20th century literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1937 in fiction

/ Whispering Gums / 30 Comments

Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time the year is 1937, and it runs from today, 15th to 21st April. As I’ve been doing for a while now, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

If the 1960s, from which our last “year” came, were exciting for many of us, the late 1930s were very different, particularly for those living in Europe. Of the 1930s, in general, Wikipedia writes that “the decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War”. For my purposes here, that just about says it all. It certainly provides a flavour for what concerned the major writers of the period. Realist fiction was still in force, and in Australia writers like Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Frank Dalby Davison, Eleanor Dark, and Katharine Susannah Prichard were expressing their ideas about social and economic injustice, for example. Many were pacifists, and many supported or worked for the trade union movement. It was, generally, an unsettled time, here and abroad. (By way of contrast, the best-selling book in the USA in 1937 was, apparently, Gone with the wind! But this was also the time of John Steinbeck, et al!)

I found books published across all forms, but as my focus here is Australian fiction, I’m just sharing a selection of novels published in 1937:

There were very few literary awards at the time, but the ALS Gold Medal went to Seaforth Mackenzie’s The young desire it. He is now among the least known of the authors listed above.

Writers born this year include novelist Colleen McCullough (died 2015) and political scientist and writer Don Aitkin (died 2022). I didn’t find many deaths, but novelist Catherine Martin (born, 1848) died this year.

Finally, also in 1937, the Commonwealth Literature Censorship Board replaced the Book Censorship Advisory Committee. It temporarily lifted the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses – only to re-apply it again in 1941 after pressure from church groups.

The state of the art

As always, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian literature, fiction in particular. In addition to references to specific books and events, what I found overall was concern about the state of Australian literature, along with discussions about causes and remedies. This is similar to 1936, which I wrote about in my Monday Musings for the 1936 Club, so I’ll try to supplement – rather than repeat – what found then.

One issue discussed several times through the year concerned the importance of a good critical culture, so that’s my focus for this post. The Telegraph (14 April) took up this issue, arguing that the “leading articles” papers publish at the end of the week, versus the reviews published during the week, make a “considered contribution” to “strengthening … literary values among the numerous readers who look to the daily Press for guidance among a vast and ever-changing array of books”. The article comments on the importance not of comparing (“grading”) writers, but of offering

a consideration of their absolute quality as writers. The practice of relative appraisal too often leads to confusion where the authors considered are admittedly worthy of critical study, but derive their literary strength from different sources. The wise newspaper critic of fiction — it is with fiction that for the moment we are primarily concerned — is he who endeavours to establish the qualities which explain his attraction to, or repulsion from, a writer and then evaluates those qualities by the degree and consistency of his own sensibility.

That’s a nice, clear description of criticism – to establish one’s criteria and then evaluate them.

The Telegraph makes the point that Australia is capable of producing good literature. It believes that while achievement is uneven across the different forms, there is “no cause for pessimism about the future of Australian literature”. Indeed, the article says that:

A country that has produced, among living novelists*, Henry Handel Richardson, Vance Palmer, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin, Helen Simpson, the Barnard-Eldershaw combination, and Brian Penton is not deficient in generative power …

And adds that more writers could be added to this list.

Meanwhile, “Norbar” (Dr Norman Bartlett) in The West Australian (7 August) also discussed critical culture, observing that

One of the great disadvantages under which those in Australia who are genuinely interested in national literature suffer is the lack of guidance. Other national literatures have reliable historical and critical signposts. 

His point was that in Great Britain, for example, “reputable literary periodicals, with critical traditions”, help readers make choices. Critics, he admits, “are often wrong, and commercialism has tainted the trade of criticism, but there is a tradition of judgment”. No-one, he says, who is interested in Virginia Woolf would buy books by romance novelist Ethel M. Dell. He then discusses the work of two critics, the American expert on Australia, C. Hartley Grattan, and the Australian, H.M. Green. Speaking of Grattan, Norbar makes an important point about the role of critics:

To accept him as a guide is not to accept his judgments, but he serves the purpose that competent introductions to English literature serve, by erecting signposts in the wilderness of letters.

In other words, it’s not the “absolute” lists of names that are important but the guide they provide to the literary landscape – and, thus, presumably, encouragement for debate.

The final two articles I’ll refer to come from The Age. The first (18 September) is ascribed to R.G. (presumably, the academic and founding editor of Southerly, Robert Guy Howarth), and the second (2 October) is a response from poet and critic, Furnley Maurice (Frank Wilmot), who takes offence at R.G.’s analysis of the state of Australian literature.

R.G. commences by arguing that:

Contrary to the opinions of some critics, Australian literature is not a dependent off-shoot of English literature, but is a vital entity in process of achieving expression of its individuality.

He has very clear opinions about the development of a truly Australian literature, much of which we would agree with now. He talks about its needing to pursue its own course, to be released “from the curb of nineteenth century influences, which have so long entrammelled imagination and held it in subservience to traditional forms and ideas”. While he names some writing that he believes is truly Australian, such as that of Henry Lawson, he believes things have stagnated:

Lack of canonical criticism is responsible to an unfortunate degree for this stagnation, because contemporary Australian criticism stands equivocally in the midst of several schools of thought. A false standard of values has been created by the persistent determination of many commentators to include everything written since Wentworth’s “Australasia” in the category of literature.

Unfortunately, as well as taking criticism to task, he also finds failings in Australian writers! Some have attempted to capture Australian experience, he says, but have failed, and he gives his reasons. These Maurice does not like, so he fights back:

One fact to bear in mind is that the shortcomings of our criticism are as great as the shortcomings of the writing, if not greater. The chief fault of the criticism is one that “R.G.” appears to share — that of making sweeping general statements and giving no particulars. Surely our writers have not all “failed because they lacked technical equipment,” because they “chose banal themes,” or because they “did not possess the basic culture necessary!” Such statements would suggest that “R.G.” has the bad national habit of forming definite opinions before he assembles the facts.

Take that, R.G! He then goes on to identify what he sees as quality Australian literature, and includes* Price Warung, Vance Palmer, Brent of Bin Bin (Miles Franklin), Martin Mills (Martin Boyd), M Barnard Eldershaw, Eleanor Dark and Capel Boake. He challenges R.G. to provide evidence for his statements, and then discusses “the facts” as he sees them, identifying the “difficulties” and “practical conditions” under which Australian writers “must work”.  

He is pleased though that ‘”R.G.” supports a proper national principle in writing even if he has not much to say for the work done to date’. 

