Reading weeks/months/years

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1961 in fiction (2)

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I said in last week’s Monday Musing, which was dedicated Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) 1961 “Year Club”, that I might write a second post this week. I know the week finished yesterday, 19 April, but I couldn’t resist posting on a topic that popped up frequently during my research, the Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF).

Brief history

The Commonwealth Literary Fund (see Wikipedia) was created in 1908 to assist needy writers and their families (primarily by providing small incomes to writers needing support, and to widows and dependent families of writers who died destitute). After 1939, it was broadened to grant fellowships, provide guarantees against loss to Australian publishers, and assist Australian literary magazines (Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant and Southerly). In 1973, its functions were taken over by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts (renamed the Australia Council in 1975, and Creative Australia in 2023). Of course, these renamings involve structural and policy changes but these are not my interest here.

However, I will explain that in 1939, the Committee which made the decisions was replaced by a Parliamentary Committee, which comprised the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and one other. In practice, their Advisory board, which comprised leading writers, publishers and academics made the decisions – except when they were over-ridden.

Controversy

You won’t be surprised to hear that as an arts funding body, the CLF was involved, directly and indirectly, in controversy – in 1961 (and probably many other years if I went looking). I will share a couple from this year.

The politics of arts funding (1)

One related to the above-mentioned support for those four literary magazines. The Communist Party’s newspaper Tribune (21 June) reported that conservative PM Menzies had rejected the Advisory Board’s recommendation that Overland, a leftist magazine, should receive a grant, while he had “no objection” to a grant going to Quadrant, a conservative magazine which Tribune says has ‘infinitesimal claims to being a “literary” journal, but is renowned for the savagely reactionary nature of its political views’. They quote Katharine Susannah Prichard, Nancy Cato and Kylie Tenant as criticising this decision, with Tennant saying

We now know that the Commonwealth Literary Fund is only there to support the most anaemic and harmless publications.

Mary Gilmore, 1927 (Public Domain, State Library of QLD, via Wikipedia)

Tribune says it has criticised Overland at times for not supporting “with sufficient firmness and vehemence … the labor movement, whose energy and initiative originally launched it”. In fact, Overland had often sought ‘to take a “neutral” stand in the sharp issues of our day’. Unfortunately, ‘its attempts at “neutrality” have not saved it from the reactionary hand of Menzies’!

A few days later, poet and utopian socialist Mary Gilmore, criticised the decision in Tribune (5 July), and concluded with:

Might I suggest that, having been established by a Labor Prime Minister for the benefit of Australian writers, the unions remember this? For without such publications Australia would be a dumb continent except for book publication here and abroad.

The politics of arts funding (2)

Then, of course, there are criticisms of those who do receive funding! L.M.R, reviewing Alan Davies’ A Sunday kind of love and other stories in The Canberra Times (26 August), was not impressed, saying that the book, was “hardly designed to pass away an odd hour pleasurably. A baffling hour would be a better description”. Indeed, L.M.R. says, “they are not stories”. Rather, “each is a description of a mood, usually not accounted for”. S/he continues in this critical vein, concluding:

It was published with the help of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. I wonder why?

On the other hand, Professor T. Inglis Moore, who was on the Fund’s Advisory Board wrote a letter to the editor of The Canberra Times (5 October) correcting some points that had been made in an editorial. Apparently, the editorial had implied that grants made to writers were a new venture involving “experimentation or even gambling”. On the contrary, said Moore, the annual grants had been happening for 21 years, and formed “a well tried, sound, and constructive method of aiding our literary development”.

The editorial also seems to have implied that not all grants resulted in great works. Moore responded that there is “of course … an element of risk” but that the risk is minimised because the applications “are given careful consideration by the Fund’s Advisory Board and Parliamentary Committee”, and the “grants are made only to writers who have proved themselves … and for projects considered suitable to their particular talents”. So, in this year, he says, “it is hardly rash gambling to back Judith Wright to write good poetry and critical essays and Bill Harney to produce an expert work dealing with aborigines”.

Inevitably, though, there are occasional “failures or disappointments, but the great majority of the writers justified their awards satisfactorily, and some productions have been outstanding”. He draws a comparison with government support of the CSIRO, and concludes

there would be no success without experimentation, the risks undertaken are reasonable, and the rewards of the venture are very well worthwhile, whether in science or literature.

CLF Lectures

In addition to awarding fellowships, the CLF also supported lectures on literature around the country. Some of these were reported in the newspapers. Announcing the 1961 Fellowship winners on 2 October, The Canberra Times noted that increased interest had been shown in lectures in Australian literature, and that so far that year “the lecture programmes had reached a public audience of 8,000 and a school audience of 19,000”. A week earlier, on 27 September, the paper had reported on a CLF lecture to be given by academic Evan Jones on “The Anatomy of Frustration: Short Stories of Alan Davies and Peter Cowan.” (Given the criticism I’ve shared above of Davies’ stories, I’d love to know what he said!)

The Port Lincoln Times (3 August) wrote about a two-week lecture tour around South Australia to be given by Colin Thiele, who, they said, was well-known as a poet and broadcaster. (In fact, in 1961 he published a children’s book The sun on the stubble, and two years later Storm boy, perhaps his most famous children’s book. Today, he is best known for his children’s writing.) Two weeks later, on 17 August, the same paper reported on the tour. Thiele’s theme was “Spirit of People — Spirit of Place”. He talked about the Australian spirit (and humour), and how “a good writer should be able to observe and capture this spirit”. The report concluded by sharing the list of Australian literary works, that he recommended for “basic reading”:

  • Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery under arms
  • Martin Boyd, Lucinda Brayford
  • F. D. Davison, Man-shy (read before blogging)
  • M. Barnard Eldershaw, A house is built (on my TBR)
  • Miles Franklin, All that swagger
  • Joseph Furphy, Such is life
  • Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, We of the Never Never (read before blogging)
  • Xavier Herbert, Capricornia
  • T. A. G. Hungerford, The ridge and the river
  • Henry Kingsley, The recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (on my TBR)
  • The prose works of Henry Lawson (read some before blogging)
  • Vance Palmer, The passage (read before blogging)
  • Ruth Park, The harp of the south (read before blogging)
  • Katherine [sic] S. Pritchard [sic], Coonardoo (read before blogging)
  • Henry Handel Richardson, The fortunes of Richard Mahoney
  • Randolph Stow, To the islands (on my TBR)
  • Kylie Tennant, The battlers (on my TBR)
  • Patrick White, Voss and The tree of man (read both before blogging)
  • Douglas Stewart, Four plays (read one before blogging)
  • Ray Lawler, The summer of the seventeenth doll
  • Stewart and Keesing (ed.), Australian bush ballads
  • Howarth, Thompson and Slessor, The Penguin book of Australian verse
  • W. Murdoch and Drake Brockman, Australian short stories.

