20th century literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Two Aussie writers in 1965

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Continuing last week’s 1965 theme, this post discusses two articles on two Aussie writers who published books that year. I chose them because I think they are instructive examples of book reviewing.

Thomas Keneally

Cover illustration

Audiobook edition

Thomas Keneally, born in 1935, is a prolific Australian author with a long (and still continuing) career. He was shortlisted for the Booker prize four times between 1972 and 1982, one of which he won, and he was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin three times between 1967 and 2003, two of which he won. These were for seven different books! That’s impressive. However, the book reviewed by Maurice Dunlevey in The Canberra Times in 1965 was not one of these. It was for his second novel, The fear.

The reviewer was Maurice Dunlevy and he compares Keneally’s book with Things as they are by American author, Paul Horgan. Both, he said, were about the loss of innocence in boyhood, and both were true to this type of writing. They were also, he continued, “similar in that they deal with Catholic boyhood. That, however, is where the similarity ends.”

Horgan is successful, handling the subject “with a sensitivity surprising from a writer best known for fat volumes of historical fiction and a Pulitzer Prizewinning history”:

Horgan knows exactly what his subject is and he deals with it imaginatively and economically.

In contrast, he describes Keneally’s book as

a novel in search of a subject. Keneally doesn’t know where he is going and his characters don’t know where to take him.

The only imagination displayed in this book is that reportorial kind we expect from the great Australian tradition, the novel written under a coolibah tree.

He then goes on to (vividly) explain this tradition: it requires that

the coolibah tree should be accurately described, branch by bloody branch. The novelist must be there, on the flamin’ spot, mate, so that he can report on the tree and the nearby jumbuck with photo-graphic accuracy.

Anyone who has read ten Australian novels has read seven that were written under this realistic coolibah tree with a thumbnail dipped in the tar of experience.

The problem is that these novels are not “illuminated by imagination; they are enchained, bolted, riveted to experience — the novelist’s own actual physical experience.” These authors, in other words, focus so much on writing about things they have experienced that they are not, in fact, “writing a novel but filing a fact-filled feature story”.

Then he says something that regular readers know would interest me:

But facts are facts and truth often has nothing to do with them. Truth in literature is usually born of the imagination. It is possible that it has some relationship with facts, with hard-earned experience, but it never slavishly follows their dictates.

Events, he continues, don’t just “fall” into the necessary literary form; “they don’t impart their significance to us simply because we record them accurately.” They need to be “moulded in a unique, personal vision”.

Cover illustrationUnfortunately, Keneally does too much reporting of events, it seems. There is no “vision of the world”, “no sense of direction, no consistent subject or theme”, just “the reporter’s eye for inconsequential detail”. Dunlevy’s assessment is that The fear reads more like “a collection of notes for a novel, perhaps fragments of an autobiography”.

I don’t know what Keneally thought at the time, but I do know that he can be reflective, rather than defensive, about his earlier work. Sydney Morning Herald literary editor, Susan Wyndham, wrote in 2013 that Keneally has described The fear “dismissively as the obligatory account of a novelist’s childhood.” (Interestingly he republished/rewrote it in 1989 as By the line.)

Nancy Cato

Cover illustrationNovelist Nancy Cato was one of the writers that last week’s Soviet author, Daniil Granin, met. The Canberra Times article, I read, is by John Graham, who reviews her latest novel, North-west by south. I chose this article for Graham’s thoughtful commentary on Cato. He starts by calling her “a curious phenomenon in Australian literature, a feminist without a formed social outlook.”

He compares her with her more literary contemporaries — Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Eve Langley and Dorothy Hewett. He says they

have all expressed definite views on society through their novels. Mostly, they are militant socialist rather than purely feminist ideas, a tradition of political awareness handed down to them by Mary Gilmore and Katherine Susannah Pritchard.

But, he says, Cato has never

been drawn into this dynasty. She is closer to the individuality of Judith Wright and Rosemary Dobson in her poetry, much more aggressively feminist in her novels.

However, he continues, she never fully developed her feminism “in the social sense”, and consciously kept away from “political awareness”. Delie in her Murray River trilogy has the pioneering spirit that comes from one side of Australia’s “feminist tradition”, he writes, but she doesn’t have the social viewpoint that might have made her “a memorable figure”. (Little did he know that actor Sigrid Thornton would make her memorable via the TV miniseries, All the rivers run, in 1983!)

Seriously, though, he continues to say that Cato “has found a welcome new theme in the historical novel”, Lady Franklin, about whom I’ve written here before. Graham suggests that Franklin suits Cato much better  than Delie:

Lady Franklin’s feminism is of the same activist variety, but much more capable of development through her position as a Governor’s wife. She also has the virtue of reality, a considerable advantage for a writer with limited powers of character development.

Oh dear, that’s a backhander isn’t it! Anyhow, he goes on to detail how Cato makes a better fist of this protagonist in terms of feminism, and says that

Miss Cato handles all these subtleties with impressive dexterity, indicating a considerable technical development since she laid Delie to rest.

It’s not perfect, though, because Cato “has still not controlled her tendency, to rush from one event to another without pausing for significance”. He gives examples, such as her handling of Mathinna, the indigenous girl adopted by the Franklins. He feels that Cato became “so enmeshed in the historical details that the book is not satisfactory either as a character study of an unusual woman or as an examination of Franklin’s governorship”. Handling their historical research is, of course, a common challenge for historical fiction writers.

Graham details other gaps, suggesting for example that Lady Franklin and her husband’s efforts “to better the conditions of the convicts and to solve the problem of the disappearing Aborigines are treated so scantily that they might better have been eliminated altogether”. This aspect of the Franklins’ lives is a tricky topic that many have tried since Cato (and I list some of them in my post linked above.)

However, he also has positive things to say, calling it Nancy Cato’s “best novel so far” and suggesting it “indicates a direction in which a writer of her talents and limitations might develop further”. It’s the sort of review a writer may or may not like, but it’s clear, detailed and respectful.

