'Starters & Writers' by Kevin Childs

The usual incumbent of this space is, as it were, being spelled. Meanwhile, the view from the other side of the bookshop counter is cheery. The debate about whether too much is being published and whether women writers are getting more of the discrimination than they are positively entitled to has flitted across the pages of the Bulletin and the National Times, with John Hanrahan, formerly an assistant editor and acting editor of this magazine, providing insight and balance. But while the talk about what is being written continues, the writers are getting on with the job. Sara Dowse, for example, the Canberran by adoption whose excellent West Block is being converted into a series by ABC TV, was talking the other day about her new work. It is based partly on her extraordinary upbringing as the daughter of a successful Hollywood lawyer (her parents divorced when she was two). The Rock Hudson book, by the archetypal Lunchtime O’Booze Fleet Street showbiz ‘personality writer’ Victor Davis, also brought back childhood memories for Sara, who remembers using a large room, grandly called The Library, as a refuge in her father’s house. When she slipped in there once, aged thirteen, she was taken aback to find the handsome Rock Hudson passionately occupied with Marilyn Maxwell. The couple were as embarrassed as young Sara, she recalls. Harpo and Groucho Marx would also come to the house, and Sara describes spilling milk as she erupted with laughter at Groucho’s performance at the dinner-table. Her father grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Chicago. A close boyhood friend of his later married Doris Day, and Sara’s father was his lawyer. When he died suddenly, however, Doris Day’s husband was found to have been broke. Where had all the money gone? It wasn’t a case of Che Sera Sera because D. Day sued. The case has been in the courts for twenty-two years, and Sara’s father had sadly become obsessed with it. Sara has begun work on this novel. With this material and her skill as an author, she can be expected to be finished in about three months’ time. In Canberra, too, and as busy as ever (just wait for her exposure when her book hits the streets) is Blanche d’Alpuget, who seems to play the media like Menuhin on the violin. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have, I am told, been enthusiastic about her novel, Winter in Jerusalem, although there was a reference to the plot being hyperactive. We’ll have to wait in Oz and ponder the odd situation of one of our top writers having her book published and reviewed in a foreign country before it is seen at home. Her next novel, so I hear, is set in Indonesia, a country about which she is well informed and has made some interesting comments during the mini-confrontation between Australia and the generals over a Sydney Morning Herald article. As occasionally happens, the headline on that original story was more inflammatory than the article. The Bulletin said that d’Alpuget was about to take a highly paid media job, and there was speculation that she might become one of the new army of radio spruikers, but apparently she has changed her mind, thank goodness. One author who has taken a job is Candida Baker, whose book of interviews, Yacker, was published in May to some acclaim. She was ‘mumbling’, as the jargon describes casual journalism, on the Melbourne Age when her talents were noticed by some colleagues who were defecting to Fairfax’s new franchise, an Australian edition of Time, and she has been hired as book editor, but she will keep on writing. At the risk of attracting a libel writ, did anyone else reckon that the extraterrestrial being who forced the two heroes to listen to his worse-than-doggerel ‘poetry’ in the television version of A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was more than a little like a talentless version of Les A. Murray? A thorny question: what responsibility does a literary agent have to an author? Because there is a mere handful of agents in Australia, any criticism of them may seem unfair, and I would not say that there is widespread inefficiency. But I do know a writer whose manuscript has been with an agent, without her once writing to him, for so long that he has now completed his next book. Fifteen letters have gone unanswered, he tells me, and he has been thinking about buying a train ticket to the distant city to confront her. Now that lawyers can be sued for negligence (in Victoria, at least), will we see the day when an agent cops a writ for failing to carry out the duties that are implied when his or her shingle is hung out? Or is prevarication not a crime? I feel that I must say something about The Book Programme, even if it’s only this: Help! What a commentary it is that a lot of money can be spent by the ABC on, say, Countdown, to cater for one section of the audience, while the book show, with one researcher and a producer who is working long hours to produce series and other shows, is extinguished for lack of money. Some Sydney TV critics said the show was smugly Melbourne, but there is not enough money to fly anyone from interstate. And a Sydney columnist who took Morris Lurie seriously when he said that he had not read the books he was reviewing is the one with egg on his face. The BBC’s Booknotes programme, by contrast, recently met a returning editor of the Oxford Dictionary with a camera crew at London Airport and followed him through Customs and into a taxi for what’s said to be hilarious footage. If a crew could be sent to a Society of Editors dinner, or a Friday E.J.’s lunch with the Godfathers of Sydney writing, Richard Hall and Edmund Campion, we could move beyond those 1960s-style talking heads and appalling non-interviews. And what about a bit of a yike between author and critic? Having lost its few board members with much real integrity, the ABC can now be expected to drop The Book Programme, so everyone can watch billiards, gardening, medical shows, and even soccer. Thanks a lot, Aunty. An attempted robbery at Penguin Books’ Australian headquarters in the outer Melbourne suburb of Ringwood projected the publishing house into the news last month. Shots were fired in the foyer while an editorial meeting was under way upstairs and there was speculation that the design staff had donned masks and resorted to firearms in order to get their jacket designs approved. Another observer commented that the two bandits were not designers but collectors, and – in the climate of a booming Australian publishing program – were after that rarest of documents, a Penguin rejection slip.

Kevin Childs

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