Anything caught your attention?

Langston Hughes, Feet live their own life (#Review, #1961 Club)

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Today’s post for the Year Club is one of those rare occasions when I am not posting on an Australian short story. The simple reason is that I could not find one in my anthologies, and I am keen to read from my physical TBR. Happily, I found one in Great short stories by African-American writers, and it was by a writer I have read before, though it could be a bit of a cheat … read on …

Langston Hughes

Wikipedia tells us that James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and was “best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance (about which I have written before).  He was also “an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist” as well as “an early innovator of jazz poetry“. My anthology editors, Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell, describe him in their biographical note, as “one of the most famous African-American writers of the [twentieth] century [who] continually published poems, plays, novels, short stories, essays, translations, children’s books, and edited anthologies”. They say that “knowing first-hand the financial difficulties and discouragement of being a writer of colour, he helped numerous African Americans get noticed and published”. Poet Kwame Alexander, writing in the Beltway poetry quarterly, adds “operas, librettos, television and film scripts” and “lyrics, essays, [and] reference manuals” to his writing credentials. He was prolific.

Wikipedia explains that like many African Americans, he was of mixed ancestry, with both of his paternal great-grandmothers being enslaved Africans, and both paternal great-grandfathers being white slave owners in Kentucky. The old story! He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in other Midwestern cities. His parents separated soon after his birth. Apparently, his father, who “wanted to escape the racial intolerance of the United States”, moved to Cuba and then Mexico. The critical point for us, however, is that, because his mother travelled a lot for work, he was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother. “Through stories of Black resistance, dignity, and perseverance, [she] shaped his understanding of racial responsibility” and imbued him “with a duty to help his race”. Consequently, continues Wikipedia, he “identified with neglected and downtrodden black people all his life, and centered their lives honestly in his work”.

I’ll leave his biography here, but if you are interested, start at Wikipedia which has an extensive, well-referenced article.

I mentioned that I have read him before – and I have, but in poetry anthologies, some of them for children. He captured my attention, not just because he was new to me but because his subject matter – social justice and civil rights – interests me. I have not read his prose before.

“Feet live their own life”

I said in my opening paragraph that this selection for the Year Club could be a bit of a cheat. This is because this story was originally published in the Chicago Defender in 1943. However, my anthologists selected the story from a book published in 1961, and say that the version there is “an expansion and revision” of that original column. I think this makes it valid for the 1961 Year Club!

So, the story. Wikipedia pointed me to The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, which says that soon after inaugurating a theatre group in Chicago in 1941, Hughes went to work for the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper founded in 1905. It was here that Hughes introduced readers to his character Jesse B. Semple, aka Simple. The Hall of Fame says that

Hughes combined powerful rhetoric with down-home humor to attack or reflect the conditions of African-Americans at the time. He was eloquent and clear – and no injustice escaped his literary wrath. To some, this column was Hughes’ most powerful and relevant work. He became the voice of a people who were beginning to secure their place in society.  Hughes wrote his column for the Defender for 20 years.

“Feet live their own life” is, in fact, based on Hughes’ first column in the Defender, making it an excellent introduction to the character. Being a column, it is a very short short story, running to just three pages in the anthology. It is set in a bar, as I think are all the Simple stories, and comprises a conversation between an unnamed, somewhat serious narrator, a foil in other words, and Simple. It starts:

“If you want to know about my life,” said Simple as he blew the foam from the top of the newly filled glass the bartender put before him, “don’t look at my face, don’t look at my hands. Look at my feet and see if you can tell how long I been standing on them.”

It is a humorous character study with a political edge and a lacing of wisdom. Simple is – as his name suggests – an ordinary man, a black everyman. In this story, he introduces his readers to the travails of his life, to which those like him, the people Hughes wanted to reach and represent, could relate:

These feet have supported everything from a cotton bale to a hongry woman. These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with coloured. These feet have stood at altars, crap tables, free lunches, bars, graves, kitchen doors, betting windows, hospital clinics, WPA desks, social security railings, and in all kinds of lines from soup lines to the draft …

These are life events his readers knew. When our narrator counters that all this is general, and asks for something specific that his feet have done, Simple tells him how his right foot had broken the window of a white man’s shop and his left foot had set him off running from the cops. But why, asks our narrator, would he “go around kicking out windows”. Simple says

“You have to ask my great-great-grandpa why. He must of been simple – else why did he let them capture him in Africa and sell him for a slave to breed my great-grandpa in slavery to breed my grandpa in slavery to breed my pa to breed me to look at that window and say, ‘It ain’t mine! Bam-mmm-mm-m!’ and kick it out?”

When our logical narrator suggests that the bar glass he is drinking from is also not his, but he’s not smashing that, Simple responds, logically

“It’s got my beer in it”

I think you get the gist. Simple is a comic character who is able to say the outrageous and the human things and bring his point home. He is humorous and wise, silly and pointed at the same time. I enjoy writing like this, writing that tells the truth with warmth and humour.

I am sure many of you will know Langston Hughes. I’d love to hear your thoughts about reading him – in whatever form you have.

* Read for the 1961 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

Langston Hughes
“Feet live their own life” (first published in The best of Simple, 1961)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 181-183
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online in audio version at archive.org and



Monday musings on Australian literature: 1961 in fiction

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Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time, it is 1961, and it runs from 13th to 19th April. Once again, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

I have already written about 1960s for the 1962 Club. It was an exciting decade, one in which we thought we were really going to change the world for the better. Older and wiser now, I can see how naive that was. But, idealism is not a bad thing, and some good changes did happen. Just not enough. This decade was also the height of the Cold War. Literature reflected all of this – the enthusiasm for change looking towards a fairer more equitable world, the fear of communism, and the tension between the two. In Australia, the conservative government of Robert Menzies had a strong grip.

