Letters - November 2009

Endemic yowling Dear Editor, A footnote for Peter Craven. In 1935, the professor of English at the University of Melbourne, G.H. Cowling, declared that an Australian literature was virtually impossible. This enraged Australian writers everywhere, and provoked P.R. Stephensen’s classic The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). It is also the only reason anyone remembers Cowling (‘Yowling’, according to Miles Franklin), and a reminder of the then image of English departments and their hangers-on as ‘the Garrison’. J.I.M. Stewart was another. Maybe the problem is endemic. Jill Roe, Pearl Beach, NSW Required reading Dear Editor, I write to correct an error in Peter Craven’s review of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (September 2009). The anthology does not include a speech by me, as asserted by Craven, but rather an excerpt from my book, ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things (1993). His vicious attack on me is uncalled for, not only because, evidently, he did not read the anthology or correctly describe the contribution from me, but because, in my opinion, readers of my book have made their own judgement about its literary worth. The book has sold thousands of copies and has been required reading in film courses around the world. I understood that a book review required that the reviewer read the book. When did this cease to be the case? Marcia Langton, Parkville, Vic. Books that squeak Dear Editor, Squeaky books, anyone? As children we delighted in playbooks that squeaked when we opened and closed them. When we find adult books which have this sound effect it is merely annoying. Picador has published Clive James’s latest collection of essays, The Revolt of the Pendulum, and the production is not pleasing. The paper is too stiff, and is cased too tightly, so that the volume emits an audible squeak when opened. The print is rather crammed. Overall, the book does a disservice to the author. Clive James’s essays are as good as ever, despite the impediment to enjoyment, but one does expect a reputable firm to respect the norms of book design. Jack Bradstreet, Hawthorn, Vic. The Revolt of the Pendulum is one of three new books published by Clive James. Peter Craven will review them, squeaky or not, in the next issue. Ed. Mapping Harwood Dear Editor, As co-editor of Gwen Harwood’s Mappings of the Plane: New Selected Poems, I was very pleased to read Jennifer Strauss’s appreciative review in ABR (October 2009). In particular, it is pleasing to read her sensitive account of the two lost ‘Alan Carvosso’ poems; their enigmatic history is described in my note in Meanjin (1/2004), where they were first published. These two superb mid-career Harwood poems did not ‘pass unrecognised’, however: to anyone familiar with Harwood’s work there can be no doubt that they are the authentic article – bottle-aged, cellared and, I suspect, overlooked even by their creator. I was not a good cellar keeper in this instance. Do any Tasmanian readers recall the circumstances of what looks like a radio program of words and music from early in the 1970s? The Carcanet selection, which Chris Wallace-Crabbe and I have edited, was never intended as a replacement for the Collected Poems ‘as the essential text for Australian readers …’ This could not be so, given that Mappings is not marketed as a hard-copy text in Australia, and that the UQP Collected Poems and the Penguin Selected Poems are still in print here. Jennifer Strauss claims that ‘there is something disingenuous’ about our publisher’s claims for a readership outside Australia. This is not so: of course a few Harwood poems appear in American and British anthologies, and, yes, there is that curiously named OUP Collected Poems (the old Angus & Robertson Selected Poems), published in a small run in 1991. Dedicated Harwood readers these days have access to Amazon.com, but shelf-browsers remain unsatisfied. A note for bibliographers: the OUP Collected is not called Night Thoughts. This title is confused with the National Library monograph of 1992, differently misquoted in the second printing of Strauss’s useful UQP critical study of Harwood’s poems. Your reviewer, an experienced anthologist, regrets the omission of some poems, such as ‘An Address to My Muse’. So do we – but the number of long poems had to be restricted. Gregory Kratzmann Carlton North, Vic. Wunderkind without a shadow Dear Editor, I enjoyed Tony Hassall’s essay, ‘Vanishing Wunderkind: The Great Oeuvre of the Enigmatic Stow’ (September 2009). It was written with a sympathetic engagement that may win Stow new admirers. Indeed, the series ABR is running on Australian