The New Yorker of 21 July features an article by Jill Lepore about ancient literary battles in the USA.
Anne Carroll Moore (1871–1961), first superintendent of the New York Public Library’s Department of Work with Children, wielded enormous power in children’s literature in the USA during the first half of the twentieth century: ‘Her verdict, not any editor’s, not any bookseller’s, sealed a book’s fate,’ Lepore writes. ‘She kept a rubber stamp at her desk that she used, liberally, while paging through publishers’ catalogues: “Not recommended for purchase by expert.” The end.’
The article tells how E B White’s first book for children, Stuart Little, brought an end to her influence. She hated the book, reportedly writing to White that it was ‘written by a sick mind’, and recommended against it. In 1945, an amazing first print run of 50 000 hit the bookshops, and though ACM’s hostility initially slowed sales down, she was helpless against the tide of its popularity. Behind these events lay a great shift in what was understood to be excellent in children’s literature. Anne Carroll Moore ‘loved what was precious, innocent, and sentimental. White [both EB and his critic–librarian wife, Katharine] found the same stuff mawkish, prudish, and daffy.’
I don’t know if the history of Australian children’s literature boasts any personalities of the magnitude of Anne Carroll Moore or E B White, but I’m feeling impelled to blog a little about some rough equivalents. The School Magazine, subtitled ‘A Magazine of Literature for our Boys and Girls’, was coming into existence at about the same time as Anne Carroll Moore was setting up the Children’s Room behind the lions at the New York Public Library and winning the right for children not only to enter the library but even to borrow books. But who remembers the name of the magazine’s first editor, Inspector Stephen Smith? Since Mr Smith kept fairly busy earning his place in history as an educational mover and shaker, setting up correspondence schools and the like, it probably makes sense to think of Doris Chadwick (1899–1979), generally acknowledged as occupying the chair from 1920 to 1960, as the real first editor.
As far as I know, no one has written much about Doris Chadwick. Yet she did wield significant influence over children’s literature in Australia during the period of Anne Carroll Moore’s dominance in the US. She decided what poems, short stories, songs would be encountered by generations of primary school students in New South Wales. She may not have made or broken careers, but she almost certainly gave thousands of people their first taste of C J Dennis, May Gibbs, Henry Lawson, Mary Gilmore, Wordsworth, Blake, Tolkien, Aesop, as well as stories with titles like ‘Fairy Twee Wee’s Adventure’ (by ‘Neelia’, 1916), which Katharine White may well have found mawkish, or ‘Two Days at a Shearing-Shed’ (W M Corrigan, 1920).
I know two artists who illustrated for Miss Chadwick’s magazine in the 1950s. By that time she was deaf, and very aware of her dignity. When the young Noela Young was ushered into her presence she was asked to wear gloves and instructed to curtsey, which she did to the best of her ability. ‘Ah, yes, I remember you,’ said Doris when introduced to a promising art student, Astra Lãcis. ‘I didn’t recognise you without your hat.’ Astra never wore hats, and this was their first meeting. By that time, without the benefit of a battle in the New York manner, the power was passing to a new generation: Noreen Shelley, assistant editor, was soon to be in charge. She published an excerpt from Stuart Little in 1961.
In the last week and a bit I’ve been to a workshop in the US, which involved large slabs of time in planes and airports and close to 24 hours in a Golf Country Club in Taiwan, the latter because my Taipei–Sydney flight had vanished from the schedule. I’ve had lots of bloggable adventures, but for now, here is What I Read:
Sydney–Taipei: I first met When the Sergeant Came Marching Home years ago in the form of four short stories submitted to The School Magazine. We published them with the series title, ‘Scenes from a Canadian Childhood’, and reprinted them more than once. Now, in hard covers and with an overall narrative arc, they’re still a joy: two boys come to terms with their father’s return from killing Nazis and almost immediately uprooting them and their mother from their suburban lives to take on the life of a struggling farmer. For the book, someone has decided to transplant the farm from rural Canada to US-book-buyer-friendly Montana, but other than that the stories are as fresh, their ironic comedy as laugh-out-loud as ever. (The mother is called ‘Mum’ once, and it’s a rare case of a proofing error – if it is one – that gave me pleasure, providing as it does an archaeological trace of the family’s past life as Canadians.)
Taipei–Los Angeles, Los Angeles–Boston:The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was recommended to me as ideal plane reading. It’s a Closed Island Murder Mystery that morphs on its way to a predicable surprise ending into a Hunt for a Serial Killer. The original Swedish title translates literally as something like ‘Men Who Hate Women’, which as you might expect reveals a good bit of the plot. The English title has the virtue of focusing the reader’s attention on the novel’s most interesting character; sadly, the alluringly feminine Quercus paperback cover gives a radically false impression of her. But spiky hair, piercings, and a hint of the sociopath probably wouldn’t have sold as many books. It’s the first of three books, will almost certainly be made into a movie, and was in fact perfect plane fare, and the right length for this trip. I finished it soon after arriving in Boston.
Boston, then Boston–Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City– Los Angeles: I also packed two slim vols of poetry, which also turned out to be perfect travel fare: taking up hardly any room, they provided satisfyingly complete short reads before sleeping the sleep of the sleep-deprived and jetlagged; they were excellent for quelling panic when I turned out to have been booked on a non-existent flight with nothing to do but wait for my name to be called on the hastily found alternative; and when on this flight and in Taiwan I found myself bookless, they bore rereading.
So I consider myself in Jacob G. Rosenberg and joanne burns’s debt, even though many of the former’s poems, despite giving the initial impression that they are a sonnet sequence, read like fairly prosaic notes on the way to his wonderful memoirs East of Time and Sunrise West(as if the gruelling subject matter made attention to anything much more than bald narration seem pernickety), and I read a number of the latter’s offerings with bemused incomprehension. Inspired by Jeanette Winterson on The Book Show, however, I spent a good bit of this leg of my travels memorising poems, and they richly repaid the effort. For the record, I can recite number xii of jb’s ‘diversions’ (beginning ‘The wall longs to be rubble’) and her lovely elegaic ‘ecce’. From JGR’s book, I have taken possession of ‘My Sister Pola’, one of the Holocaust poems.
Los Angeles–Taipei: I don’t suppose Los Angeles Airport is anyone’s favourite place in the whole world, but it’s just moved down a peg or two in my affections. After queuing for maybe a total of an hour to check in, to have my check-in baggage x-rayed, to pass through immigration and to submit to a shoeless personal security check, I discovered that if I wanted a book to read over the next 25 or possibly (and as it happened, factually) 49 hours, I had a grand total of 16 books to choose from. The spanking new collection of David Sedaris essays was the only one that beckoned to me, and it proved to be a diverting read. Sedaris’s charming self deprecation and irony sometimes makes it hard to hear his more serious voice, but it is there, and the book offers meditations on death and lyrical celebrations of his beloved partner Hugh without becoming unreadably earnest. The long section on giving up smoking while holidaying/vacationing in Tokyo is full of delights. I decided two things, however: if possible, I’ll take any future Sedaris aurally, because he’s much funnier and more moving that way; and I’ll read some essays by Montaigne, originator and master of the form.
Taipei: The search for something to read continued in my enforced 24 hour layover: nothing but golf magazines and a 14 year old tourist booklet in the Miramar Golf Country Club, which was also miles from the nearest shop of any kind, let alone English-language bookshop. An anguished email home (thank heavens there was an Internet nook) gave rise to much merriment.
Taipei–Sydney: It was a relief on arriving at Taipei International Airport to discover there was a bookshop, even though it had only a couple more English-language books than LAX: the choice boiled down to The Kite Runner for 530 new Taiwan dollars or Inkspellfor 350. I opted for the children’s book, sequel to the marvellous Inkheart. I’ll write about it when I’ve read more than 50 pages (because, yes, I slept, and even watched a movie).
[I originally posted this on 10 June 2008. I’m making it public now as it’s relevant to a piece I’m writing about the Voice Referendum. 31 August 2023]
OK, I’ve seen the light. Instead of a marathon post at the end of each month about the books I’ve been reading, the plan is now to post entries much more frequently – which reflects more accurately the way those longer posts (20 of them by my count) were composed. I don’t know whether I’ll do a post for every book I read, or a weekly post, or something more idiosyncratic, but the posts will be shorter and more frequent. They won’t be reviews, though if I I feel the urge to write a review I won’t necessarily resist it. My aim, as with the longer posts, is to keep some kind of record of my reading. If I was commenting on paintings visited, I hope I would be doing something less like an art gallery audio-guide and more like the Dear Art Please Touch Me project I heard described on Radio National’s Artworks recently. That project, created by two young artists, Danielle Freakley and Elizabeth McGechie, is an audio tour of the National Gallery of Victoria in which you hear a soundscape of ordinary people giving their idiosyncratic responses to the art. In my case, I do hope you’ll add your own comments, idiosyncratic or otherwise.
