“A Ramble Through the Mind of An Adolescent” (Part 1)
On Frank Moorhouse’s Juvenilia
In February I gave a talk at the National Library of Australia on the topic of Frank Moorhouse’s Juvenilia. This was recorded and you can listen to lecture in full below. I’ve also included the text for the lecture, but because this exceeds Substack size limits, the text will be posted in two parts.
The title for tonight’s talk is “A Ramble Through the Mind of An Adolescent”: Frank Moorhouse’s Juvenilia. This line is borrowed from an essay Frank wrote when he was 16 years old. It is an apt title for tonight’s talk, because what follows really is quite rambling. The argument does not follow a straight line, there are several unnecessary asides, and it doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion: much like the arc of adolescence itself.
But there are two reasons why I chose this topic. Firstly – and why I have chosen here to talk about it – is because the National Library holds the Papers of Frank Moorhouse, from 1951-1970. This includes Frank’s early papers, from age 12, up to and including the publication of his first book, Futility and other animals in 1969 – at age 31.
This material is uniquely important because it includes Frank’s juvenilia – the literary work he did as a child and an adolescent.
But to truly appreciate the value of this early material, and its place in Frank’s life, I need to make a more general argument for why we should value a writer’s juvenilia, something which we usually overlook or else consider as a stepping stone to what comes afterwards. So I will also be speaking tonight about a new field in the humanities called Juvenilia Studies, drawing on the work of its foundational scholars, Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. I will be using this as strategic cover to then tell you the second reason why I have chosen this topic to talk about tonight.
But first, some context:
Frank was born in 1938 in Nowra, on the New South Wales, South Coast. In 1950, in his final year at Nowra Primary School, Frank started writing. He was 11. Little remains from this first phase of his writing.
The second phase occurs during three years when he was a student at the Wollongong Technical College. We have some important material from this period.
But it is the third phase, when he returned home to complete his final two years of education at Nowra High School, that Frank hits his stride. We have quite a few short stories and essays form this period, when Frank is 14-16 years old. By then, Frank was already committed to becoming a writer.
The fourth phase begins when Frank leaves high school, and moves to Sydney, to become a cadet journalist at the Daily Telegraph. Here he finished writing a novel he started in high school. And he started keeping a writer’s journal – observations and reflections on the world around him. From this, he would write a short story that would be published in Southerly journal, in 1957, when he was 18. His first ‘officially’ published short story.
By then Frank was a journalist and newspaper editor in the Riverina. He was also married to his high school sweetheart, Wendy Halloway. In 1960 they returned to Sydney – and Frank had a second story published, in Westerly journal. He was 21 years old.
As it happens, this is roughly the same period of childhood and adolescence that Juvenilia Studies takes as its area of concern, that first 20 or so years in a writer’s life, when they begin to write. It is a period of development which usually proceeds through actively later abandoning, or otherwise suppressing as a source of embarrassment, what later becomes known as an author’s juvenilia. The term itself carries negative connotations.
Christine Alexander argues that such ‘early writings are non-canonical texts that have for years been considered outside the corpus of respectable material for study; and negative implications of the word ‘juvenilia’ have added to their marginal literary status. The attitudes of authors themselves, of their family and friends, of literary critics and early editors have generally militated against a positive view of the early creative works of writers.’
And yet, offering a more positive view of such works is precisely what Alexander and McMaster have tried to do. Their initial focus was on 19th century authors – such as the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, and Virginia Stephens – who later became Virginia Woolf. There are historical reasons for this starting point: the 19th century saw the emergence and popularisation of Darwin’s theories of evolution, Hegel’s philosophy of history, and ended with Freud’s psychoanalysis. Our cultural thinking throughout the 19th century shifted toward considering the development of the human species, but also the development of the individual, within the species, and the stages of growth, from childhood through to adulthood, that accompanied this. And so writers and artists began turning toward depictions of childhood, in order to explain adulthood. By the time we reached the 20th century, this became standard fare for novels and biographies.
Paradoxically, this has produced a literature about children and childhood – but written by adults – and that has shifted the focus away from the possibility of a literature written by children.
And yet, there are limits to what adults can tell us about childhood. As a writer ages and develops in technical skill, what do they gain, and what do they lose, by also (hopefully) developing emotionally and intellectually out of adolescence? And what do they retain of those earlier experiences, unshadowed by adulthood?
Countering this, Alexander and McMaster argue that: ‘The child’s expression of his or her own subjectivity is there and available for us, if we will only take the time to pay attention.’ What Juvenilia Studies proposes is that we ‘examine childhood writings as a body of literature, almost a genre, in their own right, and for this purpose ... to consider them not just in relation to the adult works of the same author, but in relation to each other.’ That is, to compare the childhood writings of different authors, the better to examine what are the commonalities between them.
