'Why do I write?' | A survey compiled by Rosemary Sorensen

Would it surprise you to know that a number of our well-known writers write to please themselves? Probably not. If there’s no pleasure, or challenge, or stimulus, the outcome would probably not be worth the effort. If this effort is writing, it seems especially unlikely that someone would engage in the activity without enjoying the chance to be their own audience. And this, in effect, emerged as one of the most constant ingredients of the responses to our survey question, ‘For whom do you write?’. ‘For myself, of course – or perhaps an ideal Other’ says Peter Goldsworthy, whose new novel, Maestro lovingly defines the layers of personality of a boy who could be Goldsworthy himself. Thea Astley has the suspicion that she writes to please herself, at least first of all: ‘and then I hope that perhaps there might be a reader out there who might respond to that moment I wrote about in the first question.’ ‘For someone that I will probably never meet – a person willing to read my words as carefully as I wrote them’, says Gerald Murnane. Honesty? Or pessimism tinged with crossness? Equating the willingness of the reader to read with the willingness of the writer to write, making an equation of the two desires, is provocative enough. When Ross Fitzgerald responds with, ‘For fame ... for myself and my admirers – who, in reality, are exceedingly scarce’, we know that we’re really in that dangerous territory where desire straddles fear and threatens it with a jolly good word-whipping if it doesn’t keep quiet just until the next book is written. Nicely succinct, Fitzgerald is a writer, clearly, who eschews justification beyond what he calls the ‘double-edged sword’ of his passion for praise and provocation. These are just three of the writers who, with enthusiasm and graciousness (and sometimes crossness), responded to a simple survey. It came about this way ... I’d been reading Roger Shattuck’s essay titled ‘Having Congress’ from his book The Innocent Eye. Shattuck is a critic and scholar, a specialist in things French, and a lucid, vastly knowledgeable commentator about the role of the artist in society. In that essay he discusses what he calls the evolution of the writer by contrasting two surveys, both sent out by Louis Aragon, the French poet, novelist, and politically committed journalist. One he sent out to the writers of France in 1919. The second in 1934. The first asked, ‘Why do you write?’, the second, ‘For whom do you write?’. What interested me were the comments made by Shattuck as to the difference in responses between the two surveys. In 1919, ‘almost every reply was brief and facetious and implied that there probably was no purpose’. When the replies came back in 1934 the answers ‘were serious, long, partisan, far less quotable ... No one tries to wisecrack or question the question’. The difference between the European situation in the between-wars period and the Australian situation in 1990 is vast. It is perhaps that very vastness which invites a reassessment of the situation and, indeed, several people who responded to the survey letter outlining the source of the questions and sent out to a random selection of writers (no attempt was made to be comprehensive), pointed out that the question must recur. The questions ‘Why do I write’ and ‘For whom do I write’ are ‘one question’, says Ivan Southall. ‘It keeps on coming up and I keep on answering it. Almost every time I come to it, I bring a different reply, not out of contrariness, but out of a need to relate to life as it is, not to life as it was or life as it may be.’ Southall expresses the joy and necessity of writing and finds it not at all strange that the question should recur, daily if necessary, since ‘each day has its own character’ and ‘the work that comes out of it bears the stamp of it’. Compare this to poet Laurie Duggan’s opening line, which well and truly puts the question-asker in her place: It’s an unfortunate fact that people nowadays are so amazed by the existence of any form of art that they have to ask the practitioners questions like these every few years or so. But why should writers have continually to construct their benign intentions? Do workers in any other profession have to affirm the ‘seriousness’ or ‘importance’ of their endeavours? Just asking, Laurie ... thought it might be nice to hear why the author of the award-winning The Ash Range felt compelled to communicate in the world that wants ‘art to reflect their every movement like the decor of a tarted-up pub’. Laurie Duggan writes ‘for the pleasure of whoever is prepared to listen; “prepared” being the operative word’. And there’s a final swipe for the ‘Australian literary press’ who ‘would rather print an interview with the author of a mediocre first novel than a simple but effective epigram’. Helen Garner responded similarly, by swerving away from the questions and suggesting, by means of a tale about French frustrations, that such questions are just the fluff of literary mags. While it seems a shame that the vagaries of the French publishing world have deprived us of an update from one of the most admired writers in Australia today, the response is an entertaining story. Garner wrote back: I have a French story to tell. A few years ago I was invited to respond to that same question for a similar survey, an international one, run by the French daily paper Liberation. I wrote a short, self-conscious and probably precious answer and submitted it. When the survey appeared in the paper there I was, with photo, bio note, list of publications and so on, and my little essay (translated no doubt by a staff member) began exactly as I had written it. But, halfway through, its tone changed with a crunch and it turned into a grindingly doctrinaire leftist manifesto by some unnamed Australian bloke who had even less of a sense of humour about himself than I did about me. Clearly a stuff-up had occurred on the paste-up table: his response had lost its opening paragraphs and had then been grafted on to mine, producing a grammatically hermaphroditic and theoretically schizoid creature. I never did find out the name of my unwitting collaborator. My (French) husband telephoned the survey’s editor on my behalf, and helped me to compose a dashing letter of protest and correction, which received no reply. I let the whole thing drop. Then, lo and behold, several years later I received in the