I’m kicking off the new regime with Kay Anderson’s Race and the Crisis of Humanism (Routledge 2007), winner of the 2008 Gleebooks Prize, one of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. I wouldn’t have noticed the book if I hadn’t been pointed at it by the awards. I wouldn’t have bought it and started reading it if I hadn’t been so taken with Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory earlier this year, and consequently been interested in the impact of early European–Aboriginal encounter on European theorising, which is pretty much the concern of this book. And I wouldn’t have persisted with its dense academic prose, which fairly bristles with learned referencesand also with the proofreading oversights and chaotic use of commas that seem to be inevitable in such publications, if there wasn’t a promise of fresh insight into the nature of racism.
I’m glad I read it, because it introduced me to apparently vast scholarly conversations about race and racism, and about the history of people’s understanding of what a human being is, among other things. Its central argument is something like: let’s agree that the concept of innate differences between people of different ‘races’ was developed over the last couple of hundred years, and had the function of rationalising the genocidal brutality of nineteenth century colonialism; but describing its function isn’t a full explanation of where it came from; European thinkers took their own specific society to be a universal human condition, and as they encountered different-looking and differently organised peoples their understanding of what it means to be human was challenged; rather than change that understanding they found a series of ‘scientific’ ways to define the new people as lesser versions of human. Something like that – but a lot more carefully argued, and more interesting. Kay Anderson brings a coldly analytic eye to some fairly monstrous pieces of writing, all the more monstrous because I recognise in a lot of them a kind of full-blown, explicit version of ideas that still float around today, some that were presented as simple fact in my childhood education.
At some points in the book, I felt an almost physical pain at the absence of Aboriginal voices. As the European scholars – few of whom had ever visited Australia – argued back and forth about the status of ‘the Tasmanians’ and ‘the Australians’, collecting their skulls and measuring them obsessively, it was almost impossible not to think of the deep satisfaction of a man and woman in a recent Awaye program describing sleeping in the same room as ancestral remains reclaimed from a European museum before loading them onto a homeward-bound plane. As the scholars pontificated about the inevitable ‘extinction’ of the Tasmanian Aboriginals, I recalled James Boyce’s account in Van Diemen’s Land of the machinations, negotiations, lies and evasions of the British Governors who oversaw the massacres. As they rabbited on about the ‘unimproveability’ of the Australians, I was glad to have read Inga Clendinnen’s meticulous attempts to retrieve from the colonisers’ own records an account of the first years of contact in New South Wales from the point of view of the invaded. And once or twice, when something felt personal about someone I know, I almost shouted out loud, ‘Shut up! Just shut up!’ Kay Anderson has a much stronger stomach that I do: she actually goes in and tries to understand where the vile stuff comes from.
[I posted about this in my old blog in 2008, and am retrieving it to this one because it mentions Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill, who died in January, and whose more recent book of essays, Alive, Alive Oh! I plan to blog about soon – JS, 31 March 2019]
As I mentioned last month, I started reading Schulz and Peanuts to check its suitability for a young fan. I’m happy to report that in general it passes with flying colours. A young woman has a termination, and the break-up of ‘Sparky’s’ first marriage is gruelling, but these are both handled with a good bit more tact than you’d find in many YA novels.
Every week, for just months short of 50 years, Charles M Schulz sat at his drawing board to produce six daily strips and a longer Sunday piece. He inked every line himself, and penned in every letter until his final stroke meant that the speech balloons in the very last frames were filled by computer-generated lettering. Peanuts was the most important thing in his life; he hated being away from home, and died the day his last cartoon was published.
This isn’t a tale of heroic physical exploits or grand public gestures, but David Michaelis seems to have interviewed every living soul who had a meaningful connection with his subject, from the psychology student who gave him an impromptu – and effective – counselling session on his agoraphobia at a tennis tournament and never had another conversation with him, to Joyce nee Halvorsen, the main model for Lucy, his first wife and the mother of his many children (one of the best bits of the book could have been titled The First Wife’s Story).
The result is a fascinating, many-faceted portrait of an artist and of a man. Peanuts strips are scattered through the pages, not as decoration but as integral elements of the narrative. Cartooning was not only Schulz’s life work, the fulfilment of a central ambition; it was also, dare I say, a spiritual discipline by which he found perspectives on the difficulties and dilemmas of his life (and the lives around him) that allowed the release of laughter. While Michaelis is very bold (and repetitive) in some of his psychologising, I found his thesis persuasive: that what we common or garden readers received as Schulz’s comic reflections on life in the abstract were often if not always born out of particular moments of pain or joy. Schulz seems to have been an excellent exemplar for Neil Gaiman’s advice on how to deal with trouble: Make good art.
Michaelis places Schulz interestingly in the history of comics – though he barely mentions comic books as opposed to strips, and surely the moral panic in the 1950s epitomised by Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (which led to a nun confiscating a Phantom comic from me in Grade Three, and to our teachers’ recommending that we read the boring Catholic comic Topix) had something to do with the runaway success of Schulz’s wholesome creation. It’s surely not entirely coincidence that for a time in the 1940s, before he got his big break, Schulz did lettering for Topix.
[I passed the book on to my young friend, whose mother reports that after dipping into it he said, ‘It’s not all that interesting to me, even if it is to Jonathan. But he reads everything.’ Then, softening the blow, ‘Some of it is pretty good.’]
Place is People is a strange little book, neither an attractive collection of photographs to introduce the suburb to visitors nor a quick historical overview. It’s got elements of both those, but is something more personal and less orderly than either; if it was even more personal, it might have been an extended prose poem, but it isn’t quite that either.
Mary Haire leads walking tours, and the book has something of the serendipitous feel of such tours: here’s a little girl walking to school; let me tell you about a boy that age who went to the same school a hundred years ago. I know more about my suburb’s history having read it; some errors have been corrected, and some tantalising trails laid in my mind: Cardinal Freeman was born here, for instance, and the young woman at the florist’s is a single mother. How can I put those two snippets in the same sentence, you ask? I plead that the book sets a precedent with its gloriously unconcerned potpourri approach to its subject.
Talking at Gleebooks recently, Helen Garner paid tribute to Elmore Leonard’s essay, ‘Ten Rules of Writing‘: she has his sentence, ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,’ on the wall above her desk. In The Spare Room, she has given us a feminine Elmore Leonard story: it’s about the emotional tangles between two women, or at least those tangles provide the language for its telling, but it has the clean lines, the sure forward movement, the lack of hooptedoodle, that give such pleasure in Leonard’s tough-guy narratives from The Tall T to, say, Pagan Babies.
It’s a very quick read, and an intense one. There’s plenty of complexity, some of which I’ve found making itself known to me weeks after finishing the book. For instance, ‘Helen’ the character, who is manifestly a version of Helen the writer, claimed my allegiance and assent to her judgements while I was reading, but has since come to seem much less reliable, much too caught up in her own emotional reactions to be able to give us the full picture (some of which the book gives us in spite of her). It’s a magnificent achievement.
I doubt if David Campbell (1915–1979) is still studied in Eng Lit courses at many Australian unis, but I hope he is fondly remembered and occasionally reread by more than just me. He and Martin Johnston share a posthumous moment in John Forbes’s elegiac ‘Lassù in Cielo’; he cropped up in a footnote in the John Manifold collection I read last month; a recent Poetica featured his correspondence with Douglas Stewart; lines and images from his poems arrive in my mind unbidden from time to time.
Most of the poems in this selection are a strange mixture of the bucolic and the erudite (and just in case I’ve misused those words, I mean rustic and scholarly), and there’s a pleasant music to them. When I read the sequence of twelve twelve-line rhyming poems of ‘Cocky’s Calendar’, I found myself wondering how he managed to pick up his pen again after writing something so wonderful. Back in the early 1970s, in an Aust Lit seminar on this sequence, a student from North America totally didn’t get them: while the rest of us were being drawn into the poetry’s intensely personal relationship with the landscape, he lost patience altogether and said the whole thing read like verse you’d find on a Norman Rockwell calendar. I thought then that he was missing something, and I find I still do. This is the ninth poem, for September:
Under Wattles
Now, here and there, against the cold,
The hillsides smoulder into gold
And the stockman riding by
Lifts to the trees a yellow eye.