So, I hope you’ve enjoyed these little dips into 1965 Australia via its newspapers. I have!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Literary visitors in 1965

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Last week’s Monday musings surveyed Australian literature in 1965. As I researched that post in Trove, I came across some fascinating newspaper articles from the year, which I thought worth sharing in separate posts. I’ve divided them into two groups – one on overseas visitors (today’s post) and the other local writers (next week’s, probably!)

An American academic

Bruce Sutherland, Professor of English Literature at Pennsylvania State University, visited Australia to research Miles Franklin’s time in America. He is, apparently, credited with establishing and teaching the first exclusively Australian literature course in the USA – in 1942. (He’s interesting, so I might return to him another day.)

Anyhow, speaking on an ABC program, he said (according to The Canberra Times), that Australian literature was more widely read now than at any time since the 1890s, and that, compared with his visit in the early 1950s, now “every Australian university is encouraging Australian studies to some degree”.  Publishers too, he said, were rising to the challenge:

Not only are many of the older books kept in print, but more and more, the works of promising young authors are being published.

He noted the importance of reprints, to students and the general public, saying that “a literature that is not read can hardly be said to exist”. Good point, and one that publishers like Text have taken on board in their Classics series. Prof. Sutherland was particularly interested in the fact that the biggest change since 1951 had been in drama.

However, Australians shouldn’t rest on their laurels, because

Quite frankly, Australian literature has a long way to go before it attains the pedestal reserved for the English and American in the English-speaking world. … But it has made great strides, and is now well beyond the toddling stage.

Hmm … no wonder we suffered from cultural cringe! Still, he was a great proponent of our literature, and as a result, in 1993 at least, Pennsylvania State University had one of the best research collections outside Australia.

A Soviet novelist

Soviet novelist, Daniil Granin (1919-2017) was visiting Australia as guest of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW), reciprocating author Alan Marshall’s visit to the USSR the previous year. His focus was a bit different, as he was interested in what Australian literature was offering Soviet readers. “Australian literature,” he said at a FAW reception, “is the only window Soviet people have on Australian life.” DK, the Tribune article’s writer, tells us that the attendees included novelist Mena Calthorpe (whose realist novel The dyehouse I’ve reviewed), short story writer Dal Stivens, and poet Kath Walker (later, Oodgeroo Noonuccal).

Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouseGranin told the group that interest in Australia had grown “enormously” in the last decade. In 1964, for example, one and a half million copies of Australian authors were printed and sold in the Soviet Union. Amazing. Did you know? Apparently, writes DK in another Tribune article, this interest is because these Aussie writers’ characters are “flesh and blood” people with an “active attitude to reality”.

Anyhow, he also spoke with various Australian literati including Colin Simpson (who wrote Take me to Russia), Roland Robinson (a poet), Leonie Kramer (the first female professor of English in Australia), Clem Christesen (editor of Meanjin), Alan Marshall (whose memoir I can jump puddles is a classic), and Nancy Cato (author of All the rivers run). That’s interesting, but even more interesting are his comments on some significant, and still remembered, Australian writers at the time:

Of Patrick White: “He is a man who feels a great responsibility for his own literary work, and has a genuine interest in contemporary literature. He has achieved for himself a very high standard of literary craftsmanship.”

Of Katharine Susannah Prichard: “She is a human being who uplifts you from your first meeting. She has an indomitable spirit, throws aside all trifles, and gets down to the main issues.”

Of Kath Walker: “I admire her just because she is the first successful Aboriginal poetess writing in English. She has a keen interest in all new Aboriginal writers and a vital concern with problems facing them.”

Note: For copyright reasons, most of the articles available for the 1960s come only from The Canberra Times and the Tribune, because they made an agreement with the NLA to allow digitisation. For other newspapers, the library must wait until they come into the public domain – and then, I guess, wait their time in the digitisation queue!

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1965 in fiction

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1965 as a topic? What the?! Those familiar with the lit-blogosphere will probably guess what inspired this post, but for everyone else, I’ll explain. Over the last week of April, bloggers Kaggsy (Kaggsy’s Book Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book) ran a 1965 Reading Week, the latest in their series of reading weeks focusing on books published in a particular year. Needless to say, I didn’t manage to take part – if I had, you would have known about it before now! (For a list of the books read and who read them, check Simon’s 1965 Club Page.)

However, I thought I could play along, in my own way, by writing a – yes, I admit – belated post on 1965 in Australian literature. If it works, I might try it again for their next “year”, whatever and whenever that may be.

My main sources for this post were:

Australian literature and 1965

Kaggsy and Simon’s focus is books published in the year, but I’m going to do a sort of literary snapshot.

Writers born in 1965

An interesting group containing, not surprisingly, many writers in their prime now:

  • Michael Farrell: poet, who has had several books published, mainly by independent publisher Giramondo
  • Gideon Haigh: journalist and author, best known for sports and business writing
  • Fiona McGregor: novelist, whose third novel, Indelible ink, won The Age Book of the Year award
  • Melina Marchetta: novelist, primarily of Young Adult literature, whose award-winning YA novel, Looking for Alibrandi (1992), is an Australian classic
  • Mateship with Birds (Courtesy: Pan MacMillan)
    Carrie Tiffany    : novelist, whose first two novels, Everyman’s rules for scientific living and Mateship with birds (my review), both won awards, and whose third book, Exploded view, was published this year. Mateship with birds won the inaugural Stella Prize.
  • Christos Tsiolkas: novelist who has written eight novels, including The slap (my review) and Barracuda (my review), as well as plays and screenplays.
  • Charlotte Wood: novelist who has written both novels and non-fiction, and whose dystopian The natural way of things (my review) also won a Stella Prize

Writers died in 1965

Hooton and Heseltine list a small number of deaths for the year (and I’ve added them to Wikipedia), but none are particularly significant in terms of my blog’s interests. However, one of those who died was a significant Australian personage, HV (aka Doc) Evatt. Among other roles, he was President of the UN General Assembly, and helped draft the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Novels published in 1965

By 1965, a goodly number of books were being published in Australia, so I can’t list them all. Hence, I’m focusing on those that interest me! You can check my sources for more.