While I think Maurice over-reacted somewhat, as R.G. makes some good sense, both writers have something useful to add to the debate, and if you are interested, the articles make good reading. Meanwhile, I will close here – but may very well write a second post next Monday.

* Links are to my post/s on these writers.

Sources

  • 1937 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, 1954, 1940 and 1962.

Do you plan to take part in the 1937 Club – and if so how?

Thomas King, Borders (#Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

Thomas King’s “Borders” is the eleventh of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. Like the previous story by Duane Niatum, it was also written in the 1990s.

Thomas King

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides some basic information about King, but I am supplementing that with information from Wikipedia which introduces him as an “American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations”. He was born in California in 1943, and “self-identifies as being of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent”. He has written novels, children’s books, and short stories. 

King studied in Californian schools and universities, before earning his PhD at the University of Utah. Between his various degrees, he worked in many jobs, including spending three years in New Zealand. He moved to Canada in 1980, where he worked as an academic until he retired.

In terms of his First Nations activity, our main interest here, Wikipedia says that “his 1986 PhD dissertation was on Native American studies, one of the earliest works to explore the oral storytelling tradition as literature”. He is committed to a wide range of issues concerning First Nations rights, prospects and culture, but most relevant to his story, “Borders”, is a statement Wikipedia shares from his book, The inconvenient Indian:

“The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people”.

“Borders”

According to Blaisdell, “Borders” appears in King’s 1993 short story collection, One good story, that one, which was a best-seller in Canada. “Borders” is one of those frequently anthologised stories, apparently, which doesn’t surprise me because it is a ripper. From what I’ve read about King’s writing, “Borders” feels typical of his approach, with its conversational style and use of humour to convey a serious message. King adapted this story into a teleplay for a CBC anthology drama series, and it has also, recently, been turned into a graphic novel for a younger readers.

The narrative comprises two storylines which are alternated with each other. It is told first person through the eyes of a young boy. One storyline concerns his much older sister, Laetitia, leaving home at the age of 17 to live in Salt Lake City, Utah, while the other tells of a trip he makes with his mother some five or so years later to visit this sister. The crux of the story, though, lies in what happens at the US-Canada border. Asked to give her “citizenship”, the mother insists “Blackfoot” and is denied entry. She refuses to offer anything else. As a result, she and her son get caught in a no-man’s land when, attempting to return to Canada, the same response to the same question results in her being refused entry there too. As one of the border officials tries to explain to her, “it’s a legal technicality, that’s all”.

Of course, that’s not all. Blackfoot people ranged across the great northwest of America in what is now known as America and Canada. For our narrator’s mother, that land is her “citizenship”, not that she is American or Canadian, and she will not back down.

From the opening, the mother is established as sensible, no-nonsense. She doesn’t want Laetitia to go to Utah, and she doesn’t give in easily, pointing out the negatives right until they leave her at the border. But Laetitia will go and her mother is eventually proud of her, because she hadn’t “gone floating after some man like a balloon on a string” nor had she “snuck out of the house … to chase rainbows down alleys. And she hadn’t been pregnant.”

We first meet the border, as mentioned above, when the mother and son (our narrator) take Laetitia there, from where she’ll get a bus to Salt Lake City. We see the border, but mother and son don’t attempt to cross it at this point. The writing, at this early point, captures the obstinacy and strength in both mother and daughter, alongside the love between them::

The wind had come up and it blew Laetitia’s hair across her face. Mum reached out and pulled the strands out of Laetitia’s eyes, and Laetitia let her.

“Laetitia let her”. Conveys so much, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, it’s a few years later, when mother and son set off to visit Laetitia that the fun starts. Our narrator sets it up beautifully, his “mom” packing food for the trip, while he plaintively hopes they can “stop at one of those restaurants too, right?” The pacing of the border conversations is perfect. We chuckle, but we see the point too. When the mother gives up trying to get into the USA, and tries to return to Canada, the humour continues. The Canadian border guard, after some friendly small talk, asks

“Where are you coming from?”
“Standoff”.
“Is that in Montana?”
“No.”
“Where are you going?”
“Standoff.”
The woman’s name was Carol and I don’t guess she was any older than Laetitia. “Wow, you both Canadians?”
“Blackfoot.”

And it starts again. It’s just delicious. “Mom” is polite, but also determined to make her point and not. give. in. There are no histrionics, there’s no violence. Just polite behaviour on all sides. (But, the description of the few days they spend in this limbo region, visiting the duty free shop and sleeping in the car, did remind me of that Kath and Kim episode when Kath and Kel spend their honeymoon at the airport.)

The language is direct and spare, told from a pre-teen’s point of view. He reports rather than comments, but in that reportage we see the truth – of the strength of the mother’s identity and determination to preserve it, and of her wisdom in dealing with her daughter.

Hachette’s promo for the graphic novel version describes it as resonating “with themes of identity, justice, and belonging”. It is exactly that. I imagine the graphic novel is a winner, because the short story sure is.

Thomas King
“Borders” (orig. pub. 1991)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 84-94
ISBN: 9780486490953

Monday musings on Australian literature: The mysterious 6×8

/ Whispering Gums / 33 Comments

In a long past Monday Musings I mentioned the names of several people who had commented on the state of Australian literature. Many of these were pseudonyms, including the intriguingly named “6×8”. I decided to dig further, and back in 2015, I pretty quickly discovered that his “real” name was Dick Holt. (It’s not always easy to track down pseudonyms used in the newspapers.)

First published, The Bulletin, 29 October 1898, from Middlemiss

I didn’t find a lot about him back then – besides his own writings – but from what I could gather, I ascertained that Dick Holt had travelled the outback doing charcoal drawings and writing articles for the Bulletin and other journals and newspapers of the time. I presume his “6×8″ pseudonym refers to the old (non-metric) picture size of 6″ x 8”, and the fact that he included drawings in his articles. Presumably there’s a metaphorical layer to this pseudonym, too, in that his stories provided little windows on his world.

In the 1890s, according to a 1934-written reminiscence by “Stockwhip”, Holt travelled with Henry Lawson. “Stockwhip” describes him as ‘the jocular writer and “charcoal” artist, Dick Holt” and says he was “a well-known writer to the Sydney Bulletin and Western Herald of Bourke”. He had his own newspaper column “On the Wallaby”. This title references the phrase “on the wallaby track”, which is Australian slang for travelling from place to place looking for work, which is exactly what he and Lawson were doing in Stockwhip’s anecdote. His columns, at least those I’ve seen, ran anywhere from 1500 to 3000 words, and tended to comprise a collection of anecdotes.

