Women writers

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

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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

Susan Glaspell, A jury of her peers (#Review)

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One of my retirement activities is to co-ordinate a little band of volunteer indexers at the National Film and Sound Archive. Not only do we do useful work for the Archive, but we get to socialise a little with our peers, meaning we talk about what we are watching, listening to, and reading. Recently, one of the team sent me a short story to read. He “raved” about it, he wrote in the accompanying email. Well, I have now read it and I’m mighty impressed too. It’s by an American writer and appeared in one of the those annual best short stories volumes, this one for 1917.

Susan Glaspell

The author of the story, as you will have worked out from the post title, is Susan Glaspell (1876-1948). I had never heard of her, but fortunately she has a decent-sized Wikipedia page which you can read, but I’ll give a brief summary here. She was a playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. Indeed, she and her husband founded America’s first modern theatre company, the Provincetown Players. Wikipedia then says, and I’ll quote because why try to paraphrase it:

First known for her short stories (fifty were published), Glaspell also wrote nine novels, fifteen plays, and a biography. Often set in her native Midwest, these semi-autobiographical tales typically explore contemporary social issues, such as gender, ethics, and dissent, while featuring deep, sympathetic characters who make principled stands. Her 1930 play Alison’s House earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Wikipedia has much more to say but essentially, like many women writers, her star faded, partly Wikipedia says, because her “strong and independent female protagonists were less popular in the post-war era, which stressed female domesticity”. However, from the 1970s on – we all know about this revival don’t we – she started to regain traction. Now, she is recognised as a “pioneering feminist writer and America’s first important modern female playwright”.

All this might clue you in to why I so enjoyed her story.

“A jury of her peers”

Kindle ed.

“A jury of her peers” is quite a long short story, but it engrosses from the beginning because of how Glaspell slowly unfolds the story, incisively developing, as she goes, a number of ideas that still speak to us today. We readers work out fairly quickly what has likely gone on, but our fascination lies in how the two women protagonists come to their understanding of the matter, how they try to resist what they have intuitively guessed, and what they decide to do about it. Overlaying this are the assumptions made about them (and about women in general) by the men involved, which adds a social dimension to the moral one. It’s a wonderfully complex story. It’s no accident that the main action takes place in that women’s domain, the humble kitchen.

The story, according to Wikipedia again, was loosely based on the 1900 murder of a man called John Hossack which Glaspell covered while working as a journalist. She originally wrote it in 1916 as a one-act play, Trifles, for the Provincetown Players, before turning it into a short story. Later, it was adapted for an episode of that 1950s TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and into a 30-minute film by Sally Heckel in 1980.

The plot is simple. A farmer, John Wright, has been murdered, and his wife, the diminutively named Minnie, taken into custody, the day before the story’s action takes place. The story opens with Sheriff Peters and the county attorney Mr Henderson picking up the Wrights’ neighbour, farmer Mr Hale, who had called in the death the day before. Their aim is to visit the scene to look for evidence that might explain what had happened, that might provide a motive. In the buggy is the sheriff’s wife Mrs Peters who is coming along to collect some clothes for Minnie. At the last minute, Mrs Hale is asked to join them, at the request of Mrs Peters who appears to need some support in her sad task.

So, this band of five arrive at the Wrights’ “lonesome-looking place” and, while the men go in search of their evidence, the women remain in the kitchen-living area to get those items Minnie had asked for. As they do, they start to notice things around them – providing insight into Minnie’s life and state of mind – and slowly they piece together an understanding of what had happened. These two women don’t know each other well, so they are cautious with each other, sometimes moving “closer together” in solidarity, particularly when the men appear at intervals and invariably belittle women’s skills and knowledge, but other times drawing apart, uncertainly feeling each other out as they simultaneously feel out their own thoughts and feelings.

The practical farmer’s wife Mrs Hale increasingly senses what sort of life Minnie had led, and feels guilty, criminal even, about never having visited her, but she is uncertain about how the timid-seeming, law-abiding Sheriff’s wife is reacting. However, every now and then she catches in Mrs Peters “a look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else”. Eventually, they connect, “in a steady burning look in which there was no evasion, no flinching”.

It is so beautifully done, with barely a wasted word or description, with every interaction carrying weight, with perfect use of metaphor (involving birds, cages, and knots) and irony. It reminded me, just a little, of Pat Barker’s The women of Troy (my review), another story in which men underestimate women, to their detriment (though they may not always know it). And so, in this story, a number of issues are explored, including morality and natural justice versus the law; gender and men’s superior, condescending dismissal of women’s skills and knowledge; neighbourliness and guilt; and female solidarity.

“A jury of her peers” is a subversive crime story, one that wowed me, for its subject matter, particularly given the time it was written, and for its sure, unflinching writing. I’m impressed that it was chosen for an annual best anthology by a man – but perhaps that’s me being condescending now. Whatever! I would love to read more Glaspell.

Susan Glaspell
“A jury of her peers” (orig. pub. in Every Week, 5 March 1917)
in Edward J. O’Brien (ed.), The best short stories of 1917 and The yearbook of the American short story
Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 2014
pp. 256-282
Available online at Hathitrust

Carmel Bird, Love letter to Lola (#BookReview)

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In her prose piece, “Ocean of story” (my post), Christina Stead wrote that

It is only when the short story is written to a rigid plan, or done as an imitation, that it dies. It dies when it is pinned down, but not elsewhere. It is the million drops of water that are the looking-glasses of all our lives.