  • Thea Astley, The slow natives: if I’d taken part in the 1965 Club, this is the book I would have chosen. I love Astley and have written about, or reviewed, her here a few times.
  • Clive Barry, Crumb borne: included because Barry was the inaugural winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was described by the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature as a “vivid stylist with a capacity for dry humour”; his experiences as a POW in Italy in WW2 inform this novel.
  • Nancy Cato, North west by south: well-known for her historical fiction (of which I reviewed All the rivers run) but also wrote biographies and poetry, and was an environmentalist and conservationist; this book is about Lady Jane Franklin.
  • Don Charlwood, All the green year: this would have been my second choice for the club, because I have the Text Classics copy that I gave my late aunt.
  • Catherine Gaskin, The file on Devlin: best-selling romance novelist, whose book Sara Dane, based on the convict Mary Reibey, sold more than 2 million copies.
  • Donald Horne, The permit: one of Australia’s best known public intellectuals in his time, famous for coining the phrase “the lucky country”. Novels were not his main form of writing.
  • George Johnston, The far face of the moon: best-known for his My brother Jack, which won the Miles Franklin in 1964.
  • Thomas Keneally, The fear: prolific novelist who has won both the Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Award (twice).
  • Christopher Koch, Across the sea wall: best-known for The year of living dangerously, and twice-winner of the Miles Franklin Award.
  • Eric Lambert, The long white night: one of the many left-wing/communist writers who were published in the 1950s and 1960s.
  • D’Arcy Niland, The apprentices: husband of Ruth Park (haha, just had to describe him in relationship to his wife!), and best known for his novel The shiralee.
  • Lesley Rowlands, A bird in the hand: also published two humorous travel books, and short stories.
  • Randolph Stow, The merry-go-round in the sea
    Randolph Stow, The merry-go-round in the sea (my review): woo hoo, one I’ve read!
  • George Turner, A waste of shame: best-known for the SF novels he wrote later in his career, but in 1962, he won a Miles Franklin Award with his novel The cupboard under the stairs (reviewed by Lisa)
  • Morris West, The ambassador: a best-selling author in my youth, West is on my list of topics for Monday Musings one day

Selected other publications from 1965

So many well-known writers well-known published poetry, plays, short stories and other works in 1965, but I can only share a few (links on their names are to posts on my blog which feature them, though most have been mentioned in some way, in fact):

  • Rosemary Dobson, Cock crow (Poetry)
  • Frank Hardy, The yarns of Billy Borker (Short stories)
  • AD Hope, The cave and the spring (Criticism)
  • Geoffrey Lehmann & Les Murray, The Ilex Tree (Poetry)
  • Hal Porter, The cats of Venice (Short stories)
  • Kenneth Slessor, Life at the cross (Poetry)
  • Ivan Southall, Ash Road (Children’s novel)
  • Kylie Tennant, Trailblazers of the air (Children’s novel)
  • Colin Thiele, February dragon (Children’s novel)
  • Russel Ward, Australia (History)
  • Patrick White, Four plays (Drama)
  • Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian poetry (Criticism)

Literary Awards in 1965

Most literary awards we now know, started in the 1970s or later:

  • ALS Gold Medal: Patrick White’s The burnt ones (this book of short stories was my second Patrick White, the first being Voss)
  • Encyclopaedia Britannica Awards for Literature: Shared between two poets, AD Hope and Robert D Fitzgerald. The chair of the awards committee said: “As a critic [Hope] he is lively and controversial and he has earned the respect of his fellow teachers and intelligent readers, for his determined efforts to reevaluate accepted literary convention.”
  • Miles Franklin Award: Thea Astley’s The slow natives 

In conclusion

The interesting thing, not necessarily obvious from these lists, is the number of left, if not Communist, writers who were active at this time, beautifully reflecting the political activism and idealism of the 1960s.

Oh, and I found some fascinating articles in Trove about Australian literature in 1965. They deserve their own post – watch this space.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (#BookReview)

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Marilynne Robinson, GileadOnce again I have reason to start a book post with a discussion of the title, this time Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead. Gilead, in the context of this novel, has a literal and metaphorical meaning, literal because it takes place in the fictional Iowan town of Gilead, and metaphorical because “gilead” may also connote “hill of testimony”. This novel is, in fact, dying minister John Ames’ testimony of his life and values, something he is writing for his 7-year-old son to read when he is older.

Given Gilead was published in 2004,  many of you may already have read it, as well as her next two books, Home and Lila, which form a trilogy and which, I understand, cover the same people but from different perspectives. I read Gilead with my reading group. Responses were mixed, but many of us were interested enough to want to read Lila, at least, to see her perspective.

I was, though, one of those who liked the book unconditionally. I agree that it’s slow to get into, which is not helped by the fact that it has no chapters, excepting one “break” heralding a slight change of pace towards the end. This break occurs when a certain piece of information comes out about John Ames’ namesake, Jack (John Ames Boughton). It is around here that the book picks up in interest significantly because there’s a suggestion that there might even be a plot! However, given I’m a reader who doesn’t seek a strong plot and that I rather like spare writing in a melancholic tone, I was engaged from the beginning. It is melancholic, naturally, because the narrator knows his life is running out, but it’s more resigned than sad.

So, what is this essentially plot-less book about? That depends a bit, I’d say, on each reader’s perspective. For some the book is very much about theology and religion. John Ames speaks a lot about the Bible, about biblical characters and stories, and about death and heaven. Some in my group found his religion old-fashioned. And it is to some extent – partly because of its era. Ames was born in 1880 and the book is set in 1956 when he is 76 years old. John Ames also talks a lot about his family – his father and grandfather, in particular, who were both ministers. Now, Ames’ being born in 1880 means his father, and grandfather, were alive during the Civil War. We learn quite a bit about the history of the abolitionists in Iowa and Kansas. Ames’ grandfather was a John Brown follower, which meant that he was not above using violence to achieve the goal. His father on the other hand, having seen what his father did and thought, was a pacifist. Most of my reading group enjoyed this historical-cultural aspect of the novel.