I haven’t found a biography for him – he doesn’t appear in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, for example – but returning to my old draft post this week in order to actually post it, I found that AustLit has documented him a little more. They give him as Richard Holt (a.k.a. Dick Holt, and also writing as 6 x 8), and say that he “wrote a weekly column called ‘On the Wallaby’ in the North Queensland Register from January 1899 to August 1920″. So, over twenty years. AustLit says he was born in 1868, and died ca. 1923 in Tasmania (though a reference to him in February 1923 said he was now “living near Melbourne”.) Anyhow, this roughly accords with my research, which had uncovered that he had died by the mid 1920s. The reference came from columnist, Bill Bowyang (pseudonym of Alexander Vindex Vennard, 1884-1947), who wrote the following little anecdote about him in 1926 in his column, “On the track”:

It was the late Dick Holt (‘6×8’) of ‘On the Wallaby’ fame in the ‘N.Q. Register’ who once stated that when he visited a bush township he always gazed into the jail yard to see if there was a load of wood within. If the wood was there it was a certainty that the police would be searching for some inebriated individual to use the axe or crosscut. The sight of that wood was sufficient for Dick Holt, and without wasting any time he always passed on to another town where there was no lone wood piled up in the jail yard.

Holt was, it seems, a character – but one of his time. I’ve only read a tiny proportion of his voluminous output, much of which is in a jocular vein. (Indeed, a 1923 article, identifying Bill Bowyang as his successor, describes them as writing “racy bush yarns”.)

In the post that inspired this one, I shared that “6×8” had criticised Australian literature as being characterised by too much exaggeration of characters and incidents, to which another had replied that the problem was not this sort of exaggeration but a “diseased hankering after the abnormal”. Anyhow, “6×8” clearly didn’t think he was exaggerating character and incident – and perhaps not. But he did like to put a humorous spin on his wanderings about the bush, commenting on anything from a terrible Australian stamp design to what you can read from the newspaper in which the butcher has wrapped your meat. He also saw the poverty that often attended life in the “backblox” noting that country people didn’t like to pay newspaper subscriptions (which affected him), school masters, and parsons. He frequently makes comments like “do these people expect parsons [or whomever] to live without food and clothes?”

However, there’s a problematic side too. Given he’s an outback “wallabist”, he comes across many characters, including non-white Australians. He identifies First Nations Australians with terms like “black fellows” or “dusky brethren” or “dark son of the forest” or, even, “n****r”, and the Chinese are “chows”. In one instance, when listing people of Asian and Islander origins, he adds “and other colored abominations”. I looked for anything that suggested an awareness of the racism implicit in these terms, but I didn’t see it. This makes distressing reading, but for contemporary readers it’s instructive about the attitudes of the day to those they saw as other. Also, by mentioning these “others”, he also tells us about the people who populated Australia and something about their relationships with each other, which I’d argue is better than rendering them invisible.

You can see, perhaps, why I’ve taken a while to write this post, but in the end I thought there was value. Hope you agree …

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 3, Marion Simons

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

Back in 2021, I started a Monday Musings sub-series on forgotten Australian writers, but to date have only written on two – Helen Simpson and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop. I have been intending to get back to it and with this year’s slight revamp of Elizabeth Lhuede’s and my contributions to the Australian Women Writers blog, now is the time. In the revamp, Elizabeth and I are going to focus on sharing public domain works published in 1924 – or written by writers who died in 1924. My first contribution was by Marion Simons.

This post expands on that blog post – but doesn’t include the piece written by Simons, a short column titled “To the old gumtree”, that I included there. To see that, please go to AWW. It is a short piece and worth reading!

The more we research Australia’s earlier women writers, the more we become aware of just how many used pseudonyms – sometimes more than one. Marion Simons was one such. Using pseudonyms was, as we know, not uncommon for women. Often it was to hide their gender, so they would be published and/or read, or to protect themselves from criticism for stepping outside the expectations of their gender and daring to write in the public domain. Sometimes, though, writers used pseudonyms – still do, in fact – to keep their different styles of writing separate. Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about Marion Simons, so we can’t be sure of her motivation. However, she did use several pseudonyms, and some at least seem to have been used to differentiate different writing personas.

Marion Simons

So, who was Marion Simons? Most of what I’ve found has come from the (partly paywalled) AustLit database, and from Trove, mostly from pieces by her and but I did also find the occasional brief reference to her. The fourth of seven children, Simons was born in 1883 in Crystal Brook, South Australia, and spent her childhood years there and in Port Germein and Port Pirie. She never married, and when she died in 1952, she was living with one of her brothers in Mile End, a suburb of Adelaide.

It’s difficult to know exactly when or how her writing career started. AustLit, which describes her as a freelance radio script writer and journalist, says that she wrote radio plays for school broadcasts for the ABC between 1939 and 1949, including adaptations of classics. For these, AustLit says, she used her birth name, “Marion Simons”, but they add that she also wrote short stories and articles under the pseudonym “Stella Hope” and radio talks as “Lady Tulliver” (a reference, it seems, to George Eliot’s Milll on the Floss character, Maggie Tulliver). She used other pseudonyms too, including Quilp, Robin Adair and Nardoo. These were difficult to research, “Quilp” and “Nardoo”, for example, being used by more than one writer.

Book cover

Simons was clearly versatile – she probably had to be to make a living as a writer – as she also wrote plays for the theatre, including  “Casablanca”, which won the 1932 Repertory Prize, and a small 1941-published book, The Innkeeper’s wife, that was based on the Thomas Hardy poem “The oxen”. Adelaide’s News (22 November 1941), reported that this story, then unpublished, won first prize in a short story competition conducted by the South Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. (Read it online at the State Library of Victoria). It’s not clear exactly when she moved to Adelaide, but from Trove, I’d day she was there by the early 1930s, if not in the 1920s. Simons was active in Adelaide’s literary society, with various Trove articles dated from the 1930s to the 1950s reporting her being on the Poetry Society’s Council, the last librarian of the University Shakespeare Society (before it folded), Vice-President of the Adelaide Dickens Fellowship, and President of the Y.M.C.A. Dinner Club which would feature speakers at their dinners.

