A man of letters’ occasionally fortunate life
John Lang lived in interesting times and was one of the forgotten founders of Australian letters, which is why biographer Sean Doyle set out to return him to the pages of history
Three John Langs have bulked large in modern Australia. All were verbal pugilists but only two would be immediately recognisable to history buffs.
John Dunmore Lang was a Presbyterian minister and early advocate of a republic. Another, better known as Jack Lang, was dismissed by the Crown. Which leaves who?
Erased from the collective consciousness almost as soon as Australia attained nationhood, writer John George Lang’s name and fame spread far and wide in his own time and for a generation after his death at 46 in the mid-1860s.
After alienating two of the three father figures in Sydney who had raised him out of the ruck of “currency lads” – the first crop of white Australians by birth – Lang, whose biological father had died months before his birth in 1816 in a Parramatta pub, tried to reinvent himself by decamping to British India.
Sean Doyle, the author of this new and long-overdue biography, Australia’s Trail-blazing First Novelist – John Lang, shared that restlessness gene with his subject, having written about his own travels in India. Doyle’s knowledge of the subcontinent and its inhabitants provides a strong point of identification with Lang, producing some of this biography’s most readable passages.
What makes the work less readable is Doyle’s overuse of exclamation marks, sometimes two to the paragraph, which makes his prose not just racy but breathlessly so at times. But back to Lang.
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A bookish lad, the teenage John Lang immersed himself in the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare and Byron, but over the course of 360 pages this reader found him – as Doyle clearly did too – someone who was “his own worst enemy”.
An anti-authoritarian streak was both asset and liability for young Lang. An asset because he could credibly write about certain characters of the establishment in Australia’s premier colony – the bibulous, bohemians, larrikins and outcasts of his day. But also a liability when this wild colonial boy indulged himself in all manner of hijinks at Cambridge University where, after six months, he was asked to leave.
This same wildness which would get him blacklisted by Sydney society was perhaps the flipside of that impetuosity which, many years later, prompted him to dive into the sea from a Calcutta-bound ship from which a boy had fallen overboard and save his life.
So much of our hero’s life and achievements were spent in British India that Doyle is forced to concentrate for most of his work on Lang’s life outside the Australia of his youth. But, in so doing, he is only being true to the trajectory of the man’s life and explaining, in large part, why Lang is in the first rank of this country’s forgotten men of letters.
The case for remembering him is strong and well catalogued here. Lang wrote Legends of Australia – Frederick William Howard, the first novel set in Australia by someone born on these shores. He also peopled the work with recognisable types such as the colonial law enforcer and nose-thumbing larrikins, spawning the bushranger sub-genre and other sub-genres. And this, in due course, has qualified him as the writer who “kick-started an enduring, much loved idea of ‘Australia’”.
So much so that Doyle takes the liberty of christening this literary landscape Langland and once, Langlandia – reminiscent of the appellation of Greeneland for the novels of Graham Greene.
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Wrenched from Sydney to a life of horrors in India, Lang’s wife Lucy and children could never have settled to anything like a comfortable home environment. Lang clearly wasn’t cut out for that. Torn between fears for their children (cholera in the present, their prospects in future) and devotion to her husband, fear won out and Lucy departed for England with the children in tow.
What was Lang to do? In his own words: “It was not long before I made up my mind to become a wanderer in the East.”
While his inquisitiveness and ready pen result in the first book on India by an Australian, he soon takes to journalism “like a cat to summer shade”, recognising an unfilled niche – up-country Britishers starved of tidings from the outside world – and fills it with a weekly newspaper, The Mofussilite, of which he makes a great success.
Success as a newspaper entrepreneur was followed by the signal victory of his life – winning a case in the Calcutta Supreme Court while representing a Sikh man who had provisioned the East India Company during its first war against his people and who claimed the EIC owed him money.
Lang the barrister single-handedly won the case for his client, the first time anywhere in the world that an individual colonised by the British had prevailed against the Crown.
And then Lang overreached. Pursuing a vendetta against the Crown lawyer who had opposed him in that case, he found what his younger self – the teen who had steeped himself in the classics – should have known: Nemesis awaits his moment to ambush even the just.
The story of Lang at that point is one of a talented but over-confident man who goes from (comparative) riches to rags in one ill-advised step. As Doyle concludes: “He could invent plots and give multiple characters distinctive motivations, but couldn’t understand his own.”
Unfortunately, Lang’s biographer also goes too far on occasion, deploying amateur psychoanalysis to excess, but at times he hits upon a personal summation that glistens. For example when he observes of Lang: “His gift for languages did not extend to the language of love: its grammar escaped him.”
This enlightening account of a life that deserves better than it has received until now could have benefited from sharper editing.
Australia’s Trail-blazing First Novelist – John Lang by Sean Doyle, Big Sky Publishing, $24.99.