The stories in Carmel Bird’s latest collection, Love letter to Lola, could never be accused of being written to a rigid plan – and if you know Carmel Bird, you would never expect them to. What I so enjoy about Bird is the subversive way she plays with form and tone, while never losing sight of the things she wants to say – but more on that later. Love letter to Lola contains eighteen short stories, the majority of which have been published elsewhere, but mostly in niche or themed journals and collections. However, “The tale of the last unicorn” appeared in The dead aviatrix (my review), as did the titular “Love letter to Lola”, except that here Spixi’s letter earns response.

This new collection is divided into two main sections – Animals, comprising twelve stories, and Human and Angels, the other six. These are followed by a Reflection in which Bird discusses the inspirations for the stories, and much more besides, including, if you read it carefully, her thoughts on stories, writing and fiction. Ignore it at your peril! She tells us, in this last piece, that while the collection has “no primary overall topic … there is a fairly consistent kind of slant on life in general, and a distinct recurrence of themes, motifs, and propositions”. That there is, and in big picture terms, it involves “peering at life and death from different angles, in varying moods”, with a particular interest in “the wild and weird things humans do to undermine the safety of the planet”.

“inklings and threads” (“Two thirds of the truth”)

So, let’s start with the first section, Animals. The twelve stores are told in the voices of different animals, reminding me a little of Chris Flynn‘s Here be leviathans (my review). The animals, their locations and habitats, and their eras vary, but the subject matter all relates in some way to death, and, in several cases to a very particular type of death – extinction. Consequently, we have stories from, or about, a Spix’s macaw (“Love letter to Lola”), a passenger pigeon (“Resurrecting Martha”); a dodo (“The comeback or a pond of dreams”); and a thylacine (“Fertile and faithful”). In these stories, Bird plays with, among other things, plans by the “scientificators” to clone and return animals to existence, but in each one there is a different spin, drawn from the facts. Overall, there is a valid incredulity about the whole business, but the way Bird writes it through her various creatures is gloriously entertaining. Just read Dodo’s story to see what I mean.

“Fertile and faithful” is a good example of Bird’s playing with form and voice. It a distinct biblical look and tone to it, but the bite and wordplay are ever-present. She writes of plans by “delirious and magical scientists” to “grow a shiny new version of the great stripy animal within the being of a tiny little browny grey Sminthopsis, known as a dunnart”:

CHAPTER 3

8. And in the almost fullness of time the scientists became gods.

At the other end of the spectrum – hmm, is it the other end? – are the pathogenic creatures capable of playing havoc with the human race, like mosquitoes (“It’s a mosquito thing”), flies (“Surveillance”) and rats (“Completing the 1080 project”), not to mention that most reviled of creepy-crawlies, the cockroach (“The affair at the Ritz”). Then, there is the sad story of a spider, “Margaret Orb-Weaver, The Interview, 19 September 1922”, inspired by the small green spider seen crawling across a white card on Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin. This story takes the form of an interview with Margaret just before she descends into the vault on the coffin. In her brief moment of fame, Margaret manages to pass on a few truths. In this and other stories, like “The cockatoo’s question”, Bird, whose imagination runs rife while simultaneously being grounded in reality, reminds us of our contemporary ills, like the spectre of fake news, or our faith in money.

The second section, Humans and Angels, picks up more of Bird’s fascinations, fascinations that won’t be new if you’ve read other work by her, and particularly if you’ve read her bibliomemoir Telltale (my review). Through her love of fantasy and magic, and of weaving fact through her imagination, she further explores and shares her thoughts about the weird and disturbing things that humans do – and with the same sophisticated wit that we experience in Animals.

I loved “Yes my darling daughter” with its cheeky, pointed playing with the idea of wolves and sharks, and the dangers confronting young women. The chatty tone, as in so many of the stories, belies the message, but if you miss it, the “helpful quotations” at the end should see you straight.

Our last speaker is Beau, the Recording Angel (“Recording Angel”) who leads us on a merry dance (or, danse macabre, perhaps) through the island of Nevermind, referencing, presumably, humans’ general apathy. As he does so, he tells various stories including those of two young historical figures, “Walter’n’Matilda”, who suffer tragic deaths but find true love in Nevermind. If, as our angel instructs, you put their two names together quickly, you might catch a hint of a popular Australian song – and thereby catch some of the workings of Carmel Bird’s mind.

The delight of reading Carmel Bird is also the challenge. The delight comes from the playful way she digresses, the way she can allude to, or reference, anything from a children’s picture book to a Greek philosopher to the latest work of scientists, or even to her own characters and works. The challenge is how many of these we pick up because Bird‘s mind is not our mind and her reading is not our reading. But it doesn’t really matter because we are sure to pick up enough of the inklings and threads woven throughout to recognise the things Bird would like us to think about – seriously but with hope in our hearts too.

But again, if you are struggling, there are the four epigraphs which provide the perfect guide to how to approach her stories and what we should expect as we read them. Pure gold.

If you haven’t realised by now, I love reading Carmel Bird. Her “endless search for meaning”, as she describes it, is wrapped in the sort of darkly entertaining writing that I can’t resist. It is the sort of writing I can happily read again and again – with the same expectation that I read Jane Austen. That is, both writers can make me laugh and squirm at the same time, which for me is just right.

