LOUISA DEASEY A Letter from Paris. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
In this search for her father, Louisa Deasey affirms the value of love, generosity, and – crucially – encourages thinking about what a successful life really is.
Louisa Deasey’s father, Denison Deasey, died when she was a child. With only one photograph of them together, she remembers his ‘look of worn fatigue and wistfulness’. As an adult, she realises that when that photograph was snapped, he was probably already suffering from the cancer that would kill him: ‘All I’d known him to be was old, sick, the holder of history from an era I would never fully understand.’
The resulting lack of knowledge about him and his life was painful – ’an unresolved wound, a painful longing’. Worse than that, she writes, ‘was the sense that he was inexplicable, someone I should perhaps be ashamed of’. Despite his Geelong Grammar schooling, Deasey ‘wasted his talents’, never finished creative projects and was at best an ‘amateur’ writer who drove taxis: ‘The tone I absorbed was one of disapproval and shame.’
This sense of shame shapes her self-identity. A freelance writer, she lambasts herself:
Why couldn’t I just … stay in a good job for a good institution, and just think of the money like a ‘normal’ person? Why was I so obsessed with creative freedom?
Louisa’s mother – Deasey’s third wife – was 27 years younger than her husband. Remarkably, his second wife – elegant Frenchwoman Gisèle – kept in touch with her ex-husband’s new family. From her Paris home, she sent loving letters and gifts to young Louisa in Melbourne, and even travelled to Australia to visit the family during the author’s teenage years.
Time passed, and Louisa lost contact with Gisèle. Her mother died, breaking the living links to Denison. Then suddenly, a Facebook message from France presented an invitation to learn more about her father. A stranger named Coralie wrote:
My grandmother, Michelle Chomé, recently passed away and we found in her apartment a stack of letters written during the year 1949 … she speaks of an Australian man called Denison Deasey … she was very smitten with him.
Are you related to Denison Deasey?
Initiated into a challenging journey of discovery, the author learns about her father as well as about herself.
She had previously learned that digging into the archives could generate grief, reading her parents’ divorce records:
There was no romance in what I read of their relationship. No joy, no fun. Just dad’s longing for mum to come back with us – his children – as he faced death and sickness on his own …
Indeed, resuming the research leads to further difficult revelations. Louisa learns about his World War II experiences, which left him with post-traumatic stress, even though he didn’t see combat. She also finds he suffered from tuberculosis.
But there is happier evidence that Deasey was welcomed into intellectual and bohemian circles, travelled voraciously, lived many happy years in the south of France, and achieved a great deal more with his writing than had been acknowledged.
In fact, when Louisa visits the State Library of Victoria, she discovers the Denison Deasey documents are listed in a huge 44-page inventory – a collection including manuscripts, diaries, photographs and letters. And there is more in other collections – ‘sixteen library collections around the world with material about dad and numerous new books with references to him’.
Deasey captured important insights into his bohemian friends against a background of Australian cultural conservatism. He knew artists important in Australian art history: David and Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Mirka Mora, Albert Tucker (to whom he lent money). And he knew writers: Alister Kershaw, Max Harris, Geoffrey and Ninette Dutton, and Adrian Lawlor (Denison bought a printing press and set up a publishing company, Oberon Press, to produce Lawlor’s Horned Capon in 1949).
After her research, Louisa travels to France, meeting with Coralie and her sister Clémentine. For Louisa, these new acquaintances are soul-mates (Coralie is a writer on creativity; Clementine an actor/writer, and the sisters’ mother a painter). They facilitate the author’s search and find Gisèle, Denison’s second wife, living in aged care and delighted to reconnect with Louisa. Louisa also visits the Provence village – and the villa – where her father had lived.
In getting to ‘know’ Denison, Louisa finds uncanny family similarities – not just for her, but for her siblings as well. For instance, Deasey’s wartime service was in Australia’s first commando unit, stationed in the Northern Territory bush. Then decades later, his son – Louisa’s brother Declan, unaware of his father’s experiences – joins a commando regiment that bears the same name and number.
Louisa discovers that she and her father both felt at home in France on their first visit. They both published their first work in the literary journal Overland. Both were freelance journalists, and she sees similarities in their writing styles. She recognises that they share a ‘distrust of hierarchies and pretension – a discovery that is healing: ‘All the parts of me that had never made sense were here in dad’s pages.’
Louisa senses that Denison guides her research. She dreams a ‘visitation’: ‘When I woke, I realised he was asking me to keep reading his diaries.’
The quest structure reveals just enough at just the right time, drawing the reader into Louisa’s growing closeness to her father, and the intensifying connection with her new French ‘family’.
We see, too, the lost and lonely author transforming into a confident individual who celebrates marching to her own drum. In fact, early on, some passages suggest self-absorption, but the unfolding story fully justifies their inclusion; without them, the author’s growth would not be visible.
A petty irritation is the use of ‘mum’ and especially ‘dad’ without the capitalisation necessary for proper nouns.
But with or without upper case, this story carries powerful messages. It affirms the value of love, generosity, and – crucially – encourages thinking about what a successful life really is:
To me, a failure was someone who didn’t try, who didn’t finish. Who cared what others thought? Dad had fearlessly pursued his dreams, despite health and money issues … He still did it. He wrote. He finished. He sent.
Louisa Deasey A Letter from Paris Scribe 2018 PB 319pp $32.99
Jeannette Delamoir is a Queenslander and former academic who is passionate about writing, reading, culture and food.
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