US Reporting

New York snow storms may blow outside his window, but Sumner Locke Elliott is feverishly busy indoors writing a novel set in Australia between the wars. He hopes to complete it by late spring. Meanwhile, Pan will publish Elliott’s About Tilly Beamis in Australia early this year and hopes that its American success will be repeated down under. Syme International has taken out an option to film rights with Jill Robb as producer. Robb produced Elliott’s Careful He Might Hear You which ran for thirteen weeks at a Manhattan cinema. Elliott praised Robb’s production of Water Under the Bridge shown on Channel 10 and though there is no final script for Tilly Beamis, he is confident she will do it justice. Last summer, Elliott suffered a setback with the sudden death of his agent and long-time friend, Gloria Safier. ‘I feel like an orphan without her,’ he said recently, ‘it wasn’t just a matter of getting deals. She often prevented her writers from doing the wrong thing. In eighteen years we rarely had a difference of opinion.’ Though he enjoys the anonymity of New York, Elliott is no recluse. He likes to travel and recently returned from the Venice Film Festival which showed Careful He Might Hear You. He has returned to Australia three times in the last ten years. A lively series of letters followed the New York Times Book Review’s piece on Illywhacker. Reviewer Howard Jacobson had described Brisbane as ‘a remote outpost of American colonialism’, to which Janette Turner Hospital retorted, ‘How grateful we are, we denizens of the world’s outstations, to the Howard Jacobsons for making their flying visits and darting off with the quick insights that interpret our inchoate lives for us’. To which Jacobson replied ‘It is Peter Carey, in his novel Bliss who creates the remote outpost of American colonialism. If Janette Turner Hospital thinks there is no such place in Australia, her argument is with him. Australians must decide that issue among themselves. As concerns my “flying visits”, I have lived in Australia six or seven years in all. Not long enough of course – as witness my blunder in the matter of daring to acknowledge liking Australians.’ Shirley Hazzard introduced a PEN session on writers who have a special concern for human rights – ‘the Orwellian nature of our times’, as she called it. Like many delegates to the International PEN conference held mid-January, she found the PEN invitations to Secretary of State Shultz and UNESCO Director M’Bow, to be scandalous. The controversy over the Shultz invitation overshadowed the efforts of a galaxy of literary stars to apply themselves to how the state imagines. Claude Simon of France, winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, said ‘I think the question should not be how does the state imagine, but rather, how does society imagine?’ Several writers including Nadine Gordimer of South Africa and Kobe Abe of Japan agreed that the state had no imagination, while Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru warned that the state’s objective, everywhere, ‘is to last, and to grow’. Wang Meng of China compared the relationship of the state and the writer to that of a boat and the water that keeps it afloat. Shirley Hazzard will speak on a less volatile issue at the English Speaking Union later this month: Nineteenth-century Australian Painting. She has also agreed to address the first meeting of the American Association of Australian Literary Studies in New York on 21 and 22 March. A leading light in the AAALS is Herbert Jaffa, an English professor at New York University who is currently working on a novel set in Townsville during World War II. When not being sidetracked by these rare public appearances, Miss Hazzard is at work on another novel. She hopes to do a lot of writing during the spring at her home in Italy. One Woolly Wombat is earning its two authors, Rod Trinca and Kerry Argent, three cheers on this side of the Pacific. As well as featuring on the cover of the prestigious Horn Book children’s review journal, it received an illustrated spread in both the Los Angeles Times and the School Library Journal. What makes its US publisher, Sandy Miller of Kane-Miller, even happier is its inclusion in Christmas catalogues of some of the fashionable gallery shops like the San Francisco Museum Store and the Corcoran Gallery Shop in Washington. ‘Many of the major galleries have received One Woolly Wombat as an art book and it is selling well in places like the Houston and Brooklyn Museums,’ Mr Miller said. Hefty price tags are hanging on two recent non-fiction releases of Australian interest. Yale University Press has just published two volumes on the art of Captain Cook’s Voyages: The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771 