A brief 1961 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1961:

Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse
  • James Aldridge, The last exile
  • Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse (my review)
  • A. Bertram Chandler, The rim of space
  • Kenneth Cook, Wake in fright
  • Dymphna Cusack, Heatwave in Berlin
  • Nene Gare, The fringe dwellers (Bill’s review)
  • Xavier Herbert, Soldiers’ women
  • Elizabeth Kata, Be ready with bells and drums
  • H.A. (Harold) Lindsay, Janie McLachlan
  • John O’Grady, No kava for Johnny
  • Ruth Park, The good looking women (aka Serpent’s Delight) 
  • Hal Porter, The tilted cross
  • F. J. Thwaites, Beyond the rainbow
  • George Turner, A stranger and afraid
  • Arthur Upfield, The white savage
  • Judah Waten, Time of conflict
  • Morris West, Daughter of silence
  • Patrick White, Riders in the chariot (Lisa’s review)

Several short stories, and short story collections were published, including by some favourite writers of mine like Thea Astley and Shirley Hazzard, by other writers I’ve posted on here before like D’Arcy Niland and Hal Porter, and by one Ray Mathew, an Australian expat whom I discovered around a decade ago when I attended my first Ray Mathew annual lecture at the NLA.

The thing about the 1960s is that we start to see more authors appear that we still hear of today, even if not all are still keenly read.

The main literary award made this year was the Miles Franklin, which went to Patrick White’s Riders in the chariot. The ALS Gold Medal was not awarded in 1961.

Novelists born this year include Jordie Albiston (who died in 2022) and Richard Flanagan (who should need no introduction).

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove for what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. However, because 1961 is less than 70 years ago, I frequently confronted roadblocks, with Trove regularly telling me that “This newspaper article is still within its copyright period and can’t be displayed on Trove right now. The National Library of Australia will make it available as soon as copyright permits, or with the copyright holder’s permission”. Fortunately, some newspapers have – generously – released their material “ahead” of time! Thank you The Canberra Times, and more specialist papers like The Australian Jewish Times and Tribune.

Communists and other reformists

Communism was still a hot topic in the 1960s, and several writers in my 1961 list were Communists or, if not, Marxist or leftist writers, writers like Mena Calthorpe, Dymphna Cusack, Judah Waten – and Frank Hardy, whose nonfiction book about his most famous novel Power without glory, The Hard Way: The Story Behind Power without Glory, was published in this year.

I’ll start with Frank Hardy, who wrote a piece for Tribune (June 7) about The Communist Party of Australia’s Draft Resolution for its 19th Congress. ALS reviewer Teri Merlyn wrote in 2005 that “Hardy’s commitment to literature as a vehicle for working-class education and the Australian radical literary tradition was unwavering”. This is on display in his response to the Draft Resolution, for which he proposes the following additional lines:

An important part in interpreting Australian reality is played by realist literature and art. Art which lays bare the contradictions of capitalism, exposes the ramifications of monopoly, affirms class struggle, and reveals the worth and dignity of the working people and their ability to transform society.

While the “Party’s work has been decisive in the development of the working class literature and art movement”, this work has, he says, been “marred” by “errors”. He briefly discusses these, before concluding that literature and art are part of “the working class arsenal”, and the Party must make it a “whole party” issue.

Given the period, many of our serious writers were keenly interested in reform. What is interesting is how contemporary reviewers saw their works. For example, Mena Calthorpe’s The dye house is a factory novel, which, says The Canberra Times‘ reviewer, R.R. (16 September) ‘is “formula” novel, set in a Sydney textile factory’, and, “despite its immaturity of style … an impressive piece of work”. It’s a mixed review, panning much but also suggesting she has potential. R.R. suggests that editing out ‘schoolgirl words as “clatter,” “click clack,” and “tic tac,” which jangle irritatingly through it, would improve it immensely’. I, however, loved this language, as I wrote in my review.

Similarly, M.P., writing in The Canberra Times (13 May) about Dymphna Cusack’s Heatwave in Berlin, is less than complimentary. S/he describes its political content, adds s/he is not qualified to confirm the facts, and then critiques the book as

something which cannot be taken very seriously. The characters have the larger-than-life quality of figures in a melodrama, and they speak with something of the same staginess.

Not having read the book, I can’t comment, but there are some reviews from, for example, Hungarian and Estonian readers on GoodReads whose reflections offer some fascinating perspectives.

The aforementioned R.R. also reviewed Nene Gare’s novel, The fringe-dwellers, in The Canberra Times (21 October). S/he is far more complimentary about this one, calling it “a most compelling book and one of the best written on this theme”. Today, it would be critiqued for not being an “own story”, for being a story about First Nations people by a white writer. However, this was 1961, and Gare, I think, brought an important story into the main culture. It draws from her experiences in Geraldton, Western Australia, between 1952 and 1954, when her husband was District Officer with the Native Welfare Department. R.R. writes that Gare

captured completely the atmosphere of the part-aboriginal community—its pride, its squalor, and its terrible inertia — people caught between two ways of life and belonging to neither.

S/he says that it has a few – but not serious – false notes, and pronounces it “an outstandingly good, pertinent, and touching story”.

On reviewing

In my last Year Club post (for 1925), I shared some examples of reviewing style. I found some more interesting examples for this year, but will share just one here, by “Tinker”, who reviewed four books in The Canberra Times (12 August), including two by Australian writers, One rose less, by Pat Flower, and And death came too, by Helen Mace. Tinker – who must surely be a “he” – writes of the four books that, three

are by women authors, another saddening fact drawing evidence to the sex’s determination to invade almost every field of male activity.

What? Further, while “he” thinks that Flower’s book is the better of the two Aussies, he says she “just cannot resist the feminine love for tidying up”! Mace’s novel which “has some reasonably good word pictures of the Victorian countryside, but not so good as Pat Flowers’ Sydney scenes” also “unfortunately … suffers from the female tidying up complex”. Feminism still has battles to fight, but reviewers would be unlikely to get away with this today! Incidentally, several of Pat Rose’s novels have been republished in the 2020s.

I found much more, and might write a Part 2 next week. We’ll see … meanwhile I hope this post has piqued your interest about 1961.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

Previous “Year Club” Monday Musings: 1925, 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1961 Club – and if so how?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Selected Australian doorstoppers

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A week or so ago, I saw a post by Cathy (746 Books) that she was taking part in a Doorstoppers in December reading event. My first thought was that December is the last month I would commit to reading doorstoppers. In fact, my reading group agrees that doorstopper month is January, our Southern Hemisphere summer holiday month. That’s the only month we willingly schedule a long book. My second thought was that I call these books “big baggy monsters”. But, that’s not complimentary I know – and I do like many big books. Also, it’s not alliterative, which is almost de rigueur for these blog reading challenges.