It's here the couples from the farms
Play in one another's arms
At yes and no – you'd think the trees
Sprang from their felicities.
So may our children grow up strong,
Got while the thrush drew out his song,
And love like you and I when we
Lie beneath the wattle tree.
How about that present tense ‘lie’, eh?
I think the sequence as a whole speaks to me so strongly because of my father. At a family gathering once, another farmer, of a younger generation, said something about the boredom of spending a whole day driving around a paddock in a tractor (this was before the days of air-conditioned tractor cabins and iPods). When my father said mildly that he didn’t get bored, one of my female cousins asked him what he did with his mind when he was out there all day. As he drew breath to answer, my mother came to the rescue by changing the subject (‘Oh Jenny, you know you’ve been asking me about tatting, I have a pattern here I can show you’). Probably to his relief, my father didn’t get to answer the question. I like to think that David Campbell’s contemplative poems, even though his is a sheep property while my father grew sugar cane, provide some version of what my father might have wanted to say back then over tea and scones.
With The Omnivore’s Dilemma I was back to farming, in three categories: industrial, of which I read with a mixture of horror and curiosity; pastoral, which is not synonymous with ‘organic’, but tends to have the virtues claimed for it; and personal, in which the author creates a meal from things he has personally grown, hunted and killed, or foraged. I don’t know that anyone could read this tremendously engaging book without changing the way they think about food. It’s very heartening that it was a New York Times best seller. If you want a quick look at the central part of the book, which deals with ‘intensively managed grazing’ or clever grass farming, here’s a video from Michael Pollan’s recent TED talk:
The book integrates into its narrative any number of lively essays: on the ethics of meat-eating (in which Pollan engages with Peter Singer), the joys of hunting (ditto Ortega y Gasset), attempts at humane design in modern abattoirs (Temple Grandin), the US domestic and international politics of corn (in which he doesn’t discuss the so-called Free Trade Agreements that leave the US free to subsidise its grossly inefficient corn agribusinesses while preventing other nations from continuing with similar protections, but he makes their absurd brutality abundantly clear), on just about anything you can think of that’s related to his central question, ‘What should we have for dinner?’ Some of it is very funny. Some is inspiring. Some horrendous. All of it is engrossing.
I hadn’t read David Campbell’s The Man in the Honeysuckle before. As with Selected Poems, I’m fairly indifferent to the learned bits, mainly translations and imitations from the Russian, but some of the lyrics, especially the Aust Pastoral pieces, are extraordinary. The book was published posthumously, and it’s hard not to read a number of the poems as being poignantly suffused with a sense of death as imminent. ‘Crab’, ‘The Broken Mask’ and the whole ‘With a Blue Dog’ section stand out for me in this first encounter. How’s this:
Wind in Casuarinas
Camped under the she-oaks
With a dog and swag
The woman a white sapling
A straight flame
Blown all ways
And the children off
On their several roads
Lives rounding like river stones
Or washing out in wheel ruts
A high sky over tree and hill
And the clouds taking fire
I am spread out I burn
Yellow and rose – blessing and blest
A still flame in the arms of the she-oaks
Life butting into the world
With five wants and a howl
And shambles out with a blue dog.
I want to put ‘five wants and a howl’ right up there with ‘helpless, naked, piping loud’.
I don’t imagine Elmore Leonard would care much for this Heat. There’s hoptedoodle galore … though generally very high quality hoptedoodle. Ironically, the one article that seem to me to be 90 percent hoptedoodle is by a crime writer whose point seems to be that crime fiction has advantages from being bound to an absence of hoptedoodle (but maybe I was just irritated because her essay on the relationship between genre fiction and literary fiction totally ignores the existence of children’s literature and science fiction).
There’s a terrific piece on blogging by Kerryn Goldsworthy, not a hopt or a doodle in sight; a lovely pairing of a story by Eva Sallis (‘Abattoir’) and an essay by Elizabeth Campbell (called ‘Why Little Girls Love Horses’ on the contents page but ‘Envy Worship and Passion’ on its own title page); chiming mentions of the catacombs of Paris, of which I’d never heard, first in one of Jennifer Maiden’s still-intriguing George Jeffreys–Clare Collins poems and then in an engrossing essay by Sarah Knox about researching historical novels, her own and Hilary Mantel’s; and a number of memorable pieces on aspects of migration: Elisabeth Holdsworth’s memoir ‘New Holland’, a short story by Hoa Pham, poems by Ali Alizadeh (on his unborn baby) and Peter Skrzynecki (on his late father). There’s lots more. I’m a happy subscriber.
I understand that it must be a nightmare to copy edit a magazine like this: so many words, so many different voices, so little time. But there are enough lapses to present a significant obstacle to the reader, at least to this one. At one point, havoc is ‘wrecked’; as something wreaks havoc just a few pages later in the same article, it seems likely that the error resulted from an editor’s dependence on a spellchecker rather than ignorance. In the sentence, “The memoir becomes a book about illness to many reviewers; a ‘survivors’ tale; a plumbing of the issue of women’s health, and the continuing masculinist paternalism of the public health system” it looks very much as if the apostrophe after survivors was misunderstood by someone who inserted another before it to make it function as a quote mark; and the comma after health almost derails the sense. I don’t want to go hunting for similar moments, but the erratic comma and absent apostrophe in ‘reconstruction, so redolent of the historian’s duty, and the re-enactors fancy’ just leapt up at me from further down the same page (p 172). This might be just the irritated snitchiness of an underemployed pedant, but in this context it becomes hard to tell if the truly eccentric punctuation in a number of the poems is what the poet intended or the product of editorial inattention.</curmudgeonly grumble>
How could I resist reopening The Branch of Dodona, my only other David Campbell book? This one had pride of place in the bathroom for a week, to allow for contemplative reading in short bursts. Again, it’s his farming poems – in this volume, the ‘Works and Days’ sequence, with its love–hate relationship to sheep – that speak most strongly to me. Even his ‘My Lai’, which I remember him reading at Vietnam Moratorium Readings in another age, works so powerfully because of the farmer-to-peasant solidarity it embodies:
I was milking the cow when a row of tall bamboo Was mowed by rifle fire With my wife and child in the one harvest, And the blue milk spilt and ruined
I’m not sure what the friend had in mind who gave me Diane Athill’s reflections on old age, Somewhere Towards the End, as a present for my 61st birthday. As Ms Athill is almost exactly 30 years older than me and still going strong, I’ll assume she wasn’t hinting it’s time I hang up my spurs.
In terms of my current reading, the book’s matter-of-factness, its almost belligerent steadiness of gaze play as a sober counterpoint to the rage and evasion of The Spare Room: both books generate what Athill calls an ‘addictive excitement of the mind’, and they speak to each other. Ms Athill’s brief reference to Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety endorses Sarah Knox’s praise of it in her essay in Heat. The book has in spades a (to me) miraculous quality that I think of as Protestant integrity, a quality also displayed, ineffably, in the manner of my friend J’s leavetaking. I wouldn’t mind having a mind like Diana Athill’s when I’m 90. She manages to be remarkably cheerful about things usually discussed, if at all, in gloomy mode. One chapter begins, for example (the emphasis is mine):
When you begin discussing old age you come up against reluctance to depress either others or yourself, so you tend to focus on the more agreeable aspects of it: coming to terms with death, the continuing presence of young people, the discovery of new pursuits and so on. But I have to say that a considerable part of my own old time is taken up by doing things or (worse) failing to do things for people older, or if not older, less resistant to age, than myself.
Can’t you just see that paragraph, followed by the word ‘Discuss’, as an exam question on The Spare Room?
Deciding what books to take travelling is probably always problematic. They need to weigh little enough, be discardable or relevant enough, and preferably be likely to be read by more than one traveller. My reading on this trip managed a fairly decent combination of those criteria.
The Jean-Dominique Bauby memoir rates high on the light-of-weight criterion. Given the manner of its composition, it’s just as well. Bauby was suffering Locked-in Syndrome in the aftermath of a stroke: his mind was unimpaired, but his paralysis was so extensive that he could communicate only by blinking his left eye. Just reading about it was enough to restimulate my mild episode of Bell’s Palsy from some decades ago. He dictated this elegant, even lyrical book one letter at a time by blinking that eye. I’ll never look at the immobile and unresponsive people in the nursing home the same again: they differ from Bauby in being demented, but the powerful lesson of the book is surely that inability to communicate is not at all the same thing as lack of ability to perceive and respond.
I read the whole thing before we reached Singapore. As it had been lent to me, it stayed with me for the whole remainder of the trip, and came home safely. I recoil from the idea of the film (which is coming to Sydney soon). This is a quintessentially verbal creation, and I can’t see that a film could be anything other than a travesty.
