Staff Papers

The Self as Spectacle: Donald Friend and His Diaries

A paper presented by Paul Hetherington, Publications Director, Public Programs, National Library of Australia to the Friends of the Art Gallery of South Australia, at the Art Gallery of South Australia on 26 November, 2003.

I speak to you today in my capacity as editor of the recently-released second volume of The Diaries of Donald Friend. Donald Friend's diaries are being published by the National Library of Australia in four volumes under the auspices of the Library's Morris West Trust Fund. The first volume, released in 2002, was edited by Dr Anne Gray, and I am delighted that both volumes 1 and 2 have been launched so eloquently by Greg Mackie today.

The Library is undertaking this major publishing project because it holds in its Manuscript Collection 44 of the 46 diaries by Friend that are known to be extant. One diary is in the National Gallery of Australia and another-a juvenile diary-is held by the James Hardy Library of Australian Fine Arts, State Library of Queensland. Together Friend's diaries contain about 2,000,000 words and many hundreds of, often very fine, drawings. The whereabouts of three other diaries by Friend are not known. One was stolen from Friend during the Second World War and one or two others were bought from Friend by Edgar Kauffman. To date we have been unable to locate these missing diaries.

Each volume in the Library's four-volume edition of Friend's diaries will follow on from the previous volume, but each is also being published so that it can stand on its own. While many people will wish to have all four volumes of the diaries on their shelves it is entirely possible, for example, to read and enjoy volume 2 without having read volume 1 first.

The quotations from Friend's diaries that I will read today are drawn from both volume 1 and volume 2. However, the images that accompany the presentation are all from volume 2. This volume has only just been released and I could not resist showing some of the fine images that have been used to illustrate it. I am also showing them today to provide a general sense of the richness of Friend's artistic accomplishment in the diaries quite apart from the superb quality of his diary writing.

And in this context it is useful to remember that some of Friend's works of art-his drawings and paintings-incorporate written material. Such artworks are themselves reminiscent of his illustrated diaries in which image and word are so often combined as part of the same complex texture; and as different aspects of the same artistic quest.

Indeed Friend's diaries exhibit what one might call an artistic ambidextrousness. Where some people can switch easily from right to left hand as they work, Friend in his diaries switched easily from writing to drawing, and back again. His gifts were unusually wide-ranging. While many painters are good writers, and many writers are competent painters, few artists-or for that matter writers-from any culture have shown the extraordinary facility that Friend demonstrated in both arts.

There are many challenges in editing Donald Friend's diaries, and today I want to mention only a few of these.

Perhaps the most significant of these challenges is the difficulty of trying to understand who Friend was and, in exploring this issue, I would like to begin with a brief discussion of the self-portrait you see on the screen, taken from Friend's relatively late publication, Bumbooziana.

This discussion will give one indication of why I have entitled today's talk 'The Self as Spectacle'. Friend was always a close observer not only of others but also of himself and his circumstances. He depicted himself in his work, both in his art and in his diaries, much as a dramatist or novelist might present a complex character in one of their works. He was usually aware of the impression he was making and, to some extent, in his art and writing he made out of his life a spectacle for the benefit of others.

However, this is not to suggest that as an artist and writer Friend wasn't sincere. It is merely to emphasise how much of a fascinating performance Friend's life and art were. I suspect that many artists and writers, no matter how introverted, are, at their core, performers. And Friend was no introvert. He enjoyed the attention of others and, as we will soon see, was aware of his own talent, from an early age.

So, to this image on the screen. Friend produced a considerable number of self-portraits over his lifetime and, together, they form a strangely ambivalent composite picture of the self. While some of Friend's early self-portraits were fairly conventional and straightforward, his later representations of himself are inclined to be deliberately humorous, unflattering or self-mocking-and, at times, made up of calculatedly ludicrous elements.

In this late self-portrait, which exists in a number of versions, Friend depicts himself as an ape who is painting his larger-than-life human image onto a canvas. As is the way with many self-portraitists, the painterly ape is copying his own image from a mirror. As you can see, in this instance the mirror is being held by a naked boy. You can also see that the image in the mirror is a skull-a death's head. In this picture it is only the portrait on the canvas which looks out at the viewer-a relatively unflattering life-like rendition of Friend in his sixties. The portrait's gaze is questioning and rather bleak with its down-turned mouth and lined, ravaged face.