(Review copy courtesy the author, but copies are available from Spineless Wonders. Yes, Carmel Bird herself sent me this book, but that is not why I loved it. It made me do that all by itself.)

Carmel Bird
Love letter to Lola
Strawberry Hills: Spineless Wonders, 2023
223pp.
ISBN: 9781925052961

Mary TallMountain, Snatched away (#Review)

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Mary TallMountain’s “Snatched away” is the ninth story of fourteen in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, that I’ve been working through this year. It, like the previous three, was published in the 1980s, in 1988 in this case.

Mary TallMountain

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides minimal information about her. He gives her heritage as Athabascan, Koyukan and Russian on her mother’s side, and tells us she was born Mary Demoski in Alaska in 1918, and died in 1994. Wikipedia’s article on her describes her as “a poet and storyteller of mixed Scotch-Irish and Koyukon ancestry” (Koyukon being Alaska Native Athabascan). Later in the article Wikipedia also mentions her Russian heritage.

Wikipedia provides more background, though not as much as on some of the other writers I’ve read in this anthology. She didn’t start writing until she was in her 50s, which means the 1970s , and she was part of the Native American Renaissance. However, the works listed seem to be primarily poetry, and there’s no discussion of her prose writing. It describes her main themes as being Native and Christian spirituality, including a connection to nature. It also tells us that she was given up for adoption when she was 6, by her tubercular mother, who knew “she would inevitably die” from the disease. It was not a happy experience for TallMountain. Her step-father was abusive, and she was forcefully dislocated from her culture.

TallMountain’s whole life was a challenge – from the unsurprising alcoholism, given her difficult childhood, to serious health problems, including cancer and a stroke.

“Snatched away”

“Snatched away” is told through the eyes of a white man, Clem, who has an Athabascan partner, Mary-Joe, and two children, though this is only slowly revealed. The framing story takes place over a day, in the 1920s, as Clem manoeuvres his way down the Yukon river, meeting rivermen and reflecting on his life. Through him, TallMountain tells of the culture of Athabascan river people whose survival depends on their river, fishing and hunting skills:

Quick dark silhouettes against the greens of alder and cottonwood, the Indians were part of sky, river, earth itself: they wove their dories through tumbling water, poled schools of darting salmon, strode like lumberjacks. Born rivermen, Clem thought with respect. Still, the river was a tough customer. In the seven years he’d been here, ten men and boys had downed between Nulato and Kaltag.

The river might be tough, but it is nature, and its spirit and theirs are entwined. The more problematical thing is the impact on their lives and culture of the arrival of white people, particularly with their diseases like small-pox and tuberculosis.

TallMountain doesn’t gloss over or romanticise life, before or after the arrival of the whites. Rather, she tells it as it is. Early in the story is a scene, told in flashback, in which Clem spends an afternoon on the riverbank with locals, young Andy, who had later drowned, and Little Jim. They see a bundle rolling fast down the river and, on his asking what it is, Clem is told it’s a “Baby. Throwed away”. A common practice in the “old time” for imperfect babies, with a “bum leg” maybe, or “head mashed”, it happened less now, but women will still do it, he’s told, if the baby is “too bad”.

Death pervades the story, actual or intimated – from the babies and the drownings to the aforementioned diseases – but its handling is unsentimental.

From the opening paragraph describing the Yukon as being in a “fierce, frowning mood” to the end when Clem’s “words are snatched away by the wind”, it is the river that controls the story. Its power and potential to both sustain with fish and birds and to kill, and its associated spirituality, are evoked through the people Clem interacts with on his journey – like the consumptive Floyd out hunting mallard and Willy the fisherman who “looked as if he had always been there” and who tells Clem “you got to watch that river” – and through Clem’s physical struggle to keep his boat upright and on course. The river is a living thing, and should never be underrated. Nor perhaps, should be the Woodsman, an Athabascan bad spirit about which Clem asks Willy. It’s a joking reference, but with a tinge of something else all the same, given soon after this Clem senses “something besides fish alive, out there in the river”.

There is clearly an autobiographical element to the story, with Clem’s partner, like TallMountain’s mother, contracting tuberculosis and the local doctor offering to adopt the children, just as Tallmountain had been. Clem is bothered, but philosophically believes “it will all work out in the wash”. Will it? Much is left open in this story.

Like many of the stories in the anthology, “Snatched away” is at least partly about the intersection of cultures. TallMountain, like many of the authors, is of mixed heritage, and in the little I’ve found about her on the Internet, she was comfortable with that. In fact I found an Interview with her in which she describes herself as an “inbetween”*, by which she means having “a connection between two different cultures” to which must be done justice. As Clem fights his way down the river, he thinks about his own heritage and background, as well as of the Athabascan people. As he tires, he sees the faces of his wife and children “wavering” in the mist. But, his specific pronouncement about “Indianness” just after this – “what difference now, how much the blood is mixed” – felt sudden and a bit out of the blue.

It may be that TallMountain was more poet than storywriter, but I did still enjoy the story, even if more for its gorgeous writing about the river and its people than for its narrative coherence. And it has been anthologised more than once, which says something.