Anyhow, I will not be taking active part, but it seemed like a good opportunity for a Monday Musings. I’ll start with definitions because, of course, definition is an essential component of any challenge. The challenge has been initiated by Laura Tisdall, so she has defined the term for the participants. (Although, readers are an anarchic lot and can also make up their own rules! We wouldn’t have it any other way, would we?) Here is what she says:

Genre conventions vary so much. For litfic, for example, which tends to run shorter, I can see anything over 350 pages qualifying as a doorstopper, whereas in epic fantasy, 400 pages would probably be bog standard. Let’s say it has to at least hit the 350-page mark – and we encourage taking on those real 500-page or 600-page + behemoths 

I love her recognition that what is a doorstopper isn’t absolute, that it does depend on the conventions or expectations of different forms or genres. I will focus on the literary fiction end of the spectrum but I think 350 pages is a bit short, particularly if I want to narrow the field a bit, so I’m going to set my target for this post at 450 pages. I am also going to limit my selected list to fiction published this century (albeit the challenge, itself, is not limited to fiction.)

However, I will commence with a little nod to doorstoppers our past. The nineteenth century was the century of big baggy monsters, even in Australia. And “baggy” is the right word for some, due partly to the fact that many were initially published in newspapers as serials, so they tended to, let me say, ramble a bit to keep people interested over the long haul. Dickens is the obvious example of a writer of big digressive books.

In 19th century Australia, publishing was just getting going so the pickings are fewer, but there’s Marcus Clarke’s 1874 His natural life (later For the term of his natural life). Pagination varies widely with edition, but let’s average it to 500pp. Catherine Martin’s 1890 An Australian girl is around 470pp. Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under arms runs between 400 and 450pp in most editions, while Caroline Leakey’s 1859 The broad arrow is shorter, with editions averaging around 400pp.

By the 20th century, Australian publishing was growing. Like Leakey’s novel, Joseph Furphy/Tom Collins’ 1903 Such is life is shorter, averaging 400pp (Bill’s final post). Henry Handel Richardson’s 1930 The fortunes of Richard Mahony, depending on the edition, comes in around the 950pp mark. Of course, it was initially published as three separate, and therefore relatively short, volumes but the doorstopper edition is the one I first knew in my family home. Throughout the century many doorstoppers hit the bookstands, including books by Christina Stead in the 1930s and 40s, Xavier Herbert from the 1930s to the 1970s (when his doorstopper extraordinaire, Poor fellow my country was published), Patrick White from the 1950s to late in his career, and on to writers like Pater Carey whose second novel, 1985’s Illywhacker, was 600 pages. He went on to publish more big novels through the late 20th and into the 21st century.

Selected 21st Century Doorstoppers

The list below draws from novels I’ve read from this century. In cases where I’ve read more than one doorstopper from that author, I’ve just chosen one.

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
  • Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (2009, 464pp, my review)
  • Trent Dalton, Boy swallows universe (2018, 474pp, my review)
  • Michelle de Kretser, Questions of travel (2012, 517pp, my review)
  • Sara Dowse, As the lonely fly (2017, 480pp, my review)
  • Richard Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north (2013, 466pp, my review)
  • Elliot Perlman, The street sweeper (2011, 626pp, my review)
  • Wendy Scarfe, Hunger town (2014, 456pp, my review)
  • Steve Toltz, A fraction of a whole (2008, 561pp, my review)
  • Christos Tsiolkas, The slap (2008, 485pp, my review)
  • Tim Winton, Dirt music (2001, 465pp, read before blogging)
  • Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006, 526pp, my review)
Sara Dowse, As the lonely bly

There are many more but this is a start. They include historical and contemporary fiction. Many offer grand sweeps, while some, like Scarfe’s Hunger town, are tightly focused. The grand sweep – mostly across and/or place – is of course not unusual in doorstoppers. A few are comic or satiric in tone, like Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, while others are serious, and sometimes quite dark. The authors include First Nations Alexis Wright and some of migrant background. And, male writers outweigh the females. Perhaps it’s in proportion to the male-female publication ratio? I don’t have the statistics to prove or disprove this. Most of these authors have written many books, not all of which are big, meaning the form has followed the function!

Are you planning to take part in Doorstoppers in December? And, if you are, what are you planning to read? Regardless, how do doorstoppers fit into your reading practice?

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing (#BookReview)

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My reading for Buried in Print Marcie’s annual MARM month has been both sporadic and minimal, to say the least, but this year I finally got to read a book that has been on my TBR shelves for a long time and that I have planned to read over the last few MARMs. It’s Atwood’s treatise (or manifesto or just plain ponderings) on writing, Negotiating with the dead. Interestingly, in 2003 it won the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, though on reflection I can see it does have a strong element of memoir.

Its origins, however, are not in memoir but in the series of lectures she delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2000, the Empson Lectures, which commemorate literary critic, William Empson. (I recently – and sadly – downsized his most famous book, Seven types of ambiguity, out of my library). Atwood turned those lectures into this set of essays that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 (and that I leapt on when I saw it remaindered in 2010).

Subtitled “A writer on writing”, this book is probably not quite what most of us would expect, unless we really know Atwood. As she says in her Introduction, it is not so much about writing as about something more abstract, more existential even, about what is writing, who is the writer, and what are the writer’s relationships with writing, with the reader, with other writers, and with themself. It’s also about the relationship between writing and other art forms, like painting and composing. She says in her Introduction that “it’s about the position the writer find himself in; or herself, which is always a little different”. (Love the little gender reference here.) It’s about what exactly is the writer “up to, why and for whom?”

I rarely do this, but I’m sharing the table of contents for the flavour it gives:

  • Introduction: Into the labyrinth
  • Prologue
  • 1 Orientation: Who do you think you are? What is “a writer,” and how did I become one?
  • 2 Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double Why there are always two?
  • 3 Dedication: The Great God Pen Apollo vs. Mammon: at whose altar should the writer worship?
  • 4 Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co. Who waves the wand, pulls the strings, or signs the Devil’s book?
  • 5 Communion: Nobody to Nobody The eternal triangle: the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between
  • 6 Descent: Negotiating with the dead Who makes the trip to the Underworld, and why?

There is way too much in the book for me to comment on, but I don’t want to do a general overview either, so I’m just going to share a couple of the ideas that interested me.

One of her main threads concerns “duality” and “doubleness” in writers’ lives. There’s a fundamental duality for a writer – a novelist anyhow – between “the real and the imagined”. She suggests that an inability to distinguish between the two may have had something to do with why she became a writer. This interested me, but it’s not what interested me most in this book. Rather, it was the idea of the writer’s “doubleness”, which she introduces in chapter 2, “Duplicity”, the idea that there is the person who writes and the other person who lives life (walking the dog, eating bran “as a sensible precaution”, and so on). She explains it this way:

All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person.

