David Malouf’s Johnno (1975)
A lush and mysterious first novel
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The book I always meant to write about Johnno will get written after all.1
Hello,
Around the time Zadie Smith’s first novel White Teeth was published in 2000, I heard a radio critic (Radio 4, loves) say that she thought Smith had learned how to write as she wrote, that is, the journalist felt during her reading of White Teeth that she was on a journey not only with its characters, but also with its creator Smith, the tyro writer honing her craft, gaining strength as she pushed on.
Having now typed this, paraphrased from memory, I wonder if the critic appears condescending, though I’m sure she wasn’t: her observation has stayed with me for over twenty years because I took it to be a celebration of literary beginnings.
According to David Malouf, ‘[w]e all have a first novel in us, and it’s largely one that comes from direct experience’.2 We relate to (good) first novels like Smith’s because often, by their nature, they are conspicuously autobiographical, blushingly personal, imperfectly structured, slightly overwritten; and many, like Malouf’s Johnno, are portraits of an artist figure who comes of age in his or her (extra)ordinary home at a time of social change.
Whether or not we manage to produce our own Bildungsroman, all of us come from somewhere and probably came of age there; and all of us, all our lives, are (as it were) imperfectly structured and slightly overwritten. So, unless we’re cynical ratbags, there are always things for us to cherish in first novels, things to defend, things to celebrate; and I’m happy to report that after years of thinking that I should read Johnno, at last I have, and I’m not a cynical ratbag.
Johnno’s narrator, from ‘Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World’ (an allusion to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man right there), is a writer whose subjects are those places, and his friend Johnno. In the Prologue, he returns from England to Australia after his father’s death, and comes across an old photo of his school’s Stillwater Lifesaving Team. At the picture’s ‘very edge’ is the bespectacled Johnno, a ‘cocky twelve-year-old’ with a ‘big, lopsided grin’.
But Johnno was never a lifesaver. Nor did he wear glasses. There has been some ‘deliberate bending of the facts’. So who lied? The camera, or the cocky twelve-year-old?
Thus, pithily and beautifully, the mythology of Johnno begins: ratbag, madcap, jester, Lermontovian hero, conspiracy theorist; a charming, anti-social, violent, seductive, unreliable, self-destructive Dionysus to the narrator’s Apollo. Over fourteen compact chapters, we learn how their lives intersected across three decades and several countries.
In Australia, Johnno is well known as a book about place. Its most marvellous character is shabby wartime Brisbane; and Malouf is penetrating on how the town of your childhood always remains the town you live in inside your head – especially if you leave it, and regardless of how much it changes (as Brisbane changes in the book, radically, from a ‘weather-board and one-storeyed’ country town into ‘a minor metropolis’).
Yet while the writing is fascinatingly specific on the 1940s-50s atmosphere and social makeup of ‘Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World’, what makes it most beguiling is how unspecific it is about Johnno and the narrator, whose characters remain enigmatic, elusive.
In this sense and others, I was reminded of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Truman Capote’s imitation of Isherwood, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (I write about Tiffany’s here). There’s an Isherwoodian air of ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’ about Johnno’s narrator; as in Tiffany’s, he is known only by the nickname (‘Dante’) that the subject of his musings gives to him.3 The relationship between Johnno and Dante also recalls Sally Bowles’s with Christopher, and Holly Golightly’s with ‘Fred’, because there’s no sex.
The absence of sex is inevitably a space from which queer readings can emerge. However – and however much as a lazy undergraduate The Intentional Fallacy was drummed into me – I agree with Malouf that Johnno is not a ‘gay novel in disguise’.
Malouf is gay; Dante is probably gay; Johnno, in my view, is straight – and so what? It is a love story between two men, but whatever the characters’ sexualities, queerness is incidental to the novel’s real theme, which is encapsulated in a climactic and heart-stopping moment when Dante realises that Johnno perceives him in a completely different way from the way he perceives himself, and the way he perceives their relationship.
It’s here that you realise why both figures remain mysterious even as, befitting the subtropical setting, the writing is lushly descriptive. The Epilogue is a remarkable meditation on the power of Australian mythmaking: Johnno is a very grown-up first novel about how we can never truly know each other. For all that’s arguably imperfect or overwritten about it, Malouf makes the familiar distinctive, and, yes, his writing gets stronger and stronger as he pushes on.
First novels, first plays: I tip my sun hat to them. Even if there are so many of the bloody things to read.
Thanks for reading this.
Till the next book …
David Malouf, Johnno (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1975; repr. Ringwood: Penguin, 1987), p. 11. Subsequent quotations are from pp. 9-11, 49, 51, 148, 169.
Malouf, quoted in Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais, ‘Public Dreaming’, The Kenyon Review, 24 (Summer, 2002), pp. 164-73 (para. 11).
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Hogarth Press, 1939; repr. London: Minerva, 1989), p. 9.