Australian Dictionary of Biography

Morris West, 1965

National Archives of Australia, A1200, L51140

Morris Langlo West (1916–1999), novelist, was born on 26 April 1916 at St Kilda, Melbourne, eldest of six surviving children of Charles Langlo West, commercial traveller, and his wife Florence Guilfoyle, née Hanlon, both Victorian born. His parent’s marital relationship was undermined by Charles’s infidelity and his financial struggles to support the family. Although Morris’s family life suffered after their eventual separation, his extended Irish family gave him love ‘in full measure’ (West 1996, 6). His maternal grandparents and aunt Hilda Hanlon provided financial support for him to attend Christian Brothers’ College, St Kilda, until December 1929, when Morris entered the juniorate of the Christian Brothers at St Patrick’s College, Strathfield, Sydney. In retrospect he described this decision not as one for a life of ministry and service, but as ‘an act of fugue’ (West 1996, 6), a flight from the undesirable reality of leaving the world of learning to take his father’s place as a provider for the family. His sister Patricia, who also loved learning, took on that role.

Having completed his secondary education and his novitiate, West made his first vows in December 1933, and teaching appointments followed at Lewisham (1934–36), Hobart (1937), and back in New South Wales at Young (1939–40). He dedicated twenty minutes each day to learning a foreign language, and while in Hobart he studied English, French, Latin, and philosophy at the University of Tasmania. His love of teaching and music gave him enjoyment and a sense of his competence, but he became ‘restless, unsatisfied, irked by obedience and celibacy’ (West 1996, 6). West’s disillusionment led to his decision not to take permanent vows after twelve years of monastic commitment. He left the order in December 1940, later recalling ‘I surrendered my chastity to the first gesture of affection from a woman’ (West 1996, 32).

Returning to Melbourne, West worked briefly in a men’s haberdashery store and was introduced by his aunt Hilda to Elizabeth (‘Biddy’) Eva Harvey, who was part of their social set. He commenced work as a schoolteacher at Yea in February 1941, but the reality of World War II confronted him. In April he visited Army Headquarters, Melbourne, and secured an interview with the director of military intelligence, who recognised the value of his education and fluency in several European languages. That month he enlisted in the Citizen Military Forces and was posted to the directorate in the rank of sergeant. He would transfer to the Australian Imperial Force in 1943. Encouraged by his family to marry Biddy, West was at first reluctant due to his financial insecurity, but on 2 October 1941 they were married at St James’ Catholic Church, Elsternwick. They lived at the back of the Harvey family home and had a son Julian (b. 1942) and a daughter Elizabeth (b. 1944).

West was commissioned as a lieutenant, Australian Intelligence Corps, on 28 February 1942. From September he was employed as a cipher officer in the Northern Territory (1942–43), Queensland (1943), and New South Wales (1943). Among the experiences he found difficult was his lack of stories to share with the men around the fireside in the evenings. What he later described as ‘the defaced mosaic of myself’ (West 1996, 34) provided the stimulus to write his story of religious life.

Moon in My Pocket, a semi-fictionalised autobiography published in 1945 under the pseudonym Julian Morris, described West’s upbringing, his life in the Christian Brothers, and his decisions to leave the Order, to join the army, and to marry. He wrote it while on duty and later remembered the horror he experienced when ‘a desert whirlwind blew through the open tent and the precious pages were scattered’ (West 1996, 37). The book sold more than 10,000 copies and was both a revelation and a scandal within the Catholic community, breaking the ‘code of silence’ about monastic religious life.

Meanwhile, West’s publishers had brought his writing competence to the attention of the former prime minister William Hughes, who was looking for an assistant to help write his autobiography. Hughes arranged for West’s release from army service and he was transferred to the Reserve of Officers on 13 January 1944. His subsequent experience in Sydney and Canberra as Hughes’s secretary opened new avenues for the storyteller: ‘I got a marvellous education in the background of politics and the discipline of this type of slavery’ (Confoy 2005, 82). The appointment was short-lived, as was common for secretaries of the famously abrasive former prime minister; dismissed by Hughes in October 1944, he returned home to Melbourne and his family.

For a year West worked as a publicity manager for the radio station 3DB, during which time he learnt to write and produce radio plays. In December 1945, with financial support from Biddy’s family, he set up the successful business Australasian Radio Productions Pty Ltd (ARP) in Smith Street, Collingwood. He kept a frenetic working pace, sometimes recording two serials at a time, moving from room to room as he recited the storyline for each. His actors were sometimes confounded by both the speed of his delivery and his capacity to maintain parallel narratives. In addition to adapting popular novels, he wrote four original radio serials over a decade. In 1948 ARP moved to larger studios at West Melbourne and in 1950 Joyce (Joy) Patricia Lawford, a business college graduate, was appointed secretary and office manager.

West’s marriage was foundering, primarily due to his absences, but the difficulties were exacerbated by his discovery in 1950 that Biddy was ten years older than he, not five years as she had told him and had recorded on their marriage certificate. On this ground West requested an annulment of his marriage, which the Church refused. The tension in his marriage and the pressures of work contributed to his admission to hospital in 1951 with paralysis of his legs. After this breakdown West realised that he had to make some radical changes.