mail a snappy little paperback entitled Pourquoi ecrivez-vous? It was Liberation’s international survey in book form, the very one. I turned to my own contribution and found it – exactly as it had been printed in the paper, still switching tracks halfway through to the stern views of my unknown compatriot. In other words, no one gave a shit. I laughed irritably and tossed the book in the bin. Perhaps my mysterious other half might read this story and come forward. This is the best result I can hope for, disillusioned as I am about surveys on why writers write. I now have some odd moments of imagining what it would come out like if I attached Gerald Murnane’s name to Elizabeth Jolley’s responses, Thea Astley’s to Morris Lurie’s. Morris Lurie, in fact, responded in a fashion which, if not similar to the chastisements of Garner and Duggan, had a sting: ‘The business of the writer is to change the world, nothing more, nothing less, and only a fool would imagine it other, or have it else.’ Voila! Feeling humbled but decidedly perked up by the scope and piquancy of the responses, I turn to Damien Broderick’s letter. Science fiction writers, whom I’d thought of as a having their heads in the clouds, turn out to be demandingly rigorous when it comes to being asked such questions. The trouble, again, was the French context. Broderick, like Garner, wants to know who’s asking and with what authority: The earlier contexts of your two questions were dialogic and agonistic. Aragon’s respondents, first time around, knew at once that he was a dada/surrealist; in the replay, that he was a Stalinist social realist. What’s more, this is the guy who’s destined to confront the invading Nazis as speaker for the French nation, a sort of Havel of the 1940s. Dear editor, which barricades do you stand at? Are you brandishing a banana-peel, a gun, or a pile of review copies, and publishers’ advertisements? Or to put it another way, spelling out the third question which your first two ought to generate: ‘Why do you ask?’ I took all that to heart, agonised for a while over my own motivations in wishing to provide the readers of ABR with some access to the thoughts of the writers whose books they read, enjoy, bicker about, and grow attached to, and decided that I was no better than the Liberation editor who figured that two Australian writers are probably worth one real writer and they probably all think the same anyway, what with the hot sun and meat pies ... when Mr Broderick threw me a googly with this: ‘Why do I write? I write because I’m achingly sad and lonely. I write to be loved and admired.’ You’ve got to admire that, in the context. The writers I’ve just mentioned somehow throw the question back at the asker. However ‘Why do you ask?’, whether that be a question interrogating the asker’s political or personal motives, or whether it suggests that there is not likely to be much communicated by any response to this recurrent question, did not concern most of the people who replied. But while there is little doubt that many writers are ready and willing to tackle the questions, two very different responses will suggest how great is the disparity between them. James McQueen answered with efficient precision: I write because it interests me to write. I write – as a professional writer – to make money. I write because as a writer I am my own boss, because as a writer I can stay in bed in the mornings, because as a writer I can take a day off and play golf when I feel like it. I write for myself. While McQueen is out improving his handicap, Janine Burke is composing love letters addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern’: Writing is the inscription of my hunger for love. It conveys my need to interrogate sex, time, history, language, and the story of my life, passionately, incessantly. It is my daily work and ultimate metaphor. The notion of daily work is one that is often repeated. Alongside Ivan Southall’s expression of the need to see each day as unique, and Burke’s incessant interrogation of the history of her days, there’s Peter Goldsworthy’s avowal that he feels ‘depressed and frustrated’ if he is kept from writing for any length of time, as though writing is a habit, a kind of addiction. Robin Wallace-Crabbe (and his friend, Robert Wallace, who writes thrillers at Wallace-Crabbe’s typewriter when he’s not looking) calls it a habit, rather than an addiction, a habit that makes him feel good. Serge Liberman puts it another way: ‘I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t … I am too weak to hold back damnation’s tide with mere mortal breath.’ Associated with such motivation is the strong, but more elusive, impulse expressed here by Victor Kelleher who responded to the question ‘Why do I write?’ in this way: It’s easier for me to explain why I started writing. In the mid-seventies, shortly after emigrating from Africa, I suffered so badly from nostalgia that, in desperation, I took to writing about the past. My early jottings gradually grew into short stories as I discovered the benefits of assigning often painful memories to fictional characters: and short stories in turn soon gave way to the larger canvas of the novel. Why I continued writing, especially about places other than Africa ... that’s a more difficult question altogether. When pressed, I usually fall back on a number of stock responses: in order to exorcise the demons; as a way of satisfying my need to make, rather than merely to consume; because writing is an inevitable extension of years of devoted reading; and so on. None of these answers is false; but by the same token, even taken collectively, they fall short of the whole truth. It is this same surprise at the way that writing, an activity taken up almost by chance and developed almost against the odds, that shapes the answer of another writer whose books for children are among the most read and loved on library shelves. Bill Scott warned, in his response, that he didn’t think he could answer such questions easily: I love doing it though sometimes it’s difficult to do well. I was surprised when I began to do it forty years ago; I had certainly never planned to be a writer. I suppose it’s partly instinctive. He also said that he does not usually reply to such questions, ‘possibly because the replies are quite vague’. The fact that he loves doing it is not only not vague, but perhaps the most succinct response that one could hope for to these questions