THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 4

The Importance of Being Jeff

The cigarette case should have been in my jacket pocket. That was where I had put it, and where the script expected it to remain until the appropriate moment arrived for Jack Worthing to produce it and allow Oscar Wilde’s carefully constructed confusion to continue. Instead, when I reached for it, the case travelled directly through a hole in the pocket and disappeared somewhere inside the jacket. The audience laughed, the other actors looked at me, and several lines of undocumented dialogue followed while we attempted to decide whether the missing cigarette case could be retrieved without bringing the entire production to a halt.

I cannot now remember exactly what was said. Whatever improvisational brilliance may have emerged was not preserved for posterity, which is probably just as well, because it was more likely the desperate verbal scrabbling of schoolboys trying to recover a prop than an early demonstration of theatrical genius. The important fact was that the cigarette case had gone somewhere it was never supposed to go, leaving the actors to continue as though everything remained under control. It may have been my most authentic preparation for adult life.

The play was The Importance of Being Earnest,¹ and I was playing Jack Worthing, although I do not remember feeling that I had become Jack in any meaningful sense. It was a major production for the secondary school, but for me it was largely another thing one did because it was there to be done. I had not spent childhood dreaming of the stage, waiting for somebody to recognise the tortured actor concealed beneath the school uniform. A role appeared, I learned the lines, turned up for rehearsals and attempted to get the cigarette case out of the jacket when required.

That does not mean I disliked it. I later became involved in theatre restaurants and other performances, so there must have been something in the combination of words, timing and audience that appealed to me. Even then, however, acting was never a great unanswered calling or an identity I felt had been denied me. It was another room I entered, another task I accepted and another occasion on which a person was expected to appear confident whether or not confidence had been supplied with the costume.

The girl who played Lady Bracknell was my first high-school sweetheart, a fact that sounds as though it ought to produce a richer story than it does. Lady Bracknell is one of the most memorable characters in English theatre, and the prospect of being interrogated by a former sweetheart in front of an audience might seem to contain enough emotional material for several chapters. Yet she is not the centre of the memory that remains with me. I remember the cigarette case, the hole in the jacket and the brief confusion more clearly than I remember any romantic or theatrical tension between Jack and Lady Bracknell.

That is one of the difficulties of trying to construct meaning from memory. We like to believe the mind preserves what was important, but it often retains the accident while discarding the achievement. Months of rehearsal can disappear, while a prop falling through a hole remains available more than half a century later. Memory does not always distinguish between the symbolically significant and the merely ridiculous. Sometimes the merely ridiculous earns its place by being the only part that still feels alive.

Jack Worthing moves between identities according to where he is and who is asking. In the country he is Jack, a respectable guardian carrying the obligations of position and responsibility, while in London he becomes Ernest and gives himself access to a less restricted life. His friend Algernon has devised his own escape route through an imaginary invalid named Bunbury, proving that the respectable classes were apparently able to manage moral complexity provided they gave it a proper name. Wilde built the comedy from the distance between the person presented to the world and the motives being concealed behind him.

I doubt any of that struck me with great force while I was standing on the school stage. I was probably more concerned with remembering where to stand, which line came next and whether the jacket contained any further structural weaknesses. Jack did not reach forward through time and inform me that I would spend much of my life moving between identities of my own. It would be an attractive literary construction, but it would also be dishonest. The play did not create the different Jeffs; it merely supplied a character who now gives me somewhere amusing to begin thinking about them.

There has always been Jeff Banks, although even that apparently uncomplicated name has been required to do several jobs. There is Oz Jeff Banks, the name that began partly as a practical distinction and gradually became a public identity. There is Not Your Ordinary Accountant, which was both a business position and a declaration that I had no intention of becoming the sort of accountant who spoke in technical riddles and then charged clients for failing to understand him. There is also the writer, the adviser, the mentor, the husband, the father, the capable man and the man who was sometimes barely capable of moving from one room to the next.

