Archive

The reasons for which anyone finally values a literary work – for its insight into human behaviour, for the place it occupies in some aesthetic hierarchy – lie beyond the control of all but that reader himself. My concern is with the earlier and possibly sub-critical activities of gaining access to the text, making it fully present to the reader, putting him into a position to judge for himself.’ (p.3) This is the purpose of G.A. Wilkes’ Studying Literature, as expressed in the first chapter, ‘Functions of Criticism.’ The book, according to the preface, evolved from material delivered to English I classes at the University of Sydney. Because these students are the intended addressees, Studying Literature is readable; and, in its occasional humorous debunking of The Literary Establishment, and its advice to the student, it is also a valuable handbook for novices in the study of literature.

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These two first novels join the rapidly increasing library of fine and varied fiction being written by Australian women. Pairing them in this review is entirely fortuitous, and it is always possible to construct a comparison between any two books with a little ingenuity. I would want to stress the contrasting ways in which these authors explore very different aspects of female experience. However, at this juncture I am also particularly conscious of the doubtful position a male reviewer takes when he wishes to praise women’s fiction in this way. It is one thing for men imbued with a dash of new consciousness to recognise the positive examination of women’s lives in fiction; it is quite another for them to hold it up to (masculine) judgement. Despite the passage of virtually a generation, I’m uncomfortably aware, as I write this, of some remarks made by Mary Ellmann in Thinking about Women:

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Place has always been an intrinsic element in the detective story from the Paris of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (despite the fact that his knowledge of the city came from an exhibition and not reality) to the London of Holmes to the village of Miss Marple to San Francisco of Hammett. In many cases it is as important a component as the detective character itself, or at least the detective is so entwined in his or her geography as to be impossible to conceive without it. This aspect of the detective novel probably reached if not its penultimate then its most obvious demonstration in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and has continued through the LA detective tradition that Chandler founded (with considerable outside help from Hammett). The liveliness of that tradition together with the fact that Los Angeles is home to Hollywood have made it the most mapped city in public consciousness.

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I have a theory that every second Australian is a closet short story writer. And this is a conservative estimate. According to my theory, the so-called ‘booms’ in the history of the Australian short story in the 1890s and 1950s merely reflected fashions in the book and magazine publishing businesses, not the relentless scratching away in exercise books or thumping of battered typewriters which occupies the waking hours of the determined taleteller and which is, I am convinced, a more popular national pastime than dodging income tax. How else to explain the sheer volume of short stories being published? And these are but the tip of the iceberg – a mere fraction of those that have been and are being written.

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Leonard Mann’s account of his experiences in World War One, Flesh in Armour, has recently been reissued. It may be the case that there are certain experiences that are impossible to write about unless one has personally undergone them. The three great Australian classics of World War One – Flesh in Armour, The Middle Parts of Fortune and When the Blackbirds Sing – all convey an air of total verisimilitude when it comes to describing the conditions of battle. In comparison, even such gifted writers as David Malouf and Roger McDonald convey the impression of faking it when they come to write about war, no matter how much care they take or research they have done.

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The jacket painting on Bruce Beaver’s highly wrought little book of prose poems is Lloyd Rees’ ‘The Coast near Klama’. It’s an elevated view of virgin green and dun coloured headland, the ochres rising through. Sea swirls into an oysterish bay. There is one distant figure looking down on another distant figure in a rock pool below. The sky, as with so many Rees skies, is egg-shelly yellow near the horizon, a glowing compliment to the taste we form and hold of earth.

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As artists get older, they are supposed to mature, and commentators begin to look for the demarcations of their three periods, a nice bequest from Beethoven. One vitiating side effect of this is to misplace freshness in their art. Judging the vital middle period works, and bowing before the sublimity of the late, the critic bestows a nostalgic glance over his shoulder to the early output – ah, what freshness, what morning glory there! It may be true of Beethoven, but the experience of most of us lesser creatures is more often the opposite. We start a bit grey and elderly: only later, after much experience, do we throw off ponderousness, embrace wit and light-spiritedness and appear verdant for the public gaze. I hope Chris Wallace-Crabbe will not object to my including him in this (to me) honourable company: those who write, after thirty years on the job, with twice the élan they had at the beginning.

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In ‘Partying on Parquet’, the story from Vernacular Dreams chosen by Don Anderson for inclusion in Transgressions, the hapless Steve attempts to hold a party for his HSC tutor Penny. The party is split into two small groups: Penny and her ‘uni friends’ Jan and Greg, and Marina and Pavlos, ‘dumb ethnics like himself whom he had met at Greek dancing class’. Naturally everything goes wrong, from the loudness of heels on the parquet floor to the botched lunge at Penny in the kitchen. But this is not just a simple story of humiliation. Steve is depicted at the end standing under the shower moving from resolutions (‘As for Greg and Jan, the only way he would ever be able to get on top of smart arses like them was to beat them at their own game,’) to what might be called ‘shower dreams’: ‘The steam had got so thick, he could hardly see a thing. He stared up at the ceiling. It was hanging there like a mist, a fog, with the light shining through; and it as his for as long as he wanted.’ ... (read more)