He won (an) award at New Year & this is a beaut piece I reckon [Handwritten note from Grandma]
Maxwell Edgar Fatchen, AM, looked dismayed.
“It’s no good, Max, you can’t run away and say you’re too busy. I’ve been assigned.”
As he heard the words, 59 years of shyness and modesty wrote themselves on the mild face and brought from the lips a quietly murmured: “Oh, no, no.”
Oh yes, yes. A man can’t be literary editor of “The Advertiser,” be made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to journalism and literature, and expect just to go home to Smithfield and pat Butterfly the poodle on the head.
Fatchen met the enthusiastic congratulations from his colleagues with smiling thanks and then a string of self-deprecating wisecracks. Among them”
“Yeah, AM. It stands for after meals y’know. They thought it’d be appropriate.”
But he did not let the occasion pass without admitting frankly, quietly: “It’s nice, though. It’s very nice.”
To his more recent newspaper readers Fatchen is a stumbling buffoon. The character he has created for public consumption is, in his own words yesterday, “an ordinary man who isn’t too smart. He doesn’t rule his world—he’s ruled and fooled by it.”
These readers also know the author of those whimsical topical verses, sometimes brilliant, always full of jokes which come out three times every week, through sadness and joy, whether it is time to plough, to sow, or to reap.
They do not know of the Max Fatchen who goes out of his way to help and encourage his younger colleagues, who dotes on his six grandchildren, who cherishes his links with the Adelaide Plains where he has lived all his life. and who is, as an enthusiastic fisherman, one of the great fish conservators.
They may guess that the dreadful wife of what Fatchen calls his funnies does not—could not—exist.
They can know now that Jean Fatchen is spoken of by her husband as his great inspiration and help, a woman who is at once “liberated, a great companion, and with a marvellous sense of humour.”
They know very little of the hard- working disciplined writer who has been getting up early in the morning to produce a string of highly-praised children’s novels.
If it is the children who sense better than other readers that there is what one of his closest friends describes as a large store of wisdom and sensitivity in Max Fatchen, he would be happy enough.
“I have a powerful regard for children, whom I like to meet on equal terms,” he said yesterday.
“There’s a great clarity in their thought before they’re allegedly knocked into shape by society.”
“Children dream. The great thing is to carry your dreams into adulthood.”