Those identities were not invented in the same way that Jack invented Ernest. I did not become Oz Jeff Banks in order to escape the moral expectations placed upon Jeff Banks, nor did Not Your Ordinary Accountant allow me to conduct a secret life of financial irresponsibility in another suburb. Each name described something real, but each also selected the part of me that was most useful in the room I had entered. Clients did not necessarily need the uncertain Jeff, readers did not always need the accountant, and the people closest to me should not have been expected to conduct their relationships through a business adviser who happened to live in the same house.

The capable man became one of the strongest roles because other people responded well to him. He could be relied upon to understand the problem, examine the numbers, find the missing fact and construct a way forward. He knew how to sound calm when somebody else’s business, family or financial future was wobbling in front of him. The more often that performance succeeded, the more frequently it was requested, until usefulness stopped being something I offered and became something I believed I was required to be.

There was nothing false about the competence. The advice was real, the work was done and the consequences mattered, but a genuine ability can still become a hiding place. It is possible to disappear behind usefulness without telling a single lie. People see the man who can deal with the difficulty and assume he must also know how to deal with himself. The jacket looks perfectly sound from the outside, and nobody knows there is a hole in the pocket until something important falls through it.

The depressed Jeff did not belong naturally in many of those rooms. He was inconvenient, unreliable and unlikely to improve the confidence of a client who had arrived expecting answers. He could not be included in the brochure for Not Your Ordinary Accountant, although in some ways he may have made the adviser better by preventing certainty from becoming cruelty. A person who has felt himself becoming smaller inside his own life may be less inclined to make another person feel small merely because they do not understand a balance sheet.

I have sometimes called them Jeff One and Jeff Two, although the names can make them sound more neatly divided than they ever were. One Jeff could analyse, explain and continue, while the other could feel, withdraw and question whether continuing was worth the effort being demanded. They did not take turns according to a published roster, and one did not always know when the other had entered the room. The analytical Jeff could be operating at full strength while the human Jeff was quietly sinking beneath him.

Jack Worthing at least knew when he was supposed to be Ernest. He had geography on his side, with one identity operating in the country and another in the city. My divisions were less courteous and sometimes appeared within the same conversation. I could provide a technically sound answer, understand the emotional consequences of it, resent the fact that the question had been left until disaster was close, and still make a joke so the person receiving the answer did not feel judged. That was not necessarily a mask; it was several legitimate parts of me attempting to speak through one mouth.

The word mask suggests deliberate concealment, as though the real person waits behind the performance and could be revealed if the costume were removed. I am no longer certain there is a single, unchanging Jeff standing behind all the others. The adviser was real, just as the writer is real and the man unable to face the day was real. The difficulty was not that one identity was authentic and the others were fraudulent. The difficulty was that I sometimes allowed the identity most useful to other people to claim authority over all the rest.

There is a temptation to regard the public Jeff as the performance and the private Jeff as the truth. That is too simple, and perhaps unfair to both of them. The public Jeff often expressed values I genuinely held: clarity, courage, loyalty, humour, responsibility and the belief that knowledge should help people rather than intimidate them. The private Jeff was not automatically wiser merely because he suffered in private. Depression can reveal truths that busyness conceals, but it can also produce conclusions that feel convincing because exhaustion has removed the strength required to dispute them.

The importance of being earnest presents another question. Earnestness usually appears to be a virtue, particularly to a boy being trained to become reliable in a world that had limited patience for uncertainty. Serious people completed what they began, accepted responsibility and did not make their problems somebody else’s burden. There was much to admire in that, but seriousness can quietly convert itself into obligation, and obligation can become a life sentence if nobody remembers to review the terms.

I became very good at taking things seriously. Clients’ businesses were serious, taxation deadlines were serious, family provision was serious and the promises made to other people were serious. Even humour often had serious work to perform, because it allowed difficult truths to enter without setting off every alarm in the room. The danger was not that I lacked joy or failed to recognise absurdity; it was that responsibility always seemed able to present a stronger case for the available time.