I expected the Richard E Grant book to be discardable, but it’s such a good read that it too stayed with me for the whole trip and is now on loan to an emerging filmmaker. The thing about REG (as he is called in the captions to the location photographs) is that as a first-time, perhaps even one-time writer-director who is also a well-established character actor, he is at the same time an insider and an outsider in the movie business. Wah-Wah is an intensely personal, autobiographical film, and the diary of its making is also intensely personal, an account of revisiting a difficult but rich childhood. It’s also the story of a multinational, multimillion dollar enterprise in which it sometimes seemed that anything that could go wrong would go wrong. The diary form serves the subject well, and in his producer REG finds a perfect villain. It’s hard to believe she was ever as incompetent, as obnoxious, as French-arrogant as she is portrayed, but the joy she gives as a character in the book is directly proportional to the pain she apparently gave in the real/reel world. I remember enjoying the film. I’d now like to see it again. And I’d love to see a version that includes some of the (correctly) excised scenes.
By now we were in Delhi, and when in the Central Cottage Industries Emporium on Jarpath Radial near Connaught Place I saw books by Ruskin Bond, a sometime contributor to a magazine I once edited, of course I bought one – an interesting experience in itself, as the process was broken down into its parts: agreement to the purchase and receipt of a docket at the counter; payment and having the docket stamped at a cashier two floors down; receipt of the book and surrender of the docket just inside the exit door.
The book is a collection of rambling essays about the joys of living in Mussoorie, a hill station in Uttar Pradesh. It turned out I’d read a number of the pieces before when RB submitted them as typescripts to the magazine (corrected with white-out and ink – I can verify his assertion in the book that he doesn’t use a computer). We published at least one of them. But there was a special pleasure in reading them so close to the place where they were written, and where Ruskin still lives, as far as I know. Among many delights, one that stands out is the little excursion into the history of potato in India – we had an Irish soldier to thank for the plentiful potato that seemed to feature in every meal.
The Henning Mankell book made the cut because both Penny and I have enjoyed his detective stories, and I’m respectful of his two books for young people (one of which deals, like this book, with AIDS). Written, according to an endnote, in fury at the role of the West in relation to AIDS in Africa, it appears to have been revised in haste, to have done without beta readers altogether, and been copy-edited on a tight budget. The result is that, though the same endnote asks that the book be taken seriously as shedding light on terrible things, it actually comes across as a clumsy fantasy of wickedness, a rickety, even incoherent, echo of Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener, a trivialising of the issues about which Mankell undoubtedly cares deeply. The translation may be partly to blame, but I don’t think so.
We didn’t have the heart to inflict this on any of our fellow travellers, so it found a bin in the pink city of Jaipur.
We brought The One from the Other for pretty much the same reasons as the Henning Mankell, except I haven’t read any of Philip Kerr’s children’s books. It ranked low on the relevance scale, though as I took my malaria tablets one morning, I enjoyed the moment’s connection to the book’s maguffin, a cure for malaria which was to be found at monstrous cost.
It turns out to be a ripping good yarn, in an amusing tough-guy voice; its incidents and conspiracy theories are plausible; and its endnote provides quite a bit of information on the sources on post-war Germany and Austria where it is set. Of course, Kerr has the advantage over Mankell of a setting nearly 60 years in the past, which is well documented and much storied, and in which he has already set a number of novels. Still … we didn’t have any qualms about passing this one on.
Michelle De Kretser writes a pretty damn good sentence, and a pretty damn good yarn. Our copy of The Hamilton Case is a hardcover, so not designed for ease of packing, and neither Penny nor I had read anything by this author. We must have thought its setting made it relevant. And indeed, Ceylonese complexities did resonate with our experiences in the land of the former British Raj. The resonances weren’t always comfortable. I noted down a couple of neat observations:
There is an old instinct, at work in bordellos and the relations of East and West, to convert the unbearable into the picturesque. It enables a sordid existence to be endured, on one side, and witnessed, on the other, with something like equanimity
and
The coloniser returns as a tourist, you see. And he is mad for difference. That is the luxury commodity we now supply, as we once kept him in cinnamon and sapphires.
On the train from Delhi to Agra we got chatting with an Indian couple from Pune who were also sightseeing. In a wide-ranging conversation, I asked if they would recommend any books about India by Indians. They mentioned Everybody Loves a Good Drought. The first time I got to a bookshop was in Pushkar in the last couple of days of our trip, and sure enough, there it was, along with just about every other book by an Indian or about india that I have ever read. I read it on the plane home, and haven’t quite finished it. The subtitle says it all: ‘Stories from India’s Poorest Districts’.
It’s wonderful, powerful journalism: P Sainath spent some years travelling around talking to the poorest of the poor and writing articles for The Times of India. This is a collection of the articles linked by short generalising essays. It gives faces and voices to the poor, and it’s unremitting. Nothing picturesque or ‘different’ here.
Tohby’s collection of cartoons from the weekend magazines of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age was on the hall table on our return, a very welcome gift. I was still making frequent visits to the toilet, and this book made the experience much less unpleasant. I include it here, because it was part of the India experience to come home to something so very Sydney: warm, witty, elliptic, muted, spiritual and sometimes laugh-out-loud. I particularly liked the image of a search and rescue worker who, when asked where he’s going, says, ‘I’m going to India to find myself.’
Yesterday afternoon Penny and I were walking the dog when we met Arthur coming the other way. Arthur lives three doors down from us. He’s in his early 90s and dealing with encroaching dementia and increasing frailty, but regularly walks to the park and back. When you encounter him on one of these walks he will make conversation from a small supply of stock phrases — about the weather, how lovely the park is, and not a lot else. Yesterday, his mode of progress along the footpath made me fear for his safety: he was tottering, as if the only thing that stopped him from falling forward with each step was act of putting out a foot for the next step. We stopped to say hello, and he put both hands on Penny’s shoulders, leaning in close to her. She asked if he needed help to get home, but he pooh-poohed the idea, even while prolonging the contact for the purpose, it seemed to me, of catching his breath and keeping his balance. After a little while, he asked, ‘Do I know you?’ As on other occasions when he’s asked that, Penny explained where we lived, referring to one of the households that separates our houses. ‘Oh,’ he said, clearly unable to make any sense of the names she’d given him — one of whom regularly cooks meals for him and generally performs mitzvahs around him.
In his late 70s and 80s, Arthur sweated for years over an overgrown rockface beside the street near what is now the light rail stop. Without permission, vested interest, or recompense, he transformed an eyesore into an attractive patch of lawn and garden. There’s now a small plaque acknowledging his contribution to the community.
But his contribution to the broader community is more significant than that. I think the first conversation I had with him was roughly 20 years ago, when he asked if one of my sons would pose for him: he was doing a painting of nineteenth century Sydney that was to feature a young boy in knickerbockers, and he needed a model to pose with trousers tucked into socks. We agreed, though the model himself was just a bit reluctant about it: knickerbockers are not cool. That’s the only time I’ve been inside Arthur’s house: he had a number of his own paintings on the walls, and the style was oddly, comfortably familiar. It turned out that he had been, in the 1950s and 60s, the main illustrator for The Australian Women’s Weekly: in those years, the AWW published short stories and historical features, and as often as not it was Arthur who provided the pictorial elements. He also illustrated a number of children’sbooks then and into the 90s. I googled him — “Arthur Boothroyd” minus everything that brings up a British audiologist of the same name — and discovered only a handful of references: the most common is to the booklet published to mark the opening of the Sydney Opera House, which he illustrated.
It’s not that Arthur is forgotten, or that he is without honour among the confraternity of illustrators. I mentioned him to a children’s illustrator the other day, just his first name, and she said, ‘Do you mean Arthur Boothroyd? I admired his work so much when I was starting out. He was what I wanted to be!’ He is known and loved by long-term Annandale dwellers. More than one person in our block cooks meals for him. But of all the people, both children and adults, whose visual imagining of Australian landscapes and histories were profoundly influenced by his Women’s Weekly work and his children’s books, how many have even heard of him? A select few artists become household names and get headlines when a work is sold for a million dollars. The great majority fade away, and their work too fades. I think the least we can do is let them lean on us in the street to keep their balance and regain their breath.
[Originally published in May 2007 in my now defunct earlier blog, Family Life. I’ve retrieved it because a friend was looking for information on Jeff Sparrow’s book.]