It’s obvious, of course, but we don’t often think about it. Writers do, though. Take Sofie Laguna, for example. In the recent conversation I attended, she said she wished she’d kept a diary when she was writing her novel to capture the “dance” she’d had between the conscious and the subconscious as she worked through the issues she was confronting. In other words, the Sofie in front of us was not the Sofie who had written that book. In chapter 5, “Communion”, Atwood addresses this issue from a different angle when she talks about the relationship between writers and readers.

Back to the writer, though, Atwood talks about, gives examples of, how different writers handle this doubleness, the degree to which they consciously separate their two selves or don’t. This brought to my mind Brian Castro’s Chinese postman (my review) in which he regularly – consciously of course – shifts between first person and third for the same character, a character who owes much to Castro himself but is not Castro. This may be similar to the example she gives, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Borges and I”. It’s also something Helen Garner has often discussed, such as in her essay “I” published in Meanjin in Autumn 2002. Even in her nonfiction works, she “creates a persona”, one that “only a very naive reader would suppose … is exactly, precisely and totally identical with the Helen Garner you might see before you”. My point in saying all this is that I think Atwood is exploring something interesting here. Is it new? I don’t know, but it captures ideas I’m seeing both in statements like those of Laguna and Garner, and in recent fiction where I’m noticing an increasing self-consciousness in writers who are explicitly striving for new forms of expression.

Another double Atwood discusses – one related to but also different from the above – is that between the writer and the writing. The writer dies, for example, but the writing lives on. It brought to mind that murky issue concerning posthumous publication (which was discussed on 746 Books Cathy’s Novellas in November post about Marquez’s Until August). It’s a bit tangential, I guess, but Atwood’s separation of the writer and the writing, her sense of the doubleness of writers, puts another spin on this conundrum.

She discusses other issues too, including that of purpose, to which she gives two chapters (3 and 4), setting the art-for-art’s sake supporters against the moral purpose/social relevance proponents, and which of course touches on that grubby issue of writing to earn money!

It’s an erudite book, in that she marshals many writers, known and unknown to me, to illustrate her ideas, but the arguments are also accessible and invite engagement. I did have questions as I read, but she managed to answer most of them. A good read.

Read for Marcie’s #MARM2025

Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
219pp.
ISBN: 9780521662604

Nonfiction November 2025

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My participation in Nonfiction November, like Novellas in November and MARM, tends to be a bit random and sporadic. Last year, I wrote one post for Nonfiction November. I will do the same this year, focusing on two of the questions – My Year in Nonfiction and Book Pairings. These are the two that most interest me.

Week 1: Your year in Nonfiction

Heather (Based on a True Story) hosted this week, which is described as follows:

Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more?  What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

This Nonfiction November year runs, by my definition, from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2025. My nonfiction reading has been varied, though most of it involved some sort of life writing – biography, memoir, and hybrids of the two. These books were, in alphabetical order by author, with links to my reviews or posts where applicable:

  • Sarah Ailwood, “Austen’s Men, Immortality and Intertextuality” (2023, essay, read for a Jane Austen group meeting)
  • Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie, Some people want to shoot me (2024, co-written biography, my review)
  • Ruby Doyle, “A bush picnic” (1933, newspaper column, read for my post on Doyle)
  • Helen Garner, The season (2024, memoir, my review)
  • Gideon Haigh, My brother Jaz (2024, memoir, my review)
  • Marion Halligan, Words for Lucy (2022, memoir, my review)
  • Andra Putnis, Stories my grandmothers never told me (2024, biography/memoir, my review)
  • Helen Trinca, Looking for Elizabeth: The life of Elizabeth Harrower (2025, biography, my review)
  • Sonia Voumard, Tremor (2024, memoir, my review)

I am currently reading two other nonfiction works, including Hazzard and Harrower: The letters by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (see my author conversation post) which I started last year. What I’ve read so far provided some good background for Trinca’s biography of Elizabeth Harrower.

I won’t answer the rest of the questions, except to say that my favourite nonfiction includes literary biography and memoir, and narrative nonfiction on any subject that I think might be interesting!

Week 3: Book Pairings

Liz (Adventures is Reading, Running and Working from Home) hosts this week, and explains it thus:

Pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title (or whatever you want to pair up). Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or two books on two different areas have chimed and have a link. You can be as creative as you like!

This is my favourite part of Nonfiction November, because, like the #SixDegrees meme, it’s fun to think about. I’m giving you three pairs. My rule was that the nonfiction book had to come from this year’s reading, but the paired book could – and indeed all do – come from previous years.

Grandmothers’ stories

Cover

This year my reading group read Andra Putnis’ biography/memoir, Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me (my review) about her two Latvian grandmothers who survived World War Two and ended up in Australia. Five years ago, we discussed Favel Parrett’s novel There was still love (my review), which revolves around the lives of two Czech sisters, who also survived World War 2, but here one ends up in Australia while the other remains in Prague. Parrett tells her story mainly through the eyes of their grandchildren. 

Mining and land rights in Western Australia

Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie’s biography Some people want to shoot me (my review) tells the story of First Nations man Wayne Bergmann who has spent much of his life fighting for the rights of Traditional Owners. One of those fights documented in this book occurred when he was chief executive of the Kimberley Land Council during the James Price Point gas hub negotiations which saw conflict within First Nations communities and between them and the wider Broome community. Madelaine Dickie’s novel Red can origami (my review) is set in a fictional community in the same region and encompasses a similar story of conflict, negotiation, tested loyalties and skulduggery over a uranium mining licence.

Youth football

This pairing of Helen Garner’s memoir The season (my review) with Karen Viggers’ novel Sidelines (my review) is a bit looser than the previous two, but I’m going there. Both are Australian books about young people playing sport, and in both the sport is football. However, in Garner’s memoir the football is Australian Rules, while in Viggers’ novel it’s soccer (or, in fact, to many, “the” football). Also, Garner focuses on the positive aspects. Hers is a grandmother’s story. She wanted to get to know her grandson better so she followed him through a year of training for and playing games. It’s primarily about the relationship she developed with her grandson through doing so, but does include some insights into youth sport, mostly in terms of its benefits. Viggers’ novel, on the other hand, sets out specifically to interrogate what happens when parental support turns into pressure, and what that pressure can do to the young players experiencing it.

What would you pair (and/or do you have anything to share regarding your year in nonfiction)?

Novellas in November 2025

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Last Novellas in November I wrote two posts, besides my reviews, but this year I will only manage one. However, I just want to put it on record that I do appreciate the work put into it by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck), because novellas feature highly in my most memorable books.

