Martin à Beckett Boyd (10 June 1893 – 3 June 1972) was an Australian writer born into the à Beckett–Boyd family, a family synonymous with the establishment, the judiciary, publishing and literature, and the visual arts since the early 19th century in Australia.
Boyd was a novelist, memoirist and poet who spent most of his life after World War I in Europe, primarily Britain. His work drew heavily on his own life and family, with his novels frequently exploring the experiences of the Anglo-Australian upper and middle classes. His writing was also deeply influenced by his experience of serving in World War One.
Boyd's siblings included the potter Merric Boyd (1888–1959), painters Penleigh Boyd (1890–1923) and Helen à Beckett Read, née Boyd (1903–1999). He was intensely involved in family life and took a keen interest in the development of his nephews and nieces and their families, including potter Lucy Beck (1916-2009), painter Arthur Boyd (1920–1999), sculptor Guy Boyd (1923–1988), painter David Boyd (1924–2011), painter Mary Nolan (1926–2016) – who was married to painters John Perceval and Sidney Nolan – and architect Robin Boyd (1919–1971). His nephew Guy Boyd was his literary executor.
Life Boyd's friends saw him as "[c]harming, generous, frivolous and funny". He was sensitive and private; a complex man who struggled with his identity as an Anglo-Australian, as an expatriate writer and with religious beliefs. He did not believe in the class superiority which many of his critics levelled at him; was a loyal family man and friend, yet never found a lasting romantic relationship of his own. As a writer he wrote from experience and about what he knew intimately but was never sure about himself. Throughout his life he felt like an outsider whether in Australia or Europe.
Childhood and education Martin à Beckett Boyd was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, on 10 June 1893. He was the youngest son of Arthur Merric Boyd (1862-1940) and Emma Minnie à Beckett (1858-1936) who were both established painters. At the time of his birth, the family was travelling through Europe, supported financially by his maternal grandmother, Emma à Beckett, wife to William Arthur Callendar à Beckett. It was Emma's fortune, inherited from her father, John Mills, an ex-convict who founded the Melbourne Brewery, that allowed their family to live comfortably. He regarded this "somewhat casual birthplace as one of the factors accounting for his lifelong inability ever to feel completely at home anywhere."Bardwell, Michael. "Divided Novelist: Martin Boyd (1893-1972)". London Magazine. 35, 1-2, 1995, 70-76. Print.
Boyd lived in the Melbourne suburb of Sandringham until he was 13 when the family moved permanently to the family farm in , Victoria. He had a love of books and writing from an early age, but he was also colour blind. He became the only writer in his ancient family amongst painters and artists. Brenda Niall, Boyd's biographer, comments, "His family seems to have been one of those so distinctive in character and achievement that it confers its own citizenship. Being a Boyd was more important than being an Australian: it gave him a sense of identity strong enough to bypass nationalism for civilization."
Boyd's siblings included the potter William Merric Boyd (1888–1959), and the painters Theodore Penleigh Boyd (1890–1923) and Helen à Beckett Read (1903–1999). He fondly remembered his childhood years at Yarra Glen. "[T]he Yarra, only yards away, still provides summer swimming as it did for the Boyds. The river yields cold eels that writhe and bite like snakes but make nice eating later. On the farm the Boyds had ponies, hunting, and fishing, and gorged themselves in the evenings on unlimited fruit and cream."Kinross Smith, Graeme. "Martin Boyd." Westerly. 2, 1975, 33-37. He enjoyed his school years at Trinity Grammar School, Kew. Niall notes that "Boyd did respectably in academic work; he edited the school magazine, the Mitre; he developed a love of English poetry; and, through [his headmaster's] example, he began to consider a future as a clergyman."
After finishing school in 1912, Boyd was undecided on a career path and so commenced study for a religious vocation at St John's College, St Kilda. He did not see out the year but this was the beginning of a lifelong, but never resolved, investigation of the place of religious devotion in his life. At the suggestion of his mother, he began training as an architect at Purchas and Teague in Melbourne.
War experiences Initially feeling no pressure to enlist, Boyd eventually signed up after hearing that some of his contemporaries at Trinity Grammar had died during the landing at Gallipoli. On the advice of his family, who thought he might not survive the rigours expected of an ordinary Australian soldier, he travelled to England and in 1916 took up a position as a commissioned officer in the Royal East Kent Regiment, known as the "Buffs". After fighting in the trenches in France for several months during 1916 and 1917, Boyd requested a transfer and was accepted into the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 where he stayed until the end of the World War I. His war experiences coloured the rest of his life, including his writing.
In the 1940s Boyd questioned following Britain into World War Two believing that Australia should look to America and Mediterranean countries for replacement ties. Even though he had served in the military, he felt a strong sense of injustice at the bombing of German cities and the killing of innocent women and children, and questioned the complicity of the Church of England in the atrocities during that time.