But what does this mean in practice? At the risk of oversimplifying what is otherwise a sophisticated body of knowledge, I want to outline some of the findings of Juvenilia Studies here somewhat schematically – perhaps too schematically – by listing only some of what Alexander and McMaster suggest – drawn mainly from an examination of 19th century child writers – to which I will add parallels with the childhood experience of Frank Moorhouse in the 20th century. These commonalities reinforce the notion that writers are not born, they are made; and the conditions that support the making of our writers is precarious and not to be taken for granted.
There are three factors at play. The first is the juvenilia itself. But these are considered within a nexus of two other factors. On the one hand, there is the material and historical pre-conditions which allows a child to engage with reading and writing in the first place. And, on the other hand, is what Alexander and McMaster refer to as the ‘epistemology of the child writer’ – by which they mean how children learn about the world around them, their knowledge-seeking capacities and how they assimilate such knowledge into the development of their own sense of self. All children do this, of course, but the focus here is the degree to which this is done through reading and writing.
The interplay of these three factors is both dynamic and constitutive of a process that forms the background and context to answering the question of why and how certain children engage with particular types of writing, and through doing so, begin to develop, not only their own sense of self, but their sense of seeing themselves as writers.
So, what are some of these pre-conditions? In the 19th century the State instigated a series of Education Acts. This drove the growth of mass literacy, and the demand for printed works. Economically, child writers also tended to emerge from within middle-class families, with such families having ready access to reading and writing materials in the home.
This also describes the Moorhouse family in the 1940s and 1950s Australia. Frank’s father was an entrepreneur and inventor, running a successful agricultural manufacturing business. Frank’s parents believed in the importance of education, and although this was oriented more toward developing technical and mechanical skills, it was grounded in a humanistic and philanthropic framework – often with an internationalist outlook.
The education track for Frank and his two older brothers was to attend Nowra Primary School, then complete middle school at Wollongong Tech, before entering into an apprenticeship at the family business – with a view to an eventual management role. But Frank broke from this tradition, and chose to complete high school, in order to be a journalist, and to become a writer.
But just as literacy is grounded in orality – you need to speak before you can learn to read and write – so, too, formal education is grounded in informal physical play, and for the potential child writer this often takes the form of playacting scenes from books or stories that a child has read or has been read to. The Brontë sisters, for example, as children, playacted scenes from historical stories derived from Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather. Likewise, at primary school in Nowra Frank would play act scenes from the stories about Gallipoli he was taught in school. He would wear his father’s Home Guard officer hat and his oversized leather pistol holster.
In this way, children initially cultivate their interests based upon what materials are close at hand. So what books, periodicals, and newspapers are present in the family home is very much a pre-condition for what types of writing and what knowledge a child will initially assimilate into the foundations of their literary experience.
The Moorhouse family, in both their business and their public service, worked closely with their local newspaper, which was also a mainstay in the Moorhouse home. The family also subscribed to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Women’s Weekly. And in the 1950s, a political magazine called The Free Spirit, the house publication of the newly formed Liberal Party of Australia. Frank had access to, and read, all of this material.
In this, and continuing the playacting and physical activity of earlier forms of engagement with storytelling, some child writers would make their own periodicals and family newspapers. Virginia Woolf, for example, at age 9, produced the “Hyde Park News”, a family newspaper that ran into more than a hundred issues. Here the child writer learns through doing: the work of editing, reviewing, designing, illustrating – the act of physically making a family newspaper.
This activity teaches the child not just about writing, but about the necessary infrastructure that supports writing.
At primary school, while playacting war scenes, Frank also playacted at making a newspaper. At Wollongong Tech he participated in making an actual student newsletter, where he also wrote stories and essays, and even wrote theatre criticism for the school’s play night. When he returned to Nowra High School he started his own student newsletter. Before he was 21 years old, he was working as a journalist and editing his own country newspaper. Playacting is a precursor to actually doing something ‘informally’, which itself becomes a rehearsal for doing so professionally.
So far, Frank’s experience reflects a print culture shared with 19th century middle class families. But where the Moorhouse family was at the cutting edge of the 20th century was in their embrace of new communications technologies. Since his childhood in New Zealand, Frank’s father was enthralled by the cinema. So when the Roxy Theatre opened in Nowra, the Moorhouse family had permanent seats for the Saturday pictures.