In addition to revealing her involvement in the above organisations, Trove also told me that she was cousin to one J.J. Simons. She may not appear in Wikipedia, but he does. He was born in Clare, South Australia, in 1882, and, says Wikipedia, “was an Australian businessman and politician, best known for establishing the Young Australia League” (in 1905), which started as a football league but, says Wikipedia, “diversified to include literature, debating, band music, sport and theatrical performances, as well as outdoor pursuits such as hiking and camping”. It still exists. He was also active in publishing, but all this was in Western Australia where he moved in 1896, and I am digressing a bit too much now, so back to Marion. (You can read about him at ADB, if you are interested.)

Given Simons’ use of pseudonyms, it’s difficult to identify her earliest writings. However, Port Pirie’s Recorder (10 November 1934) says that she wrote as “Quilp” while living in Port Pirie, and I found a “Quilp” writing the “Comment and Criticism” columns in the Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail of 1906. I believe this is Simons because this “Quilp” mentions not having been long out of school. (I found some earlier columns by a “Quilp” in a Port Augusta paper but they were dated 1902 when Simons was 19 and they seem to have been by an older man.) In late 1907, “Quilp” seemed to be also writing a column “Odds and Ends from the Oracle” in the Quorn Mercury and the Petersburg Times. A letter to the editor, referencing one of “Quilp’s” columns, describes “Quilp” as “your comic writer”. Certainly “Quilp” used a humorous tone used for reporting local events and activities, much as you find in modern columnists. Take for example this from her “Comment and Criticism” column in the Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail (of 5 December 1906):

I went to a garden fete the other day and helped to damage a very nice garden…

“Quilp” was also referenced in another (1907) report as delivering a paper on David Copperfield to Port Pirie’s St Barnabas Literary Society.

The “Stella Hope” by-line appeared in South Australian newspapers in the early 1920s. These pieces included general interest columns, also delivered with a touch of humour, and short stories. The first piece I found was “February the Fourteenth, St Valentine’s Day” in The Journal (17 February 1923).

My first in this series were novelists, which Marion Simons was not, but she was prolific enough across a number of forms to make her worth including here. I’d love to know more about her life but, despite her active involvement in Adelaide’s literary community, I have not yet located an obituary. I’ll keep looking though.

Duane Niatum, Crow’s sun (#Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Duane Niatum’s “Crow’s sun” is the tenth story of fourteen in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, and moves us into the 1990s, where we will remain for the next two stories before ending up in the early 2000s.

Duane Niatum

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides more information about Niatum than he does for some of the writers, but I am supplementing that with information from Wikipedia and the Poetry Foundation. Variously described as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist and editor, Niatum was born in 1938 in Seattle, Washington, to a Klallam (Salish) mother and Italian-American father. After his parents divorced when he was just 4, he spent a lot of time with his maternal Klallam grandfather, from whom he learnt tribal ways and oral traditions. He is an enrolled member of the Klallam Tribe (Jamestown Band).

At 17, Niatum enlisted in the United States Navy, and served in Japan. On leaving the Navy, he did his B.A. in English, at the University of Washington, studying with poets, Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop. He then earned his M.A. at Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan.

Poetry was his main love, it seems. Wikipedia states that he “established himself as one of the most influential promoters of Native American poetry”. He edited a Native American author series at Harper & Row Publishers, producing two “influential anthologies”. He has published essays on Native American literature, and his poetry has been translated into many languages.

The Poetry Foundation says that his “writing is deeply connected with the Northwest coast landscape, its mountains, forests, water and creatures” and that “the legends and traditions of his ancestors help shape and animate his poetry”. However, it is a short story, of course, that Blaisdell has chosen for his anthology.

“Crow’s sun”

I’ve now read a couple of Niatum’s poems at Poetry Foundation, but none that specifically illuminate this story. “Crow’s sun” presumably draws from his experience in the Navy as it deals with a young sailor named Thomas sentenced to 30-days in the brig. I’m not saying that the story is autobiographical. It may be – I don’t know – but my point is that his Naval experience, and its treatment of people of colour, is sure to have informed the story.

The narrative takes place over one day. It starts with Thomas, just one year into his service, waiting to be taken to the brig and ends with him behind bars. Not a lot of action, in other words, but a lot goes on. This is a story about systemic racism. Thomas, we learn, had let his mother and step-father talk him into enlisting under-age, a common story for youths of colour with limited opportunities. In his case, he’d already been kicked out of home after he’d “stopped his step-father from beating up his mother in a drunken brawl”.

Once in the Navy, things don’t go well. Thomas “cannot fathom why sailors 17 to 70 live in some dream of future glory, which is the oldest myth of the military”. We are not told what Thomas has done, but it appears, from Shore Patrolman Cook’s advice as he delivers Thomas to the brig, that Thomas has been treated harshly:

“This hole’ll be your home for thirty days, Thomas. And buddy, you’d better watch your mouth in this joint. Do your time with your trap shut, until you’re running free. Don’t act the wise-guy. I don’t like your face, Thomas, but I don’t think those hicks from the base were right. You’re a punk, but who isn’t at your age. They went too far. I believe burning a man at the stake’s too much like what like what I left in Alabama.”

This surprises Thomas, because Cook, who “is a spit and polish sailor married to the idea that blind obedience to orders is the only law”, has never really liked him. His advice, then, means something, and Thomas thanks him for it. The rest of the story tells of his admission interview with the Brig Warden – and we get the full measure of the racism he is likely to experience. The Warden aggressively violently enforces his will. He calls Thomas, insultingly and erroneously at that, a “wetback”. He ridicules Thomas’ name insisting it should be “Pancho Villa or Willy Garcia”. I don’t need to continue because you’ve surely seen or read enough scenes like this to get the gist.

What makes this story is how Thomas handles the situation, which is to call on the wisdom of his grandfather. At the first sign of the Warden’s aggression:

The muscles in Thomas’ face tighten; his eyes thicken; narrow into tiny moons peering from behind a shield of fern. He sways slightly; stiffens his whole body, not sure what to expect from the man closing in. Grandson to Cedar Crow, Thomas feels his fingers change to claws, to a wing of thrashing spirit flying wildly inside his ear. (Be calm and steady now. This man could be your enemy. Know his every move. Break him like a twig if he tries to harm you. Be the Thunderbird of our song. I am Crow, your father.)

From here on, Thomas draws on his grandfather’s wisdom to assess and manage the situation. There is violence but he sees death is not on the cards. We learn that many Klallam people had lost faith in their beliefs and practices, but not Thomas. His late grandfather, “the quiet man of family, sea and forest had counselled him well”. From here to the end, where we leave Thomas standing in his cell, we observe him watching and responding to the Warden and drawing on his spirit wisdom.

