Eight years ago, around the same time Doherty’s book was published, Malcolm Knox’s wife, Wenona, feeling that every man needs a hobby, gave him some surfing lessons as a gift. At the age of 37, Malcolm was smitten. When I visited the Knox family home on Sydney’s north side, where they’d recently moved in part-response to the lure of the waves, Wenona sounded like any surf widow when describing how their trips to the beach suddenly changed. “We have to go to the beach where it’s blowing a gale because that’s where the waves are good,” she said, half teasing Malcolm, who stood abashedly in a corner of their kitchen, like any other obsessive surfer busted by his better half.
On brief acquaintance, Malcolm Knox came across as thoughtful and principled, a bit distant at times as he thought about the book, its implications and how it came to be written. Also as he remembers parts of his life.
He grew up in St Ives and would go on holidays at Palm Beach every summer, experiences that translated partly into two of his earlier novels, Summerland and Jamaica.
“I was pretty good at ball sports, I played cricket and rugby and golf and all that, but… when I tried to ride a bike, my older brother convinced me that I had no balance. I didn’t ride a bike till I was 21. Same with skiing – I didn’t do it till I was in Europe at 26 years of age and when I did, I couldn’t get enough of it.”
Malcolm did a year of law at Sydney University before realizing he hated law. What he really loved was books. “I’d always been an avid reader but around then was the time when I began to read the books that really stuck in my head. I was interested in novels, reading and writing novels. Never short stories; I don’t understand them, don’t know how to make them work, it wasn’t what I was interested in.” He spent years writing and discarding work, in the process beginning a career in journalism at the Herald, where he eventually won a Walkley for a series of articles exposing Norma Khouri, the author of Forbidden Love, as a fake.
As a result of his late start in surfing, Malcolm wasn’t exposed to the MP mythology of the ‘70s; he hadn’t really known about Peterson until he’d read Doherty’s bio. “He seemed not a specific person – more an embodiment of that time,” he said. “He was such a symbol. He was almost like Don Bradman in a way, in the way Bradman retreated from public life, and so the space he’d left was filled with what people imagined about him. As I thought back into those times, there were no other human shapes to fit what was in my head.”
He has never met MP and is quick to acknowledge he didn’t want to – talking to him and looking him in the eye, and the accompanying realization that this was a real person, would have irretrievably distorted his ability to imagine DK, whom he steadfastly defended as fictional. “I’d be very surprised if any of DK’s voice corresponded to how Michael Peterson talks, the words he actually uses …I wanted to put his voice under some pressure, so I decided he wasn’t going to use swear words. He had to find other words to say what he means.”
Besides, he said, Doherty’s book had already done the job. “It’s one of the great Australian biographies. I didn’t want to do another biography; it wouldn’t have been as good.”
For him it feels like the book’s bloodline is more in his own reading patterns: writers like David Peace, the spectacularly talented Yorkshireman, and J P Donleavy’s wonderfully staccato The Ginger Man. You can feel the connection between The Damned Utd, Peace’s superb book about Brian Clough’s ill-fated management of the Leeds football club, and the intense pared-down style employed by Malcolm for The Life, in which broken shards of sentences play out DK’s weariness and half-broken memories – almost deconstructed, but not quite.
Malcolm reminded me that there are many examples of literary takes on real lives, nominating Peter Carey’s take on the outlaw Ned Kelly, True History of the Kelly Gang, as an example. But – as I reminded him in return – Ned’s dead. MP, on the other hand, is still alive.
But he had been concerned enough to send a draft of The Life to Sean Doherty, and via Sean, to Joan. “I thought a lot about whether I was crossing the line between exploitation and inspiration. That’s really why I sent the manuscript to Sean. He was great – he said “ahh, you’re trying to get to what’s behind the sunglasses.”
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