Curve as cue

An absorbing multicultural story

Sheridan Palmer

Growing up Modern: Canberra’s Round House and Alex Jelinek

by Roger Benjamin Halstead Press

$49.95 pb, 196 pp

Childhood memories often merge real life with imaginary nostalgia, but in Growing up Modern, Roger Benjamin’s memoir of his family’s 1956 modernist Round House, in the then rural Canberra suburb of Deakin, we find adolescent memories collaged with a mix of archival, architectural, social, and personal histories. It is set mainly during Australia’s postwar about architectural and cultural modernism, so often imported with the émigrés, that countered Australia’s cultural cringe and anachronistic nationalism. years of the 1950s when reconstructive policies drove economic, scientific, educational, and cultural reform. this was also a time when an influx of immigrants, multicultural labourers, and specialist émigrés inserted themselves into Australia’s Anglocentric landscape. The book tells a Canberra and Melbourne story

Benjamin, an accomplished art historian, offers a polished narrative balanced by his unwavering sense of content, form, and cultural value. He takes us to the heart of 1950s optimism set within the national capital’s utopian framework and its fishbowl world of public servants and close-knit academics attached to the capital’s new university. We also encounter the best of European modernism within a bush setting when Bruce Benjamin, Roger’s philosopher father, commissioned a young refugee Czechoslovakian to design and oversee almost every detail of their new family home, the remarkable Round House at 10 Gawler Crescent. Thankfully, the house is now a protected heritage building, due to the custodianship of Roger, whose meticulous cataloguing of its history brings the spatial, functional, aesthetic, and textural properties of the building into sharp focus, while introducing an entourage of émigrés and individuals associated with the family and the construction of the building.

Like the spokes of a wheel, Jelinek’s Round House, based on a Pythagorean spiral, complements Walter Burley Griffin’s circular geometric layout of the city. Benjamin’s deftly researched study of Alex Jelinek illuminates the aesthetic foundations that shaped the young architectural student during the 1930s, when the interwar Czech modernist group Devêt sil, the counterpart to the Dutch De Stijl and Russian Constructivist movements, as well as Functionalism and the International Style, epitomised Europe’s own cultural revival. There Jelinek had flourished, until Stalin’s Soviet police state suppressed cultural freedom and forced his escape. We are told of his survival and arrival in Australia, and his employment with the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, which from 1949 was a magnet for many ‘new Australians’, including British, European, Mediterranean, and Eastern Bloc men. It sets the multicultural tone of this fascinating story.

Benjamin structures his architectural history-cum-memoir around his parents Bruce and Audrey Benjamin, ‘left-leaning social progressives’ who relocated to Canberra via Oxford from Melbourne’s élite Jewish and business echelons. They were introduced to Jelinek by Bruce’s cousin, the modernist artist Lina Bryans, described by Alan Sumner as the ‘Gertrude Stein of Melbourne’. Bruce Benjamin was a collector of art and cars, and it is through the ‘guiding spirits’ of treasured art works and iconic vehicles that the design of the house is shaped. A central, cylindrical glass fountain served as a point from which curved walls took their cue, with one wall showing off a Ming scroll in its five-metre entirety. The fountain was a receptacle for rainwater from the butterfly roof; as Jelinek said, ‘Rain coming down the glass cylinder is visible from the dining room and lounge-room, and gives the same visually cooling effect of water running down the inside of a butcher shop window.’ One might muse on Roy Grounds’s large water window for the St Kilda Road National Gallery of Victoria, and whether it owes something to Jelinek’s Round House. The use of water in the design of the house may have originated from Jelinek’s employment on the Snowy Hydro Scheme where, as a newly arrived émigré, he was acutely aware of the sustaining force of water in the Australian landscape’s hostile climate: ‘Rainwater and sunlight are the most important gifts of nature … in this house I have tried to capture their movement and beauty, and make them part of the life of the house and the family.’

