Fiction

These two very different novels by women provide a wealth of suggestive information about the women’s history being reclaimed and re-established by Australian feminists. They also happen to be intrinsically good novels, accomplished and charming in contrasting ways. Add Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings, reprinted in the Virago Modem Classics series, was first serialised in 1883 in The Australasian, published in novel form in 1891, and soon became one of Cambridge’s most popular novels. It draws upon the familiar form of the romance, but it also, in its translation into an Australian setting, illuminates an idiosyncratic colonial grafting onto that form.

About a year ago, when The Woodpecker Toy Fact and Other Stories was just a gleam in its author’s eye, I chanced to hear this very fancifully dressed woman read a story about childhood perception, semantic confusion, and small-town gossip. It was one of those welcome breaks at an academic conference, when we turned our attention from the analysis of art to the thing itself. And it was perhaps the context, along with the exceptional performance of the reader, which made this particular story stand out so vividly. For while it satisfied, they (by then quite desperate) desire to be enthralled by something fictive, it also played up cleverly to the critic in us all.

Ally is fifty-four when her husband leaves her. Her best friend and her daughter – neither of whom she has ever really talked to before – are each thousands of miles away. She descends rapidly into an undignified breakdown. Retreating from everyone and everything, she grows increasingly fat and fearful. Ally has never been terribly confident in her own identity (‘People tend to look past her, rather than at her. Shop assistants tend to give her bored glazed looks and a sharp “What?”’) and now, unloved and unneeded, she is threatened with disintegration. The woman in the mirror is a stranger, she imagines herself as a white grub that she can make vanish by closing her eyes.

At various times in its history, the Australian short story has been predictable, as editorial and public appetites have limited experimentation. I am glad to be reading now, when approval can be conferred on collections as different and as variously excellent as Julie Lewis’s The Walls of Jericho and Peter Skrzynecki’s The Wild Dogs. Lewis’s work is more formally experimental than Skrzynecki’s, but both collections offer insight into the social and the literary.

As I write these words, I have just read the first forty-five pages of Murray Bail’s novel. Those pages are mostly about the Shadbolt family of Adelaide.

In her autobiographical sketch One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty wrote of her mother: ‘But I think she was relieved when I chose to be a writer of stories, for she thought writing was safe.’ Can you just imagine the shock on Chestina Welty’s face when she read, as she must have, this sentence tucked away into the middle of one of her daughter’s first stories: ‘When he finally looked down there was blood everywhere; her lap was like a bowl.’ 

In her interview with Candida Baker for Yacker 2, Jessica Anderson expresses her dissatisfaction with the covers of a number of her books, citing in particular the glum face on the paperback of The Impersonators and the representation of The Commandant as, in Baker’s words, ‘a Regency romance’. Anderson, who began as a commercial artist, stresses that ‘Design and presentation ... really matter. They’re the introduction to a book.’ It seems to me to be particularly unfortunate (although she may well have given it her blessing) that her new book sports a clichéd Ken Done cover. Perhaps Done’s bright colours might evoke the ‘warm zone’ of the title, although Anderson is referring to Brisbane, not Done’s mock-naïve view of Sydney. Unfortunately, the cover subliminally suggests that Anderson’s writing is sunnily comforting, easily assimilated.

There has been altogether too much talk recently about literature and bliss, and not enough about sadness. Think of the gloom that descends when you have read all the works of a beloved author, and no fresh fields and pastures new remain. Years ago, I suffered this depression after reading all the works of William Faulkner. There was a brief respite when Flags in the Dust, an ur-version of Sartoris, appeared, but brief it was.

Each person’s death diminishes us all, but the death last year of Olga Masters has removed from us, and our literature, a talent that had too little time to flourish.

It’s a favour to no-one to call him (certainly never her) ‘a modern Henry Lawson’ – as the back cover of Bruce Pascoe’s collection proclaims – because of the large and difficult questions that are raised. What does the name ‘Henry Lawson’ mean? ‘The Loaded Dog’, or ‘Water Them Geraniums’? The writer of humorous stories about the bush where life is animated by a huge and comic spirit, or of ones about living in the bush that leave you feeling dismayed and chilled to the bone? And who is this epithet aimed at? For some, Lawson is the face on the ten-dollar note; for others, he’s the successful Australian writer who went to England and failed to make any impression, returned, and then lived long enough to mourn his own decline as a writer, ending his life as a miserable drunk; for still others, he’s one of the first writers you read at school.