Heat was, as always, a solid read. And as always it’s a bit of a puzzle how the title was arrived at: in this case it’s a phrase from one of the stories, with no obvious overarching thematic relevance. But it doesn’t matter. Even if there is no theme that makes the book hang together, the pieces in this issue, as in others, are free to resonate with, echo and comment on one another, so that the whole is pleasingly more than the accretion of its parts — and I did read and enjoy this issue cover to cover.
Beverley Farmer visits her former husband’s village in Greece in ‘The House on Rebirth Street’ (dropping a few too many untranslated Greek words for my comfort); Greece brings some respite to the heroine of Stephen Edgar‘s pseudo ghost story in verse, ‘The Deppites’. There are a number of nostalgic visits to family homes, and frequent references to migration.
Nostalgia for religious belief bubbles to the surface in a number of pieces. Gillian Mears is visited by the rumtitum rhythms of Edward Lear’s ‘Pelican Chorus‘ as she’s wheeled in, near death, to the operating theatre; Felicity Plunkett‘s wonderful sequence of poems ‘The Negative Cutter: An Introduction to Editing’, also deals with surgery, playing with a cinematic metaphor; Mark Rappaport, documentary film maker, has fun riffing on his connections to Catherine Deneuve, as fan and appalling collaborator. I love all this.
When I edited a literary magazine not so very long ago, it was regularly proposed to us that each issue should be organised around a Theme. Just as regularly, I resisted the proposal, as it seemed to me that it was based in a misunderstanding of what kind of creature a literary magazine is. My pleasure in Heat confirms me in my belief. Instead of corseting, regimentation, control, there is a sense of organic relationship, of many minds independently but harmoniously making story, or seeking truth, or singing, or doing whatever it is that literature does.
In his introduction to Communism: A Love Story, Jeff Sparrow writes:
Communism provided an alternative. It was, in many ways, the alternative, the most important indicator that society could be remade. Between 1917 and 1989, its star shone bright and its star shone dim, but its continuing sparkle in the political firmament allowed millions to believe in a world beyond the free market. Even those who despised communism felt that while it existed, change – whether they wanted it or not – was a possibility.
Today, that feeling is gone.
The book is a biography of Guido Baracchi, a well-heeled, literate bohemian and committed Marxist/Communist who lived from 1887 to 1975, described by Stuart Macintyre as ‘the knight errant of Australian communism’. He’s a terrific subject for biography: he worked for the cause in Weimar Germany and the 1930s Soviet Union; he had intense relationships with a number of poets and playwrights (Lesbia Harford, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Betty Roland), each of whose accounts this biography has drawn on; he was widely read and wrote a lot himself, also supplying a wealth of material to his biographer.
I was telling some friends about the book, and one woman was prompted to talk of her youthful romance with a son of a leading Communist family: when they were about to go out on a date, he would say, ‘Let’s stay home tonight – the old coms are coming around and there’ll be lots of tales.’ I suspect Jeff Sparrow had a background something like that, because while this book meticulously cites its written sources (discreetly, up the back, not interfering with the flow of the narrative), and doesn’t hang back from quoting T S Eliot and James Joyce to good effect, it’s also bursting at the seams with ‘tales’, with the lore of Australian Communism: clever ploys, bastardry, romance, betrayal, nobility (like Guido’s wife Neura’s principled reaction to the news that he had taken up with another woman, from which she seems never to have wavered), tragedy (which is too pallid a word for what Stalin and Stalinism did to the hopes of the world). You can almost hear the stories being told with suitable embellishment at a smoke-wreathed kitchen table far into the night.
As the story unfolds, what today is called the mainstream media is relegated to commenting from the sidelines: for example, during the travails of the tiny Australian Marxist movement of the early 20s, bitterly divided within itself, devoting most of its energies to self-education, and discouraged at the prospect of ever being effective, we learn that Prime Minister Bruce gets headlines by accusing the Labor Party of pandering to Bolshevism, and succeeds at a stroke ‘in elevating communism into a public issue in a way that the communists themselves found impossible’. Sadly, the MSM version has become received wisdom, and a whole dimension of our history has been largely forgotten. Those who deplore ‘black-armband history’ would no doubt equally deplore this, perhaps as ‘red-tie history’. I can’t recommend it enough – for that worthy reason, but also because it is a ripping good read, another example of history written with the verve and imaginative force that some think is the exclusive domain of the novel.
An extra pleasure of the book for me was encountering a number of people I have actually met: Betty Roland, the Currency Methuen edition of whose play The Touch of Silk I edited in 1974; Eric Aarons, ‘the young branch secretary’ who banned Guido from lecturing in 1939, whom I met as a gentle old man, a sculptor and caretaker of a workshop site (and whose own memoir What’s Left sits on my bookshelf unread); Nick Origlass, Trotskyist, who seems to have used the long boring speech as a weapon just as consistently in youth as in age; Bob Gould, shambolic bookshop proprietor, who appears here as a fiery youth; a friend’s mother gets a guernsey as one of two students who defied pressure to reject Guido’s teaching in 1939. And a final personal note: one of my dearest friends and teachers, a US communist in the 30s and 40s, still preserved his hatred for Trotskyism intact 40 years after leaving the party; I wonder what he would make of Jeff Sparrow’s implied contention that it was the Trotskyists who kept the flame of communism burning clearest during Stalin’s era.
Rotters and Squatters is the third in the Fair Dinkum Histories series, and takes the story of the Australian colonies from 1820 to 1850. I’ve already raved about this series. Consider it raved about again. They’re children’s books, but only a bizarre age-based separatist mentality would prevent an adult from enjoying them. Maybe you need an appreciation of juvenile humour to enjoy the deliberately appalling puns in some of Peter Sheehan’s cartoon illustrations, but this book communicates without condescension or chalk-dust or scatology, and strikes a wholly attractive balance between the general and the particular, the comic and the very serious, the personal and the (discreet cough) political.
Like the previous books in the series, it doesn’t attempt sanitised ‘balance’: no doubt it will irk the haters of black-armband or red-tie history. I reckon the series, and this book as part of it, makes a significant contribution to historical writing about Australia, not least by being a quick read with an occasional laugh-out-loud moment. One of several idiosyncratic reasons for my enjoying it is that its short Recommended Reading list includes just one book by an explorer: Edward John Eyre’s Journals of Expeditions of Discovery, the subject of my aborted MA thesis in the 1970s, which in my opinion richly deserves its recommendation here. (If my thesis supervisor – you know who you are! – is still alive and reads this, I’d like my copy back, please).
After a break, I went back to the Frank O’Hara. I still don’t think it’s my cup of tea, but I decided to read the poems as play – instead of puzzling over what he means by an obscurity, I’ll just take it that it’s there because it’s what popped into his head and sounded cool – or in some way captured the emotion of the moment. And I decided not to worry about his name-dropping and hi-falutin’ allusions. In other words, I stopped trying to understand what was going on and just let it flow. No doubt I missed a lot – because of his hurling words at the page like Jackson Pollock creating a painting, and because of the references and allusions that went past me – but I also enjoyed a lot. There are some outright reader-friendly bits like this piece of New-York patriotism from ‘Meditations in an Emergency’:
I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
I gather he’s as hip as ever: people even use phrases from his poems as novel titles.
I read the Pitcairn book in preparation for an editing job (which seems, alas, to have fallen by the wayside – in Pitkern, it es ay los’ bawl). Susanne Chauvel Carlsson is the daughter of Charles and Elsa Chauvel. Her interest in Pitcairn Island grew from her parents’ relationship with the island, beginning with their 1932 visit to film parts of In the Wake of the Bounty. The book is a mix of fascinating potted history, family lore, personal reminiscence and observation, and travel log.
People who read the newspapers more carefully than I do, and that’s probably most people, may already know a lot of the Pitcairn story, but even if I’m coming in late, I’m compelled to say the story is riveting. Pitcairn was settled in 1790 by a party of Bounty mutineers led by Fletcher Christian and accompanied by a number of Polynesians: nine mutineers, six Tahitian men, nine Polynesian women (all but one of them from Tahiti) and one baby girl. The first decade was rough, with quite a bit of drunken rioting and mayhem (ears bitten off and so on), murder, a suspicious suicide. After a failed escape attempt, some of the women murdered the remaining Tahitian men. By 1800 the population comprised one man, the mutineer Aleck Smith (who later changed his name to John Adams); ten women (I don’t know where the extra one came from – the book is plagued with such inconsistencies ); and about 23 children. It was another eight years before the Pitcairners had any contact with the outside world, and isolation has been a major factor in the Island’s cultural, economic, linguistic and political development ever since.
