My Greatest Ambition

My greatest ambition was to be a comic-strip artist, but I grew out of it. People were always patting me on the head and saying, ‘He’ll grow out of it.’ Had any of them ever read a comic? Studied one? Drawn one? ‘Australia is no place for comics,’ they said, and I had to lock myself up in the dining room to get some peace.

I was the only person in my class—probably the whole school—who wanted to be a comic-strip artist. They were all dreamers. There they sat, the astronomer, the nuclear physicist, the business tycoon (on the Stock Exchange), two mathematicians, three farmers, countless chemists, a handful of doctors, all aged thirteen and all with their heads in the clouds. Dreamers! Idle spectators! A generation of hopeless romantics!

I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with it. Actually, doing anything with it hadn’t ever entered my mind. Doing it was enough. Over the weekend I read it through sixty or seventy times, analysed it, studied it, stared at it, finally pronounced it ‘Not too bad,’ and then put it up on the top of my wardrobe where my father kept his hats.

And that would have been the end of it, only the next day I happened to mention to Michael Lazarus, who sat next to me in school, that I had drawn a comic-strip, and he happened to mention to me that there was a magazine in Melbourne I could send it to.

One of the things that kept me tossing and turning was the magazine I was sending my comic to. Boy Magazine. I had never bought one in my life, because it had the sneaky policy of printing stories, with only one illustration at the top of the page to get you interested. Stories? The school library was full of them, and what a bore they were. Did I want my comic to appear in a magazine which printed stories, where it would be read by the sort of people who were always taking books out of the library and sitting under trees and wearing glasses and squinting and turning pages with licked fingers? An awful prospect!

Now let me properly introduce my father, a great scoffer. In those pre-television days, he had absolutely nothing better to do in the evening but to walk past my room and look in and say, ‘Nu? They sent you the money yet?’ Fifty times a night, at least. And when the letter came from Boy Magazine, did he change his tune? Not one bit.

My voice, when I was thirteen, and standing on tiptoe and talking into a public phone, was, I must admit, unnecessarily loud, but Miss Gordon didn’t say anything about it. ‘And what day will be most convenient for you, Mr Lurie?’ she asked. ‘Oh, any day at all!’ I shouted. ‘Any day will suit me fine!’ ‘A week from Thursday then?’ she asked. ‘Perfect!’ I yelled, trying to get a piece of paper and a pencil out of my trouser pocket to write it down, and at the same time listening like mad in case Miss Gordon said something else. And she did. ‘Ten o’clock?’ ‘I’ll be there!’ I shouted, and hung up with a crash.

It hadn’t occurred to me to mention to Miss Gordon that I was thirteen and at school and would have to take a day off to come and see the editor. I didn’t think these things were relevant to our business. But my mother did. A day missed from school could never be caught up, that was her attitude. My father’s attitude you know. A cheque or not a cheque. Was I a rich fool or was I a fool? (No, that’s wrong. Was I a poor fool or a rich fool? Yes, that’s better.)

Now, as the day of my appointment drew nearer and nearer, a great question had to be answered, a momentous decision made. For my father had been right. If all they wanted to do was to buy my comic, they would have sent a cheque. So there was something else. A full-time career as a comic-strip artist on the permanent staff of Boy Magazine! It had to be that. But that would mean giving up school and was I prepared to do that?

The offices of Boy Magazine were easy to find. They were part of an enormous building that looked like a factory, and were not at all imposing or impressive, as I had imagined them to be. No neon, no massive areas of plate glass, no exotic plants growing in white gravel. (I had a picture of myself walking to work every morning through a garden of exotic plants growing in white gravel, cacti, ferns, pushing open a massive glass door under a neon sign and smiling at a receptionist with a pipe in my mouth.) I pushed open an ordinary door and stepped into an ordinary foyer and told an ordinary lady sitting at an ordinary desk who I was.

I don’t think Mr. Randell was used to receiving quick decisions, for he then said something that seemed to me enormously ridiculous. ‘That’s, ah, two pounds ten a page,’ he said, and looked at me with his eyes wide open and one eyebrow higher than the other.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. ‘Six two-and-a-halfs are fifteen. Exactly.’

That made his eyes open even wider, and suddenly he shut them altogether and looked down at the floor. One of the other men coughed. No one seemed to know what to do. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs and just generally smiled at everyone. I knew what was coming. A job. And I knew what I was going to say then, too.

Now, Ned Kelly is alright, but what I like about comics is that they create a world of their own, like, say, Dick Tracy, a totally fictitious environment, which any clear thinking person knows doesn’t really exist, and Ned Kelly, well, that was real, it really happened. It wasn’t a true comic-strip. It was just history in pictures.

But naturally I didn’t say any of this to Jim. All I did was lean forward and pretend to study the linework and the inking in and the lettering, which were just so-so, and when I thought I’d done that long enough, I leaned back in my chair and said, ‘It’s very good.’

‘Would you like to see how a magazine is produced?’

‘Yes,’ I said, but the word sounded flat and awful to me. I hated, at thirteen, being shown round things. I still do. How A Great Newspaper Is Produced. How Bottles Are Made. Why Cheese Has Holes And How We Put Them In.

And the rest of it, the job, the core of the matter? But everyone was standing up and Mr. Randell’s hand was stretched out to shake mine and Jim was saying, ‘Follow me,’ and it was all over.

Now I’m not going to take you through a tour of this factory, the way I was, eating an ice cream which Jim had sent a boy out to buy from me. It lasted for hours.

Yes, my comic-strip appeared and my friends read it and I was a hero for a day at school. My father held the cheque up to the light and said we’d know in a few days if it was any good. My mother didn’t say much to me but I heard her on the phone explaining to all her friends what a clever son she had. Clever? That’s one word I’ve never had any time for.

I didn’t tell a soul, not even Michael Lazarus, about that awful tour of the factory. I played it very coolly.

Anyhow, I had decided (I told myself) that I didn’t want to be a comic-strip artist after all. There was no future in it. It was risky and unsure. It was here today and gone tomorrow. The thing to be was a serious painter, and I set about it at once, spreading new boxes of water colours and tubes of paint all over the dining-room table and using every saucer in the house to mix paint. But somehow, right from the start, I knew it was no good. The only thing that was ever real to me I had ‘grown out of’. I had become, like everyone else, a dreamer.