classics no longer familiar to many readers is a worthwhile one, offsetting the tendency to let the present diminish the past. Stow’s first major novels had to survive initial disparagement. As I remember, Vincent Buckley, for instance, considered To the Islands flawed because ‘the shadow of Patrick White’ fell across it. Stow’s work stood in no one’s shadow, nor did it cast one over others. Ironically, in 1979 Stow received the (sixth) Patrick White Award, given to ‘writers who have been highly creative over a long period but have not necessarily received adequate recognition’. I can think of no Australian writer who has so excelled in the genres of poetry and fiction. With the award money, Stow bought a house by the water at the international port of Harwich, in Essex, so that he would be near his beloved sea, which, along with the Australian land and the Trobriand Islands, so haunts his work. Laurie Hergenhan, Brisbane, Qld Direct to the heart Dear Editor, I am an avid reader of poetry, but I don’t always understand the poems I read. One exception is the poetry of Ted Kooser. His poems speak directly to my heart. Imagine my surprise when I saw a poem in tribute to him by Anthony Lawrence in ABR (September 2009). To be honest, I thought I was the only one who knew this gem of a poet. As Lawrence said, he ‘... takes the small often / overlooked details / and makes from them / something extraordinary’. Thank you, ABR. You caused me to dig out my slim volumes of Kooser poems and reread them. Somehow I’ve managed to hold onto these treasures despite moving across countries and continents since 1976. I live in the tropics now, about as far away from Nebraska as you can get, yet Kooser’s poem ‘First Snow’ reminds me of the wonder of winter’s first snowfall. It’s why we love poets like Ted Kooser. Sally McDonald, Port Douglas, Qld Hamstrings and the Nobel Dear Editor, With Les Murray again mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is opportune to reflect on the importance of literary tradition in Australian society. If successful, Murray would probably be met with quizzical expressions from most of the population, notwithstanding the fact that he would be only the second Australian to receive this Prize. How many Australians could name the first? Patrick White won the prize in 1973, two years after the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. No such questions would be asked in Latin America, where Neruda’s works have become an ingrained part of the cultural and historical landscape. Neruda worked his way in to the heart of the culture and reflected it; now it reflects him. Sport is Australia’s key vehicle for cultural reflection. A Nobel Prize would sell a few more books, but it wouldn’t afford Murray the attention given to the hamstrings of our top football players. Nor, I suspect, would Murray want to engage in the meaningless metaphors parroted by our athletes to explain their performance. The roots of the Australian literary tradition have been white-anted by a barrage of popular culture entities of little worth. Traditional literary values are unlikely to return unless we pull the plug on television and its false idols. Distracted by the pressures of time and seduced by casual interest, we begin to lose the ability to judge the inherent worth of what we are busily reacting to. Eloquent deconstruction is derided as intellectual posturing. Our ability to form a cogent critique has been reduced by biased, simplistic current affairs programs which invite generalisations, ridicule and facile judgement. Reality television offers us simplistic narratives. We become reactive readers, if we read at all, drawn to myriad books on personality as minor stars are encouraged to write memoirs about their uninteresting lives. Unskilled writers, revealing a poverty of syntax, pen sagas that captivate and sell millions. The worst part is that these books make it through the editorial process. The reading public fails to demand more from purveyors of narrative. We have traded adjectives for acronyms – we’re too busy typing ‘LOL’ and ‘ROFL’ to describe our mirth in a meaningful fashion. Greg Lewis, Grange, Qld

Endemic yowling

Australian Book Review

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‘Some sort of afterlife: Posthumous representations of Gore Vidal’ by Heather Neilson

‘Information and transformation: The continuing expansion of AustLit’ by Maggie Nolan

The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of memory, mourning and consolation edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan

On Kim Scott: Writers on writers by Tony Birch

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