Jane Goodall

Don’t be put off by the subtitle. This is not a work driven by some New Age personification of Nature. If you’re looking for a gloss on the one-word title, you might focus instead on the inspired austerity of the cover photograph: Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point, by Ansel Adams. Then again, the book contains no mention of Ansel Adams, or of Glacier Point. During the course of the chapters, many inspiring and extraordinary places are visited, but this is not one of them.

Samuel Johnson had some advice for aspiring writers. ‘Read over your compositions,’ he said, ‘and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’ One imagines the impact of this recommendation on an eighteenth-century student of literature, clutching a page of overblown rhetorical flourishes and faux erudition. Our crimes of vanity in writing are very different now – more likely to take the form of descriptive tours de force of the kind fostered in creative writing classes.

Craig Sherborne’s previous books include two memoirs, Hoi Polloi (2005) and Muck (2007), and an autobiographical novel, The Amateur Science of Love (2011). His second novel, Tree Palace, is an excursion outside the confines of the first-person narrative. First-person narrative does not of course always imply confinement, but in Sherborne’s case the mining of his own life experience has an intensity of focus and closeness of observation that reminds me of Lucian Freud’s painting. He has a way of pulling you into the room with him and making you look at the nakedness of others, holding you there to witness every nuance of exposure, physical and psychological. Sherborne’s fascination with bodily intimacy focuses on a sexual relationship in The Amateur Science of Love, but in the memoirs it arises from contemplation of evolving family resemblances from his youth and early adulthood through to his parents’ old age. They are a family of three, insular and closely interdependent, and the sense of confinement takes on a genetic dimension.

By its title, Tales from the Political Trenches promises reportage from the front line, eyewitness accounts of what really happens in the hidden zones of the political battlefield. The tales told here follow a rollercoaster sequence of political events: the meteoric rise of Kevin Rudd, Maxine McKew’s triumph over ...

When Gore Vidal died a few weeks ago, his publisher issued a statement calling him the last survivor of a postwar crop of American literary giants. ‘It is hard to think of another … who cut as dashing and visible a figure in various public realms,’ said Vidal’s Doubleday editor, Gerald Howard. Less than a week later the obituary columns were taken over by just such another figure – except that Robert Hughes was an Australian. Malcolm Turnbull made a pronouncement on the floor of the Australian parliament: ‘This titan of arts and letters will never leave us.’

What two things do the following people have in common: Samuel Pepys, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Émile Zola, Franz Kafka, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gabriel García Márquez? Answer: they all did office work, and they all wrote about it. Regardless of Kafka’s conviction that ‘writing and the office cannot be reconciled’, the evidence is that the office breeds writing like nowhere else. From the Restoration period to the present, all the great themes of modernity seem to coalesce around it.

As creative writing programs continue to surge in popularity, it has become something of an uphill battle to recruit students for literature courses in universities. In an environment overstocked with would-be writers fixated on the image of a potential publisher whose own field of vision is a mass of BookScan figures, a collection of critical essays on a literary writer has something of an ambassadorial role to play. Can those who profess an interest in books and writing be persuaded that there is value in complex engagements with context and tradition, form, and theme?

‘I’m sitting in my tower, cogitating.’ Well, Dessaix admits, it’s not a real tower, though he likes to think of it that way. Actually, it is an elevated writing room in his house in Hobart, with a view of the mountains to the west. He is cogitating, not meditating – he’s particular about this – and the thoughts he proceeds to capture on the page are those of a mind given to rambling. As he sits there, the train of thought moves off to connect him with other writers in other towers, widely distant in place and time: Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst in Kent, Michel de Montaigne in rural France, W.B. Yeats in County Galway, Rainer Maria Rilke at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland.

Address to the reader is one of the conventions of the modern essay form, going back to Montaigne, who includes a statement of address by way of an introduction to his collected writings. A question or series of questions refreshes the direct address along the way, accentuates the sense of voice, and vitalises the connection by supposing the reader as an interlocutor, someone whose responses may be silent, but are explicitly solicited. For the reader, this necessarily carries the risk of being co-opted into a pretence of dialogue: there is an assumed complicity in the line of thought, and on the principles guiding it.

In his conclusion to this book, Kevin Brophy states a key principle of creative composition: ‘to be responsive to what happens, what is thrown into the mind, what one comes upon.’ This is at once a statement of advice for an artist at work, and a theoretical proposition. Through the course of the ten essays that make up the volume, Brophy develops a hypothesis about the kinds of brain function involved in creativity and, in particular, the role of consciousness in relation to other mental and sensory forms of intelligence. Without drawing the terms ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ into play – a great relief to those of us who have grown weary of that inevitable binary – he suggests that the work of an artist or writer may be facilitated by an exploratory interest in the operations of consciousness.