and The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772–1775. At US$50 each, these may seem expensive but Cook has never failed to capture the imagination, and with two distinguished writers like former Power Professor of Contemporary Art at Sydney University, Bernard Smith, and Ruddiger Joppien of the Museum of Applied Arts in Cologne, its place is assured on college library shelves across the country. G.K. Hall in Boston will release the Australian Encyclopaedia next month. At $49.50, the market is expected to be limited but it should fill a gap in local reference collections. Chairman of the English Department at New York University, John Maynard, is hoping for financial support from the Federal Government for his proposed Australian literature course to start at the beginning of the 1986–87 academic year. The money would pay for regular visits of Australian professors and writers who would lecture in the university’s fine creative writing program. The last few months have seen authors like E.L. Doctorow and Louis Simpson addressing packed auditoriums at NYU and Maynard would like to see more writers from other countries. ‘New York City is the centre of American culture and I can think of no better way for Australian writers to get to know Americans,’ Maynard said recently. ‘Our ultimate goal is to endow a chair in Australian literature.’ Colleen McCullough’s latest novel A Creed for the Third Millenium probably won’t receive the same solid commercial turnout as Thorn Birds. Early reviews have been unanimous in their disappointment: Whitley Strieber in the New York Times deplored the poor reader’s choice between cheering the hero’s insipid philosophy or ruining the story. Kirkus Review found only ‘embarrassing dialogue, murkily verbose narration and oafishly explicit New Testament parallels’. Beth Ann Mills in Library Journal found the main character, Joshua Christian, to be the novel’s major flaw. ‘Supposed to be incredibly warm and charismatic, he is simply not convincing. Speeches meant to be grandly inspirational merely sound trite.’ This last review is especially damning as Library Journal is the crucial selection device for America’s 32,800 libraries. Elizabeth Jolley Getting a review on the front page of the weekly New York Times Book Review is probably one of the best boosts to sales and morale an author can get around here. Elizabeth Jolley can feel justly proud of the accolades showered on Foxybaby (Viking) in the past few weeks. Apart from the NYBR page one review, there have been lengthy reviews in most of the library journals and an editor’s choice listing in the Christmas Books supplement to the New York Times. Author and critic Angela Carter called Foxybaby ‘delicious and sustaining … As solitary and as mysteriously self-contained as those in Patrick White’s fiction – perhaps it is an Australian type – Miss Porch at first finds Trinity College with its regime of lettuce leaves and herb tea, scarcely supportable. She gains comfort from the heartening presence of Meridian Viggars, whose very name is sy1wnymous with vigorous middle age.’ A new novel, The Well, and a story collection Woman in a Lampshade will be published in the US in a year or so, and there are long range plans to bring out more stories and to reissue an early novel, The Newspaper of Claremont Street. Collages Unanimous praise for the latest collages of Australian artist Jeannie Baker. Baker was author and illustrator of the wall frieze and book, Millicent, about a pigeon lady in Sydney’s Hyde Park, and now Morrow has just released Baker’s Home in the Sky set in New York City. Anita Silvey in Horn Book wrote ‘At times the viewer almost feels able to walk through the scenes. The young Australian artist has made NYC come vibrantly alive’, and Kristi Beavan in School Library Journal said, ‘the strength of the book lies in the meticulously created 3-D collage constructions which colorfully detail the busy city-scape: litter, graffiti, washlines, roller skates form a visually pleasing and intriguing jumble.’ Poets Four Australian poets have just completed a reading tour of the US and when I caught up with them at the Australian consul-general’s in New York last month, they seemed pretty pleased with their reception around the country. Dorothy Hewett, Geoff Page, Pi O, and John A. Scott travelled to half a dozen cities and had good audiences wherever they went.

Diana Smouha

From the New Issue

Saving Lieutenant Kennedy: The heroic story of the Australian who helped rescue JFK by Brett Mason

Rogue Corporations: Inside Australia’s biggest business scandals by Quentin Beresford

The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

Letters to the Editor - April 2024

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