This complex picture can be interpreted in a number of ways. It suggests that Friend saw himself as partly a creation of his own pursuit of art-which, in turn, he saw as a response to the fact of death and a desire for sensual gratification. Yet the depiction of his artistic self as a sophisticated performing monkey undercuts his artistic pretensions. It suggests that at his core he was ambivalent about the performance and public view of his vocation, if not about his vocation itself. However, the picture remains ambiguous because it also suggests that Friend saw art as redeeming and transformative-as obviously it can be.

Like so much that Friend produced, this work poses questions about deep issues of identity and the construction of meaning.

The portrait I have just discussed is one of many possible examples that could be given to demonstrate that Friend was a fascinating, thoughtful and complex figure-and someone hard to pin down. Having said this, I would like to examine the phrase, 'Donald Friend's diaries', more closely.

The simple phrase, 'Donald Friend's diaries', implies an understanding of Friend. In this phrase, 'Donald Friend' can mean some combination of the following characteristics: an Australian painter from a relatively privileged yet peculiarly troubled background, superb draughtsman, man-of-many-talents, friend of Russell Drysdale, restless traveller, collector, homosexual, writer, diarist and long-time resident in Bali. Yet, like the figure in the portrait, this well-known figure is partly myth; partly a self-conscious construction by Friend himself.

One example of Friend's self-awareness as a diarist is the following entry from 2 June 1943:

You know, sometimes I rather doubt if people reading all this will credit truth to my record. But I assure you it is as true as anyone could expect. After all, one can never do more than translate the facts through the medium of one's own personal perceptions. Thus many of the stresses may be false or exaggerated. I see things absurdly, because I am absurdly incapable of the state of mind that can seriously indulge in the very activities that I record. Somehow they appear to me as funny, sometimes monstrous, symptoms of wrong-mindedness. They are like the laughable antics of droll animals; diverting to those watchers outside the cage, but really solemn affairs to the denizens within. (1, 240)

This passage exemplifies one of Friend's characteristics as a diarist; a tendency-on occasion-to adopt the stance of a sceptical, sometimes amused, observer, standing apart from himself as writer and artist. At such times he appears hardly able to take himself, or others, very seriously. Indeed, he almost seems to want to disclaim any responsibility for what he writes about. But even in such a frame of mind he was able to assert that his diary writing is 'as true as anyone could expect.'

In many other diary passages Friend is less sceptical and very much involved with his material:

I've been working hard these three days on the Colin portrait and on a new work, an Annunciation, and been happy enough, as the boy himself turned up yesterday, and spent some time while I made drawings, and the same again today, when he had finished some work for Fleischmann.
That was delightful of course, and I drew and painted like a madman when he was with me, tho' with shaking hand and heart beating wildly, for in his presence I am the completest fool that ever there was, distracted and hasty, so that nothing I say is complete or sensible, only beginnings and endings of foolish sentences, and sheep's eyes, and slaverings, so that the boy must esteem me an idiot: for all that, he seems friendly. He is friendly. He likes me as a friend, is flattered, I suppose. But loves me not. (2, 389)

This is Friend at work, in love-and involved and passionate-although he maintains the capacity to observe himself from something of a distance, in this case rather ruefully.

And here is another kind of involvement:

The sight of physical perfection never ceases to delight me: more than that, when I see a beautiful body, it comes always as a sort of happy surprise. Astonishment and pleasure. This afternoon when we all went out into the bush to play a ball game, and when at night we went down to the baths to swim, there was plenty to be astonished and pleased at. Their intense physical energy gives to these people an aura of constant activity, and one seldom sees them in repose, yet all their movements are fresh and free and vivid. (2, 443)
So, while it is true that in his diaries Friend is sometimes detached, arch or self-conscious, he is also often unguarded, sensitive, furious, or in love. At times the diaries demonstrate real tenderness and affection in their writing, something relatively rare in Australian literary culture. Sometimes his emotions are extravagant; at other times he downplays his emotional responses. But his natural fluency and poetic gift for description are given free rein in many diary entries, which are explorative, evocative and suggestive. And they demonstrate a richness and variousness of thought and attitude which is multi-layered and, at times, extraordinarily subtle.

