life is theirs no longer, and

The dread of death, and I know not what strange anguish at this all-important moment, blanch those human faces, to which the choicest wines of Greece and Italy had just given a hue of purple. These men feel -- instinct tells them -- that life is theirs no longer, and they have not the courage to die!

The opulent freed-man calls to his slaves, and promises them their liberty if they consent to risk their lives in an attempt to save his. But the vile herd is already dispersed; the porter alone remains -- for no one had thought to liberate him -- and he, in his impotent fury, replies by insulting clamours to the cowardly supplications of his quondam master.

Reading this part of the Pantropheon, a chapter called "A Roman Supper," which describes a feast laid on for semi-enemies by a rich freed slave named Seba, I thought Soyer was inventing behaviour for a real person, as Hackforth-Jones did in her Barbara Baynton biography. Only after I had finished the book did I try to find out if Seba had existed, and discovered that he was probably the Frenchman's invention. "So why" I asked myself, while I was still believing him real, "aren't I insulted by this, why don't I react with irritation, the way I reacted to Aitch-Jay and her fake Baynton?"

Speculation.

1. Because Seba was an ancient Roman, and so much has been written about ancient Romans that their reputations have become impenetrable. People rarely write about Barbara Baynton. Therefore anything written about Baynton seems precious. Anything written about ancient Romans does not.

2. Soyer's piece is one chapter in a long book. Baynton's piece is the book itself.

3. Soyer is old and dead and foreign and therefore quaint and unthreatening. Hackforth-Jones is none of these things. There is more of a temptation to judge the living, who are our competition.

4. Soyer is an entertaining writer, Hackforth-Jones is not, or not as much. Entertained, I feel recognised and included. I'm ready to forgive someone who entertains me.

5. Hackforth-Jones was privileged by her intimacy with people who knew her subject. Baynton's son-in-law was her uncle. Soyer didn't have anything comparable. More hope rests on Hackforth-Jones because she could have achieved more. Hers is possibly a cornerstone biography and she's padded it with misinformation. In the future it could be taken as a given that Barbara Baynton's son Alexander Frater was precocious at the age of five, and theories built around that -- someone might get hold of that idea, look at Drought Driven, and say, "Yes, the son is this story is obviously based on Alexander Frater," not realising that their Alexander Frater (Hackforth-Jones' Alexander Frater) is based on the boy in the story. Then they'll go on to write about an Alexander who is not the real Alexander and not the boy in the story but a hybrid imaginary animal, like a mermaid. Naturalists don't tolerate mermaids, so why should ...

6. I care about this why?

7. I should relax. This Hackforth-Jones way is the way history goes and has always gone. This is natural. Someone hears a truth, decides it needs to be embellished; entertaining, it becomes a rumour. Someone else continues the rumour, throws in some extra details, sees a gap, fills the gap. On it goes. The creature that comes out is not quite real, not quite false, and this is History. Pliny says that Seba's friend Nero was a monster; Lucanus tells us he was not so bad. But the monstrous Nero is the Nero who has survived. The ordinary Nero still hovers around us invisibly but he is not well known, no one summons him up with a saying ("Fiddling while Rome burns"), John William Waterhouse did not find him a compelling subject for a portrait, he does not appear in animated Warner Brothers shorts saying, "Release the lions," his name is not a byword for overbearing spoilt-brat tyrants or for anything else. If Nero had been nothing but good (not only in fact, but in the minds of historians) he wouldn't have the reputation he does now, and everywhere we think of Nero we'd be mentioning Heliogabalus or someone else instead, or no Roman at all, but a different figure from a different place and time.

8. I am identifying myself with Alex Frater and thinking, "I would not want someone to steer me around like that after I died, I would prefer to maintain the integrity of myself at the age of five."

Ultimately

9. Fear of posthumous possession.

The ancient chronicles say that in the 12th century a German cathedral held the cranium of John the Baptist at the age of twelve ...

Umberto Eco: The Infinity of Lists

then lost patience and swore at her, disgusted

The thing about Penne Hackforth-Jones is that she doesn't acknowledge a difference between Baynton's life and the events in Baynton's fiction. The first part of that life (born obscurely and illegitimately, Baynton lived lonely in the bush during her first marriage while her husband rode away to find work elsewhere or gambled at track meetings) is mostly negative space and mystery, the second part is positive space and recorded detail, viz, her book of short stories being published, interviews with newspapers, a friendship with the editor of the Bulletin, houses in England and Australia, her photograph in the London Daily News, her patriotic behaviour during World War I, and so on. The contrast between positive and negative, invisibility and visibility, could have been the theme that shaped the book (the subtitle paves the way: Between Two Worlds), but Hackforth-Jones prefers a clean, smooth, even surface spread over everything: she won't let the negative space be. She fills it with information lifted from the stories; she goes at her subject's life like a handyman with a tub of polyfilla. She writes --

She was frightened when she tried to separate the cows from their calves and had to be forced to do it. Alex [her first husband] first laughed and then lost patience and swore at her, disgusted. When she finally had forced the animal to do as she wanted and came back white-faced and trembling with the stick he had given her to brandish still in her hand, she wondered if he too would run if she tried the same on him.

