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Chosen by:
Mr John Arnold,
National Centre for Australian Studies
Lindsay, Philip, 1906-1958.
The mangle : a novel [typescript] / by Philip Lindsay (1927)
Original carbon typescript with numerous corrections in the author’s hand, 317pp. Acquired in 1999 with support from the National Centre for Australian Studies.
This unpublished novel about Sydney bohemian life in the mid-1920s is set in a block of flats in Darlinghurst, named after their owner, Mr Mangle. It tells the story of a week in the life of Pauline Carmel who has fled from her husband in Brisbane to ‘taste life’ in Sydney.
The novel was written in 1927 when Philip Lindsay was twenty-two years old. The third son of artist and novelist, Norman Lindsay, Lindsay was, at the time, living a bohemian life in Sydney. He had moved on from being a member of a local teenage larrikin push to freelance journalism, coupled with attempts at novel writing and a longing to join his elder brother Jack in London where the latter was running the Fanfrolico Press with his old University of Queensland friend, P R Stephensen. One of the characters in the novel, Ronnie Doebrook - Nordic features and an ex-Rhodes Scholar – is probably modelled on Stephensen.
Included with the manuscript is an undated three-page letter from Philip Lindsay to his father, written about May 1929. In it he talks of ‘the amount of times I have scribbled through the Mangle . . . And yet I am not satisfied . . . I cannot even bear to read it again. … It is thin. There is no depth in it, no reason for it. And it is damnably constructed’.
‘The Mangle’ was one of three novels Lindsay wrote in Sydney in the nineteen-twenties, the others being ‘Farewell Rocking Horse’ and ‘Jesting Venus’. All remain unpublished although a couple of chapters of ‘Farewell Rocking Horse’ were published as short stories by Jack Lindsay without Philip’s permission in the London Aphrodite.
Their unauthorized publication and a general dislike of the contents of the London Aphrodite led Philip to ‘produce’ his own mock critique entitled ‘The Bondi Venus’. The unpublished manuscript of this along with that ‘The Mangle’ and ‘Jesting Venus’ were left with his other brother, Raymond Lindsay, when Philip Lindsay achieved his long held wish and sailed for England in mid-1929. They were later acquired by the noted Sydney collector, Harry Chaplin and described in his A Lindsay Miscellany (1978). The manuscript of ‘Farewell Rocking Horse’ was lost when Brian Penton, to whom Philip had given the manuscript to take to London to try and find a publisher, left it in a brief case at an underground station.
In England Philip Lindsay worked for the Fanfrolico Press until it folded in late 1930. He then moved on to become a successful, hard-drinking historical novelist. He died in Sussex in 1958. His days in Sydney and first years in England are detailed in his rather romanticized autobiography, I’d live the same life over (1941).
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