But, what interested me most about the book was what I saw as one of its main themes, which concerns how to live a good life. In the opening paragraph Ames refers to a conversation with his young son. He writes

I told you that you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are may ways to live a good life.

Late in the novel, he says something much simpler than this, though. He says

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

Is he departing from the idea of living a good life, to just living your life? I’m not sure. Pretty much at the novel’s central point he refers a statement by theologian John Calvin that we are actors on a stage with God being the audience. Ames interprets this as suggesting that we are “the artists of our own behaviour”, and, further, that God as audience implies an aesthetic rather than (as well as?) a moral aspect to God’s reaction to us. He explores the implications of this role of God’s a little further but, while it was interesting, it’s not where I want to take this post. I have other ideas to share!

One of the main threads – or themes – in the novel concerns fathers and sons. This is pretty obvious, really, given the whole book is framed as a letter from a father to a son in which Ames discusses his wishes for his son, but it is amplified through his discussion of the relationship between his grandfather and father, and between his father and himself. The relationships are complex, as I’ve already suggested. But, his thoughts on these relationships are intensified by his relationship with and attitudes to his namesake, the aforementioned Jack, to whom he is a “second father”. It is Jack who forces Ames to reassess his values and attitudes, not to mention his understanding of his worth as a Christian minister.

The problem is that Jack has been a bad boy. He became involved with a young girl, and a child ensued – after which he scarpered, leaving his family to work out what to do. Ames struggles with his attitude to Jack – particularly when Jack reappears 20 or more years later, as Ames is writing this letter. He says of Jack’s behaviour:

It was something no honourable man would have done … And here is a prejudice of mine, confirmed by my lights through many years of observation. Sinners are not all dishonourable people. But those who are dishonourable never really repent and never really reform … in my experience, dishonour is recalcitrant.

This is his own view, he admits, because “no such distinction occurs in Scripture”. Again, we are turned to formal theology, but again, I am going to turn away. The point for me is, regardless of what is “scriptural” or not, that Ames struggles with the idea of forgiveness, of acting with grace towards Jack. This forms his inner conflict as he considers father-son relationships, his preaching to his flock, and his relationship with his old friend and Jack’s father, Boughton. It is through this conflict, through finally opening himself to really listen to Jack, that he comes to a deeper more all-encompassing idea of what “grace” and, within that, forgiveness, really mean.

And that’s why I liked this book. It’s quiet but it deals with the essence of what confronts each of us every day in our relationships with each other. It deals with the disquietude that we all confront when people don’t behave in the ways we think they ought. Ames describes it as “that old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it from myself.” You don’t have to be a minister or a Christian to have the same hope that John Ames does, which is “to die with a quiet heart”. Gilead is, to me, a lovely book about what it means to be human and to live with humanity.

Marilynne Robinson
Gilead
London: Virago, 2006
282pp.
ISBN: 9781844081486

Rudyard Kipling, The Janeites (#Commentary)

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The topic for my local Jane Austen group’s March meeting was “Jane Austen in the trenches” which, I realise, sounds a bit anachronistic, given she died in 1817, nearly a century before the trenches we’re talking about. But, you see, Jane’s fame didn’t start in 1995 with Colin Firth and that wet shirt. No, her popularity took off around the late 19th century and has continued ever since, albeit with a huge spurt in the late 20th century. As Claire Harman states in Jane’s fame, she is the only writer “who is instantly recognisable by her first name”.

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Anyhow, into the trenches. Our discussion was inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Janeites”, first published in 1924. It’s a little tricky to read, being peppered with Cockney voices, but it’s worth the effort – and not just for Janeites. It is set in a London Masonic Lodge in 1920, during a weekly clean-up of the premises. There are three main characters – Brother Anthony, a veteran of army service in the Holy Land during World War I, now a taxi driver; Brother Humberstall, a hairdresser who is a veteran of artillery service in France and who suffers somewhat from shell-shock (now, PTSD); and the first-person narrator, ostensibly Kipling. Humberstall tells the others of his induction, during the war, into a secret society, the Janeites. He explains how he came to join this society, which included members from all ranks, and the tests he had to pass to do so. He tells how this society kept them sane during the war, and how it, in fact, saved him, when, after a terrible attack, he was his group’s only survivor:

… I walked a bit, an’ there was a hospital-train fillin’ up, an’ one of the Sisters—a grey-headed one—ran at me wavin’ ’er red ’ands an’ sayin’ there wasn’t room for a louse in it. I was past carin’. But she went on talkin’ and talkin’ about the war, an’ her pa in Ladbroke Grove, an’ ’ow strange for ’er at ’er time of life to be doin’ this work with a lot o’ men, an’ next war, ’ow the nurses ’ud ’ave to wear khaki breeches on account o’ the mud, like the Land Girls; an’ that reminded ’er, she’d boil me an egg if she could lay ’ands on one, for she’d run a chicken-farm once. You never ’eard anythin’ like it—outside o’ Jane. It set me off laughin’ again. Then a woman with a nose an’ teeth on ’er, marched up. “What’s all this?” she says. “What do you want?” “Nothing,” I says, “only make Miss Bates, there, stop talkin’ or I’ll die.” “Miss Bates?” she says. “What in ’Eaven’s name makes you call ’er that?” “Because she is,” I says. “D’you know what you’re sayin’?” she says, an’ slings her bony arm round me to get me off the ground. “’Course I do,” I says, “an’ if you knew Jane you’d know too.” “That’s enough,” says she. “You’re comin’ on this train if I have to kill a Brigadier for you,” an’ she an’ an ord’ly fair hove me into the train, on to a stretcher close to the cookers. That beef-tea went down well! Then she shook ’ands with me an’ said I’d hit off Sister Molyneux in one, an’ then she pinched me an extra blanket. It was ’er own ’ospital pretty much. I expect she was the Lady Catherine de Bourgh of the area.