Perhaps that was why theatre could be useful without becoming a passion. It gave me permission to use words differently and to occupy a room without being entirely responsible for everything happening inside it. The script belonged to somebody else, the character carried the consequences and even the mistakes could become part of the entertainment. When the cigarette case disappeared, nobody’s business collapsed and no family’s future depended upon whether I recovered it. The worst likely outcome was laughter, which had already occurred.

There was also something valuable in discovering that an audience did not require perfection in order to remain with you. A missed cue, an uncertain line or an uncooperative jacket could be absorbed if the people on stage kept moving. That lesson may have travelled further into my life than the character of Jack Worthing ever did. Communication was not always about delivering the correct words exactly as prepared; sometimes it depended upon noticing the unexpected, acknowledging it without panic and finding a way to continue together.

That became part of the accountant I later chose to be. Technical knowledge mattered, but it was useless if it remained trapped in professional language that made the client feel foolish. I had to read the room, judge the timing and know when the carefully prepared explanation had fallen through a hole somewhere between my mouth and the other person’s understanding. Repeating the same line more loudly was rarely the solution, although the professions have built entire traditions around attempting it.

Not Your Ordinary Accountant was therefore a role, but it was also an attempt to bring more of myself into the work rather than conceal myself behind it. The humour, directness and willingness to challenge were not decorations attached to a conventional accountant. They were ways of refusing the expectation that seriousness must always sound solemn. A person can discuss insolvency, taxation or business failure in ordinary language without reducing the gravity of the situation. In fact, the gravity may be understood more clearly once everybody stops pretending that complexity is evidence of authority.

Oz Jeff Banks developed in a similar way. At first it helped distinguish me from another Jeff Banks who was already known in a different field, but over time the name carried an Australian informality and a slightly exaggerated version of my willingness to be visible. Oz Jeff could write, promote books, tell stories and occupy the public space that Jeff Banks may once have entered more cautiously. Yet he was not an invented Ernest travelling to town for freedom. He was one part of me given a louder microphone.

The writer may be the place where the identities have come closest to sharing the same room. The accountant can bring structure, logic and an instinct for following consequences, while the human Jeff can admit uncertainty, pain, affection, anger and the possibility that the numbers have not answered the most important question. Humour can enter without being required to rescue me from every uncomfortable truth. On the page, I can sometimes allow the capable man and the struggling man to exist together without insisting that one of them leave before the reader arrives.

That does not mean the conflict has been resolved. I still feel the pressure to present the version of myself most likely to be useful, particularly when another person needs something and I believe I can provide it. I still confuse being needed with belonging and occasionally treat exhaustion as evidence that the work must have mattered. The older I become, however, the less convincing the performance is when it requires one Jeff to silence all the others.

Looking back, I do not regard playing Jack Worthing as one of the great formative events of my life. It was a school production, a responsibility accepted and completed, with enough pleasure attached to it that I later wandered into other forms of performance. The part did not reveal my destiny, Lady Bracknell did not dominate the memory, and no theatrical agent waited at the stage door. What survived was a cigarette case, a damaged pocket and a small demonstration that even a carefully rehearsed identity can be disrupted by something nobody thought to inspect.

Perhaps that is enough reason for Jack to remain in this book. He does not need to carry the full weight of my identity or become a prophet who recognised the future accountant, adviser and writer concealed within a schoolboy. He merely provides a doorway through which the different Jeffs can be seen moving from room to room, sometimes confidently and sometimes checking whether the pockets are intact. The importance was never really in being Jack, Ernest or even permanently earnest. It may simply be in allowing all the legitimate parts of Jeff to remain present when I answer to my own name.

Notes

1. The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy by Oscar Wilde, first performed at the St James’s Theatre in London in 1895. Jack Worthing leads a double life, using the name Ernest while in London, while Lady Bracknell is the formidable mother of Gwendolen Fairfax. Jeff played Jack Worthing in a secondary-school production.