* Joseph W. Bruchac III, “We are the inbetweens: An interview with Mary Tallmountain”, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series 2, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1989), pp. 13-21

Mary TallMountain
“Snatched away” (orig. pub. 1988)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 65-74
ISBN: 9780486490953

Shelley Burr, Ripper (#BookReview)

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When I started reading Ripper, Shelley Burr’s follow-up novel to her bestselling award-winning debut novel Wake (my review), I thought about crime novels, about how they are often written in series and how I am not a big series fan. Ripper looked to me like a stand-alone novel – and it is, somewhat! I say somewhat, because a few chapters in we come across one Lane Holland.

The plot thickens…

Lane Holland, I thought. I know that name. Sure enough, Lane Holland is the private investigator protagonist of the aforementioned Wake. However, he is not the prime investigator in this novel, because he is in prison as a result of his previous investigation. (You’ll need to read Wake to find out more!) The result is an intriguing crime novel in which we have our prime, self-appointed amateur investigator, Gemma, plus the police working away in the background, and Lane who is pulled into the investigation by his prison governor, Patton Carver. Yes, you’ve guessed right, the plot thickens – except I haven’t really told you about the plot yet.

Ripper is set in a fictional town called Rainier, which, as Burr confirms in her acknowledgements, is partly based on the town of Tarcutta. Seventeen years before the novel opens, three murders had occurred in this little country town, the last one outside the door of Gemma’s little teashop. She – and the town – have never fully recovered from these events. The town has stagnated under its black reputation, and Gemma herself suffers PTSD from what she had experienced. Now a tour company has arrived wanting to run a true crime or dark tourism walking tour of the Rainier Ripper’s murderous path, but Rainier’s residents have mixed feelings about the idea. On the eve of the trial tour aimed at garnering their support, the tour operator is killed in what looks like a copycat murder. It has to be copycat because the Rainier Ripper is in prison, the same prison as Lane Holland. As I said, the plot thickens, and part of the thickening springs from why prison governor Carver is interested.

Once again, I enjoyed Burr’s story, because once again it is more than a crime story, exploring issues like the impact on a small town of having a reputation for violence, the impact on people who have been close to a violent crime, the idea of dark tourism, and the murky world of police investigations and the ways in which confessions are elicited. I am not an expert but Burr’s research into the relevant issues, including prison life, felt thorough but lightly applied.

I also enjoyed Burr’s characterisation. Gemma and Lane are well-evoked. Other characters are necessarily more sketchy, but they are individualised enough to lift them above pure stereotype, to make them feel true. There is an engaging exploration, through Gemma’s daughter and her friends, of how teenagers cope with a complex adult world. There are some truly “tangled” family relationships in the town. There is some diversity, including a non-binary teen and a Wiradjuri woman, which Burr introduces without trying to appropriate other experiences. There are farmers, business people, pub owners, and doctors whose lives are entwined through marriage and murders. It’s a lot to convey, and there are plenty of names, but I rarely got lost!

Ripper has some similarities with Wake, in addition to also belonging to the rural noir sub-genre. It’s told through roughly alternating third person voices (Gemma and Lane); the protagonist is privately investigating; and it deals with a cold case, which involves a missing person. But it is significantly different, too, including the fact that Gemma is an amateur unlike Wake‘s Lane, and that it is set in a different place with different issues to confront. This means that it is not formulaic, which keeps us readers on our toes. We can’t assume anything about where Burr is going.

Now, I am not a big plot-follower, by which I mean I don’t put serious brainpower into trying to work out who dunnit. Rather, I read crime like I read most books, that is, with a focus on the characters and the issues being explored. But of course, I can’t help following the actual plot, particularly when the characters have engaged me and I want them to fare well. In Ripper, I worked out one of the plot twists, but it had several – like those Christie and Christie-like TV shows I watch – and they left me for dead. They did make sense, though, which is the important thing.

On the basis of her manuscript for Wake, Burr won a two-book deal with Hachette, and Ripper is the second book. I do hope she is offered more book deals because, while there is absolute closure on this book’s crimes, there is also a clear hint at the end about where a next book might go – and I’m intrigued. Burr is a clever writer, with her wits about her. Ripper’s readers will guess the main investigation Burr plans for her next novel, but what will the context be this time? What will be the issues? Time will hopefully tell.

Shelley Burr
Ripper
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2023
346pp.
ISBN: 9780733647857

(Review copy courtesy Hachette Australia)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Elizabeth Webby (1941-2023)

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This might be a first for me, an obituary-style post for an academic/literary scholar rather than for an author. However, this post seemed appropriate as, Elizabeth Webby, who died last month, is someone whom I’ve mentioned several times in my blog due to her having written in areas that are of interest to me. Specifically, these areas were colonial Australian literature and contemporary Australian writers, particularly women writers. I heard about her death from the Association of the Study of Australian Literature, for which she was a founding member and of which she was President from 1988 to 1990.

A significant legacy

Julieanne Lamond, current president of ASAL and co-editor of its online journal, Australian Literary Studies, has posted a tribute to her on ASAL’s website. It is well worth reading, because it outlines her major roles and achievements, which include her being Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney from 1990 to 2007. This involved her “supporting works of scholarly infrastructure including the AustLit Database, numerous scholarly editions, and the online Australian Poetry Library”. I have often used AustLit (albeit much of the content is paywalled) and the Australian Poetry Library (which seems not to be currently available, perhaps due to lack of ongoing support?) Webby also edited the Southerly literary journal for over a decade.