It’s a strong story about the power and value of knowing your culture.

Duane Niatum
“Crow’s sun” (orig. pub. 1991)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 75-83
ISBN: 9780486490953

Monday musings on Australian literature: on 1923: 7, Humour

/ Whispering Gums / 25 Comments

With 1923 nearly over, I’m running out of time to share more of the thoughts and ideas I found regarding Australian literature in 1923 from Trove. This post, I thought to share some of the ideas expressed about humour in Australian literature.

Humour wasn’t always specifically mentioned in 1923 as being a feature of Australian literature, but was mentioned enough to suggest that some, at least, appreciated its use.

The most frequent mention I found concerned, Steele Rudd, famous for the Dad and Dave stories. He is praised for using humour to make interesting and enjoyable the truths he has to tell about Australian lives. The Queensland Times (2 May) introduced Rudd’s new book, On Emu Creek, and describes it as giving “full play to his whimsical humour, his knowledge of the rural dwellers, and his sympathy with their struggles”. Melbourne’s The Age (5 May) is more measured, but seems also to like the humour, describing it as “an agreeable story, without any affectation of style, and containing points of humor”.

Others, though, are a little less enamoured, with various reviewers qualifying their approval. One of these is J.Penn, writing in Adelaide’s The Register (19 May). There is some satire, he says,

But the main idea of nearly every chapter is someone being knocked over. It is difficult to think of any other humourist who would not seek to find humorous terms in which to describe intendedly humorous incidents. But Steele Rudd is firmly convinced that his readers will find sufficient fun in the mere fact of some one being humiliated or hurt, without the author’s having to worry to hunt for words.

Presumed Public Domain, from the NLA

Ouch … This is not to say that J.Penn doesn’t like humour. He clearly likes satire. And, he critiques another 1923 literary endeavour for lacking “gaiety”. It was a literary magazine titled Vision: A Literary Quarterly, that was edited by Frank C Johnson (comic book and pulp magazine publisher), Jack Lindsay (writer and son of Norman Lindsay), and Kenneth Slessor (poet). The quarterly, which only lasted 4 issues, aimed, says AustLit, “to usher in an Australian renaissance to bolster the literary and artistic traditions rejected by European modernists”, but they also wanted to “invigorate an Australian culture they claimed was stifled by the regressive provincialism of publications such as the Bulletin“. 

Anti-modernist in ethos, Vision, continues AustLit, was influenced by “Norman Lindsay’s principles of beauty, passion, youth, vitality, sexuality and courage” and “consistently provided readers with potentially offensive content”. Penn was thoughtful about the first issue:

It is a welcome guest, as giving outlet for a lot of good work which might not find a fair chance elsewhere. But it has three faults, one of outlook, two of detail. Contemplation of sex matters is not the only way to brighten life; yet they constitute quite four-fifths of this opening number.

Not only that, but, he says, ‘while it would seem difficult to be heavy, even “stodgy,” on matters of sex, that feat has been accomplished here’. Indeed, it has “no spark of gaiety”, which is exactly what Norman Lindsay, in the same issue, accuses James Joyce of. (Excuse the prepositional ending!) However, not all of Vision is like this:

The poetry in this volume, by Kenneth Slessor and others, has much of the desired element of gaiety; and a page of brief quotations from modern writers in other countries, with satirical footnotes, is delightful. There remain the pictures. These are as bright and gay as could be wished—a riot of triumphant nudity, in which Norman Lindsay in particular finds full opportunity.

Overall, he feels that “with some judicious editing, this endeavour to brighten Australia should have at any rate an artistic success”. (Also, he does like Jack Lindsay’s “valuable essay … on Australian poetry and nationalism, with a theory that we must get away from shearers and horses”.) 

A very different magazine is one praised for its cheerfulness, Aussie. It ran from 1918 to 1931, and had various subtitles, The Cheerful Monthly, The National Monthly, and The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine. I had not heard of it before, but AustLit once again came to my rescue. Created for soldiers in Europe, most of its early contents came from them, and comprised, says AustLit, “jokes, anecdotes, poems and drawings” which reflected “the character (most likely censored) of the Australian soldier in World War One”. In 1920, it was revived as a civilian magazine, but “the humour … was maintained”. Now, though, its contributors were established writers and artists, like AG Stephens, Myra Morris, and Roderic Quinn. I found a review of a 1923 issue in The Armidale Chronicle (19 September). It is unfailingly positive, telling its readers that “every page of Aussie breathes cheerfulness, and there is not a joke, a picture, or a story that fails to portray some phase of Australasian humor”. I wish it described what it meant by “Australasian humor” but the word it uses most is “cheerfulness”. This perhaps makes sense, given AustLit’s assessment that “it maintained its position between political extremes, addressing the views of a predominantly middle-class audience”. 

Humour is also mentioned reviews of books for children, such as The sunshine family, by Ethel Turner and her daughter Jean Curlewis. It is described in the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate (14 December) as having “rare good humour”, but is that unusual for a book for children?

The descriptions of the 100 books chosen by AG Stevens for Canada, that I wrote about earlier this year, include several references to humour – in fiction, such as EG Dyson’s 1906 Factory ‘ands, with its “brilliant satirical humour”; in children’s books, like C Lloyd’s 1921 The house of just fancy, whose pictures “have quaint loving humour”; and in much of the poetry, including JP Bourke’s 1915 Off the bluebush, which contains “verses of sardonic humour”.

Humour is such a tricky thing – from the sort of situational humour in Rudd’s On Emu Creek, through the apparent “cheerfulness” of Aussie, to the more satirical humour liked by J.Penn – but unfortunately, most of the references I found don’t analyse it in much detail. I will keep an eye out as we go through the years.

Meanwhile, do you like humour in your reading? And if so, what do you like most?

Other posts in the series: 1. Bookstall Co (update); 2. Platypus Series; 3 & 4. Austra-Zealand’s best books and Canada (1) and (2); 5. Novels and their subjects; 6. A postal controversy

Margaret Atwood, The Labrador fiasco (#Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

Although I am an Atwood fan from way back, I haven’t, to date, taken part in Marcie’s (Buried in Print) MARM (Margaret Atwood Reading Month) event. But I promised her I would this month, albeit with just one little short story probably, this one. I have had The Labrador fiasco on my “little book” TBR shelf since it was produced as a Bloomsbury Quid back in the 1996. I have no idea why I have not read all my little books, but, there you go!