It’s a story that reads like a lost-in-space fiction: the language developed as a mixture of rough English and Tahitian; the religion grew from the one semi-literate man’s determination to read and then communicate to the women and children what he found in the Bounty‘s bible. Susanne Carlsson makes no bones about having fallen in love with the place and the people – it’s one of those unfathomable complexities that the object of her affection has also been the site of a history of sexual assault and of sanctioned sexual practices that in most other places would be condemned as paedophilia.
All that news was bad enough already. It becomes much worse when you’ve read accounts of these people playing a cheerfully innovative version of cricket (you have to innovate when your total population is about 50), sharing out Christmas presents in the town square, praying in their Seventh-day Adventist chapel, rowing longboats out to meet the still infrequent visiting ship. I imagine we’ll never know whether the evidently widespread sexual abuse has been there from the beginning or whether it is a symptom of the recent breakdown of the stern religious glue that held the community together.
Oh, and this book had an excellent addition to the Little Known Facts file: in 1838, when the Pitcairners persuaded a visiting Royal Navy ship’s captain ‘to draw up a constitution and code of laws suitable to their needs’, Pitcairn became the first place where women had the right to vote, 46 years ahead of South Australia.
Baby Boomer Reminiscence Alert. Skip to the end if BBRs drive you nuts.
(OK, they’ve gone, but I’ll assume I’m not talking only to myself.) Back in the early 70s there were a lot of poetry readings in Sydney: there were Moratorium readings, Balmain readings, Sydney University Great Hall readings; at the 1972 Aquarius Festival in Canberra, the year before the much more famous Nimbin Aquarius Festival, there were a number of serious group poetry readings. I was a keen poetry-goer in those days. There were dramatic moments: Roland Robinson once shouted something like ‘This is muck!’ during a Chris Wallace Crabbe poem that began ‘To f**k is to move through grooves of time’. The dignified cadences of A D Hope shared the stage with the precision of Dave Malouf, the raffishness of Bob Adamson, the heady intellectualism of Martin Johnston, the drugged waifishness of Michael Dransfield, the hypnotic incantations of Les A. Murray … and so on. If I remember correctly, John Tranter was a regular at these events, but for some reason I’ve never really got his poems: back then, and on my occasional attempts to read him since, I found them intriguing but it felt as if they existed in a thicket of references and allusions and associations that were outside my experience. I thought of him as a poet’s poet.
Afflicted as I am with an indefensible, irrational and unfillable greed to know and read everything, I used one of my 60th birthday vouchers to buy Urban Myths, which includes selections from his previous books dating back to 2000. I’m now about a third of the way through it. Those early poems are still intriguing but almost completely opaque. It’s not just the allusiveness; in some way that’s hard to articulate, I can’t hear a human voice in the poems, even one I don’t understand. I’m pleased to report that we’re getting on much better by page 80: I’ve laughed, I’ve been close to tears, I’ve reread some poems a number of times until I feel I understand them, because they promised to repay the effort. The book won the NSW Premiers Literary Award for poetry a couple of nights ago. John read the poem that opens the book, ‘After Hölderlin’, and I couldn’t remember what my problem was. That poem is dated 2002 in Urban Myths, so I’m expecting the best as I read on.
The Sydney Writers Festival is under way. I kicked off my personal festival yesterday with a workshop led by Patti Miller. The workshop was billed as ‘Memoir – Random Provocations’, which anyone who had read Patti’s book would have recognised as incorporating the title of her chapter on the personal essay. The rest of us signed on for what we thought was three hours looking at approaches to memoir. Heigh ho! It was an excellent three hours regardless, and probably useful. Then last night I went to a screening of Ten Canoes preceded by a conversation between Julianne Schultz and Rolf de Heer, for which the microphones were turned up far too loud for my comfort (I really must post about my tinnitus and booming ears some time). The conversation was interesting, if a little gossipy, and the film was even more wonderful the second time around.
This evening, though, was the real start of my festival. The great court of the Art Gallery of New South Wales was overrun once more by literary types, some who’ve had their likenesses on the walls, but mostly humble key-tappers and pen-wielders. I was at a table with, among others, my friend Madam Misrule, children’s literature activist Bernard Cohen, academic John Stephens, editor-writer-politician-parent Peter Coleman and a charming woman who lives in my street and is often walking her dog when I am walking mine – this was the first time we’ve exchanged names and discovered we have friends and interests in common. The meal was excellent, though I didn’t see anything that would have thrilled a vegetarian. There’s something wonderful about a conga line of waiters weaving between sculptures and tables with plates of beautifully arranged meat and what looked like a dainty caponata.
But on to the business of the evening. Geoffrey Atherden’s address and the award citations are, or soon will be, up on the Ministry for the Arts web site [links all dead in 2020]. I recently bought a microphone for my iPod, and took it for a trial run tonight, so I can give you verbatim bits of the acceptance speeches. But first, I can tell you, nerdishly perhaps, some of the differences between Geoffrey Atherden’s excellent speech as written and as spoken. He cut out about a third of it. In fact he cut out the parts where he argued his case against User Generated Content: someone, talking to me recently about the User Generated Content business model, said that mindless consumerism is being replaced by mindless producerism, and Geoffrey makes a similar argument. He also left out interesting reflections on the Free Trade Agreement, and on the argument that ‘the exciting new multi media, multi platform, new age of digital technology’ will increase the demand for good writing. Presumably these omissions were in order to save time. More interesting than the omissions was an insertion right at the end. Where the written speech, having lamented the current lack of opportunity for young writers in Australia, ends by inviting us to imagine ‘if we had an environment of artistic and cultural activity here that was so stimulating that all those talented young Australians would want to come back,’ and says, with something approaching a non sequitur:
You see, I’m only pretending to be gloomy. Deep down, I’m still hanging on to a last, thin shred of optimism.
The address as spoken ended like this:
… all those young Australians would come flooding back. I seem to remember it happened once before. I seem to remember it happened just after a federal election. Indeed, I’m only pretending to be gloomy.
Gough Whitlam, to whose election in 1972 he was of course referring, was in the room. On the tape I hear myself saying, ‘Stay gloomy, Geoffrey, stay gloomy. It’s not going to happen.’ I hope he’s a better prophet than I am. Given the company I was keeping, I was a little embarrassed when the premier later seized on Geoffrey’s remarks to be fairly crudely party political.
One other nice moment to do with the opening address. As a warm-up remark, Geoffrey said that Maggie Beare in Mother and Son was not based on his mother, and Geoff Morel’s political wheeler-dealer in Grass Roots was not based on Frank Sartor, Minister for the Arts and presenter of all but the final award. In thanking Geoffrey for his address, Frank said, in a welcome departure from his generally ill-at-ease manner, ‘You may not have known this, but Geoff Morel followed me around for two days before he started filming Grass Roots.’
I can’t offer an opinion on any of the awards, because I’ve read so few of the works on the shortlist, but I can tell you a little of what happened.
The first award, the NSW Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Medallion, went to John Nieuwenhuizen, who has translated from Dutch and Flemish. ‘I’m actually invisible,’ he said. ‘At least that’s what a review of one of my books said, and the judges for this prize agreed. This is of course a huge compliment for a translator. But here I am.’ He also accepted the award as a validation of writing for children – many of the books he has translated have been for children, and this award counterbalances the times he has been asked when he was going to move on to ‘real’ books.
The UTS Award for New Writing was won by Tara June Winch for Swallow the Air. With lovely self deprecation, she said that she’d spent the week practising walking up and down in high heels instead of writing a speech. She made it to the dais and back without stumbling.
Gideon Haigh won the Gleebooks Prize for Critical writing for Asbestos House: the secret history of James Hardie Industries (Scribe). ‘Some books you want to write. Some books just have to be written. This was one of the latter. I couldn’t have turned it down and still considered myself a proper journalist.’
Community Relations Commission Award was won by Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (Hachette Livre Australia), a wordless graphic novel. A friend told me later that she’d nearly hit someone in the ladies’ who was mouthing off about how wrong it was to give a literary award to something that didn’t use words. Well, it’s a paradox I suppose, but it’s a marvellous book, and as Shaun said in his acceptance speech, it’s being read by people who don’t normally read graphic novels, or anything at all – older migrants, for whom the book was really written. I’d cheerfully predicted that this book would win three awards. It won two: it also won the Book of the Year Award. Ms Misrule leapt to her feet and cheered. ‘I love it when one of ours wins,’ she said, encapsulating the esprit de corps that prevails in the children’s literature mob at events like this.
The Scriptwriting Award went to Tony Ayres for the script of The Home Song Stories, a movie we haven’t seen yet. He explained that the story had started out as a memoir but turned into a film script because that’s what he knew how to do.