Lina Bryans played something of a matchmaker between Jelinek and Bruce Benjamin, as well as introducing Bruce to Ian Fairweather’s paintings, eight of which adorned the Round House. The art historian Bernard Smith believed that ‘Australia assisted Fairweather to achieve the best that was in him’, but Bryans’s support of this reclusive artist was crucial to that end. We find in this book Wolfgang Sievers’ brilliant photographs of various stages of the construction and completion of the house, his stark lines of design and professionalism attesting to what this German émigré brought to Australia with his documentation of architectural modernism and multinational industries. Another émigré, the Romanian furniture maker Schulim Krimper, who had been active in the Deutsche Werkbund until exiled by Hitler, was commissioned to make no less than eighteen pieces of outstanding furniture for the Round House.

Benjamin’s meticulous audit of his family’s life includes everyday household objects, recipes, the genus and botanical names of trees and shrubs planted, names of manufacturers of sundry items, favourite pop music, colours of floors and fabrics. While this sounds tediously obsessive, his attention to the detail of mid-century culture and design, through to the radical 1960s cool bohemianism, and alterations and additions made to the house up to the present, provides a historical exactitude and a commanding encyclopedic homage to this extraordinary dwelling. Nor does Benjamin shy away from births, deaths, marriages, and tragedies, each handled calmly while evocatively permitting characters to exit with dignity.

We are introduced to the British maverick art historian and critic Donald Brook and his wife, Phyllis, who lived for a time in the rear garden flat and became, as Brook describes, ‘a sort of locus parentis’ after Bruce Benjamin’s death in 1962. And while Jelinek’s brief and brilliant architectural career petered out in the early1960s because of his reluctance to compromise with clients, this inventive European quietly maintained a creative life with and beyond Bryans, until his death in 2007.

There are many undervalued contributors to Australia’s road to modernism, this generously illustrated book recognises some of the exemplary artisans whose inspired idealism matched Alex Jelinek’s magnificent Round House. g

Sheridan Palmer edited the third edition of Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, released in 2022 by Miegunyah Press.

‘The song of null land’

The poetics of disorientation

Judith Bishop

The Book of Falling by David

McCooey

Upswell Publishing $24.99 pb, 112 pp

A Foul Wind by Justin Clemens Hunter Publishers $24.95 pb, 104 pp

In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encounter other worlds and world views.

A Foul Wind traces its lineage back to a hermetic Occitan troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, whose provocative poem ‘Pus Raimons e Truc Malecx’ reads in part (the translation is unattributed), ‘Cos the trumpet’s crude and hairy / And the swamp it hides is dark’. This poem, Giorgio Agamben suggests in The End of the Poem (1999), ‘transforms a sexual prank into a poetic query’, with a trope that seems to doubly signify the anus and a break with metrical norms. Dante referred to Daniel as il miglior fabbro, the better maker. Clemens’s genre-blending fluency is likewise highly artful, formidably energetic, and incessantly coded. Some readers will relish digging up the source codes and spotting the compulsive transformations (‘Hombre Wail, / Sea Moan’s brother’, ‘Punk Fraud’, ‘Lacky’, ‘Thus Spuke Zerothruster’). Others will enjoy the Beckettian nihilist exuberance and its self-reflexive, rollicking disorder and muck: i put me trumpet to me lips and blow much like roland at roncevalles but this is not navarre & there’s no Charlemagne to send belated aid: there’s only champagne & abominations breeding like the cane toads of Outremer flowering to deliquescent pustules in fading night (‘the song of null land’)

Do not endure the enteritis of elocutionary ordure a voice brayed suddenly through the half-light of the hall. (‘Busting stile to prolong the mechanical’s existentially intervallic void’)

If representational meaning is off the table here, emotive meaning slides into its place, underscoring the black humour with recurring tropes and jokes about putrescence, orifices, money, death, escape, power, illusion, hype, ruin, abomination, and exhaustion. A hallucinatory, David Lynch-inspired opening poem, ‘the problem of evil’, sets the scene by DJ’ing a sequence of four genre snippets in as many stanzas, one of which reads like a punk rock lyric: ‘All doing / Is a death ray / To fuck the one you love.’