which, though well-worn, can never be thoroughly worn out. Judith Rodriguez proves as much with her explosive answer: I usually answer this question, ‘to live more fully’. But also – to get rid of it, the thing as it was ... since it has already changed ... and so, start something. To see and be this new thing, like performing a musical work now. Like kids telling it their way, or making impossible plans: if you keep on telling the story, it happens, they have to believe you, a bit anyway. Despite evidence. You make a reality that has relationships with the other realities. Then they have to believe you exist, it exists, and because it exists in their belief, they exist. I write to be doing it. What they are doing when they write is expressed in ways, time and time again, that suggest the delicate struggle and the excitement of the activity. For Marion Halligan, this involves a physical pleasure: I write in order to put what I perceive into words. I’ve always done that in my head; I can’t see or feel or think anything without trying to find words for it. When I began to put the words down on paper and work at getting them exactly right I became a writer. Now I enjoy the physical pleasure of the pen forming the letters, the ink flowing. Andrew Sant finds it impossible to imagine a world in which ‘imaginative responses to our expression of it’ did not exist. He places this response in a context much larger than this century’s history, tracing it to a basic human impulse: The fundamental aesthetic desire to shape and transform our experiences goes back to the cave dwellers who made representations of animals on the walls. It is an impulse that hasn’t really changed and facilitates contemplation. The role of writer as shaper and transformer may be compared to the role of recorder, and it is this role which Thea Astley, whose new book Reaching Tin River was reviewed in last month’s ABR, privileges in her response: ‘I write because occasionally I find there are moments of human engagement, observed, half-observed, heard about, that I feel I want to put down with a little more permanency.’ Gerard Windsor says that he is ‘utterly unpolitical’ in his fiction, but that when he aims at producing something beyond himself, he is ‘straining after some solidity in the face of death ... not so much bids for posthumous fame as artefacts that have some element of transcendence over very mortal me’. In contrast, a writer like Bruce Pascoe suggests that engagement in the here and now motivates him, and that it is not transcendence but immersion in the state of things that he seeks: I write so that I may have the conversations with strangers I am unable to initiate otherwise. They are one-sided conversations but they represent my reply to all the listening I do, being a social mute. I am overwhelmed by the glory of our world and our people and the follies and treacheries such a magnificent beast resorts to when frustrated. Too many rats, too close together, bite the innocent by-scuttler. Pascoe is one of the few writers who brought this commitment back, quite specifically, to the Australian context. In answer to the question ‘For whom do you write?’, he says: In a small country it is tempting to allow writing to become a habit of the university world, a place where literature is sure to find protection from a materialist world. The Australian people are intelligent and culturally voracious compared to most other western countries and I seek my audience amongst them. The most detailed response to the questions came from Sally Morrison, whose two volumes of short stories have received the kind of praise that would encourage any writer. Like several of the people to whom the survey was sent, she began by querying her status as a ‘well-known writer’ (the term is loosely used but very flexible) and then produced a vigorous personal manifesto, spiced with garden similes (hyacinth bulbs display ‘small, gnarled reminders of their presence, which is more or less what I can say of myself among the words my brain has a ceaseless propensity to shed’). Writing for Morrison is a way of putting herself in perspective: Distinguishing qualities exist only in an environment of comparison. Writing is my way of comparing what I believe to be true against the greater truths existing in the world and ultimately, deep mysterious truths beyond human comprehension. I like to believe the human mind is a minute portion of a far greater whole and at present I write to curry favour for this belief. It seems to me the world is a wiser organism than I am – it has had far more time to be a sage and it hasn’t been handicapped by its mortal individuality to nearly the same degree as I have. Morrison also provides a contrast to Gerard Windsor’s apolitical stance, for she writes ‘to tell those with baritones what’s wrong with me, and those without baritones what’s wrong with them’. And that’s not all: ‘And I write because those with baritones have been hogging the pens and would hog the word processor too if they knew how to use it, but mercifully they were above being taught how to type in case all else failed.’ There it is. Every single response was strongly individual and, in some way, provocative since every single response provoked a comparison, a contrast, and an affiliation with each of the others. It may well be reinventing the wheel to ask ‘why?’, but that’s the way to make the wheel a Catherine Wheel, sparking and spinning with light and colour. One final response, that of Elizabeth Jolley, which is one of my personal favourites because it alerts me to the pleasure of asking, and the joy of receiving an act of communication: Why do I write? I have no answer to this question. I do not know what makes me write. Perhaps if I knew I would no longer write. Perhaps the reason would prove too awful. What sin to me unknown Dipt me in ink, my parents’ or my own? For whom do I write? While I am writing I am both reader and writer. When I am composing I do not think of a possible readership, the thought would be too frightening. On subsequent writings, second or third drafts, I start to draft the material in an attempt to make it readable, i.e. not dull! for a possible reader. I think reading should provide entertainment and be thought provoking. I think ultimately a writer must hope for readers. A man building a bridge would expect people to walk or drive across it ...

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