However, my “experience” of Webby has also been more specific. While I had come across her before, I became seriously aware of her through The Cambridge companion to Australian literature (1996), which she edited. This book is a little different from those “companion” style books which contain alphabetic encyclopaedic entries related to their chosen topic. Rather, it comprises essays which provide a partly chronological, partly thematic, survey of Australian literature starting with “Indigenous texts and narratives”. It works, in other words, more like a text book or history than a reference book. I often dip into it, when I am researching specific aspects of Australian literature, and find it sometimes useful sometimes not, depending on how well my particular interest has been covered.

However, I had came across Webby earlier via her essay on colonial poets in Debra Adelaide’s A bright and fiery troop (1988), which is another book of essays on Australian literature, but this one limited to 19th century women writers. It’s another book I often dip into when researching earlier writers.

Both these books, though, were in my ken before I started blogging. Skip a couple of decades to 2018 when I wrote a Monday Musings post titled Literary culture in colonial Australia drawing on Webby’s work. It was fascinating research, both for what she found and for the sorts of sources she used and their varying levels of completeness. Then in 2021, I wrote another Monday Musings on the Irish-Australian poet, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880), using research by Elizabeth Webby and another academic, Anna Johnston. These are just two examples of Webby’s work but, as Lamond of ASAL writes, her research interests spanned the breadth and depth of Australian literature, from early colonial literature, through early 20th century writers like Miles Franklin and Barbara Baynton, and mid-20th century ones like Patrick White, to those more contemporary to her own times like Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Harrower and Joan London. She was also, apparently, a loved and respected teacher, academic supervisor and mentor.

All this is important and significant, but another measure of who she was can be found in the funeral notice for her in the Sydney Morning Herald where can be found the following request, “In lieu of floral tributes, please consider a donation to the Indigenous Literary Foundation”. Presumably that was her own request – or from her family based on their knowledge of her passions. Either way, it’s the icing on the cake. Vale, indeed, Elizabeth Webby.

Pat Barker, The women of Troy (#BookReview)

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I shocked my reading group last week when I announced during our discussion of Pat Barker’s novel, The women of Troy, that I was tiring of feminist re-imaginings of historical women. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the novel, and it is definitely not to say that I am not interested in novels addressing feminist issues and concerns. It is simply to say that mining the past for the wrongs of the past, while perfectly valid, is starting to feel a bit repetitive, and consequently, also perhaps a bit reductive.

In the last couple of decades, the Classics seem to have been particularly popular for authors to revisit. I can point, in my own reading, to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (my review), and more recently to authors I haven’t read like Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes. These authors have all re-imagined women’s roles from the Greek classics. A somewhat different, because non-feminist, re-imagining is one that relates closely to Barker’s novel, David Malouf’s Ransom (my review). In it, Malouf explores the visit Priam makes to Achilles to beg for the body of his son Hector. This event occurs before Barker’s novel starts, but it – particularly how the characters interpret it – underpins Barker’s plot.

So, let’s get to Barker’s novel. It starts with the fall of Troy but it mostly occupies the time during which the victorious Greeks, eager to return home with their spoils of war, which include the titular women of Troy, are unable to leave because they need the right weather to sail. However, it’s not coming because the gods are offended. The Trojan King Priam’s body has been brutalised and left unburied – by the now-dead-Achilles’ son Pyrrhus, who is emulating his father’s treatment of Priam’s son Hector.

Barker evokes the scene well, detailing life at the encampment along the bay, which includes the households of Greek heroes and kings – like Agamemnon and Odysseus – and the women’s quarters where the captive Trojan women are being kept. The warriors, who are fine when they are fighting, are restive, while the women are trying to survive this nightmare. Three voices carry the story, the main one being the first-person voice of Briseis, who had been Achilles’ “prize of honour” but is now married to his trusted companion Alcimus. She tells her story from 50 years hence. Her voice is occasionally interrupted by one of two third-person male voices who speak from their present, the aforementioned Pyrrhus, and the out-of-favour seer, Calchas. In fact, it is Pyrrhus who opens the novel.

“nobody would believe a girl capable of doing it” (Briseis)

Barker knows how to tell a compelling tale. She unfolds the plot at a steady pace, building up the tension in the encampment through strong imagery and tight description. I particularly loved her use of birds to both convey tone and further the themes. Chief among these were the ever-present crows who, Briseis tells us partway through the story,

were everywhere now, and they seemed so arrogant, so prosperous … Almost as if they were taking over.

Above all, though, it’s Barker’s characterisation that engaged me, her ability to invest her characters with humanity – including the brutal Pyrrhus who at 16 years old is young, unconfident and struggling to live up to the reputation of his father Achilles. Briseis, the spoil of a previous war and now carrying Achilles’ child, is more privileged than the newly captured Trojan women, but she needs all her wits if she is to keep them as safe as she’d like, particularly the independent Amina who is determined to defy Pyrrhus and give Priam the burial he deserves.

One of the ways Barker creates these relatable characters is to use contemporary and often highly colloquial language, which I admit I initially found off-putting. I don’t usually bother much about anachronism in historical fiction, so it tickled me that our reading group member who tends to be the most critical of anachronism was the main defender on this occasion. She argued that the language of The Iliad, for example, is poetic, rather than realistic, and that, given we don’t know the language of the time, Barker’s earthy approach – with its expressions like “poor cow”, “as you would”, and “fat lot of good” – is valid. Fair enough – and, in fact, I did find myself able to go with the flow, once I’d attuned myself.