Of course, you have to know your Jane Austen to get the Miss Bates reference … !

Jane Austen by sister Cassandra

Throughout the story Austen is only ever described as Jane, which bears out Harman’s comment above. There’s an entertaining description of Austen’s subject matter –

’Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to ’em, either. I know. I had to read ’em. They weren’t adventurous, nor smutty, nor what you’d call even interestin’

– and some amusing references to various Austen characters, particularly Reverend Collins, Lady Catherine de Bugg (de Bourgh), General Tilney and Miss Bates. There’s also a comment that Austen did “leave lawful issue in the shape o’ one son”, and that was Henry James. Fair enough. At one stage, Humberstall chalks their guns with the names of Austen characters. His Janeite superiors approve, though there is some discussion about whether he’d accorded the right name to the right gun. For example:

… they said I was wrong about General Tilney. ’Cordin’ to them, our Navy twelve-inch ought to ’ave been christened Miss Bates …

Of course, much has been written about this story, including its secret society setting, the Masons, and Kipling’s intentions about that – but these other issues are not my focus here.

What is of interest is Humberstall’s statement late in the story:

“… You take it from me, Brethren, there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. …”

It is this that inspired our meeting because, while Kipling’s story is fiction, it is the case that Austen’s novels, among others, were provided to soldiers to read for morale. On the Kipling Society’s website is this:

In 1915, John Buchan and George Mackenzie-Brown, co-directors of Nelson, launched the highly successful Continental Library series, designed to be carried in soldiers’ pockets. Gassart [who wrote an article for the TLS in 2002] quotes the papers of W.B. Henderson, a Glaswegian schoolmaster attached to a Siege Battery in the Royal Garrison Artillery, in arguing that a book’s solace:

was its power to transport the infantryman from a world of “sergeants major and bayonet fighting, and trench digging and lorry cleaning and caterpillar greasing” into the fantasy of the novelist – and none was better at it than Jane Austen.

Her novels were also used during the war as part of therapy with shell-shock victims. Indeed, the above-mentioned Clare Harman says that three of Austen’s novels were “at the top of a graded Fever-Chart”. Academic Claire Lamont (in her paper, “Jane Austen and the nation”) suggests that this was because Austen’s “Englishness expresses itself as the standard of where and how one might live…”. Other critics have other ideas – though many of them are variations on this theme. One member of my group found a report that novels like Austen’s were used to gee-up damaged soldiers to get them back to the front! That shocked us somewhat. Bibliotherapy, it seems, is not a new thing.

Kipling, himself, was, not surprisingly, an Austen fan. As well as his story “The Janeites” (which term was coined by a critic back in the 1870s), he wrote a poem, whose final lines are used as an epigram for “The Janeites”:

Jane lies in Winchester, blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made.
And while the stones of Winchester – or Milsom Street – remain,
Glory, Love, and Honour unto England’s Jane!

OK, so it’s a bit sentimental I admit, but he wrote it and that’s my excuse for using it to close today’s little commentary!

Rudyard Kipling
“The Janeites”
First published: Hearst’s International, MacLean’s, and the Story-Teller Magazine, May 1924
Available: Online at UWYO

Capel Boake: Three short stories

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Capel Boake, no date, presumed public domainHaving written about Capel Boake in my last Monday Musings, I couldn’t resist checking out some of her short stories. Bill’s AWW Gen 2 Week concluded yesterday, but I hope he’ll accept this post as a contribution.

Boake’s stories are easily accessible in Trove. In fact, I was spoilt for choice, so just picked three at random. By the time I’d edited three – that is, corrected the multiple OCR errors* – I felt I’d done my bit for a while and so stopped there. I can’t say whether my three chosen stories are representative of her whole output – she wrote many short stories and poems – but I’m assuming they are. All appear in newspapers – in the days when newspapers published short stories – and most were syndicated. This means the version I edited is not necessarily the original publication, but I decided not to spend time identifying this.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeThe three stories (linked to their newspaper text) are:

  • The brothers (Canowindra Star and Eugowra News, 9 January 1920): a brother returns from the war, under a cloud, having been accused by his father, before leaving, of stealing money from the family farm business. He hadn’t, but he’s not going to dob in who did.
  • The necessary third (The Australasian, 28 August 1926): a wealthy young man meets, on a steamship trip from South Africa to Melbourne, a not so well-heeled young woman, and her mother, who is ambitious for a good marriage for her daughter.
  • Jenny (Weekly Times, 21 June 1930): a poorer young woman, “a State child”, is helped by a young man to make her career as a world-famous dancer.

A propos my point above re syndication, “The brothers”, for example, was first published, according to the subscriber-only AustLit database, in The Australasian in 1919.

These are generally straightforward stories, which is not surprising given they were published in newspapers and therefore intended for a broad audience. They lack the punch of, say, Barbara Baynton’s turn-of-the-century stories, but they make interesting reading nonetheless.

Two of them are romances – or, what the Western Mail reviewer I quoted in Monday Musings called “sex stor[ies] created on conventional lines”. They draw on traditional tropes – the poor young woman with the pushy mother, and the poor young woman who becomes a star thought the assistance of a young man who loves her. And yet, these young women are not pawns, and they do exercise some agency. Paula (“The necessary third”) takes things into her own hands to protect her self-respect, while Jenny (“Jenny”) takes action to ensure that she gets what she really wants (even if what she really wants is traditional!)

The stories also provide some insight into the times. I was particularly intrigued by this comment in “Jenny”. It’s told through the eyes of the young man, and here he is watching her, now a world-renowned star, dance on her home stage:

Glancing at the absorbed faces around him, their parted lips and shining eyes, he saw she had the same effect on them. Release . . . release . . . their spirits were free for once from the tyranny of the mechanised age that had gripped the world with relentless fingers.

This, then, is not “bush realism”, but a commentary on the modern urban world. However, it was also written in 1930 – Capel Boake straddling Bill’s Gen 2 and Gen 3 periods.

