Jack Lindsay


Jack Lindsay was an Australian-born writer, who from 1926 lived in the United Kingdom, initially in Essex. He was born in Melbourne, but spent his formative years in Brisbane. He was the eldest son of Norman Lindsay and brother of author Philip Lindsay.

Early life

Lindsay was educated at Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland, from which he graduated with first class honours in Greek and Latin. On 27 October 1922 at the district registrar’s office, Waverton, he married Janet Beaton, granddaughter of W. B. Dalley. He started his literary career in 1923 as a poet with a book Fauns and Ladies, illustrated by his father. In the 1920s he contributed stories and poems to a popular weekly magazine, The Bulletin, as well as editing the literary magazines Vision and London Aphrodite.
Lindsay founded, with P. R. Stephensen and John Kirtley, the Fanfrolico Press for fine publishing, initially in North Sydney. He left Australia in 1926, never to return. When the University of Queensland Press tried to persuade him to come to Australia for the launch of The Blood Vote in 1985, he declined.

In the UK

In the 1930s the Fanfrolico Press ceased as a business. Lindsay described that experience later in the autobiographical work Fanfrolico and After. He moved to the left politically, writing for Left Review and joining the Communist Party of Great Britain at the end of the decade, becoming an activist. He started writing novels while living in Cornwall. Lindsay's earliest novels were set in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire; they included Cressida's First Lover, Rome For Sale and Caesar Is Dead. Lindsay's historical fiction also includes 1649: A Novel of a Year, a social realist novel that begins with the execution of Charles I of England and explores the first year of the Republic through the eyes of ordinary citizens. He wrote 1649 as an anti-fascist novel. He collaborated with Edgell Rickword amongst others.
During World War II, Lindsay served in the British Army initially in the Royal Signal Corps. From 1943 he worked for the War Office on theatrical scripts. He began an affair with the actor and activist Ann Davies which was announced as a marriage although Lindsay was still married. Ann was popularly known as Ann Lindsay.
After the war Lindsay lived in Castle Hedingham, becoming the subject of defamation and suppression because of his Communist standpoint. Being a prolific writer, he published 169 books including 38 novels and 25 volumes of translations, as well as art, literary, classical, historical and political studies, biographies and autobiographies written from a Marxist perspective.
Lindsay was a vegetarian all his adult life.

Awards

Lindsay was awarded the Soviet Order of the Badge of Honour in 1967, an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Queensland in 1973. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Member of the Order of Australia.

Works

Fanfrolico Press books, as translator, author or editor

Edited by Lindsay, Honor Arundel and Maurice Carpenter. Poets included were:
Dai Alexander – Honor Arundel – John Atkins – Maurice Carpenter – Herbert Corby – Leslie Daiken – Idris Davies – Tom Farnol – Alun Lewis – Jack Lindsay – John Manifold – Geoffrey Matthews – David Martin – Frances Mayo – Hubert Nicholson – Harold W. Owen – Paul Potts – John Pudney – Arnold Rattenbury – M. Richardson – Joyce Rowe – Francis Scarfe – John Singe – Randall Swingler – Mike Whittock