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The power of two

By Stephanie Dalzel

24 May 2008

Catherine Cole found being mentored by A.D. Hope warmly encouraging.

Two writers profile literary mentors, with very different styles.

As a student, young Catherine Cole wrote a letter on a whim to the man she admired. In it, she told the venerable poet A.D. Hope that she enjoyed his poetry. An unlikely relationship ensued, with the student discussing her pieces and taking on Hope’s gentle suggestions.

She says she was not always comfortable with it, however. “I felt anxious about the process. He was so well known and it was nerve-wracking to have him to read my work,” Cole told Festival News.

The Festival event, titled Remembering A.D. Hope and Patrick White, documented two atypical relationships, with the subjects inhabited by a powerful sense of their mentor’s memory that they could not shake. Literary great Hope, who passed away in 2000, was in his mid-70s when he met Catherine Cole, as documented in her book The Poet Who Forgot.

While Hope gently guided Catherine Cole through her studies, Vrasidas Karalis experienced an entirely different teacher/student relationship with that of Manoly Lascaris, Patrick White’s partner of half a century. Karalis was 30 when he orchestrated the first of many discussions with White’s partner after arriving in Sydney from Greece.

The University of Sydney lecturer was translating White’s Voss into Greek and wanted more information about the author. Karalis’ book, Recollections of Mr Lascaris, describes a man whose loneliness and traumatic upbringing manifested in a sharp tongue. “He told me I had to always concentrate, and said I was ‘so low-class’,” Karalis said in good humour at the Festival.

The entertaining scholar with his strong accent captivated the audience with his anecdotes. “With an eruption of a volcano, you know that it’s dangerous, but you still admire it. That’s what Mr Lascaris was for me,” he says. Martin Harrison, Head of Writing and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney and chair of the Festival event, points out that Lascaris was almost a Zen teacher: incredibly negative in a way that A.D. Hope was not with Catherine Cole.

“He’d be glad I stopped talking about becoming a writer and actually started writing,” Cole says. She recounts a mutual friendship where Hope would stay at her place and they’d dine together. Their dinners were always accompanied by colossal amounts of wine. “I think I nearly killed him once because he was a diabetic. He was hypoglycaemic for three days after,” Cole says. She also recalls the terrifying moment she discovered Hope had kept every one of her letters, which are now in the National Library.

The audience was vocal throughout the event, with questions running well past the scheduled time, and many participants continuing to talk after it wrapped up. Festival-goer Alan Shaw says he heard all the additional gossip he couldn’t have read in any book. “Not that I’m a sensationalist, but I was like ‘Oh, shit! This Manoly person is a guy, not a woman.’ I was being arrogantly heterosexual,” he says.

Both writers detail encounters with their mentors, though Karalis says he felt pressure to omit certain aspects of his conversations with White’s lover. “With things that referred to the private life of two people, I felt I couldn’t put them in … it would become a book of scandals.” And while the audience probably loves a good scandal, some are nodding in agreement that some things are better kept sacred.

The irony is not lost, though, when a tabloid magazine is spotted sticking out of one Festival-goer’s handbag. Score one each for gossip and for the sacred.