Different attitudes

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to John Biggs’s letter (ABR, June/July 2004) regarding my review of his novel, The Girl in the Golden House (ABR, April 2004). Reading Biggs’s comments on my discussion of his use of English names and idioms, I was reminded just how different our attitudes towards contemporary fiction are. We are obviously writing from different generational perspectives, with quite different expectations of what writing, especially that about ex-British colonies, should be able – or at least attempting – to do. Of course I am aware that Chinese people in Hong Kong have old-fashioned English names and have received aspects of an English education, but it was the way that Biggs wrote about and, simply, continued this colonial tradition that I felt compelled to critique. People in Hong Kong have Cantonese names and traditions as well, but Biggs’s characters lacked complexity and believability in this regard. As I suggested in my review, this was most probably not only a result of Biggs’s own cultural background but, more importantly, of his lack of awareness of some of the wider debates that currently surround the practice of Westerners writing about Asia.

Scholarship and stylishness

Dear Editor,

On the subject of my poem (ABR, March 2004) about William Dobell’s Cypriot, Judith Pugh is no doubt correct about the scholarly facts (ABR, April 2004). At the moment, I am searching the poem for a single fact I got right. The only possible benefit of my blunder is that it might help draw even more attention to one of the greatest paintings in the Australian heritage – a painting which really did, after all, focus on the stylishness of a European male at a time when the stylishness of the Australian male was not yet even a concept. That was my subject: but I agree that scholarship should always set the limits before imagination gets to work.

Clive James, London, UK

Clive James’s Cypriot

Dear Editor,

It was irritating to read Clive James’s poem ‘William Dobell’s Cypriot’ in the Spectator, but surprising in ABR (March 2004). Doesn’t anyone there know that Dobell’s painting The Cypriot was worked up, after Dobell had returned to Sydney in 1940, from sketches made in London? James Gleeson’s William Dobell (Thames & Hudson, 1964) names The Cypriot as Aegus Gabriell Ides, a waiter in a restaurant in Bayswater Road.

Unambiguous rodomontade

Dear Editor,

I have not read Elliot Perlman’s new novel, but I was startled by the bilious tone of Peter Craven’s review (ABR, November 2003). It seems to me that whatever critical flaws the book may have could have been elaborated without applying the blowtorch as intensely and personally as Craven did. If Seven Types of Ambiguity was a polemic, Craven’s rodomontade might have been perfectly appropriate, but I thought that he was unfairly harsh. From my impressions, the book is ambitious and no doubt cost Perlman many buckets of sweat and blood to write. Is it not better to encourage literary ambition than to crush it, even when it, in Craven’s estimation, does not succeed?

Hugh Dillon, Drummoyne, NSW

Ali Ismail Abbas

Dear Editor,

Chris Goddard has written a powerful letter (ABR, August 2003) arguing that the photograph of Ali Ismail Abbas should not have accompanied my essay ‘Only As a Last Resort’ (ABR, May 2003). To tell the truth, I don’t know whether or not he is right. I am writing only to clarify the record. Peter Rose graciously accepted all responsibility for publishing the photograph (ABR, August 2003) and, thereby, all responsibility for whatever criticism its publication provoked. He did, however, consult me about the photograph, and I readily agreed that it should accompany my article, without, I’m now ashamed to say, thinking as much about it as Goodard has shown that I should have.

Judith Wright and Meanjin

Dear Editor,

As generally happens, your note of the recent death of ‘Clem’ Christesen (ABR, August 2003) appears to give him full credit for the early days of Meanjin. Judith Wright is, unfortunately, unable to correct that view of history herself. From what I have been told of those gestational wartime years, her role was no less significant than Christesen’s. Furthermore, she certainly did a great deal (probably most) of the practical work that is essential to sustain such a journal, especially one that was determined to open windows to worlds different from the one represented by the Bulletin. As their contemporary, the Queensland poet Val Vallis, once put it to me, poetry ‘had to have a whiff of eucalyptus about it for the Bulletin’. Certainly, Douglas Stewart, the redoubtable editor of The Red Page, did not relish the new competition, and Vallis recalls being told, with more than a touch of schadenfreude, when work appeared in the fledgling Meanjin: ‘We knocked that back at the “Bully”.’

Santamaria absolved

Dear Editor,

As one who was both active in the Labor Party at the time of The Split and also a Catholic, I agree with almost everything in Heather Nash’s review of The Pope’s Battalions (ABR, August 2003). But there are serious omissions.

The most important one is the reviewer’s neglect of a matter of history that is evident early in the book and that goes to the heart of the cause of The Split. This is the now proven fact that B.A. Santamaria aimed to control the ALP, secretly and from the outside, and to promote legislation through a Labor government in keeping with his own religious/political fantasies. Bemused, if not blinded, by his own enthusiasm and self-righteousness, Santamaria was confident that he would be able to do so. The Pope’s Battalions makes this clear, and provides firm evidence. This is not the first book to do so, but its early chapters also show how these less-than-realistic aims were the outcome of ideological theories of society that Santamaria absorbed from several different sources during his youth. They crystallised in his heart and mind, despite the impracticality of such dreams in the twentieth century, especially in Australia.

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

Ali Ismail Abbas

Dear Editor,

There is a terrible irony in the title of Raimond Gaita’s La Trobe University Essay, ‘Only As a Last Resort’ (ABR, May 2003). His title should surely have been the phrase that guided the choice of accompanying stills. Gaita’s admirable piece contained much to ponder and praise. The Reuters photograph (by Faleh Kheiber) of Ali Ismail Abbas diminished those reflections.

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

Tim Bowden on Denis Warner

Dear Editor,

I write to point out a singularly unfortunate error in Brian McFarlane’s otherwise thoughtful and indeed generous review of my autobiography, Spooling Through: An Irreverent Memoir, in the May edition of ABR. By using the phrase ‘the egregious Denis Warner’, your reviewer has confused the distinguished Australian foreign correspondent and author with Russell Warner, an ABC executive with whom, to put it bluntly, I did not get on, for reasons clearly stated in my memoir. 

Dear Editor,

Kerryn Goldsworthy’s valuable piece on the early years of ABR (‘The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah’, ABR, April 2003), giving details of Australian Book Review under Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton from 1961 to 1973, does not mention what caused its disappearance from 1973 to 1978, when John McLaren and the National Book Council revived it. Perhaps it is time for the explanation to be given.