Letters to the Editor

Dear Editor, That twice but incompletely published review of mine of recent architectural books continues to cause trouble for all concerned. Noting the letter (ABR, August) from the Townsville City Council, I’m delighted to learn of their concern for the preservation of old buildings, and fully understand their distress at being misrepresented by me. As they have magnanimously conceded, I was merely working with ‘facts’ found in the books under review. I therefore gladly volunteer my apologies to the Townsville City Council. My intention in writing so strongly was to alert people to the fact that, even though many historic buildings have now been listed for preservation, demolition continues. At the time of writing the review events in Melbourne, not Queensland, dramatised the point with the assault on the old Toorak Methodist Church. Hence my emphasis on the need for vigilance, and happy appropriation of the ‘ox’ quote from one of the other books under review. Those points still stand. Jim Davidson Dear Editor, Pariah Press must decline the term ‘Community Based’ applied to it by John Irving in his review of four of its books of poetry in ABR (August). The Press is in fact exclusive, is a publishing venture and not a community writing project as the review seems to imply. The fact that two of the poets we have published work as ‘Writers in the Community’ is a reflection of the needs of such employment rather than the intentions of our company. Pariah Press was founded in 1983 to publish poetry and is a legally constituted co-operative, membership by invitation only. All of our books to date have received grants either from the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, the Literature Board, or both, which says something of their quality. Reviews of our books, based on their intrinsic values, rather than some imagined commonality of popularising intent, have been good. Mr Irving must have written his review some time ago [Editor’s note: he did. ABR is the culprit here], or he would not have failed to mention that Stephen Williams’s book with Pariah, A Crowd of Voices, was this year’s winner of both the Anne Elder and the Mary Gilmore prizes, two respected awards. Pariah poets are as different as chalk from cheese in terms of age, number of books published, marital status or most other criteria, except for, we believe, a respect for standards in poetry. Barbara Giles Dear Editor, We are a little surprised by Michael Denholm’s remarks about Scripsi in the last issue of Australian Book Review. The editor of Island has a perfect right to criticise Scripsi if he thinks this is appropriate in the case of a magazine with which his own competes. The trouble is that Denholm is misleading where he is not downright inaccurate or insulting. One index of Denholm’s general accuracy is his suggestion that we wield excessive power because we supposedly make a habit of reviewing for The Age Monthly Review. Since its inception there has been a single article by one of us printed in the Monthly Review, and that was the text of Michael Heyward’s obituary for Basil Bunting originally broadcast on the ABC. It is ludicrous to suggest that literary editors should not write reviews (what does Denholm imagine he is doing himself?). Michael Heyward has written one piece for the ABC part of which touched on some of the poets Denholm mentions – in the same review he was also talking about such young turks as Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Denholm’s rhetorical question ‘Is such influence good regarding the writers they are promoting?’ becomes even more ludicrous in the case of Peter Craven, whose last review was of the new Patrick White novella and whose next is to be about a book on Shakespeare. Any influence we wield is intimately related to our editorship of Scripsi, which constitutes much the greater part of it. There seems a fair chance that the quality of that influence will be judged by more dispassionate judges than Denholm. We also fail to see how Scripsi is supposed to give ‘academic respectability’ to anyone when neither of its editors is a career academic or possesses any academic power whatever. Scripsi is not published by an academic institution (the fact that it is housed by one is neither here nor there; so is Island). The kind of writing in Scripsi Denholm seems to think ‘academic’ is as likely to be by John Forbes or Kenneth Cox, neither of whom works in a university. David Malouf, when he reviewed Scripsi in The Age, described the magazine as ‘in no way academic’. Of course, to Denholm we and Malouf are simply engaged in log rolling: we write articles about his work, so he writes glowing reviews of Scripsi. This is an extraordinary suggestion which is as insulting to a distinguished novelist as it is to us. John Tranter, who is supposed to crave ‘academic respectability’, has said in Scripsi that ‘not all poets have as their highest ambition a teaching career among the middle class’. Les Murray and Peter Porter, to name a couple of Scripsi contributors, would agree. So for that matter would Vincent Buckley. It is ridiculous to suggest that Scripsi, which has published everyone from Helen Garner to Michel Tournier, is simply publishing the work of one group of writers. And it is equally ridiculous to suggest that poets like Wearne and Duggan are ‘in favour of writing that has little interest beyond itself’ – whatever that may mean. Wearne is obsessed by politics, Duggan by history. Tranter’s stature as a poet, which certainly pre-dates Scripsi, may be measured by the tension between his self-reflexiveness and the gravity of his tone. John Scott writes about sexual morality and totalitarianism as well as ‘language’. There is no evidence that Denholm has ever read through Scripsi, or that his knowledge of its reception extends much further than the quotations in our ads. It is in Scripsi, after all, that the Tasmanian novelist Amanda Lohrey chooses to preview her deeply political work-in-progress The Reading Group. And it is Scripsi that regularly publishes such exponents of ‘mere cleverness’ as Elizabeth Jolley or Gerald Murnane. Denholm also talks confusingly about the Susan Sontag article we ran, as though we were somehow guilty of false pretences because it also appeared in an American glossy magazine. We published the piece on Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz because Sontag wrote to us, offering it shortly after it was written, because she had seen the stills from the film in our German issue. She emphasised that any American publication would be for a totally different audience (i.e., not in national terms, she assured us that the kinds of readership would not overlap). Denholm is talking nonsense if he wishes to imply that Scripsi makes a habit of getting its international material by any easy reprint route. Occasionally, as with the Francis Steegmuller translations of Flaubert, we will publish material which has appeared in another magazine, though very rarely in book form. This is the almost invariable practice among magazines of international scope: it applied to Christesen’s Meanjin as it applies to the contemporary British magazine Granta. We should add that none of the international material in the current Scripsi, from the Ashbery poems to the Robbe-Grillet translation, has been published before. It might also interest readers of ABR that the translations of Michel Tournier, which we commissioned, and which were published in Scripsi, are to be reprinted in Partisan Review, with acknowledgments. The consultants to Partisan Review include Scripsi contributors like John Ashbery and Susan Sontag. Apparently, the Americans lack Denholm’s insularity. Peter Craven and Michael Heyward Dear Editor, I noticed Michael Denholm’s piece on little magazines in ABR today (August 1986), and I was wondering what he meant by the following, on page 19: Founded in 1981, Scripsi has in a sense given to the ‘New Writers’ or the ‘Generation of ‘68’ the academic respectability that they have craved. (See John Tranter’s introduction to The New Australian Poetry, Makar Press, St Lucia, 1979.)’ I’m curious to know why Mr Denholm thinks my introduction implied that all these writers – whoever they are, exactly – ‘craved’ ‘academic respectability’. I wasn’t aware that I had implied anything so insulting. If I have, I’d be grateful if he’d explain how and where, so I can make a proper apology to the poets I anthologised in that book. John Tranter

From the New Issue

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

‘“Thin labourism”: How is the Albanese government travelling?’ by Frank Bongiorno

No Church in the Wild by Murray Middleton

Three recent short story collections