These reading months tend to suggest you start with “my year in [whatever the topic is]”, so that is my focus for this post. Last year I had read nine – a small number I know compared to many of you. This year, which goes from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2025, I’ve read even fewer, but they were good! I’m dividing them into two groups: Novellas, and Novella-length Nonfiction.

Novella

  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow (185pp.) (my review): shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize and other awards
  • PS Cottier and NG Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (115pp.) (my review): joint winner of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (184pp) (my review): winner of the 2025 Stella Prize and Prime Minister’s Literary Award
  • Shirley Hazzard, The bay of noon (182pp.) (my review)

Novella-length nonfiction

  • Helen Garner, The season (Memoir, 188pp.) (my review)
  • Gideon Haigh, My brother Jaz (Memoir, 87pp.) (my review)
  • Sonya Voumard, Tremor (Memoir, 129pp.) (my review): joint winner of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize

In addition to these, I have read a novella this month but it will appear in next year’s novella count. And I’ll soon be reading another novella-length nonfiction, but again that’s for next year’s count.

All of the above, with the exception of Shirley Hazzard’s The bay of noon, were published in 2024, which suggests that publishers are currently happy to publish shorter works – and, given some showing in literary awards, that judges see value in them. Meanwhile, Shirley Hazzard’s novel, now 55 years old, could be called a classic.

It’s interesting – and completely serendipitous – that the three novella-length nonfiction books are all memoirs. It’s made me think, however, that this shorter length is a good one for memoirs because it encourages a focus on the main driver for the memoir, and discourages the wallowing or padding that can sometimes happen? Indeed, Sonya Voumard made exactly this point about writing Tremor (see my post on a conversation with her).

And this leads me to making a brief final note on novel-length. I have read many wonderful long books, but I have a preference for short (and therefore usually tight) ones. Just as, anecdotally, there’s the view that readers want more bang for their buck when buying books, meaning they don’t want to pay around the same amount for a 100-page novella as for a 400-page tome, I want more bang for my reading time! In other words, I prefer to read three great novellas in the same time I can read one great tome. That’s three different authors’ perspectives and ideas versus one. This, in addition the fact that I do enjoy concision (which I seem unable to emulate!), is what appeals. The point is that getting lost in a book’s world and never wanting to leave it, while I do love that, is not my main criterion for enjoyment.

If you are taking part in Novellas in November, you clearly enjoy them too. And, you are probably interested in literary culture, so if you are interested in the history of book-lengths, check out this article “Novels and novellas and tomes, Oh my!” by American writer and editor, Lincoln Michel. It has an American slant but I found it most interesting nonetheless. (BTW, if you read to the end, you’ll see that he struggles to be concise too!)

Thoughts anyone?

Written for Novellas in November 2025.

Teffi, The examination (#Review, #1925 Club)

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Mostly for the Year Clubs, I read an Australian short story, usually from one of my anthologies. However, for 1925, I couldn’t find anything in my anthologies, so turned to other newspaper-based sources, including Trove, but I mainly found romances or works that were difficult to access. And then, out of the blue, I found something rather intriguing, a story titled “The examination”. It was written by a Russian woman named Teffi, translated into English by J.A. Brimstone, and published in The Australian Worker, an Australian Workers’ Union newspaper, on 25 November 1925. I don’t know when it was originally written, nor have I been able to found out who J.A. Brimstone was.

Who is Teffi?

The Australian Worker ascribes the story to N. Teffi. This nomenclature is interesting. My research suggests that Teffi, not N. Teffi, was the pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952). Wikipedia gives her pen name as Teffi, but its article on her is titled Nadezhda Teffi. Curiously, the article’s history page includes a comment from a Wikipedian, dated 11 June 2014, that “Her pen name is only Teffi, not Nadezhda Teffi”. This Wikipedian “moved” the article (Wikipedia-speak for changing titles) to “Teffi”, but it was later moved back to “Nadezhda Teffi”. Seems to me it should be under “Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya” or “Teffi”. But, let’s not get bogged down. There’s probably more I don’t know about how she used her name over time.

The more interesting thing is who she was. Wikipedia provides what looks like a fair introduction to her life, so I won’t repeat all that here. Essentially, it says she was a Russian humorist writer who could be both serious and satirical, but whose gift for humour was “considered anomalous for a woman of her time”. However, she proved them wrong, “skyrocketing to fame throughout Russia with her satirical writings, so much so that she had candies and perfume named after her”.

Literary scholar Maria Bloshteyn, writing in the LA Review of Books in 2016, would agree. She starts her piece by describing Teffi as “once a Russian literary superstar”, and says that “Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya claimed that she took the comic-sounding and intentionally androgynous nom de plume for good luck”. Bloshteyn writes:

She began to publish in her early 30s and tried her hand in various genres, but it was her short stories, with their keen and hilarious observations of contemporary society, that were read by everyone from washerwomen to students to top government officials. They won her literary success on a scale unprecedented in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

My short story, however, was written post-Revolution, given we are talking 1925. But, I’m jumping ahead. Tsar Nicholas II was a big fan, Bloshteyn says, as was Vladimir Lenin “with whom she worked in 1905 at the short-lived New Life [Novaia Zhizn’] newspaper”. She left Russia in 1919, during the “Red Terror” when things started to turn sour. Her popularity continued in the émigré world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, her books were read again and “celebrated as recovered gems of Russian humor”.

This potted history sounds very positive, but Bloshteyn explains that there was also darkness in her life, including the death of her loved father when she was young, difficult relationships with siblings, a failed marriage, mental health problems, and more. Also, “she became a victim of her immensely successful but severely confining brand”, meaning editors and readers “only wanted the Teffi they knew” and, worse, “they perceived all of her stories as funny, even when they were clearly tragic”. How frustrating that would be, eh?

She was inspired by – and has been likened to – Chekhov. Bloshteyn says:

Her appreciation of the absurd, of the comic minutiae of life, helps set off the darker or more transcendent aspects of our existence, but her main focus, in the tradition of the great 19th-century Russian writers, was always human nature itself: what makes us tick and why.

I’ll leave her biography here, but if you are interested, start at Wikipedia, and go from there.

“The examination”

“The examination” tells the story of a young girl, Manichka Kooksina, who is sitting for her end-of-year exams which will decide whether she moves on to the next grade. Important things ride on passing them, including staying with her friend Liza who has already passed and getting the new bike her aunt promised her if she passed. However, instead of knuckling down to study she fritters her time, trying on a new dress, reading, and finally filling her notebooks with a prayer “Lord, Help”, believing that if she writes it hundreds or thousands of times she will pass. Needless to say, she does not do well.