Most of you will know Margaret Atwood (b. 1939). I read several of her books before blogging – including her dystopian novel, The handmaid’s tale; her historical fiction novels, Alias Grace and The blind assassin; and her more contemporary novels Cat’s eye and The robber bride – and I have more on my TBR. But, I have only reviewed her twice here, her novella, The Penelopiad (my review), and her recent poetry collection, Dearly (my review). Now, I bring you a short story. This woman is versatile.

As far as I can tell, “The Labrador fiasco” was first published in this edition. Many of my “little books” comprise previously published short prose works, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here. I have three other Bloomsbury Quids, two of which were previously published, with the other, Nadine Gordimer’s Harald, Claudia and the son Duncan (my review), also seeming to have been first published as a Quid. Interesting, but not relevant to my discussion of Atwood’s story, so let’s move on. The Quids, though, are gorgeous little books.

“The Labrador fiasco” is a “story-within-a-story” story. (Ha!) The framing story concerns the narrator and her aging father and mother. (The narrator’s sex is not provided, but let’s go with female as Atwood is female.) The father, in particular, is declining, having experienced a stroke six years before the story’s opening. It is told first person by the daughter, who regularly visits her parents.

The story within comes from Dillon Wallace’s The lure of the Labrador wild, published in 1905. Wallace was, says Wikipedia, “an American lawyer, outdoorsman, author of non-fiction, fiction and magazine articles” and this, his first book, was a bestseller. It tells of an exploratory trip through Labrador undertaken by Wallace and a man called Leonidas Hubbard, with their Cree Indian guide, George. The Cree bit is important as the Cree are not from the region they were travelling in. Anyhow, the aim was to explore a part of Labrador that hadn’t been explored by Europeans, with Hubbard wanting to “make his name”. However, as Wikipedia (and Atwood’s story) explains, they took the wrong river from the start, with tragic consequences.

Atwood’s story opens with:

It’s October; but which October? One of those Octobers, with quick intensities of light, their diminuendos, their red and orange leaves. My father is sitting in his armchair by the fire. He has on his black and white checked dressing gown, over his other clothes, and his old leather slippers, with his feet, propped up on a hassock. Therefore it must be evening.

There’s so much going on here, besides the gorgeously structure sentences. We are immediately put on the back foot with “which October”, and “it must be evening”, but at least the father is very much present. The uncertainty suggests that the story is being told from a later time. Whichever October it is, however, it is autumn – or fall – and that means the season of decline. Within a couple of paragraphs, we learn of the father’s stroke, and know he is declining. But, the question, “which October”, also hints at the October in the Wallace-Hubbard story when things have really started to sour – because not only is it cold of course, but our explorers have taken the wrong route and are running out of supplies.

This is the set up. As the story progresses, the narrator’s father, who was an experienced outdoorsman himself in his day, provides a running commentary on the explorers, with the narrator adding her own layer. “They took the wrong supplies”, the father says, pleased because he would have known what to take. However, our narrator wonders “what supplies could they have taken other than the wrong ones” … “No freeze-drying then” or “nylon vests”, for example.

“harsh and unmarked and jumbled”

What Margaret Atwood does in this story, then, is parallel the deterioration in the condition of the explorers as their expedition goes awry, with the narrator’s father’s decline as he ages. The explorers leave things behind, their feet suffer because they don’t have effective footwear. The father leaves hobbies behind, and says his feet are too sore to walk. The father thinks he would have done the expedition better, but he faces his own “forest” and in fact, like the explorers, he and his supporters are not fully equipped to deal with it.

And so it goes. In under 40 (very small) pages, Atwood combines commentary on a failed (colonial) expedition, conveying the poor planning and hubris of those involved, with a tender family story of an adult child and mother coping with a failing father. To do this she calls on her obvious love and knowledge of Canada’s history and “wilderness” (a contested term now, I know), and her keen interest in humans and how our lives play out.

We are all explorers, I think Atwood is saying, and the way, at least some of the time, can be “harsh and unmarked and jumbled”. It takes all our energy to traverse it. Good planning and the help of others can ease the way, but in the end, we each have to do it on our own. A clear-eyed, clever and tight story with an ending that encompasses genuine warmth with an acceptance of life’s realities. Beautiful.

Read for MARM 2023

Margaret Atwood
“The Labrador fiasco”
London: Bloomsbury, 1996 (A Bloomsbury Quid)
64pp.
ISBN: 9780747528890
Available online at Independent, 1996

Patrick Modiano, Sundays in August (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments

Disappointingly, I ended up missing my bookgroup’s discussion of the book I had encouraged us to read, Sundays in August by 2014 Nobel prize-winner Patrick Modiano. I have no-one else to blame but myself, since I did the schedule and should have remembered that I was going to be in Hobart for my brother’s exhibition. C’est la vie.

I recommended this book for a couple of reasons, one being high praise from Kim (Reading Matters) and the other being to include translated fiction in our reading diet. Also, the book intrigued me. Kim described it as a “jewel heist”, albeit qualified by “with a difference”. That seemed unusual subject matter for a Nobel prize-winner. Having now read it, however, I see that he is a skilful writer. I loved reading it. But the subject matter?

According to Wikipedia, Modiano (b. 1945) is “a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction”. He has published over 40 books, and in them, Wikipedia continues, has “used his fascination with the human experience of World War II in France to examine individual and collective identities, responsibilities, loyalties, memory, and loss. Because of his obsession with the past, he was sometimes compared to Marcel Proust”. I’m not sure about the “was” here, as he is still alive. Anyhow, it is this obsession with the past, with its associated exploration of memory and loss, that made Sundays in August (Dimanches d’août) so fascinating. I am drawn to stories about the past that are told in well-controlled melancholy tones, stories that involve a later reflection on what had happened and the implications for the protagonist’s present. (By the way, this does not appear to be one of Modiano’s autofiction works.)

The novella is set in Nice, and starts with a first person narrator (identified partway through the book as Jean) spotting someone he’d known seven years ago. The man is Villecourt, and he is selling leather goods in the market. Neither man, in fact, has done well in the years since they’d met. Both are alone, and not living the apparently secure lives they had been. We quickly realise that this is not a case of old acquaintances happily re-uniting. Instead, there is palpable tension. After they meet for a drink, Jean makes clear he wants nothing more to do with Villecourt, while Villecourt tries to keep the contact going. He does little to ingratiate himself, however, reminding Jean that he, Villecourt, was the only man someone called Sylvia had loved. He also says that he and Sylvia had not been married. Why had she lied to him about that, Jean thinks to himself?