A neglected woman writer

Capel Boake has been identified as one of three neglected women writers of the 1930s by Gavin De Lacy in the La Trobe Journal (vol. 83, 2009), the other two being Jean Campbell and ‘Georgia Rivers’ (pseudonym for Marjorie Clark). De Lacy says that while they were all prominent in the Melbourne literary scene in the 1930s, they have been, with the odd exception, overlooked in significant studies of Australian literature. (He’s right. I found little about Boake in my little collection of books.)

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Boake did not write many novels. Painted clay (1917) was highly praised, but only two more novels were published in her lifetime – The Romany mark in 1923 and, 13 years later in 1936, The dark thread. De Lacy quotes a contemporary critic as saying The dark thread had some shortcomings which “constant practice in the novelist’s art might have been expected to overcome.” Another critic, Frank Wilmot (writing as Furnley Maurice), compared it with Dreiser’s An American tragedy. Nettie Palmer, however, said that it wasn’t “quite a Dreiser, as Furnley suggested … but it’s very respectable.” More interesting to us, though, is contemporary critic Susan Sheridan who argued that it

provides a salutary corrective to the bourgeois family sagas of the period.

Another reason for revisiting Boake in Gen 3!

De Lacy notes that Boake, Campbell and Clarke haven’t been revived as “forgotten authors despite the recent interest in Australian women writers”. Not only are most of their books long out of print, but are “virtually unprocurable in second-hand bookshops”. An option for Text Publishing perhaps”?

He offers various reasons for this, including publishing practices at the times, but he also says that the 1930s was a “radical literary and political decade” and these three women’s novels don’t quite fit “the prevailing orthodoxy and literary preoccupations and myths of the ’30s.” Also, he says, the writers who have been remembered were mostly Sydney-oriented and associated with the New South Wales section of the Fellowship of Australia Writers. Kerr, Campbell, and Clark belong to the same period, but they

were Melbourne authors, setting their novels in that city. They were among the earliest prewar Australian writers to fictionalise an urban environment, ignoring the bush as a theme, and preceding most of their better known contemporaries in writing about the city.

Including them in our study of the era would, as he says, deepen our understanding of the history of women writers (and, thence, I’d argue, of Australian literature.) Gen 3, here we come.

* The original image of “The brothers” is so bad that I was unable to fix all the errors – that happens sometimes in Trove, newsprint not being the best quality medium for preservation.

Katharine Susannah Prichard, Christmas tree (#Review)

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Katharine Susannah Prichard

Prichard, by May Moore (Presumed Public Domain, State Library of NSW)

Commenting on my recent post on Katharine Susannah Prichard’s short story “The bridge”, Prichard biographer Nathan Hobby, pointed us to an online version in Trove of her short story, “Christmas Tree”, which he describes as the best of her early work. It’s about farmers, droughts and banks. Seemed very appropriate (to us in Australia right now, anyhow) so of course I checked it out. (And I corrected the OCR-introduced errors while doing so – hope I caught them all.)

So, “Christmas tree”. Published in The Australasian in 1919, it was, according to writer Glen Phillips, the first of Prichard’s stories to be translated – into Chinese in the 1920s! Fascinating eh? It would be interesting to know who read it and what they made of it.

“Christmas tree” tells the story of Western Australian wheatbelt famers Jinny and George Gillard, and is told third person, primarily through the eyes of Jinny who, at the start, is standing at her back door, reminiscing about their thirty years on the farm. The story starts:

Against the dim blue of the summer sky the Christmas trees had thrown their blossoming crests; they lay along the horizon like a drift of clouds, fluted and curled, pure gold.

The trees stood irregularly in the dry, scrubby land of the plain beyond Gillard’s fences to the north of Laughing Lakes homestead. Their trunks were not visible from the backdoor of the house to where Jinny Gillard stood, her eyes on that distant line of yellow blossom. But she was not thinking of the dark, heavy trees which put on an appearance of such opulent beauty at Christmas time. Her thoughts glanced from them and wandered listlessly, ravelling and unravellin, fretted, anxious, thoughts, old hopes, despairs, bitter, weary, and faint, sweet memories.

This year’s crops were, in fact, better than they had been for years, but it’s all too late – it is not they who will be benefiting from this year’s wheat but the bank.

It’s a sad story, but realistic rather than melodramatic. It’s about hard work and bad luck. Jinny knows they are not the only ones who have struggled. Some have had better luck than George who had sown “lightly when a good season happened along, or heavily when the rain kept off, and so had lost both ways” but some are also in George and Jinny’s predicament. The second part of the story concerns a Christmas party underwritten by one Christopher Tregear, who was chairman of the Great Western’s board of directors and “supposed to be one of the wealthiest men in the State”. Many farmers did business with Great Western, “thinking Tregear’s position in it would guarantee them from harsh treatment. But it had not.” Not for George, not for many others, and yet, here they all are, sees Jinny, dancing and singing with him, though “he was not a good friend of theirs.” Of course, we don’t get Tregear’s point of view, but there’s a sense that with the good season coming, compromises could have been reached.

This story is enjoyable on several fronts. Its realism means it conveys the facts without the histrionics that can sometimes distance readers. The realism also makes more effective the underlying theme that with more loyalty and less greed from the men with money, more farmers could survive the bad seasons. But it’s also enjoyable because of the tight, focused writing – from the sly irony behind the parasitic Christmas trees, and the names of the Gillards’ properties, Laughing Lakes and Everlasting, through the evocative descriptive writing, to the pointed repetition of the Gillards’ mantra “Crack hardy … I’m crackin'”.

“Christmas tree” is a story that hasn’t dated. It’s as relevant now as it was 100 years ago when it was first published – stoicism and dignity never go out of date, and we are still challenged by the role capitalist structures play in people’s lives and livelihoods. Another good read from Prichard – but that’s not surprising.

