The Cardboard Crown

MARTIN À BECKETT BOYD
was born in Switzerland in 1893 into a family that was to achieve fame in the Australian arts. His brothers Merric and Penleigh, as well as Merric’s sons Arthur, Guy and David, were all to become renowned artists, while Penleigh’s son Robin became an influential architect, widely known for his book
The Australian Ugliness
.

After leaving school, Martin Boyd enrolled in a seminary, but he abandoned this vocation and began to train as an architect. With the outbreak of World War I, he sailed for England where he served in the Royal East Kent Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps.

Boyd eventually settled in England after the war. His first novel,
Love Gods
, was published in 1925, followed by
The Montforts
three years later.

After the international success of
Lucinda Brayford
in 1946 Boyd decided to return to Australia, but by 1951 he was back in London. In the coming decade he was to write the Langton Quartet:
The Cardboard Crown
,
A Difficult Young Man
,
Outbreak of Love
and
When Blackbirds Sing
. In 1957 he went to Rome, where he lived and continued to write until his death in 1972.

It’s one of the set pieces of nineteenth-century fiction and painting: the exile’s return. A long-lost uncle, bearded and careworn after penitential years in Australia, is restored to a joyful family whose problems will all be solved by a sackful of nuggets from the goldfields.

In some such tableau, its English setting transposed to mid twentieth-century Melbourne, Martin Boyd might have taken centre stage. Having led a nomadic life in England for twenty-seven years, making a meagre living as an author, he came home in 1948, aged fifty-five, with fame and money earned at last, eager to regain his place in the famous Boyd family of artists, restore an ancestral house and rescue his needy, talented nephews—painter Arthur, sculptor Guy, painter and potter David, architect and writer Robin. But ironic comedy, not melodrama, was Martin Boyd’s style and in that spirit he had to play his part. Nothing went to plan; nothing was as he had expected it.

Yet the brief return of Martin Boyd had its reward. This was the splendid, witty, poignant series of novels known as The Langton Quartet. In
The Cardboard Crown
(1952),
A Difficult Young Man
(1955),
Outbreak of Love
(1957) and
When Blackbirds Sing
(1962), Boyd reinterpreted a century of family history. His homecoming prompted the first in the series,
The Cardboard Crown
. The subtle shadings of light and dark in the interplay of his own childhood memories, and the perceptions of the middle-aged expatriate narrator Guy Langton, make this one of the finest Australian novels—as fresh and funny, sad and shrewd as when it was first published in 1952.

Historical novels are often weighed down with period detail. Not this one. Martin Boyd knew his family so intimately that he did not need to persuade his readers, or himself, of the texture of life in Melbourne from the time of his grandparents’ marriage in 1855 to his own departure for service in World War I. The shock of return to an almost unrecognisable world gives
The Cardboard Crown
its sharp focus; it also sets the mood of rueful acceptance.

The creative impulse often works mysteriously. For Coleridge it came in a dream. Tolstoy’s chance reading of a newspaper report suggested the tragedy of
Anna Karenina
. By contrast the catalyst for
The Cardboard Crown
was specific and immediate. A moment in time, a familiar place and a hoard of family papers prompted Boyd to write something quite unlike his earlier work, more accomplished
in tone and more personal. Its narrator, Guy Langton, is a version of the author, seen with wry detachment as well as understanding.

Martin Boyd’s
Lucinda Brayford
was published in 1946, while he was living in Cambridge. He was already an established author but nothing in his earlier work had prepared him for the rapturous reviews and astonishing sales of this novel, in which his experiences as a young officer in World War I, his pacifist leanings and his sense of cultural displacement, found their appropriate form. A bestseller in Britain and the United States, it was greeted by the influential critic Richard Church as one of the three great novels of the twentieth century.

