‘One of the many things the three literary men had in common, along with their writing talents and love of literature, was a great and growing want of money’

The volume is like an extraordinarily detailed gossip fest, if infinitely more accurate than the average gossip. It combines travelogue, stories, and verbatim quotation of documents – letters, diaries, newspaper extracts, racing commentaries, IOUs. It is an extraordinary work of scholarship, admirable and frustrating by turns. Few currently employed university scholars can afford the time and space lovingly and fruitfully devoted by the now-retired Wilding to properly trace whole days and weeks of these men’s lives and to unearth the smallest intersection and interaction between them.

This level of detail leads to the reader knowing more (perhaps more than you ever wanted to) about these figures. It seems as if every horse the reckless Gordon ever rode to steeplechase – win, lose, or place – is identified; every drink Kendall quaffed and regretted is tracked down his throat, every debt he hoped to pay, and couldn’t. Of Clarke’s pressing invitation to Kendall to join the Yorick Club, Kendall wrote: ‘That I was a scribbler I was too vain to deny, the invitation to beer I was too modest to refuse.’ Every one of Clarke’s bad investments, every failed editorial venture, as well as his experiments with opium and absinthe, is examined in detail.

Marcus Clarke, 1866 (source: State Library of Victoria via Wikimedia Commons)

One quirk of the organisation of the volume is that we learn that Gordon was taciturn and a great conversationalist, would only talk about horses, and only became animated in discussions of poetry. With so many points of view carefully documented it becomes inevitable that contradiction is rife; at times the biography resembles a court report, laying out all accounts without sifting or favour. On one thing every commentator seems to agree: that Gordon was a terrible reader of his own poems.

We can also learn that Gordon had excellent night vision, may have been on the autism spectrum, and liked to write sitting up trees or mumbling to himself on his horse. We know the address of perhaps every house Kendall ever occupied, the location of almost every poem and piece of prose each one of them sent out. Clarke is described as an amateur actor of ‘no inconsiderable ability’. In his case there are numerous descriptions of his charm and mercurial personality, along with the tracing of his variously ascribed, or not ascribed, writings. This includes the occasion when the bailiff occupied the bankrupt Clarke’s house, and Clarke convinced him to adopt a persona for the sake of the children, so ‘“Uncle John from the East” chopped wood and did odd jobs about the house – in short played up to the part.’

Wilding traces personal connections through the way the writers read and edit and review and publish one another (although it is usually Clarke publishing the others). Books, and therefore reading habits, can be tracked from personal library to library, most often through departure and bankruptcy sales and purchases among the little group circulating around the three, the Yorick Club, and other associated literary clubs like the Athenaeum.

One of the major achievements of the volume is to make you forget that the whole series of events is racing towards a train wreck, even as the documentary evidence is like a nineteenth-century CSI report into what cut down these talented, clever, nimble men in the prime of their productive lives.

‘We can also learn that Gordon had excellent night vision, may have been on the autism spectrum, and liked to write sitting up trees or mumbling to himself on his horse’

No amount of horrendous detail, collated from the contemporary reports (‘placing the butt of the rifle firmly in the sand, between his feet, put the muzzle to his mouth ...’) can do much more to explain why Gordon killed himself in June 1870. Kendall had written, and almost certainly shown him, a glowing review of his newly published Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes. One of Kendall’s next pieces of writing was Gordon’s elegy. Kendall left Melbourne in October 1870, by November was charged with ‘mental aberration’ in a case around a forged cheque, and was admitted to Gladesville Hospital for the Insane by 1871. In this period Marcus Clarke was serialising his best-known work, For the Term of His Natural Life in the Australian Journal, and also obtained a position in the Public Library. The Melbourne circle was broken up, as far as these three were concerned. Clarke and Kendall outlived Gordon by ten years, Clarke dying in 1881, Kendall in 1882.

Wilding warns the reader, in his title, that the volume is ‘A Documentary’. At a certain point, the detail of the complicated weaving and interweaving of lives becomes not just exhaustive, but exhausting. In a recent interview at the Perth Writers Festival, the novelist Hilary Mantel comments on that set of arguments raging between historians and historical novelists about who owns the representation of history:

there is inevitably a great marshy area of interpretation ... There aren’t two categories: historical fact and historical fiction; there is an area inbetween very much where the biographer operates in trying to work out and diagnose motive ... history is what we call our very defective record of events that we basically don’t understand.

The illusion of Wild Bleak Bohemia is that it tells the truth; that this massive accumulation of fact and detail and record and letters and data will fill in all the gaps, will make a complete picture of this community of men, and their relationships with each other, their clubs, their movement through the streets and cafés, clubs and tiny houses and race meets, so that if this was an historical painting there would be no white patches in the canvas. It is a lovely feeling, and if anyone could do it Wilding could.