AWW Badge 2018Katharine Susannah Prichard
“Christmas tree”
First published: The Australasian, 20 December 1919
Also published in Potch and colour, Angus & Robertson, 1944
Available: Online at Trove

Apology: I posted this an hour or so ago with the wrong short story title, so have deleted that post, and republished with the right title, otherwise we’ll all get confused (including Google!)

Katharine Susannah Prichard, The bridge (#Review)

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Time for another post on a short story available online, but not, this time, from the Library of America. Indeed, it’s not even American, but one of our own – Katharine Susannah Prichard’s (KSP) “The bridge”. As far as I can tell it has been published at least three times: in 1917 in the Weekly Times Annual; in 1940 in The ABC Weekly, which is where I found it; and in 1944 in a collection titled Potch and colour, about which Prichard biographer Nathan Hobby has posted.

Writing about Potch and colour, Hobby says that

Katharine wrote some incredible short stories. I would go as far as to say that I think the form suited her better than the novel, even if she is not as remembered for it. This collection mainly includes stories originally published in journals after her first collection, Kiss On the Lips (1932), but the first appearance of some of them still needs to be established. One story, at least, is quite early – “The Bridge”; I found a newspaper copy of it on Trove from 1917 (unfortunately, it’s not one of her “incredible” stories…).

Hobby then identifies three short stories from the collection as particularly worth commenting on. The first is titled “The siren on Sandy’s Gap” and Hobby says it “manages to be both humorous and an astute critique of marriage.” It’s about Susan – the siren – and her refusal to do “what they [men] say.” The second, “Flight”, is about the forced removal of mixed-race Aboriginal children from their homes, and the third, “The Christmas tree”, is about banks failing wheatfarmers during the Depression.

Now, before I get to “The bridge” a little from KSP herself. In 1967, Angus and Robertson published Happiness: Selected short stories by Katharine Susannah Prichard. It includes two of Hobby’s favourite stories from Potch and colour, but not “The bridge”. Most interesting, though, is Prichard’s Foreword. She talks of her various inspirations, including Thomas Carlyle, and says that Guy de Maupassant’s “Contes Normands” gave her “the short story technique, which, more or less unconsciously” influenced her story telling.

Defending herself against a criticism of her “loose and slipshod English”, she says that she purposefully used “the living speech of our people … making the context of a sentence give the meaning of an unusual word or phrase.” She quotes a Professor Holme who praises her style as responding to the need of her characters, and Nettie Palmer’s statement that her writing “made us remember that there was nothing so well worth writing about as the loves, conflicts, and sufferings of our own people”. Including all this in her short Foreword suggests that she felt the need to defend herself. Anyhow, she concludes with:

All the stories were inspired by an intimate sympathy with men and women in the comedy and tragedy of their lives.

So, “The bridge.” It’s not, perhaps, “incredible”, but it is moving – and reminds me, a little, of some stories by Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. It’s a brief story about the building of a bridge in southeast Victoria by a young man called Bryant and his off-sider Charley. The main action concerns the opening of the bridge, and the wedding that takes place immediately afterwards.

The story commences with Bryant and Charley reminiscing about some of the challenges they faced in building the bridge. It had taken a year to build, and without any loss of life:

“They’ve got a notion in some parts of the world, a life’s got to go into a bridge if she’s to going to wear,” he [Bryant] mused. “I’m mighty glad no one’s been killed or hurt on our bridge, Charley … and she’s a good bridge … as good a little wooden bridge as there is in the country.”

However, a flood crisis had threatened the bridge. To save it, Bryant needed horses but local farmer Joe Gaines would not help out – until Bryant tried a bit of psychology involving a pretty young woman working in Gaines’ kitchen. He got his horses, but at a great cost to that young woman, unbeknownst to him but discovered by Charley later at the wedding.

It’s a tight little story – about single-minded ambition and sexual jealousy set against female generosity and sacrifice – with a sting in the tail that ironically comments on Bryant’s belief about his bridge. I can see the influence of Guy de Maupassant here – and Prichard’s interest in the lives of women. You can read it at the link below.

AWW Badge 2018Katharine Susannah Prichard
“The bridge”
First published: Weekly Times Annual, 3 November 1917
Also published in The ABC Weekly, 24 August 1940, and in the collection,
Potch and colour, Angus & Robertson, 1944
Available: Online at Trove

EM Forster, Howards End (#BookReview)

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EM Forster, Howards EndWhere to start? Like all great classics, EM Forster’s Howards End has so much to think and write about that it’s difficult to know where to focus, not to mention what new angle I could possibly add. Perhaps I’ll just start at the beginning – with its epigraph, “only connect…” That’s a concept that’s sure to get idealists like me in!

First, though – a quick plot summary. Howards End is a place – and it was left, unbeknownst to her, to a young woman named Margaret Schlegel. The novel tells the story of how this came about and what happened after the owner died and Margaret was not told the place was intended for her. But, of course, this is Forster, so the story is not a simple inheritance plot. In fact, almost none of the central plot tensions relate to this little Wilcox family secret. Instead, the novel explores the lives and values of two – well, three, really – families: the business-capitalist-oriented Wilcoxes; the more intellectual, idealistic, arts-and-culture-focused Schlegels; and the poor, down-on-their-luck Leonard Bast and his ex-prostitute wife. You can surely see in this, where the theme of connection might play out.

The novel is described as a “condition-of-England” novel. It is set in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Edwardian period, and England was changing. Money and progress (symbolised by things like the automobile) were replacing more traditional culture and values (symbolised by things like Howards End). It was a time when socialist ideas were being discussed, and of course, it was the time of the women’s suffrage movement. It was a time when society was moving increasingly from a division between the leisured class and the (mostly agricultural) working class to one between those with “their hands on the ropes” in business and industry and the urban workers who had little control over their destiny. (At least farm workers, traditionally, had homes, for example. Not so, the urban poor.)

All this Forster explores through the relationships that develop between the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels – and the poor Basts who get caught in the middle of their complex economic and moral conflicts. This is not to say that the book is all about overt conflict. Our characters are “civilised”. There is a lot of discussion, of presenting ideas and values. But, most are set in their ways and it will, in the end, take more than discussion to shift understanding on.

