Allan Appel Photo
At a book party for a Fair Haven author who’s spreading New Haven’s glories Down Under, the ANZAC — that’s Australia, New Zealand Army Corps — biscuits nearly stole the show.
Australian-born Patrick McCaughey — former director of both the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford and the Yale Center for British Art — wrote Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters, about Australian art from the colonial period to the present, entirely from his home studio overlooking the Quinnipiac River just south of the Grand Avenue Bridge.
He found the river a free and useful eyeful of visual medicine for the occasional episode of writer’s block. That points to the inspiration many people in Fair Haven derive from being close to the river.
McCaughey wrote about Fair Haven in an article published in Meanjin, a distinguished Australian literary journal.
So if you one day encounter someone who compares the view of the Grand Avenue Bridge over the Q to the swiveling span over the Firth of Forth near Fife in Scotland — or the mist over the marsh to the Seine in winter — you have McCaughey to thank for it.
Sunday’s soiree was held in McCaughey’s 1880 home, which he and partner Donna Curran, who owns Zinc Restaurant, bought and restored near the river. Zinc chef Denise Appel and manager Elizabeth Ciarelli teamed up to provide the food. That’s where the ANZAC biscuits come in, the fare of soldiers serving in World War I. The ingredients are butter, sugar, oats, coconut, flour, and the secret item: Lyle Golden Syrup, said Ciarelli.
McCaughey said that he wrote the entire book, an effort taking four years, while in his studio overlooking the river. What was the river’s effect on his writing? He quoted T.S. Eliot: “The sea is all about us, the river is within us.”
The McCaughey-Curran house, called Dragons Reach, with studio beneath white porch, viewed from the west bank.
He added, “if I got bored or had a bout of writer’s block, I walked to the bottom of the garden” — where the land meets the river — “and it had a restorative effect.” The river might fairly be described as an extension of his desk, and his work.
One of the key differences between the American and Australian experience of their continents, McCaughey said, is that “in the 19th Century Australians were always searching for an inland sea. They were regularly disappointed by the aridity they found. That’s why they named so many of the places they found Mt. Hopeless or Mt. Despair. By contrast, if you take Lewis and Clark, they’re amazed by the fecundity of the land.”
McCaughey said he has no plans at the moment to write anything more extensively on Fair Haven and its environs, but he wishes someone else would. His advice to that would-be scribbler: Focus on the neighborhood’s wide ranging and various churches.
And if writer’s block raises its head, McCaughey has a river he can recommend.