Dizzying lexical and dialectal mash-ups thumb their nose at the conventional lyric conflation of identity and language, offering in its place a style driven by the accidents of ‘stochastic metaneuronic discharge / and exhaust’:

Ah he wuz well rewarded later wit a million books he couldna read, so it’s hard to feel too sorry for the impersonal personage he felt himself.

(‘Mentaphonic radiocules enwinkling ordographic delicacies outta insalubrious oncophores’)

The final section, ‘Home of own’, which comprises half the book, is energetically and tonally distinct from the rest, though many of its lexical moves are the same. Spoiler alert: ‘Home of own’ is a near-homophone of – well, you know what. Lacking the rewards of exuberant lingual energy, this extended play on philosophical conceptions of language, naming, and being falls rather flat, with the effort of deciphering lines such as ‘One a mat, a peer / and a lurgy. / I, runny, / Lie to tease’ offering little even to the most ardent lover of homophony.

And yet, there are arresting lines here, though one hesitates to read them as transparently sincere: ‘so many prophets of hate / hate needs no prophets’.

David McCooey’s fifth collection, The Book of Falling, opens with a section on other creative lives. Here is the poet voicing over Elizabeth Bishop as she contemplates her imminent move to Seattle:

Underneath us all, the heavy, red earth keeps faith with the human structures built upon it, [...]

Meanwhile living things spring and decline, in their godless and Biblical manner.

(‘Questions of Travel’)

‘Fleeting’ imagines Sylvia Plath, having lived a further fifty years past her death at the age of thirty, finding life again after ‘the deranging noise’ of poetry and ‘the brief duration of abysmal sleep’.

Elsewhere, McCooey’s poems can be oneiric in their understatement. In the serial poem ‘Chamber Pieces (ii)’, the unremarkable becomes the revenant:

We are at a dining table. The window looks out onto bush.

Someone remarks on the view.

‘What is a view?’ I ask.

My father gestures with his hands. I look outside at the unfamiliar trees.

A number of the poems reveal a disjuncture between human frailty, including depression, and the many cultural frames (movies, interviews, and theme parks among them) that urge and compel our energy and involvement. ‘Extracts from an Interview’ points to this as a common artistic experience (On the Beach was famous as a comedown from earlier successes):

Q. How do you feel about critics?

After the downpour my son puts on an LP: Neil Young’s On the Beach.

Joining an increasing number of books that use the cognitive ricochet between word and image to strong effect, a section titled ‘Three photo poems’ invites us to parse that space for various sorts of disconnect. The lines in ‘Posing cards’ read as directives to a photographer (‘Have the couple half hug / with their arms crossing in the front’). The words underline the parents’ estrangement with instructions on how to create the false impression of a close-knit family. (Later in the book, ‘A Brief Family History of Falling’ touches on a fall that may have led to their marriage: ‘He was a broken man, and she felt sorry for him’). In ‘Bathroom abstraction’, photographs of bathroom tiles foreground the inhuman indifference of their surface, while the words limn the vulnerability of human bodies trying to keep it all together in post-operative, post-partum, and foreign bathrooms.

In her critical work The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (2016), Nikki Skillman proposes that lyric and anti-lyric modes are less distinct than their proponents might imagine, at a time when materialist, somatic and neurological thinking are increasingly sources for both kinds of poets. The Book of Falling substantiates her thesis with a neurological poem, ‘Synaptic Transmissions: An Elegy’. Here, the dead father ‘becomes real in a human sense’, in the neural reconstructions of presence that memories are. There is comfort in the bodily traces of intimate connection that continue in the brain:

Now he is heavy as a thought distributed in the deep sediment of my memory, in the uncanny articulation of a gesture, a signal from a dying star.

If McCooey’s book keeps faith with the representational mode and affective powers of contemporary lyric, Clemens’ is a vigorous exemplar of the anti-lyric mode. Both move through the maze of biological and cultural disorientation and emerge with a poetics that deserves our undistracted attention. g