In fact, the first story Frank wrote, when he was 11, was one Saturday, after seeing a Western film at the Roxy. He went home and wrote out the story he had just seen on the screen. This is an example of an impulse to write, even when you do not yet have anything original to write about. It is the compulsion of form, even when you do not yet have the experience to substantiate it. But it is this form that a young writer grows into, and finally comes to call their own, occupying it as if a second skin.
This is accompanied by a parallel process, interacting with these material pre-conditions, and that is the development of a child’s knowledge-seeking capacities. This initially operates through a process of imitation. As we saw with the playacting, and with copying the Western film.
Frank, at age 11 was also reading Alice in Wonderland, but having also started writing he began reading and modelling short stories from the Australian Women’s Weekly – because that is what was available to him. By middle school his English teacher introduced him to more adult books like John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps - the scope of his models widened.
But this process of imitation, and who you are choosing to imitate, also reveals a child writer’s ambition. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example, the 19th century English poet, at age 13, wrote an epic poem in imitation of Homer. She was asserting her ambition. Likewise, at middle school, Frank wrote a parody of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, but translated – as he explains in his introduction – for the ‘modern school-boy’. This is Frank, age 14, asserting his own ambition. He states: ‘It always puzzles me to understand why teachers say that Shakespeare is England’s greatest writer. So I, being a benevolent humanitarian, have decided to write, on behalf of our honourable and esteemed system of education, a modern and up-to-date edition of Shakespeare’s work.’
But at the same time the child writer is also modelling the world around them, not just what they are reading. And because children learn to write through a process of imitation, their writings can be read, as Alexander states, as a ‘microcosm of the larger adult world, disclosing the concerns, ideologies, and values of the age.’ It is, in other words, an almost unfiltered point of entry into the historical period within which the child is living, albeit from the child’s limited perspective. But for all that, juvenilia can provide a raw, emotional history of a particular moment. Take, for example, the ongoing significance of The Diary of Anne Frank.
The 1940s and 1950s were a significant period in Australia. Initially raised during the Second World War, Frank very much came of age during the cold war, and the fear of another war to come. He even wrote a short story for his high school annual on exactly this topic: a student finishes high school only to be conscripted into World War Three. A couple of years later, Frank himself was called up to do his National Service Training, the prospect of war becoming even more real to him.
Associated with this was a fear of communism. There was Prime Minister Menzie’s Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950, and subsequent referendum. All this was very real, and argued about in the Moorhouse family home. There was also the question of censorship, which Frank was very much aware of as an adolescent. He read about it, he was unable to access certain books because of it, and he experienced it first hand in the publication of a school newsletter.
The effect of all of these historical, social, and political conditions left traces on what Frank wrote during this period. But writing is also a way for children to ‘appropriate’ the freedoms of the adult world and to assume for themselves a certain power and voice that would not otherwise be permitted to children in an adult environment. In other words, in these traces we don’t just find a repetition of the world, but also the child’s response to that world.
This points to an advance in a child’s knowledge-seeking capacities. Building on this initial process of imitation is a more critical process of differentiation. This can be seen, for Frank, in his seeking out his own reading materials, while a more critical tone enters his writing.
By the time Frank reaches high school his literary models are Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Katharine Mansfield. And yet, his short stories are very much set in his own world, in his school and home life. There are stories about the difficulties being a school prefect, the challenges of playing sport, the anxiety of going to a school dance, the boredom and doubts of going to church, the joys of hanging out at a milk bar with friends. In one story, he describes a boy’s first kiss. I quote: ‘Their lips met. When he opened his eyes the lights along the street were blotches of yellow on a sheet of blackness. He pulled her closer. To himself he muttered, “Jesus Christ, what have I been missing.”
But even here, this knowledge seeking-capacity continues to be supported by certain material pre-conditions, which places Frank very much in the 20th century. And that is the use of state-sponsored public libraries. Although libraries in the modern sense emerged in the 19th century, it was really only in the 20th century in Australia that a network of libraries became integral to Australian regional communities.
Frank participated in a program whereby he could order, and the State Library of NSW would deliver, a box of books via train each month to Nowra. There was a series of articles in the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, that would showcase Australian authors. This was one of the ways Frank discovered Australian literature for himself. He would cut the articles out and pin them to the wall above his writing desk, and then order the books mentioned in the articles from the State Library.
Another way of considering this dual-process of imitation and differentiation – in terms of developing a child’s knowledge-seeking capacities – is to consider the distinction between ‘official’ and ‘formal’ knowledge, on the one hand, and ‘unofficial’ or ‘informal’ knowledge, on the other hand. The former is that which is authorised by convention, by parents, school, church.
