Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961) and Ella Viola Grainger (1889–1979)
Towelling outfit worn by Percy Grainger c.1934
Grainger Collection, the University of Melbourne

True Thrills
Country Press Inc., USA, vol. 1, no. 4, 1942
pulp fiction magazine
Grainger Collection, the University of Melbourne
As a boy Grainger read the 14th-century Icelandic saga Grettir the Strong, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1893) and, later, Leaves of Grass (1855), by the American poet Walt Whitman, which celebrated ‘the body electric’. From these influences, he fashioned a personal ‘athletic philosophy’ and was always cycling, walking and bounding up and down stairs. His playing could also be vigorous and he once observed that ‘fierceness is the keynote of my music’. Indeed, Grainger was an athlete and an artist with an austere outlook on life. He declared: ‘I do not eat meat, I do not smoke, and I do not drink.’
If the artist in Grainger admired beauty, the athlete in him enjoyed cruelty. Grainger’s childhood mischief was corrected by his mother with corporal punishment, which was perhaps not unusual for those times. As a teenager, however, Grainger discovered a taste for inflicting pain upon himself and others. His mother, to whom he told everything, tactfully referred to these episodes as ‘blue roses’. Percy was to write: ‘A man cannot be a full artist unless he is manly, and a man cannot be manly unless his sex-life is selfish, brutal, wilful, unbridled.’
The public face of Grainger, however, was of an amiable eccentric, a rare nonconformist at a time when the United States was led by the conservative president Eisenhower. Around the house, Grainger and Ella often wore remarkable towelling outfits designed to promote wellbeing. Away from the formality of the concert platform, Grainger could be found in ‘green corduroy pants, [and] bright red vest with a canary yellow shirt’.
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