Only connect …

A BIT OF A SPOILER

This is a classic, and has also been adapted to film and television, so I’m not sure how careful I should be, but it’s hard not to say that by half way through the novel Mr Wilcox (father, and widower of Mrs Wilcox who had “left” Howards End to Margaret) proposes to Margaret. Margaret’s more romantic, uncompromising sister Helen is horrified, and when some unfavourable information regarding Mr Wilcox comes out, she deserts the scene while Margaret – doing her best to “connect” in her own way – learns to accommodate this new knowledge.

Even before this crisis, however, Margaret has expressed (to herself) the “only connect” mantra:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.

She wants to help Mr (Henry to her, now) Wilcox build within himself “the rainbow bridge” that will unify all the fragments of his soul, “the beast and the monk.” This is where Margaret and Helen differ. Helen has no time for the Mr Wilcoxes of the world, no time for business and industry, or for murky morals, while Margaret, who is “not a barren theorist”, makes the connections. She knows for example that Mr Wilcox had saved Howards End for Mrs Wilcox when it was all but lost, and she knows that their comfortable lives are underpinned by the industry that Helen so despises.

This difference between the siblings reminded of another writer – one whom EM Forster admired greatly – Jane Austen! Soon into the book, I felt there was a bit of Sense and sensibility going on here, a bit of sensible, practical Elinor versus romantic, idealistic, single-minded Marianne. Like Elinor, Margaret has a good heart, and deeply humane values, but she’s not blind to the world and how it works. Like Marianne, Helen sees only one way to live … and must learn something about compromise and moderation.

And so, the resolution, when it comes, sees Mr Wilcox and Helen coming to appreciate each other’s strengths, with Margaret’s more mature understanding prevailing. That said, the ending, while recognising the role of the Wilcoxes in the world, comes down firmly on the side of the importance of “the inner life”. It is only when Margaret finally makes a stand on the values most important to her – when she confronts Henry with his refusal to connect – that the rapprochements can begin.

Where to end?

I started this post by asking “Where to start”, and now I’m wondering “where to end?” Howards End is so rich – I took multiple notes and made many observations as I was reading it. I want to share them all, but that would be impractical (if not downright boring.)

So, I might just share a few things about the pleasure of reading this book. What makes a classic a classic – that is, a book that we keep re-reading – can be many things. Most important is that they have something new to say on each re-read and for each generation, that, in other words, their themes and/or understanding of humanity translate well into other times. This is certainly true of Howards End, given the philosophical and political schisms we are facing now.

But, we are, I think, only prepared to read these older books if their writing is also good – if they tell a good story, if their characters engage us, if their language and style woo us. Again, Howards End satisfies. The involving story of the Wilcoxes, Schlegels and Basts and the evocation of their individual characters get us in. These are why the book has been adapted for screen more than once. But it’s more than the story and characters that made this book such a wonderful read for me.

It’s also that it is so beautifully conceived and written. It starts with Helen’s letters from Howards End in which she describes the place and talks of Mrs Wilcox bringing in the hay, and ends with Helen, back at Howards End, but bringing in some hay herself this time. There is recurring imagery – such as frequent references to “grey” and “greyness” which convey the misery of impoverished lives, the impoverishment (of mind and spirit), and, more generally, the dullness of daily life. Here is Margaret near the end, reflecting on the importance of respecting and tolerating difference:

It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences – eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.

I also enjoyed EM Forster’s surprising, occasionally intrusive first person voice, and the sly irony that enhances, or complicates, the novel’s commentary. Some deeper analysis would be worth doing, in fact, on the narrative voice.

Howards End was my Reading Group’s classic for the year and while everyone enjoyed the writing, there were some understandable demurs, demurs which are comfortably explained or overlooked for some, but not for others. Aspects of the plot, for example, are improbable – but that’s not new in fiction. And some of the values and attitudes are problematic – particularly regarding the impoverished Basts, who seem more like pawns than real people. But, for me, these were not flaws. They marked the book as being of its time, and perhaps, of a time in Forster’s own life and thinking, but they do not destroy the integrity of the message, nor of Forster’s overall humanity.

Have you read – or re-read – Howard’s End? If so, did it speak to you?

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) posted on this back in 2016.

EM Forster
Howards End
Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1941 (1910 orig. ed.)
319pp.
ISBN: 140003118

Delicious descriptions: EM Forster and downsizing

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EM Forster, Howards EndMy reading group’s next book is EM Forster’s Howard’s end which I first read at university in 1973. (My lovely Penguin Modern Classics edition cost me all of $1.20.) It’s a delicious read and I’m falling in love with Forster all over again. My full post on it will go up some time next week, after I’ve finished it and book group is over. But, I can’t resist sharing this little section on moving house, because it feeds into all those discussions that have been happening over recent years – in the media and in my personal circles – about downsizing and decluttering.

THE Age of Property holds bitter moments even for a proprietor. When a move is imminent, furniture becomes ridiculous, and Margaret now lay awake at nights wondering where, where on earth they and all their belongings would be deposited in September next. Chairs, tables, pictures, books, that had rumbled down to them through the generations, must rumble forward again like a slide of rubbish to which she longed to give the final push, and send toppling into the sea. But there were all their father’s books — they never read them, but they were their father’s, and must be kept. There was the marble-topped chiffonier — their mother had set store by it, they could not remember why. Round every knob and cushion in the house sentiment gathered, a sentiment that was at times personal, but more often a faint piety to the dead, a prolongation of rites that might have ended at the grave.

It was absurd, if you came to think of it; Helen and Tibby came to think of it: Margaret was too busy with the house-agents. (Ch. 17, opening)

My first reaction was plus ça change. My second was how I love Forster’s language and writing, and how this paragraph (or so) shows exactly why I love the writing – the language, the voice and tone, the gentle satire and social commentary. And my third was that I must share it with you all.

Are any of you Forster fans?