In this way, in the first few pages, we are drawn into a mystery involving these three. Soon after, the aforementioned jewel – a diamond, with a “long and bloody history”, called the Southern Cross – is introduced, and we learn that Jean and Sylvia had been on a mission to sell it. Then, a little further down the track we meet the mysterious Neals, who seem to live in a grand home named Château Azur, and who all too soon offer to buy the diamond.

It sounds like a simple story involving a love triangle and a heist, but in fact, it is a complex crime story in which it behoves readers to attend carefully for hints and clues about what’s really going on. These are conveyed through the narrative, as Jean tries to “rejoin the invisible threads”, and through gorgeously written imagery that creates an oppressive, foreboding atmosphere, occasionally lightened by the Riviera’s bright sun, and blue skies and water.

“blurred … dissolving”

As we read, the ground constantly shifts beneath our feet. People appear and disappear, and sometimes shapeshift. Virgil Neal, for example, sounds American, then he doesn’t, then he does again, before finally turning out to be someone else. Cars and buildings, too, aren’t always what they seem. Nonetheless, through cleverly managed flashbacks and foreshadowings, we gradually start to see – or, think we see – the set-up. It is all complicated, however, by that tricky beast, memory. Jean writes:

I don’t know anymore whether we met the Neals before or after Villecourt arrived in Nice. I have searched my memory, looking for points of reference, but am unable to sort out the two events. Anyway, there’s no such thing as “events.” Ever. It’s a false term, suggesting something definitive, spectacular, brutal. In fact it all happened gently, imperceptibly, like the slow weaving of a design into a carpet…

Soon after this reference to meeting the Neals, Jean says

The word “meet” doesn’t apply, any more than “event.” We didn’t meet the Neals. They slipped into our net.

Who slipped into whose net is the question. And how many nets were there? Jean will probably never know it all, but by the end he’d learnt that “our anxiety didn’t come from our contact with that cold stone with glints of blue – it came from life itself”.

Typical for a novella, the book is tightly written. Every word counts, and is worth noticing. I loved, for example, that Jean was a photographer who now can’t seem to remember the necessary details, and that Sylvia’s last name is (ironically?) Heureux. These little details aren’t casual, and make us readers think and question at every step, as we are alternately unsettled then proffered glimmers of light.

Sundays in August is an accessible, noir-ish tale about loss and the emptiness that accompanies it. It explores life’s shadows and uncertainties, shows how innocence can be so easily taken advantage of, and it doesn’t wrap everything up neatly, leaving us to ponder the possibilities. I won’t spoil the ending, but it is spot on, and explains, at last, the title, leaving us on a little up despite it all. I’ll be reading more Modiano, if I can.

POSTSCRIPT: I believe we know the main culprit in it all, but the question is, who else was in on it and who else was taken in. It would take more reads to work through that, but in the end I think we can’t ever know it all because we can only know what Jean saw and tells us.

Read for Novellas in November.

Patrick Modiano
Sundays in August
Translated from the French by Damion Searls
New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2017 (Orig. French pub. 1986)
156pp.
ISBN: 9780300223330 (Read on Kindle)

Hal Porter, Francis Silver (#Review, #1962 Club)

/ Whispering Gums / 27 Comments

Introducing my first review for the 1962 Year Club – Shirley Hazzard’s “The picnic” – I said I had read two short stories and might post on the second one. I am doing so now but, stupidly, I left the book back in Canberra and here I am in Melbourne, so my post will be limited, and without the usual quotes to convey Porter’s writing style. But, it was this, or not at all, because by the time we return home, I will be onto other things. I am cross though, because Kerryn Goldsworthy did write a useful introduction, which, if I remember correctly, placed Porter as part of a change in short story writing from the more realist school that had held on strongly since Lawson.

Like Hazzard’s story, “Francis Silver” appears in the Carmel Bird edited anthology, The Penguin century of Australian stories.

Who was Hal Porter?

Porter (1911-1984) was an Australian novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer. His first autobiography, The watcher on the cast-iron balcony (1963), is regarded as a classic.

The Wikipedia article, linked on his name, is relatively brief, but there is a more thorough biographical entry for him in the Australian dictionary of biography (ADB). Written by literary critic and academic, Peter Pierce, it tells us that he had many occupations, including teaching (on-and-off at many schools), librarian, and shorter term jobs like window-dresser and sheep-station cook. But, cutting to the chase, it also reveals Porter as a problematic figure, because of his pederast behaviour. Peter Pierce writes, for example, that, around 1940, he had “an affair” with a male student at the school where he taught, “an indiscretion that went unpunished”. Those were the days, I suppose. This “affair” – should we grace it with that description? – is apparently fictionalised in his short story “The dream”.

Pierce also writes that, in her 1993 book, Hal Porter: Man of many parts, Porter’s biographer, Mary Lord was, “even-handed in judging an old friend and sensational in revealing Porter’s paedophilia, in particular his sexual relations with one of her sons.” Hard to understand. Moreover, Pierce says that Porter’s third autobiography, The extra (1975),

ventilated many of Porter’s prejudices — against Jews, ‘foreigners’ and Aborigines. The counterpart of Porter’s grace, charm and cultivation was an intense snobbery that, for instance, saw him elevate his father’s occupation from engine-driver to engineer. His facility at winning friends was matched by ceaseless demands on their patience.

So, a difficult man, and one I thought twice about sharing here. However, I read the story, liked it, and as it doesn’t smell of these difficult issues, I am covering it in the uncomfortable spirit of separating the work from its creator. Peter Pierce described him in his 2012 ADB entry as “one of the finest of all Australia’s authors of short stories and a pioneer of the first flowering of autobiographical writing in this country”. (This piece by the late academic Noel Rowe explores the Porter issue in depth.)

“Francis Silver”

“Francis Silver” is a first-person story in which an older man tells of fulfilling a deathbed request from his mother who had died at the age of 41 when he was 18. All through his childhood, he had heard about a man called Francis Silver, who, his mother had implied, had been not only a beau, but an alternative potential husband to the country-living man she did marry, the narrator’s seemingly long-suffering father.

Through our narrator’s childhood, his mother had shared with him an album of postcards sent to her by Francis Silver. Along with sharing this album, she had told stories about this man which suggested he was a worldly, debonair man, who loved the theatre. Her wish was for him to give the postcard album to Silver – but, on no account, was he to also give the lock of her hair that she had kept in an envelope with Francis Silver’s name on it. He was to burn that.