What, then, are the hallmarks of Friend's writing style?

While some of his diary entries are very matter-of-fact, his style is more often various, finely observed, irreverent, iconoclastic, snobbish and expansive. He is a marvellous storyteller.

I got a little freshwater turtle-a tiny creature hardly bigger than a penny in circumference, and so cunningly designed, so neatly fitting, that he seemed to be more a work of art than of nature-in olive brown and green, jade colours shading to ivory, like a Chinese carving… (1, 419)

He is also a fascinating chronicler of his life and times; a kind of latter-day Australian Samuel Pepys-but more wide-ranging than Pepys.

The American sailors who periodically invade the town, land on the beach from great invasion barges such as they use in New Guinea. I stood awhile this evening watching them. They seem to be very jolly and undisciplined and full of loud voice. An odd thing I have noticed about Americans, they walk differently to us; they walk with a sort of mooch, a roll, a little like a camel, or like the sturdy Texan cowboys in films. Maybe that is why. They are so intensely Hollywood conscious, that with them one feels that every man is his own Gary Cooper. (1, 197)

Friend's writing in his diaries always seems knowing-even when it was the product of adolescence-as if innocence either passed him by entirely or was dispensed with very early on. Friend was sometimes self-indulgent, often a Romantic, at times cynical and bitter and disillusioned (as many Romantics can be). He has fine analytical skills and a superb ear for the music of words. Indeed, he loves words and their nuances in the way that many painters love the feel of the brush and palette knife on a canvas or board. He is aware of many of his own failings. For a writer who loves the play of surfaces, he is also capable of profundity. He has a marvellous, sometimes caustic and often bawdy sense of humour. It seems particularly appropriate that Friend fantasised that his ancestry on his mother's side included the famous libertine and brilliant, scandalising poet, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Rochester's poetry is highly articulate and often obscene. He is a scarifying critic of human beings and their predilection for self-delusion and hypocrisy. Here is the opening of Rochester's superb poem 'A Satire Against Reason and Mankind':

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear
I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational.

In a 'Memoranda' in his first diary-Friend wrote 'Memoranda' rather than 'Memorandum'-he writes:

I am Donald Stuart Leslie Friend, and am 16-years-of-age, being blessed with a genius for art and a talent for writing. My mother, known in this and other writings as Adorable, is a lady of extreme beauty, wit and sophistication, it is from this gracious lady that I inherit all talents-she is the descendant of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who was reputedly an illegitimate son of Charles I. This explains Adorable's eyes-so magnetic and brown are they that an aged servant, unknowing of the descent said they were the laughing, lovely eyes of Charles Stuart himself.
I have a sister Gwen, and two brothers, the elder, my senior, called Harley, being monstrous grim of appearance and most unbelievably grown-up for eighteen. Ten is younger, fair-haired and good-looking. I have been told by sages and seers that in June or July I shall leave for England. July is almost over, and I have been disappointed for the last three years. All predict a brilliant artistic career for me. (1, 61)

In this 'Memoranda', as in many passages throughout Friend's diaries, there is confidence and affectation at once, along with evidence of a rather hypersensitive nature-and, importantly, Friend is adopting a pose. Yet, while a 16-year-old's pose may be looked at sceptically, even dismissively, Friend's later life, art and writing confirms that even at 16 Friend was affirming for himself who he was to become.

This early passage, and his allegiance to the Earl of Rochester, shows Friend's precocious self-confidence, his snobbishness and sense of humour, his youthful Romanticism, and his sense of being a person apart. As he grew older, these qualities developed and matured in his writing-they were never entirely banished.

This passage also expresses Friend's extraordinary, richly idealised, strongly Oedipal attachment to his mother; his association of his family with high, aristocratic breeding; his sense of being apart; his identification with writers and writing; and his identification with an unconventional sexuality-the Earl of Rochester's larger-than-life reputation was partly due to his bisexuality.

Friend's life and pose-perhaps it is more satisfactory to call this a constellation of attitudes-are inexorably moving towards one another, ensuring that he would become the artist and writer rather than the grazier's son.

