MEMOIR: Less than 10 years ago, Barry Humphries wrote his autobiography, More Please, a very well-received account of the man behind Dame Edna, Les Patterson and other resonant comic creations. He has now decided, as is his wont, to re-write it.
No vain excess here though and, as he explains, More Please was written as the first of two volumes, taking him up to the end of the 1960s. When he handed the manuscript into the publishers though, he was told that the book had already been heavily flagged in advertisements as going "up to the present day". Humphries had two weeks to fast forward through the years, and as a result always viewed the book as a hasty and incomplete effort. Hence, My Life As Me, a more considered, if not languid, look at his life and eventful times, or as he puts it himself in his distinctive writing style: "this is a cubist, even a futurist self-portrait that I offer the reader, observing myself from many angles at once as in the hall of mirrors at a fairground, and with whiffs of scent, incoherent voices, shards of music . . ."
If you had the time and inclination, you could compare and contrast the two books; as it stands, though, Humphries has to dig deeper here to avoid retreading past literary ground. In More Please he dealt effectively with those who sought to analyse him through his comic creations, something he always thought was quite daft. Thankfully, this frees him up here to return again to his Melbourne childhood, but this time with a sharper focus.
A privileged suburban background, he found the Melbourne of the 1940s and 1950s to be a "city where everyone was so pleased with themselves, so clean, so house-proud, so obsessed by the politics of Niceness". His parents are beautifully portrayed, especially his mother, Louise, with her time-honoured utterances - "You used to be so nice", "stop drawing attention to yourself" - and best of all, after upsetting him by throwing away all his books - "but you've read them all, Barry".
Much has been made of his mother's suburban matron figure being the influence for Dame Edna Everage, fuelled by the fact that Humphries called one of his later West End Edna Shows after a withering expression his mother used after reluctantly visiting a Melbourne theatre to see a Thornton Wilder play: "At least we can say that we've seen it." Elsewhere, other Edna shows rejoice in the titles: "Isn't It Pathetic At His Age", "Remember You're Out" and "Look At Me When I'm Talking To You" - all maternal epigrams.
Humphries writes of the mother/Edna assumption: "Writers now and in the future who persist in being so pompously analytical will always prefer to see Edna Everage not so much as an act of of comedy but as an act of revenge".
Speaking of revenge, Humphries's adolescence was one long masterclass in how to épater les bourgeois. As a result of the stifling conformity of his upbringing, where any type of art was considered something subversive and threatening, Humphries immersed himself in a swampy Bohemia to emphasise his distance from familial values: "My paintings were either impressionist or starkly cubist; expressionist self-portraits, or whimsical surreal collages. In poetry I jumped from writing 'vers libre' in the manner of Ezra Pound, then next Wyndham-Lewis-like polemics or crude anticlerical satires - distant colonial cousins of Osbert Sitwell's contributions to Wheels, the Vorticist annual"
His first performance was as "Aaron Azimuth", a sinister Dadaist who, against all warnings, drew plenty of attention to himself through a series of pranks and stunts all designed to rattle the "nice people" of Melbourne.
The story from here on in is well known, and perhaps as a result doesn't possess the sort of elegantly crafted mordant observation that characterises his account of his early years. Humphries's theatre career takes off when he moves to Sydney and the characters that made him famous, the original "ocker" Barry McKenzie, the bawdy and bibulous Les Patterson and the high-camp Dame Edna Everage.
There's some great anecdotes about comic colleagues Spike Milligan, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and interesting snippits about John Betjeman and Stephen Spender (Humphries is married to Spender's daughter, Lizzie) but you feel that in this part of the book Humphries is shaking himself down, looking for material that hasn't already been used in his first autobiography.
If you want detailed information about his alcoholism or the break-up of his first three marriages, look elsewhere; these subjects are treated factually and tactfully here. There is obviously reams of material on Dame Edna, and you get a bit of shock to see her, in all her lurid finery, in a photograph dating from as far back as the mid 1950s.
Sticking to the "it's not my mother" line, he talks about his enduring comic creation with a strange sense of detachment. He discusses the technique of the character, rather than the content, which is interesting - but only up to a point. "Acting the part of Edna is the perfect Method acting exercise - for the Method actor, when contemplating a new role, must fabricate his character's history. He must invent its memories, relationships, previous experiences, tastes and obsessions. Edna I now know so well, I can instantly assume her persona. She is not an alter ego, as some might like to suggest, for I have absolutely nothing in common with this woman, all I do is try to give the impression that she has accidentally strayed onto the stage, so that what we see and hear in the theatre is a fragment of her total existence . . ."
Away from his characters, Humphries is quite an aesthete and writes about literature and art with all the passion of an autodidact. Elsewhere, he reveals a vocabulary that is quaintly recherché: words like "bedizen" "tatteredmialion" and "eldritch" punctuate the text.
For all the showbiz stories though, all the films, theatre runs, TV appearances - Dame Edna was last seen on Ally McBeal - nothing can quite measure up to those resonant early tales of suburban claustrophobia and wilful teenage rebellion. With his erudition and his humorously scabrous turn of phrase, maybe Humphries should bin the gladioli and take to fiction.
My Life As Me: A Memoir. By Barry Humphries. Michael Joseph, 1,384 pp. £16.99
Brian Boyd is an Irish Times journalist and critic
Brian Boyd