Martin Boyd had not wanted to return to Australia as a failure or an indifferent success. He had always been restless, and with the success of
Lucinda Brayford
he had the means to make a home wherever he pleased. He had no close personal ties and seems never to have contemplated marriage. Some of his friends were sure he was homosexual; others disagreed. A few discerned inner loneliness in this witty, sociable, generous man whose private life was closely guarded. In middle age he felt the need for permanence. He began to think of family life, imagining himself as a generous uncle, helping his young nephews to a start in their creative lives. Spinning a fantasy of homecoming he arranged to buy and restore The Grange, his maternal grandparents’ house at Harkaway, near Berwick, Victoria, and once again make it the family centre it had
been in his childhood. It was a beguiling dream, but the homecoming was a failure.

Lucinda Brayford
, as Martin Boyd soon discovered, was unknown in Australia: few copies had reached Australian bookshops and no one had reviewed it. His Boyd nephews, then in their twenties, were better known than Martin himself. Robin Boyd was making his name as an architect and writer. Arthur’s paintings were critically acclaimed, even though they did not yet sell; and in Sydney, Guy and David Boyd had established a business which, without consulting their uncle, they called the Martin Boyd Pottery. There were no accolades for
Lucinda Brayford
. Instead, Martin Boyd was asked how he found time for writing as well as pottery.

Stubbornly, but with growing unease, he began to transform the old house. Nostalgia for his Australian childhood mingled with a yearning for the English country life he had left; and in an oddly contradictory act of reclamation he turned his grandparents’ unpretentious house into an English gentleman’s residence, furnishing it with elegant eighteenth-century furniture ill-matched with the overgrown garden and neglected paddocks. Even the verandah, which gave the house its authentic Australian character as well as much-needed shade, was removed to give the facade a Georgian look. In the Australian bush it seemed very odd; and although the nephews were too polite to say so, they thought it was absurd.

The house needed an heir and Martin needed company.
Arthur Boyd was invited to bring his wife Yvonne and their two young children to live at The Grange, and to paint biblical frescoes in the dining room for a substantial fee. Arthur, however, was too independent to be woven into his uncle’s design. The frescoes, a brilliant artistic achievement, seemed likely to be the only gain from an ill-advised venture.

The house itself saved the day. Stored in one of the outhouses, forgotten for half a century, the diaries of his grandmother Emma à Beckett were discovered. From the time of her marriage in 1855 until her death in 1906, Emma had recorded the life of the family. Martin read the entry on his own birth in 1893, and the sad, stoic words written three years later when his oldest brother Gilbert was killed in a riding accident. The diaries took him back in time to discover much that was unexpected. Urged on by Arthur (who was always saying ‘Why don’t you?’ to his uncle), Martin saw the makings of a novel in his grandmother’s diaries.

If he had merely turned the diaries into narrative,
The Cardboard Crown
might well have been an unremarkable period piece. But as Martin read Emma’s daily entries he reflected on the family stories he had been told as a child, which were sometimes sharply contradicted by the diaries. His grandparents—the amusing, terrifying and eccentric W. A. C. à Beckett, and the serene, beloved Emma—were not easily reconciled with the images of the young Willie and Emma and the circumstances of their marriage, which once rattled the teacups of polite Melbourne and caused
Willie’s father, Chief Justice Sir William à Beckett, the deepest embarrassment.

The diaries confronted Martin Boyd with the truth of his grandmother’s parentage and the source of the prodigious wealth she had inherited from her father, John Mills. Even after huge losses in the financial crash of the 1890s, and the division of the remaining assets into smaller shares as the family increased, there had still been enough to keep Martin’s artist parents Emma Minnie (nee à Beckett) and Arthur Merric Boyd in modest comfort, with no urgent need to sell their paintings. It was the Boyds who helped the impoverished Arthur Streeton by taking his now famous canvas
Golden Summer: Eaglemont
to London. They entered it in the Royal Academy show of 1891, where it was accepted, as were two works of their own. Returning to Australia they brought up their children in a ‘golden summer’ landscape at Sandringham, on Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay, and at rural Yarra Glen. The Boyds gave small allowances to their sons Penleigh and Martin, and they supported Merric in his financially unrewarding pottery. The family’s roller-coaster ride from riches to poverty reached bottom in the 1920s depression. When Martin returned to Australia, Merric’s sons, Arthur, Guy and David, were beginning again, inheritors of nothing except their talent and the certainties of art.