The story is beautifully told from her perspective, with much humour for the reader as she flounders her way through preparation and the exam itself. She feels persecuted, an animal being tortured, and resorts to the absurd solution of writing lines, while her nervous peers have at least tried. I wondered why this particular story of hers was chosen by The Australian Worker. Was it the only one available to them in English? Did the examination theme feel universally relevant? According to Bloshteyn, Teffi said that “even the funniest of her stories were small tragedies given a humorous spin”. This is certainly a “small tragedy” for the – hmm, foolish, procrastinating, but believable – Manichka.

Bloshteyn’s essay is primarily a review of two books that had been recently published, Tolstoy, Rasputin, others, and me: The Best of Teffi and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea. The former includes sketches and some of her “best loved short stories”. GoodReads says of it that “in the 1920s and 30s, she wrote some of her finest stories in exile in Paris … In this selection of her best autobiographical stories, she covers a wide range of subjects, from family life to revolution and emigration, writers and writing”. I don’t know whether “The examination” is one of them, but Bloshteyn writes, of the child-themed stories she mentions, that all “show children in the process of getting to know the world around them and finding the means to cope with it”. Manichka, although showing some resourcefulness, has a way to go.

I was thrilled to find this little treasure in Trove, and will try to read more Teffi. Has anyone else read her?

* Read for the 1925 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

N. Teffi
“The examination” [Accessed: 21 October 2025]
in The Australian Worker, 25 November 1925

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1925 in fiction

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Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1925, and it runs from today, 20 to 26 October. As for the last 8 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

The 1920s were wild years, at least in the Western World. The First World War was over, and neither the Depression nor Second World War were on the horizon. It was a time of excess for many, of the flappers, of

A brief 1925 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1925:

  • Martin Boyd (as Martin Mills): Love gods
  • Dale Collins, The haven: A chronicle
  • Erle Cox, Out of the silence
  • Zora Cross, The lute-girl of Rainyvale : A story of love, mystery, and adventure in North Queensland
  • Carlton Dawe, Love: the conqueror
  • Carlton Dawe, The way of a maid
  • C.J. de Garis, The victories of failure
  • W. M. Fleming, Where eagles build
  • Nat Gould, Riding to orders
  • Jack McLaren, Spear-eye
  • Henry Handel Richardson, The way home (the second book in the The Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy)
  • M. L. Skinner, Black swans: Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno
  • E. V. Timms, The hills of hate
  • Ethel Turner, The ungardeners
  • E. L. Grant Watson,  Daimon
  • Arthur Wright, The boy from Bullarah

EV Timms had a long career. Indeed, he also appeared in my 1952 Year Club list. Zora Cross has reappeared in recent decades due to renewed interest in Australia woman writers. Both Bill and I have written about M.L. (Mollie) Skinner, a Western Australian writer who came to the attention of D.H. Lawrence. And then of course there are those writers – Martin Boyd, Henry Handel Richardson and Ethel Turner – who have never “disappeared” from discussions about Australia’s literary heritage.

While my focus here is fiction, it’s worth noting that many of Australia’s still recognised poets published this year, including Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar, Furnley Maurice and John Shaw Neilson.

The only well-recognised novelist I could find who was born this year was Thea Astley.

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. Because 1925 is a century ago, I had already started researching the year for the little Monday Musings Century ago subseries I started in 2022. So far, I have written just one post on 1925. It focused on two literary societies which were active at the time, the Australian Literature Society and Australian Institute of the Arts and Literature, so I won’t repeat that here.

I found a few interesting tidbits to share, including, in a couple of newspapers, a brief report of a talk given to Melbourne’s Legacy Club by local bookseller, C. H. Peters, manager for Robertson and Mullens. He reported that the English publisher, John Murray the Fourth, said

that the Australian consumption of fiction was enormous, compared with the English market, and that, making allowances for differences in population, the Australian read five novels to every one read by the Englishman. 

Some of the other items of interest I found were …

On a cult classic?

One of the surprising – to me – finds during my Trove search was the book Out of the silence by Erle Cox. It was, says The Argus (9 October) and the Sydney Morning Herald (28 November), first published in serial form around 1919, but there were many requests for it to be available in book form, which happened in 1925. The story concerns the discovery of a gigantic, buried sphere, which contains the accumulated knowledge of an ancient civilisation. The Argus’ reviewer says that the sphere’s aim “was to exemplify the perfection attained in a long past era and to assist the human race of the time of discovery towards similar perfection”, with the finder being helped in this goal by the “dazzling Earani”, a survivor of that civilisation.

The reviews at the time were positive. The Argus says that “the story is carried on with much ability”, while The Age (17 October) describes it as “brilliantly conceived and charmingly written … original and weird, maybe a little far-fetched”. Edward A. Vidler writes for the Sydney Morning Herald that “Mr. Cox is to be congratulated on a story of rare interest, which holds the attention from beginning to end”.

It has been republished more than once since 1925, including in other countries. For example, in 1976, it was republished in a series called “Classics of Science Fiction” in 1976, by Hyperion Press, and in 2014 an ePub version was published “with an Historical Afterword by Ron Miller”, who featured it in his “The Conquest of Space Book Series.” The promo for this edition describes it as “the classic lost race novel” in which a pair of amateur archaeologists “inadvertantly revive Earani, the survivor of an ancient race of superbeings”. But this is not all. It was also adapted for radio, and turned into a comic strip. You can read all this on Erle Cox’s Wikipedia page.

On reviewing

I enjoy seeing how reviewers of a different time went about their business. Some reviews in this era – the 1920s – tell the whole story of the novel, and do little else. Others, though, try to grapple with the book, finding positives as well as negatives, and sometimes discussing the reason for their criticisms.

Reviews for Dale Collins’s island adventure The haven are a good example. It seems that Collins had decided to have the main character – the male protagonist – tell his story. The reviewer in The Age (31 October) didn’t feel it worked, writing that Collins

repeats the experiment of blending psychology and sensation which he caried out so successfully in ‘Ordeal.’ It is a very clever and original story, but the reader who wants sensation will find there is too much psychology in it; and the reader who is interested in psychological studies will discover that the author has handicapped himself by making the central figure tell the story. As a result the psychology becomes monotonous …

The Argus (6 November) on the other hand was positive about the technique of Mark telling his own story:

Mr Collins has skilfully worked out the effect of the situation on each one of his characters, but especially on that of Mark, who reveals himself through a diary of their life on the island … The author has set himself a very difficult task in the carrying out of which he has been remarkably successful.