The Play Award was won by Tommy Murphy for Holding the Man. Impeccably dressed in suit and tie, he told of nervously reading his initial list of ideas for the play to his director: ‘This play might open on the moon. Perhaps the Grim Reaper will appear at some point. And when the character John gets sick he will become a puppet.’ He talked of the importance of collaboration. And he did a gracious thing, which you’ll understand better if you bear in mind that in the play the family of the dying John treat his lover Tim, devastatingly, as having no valid place at his bedside. Tommy, in contrast, thanked his family for teaching the seventh of eight children to embrace sharing, and said his family were represented in the hall by his boyfriend Dane. He went on with some high romance: ‘You can’t win a prize for a love story unless you love someone as deeply as I love Dane.’ He also paid tribute to Tim Conigrave, author of the memoir the play was based on: ‘Tim has taught me that writing is sharing too much. There’s no avoiding that, and I embrace it.’
The Patricia Wrightson Prize went to Narelle Oliver, a Queenslander, for Home (Omnibus), a picture book about peregrine falcons who built a nest high up in a building in Brisbane. She thanked, among many others, the falcons Freda and Frodo: ‘They are probably bedding down right now on their nest of stones upon which I did lie with my camera to capture their home a couple of years ago. I saw my city afresh, in a new and exciting way, through the eyes of falcons, and I hope to share that with children and adults in the book.’
The Ethel Turner Prize for young people’s literature was won by Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Red Shoe (Allen & Unwin). Ursula had had a dog accident in the morning, resulting in a broken wrist and her absence from the dinner. Her father, Peter Colemen, read her acceptance speech. ‘You may well ask what on earth does a six year old girl [the book’s heroine Matilda] make of something as weighty as the Petrov affair [A Soviet defection that made headlines in the 1950s]. What indeed do six year old children make of the current images of public fear – the Twin Towers, Saddam Hussein, global warming? Well, in reply, as the late Ted Hughes has observed, just remember, your first six years shape everything.’
John Tranter won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry with Urban Myths: 210 Poems (UQP). He read a poem (which someone objected to as inappropriate, but I appreciated: it was ‘After Holderlin’, and John’s brief explanatory notes were illuminating). He then contributed to the political theme of the evening by thanking ‘the working men and women of New South Wales who elected this generous government and whose tax dollars went to make up this wonderful cheque’.
The Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction was won by Robert Hughes’s Things I Didn’t Know: a Memoir (Random House Australia). Bob wasn’t there but his acceptance speech was read by his publisher. His first remark – ‘The last time I won any sort of prize in Australia was a dismaying number of years ago: I won it for building a control line model aeroplane and flying it in Centennial Park’ – enraged one of my dinner companions: ‘That man is incapable of telling the truth. Everything he says is a lie.’ Be that as it may, the acceptance speech went on to a gracious tribute to Douglas Stewart, his nature poetry and his verse drama, in particular The Fire on the Snow, ‘much of which I still find I know by heart’.
Probably the most prestigious prize apart from book of the year, the Christina Stead Prize for fiction, went to Peter Carey for Theft: A Love Story (Random House Australia), another New Yorker, whose speech was read by the same publisher. After some nicely-turned complaints about a back injury and dental problems, this speech too paid tribute to the person who gave the prize its name. Christina Stead spent 46 years away from Australia; Peter Carey has been away for 16:
I can now understand Christina Stead as one part of that endless stream of Australian travellers most of whom come back in a year or two – most, but not all. Hundreds and thousands of us have become waylaid, up some foreign creek, some foreign road among people who cannot imagine who we are, or that our dreams each night are of Australian landscapes with those smooth, lovely trunks and the vast khaki canopy tossing in the wind showing the silver undersides of its fragrant leaves. I probably don’t need to say this to anyone who has read my work … but I am not only pleased that Theft has been read with pleasure and intelligence by its first true readers, people who do not need a footnote to know what a Blue Heeler is; but also deeply moved that it is the Christina Stead award I am receiving. The award this year is for Theft, but every year it makes us honour a brave artist who swam against the current, worked away from home for 46 years, and bequeathed us novels that are among the greatest works of Australian literature.
Special Award winner was Gerald Murnane. On the tape, when Frank Sartor mispronounces the name of the journal and enduring feature of Australia’s literary landscape Meanjin as ‘Minnajin’, it sounds as if the whole assembly murmurs in amazed disapproval. Frank hesitates, then realises that whatever he’s done wrong can’t be mended and ploughs on. Mr Murnane gave a curmudgeonly speech about receiving the award late in his career.
Shaun Tan was called back to the podium, this time to shake hands with the Premier, Morris Iemma (who seems to be winning people over, to the extent that I heard him referred to as Morris Yummy). One of the great things about the Book of the Year prize is that the recipient doesn’t necessarily know about it in advance, so we get some unprepared remarks. After muttering that there must have been a mistake and thanking the people he’d forgotten in his first trip up front, Shaun talked about his long campaign to have picture books recognised as being for adults as well as children: ‘Part of my success with this book may have been children getting their parents to read it. I’ve got this huge support base among children.’ He thanked independent booksellers for supporting the book, ‘and seeing its inability to be categorised as a blessing rather than a curse’.
And it was all over bar the tart, the chocolates and the schmoozing.
Crotchety note added later: The Sydney Morning Herald‘s report, headlined ‘Big Names Take Book Awards’, doesn’t even mention the Book of the Year or the Special Award, possibly because the sub-editor didn’t deem Shaun Tan or Gerard Murnane to be Big Enough Names, or because the money is the story, and the combined monetary value of Shaun’s two prizes amounts to $17 000 and Gerard raked in a measly $5000, whereas the Big Names each won $20 000. But then John Tranter and Ursula Dubosarsky each got a guernsey – perhaps as token poet and children’s writer, or to flesh out the subtext of resentment of expatriates by indicating that, unlike the judges, the Herald knows about non-expatriate talent. It’s a mystery.
I started writing notes for my end-of-month entry about books I’ll have read, but realised that one book stirred me to such spleen that it needed an entry all to itself. This is not a review, so I’m not going to even name the novel: my aim is to get the thing out of my system rather than to protect you from it (though I’m leaving in enough clues for you to figure it out). Since it has received high praise in some quarters, you may well enjoy it. But here goes anyhow.
It’s probably a commonplace among Cultural Studies cognoscenti that different texts are meant to be read in different ways: the kind of attention you bring to a novel by Jane Austen is different from the way you take in information from an advertisement on the back of a bus in traffic. If you bring to either of them the kind of attention that is appropriate for the other, you’re likely to get cranky one way or another. The advertisement will insult your intelligence; Jane will go on about not very much. I met this idea in Meaghan Morris’s excellent and challenging Too Soon Too Late, and it came in handy when I was trying to understand the success of the book I’ve just finished reading. Read with anything like close attention, the book is atrocious. Hardly a page goes by without the kind of error that an attentive copy editor would surely have picked up, let alone an author who cared about detail. My favourite example isn’t printable here because I aspire to a PG rating. Suffice to say there’s a cleft in a most unusual place, and the word ‘soul’ is used twice in a sentence along with three anatomical words that are definitely not PG. But take these little gems:
The Doll followed a small monsoon of Asian tourists pouring into the hotel’s lobby, the eye of their storm a woman with a long stick topped with a plastic sunflower.
If you don’t object to a pouring monsoon with an eye, presumably borrowed from a cyclone, then how about this:
Wilder said nothing. Wilder knew nothing drove him madder than saying nothing. She changed the topic, knowing that made him angrier still.
Of course anyone can make mistakes like this. But they’re not supposed to get into print, at least not in books that are touted as being by internationally prestigious novelists, and certainly not with the frequency they occur here. And I’m not counting the occasional genteelly aspiring ‘and she’ where ‘and her’ would be correct.
Then there are things that don’t lend themselves easily to quotation. The main character is set up with a verbal habit of calling people ‘my friend’, a habit which disappears altogether until it is suddenly brought back into play about 200 pages later. There’s a chapter early on where a male character broods on the parlous state of his marriage (if you can get past the narrator’s clumsiness enough to register this sort of thing as brooding: ‘The sex was absurd, pointless; an affirmation only of what they didn’t have – the affection, tenderness, hope and dreams that had once been theirs’) and on how deeply he loves his sons – but the sons don’t even get names, and although the chapter starts with him standing in the doorway of his youngest son’s bedroom, we discover four pages later that there are only two of them. It’s for all the world as if the writer didn’t know at the start of the chapter how many sons there were, made up his mind after four pages, and didn’t care enough to go back and make that ‘youngest’ a ‘younger’. I don’t think this is just me being a pedant: it’s as if no one bothered to make the world or characters of the book convincing, as if the actual imagining of the story is left to the reader.