Francis Silver, his mother told him, had worked in a picture-framing shop, and that is where our narrator finds him – but what he finds doesn’t gel at all with the stories his mother had told. The story, then, is about memory, illusion and reality, and the boy’s recognition of the difference. In his own romantic fantasy, he had decided to ignore his mother’s second request and give Francis Silver (whose name works as a mantra in the story, hence my using it in full for each reference here) the lock of hair too. But, as he confronts reality, he changes his mind. The closing sentence vividly conveys his decision in an act that encompasses layers of meaning and feeling.

The father is a less developed figure, because the son was in his lively mother’s thrall, but the sense we get is of a man who loves his wife, and who tolerates her flights of fancy, feeling comfortable, it seems, that she chose – and remains with – him. He seems to recognise (or trust) that Francis Silver is one of those escape fantasies people have to help them cope with the tedium of life, the fantasy that, should it get too hard, there were, or perhaps even are, other options. The narrator, as a boy, doesn’t understand these nuances.

There was a strong autobiographical element, I understand, to Porter’s writing. From the little I read for this post, I am aware that there are such elements in this story. For example, Porter’s beloved mother died when he was 18 years old, as does the narrator’s mother in this story. How much else might be autobiographical though, I don’t know.

Anyhow, just to finish … in the end, the narrator resolves the differences he confronts and is generous to his father for whom Francis Silver had seemed an imagined (if not, as it turns out, real) rival. Our narrator has also learned something about the imagined, illusory past, and its relationship to present realities. A tight, neat, engrossing story.

* Read for the 1962 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

Hal Porter
“Francis Silver” (orig. pub. in Hal Porter, A bachelor’s children, 1962)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 186-197

Shirley Hazzard, The picnic (#Review, #1962 Club)

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments

As I have done for most “year” reading weeks*, I decided for 1962 to read a short story by an Australian author. I read two, in fact, and may post on the second one later.

Today’s story, though, is Shirley Hazzard’s “The picnic” which I found in an anthology edited by Carmel Bird, The Penguin century of Australian stories. It was my mother’s book, which Daughter (or Granddaughter to her) Gums gave her for Christmas 2006. I’m glad she kept it when she downsized. Shirley Hazzard is a writer I’ve loved. I have read three of her books, including the novels, Transit of Venus and The great fire, but all of this was long before blogging. I have mentioned her on the blog many times for different reasons, but an early one was in my Monday Musings on expat novelists back in 2010.

Who was Shirley Hazzard?

Hazzard (1931-2016) is difficult to pin down, and can hardly be called Australian given she left Australia in 1947 when she 16, returned here briefly, but left here for good when she was 20. Wikipedia calls her an Australian-born American novelist. As I wrote in my expat post, Hazzard didn’t like to be thought of in terms of nationality. However, she did set some of her writing in Australia, and did win the Miles Franklin Award in 2004 with her novel The great fire, against some stiff competition.

According to Wikipedia, she wrote her first short story, “Woollahra Road”, in 1960, while she was living in Italy, and it was published by The New Yorker magazine the following year. This means, of course, that “The picnic”, first published in 1962, comes from early in her writing career. Her first book, Cliffs of fall, was published in 1963. It was a collection of previously published stories, including this one. Her first novel, The evening of the holiday, was published in 1966, and her second, The bay of noon, was published in 1970, but it was her third novel, The transit of Venus, published in 1980, that established her.

She is known for the quality, particularly the clarity, of her prose, which, it has been suggested, was partly due to her love of poetry

“The picnic”

It didn’t take long for me to discover that “The picnic” is the second story of a linked pair, which were both published in The New Yorker in 1962. Together they tell of an affair between the married Clem and a younger woman, Nettie, his wife May’s cousin. The first story, “A place in the country”, concerns the end of the affair, while in “The picnic” the ex-lovers meet again, eight years later. They are left alone by May, probably deliberately thinks Clem, while she plays with their youngest son down the hillside.

This is a character-driven slice-of-life story in which not a lot happens in terms of action but which offers much insight into human nature – and into that grandest passion of all, love.

In 2020, The Guardian ran a review of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected stories, edited by Hazzard biographer Brigitta Olubas. Reviewer Stephanie Merritt writes that “Hazzard’s recurring themes here – enlarged upon in her novels – are love, self-knowledge and disappointment”. From my memory of Transit of Venus in particular, this rings true. And, it is certainly played out in “The picnic”.

So, love, albeit a failed love, is presumably played out in the first story, but in this story it is still present in its complicated messiness. The two ex-lovers look at each other uncomfortably. Self-knowledge is part of it, but it’s not easily achieved for Clem for whom self-deception has also powerful sway. There’s resignation about love – “an indignity, a reducing thing” which he sees can be a “form of insanity” – and about marriage, which involves “a sort of perseverance, and persistent understanding”. There’s also a male arrogance. He didn’t, he realises, “know much about her [Nettie’s] life these past few years – which alone showed there couldn’t be much to learn”. By the end of his reverie, he comes to some self-understanding, despite earlier denials, about his true feelings and about the decision he’d made. Whether the reader agrees or not, he feels he has “grown”.

Nettie’s reveries tread a roughly similar path. There’s not a lot of regret to start with. She sees he is nearly fifty, and with “a fretful, touchy air”. She sees his self-deceptions, and his caution, and yet her feelings, like his, are conflicted. For her, too, love is a complicated thing:

… one couldn’t cope with love. (In her experience, at any rate, it always got out of hand).

What I haven’t conveyed here, because you have to read it all to see and enjoy it, is the delicious way Hazzard conveys their internal to-ing and fro-ing, through irony and other contradictions. They say nothing to each other, but in their thoughts and observations, while they rationalise what happened and why it was right, they reveal their true feelings. Love and disappointment or disillusion live side by side, never quite resolved.

The story is told third person but from shifting perspectives. First Clem, followed by Nettie, reflect on their situation at some length. Then, in a surprise switch, the short last paragraph moves to May, whose feelings neither of them had seriously considered in all their internal ponderings. But Hazzard makes sure we see them. This technique reminded me of Kevin Brophy’s very different short story “Hillside” which does a similarly powerful switch of perspective in the last paragraph. In both cases, concluding with the perspective of someone who is both outsider but very much affected by the situation just nails it.

Not only did I enjoy this story, but I’m very glad to finally have Hazzard reviewed on my blog.

* Read for the 1962 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book). This week’s Monday Musings was devoted to the year.

Shirley Hazzard
“The picnic” (orig. pub. The New Yorker, 16 June 1962)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian short stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 178-185