The latter is that which such convention prohibits and tries to keep at bay, through surveillance, coercion, or censorship. These are the secrets adults keep from their children. And, of course, for every child the world is an enormous secret that they feel is being kept from them, and only slowly do they begin to piece together some semblance of the truth. In doing so, what is revealed are the hypocrisies and fallibilities of adults, but also the dangers and darkness of the real world.
Many of Frank’s essays and stories are explicitly about this distinction between formal and informal knowledge associated with the adult world and the ways it oppresses, protects, or overprotects, adolescents. They are also concerned with, what Juvenilia Studies calls the ‘child’s quest for forbidden knowledge, especially sexual knowledge’. Of course, this transition from childhood to adolescence is accompanied by puberty, and certain biological imperatives. The adolescent body has its own secrets to be revealed.
This also includes coming to understand gender boundaries, and the formation of gender stereotypes, which the child writer may or may not come to later accept as an adult, but which they nearly all play around with before those identities become fixed. This includes what has been called ‘literary cross-dressing’. Jane Austen’s juvenilia, for example, often display parody and jokes about gender. She would also write stories where the male characters would be described in terms conventionally used to describe heroines, and female characters would be given more conventionally masculine characteristics, such as taking a lead role in the courtship process. Other child writers experiment with writing stories from the perspective of the other sex. This is, in part, an extension of that earlier process of playacting, but now performed on the page.
Frank’s juvenilia shares some of these concerns. We’ve already heard his high school story about having your first kiss. This advances to the point that by the time he’s 17 or 18 years old he would write a story about having sex, or rather trying to have sex, but being unable to do so precisely because of the damaging effect of convention and censorship on the self-knowledge of the main character. Unable to perform sexually, because of ‘fear’, the narrator then interprets this fear as being:
Because his mind and body were dominated by his mother and father and ministers of religion and a stew of ideas about women and love which came from his past. They were holding his body tight in their hands although the door was locked. They were still with him and he felt them. They remained inside him like the smell of rotten meat remains in a refrigerator.
Surprisingly, considering that much of Frank’s later writing addresses gender and sexuality, there is very little of this in adolescent writings. Outside his writing, there are early indications that his mother dressed him is girl’s clothes. He was also molested when he was a student at Wollongong. He started cross-dressing when he was 18 years old, around the same time he started an affair with an older man, while still courting his girlfriend – and soon-to-be-wife. But outside of some hints these themes do not yet become part of his stories, until he was in his 20s, and then were only slowly revealed over the coming decades.
One exception – other than this story just cited – is Frank’s 1957 story, “The Young Girl and the American Sailor”, which contains a veiled reference to the young girl being the victim of a sexual assault. Significantly, this was also Frank’s first ‘officially’ published story. So, technically, it also marks the beginning of his professional, adult writing life.
But this speaks to a limitation of juvenilia; that there are some experiences which a child does not have the capacity to fully articulate. This also raises an important point and a potential trap for a biographer. There is a danger in reading juvenilia and assuming the precociousness or rebelliousness present in the writing extends beyond the page, and describes how the child acted in the world. This is not necessarily the case.
For Frank, his adolescent writing was an outlet for the frustrations and shyness which he found difficult to overcome in his everyday life – but also a pervasive sense of fear; especially within his family, and within his school. At home he was quiet and sullen. At school he was considered polite and well mannered. In his writings, he raged.
There is also evidence that Frank turned to writing as an adolescent precisely to avoid or escape from some of these traumas or confusions. He found a joy and a sense of relief in his writing – even if only a temporary joy or relief – that he could not find in his everyday life.
In his journal, when he was 18 years old, he describes how writing makes him feel:
i must express the inner excitement i feel
after i have written a short story
i get up and walk around and around
...
i lose all self consciousness
and a feeling replaces it
i am inclined to strut
i feel as though the story was a part of me
and after great pain and effort i have torn it
away
...
a gladness that the piece of me has been removed a pride in the place removed
and a relieved happy feeling in my self
But it was a hard won ‘inner excitement’, born out of a long process, and the interplay of a particular set of circumstances coming together – certain material and historical pre-conditions, and Frank’s own unique knowledge-seeking capacities, both assimilating and rejecting those circumstances, within which his sense of self could emerge.
So that is just a glimpse of how Juvenilia Studies approaches this period. Ultimately, what I see as its value to the field of literary biography is that it draws our attention to, and activates this necessary background to a child’s life as being fundamental, not just to the writer that child will become, but in establishing a body of writing that is significant in its own right.
But now I have to make a confession….
Part 2 can be accessed here
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