Michael Bardwell notes that Boyd was "a great campaigner [...] often writing letters to the press about matters he thought were of public importance." A wartime example of this activism was an incident in December 1943, which Boyd relates in his autobiography Day of my Delight, quoted by Bardwell: "A group of eminent people had drawn up a petition to end by mutual agreement the night bombing of cities, which had now become senseless massacres. I put one of the printed forms of this petition on the village notice board, and one on my gate, saying it could be signed at my house. The notices were torn off at night. . .I then put up another inscribed: "The object of this petition is to stop the murder of women and children. Will those who think this aim undesirable, please come in and explain why, instead of tearing this notice off under cover of darkness?" No one came, and a farmer's wife in the village said: "It is a pity Mr. Boyd put up those notices. It quite spoiled the Christmas spirit."
While Boyd did not see himself as a pacifist (he described his belief as 'qualified pacifism',Boyd, Martin. Day of my Delight, Melbourne: Landsdowne Press, 1965. he supported those who did. Throughout the years his consistent opposition to war included the publication of a seven-part protest pamphlet during the war in Vietnam entitled Why They Walk Out (1970). Extracts of the essay were published in Australia.
Life after World War One Boyd returned to Australia after World War One but found he no longer fitted in. Because of his decision to join the British Army, he felt that a wedge had developed between him and his friends as their wartime experiences were different. Listless and directionless he left Melbourne in 1921 to live in London, did some newspaper work and travelled. Wearying of that world too and with the death of his brother Penleigh in 1923, Boyd again turned to religion joining an Anglican Franciscan community in Dorset. This too was a phase, however, so he left and continued on as before. For almost twenty years he lived a nomadic life, never staying long in any place and owning few possessions. He survived financially on one hundred pounds a year from his parents, a short stint as acting editor of The British Australasian, and sporadic payments from his writing. Joan Lindsay, author of Picnic at Hanging Rock, remembers her cousin Martin as a gentleman. He was a modest, free-spirited bachelor, adept at finding comfortable lodging. She remembers, "…he had always had a nose for odd and unusual pieces of furniture and queer old paintings picked up for a few pounds. During the war he had embellished his dugout in France with a large statue of his favourite Dancing Faun, dragging it from one filthy hole to another until forced to abandon it forever in the oozing mud". The image of loss in oozing mud is recreated by Boyd's character Dominic Langton who flung his Military Cross and other medals into the "clayey-yellow pond". As Boyd wrote in When Blackbirds Sing, Langton "his native Toryism was shocked at his anarchy. He realized fully the implication of what he had done". Langton's wife Helena cries "we must try to rake them out". Langton replies: "we can't. They're in the middle - I threw them there."
In 1925 Boyd's first novel, Love Gods, was published. He had found his vocation and between 1925 and 1949 he published ten novels, a volume of autobiography and a children's story.
While living in England he is recorded as having an affair with a woman. Boyd's sexuality was, and continues to be, the subject of conjecture. Illicit love, and same-sex desire, are prevailing themes in his work. A 1930s novel, The Shepherd of Admetus was rejected by publishers due to its overt homosexual narrative.
After his father's death in July 1940, his mother's inheritance was released, which gave Boyd the financial freedom to live life however he chose. The money originally came from Martin's grandmother Emma à Beckett (née Mills) and had been secured with the direct intervention of his male relatives.
Boyd delayed a return to Australia in the hope he could return a success. His motivation was not to be a disappointment to his family and he was plagued by doubts about his own achievements. After the success of Lucinda Brayford, he returned to Australia in 1948, intending to remain living in his grandfather à Beckett's home, 'The Grange', near Berwick. After three years he left again for England in 1951, disappointed by his dream of 'The Grange' and the past, ignored by the Australian literary establishment, and out of touch with his younger relatives. This wrenching departure of goodbye to his newly created life, his country and his family finds its fitful expression in the discarding of military medals to the waters, debris and mud of a dam on a later owned property in a novel written in Rome [described herein in an above paragraph].
Boyd moved to Rome in 1957 where he wrote the Langton tetralogy, frequently considered his finest work, the second autobiography, Day of My Delight, the travel story Much else in Italy and a light novel The Tea-Time of Love. Despite his literary successes, Boyd's medical expenses in the year before his death were paid by his nephews Arthur, Guy, and David Boyd. His loyalty to his family and friends was being generously repaid. Brenda Niall recounts, "A few days before Christmas 1971, Boyd was astonished to get an official letter from Canberra. The Commonwealth Literary Fund had awarded him $1000 and a life pension of $30 a week "out of regard for the part you have played in the development of the literature of Australia". This had come about because a number of his Australian friends had heard of his illness and financial difficulties; and stirred others to do something about it. Thelma Herring, Barrie Reid, Patrick White and Gough Whitlam (then Leader of the Federal Opposition and a member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund committee) were among those responsible."
Death Martin Boyd suffered from ill health for the last decade of his life. He died of cancer on 3 June 1972 just days after being received into the Catholic Church. He is buried near the poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley in Rome's Protestant 'English cemetery'.
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