West left his marriage in 1952. The next year he moved to Sydney with Lawford and set up an ARP branch office. He retired from active management of the company in June 1954 to concentrate on writing, publishing the novels Gallows on the Sand (1955) and Kundu (1956), and writing a play, The Illusionists (1955). West and Lawford’s first child, Christopher, was born in 1954, later followed by Paul (b. 1956), Melanie (b. 1959), and Michael (b. 1964).

Having sold ARP to an English company, in January 1956 West left Australia with his new family and sailed to Sorrento, Italy. In his search for the subject of a new book, he met Mario Borelli, a priest in Naples, and saw his work with street children. The result was his non-fiction Children of the Sun: The Slum Dwellers of Naples (1957), which was a publishing success although not financially lucrative for West. The family moved to England in March 1956, and spent time in Sweden, Austria, and Rome, where West wrote articles on Vatican finances for the London Daily Mail. He used the pseudonym Michael East for two more novels, McCreary Moves In (1958) and The Naked Country (1960).

Returning to Australia in April 1958, West wrote his most successful novel, The Devil’s Advocate (1959), about a terminally ill English priest appointed by the Vatican to investigate the life of a potential saint from a Calabrian village. It won both the James Tait Black memorial prize for fiction (1959) and the Heinemann award (1959) of the Royal Society of Literature. It was followed by Daughter of Silence (1961), a crime novel set in Tuscany, and the bestselling The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), about the election of a Ukrainian pope. The latter was published on the day of the death of Pope John XXIII, about whom West wrote approvingly in an obituary for Life magazine.

During this period West lived primarily in Sydney but spent a year in California in 1960–61. He was elected a fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature (1960) and the World Academy of Art and Science (1964), and he was a founding member (1964) and president (1965) of the Australian Society of Authors. In 1965 he was a prominent contributor to the Australian National University’s teach-in against Australia’s proposed commitment to the Vietnam War, ‘one of the proud moments of my life’ (West 1996, 99). His novel The Ambassador (1965) was a fictionalised account of the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam’s Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem.

In 1965 West sold the film rights for The Shoes of the Fisherman to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was employed as an adviser for the film. Moving to Italy, he lived with his family in a villa outside Rome. In addition to two more novels, he wrote The Heretic (1969), a play based on the life of Giordano Bruno, a failed sixteenth-century monk with whom West identified.

After much resistance Biddy had agreed to a divorce in 1965, and in September 1966 West married Lawford in a civil ceremony at Hampstead, London. In 1985, the year after Biddy’s death, they married with Catholic rites in the Church of Maria Regina, Avalon, Sydney. Only then was West once again able to receive the Catholic sacraments. His marital experiences motivated a non-fiction book, Scandal in the Assembly (1970, with Robert Francis), on the laws of marriage and divorce in the Catholic Church. The Wests lived in Rome until 1971, then moved to a mansion at Wentworth, Surrey, England, from where Morris wrote five more novels over a decade. Returning to Australia in 1982, the Wests settled at Clareville, on Sydney’s northern beaches.

In 1983 West endowed the Morris West Trust Fund to the National Library of Australia, for the publication of material in the library’s collection, with a $50,000 donation supplemented by $5,000 annually. He also served a term as chairman (1985–88) of the library’s council. In 1986, when Pope John Paul II made his first official visit to Australia, West was invited to Alice Springs by a local priest to help prepare for the visit. He observed the important community role of Indigenous women, with whom he thought ‘the true strength of the Aboriginal people still resided’ (West 1996, 42). West later wrote a reflection on John Paul II during the pope’s second visit to Australia in 1995.

After his return to Australia West published nine more novels. He was appointed AM in 1985 and received honorary doctorates of letters from the University of Western Sydney (1993), the Australian National University (1995), and the University of Sydney (1999). In 1997 he was raised to AO, the National Trust of Australia declared him a living treasure, and he received the Lloyd O’Neil award of the Australian Book Publishers’ Association.

West’s vigorous life took its toll and in 1988 he had cardiac surgery. The nature of his faith during his final years is reflected in the words of a Jesuit character in his novel Lazarus (1990):

You ask me how I perceive of the Godhead. I can’t. I don’t try. I simply contemplate the immensity of the mystery. At the same time, I am aware that I myself am part of the mystery. My act of faith is an act of acceptance of my own unknowing. (West 1990, 187)

In his autobiography, A View from the Ridge (1996), West related his many lifetime experiences of vulnerability, but also affirmed his overriding sense of peace. Survived by his wife and their four children, and the two children of his first marriage, he died of a heart attack on 9 October 1999 at Mona Vale Hospital and was buried in the local cemetery. He had been working on his final novel, The Last Confession (2000), which again took Giordano Bruno as its subject. In a writing career spanning six decades, he had written 27 novels, four original radio serials, five plays (including three adapted from his novels), and four non-fiction works. Seven of his novels were made into films. At the time of his death, his books had been translated into 27 languages and had sold more than 60 million copies.