There were other moments, too, though, where the language felt a bit clunky, but they were not enough to spoil what was a page-turning read about the politics of war, of enslavement and of genocide, a story in which the victors take the women for their own and aim to kill all surviving Trojan males:

They weren’t just intent on killing individual men; they meant to erase an entire people.

It’s a grim and brutal world. As Briseis tells us near the beginning, “the only thing, the only thing, that mattered in this camp was power – and that meant, ultimately, the power to kill”. 

But, there are some things that the victors, for all their swaggering physical power, overlook or can’t control. One is the greater power of the gods, and the other is the women. Barker shows how women, in being so ignored, so underestimated, so under the radar, can in fact exert some agency exactly because of this. It’s not an ideal way to be, but when needs must you do what you have in your arsenal.

You don’t need to have read the first book in the trilogy to appreciate this novel. I hadn’t. And, while the kernel of a sequel can be seen in its ending, The women of Troy has enough closure to make it work as a stand-alone novel. I wouldn’t call it a must read, but for those interested in looking at Greek myths from a different angle, there is much to “enjoy” here.

Pat Barker
The women of Troy (Troy trilogy #2)
Penguin Books, 2021 (Kindle ed.)
309pp.
ISBN: 9780241988343

Rayna Green, High cotton (#Review)

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With Rayna Green’s short story, “High cotton”, we pass the halfway mark in that anthology I’ve been posting on over the last few months, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. We are also getting closer to the anthology’s publication date of 2014, so these chronologically listed stories are starting to bunch up in their dates. The previous two were both published in 1983, with “High cotton” being published just a year later in 1984.

Rayna Green

Again, I’m mostly using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s intro and Wikipedia to introduce the author. Blaisdell’s intro is brief, as usual, but it is he who formally clarifies Green’s identity as a Native American, explaining that her “Native background, through her father, is Cherokee”. Identity, as we’ve come across already in this collection, can be problematical so I was a bit unsure when Green’s Wikipedia article didn’t explicitly provide her tribal affiliation, as I’ve found for our preceding authors. As this anthology specifically contains stories by Native American writers, I do want to identify how each writer fits into this.

Wikipedia’s article on Green (b. 1942) isn’t completely silent. It does imply her heritage, describing her as the “first American Indian to receive a Ph.D.” in Folklore and American Studies, and stating, near the end, that she was “a founding member of both the Cherokee Honor Society and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society”.

Continuing with Wikipedia, I was also surprised that, unlike for our previous writers, Green is not introduced as a writer, but as a curator and folklorist – at the Smithsonian Institution, among other organisations – and as having worked in academia. Duke University is more useful regarding her writing career. In 2008, it said that she had written or edited four books and published “many essays on American Indian representations, American Indian women, American identity, American Indian material culture, and American Indian food and foodways”. The page also says, and this was of particular interest to me, that

Several of her short stories and essays on Native women and American identity have been widely reprinted and have served as standard reading for twenty years in courses in women’s studies, American Indian studies, and American studies (e.g., “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of American Indian Women in American Culture,” “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in Europe and America,” “Magnolias Grow in Dirt: Southern Women’s Bawdy Humor,” and “High Cotton”).

This seems like a good point to move to today’s short story …

“High cotton”

“High cotton” is a tricksy story. For a start, it is framed as a story within a story, which suggests that storytelling is one of its concerns. There is also the challenge of the Oklahoman Tahlequah vernacular that is used in the telling. Finally, there are complicated relationships, and, dare I admit it – identities – to unravel. I’m not sure I completely got them all, but that I think it part of the point about identities: To what extent are they what you are born as and to what extent what you choose?

The story-within-the-story concerns Rose who, in effect, gets the better of those who have made her life hell – the Baptist Church and her abusive alcoholic white husband Will – by emulating Jesus to encourage said husband to convert to Christianity and preach the word. The story turns to almost pure farce at this point as Rose prances around the bedroom in a cloudy, white nightgown exhorting her out-of-it husband to repent his ways. She can’t believe that he doesn’t recognise her, but she does such a good job of it that he does indeed repent and go on to preach the word while, in a pointedly ironic twist, she goes on to support herself by selling the very liquor that had made her life a misery. And, she stays away from the church.

Framing this is Grandma (Rose’s sister, I think) telling the story to Ramona (a great-niece, I think). Green opens her story with:

Is everything a story? Ramona asked her.

To which Grandma replies, somewhat cryptically:

It is if a story is what you’re looking for – otherwise it’s just people telling lies and there’s no end to it.

While Grandma waits for Ramona’s response, Ramona is watching some “purple cockscombs” through the kitchen door. This ends the opening paragraph so, hmmm, what do these “purple cockscombs” signify, as they seemed too deliberately placed there to mean nothing. They are flowers, but my first thought was of the cockscomb strutting about in foolish pride. My web search retrieved several, often paradoxical meanings. Symbolsage.com provides a good description, summarising them as symbolising “love, affection, silliness, partnership, individuality, strength”. Green could be calling on some of these, and/or on that “cockscomb” image of showy emptiness.

Perhaps more relevant to focus on is the black snake that runs across another character’s foot out in the cotton fields. The snake doesn’t bite her – a Cherokee named Gahno – but the event results in pandemonium and change that involves, over time, the women working on the cotton fields leaving. This infuriates the German plantation-owner Poppa, particularly when his daughter (Ramona’s mother) marries Gahno’s son: “Betrayal was bad enough, but race mixing was worse”.

