There are many such stories in Jack Lindsay’s autobiographical trilogy, now released as a whole for the first time, with an introduction by Michael Wilding; many such moments in which the period’s bohemia, and especially the group within it of father Norman’s disciples, comes alive in all its charming gusto and strutting silliness. For the young Jack Lindsay at that time, an earnest fledgling Nietzschean in thought if not deed on the approved paternal lines, a Dionysian Stephen Dedalus given to poetically enshrining girls seen on harbour beaches and ferries as newly arisen Aphrodites, Lynch’s plans were simply home truths. Something of a classics prodigy in his virtually fatherless Brisbane childhood, an early teenage convert to Blakean dialectic with the conviction that ‘Athens had to become Brisbane in order to be Jerusalem’, the paternal view from Olympus-at-Springwood was to hold him in thrall until his adult literary career was well under way.

Independence did come, however, through a growing organically rather than simply rejecting, and the enriching of his sense of things beyond the heroic abstractions of the inherited Weltanschauung was to enable him to make a substantial contribution to Australian and English intellectual life. He has been one of the rare breed of successfully all-round Australian intellectuals, synthesising rather than just versatile in his interests in literature, art, history, and anthropology. In these volumes, development beyond plus a felt continuity with his origins manifests as a poised empathy with and critical distance from the life it records.

For the Lindsayan movement was, or course, largely a ‘mistake’, a false though influential lead in the story of Romanticism in Australia. Its rejection of mainstream modernism had a genuine point to it, but it inevitably led to crude and empty posturing in its too self-conscious affirmation of good old-time Dionysian joy as a kind of transcendental essence aloof from lesser life. Jack Lindsay was right enough, for instance, in objecting to T.S. Eliot’s ‘sniffy fear of life’; yet there was perhaps a clearer direction towards genuine vitality in Eliot’s accepting and poetically acting out his genuine angst, than in the Lindsayan stance of pretending to be born-again Greek gods, or even born-again Renaissance artist-gods.

Nevertheless, the whole Vision phenomenon, as depicted here, retains more appeal than one might expect. Largely this is because of its Australianness. Local circumstances, for instance, inhibited its uglier potentialities. As Lindsay himself comments, the relative cultural rawness of Australia enabled the group to be at once fiercely, modernistically anti-bourgeois, and still to affirm ‘the grand tradition’: Rubens nudity could be used to shock a local Establishment that hadn’t yet mellowed to the point of owning such things. The group taste hence combined with its general stance to echo the first generation of European Romantics with a directness that would have been impossible in twentieth-century Europe, right down to the habit of writing unreadable mock-Elizabethan verse dramas à la Cenci (a practice cited here at rather shameless length). A similar explanation, too, could be given for the ahistorical nature of the Lindsayan appeal to tradition, its refusal to identify heroic values with any extant or emerging social group or order. This ensured immunity from the pro-fascist, temptations that beset Yeats, the European anti-modernist modernist (and far superior artist) with whom the movement had most affinity.

Another redeemingly Australian feature of the enterprise, too, is the sense it makes given the physical and climatic setting. ‘We’ve got the scenery’, as Lynch said, and no one accustomed to rejoicing in the play of sunlight, air and water on an Australian beach can be totally out of sympathy with the dream of Hellenic pagan restoration. This elemental factor certainly pervades the Australian-based sections of Jack Lindsay’s life story, giving fundamental point to his pre-occupation right from the early tale of his mother’s excuse to herself for letting him stay home from school (fruit of her son’s guerrilla tactics in hiding his shoes): ‘at least he’ll be out in the sun’. What better place to envision a reborn Venus, after all, than Sydney harbour? What more suitable agistment for a bunch of Coppelia-inclined sculpted nymphs and satyrs than somewhere like the Blue Mountains? The lovely moments in Jack Lindsay’s own generally not very successful poetry (amply quoted here) attest to this.

Still, men and women aren’t satyrs and nymphs; or rather, they both are and are not, and getting the balance right in his paradox is one of those fundamental dilemmas of life. It’s no peculiar shame of Lindsayism, therefore, that it failed here to extent of not even seeing that there was a balance to be struck, though this account interestingly reveals how distinctively Australian this failure was. The evocation of literary bohemia (the trilogy’s predominant setting) clearly shows the relation of the Lindsay ideology to its social setting. The jaunty, myth-making tone of the paternal Bohemians of the Bulletin, the tone of the ethos and its buoyancies, blends with a viewpoint that owns up to a good deal of fetishism in the vaunted robustness. There’s a sound of the clattering of clay hoofs amidst the bachanals, as in the generally candid Jack’s own self-revelation as a bit of a sex-in-the-head man, more polemic than impulse in his more wayward ‘submissions-to-Life’

The upshot is not so much that the Lindsayites erred by celebrating Life (capital L) as divorced from ordinary experience (as Evan Jones has suggested in Dutton’s Literature of Australia), but that the Art and its ideology were an enabling in historical fancy-dress of a social experience riddled with play-acting and itself, in its scorn of everything bourgeois, narrow and repetitive.