MORRIS LURIE, 1938-2014
Morris Lurie was a writer's writer. Not an author of best-sellers and at times even drifting into obscurity during his long career, he was nevertheless highly regarded in literary circles.
The Jewish Melbourne author wrote more than 35 books including novels, children's fiction and drama, but he was best known for his short stories about unstable family relationships, which drew on his own unhappy childhood.
Among Lurie's most notable works were his first novel Rappaport (1966), the children's book The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race (1969), once voted by Victorian schoolchildren as their favourite Australian storybook, and the adult books Flying Home (1978), Whole Life (1978), The Night We Ate the Sparrow (1985) and Madness (1991). Flying Home, an autobiographical love story about an expatriate's quest for meaning, was named by the National Book Council as one of the 10 best Australian books of the 1970s.
Lurie's writing can place great demands on the reader. It is characterised by an idiosyncratic, often mock-heroic, style that uses humour to deal with complex issues about cultural displacement and personal loss, and has been compared with the work of the Jewish American writers Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
In 2006 Lurie won the Patrick White Award, which goes to writers who have not received sufficient recognition for their work. The judges described Lurie as "one of the funniest writers Australia has produced", yet behind the wit was an undercurrent of personal tragedy.
Moses "Morris" Lurie was born in 1938 to Polish immigrants Arie and Esther Lurie. He grew up in Carlton in Melbourne with an older sister and younger brother as well as their grandfather.
Lurie said Arie, who had migrated from Poland with his own father and quickly married Esther, a Jewish girl, also from Poland, was a sardonic man who never missed a chance to belittle his son.
Lurie and his sister grew up in a Yiddish-speaking "bubble", he said. Their grandfather, whom Lurie called a hateful tyrant, raised them while Arie father worked long hours in a rug factory and Esther sold knickers at the Queen Victoria Market.
A lover of comics, Lurie escaped into drawing and, after his grandfather died, enjoyed listening to jazz, becoming a lifelong fan of Miles Davis.
Lurie attended Elwood Central School, Prahran Technical School and Melbourne High School, matricularting in 1956 with first class honours. He studied architecture for two years at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology but, after both his parents died when he was 22, leaving him to care for his 12-year-old brother, he worked for several years in advertising in the same agency as Peter Carey and Barry Oakley.
In 1963 he got his first typewriter and two years later handed his brother to an uncle and went to live in Morocco, Greece, Denmark and England, where he published Rappaport and married his publisher's assistant, Caroline.
By the time Lurie returned to Australia in 1973, his short stories were appearing in American magazines such as The New Yorker, "their edgy wit a cover for explorations of emptiness and rootlessness".
The Luries were married for 18 years before divorcing and, in 1993, while Lurie was attending a literary festival in Canada, their daughter, Rachel, committed suicide. This tragedy resulted in To Light Attained, a poetic short novel about a 58-year-old writer-father Herschel Himmelman who loses his daughter, which Lurie waited 14 years to publish in 2008. The father's grief is given voice through the rhythms of jazz, poetry and broken Yiddish, which formed Lurie's signature style.
Today many of Lurie's works are out of print and after his marriage disinitegrated he received psychotherapy. It might explain the relationship-ending conflicts he had with some friends and family members at the time. A fan of Picasso, he also used this period to develop his skill as a painter.
However, Lurie's literary legacy remains intact. His said his favourite form of writing was always the short story. "There's something about a story where there's no fooling around," he said. "The boat either sinks or floats."
Morris Lurie is survived by his partner, Helen Taylor, his son Ben and a granddaughter.
Marc McEvoy