It is only after we are told all this, and after Ramona has doctored Grandma’s iced tea with some “boogered Indian” whiskey, that we hear the story of Rose and Will. Grandma is quite the storyteller:

Rose got all the church women to pray and pray over him, week after week, and they kept poor Jesus awake yelling about Will’s sinful state. The more they prayed and hollered over him, the more he cussed and drank. And that made them pray more. You know how them prissy Baptist women is, honey—wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful—and they like to drove everyone to the ginmills and shake dance the parlors before long. But everyone was more disgusted with Will.

By the end of the story Will has been dead some years, and Rose “had turned Indian just as sure as she’d turned away from Christians”.

To conclude, we return to the aforementioned snakes. Grandma tells Ramona that Rose “always figured, just like Gahno, that snakes were meant to warn you, and she took the warning”. As for stories? Well, they may be lies or they may be what Grandma calls them, “snakebite medicine”. “High cotton” is an intriguing story. Green evokes a lively scene, and explores with dark humour the complexities of multiracial communities where personalities and cultures clash, but I did have to read it several times to work out who was who. If anyone else has read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Rayna Green
“High cotton” (orig. pub. 1984 in That’s what she said: Contemporary poetry and fiction Native American women, ed. Rayna Green)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 59-64
ISBN: 9780486490953

Debra Dank, We come with this place (#BookReview)

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First Nations people are advised that this post contains the names of deceased people.

It has been my reading group’s tradition for some years now to read a book by a First Nations writer in July, the month in which NAIDOC Week occurs. Coincidentally, NAIDOC Week’s 2023 theme was “For our elders”, which worked beautifully with our chosen book, Debra Dank’s We come with this place, because a large part of it is about the value and importance of elders and ancestors.

This was not, however, why we chose Dank’s book from the options before us. Its subject matter intrigued us, about which more anon, but we were also influenced by the fact that, at the time we were choosing, it had just won a record number of four awards in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards: the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, the Indigenous Writers’ prize, and the overall Book of the Year. It was also shortlisted for this year’s Stella Prize, and, after we scheduled it, it won the ALS Gold Medal. These are significant awards and, for most of us, the book lived up to its advance publicity.

I mentioned the subject matter above, but We come with this place is one of those books that is tricky to categorise. It’s a sort of multigenerational memoir that is also a guide to her culture and a community history of her people, before and after colonisation. It grew out of her PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics. Dank describes it in her Preface as a:

strange kind of letter written to my place – a recording of events and activities that I and my family have experienced, in order to tell Garranjini that I remember, and I know. It is all based on real events. Some parts have been reimagined, because they happened outside my presence, and several names have been changed. Our relationship with our place, however, is genuine and lives in ways that not easily told in English words or western ways.

She goes on to say that she wanted to show “how story works in my community, and how it has contributed to our living with country for so long”. It also felt imperative, she says, to talk about the “voices, human and non-human, who guided the Gudanji for centuries before anyone else stepped onto this land”. This is a truly generous thing to do, and my group loved that, loved how Dank shared her story, and particularly how she helped us whitefellas “see” how First Nations people understand and relate to Country. I knew much of this from all I’ve read and heard, but this book really grew my understanding.

The other special thing about this book for me is that it is set in an area I know. I spent three formative late-childhood years in Mount Isa, close to Camooweal where Dank’s mother’s family were based. I visited Camooweal several times, and traversed parts of the Barkly Tableland which encompasses her Country. The first First Nations people I heard of were the Kalkadoons, whom Dank mentions in her book. Dank herself, though, is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman, the former through her mother and the latter, her father.

“to see the pain as it lies in the landscape”

We come with this place is a confronting book, from its perfect and defiant title to its chronicling of the atrocities that her people faced. The fear of children being taken away pervades the book. There are stories of massacres, and other appalling brutalities including a rape of her father’s mother. Lucy’s “choices were both dire – a drover’s boy or a special girl. The same, just in different clothes”. There is intergenerational trauma, which Dank exemplifies through her father, Soda. Hardworking and loving, he bears traumas, which she characterises as “newer stories … that pushed and jostled with the older stories” and sometimes “pushed their way out with a violence” that was often directed at her mother, and sometimes herself.

Dank doesn’t hold back; the way she tells it is strong, speaking her truths and segueing between past and present, between brutal history and rejuvenating story, between people and ancestors. Amongst the tough stories are warm-hearted anecdotes about family life. An example is Dank telling of being on country with her grandfather Bimbo and her surprise and joy in learning how to catch fish in arid land. The stories speaking of deep love sit alongside the hard ones, and together convey that the people, their ancestors, and Country are interconnected. This idea is mirrored in the structure.

However, I admit that I did, initially, find the structure a bit confusing, but as I read on, I started to sense an overriding arc similar to that of Bangarra Dance Theatre’s recent offering, Yuldea. Both start with origin stories, then move through colonial history, and conclude with the power of kinship and connection to Country. But it’s not as linear as this sounds. For example, starting the book, and threading through Dank’s narrative are the three Water-women who came from sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and travel far to create “the freshwater and hill country” of the Gudanji. They also end the book, giving it an overall cyclical structure which, I think, reflects First Nations’ understanding of life. Other cycles occur within this structure, so there is a continuous sense of moving forwards and back in time, as experiences and stories build on each other to create “Gudanji memory” – for us, and for her people to whom she is writing. This idea of building “memory” from stories, from lines between places and the things that have happened there, is strange to western ways of thinking, but Dank makes it make sense. She shows us how stories are made and passed on through Country.