The reviewer in The Age (25 July) – the same one? – was disappointed in Zora Cross’s The lute-girl of Rainyvale, seemingly because of its supernatural subject matter concerning Chinese vases and curses, after the quality of her previous novel Daughters of the Seven Mile, but ended on:

The story has some vivid descriptive writing, which serves to emphasise that Zora Cross’s real gifts are wasted on fiction of this character.

Mollie Skinner’s Black swans was reviewed twice in the same column in The Age (12 September) with slightly different assessments. The first writes that it is “a very readable story founded on historical events in the convict days of Western Australia” and goes on to say that she had collaborated with D. H. Lawrence on The boy in the bush but that “her unaided work is preferable”. The review concludes that Skinner had “drawn her picture strongly and produced a good novel”.

Later in the same column, the reviewer (presumably a different one?) references Skinner’s work with Lawrence and then says of this new book that the story begins in Western Australia’s Crown colony days of 1849. Skinner “sends her childish heroine and hero on adventures amongst blacks and Malays, in company with an escaped convict” then “takes them to England for the social and love interest”. The reviewer concludes that

Miss Skinner writes well, with a special anxiety to set down striking phrases and epigrams. To quote a common, phrase, she is more interesting than convincing. 

Hmm … there’s a sense between the lines here that the story doesn’t hang together, but that Skinner, like Cross, has some writing skills.

As for Henry Handel Richardson, although her novel came out in mid-1925, I found only a couple of brief references to it. Martin Mills (Martin Boyd), on the other hand, fared better with some quite detailed discussions, including in the West Australian (4 July). The reviewer explored it within the context of being part of a rising interest in the “religious novel” and ended with:

Love Gods, with its old story of the unending conflict between the Pagan deities and the restraining influences of Christianity, is a novel of unusual insight, and most uncommon power of literary expression.

There’s more but I’ve probably tired us all out by now! I will post again on this year.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

  • 1925 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
  • Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1925 Club – and if so how?

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1952 in fiction (2), a national stocktaking

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I said in last week’s Monday Musing, which was dedicated to (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) 1952 “Year Club”, that I wouldn’t write about the ongoing issue of journalists and academics feeling the need to defend Australian literature, because I’ve discussed it before. However, I did read an interesting article on the wider issue that I thought worth sharing. Yes, I know the week officially ended yesterday, 27 April!

Bartlett on Aussie culture

The article I’m talking about came from someone called Norman Bartlett. Born in England in 1908, he migrated to Western Australia with his parents in 1911, so he grew up Australian (albeit he did live in England again with his mother and sister between 1919 and 1924). According to the NLA’s Finding Aid for his papers, he studied journalism, obtained an Arts degree, and served with the RAAF in World War 2. In 1952, he was literary editor and leader writer for Sydney Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. The article in question was written in reflection of the 1951 Golden Jubilee of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Titled “Let’s take stock of Australian culture”, it appeared in the Daily Telegraph (5 January). Bartlett’s fundamental question was whether Australia had “grown up as a nation”. This meant, he argued, much more than things like “Dominion status, industrial development, the fighting reputation of the A.I.F., a record wool cheque, and prowess at tennis, cricket, and, with reservations, Rugby, football”. Yes, indeed! Rather, it means

maturity in art and literature; a distinct and original “way of life”; a quickened awareness of what being an Australian means; and why being an Australian is different from being an Englishman, an American, or a European. 

A national culture is much more than a cultivated minority’s appreciation of good books, pictures, music, and architecture. 

It is the way we — the majority — feel, think, act, talk, wear our clothes, play our games, and fight our wars.

When our literature, art, music, architecture, and philosophy reflect our national idioms and attitudes they become part of our national culture. Thus, a truly national culture is the expression of a particular people living in a particular place for a long time.

Of course, he doesn’t consider the nation’s original inhabitants in any of this, particularly when he says “originally, Australians were colonials. That is, slips from older stock transplanted into an initially alien soil”. I will just leave that thought, because we are talking 1952 and I think the best thing for us to do is to recognise this context in all he says.

His article aimed to analyse “whether we’ve taken root; whether we are making a collective, intelligent attempt to adjust ourselves to our environment; whether our environment reflects itself in our speech, attitudes, art, music, and literature”. He argues that by the late 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, writers and artists were moving away from “writing and painting in the English style”. They were “beginning to wake up to the fact that Australians had grown different from the parent British stem”. Not only were writers like Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy (“Tom Collins”), “Banjo” Paterson, A. H. Davis (“Steele Rudd”) expressing this difference in their stories and verse, but they were writing in “everyday idioms of the Australian people”, as Mark Twain had done in America.

He quotes American critic, C. Hartley Grattan, who argued that a fundamental characteristic of ‘this budding Australian literature was an “aggressive insistence on the worth and unique importance of the common man”.’ But, Bartlett says, with “the growth of a more sophisticated city life, many writers began to feel that aggressive semi-socialistic nationalism [as seen in many of the above-named writers] wasn’t enough”. Writers and artists like the Lindsays and Kenneth Slessor wanted to “liberate the Australian imagination from droughts, gum trees, drovers, and the wide-open spaces”. In 1923, they created a literary magazine called Vision, but soon, says Bartlett, the Lindsays’ romanticism, with its “bookish carnivalia rosy with the fumes of canary wine and cheerful with the seductions of full-breasted wantons … blunted itself on Australian realism”. Love this!

By the Jubilee, increasingly more Australian writers were “realising that life is where you look for it”. He said writers like Kylie Tennant, Frank Dalby Davison, and Xavier Herbert showed there was ‘still plenty of kick in the Australian “bush” tradition”‘ while those like Ruth Park, Dymphna Cusack, M. Barnard Eldershaw, and Dal Stivens, were “more interested in the cities”. He separates out Eleanor Dark, who, despite setting some of her novels in country towns, had “a sophisticated interest in character rather than place”. Overall, he argued, that Australia’s contemporary fiction writers were “more analytical than exultant about the Australian way of life”.

Bartlett also wrote about poetry, visual arts, music and, briefly, dance. You can read these thoughts at the link provided above. He concludes by stating that “Australians are a reading people”, who spent significantly more on books than Americans and Canadians. This rather quantitative conclusion doesn’t answer much in terms of his framing question. However, I liked his discussion of how the bush and city strands were playing out in mid-20th century Australian literature, and his assessment of contemporary writers being more “analytical than exultant” is what I’d like from our artists of all persuasions. What do you think?