In this post, I share some reflections on my high school English teacher, Douglas Webster St Aubyn Berneville-Claye. This includes revisiting a creative response of mine to revelations about him which appeared many years after his death in 1975.
I left high school in 1976 and for decades, like many of my school colleagues, I didn’t once look back. That was until about 2009 when an article about Berneville-Claye was published in The Campbelltown Macarthur Advertiser. It told the story of All My Father’s Children, a book published several years earlier by Margaret Metcalfe, one of Berneville-Claye’s daughters. Under the impression that Berneville-Claye was a war hero she set out to write his biography, only to discover he was in fact a conman, villain, traitor, Nazi collaborator and a man engaged in a whole lot more deception right through his life. Word travelled fast about this news. We mostly remembered him in high school as a man accomplished in English language and literature, though he perhaps loved talking a little too much about himself, often drifting onto the subject of his bad back due to the torture inflicted upon him by the Germans during WW2.
In 2011, as part of my extended work for my Master of Creative Arts (Prose) at the University of Wollongong, I wrote a 15,000 word short story cycle called Splitting the Scene. The UOW Faculty of Creative Arts at that time was a truly inspiring place. As preparation for my prose work, I researched the writing of Frank Moorhouse and his concept of the discontinuous novel as a genre well suited to readers living in the modern world. I also wished to explore the subjective aspects of point of view, a la Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Browning’s The Ring and the Book. I created six characters and built a six-part story told from six different points of view. One of those characters was Neville Horace Barnaby Stearns-Chapman which already indicates something about my intentions for this character. In the work, he goes by the name of Nev.
Upon graduation, I turned this prose work into a full length novel, Splitting Apart. I can’t say I was fully aware of it at the time, but this novel was a type of summation of my life and writing experience up to that moment, brimming, perhaps too much, with writing strategies and devices.
At this point, I need to mention the experience of James Joyce after he wrote Ulysses which went on to become what some consider to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. His first print run was a few hundred copies which received very little response from readers. After a few years, Joyce felt he needed to go out and explain to the world what he was attempting to achieve in that work, and eventually the book went on to gain its ‘hero’ status.
After self-publishing Splitting Apart I felt some of Joyce’s early concern about the lack of recognition of his efforts, for my work was not only an homage to the works of literature mentioned above, but it references numerous other works of literature, in particular the book is sprinkled with scenes that salute the Russian literary and musical tradition (enamoured as I was after having lived in Moscow for three years) too easily overlooked by others, as were, on another level, the title and the six part book structure which is informed by Hexagram 23 of the Yi Ching classic (composed of six lines) and a text I have long been interested in; but further than all of this, the work is, in part, an extended creative response to Berneville-Claye.
Splitting Apart is set in the not too distant future. In summary, Nev, a migrant from England hiding his military and criminal past, becomes the leader of a team of six in a government office in Canberra. They face the task of reporting on the emerging break up of the Russian Federation. The son of Vic, Nev’s deputy manager, stumbles across Nev’s secret history online. Vic, a seasoned public servant, does not necessarily want to bring Nev down for no reason at all, but she decides to use the information she has found to help secure her next promotion.
Each of the six sections of the text are told by different narrators. Voice depends on many elements, but especially on language. The writer really has to let go of their own familiar writing style to get into another first person voice. Writing Nev’s section was such a joy as I largely recalled what we may call the vibration of Berneville-Claye standing in front of our class, somewhat pompously, lecturing us on all sorts of extraneous subjects. I can only offer a few simple examples here:
- When a student one day was considered to be disrupting class, as punishment he was instructed to write ‘discretion is the better part of valour’ one hundred times after school;
- One day, he wrote the phrase ‘latchkey children’ on the board and started a long discussion about this layer of modern society- children who regularly spend part of the day unsupervised at home while the parents are at work;
- On another occasion, he came into class and wrote the single word ‘polarisation’ on the blackboard and went on a long diatribe to warn us of the political dangers we would face in the future;
- One day the Leader of the Federal Opposition came to our home town for some electioneering. My father and my sister attended the meeting intending to heckle. It so happened that Berneville-Claye was seated behind them, and when my sister shouted something, Berneville-Claye berated her and called her a trollop. From this you get the idea of his way with words. Though my father’s threat to Berneville-Claye was a lot more direct and less embellished than his.
Of course, I borrowed the voice, but the character of Nev is a total fictional creation.
Ending up in a Catholic school, it was inevitable that when Berneville-Claye’s story came out he would be judged harshly. Some former students with whom I have discussed this matter unforgivably call him an outright liar and bullshit artist etc. Others are slower to judge and mention how he was quite a memorable English teacher. Such was the phenomenon of Douglas Webster St Aubyn Berneville-Claye.
As I sit here wondering about why we write, whether fiction or nonfiction, I do believe in the cathartic effect that Aristotle mentions, which I interpret as a release, a letting go of resistance or resistant ideas, and one device that allows us to find such release is to write from differing points of view as a way of reminding us that often we don’t see the whole picture and we should therefore be slow to judge other people and situations. And I also believe it is not our job to judge and rectify others, this is an enterprise, though deeply entrenched in our society for a long time, based on ignorance, or we may say based on fundamentally flawed metaphysical premises.
If we were to spend more time tending to our own nature, we would see the world through more impartial eyes and, as a result, find we have more time to build the world that we want with less need to knock down those people and elements we don’t like, don’t want. This is quite a project for any human being or writer.