I’ve been trying to decide how to end this post, and then it came to me that the best way might be with some words from Dr Tyson Yunkaporta’s Introduction to the book. He is a First Nations scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and the author of Sand talk. He admits to not being able to face “the through line of history from the savagery of the frontier wars to the interventionist policies of today”. Dank, though, has. He writes:

She hurts us, digs bullets out of old wounds that never healed properly, sucks out the poison and then begins our healing with love and laughter. She does this for everybody, no matter which side of the rifle you’re on.

Dank, in other words, doesn’t pull any punches, but neither does she ram them down your gullet. Her aim is to tell the truth, proud and clear, but to do it in order for healing to take place. Isn’t that what we all want?

Kim (Reading Matters) also loved this book.

Debra Dank
We come with this place
London: Echo, 2022
252pp.
ISBN: 9781760687397

Joseph Bruchac III, Turtle meat (#Review)

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I’m continuing to work through the stories in Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. With this post, we jump from 1968 to 1983, which mens we are getting close to contemporary territory. The story is “Turtle meat” by Jospeh Bruchac III.

Joseph Bruchac III

As before, I’m using anthology editor Bob Blaisdell’s intro and Wikipedia to introduce the author, though in this case Blaisdell is extremely brief. Bruchac was born in 1942 and, says Wikipedia, “identifies as being of Abenaki, English, and Slovak ancestry” with his Abenaki heritage coming from his grandfather. He writes poetry, novels and short stories, with “a particular focus on northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore”, and is the director of a press which publishes new Native American writers. He is also a performing storyteller and musician.

This post’s short story, “Turtle meat”, was first published, according to Blaisdell, in 1983, in an anthology titled Earth power coming: Short fiction in Native American literature, which was published by the Navajo Community College Press. It was published again in Bruchac’s own collection, Turtle meat and other stories, nearly a decade later in 1992.

“Turtle meat”

Wikipedia’s description of his focusing on “northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore” certainly rings true for this story. Blaisdell introduces the story this way, “In this strange great story about an elderly Native American who has been living for years with a debilitated woman, Bruchac writes one of the most extraordinary fishing scenes in literature”. That sure sets up some expectations. It is also a bit misleading because “the debilitated woman” is simply old. She hadn’t always been so.

The story concerns Homer LaWare who, when the story opens, had been Amalia (Mollie) Wind’s hired hand for decades after she had kicked out her husband and come for him. There’s a little sense of “Driving Miss Daisy” here except we are on a farm and life is more earthy than Miss Daisy’s refined life with her Black American chauffeur. To start with, Homer and Mollie have been lovers from the beginning, even though Homer always slept in his cot in the shed – his decision it seems, because “it’s the Indian in me”.

The point at which the story starts, both are showing their age. The story opens with Mollie calling out to him because she needs help getting off the toilet. He comes in from the once-farmed but now overgrown field, and “gently” lifts her, reassuring her that she’s not old, that it “must of was just a cramp. Nothing more than that”. This opening scene tells us a few things – that they are old, of course; that they are comfortable with each other; and that he is sensitively attentive to her physical and emotional needs. We also learn that she has retained ownership of the farm that had originally been her father’s, and that Homer is happy with that: “It’s the Indian in me that don’t want to own no land”. Her grasping husband, Jack Wind, had been sent packing, and her “no-good daughter” had not been seen for years.

The central part of the story describes Homer’s fishing expedition – his catching (and cleaning) several yellow perch, and then an old snapping turtle. It’s a battle – it was easier when he was young “and his chest wasn’t caved in like a broken box” – but he does it. Finally, having been out longer than he’d expected, he returns home, muddy and bloody, to find Amalia missing. Where is Amalia, and why is her daughter – who has “Jack Wind written all over her face” – sitting in Amalia’s rocker?

In one sense, “Turtle meat” is a traditional story of ageing parents and grasping children, but it is imbued with a different sensibility. Homer’s battle with the turtle recalls other literary battles between fishermen and their prey, but in this case it is not only about Homer confronting his age, but is also symbolic of the battle Amalia simultaneously faces. I suspect, too, that the choice of a turtle has specific cultural references for Bruchac, given turtles seem to feature often in his writing.

It’s a great story, as Blaisdell says, but what makes it particularly so is the writing. The characters are more than just types. There’s a natural dignity to them, with an individuality that is conveyed mostly through dialogue – and in Homer’s case, also through his thoughts expressed via italics. The descriptive writing is tight and fresh. And it has a quiet humour. Take, for example, Homer out on his boat:

He looked in the water. He saw his face, the skin lined and brown as an old map. Wattles of flesh hung below his chin like the comb of a rooster.

“Shit, you’re a good-looking man, Homer LaWare,” he said to his reflection. “Easy to see what a woman sees in you.”

How can you not warm to such a character and such writing?

Unfortunately, I don’t think this story is available online so you’ll just have to believe me that it’s another one worth reading from this anthology.

Joseph Bruchac III
“Turtle meat” (orig. pub. 1983)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 50-56
ISBN: 9780486490953