It occurred to me that I’d read this kind of writing before. This book has been compared to Peter Corris‘s Cliff Hardy books – unfavourably by Germaine Greer, bless her old-fashioned literary sensibility, favourably by others. Wrong comparison! This book strives to emulate, not the taut, hard-boiled prose and pose of Corris (though the statement on the first page that ‘the innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love’ is probably best read as a gesture towards a tough-guy voice), but that paradigm of successful writing of our time, The Da V i n c i Code (spacing to avoid giving it even more Google-juice). The narrator here throws words at his idea in the same way Dan Brown does there, evidently hoping that enough of them will stick to get the general effect he’s after. Back to the idea I picked up from Meaghan Morris: the book isn’t meant to be read carefully with attention to the words. There’s no room here for the pleasures of the text. It’s meant to be skimmed: the reader isn’t meant to care about the words on the page, but to take in enough of them to allow a satisfactory story to be extracted. So syntax doesn’t matter, nor do precise meanings. A first draft will do. I’m not saying that the book is written without research or passion, or even without ambition to move its readers, just that attention to detail isn’t considered necessary: there are enough rude words for spice and an accurate enough presentation of a corrupt society, especially a corrupt press, to satisfy the like-minded. There’s a scene in which the provisions of Australia’s recent anti-terrorism laws are spelled out laboriously. As one of my sons said, ‘It’s badly written, but it’s got some good ideas.’
None of this would matter so much. I mean, when you find awful writing in a novel by Lynda La Plante, or Steven Bochco, you probably shrug like me and go on enjoying their television offerings. But the publicity machine accompanying this book wants it both ways. On the one hand, there’s a note on the back cover telling me where I can download reading group notes, and the prelim pages inform me the author is regarded ‘internationally as one of Australia’s pre-eminent novelists’. On the other hand there’s a web site featuring a ‘trailer’ with close-ups of large breasts and fluorescent knickers bumping and grinding away, and a high-adrenaline slogan that actually doesn’t reflect the content of the book at all. No doubt there will be a movie. Maybe it will be good. Meanwhile the passionate heart of the book is ostensibly a denunciation of lazy, venal or corrupt public discourse in which people’s reputations and even lives are shredded in the service of the greedy, the ambitious or the politically expedient, while the majority of people acquiesce out of laziness, gullibility or unreflective cynicism. The book, in its Dan-Brownishness and its marketing hooha, is part of the thing it pretends to denounce.
It’s published by the company who publish Tim Winton. I imagine that makes them serious publishers. (And either Tim Winton is a bloody good reviser of his own drafts or they treat his work with less haste and more respect than this.) No wonder there are people who say they don’t like Australian fiction. I did read to the last page (a gracious though possibly defensive note on sources), and now I need to reclaim my mind. If I didn’t have work to do I’d get out the video of the excellent German film it claims to have stolen its plot from.
Years ago, when he was in his teens, Alex explained why he wouldn’t read Terry Pratchett: ‘If I’m going to make the effort to read a book, it needs to be about something important.’ He made sense, but I’ve never felt that way myself, not in the slightest – until I picked up a detective story at the start of this month and couldn’t see the point. After books on climate change, Arab-Israeli politics, the nature of history, etcetera, I wanted something that was either very meaty or no effort at all.
I found this Lily Brett book on my friend Judy’s shelves – a collection of short pieces, each one exactly three pages long, and staying resolutely at the level of observation and wry, reflexive commentary. (Unsurprisingly, mentioned nowhere in the book itself but prominent in its description on Lily Brett’s web site, the 52 pieces were commissioned as weekly columns for a newspaper, Die Zeit – a provenance which also explains the frequent German references.) Perfect, elegantly insubstantial bedtime reading, which morphed into perfect read-aloud in the car on the drive from Melbourne to Sydney when my reading of Shlomo Ben-Ami’s syntactically challenging sentences threatened to send driver my to sleep by the time we’d reached 1967 (roughly a third of the way through). We arrived home safely and in buoyant spirits ten minutes after the end of Lily’s last piece.
Once home, I didn’t immediately pick up Scars of War as a solitary read. I took a break, and knocked over Simon Leys’ book on the Batavia in a couple of days. He starts out saying he had planned to write on the subject for a long time, but given up when he read Mike Dash’s Batavia’s Graveyard, a book he recommends. I don’t think I’m up to the long book, and might not have read this one had I not received it as a freebie when I re-subscribed to the excellent The Monthly. But it’s a fascinating subject: a hideous reign of terror on a coral atoll off the coast of New Holland in the mid 17th century. I was impressed to find that the murderous teenage boy who was part of the events comes across as just as horrifying in this brief account as he does in Gary Crew’s young-adult novel, Strange Objects. The impression created by the novel that it is based in something real is borne out by this book. Simon Leys’ Batavia isn’t really book-length, and the volume is filled out with another essay, this time an account of the author’s tuna-fishing trip on a sailing boat in 1958.
After that bracing dip into two very different seas, I was about to return to the dryness of war and peace in Israel, when Heat 12 arrived in the post. It turned out to be right on theme – I’ve written a separate post.
Then I got back to Shlomo Ben-Ami‘s book. The author is a self-described Zionist of the Left, a one-time member of the Knesset and chief negotiator in Israeli–Palestinian negotiations, an activist for peace, and clearly a passionate historian. The book is a superb history of the diplomatic, political and military tactics and strategies, coups and blunders in the Middle East. Its emphasis is on the negotiations, ‘the peace process’; wars and violence feature only as they impact on the politics. The Munich Olympics, for instance, don’t rate a mention, and one searches in vain for a detailed account of any of the many violent episodes. As a know-next-to-nothing reader, I would have loved an easy-reference timeline up the back, and perhaps a glossary giving key dates, events and outcomes for each salient episode. In the absence of such kindnesses, I felt my ignorance acutely at times, but if that minor discomfort was the price of admission, the show was well worth it.
There are wonderfully sharp portraits of the main players, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzak Rabin, Yasser Arafat – not the kind that seizes on colourful details but rather evokes the characters as complex human beings and political operators: no mention at all of Dayan’s eye patch, but a brusque sketch of him as a man who inspired many people but was completely incapable of being close to anyone, a fierce Zionist who despised Judaism and had a kind of pagan belief system. The pages on Arafat are devastatingly brilliant (I wouldn’t have a clue if they’re accurate, but they explain a lot).
The early chapters delineate the complex interplay of imperial aggression and Zionist aspiration that led to the first Jewish settlements, are unflinching in their account of the dispossession and abandonment of the Palestinians, and anatomise the complexities of the politics in the region, including the roles and objectives of the superpowers. As the book comes closer to the present, and the author’s own direct observations and even interventions become part of the story, it might easily have lost its way in the detail of personalities and politicking; instead it becomes absolutely engrossing. Little bits of gossip enliven the narrative – Arafat had such difficulty renouncing terrorism that he also had difficulty pronouncing it: at the Camp David peace talks he three times promised to renounce ‘tourism’.
The book’s real strength is that this is an insider’s view, and the whole story is presented on a human scale – not that the narrative reduces the stakes and complexities to the level of personality; more that it explores the huge dimensions of the persons involved: the myths that sustain them and undermine them, their capacity for generosity and humiliation, their relationships as political leaders with their constituencies, their skills as negotiators …
No doubt this book has its detractors, and it may well have got it wrong on any number of counts. But reading it has put me within cooee of understanding why the Middle East goes on defying attempt after attempt at peace. It has also given me tantalising glimpses of Advanced Negotiation (it’s salted with gems like, ‘The weakness of your rival is a reason to reach an agreement with him, not the trigger to humiliate him further’) and of Leadership With or Without Megalomania. Although its subtitle, ‘The Israeli-Arab Tragedy’, is thoroughly justified by the amount of death and destruction contained in this narrative, by the hubris of some players (mostly Israeli) and the opportunities culpably missed (spectacularly, but not at all exclusively, by Yasser Arafat), it manages all the same to end on a note of cautious but plausible optimism:
The time has finally arrived to assume that the complete satisfaction of the parties’ respective dreams or presumed rights will only lead them both to perdition. Here it is incumbent upon each to devise realistic ways that would heal without opening new wounds, that would dignify their existence as free peoples without putting into jeopardy the selective security and the particular identity of the other. The moment has come for the creative energies of the parties to this most protracted of conflicts to be put, at long last, to work in the service of a durable peace.