-- then endnotes it to one of Baynton's short stories, The Chosen Vessel. "This story was used to reconstruct Barbara's early married life." The relevant part of the story reads:

It was he [the protagonist's husband] who forced her to run and meet the advancing cow, brandishing a stick, and uttering threatening words till the enemy turned and ran. "That's the way!" the man said, laughing at her white face. In many things he was worse than the cow, and she wondered if the same rule would apply to the man, but she was not one to provoke skirmishes even with the cow.

But no recognition of the difference between fiction and fact, an absence of the note that would remind us there is no reason to believe that the thought Baynton gives to her character should be given to her as well,* and no discussion of Baynton's debt to Gothic literature, or the similarity between the husband in this story and the standard Gothic villain who traps the heroine so that he can gloat over her. In the biographer's eye the husband and the villain become indistinguishable, the author and the heroine are the same person, and the precocious little boy in the unpublished short story Drought Driven is precisely Barbara Baynton's son at the age of five. Hackforth-Jones shows the same faith in Baynton that Robert Burton shows in the Bible when he advises his readers to treat their melancholy with wine in accordance with Proverbs 31:6, as if the Holy Book is only incidentally a spiritual guide and more importantly a health manual. ""Give wine to them that are in sorrow,"" he writes, "or as Paul bid Timothy drink wine for his stomach's sake, for concoction, health, or some such honest occasion." In the mind of Hackforth-Jones, Chosen Vessel and Drought Driven cease to be stories; instead they are transformed into diary entries with the names changed a little; they are not literature; they are news reports in disguise.







* Compare this, for example, to Peter Ackroyd's long Dickens biography. Ackroyd acknowledges that certain events in the author's life might have turned up again in his fiction, but he does not draw absolute conclusions with the insouciance of Hackforth-Jones. She treats uncertainty with repulsion; he treats it like an invitation to an unanswerable mystery. He will say that "such and such seems to be the case" or "we may speculate that ..." For example, "There is another small echo, too, perhaps in the importance which in his fiction Dickens imparts to someone helping a small boy with his homework -- Paul Dombey is helped by his older sister, and Anges helps the young David Copperfield. Can we see in these two consonant pictures an image of Dickens' older sister Fanny helping him?"

So the idea is introduced but not taken for granted. In place of Hackforth-Jones' conflations, Ackroyd writes: "But such derivations have to be taken very cautiously -- there is no doubt that on many occasions Dickens used certain salient characteristics of the people whom he met or knew, but there are very few instances when he simply transcribed what he had seen and heard onto the page. The novelist's art is not of that kind. Dickens perceived a striking characteristic, or mood, or piece of behaviour, and then in his imagination proceeded to elaborate upon it until the "character" bears only a passing resemblance to the real person."

flat on her back she played

The Fraters by then had three children -- the last, Alex,* was born in 1859. They had risen in standing enough to have the death of their second son, Peter, reported in the Maitland Mercury two years before.

* To distinguish the three Alexander Fraters in Barbara's life, the first, her father-in-law, is always called Alexander; her husband, Alex; and her son, Alec.

It's a fact, M. says, that once you become aware of something you see it everywhere. It was only a few days after I finished Penne Hackforth-Jones' 1989 biography of Barbara Baynton that I was working my way through a box of of books in one of those shops that sells cheap remaindered stock when I came across a name that was absolutely familiar to me from Baynton -- the name of Alexander Frater -- on the cover of a book called Tales From the Torrid Zone -- and so I stood there, startled, as I tried to work out how this person might be related to Barbara Baynton, if he might, somehow, be her son -- this, in spite of the fact that I knew the dates were wrong, that the son had been a middle-aged man when his mother died in 1929, that there was no earthly way he could be alive now and writing travel books -- unless he was immortal or magical -- yet I stood there on the concrete floor for about a minute, thinking, "The Alexander Frater?" We're going through a cold stretch of weather and my toes are like marble. When I went outside earlier there were lorikeets on the telephone wires.

The one bird that recurs throughout Hackforth-Jones' book is the crow:

On a trip visiting friends in the bush, she [Barbara Baynton, in her sixties] had risen before dawn to watch the countryside waking. She had walked far out to see the bird and animal life as it stirred into action. An emu rose stiffly from its nest, a dog barked at the hurdled sheep, lizards scrambled out of their shelters. Lying flat on her back she played childhood games with the crows -- trying to dupe them into thinking her dead

In photographs taken around that time Baynton looks rich and fashionable; she was one of those women who are called formidable. When I try to imagine her on the ground it's this vision that I see: the slightly-smiling woman of the photographs wearing her collar of grey pearls, prone like an effigy among the trees, while, nearby, a crow stands on a fallen branch, turning its head suspiciously and watching her, waiting to peck out her eyes, as, in an earlier chapter, a different crow removed one eye from the head of a dead cow. A vision so radiantly strange that it comes like benediction in a book that tries too hard to guess its way into the life of its subject through a mixture of cheap psychology and passages lifted from her fiction.