As with many artists, Friend's closest subject was himself and, as he represented himself in his diaries and his art, and as he made himself into an image of the person he wished to be, he also obscured a great deal, including a strong sense of vulnerability. Late in his life, on 1 January 1983, after re-reading one of his early diaries, Friend wrote:

It was diverting for a while to leaf through it reviving old memories until gradually the full horror dawned: I haven't developed at all!-what seems quaint and even charming in a precocious adolescent is horrifying to find undisciplined and unimproved in oneself approaching one's 68th birthday.
Self-centred, conceited, atrociously snobbish, frivolous, obsessed with aristocratic delusions, adept at self-deceit. None of that's changed. Already I was infatuated with the spectacle of myself as a superior being, a genius destined for fame moving wittily around in a world composed of romantic subject-matter, arranged for my own delectation.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of this passage is the mordant eye which Friend casts on himself and his own posturing. While many people like to think that they can look honestly at themselves, Friend was actually capable of doing so-although not always-and capable of looking more-or-less unflinchingly and unsentimentally at the world.

This unsentimental quality may seem at odds with his tendency to be a rich, even wild fantasist and Romantic. However, it is the unusual capacity for both truthfulness and Romance; sceptical clear-sightedness and fantasy, which creates the particular, shifting, involving quality of much of Friend's diary writing; which allows it such a wide and interesting tonal range, and such a range of multiple perspectives.

From his first diary onwards, then, Friend was aware of his role as the artist consciously shaping the narratives that he constructs (and it is also worth remembering here that many of his paintings are also complex visual narratives, full of absorbing, accumulating detail).

In his diaries he demonstrates a conspicuous mastery of the well-constructed phrase, sentence and paragraph. His narratives are usually tightly-written, succinct and fast-paced. His vocabulary is wide and often surprises with its inventiveness-another hallmark of the stylist who writes not only to record but writes also for posterity. Or, at least, for an imagined future reader.

Here, for example, is a moving diary entry from 1943:

I am rather furious with myself at the moment. I have the opportunity to write and an empty mind-or rather a mind full of unrelated stuff with no focal point, comments on this and that with no relation to the day and hour. This is a ghastly waste. There is nothing to do but sit in the pale afternoon sun and improvise until I think of something. You see, I have not lost one whit the obsession that has given an urgency to everything for this last year and a half-the feeling that each hour may be my last of leisure and privacy. So at such times as this, when I have time to set down something which will preserve my shape for the future, and yet am oppressed by mental inertia, are an exasperating torture. One somehow feels that by recording all these trivial things they are somehow given permanence and body. Why should it matter at all? Why bother to give a lasting (how can one even know it will last?) form to the jiggle of memories and comments, so that other people at other times can read what I was thinking about, and what I knew. Well it is futile. But anyway I do it. I try to tell myself I do it entirely to satisfy myself; but at its best, that is only half true. If I were doing that I'd probably invent a complete language of my own, and go the whole hog and write down everything-but everything. And such a record would turn white the hairs of he who read it, as do all stupendous experiences, such as hanging all night over a chasm suspended by a rope that is slowly being sawed through. And furthermore, I am lonely enough without indulging in such an extreme introversion. (1, 244)

This is Friend mastering a sense of crisis through language; constructing and construing his difficulties into words of considerable pathos. The bright voice of the adolescent would-be literary stylist of the 'Memoranda' I quoted earlier has matured and darkened.

And here, finally, is Friend in 1982, relatively late in his life, writing of his diary again. (This passage will be included in volume 4):

It stands to reason, nobody would keep a diary who did not find himself and his world absorbing.
As I do. And in this book I shall attempt to revive something of the spirit of those earlier diaries full of drawings and letters and the excitement of life-diaries which are already a legend, & generally assumed to be a unique personal exposé of our art world from the 1940s on. No more slipshod, neglected journals like those of my past five years or so.
Such is my resolution-or to be more realistic, my good intention. For I am aware that the essential ingredient for a fascinating diary is a fascinating life. And that in my rickety incurable ill-health, bodily feebleness etc, is hardly within my capabilities. A month of fascinating incidents would most certainly kill me. However, there remains the life of the Spirit and that of the Mind: the latter presents no problem at all.

Friend's emphasis on the life of the mind is telling. His diaries are fascinating partly because he thinks so well in his writing; because he controls his material with such a conspicuous, and often beguiling, intelligence.

These are marvellous works. I recommend them to you.

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