Next month ABR Editor Peter Rose and Development Consultant Christopher Menz will lead the third ABR international cultural tour with Academy Travel. This booked out German tour will include visits to Munich, Berlin, and Bayreuth.
Tickets are now available for the fourth tour, a return to the United States. Join a like-minded group on a twelve-day tour that explores literature, art and architecture, theatre and music in three of America’s greatest cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. All three cities have magnificent art collections, great music and theatre offerings, splendid architecture, and strong literary traditions. The tour will experience selected cultural highlights in each city. Australian Book Review will also hold a special literary/cultural event. Details are available from Academy Travel and the ABR website.
alexis WrighT
Alexis Wright’s collective biography of Tracker Tilmouth, Tracker (Giramondo), reviewed by Michael Winkler in our January–February issue, has won the $50,000 2018 Stella Prize. In his review Winkler wrote, ‘Wright takes a polyphonic approach to profiling her quixotic subject. The lead voice belongs to Tilmouth, but she augments and counterpoints his words through interviews with more than fifty informants, in often pungent vernacular.
The voices overlap, re-embroider, and articulate different perspectives,’ describing Tracker as ‘a book performed by a folk ensemble rather than a solo virtuoso, [which adds to Wright’s] enduring non-fiction oeuvre.’ The other titles shortlisted this year were The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman, The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser, An Uncertain Grace by Krissy Kneen, and The Fish Girl by Mirandi Riwoe.
Jolley Prize
When entries closed for the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, we had received about 1,170 stories, from thirty-five countries. Judging is underway, and we look forward to publishing the three shortlisted stories in our August issue, ahead of the Jolley Prize ceremony later that month. Can’t wait to read the shortlist? Visit our website to read stories by past winners and other great short fiction.
Beverley Farmer (1941–2018)
Novelist, essayist, and short story writer Beverley Farmer died on April 16 at the age of seventy-seven.
Farmer’s first novel, Alone, was released in 1980. Her second book, Milk (1983), won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in 1984 as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and her third novel, The House in the Light (1995), was shortlisted for the 1996 Miles Franklin Award. In
WRITTEN WORD
2009 she received the Patrick White Award, an annual prize established in 1974 to honour a writer who has been ‘highly creative over a long period but has not necessarily received adequate recognition’.
This Water: Five Tales (Giramondo), longlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize, was announced at the time of publication as Farmer’s last work. In her review in ABR’s June–July 2017 issue, Anna MacDonald wrote, ‘Farmer’s prose is virtuosic, she is a stylist unlike any other living Australian writer, and it is difficult to read this last work without a haunting sense of loss.’
melBourne JeWish Book Week
Melbourne Jewish Book Week will present its first full program between 3 and 9 May with ABR contributor and inaugural Calibre Essay Prize winner Elisabeth Holdsworth appearing at an event on Sunday May 6 at 1.45 pm at the St Kilda Town Hall. ‘The Jewniverse’ will explore ideas raised in Holdsworth’s ABR RAFT Fellowship Essay ‘If This is A Jew’ (November 2017). Moderated by Rebecca Wartell, the event will look at the current Jewish landscape and where things might be heading in a discussion between Holdsworth, historian Paul Forgasz, and Rabbi James Kennard.
Visit the MJBW website for more information about this event and to see their full program: http:// melbournejewishbookweek.com.au
Film and T v survey
In addition to a wide range of reviews, commentaries, and articles, we will invite some leading film critics and professionals to nominate their favourite film in the June-July Film and Television issue of ABR. To complement this feature, we want to hear from readers about their favourite film, director, and actor. All you have to do is vote online at: bit.ly/2Czft1k. There are some fantastic prizes for completing the survey, including a one-year Palace VIP Card, thanks to Palace Cinemas, and a pack of ten DVDs from Madman Entertainment. You have until 21 May to vote.
kendrick lamar
Predictably, the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes included the authors of exposés on sexual predators in Hollywood, multifarious scandals in US politics, and the plight of refugees worldwide. Less predictable was the Prize for Music which was won by US hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar for his 2017 album DAMN., described by
Pulitzer as ‘a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life’. Lamar is the first non-classical or jazz artist to win the prize, beating Michael Gilbertson’s Quartet and Ted Hearne’s Sound from the Bench The decision to award the Pulitzer to the thirty-year old rapper has been received well so far, unlike the controversy which greeted Bob Dylan’s unexpected 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. But as James Ley writes in his review of Why Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas on page 58 in this issue, ‘… those who disapproved of the decision seemed unable or unwilling to disentangle the question of whether or not he deserved the award from the question of whether or not it was appropriate to bestow it upon someone like him … someone whose work falls outside a traditional definition of ‘literature’, someone with the temerity to have succeeded in a popular medium that has allowed his work
John Allison
Ben Brooker
Tim Byrne
Lee Christofis
Jane Clark
Des Cowley
to reach millions of people and exert a huge cultural influence.’ It’s hard to ignore the insightfulness of certain lines in Lamar’s repertoire which include: ‘Hail Mary, Jesus and Joseph / The great American flag is wrapped in drag with explosives / Compulsive disorder, sons and daughters / Barricaded blocks and borders / Look what you taught us!’ (‘XXX’) as the US, and indeed the world, teeters on the brink of a Trump-shaped abyss.
T-shirTs & ToTe Bags
While the last vestiges of warm weather cling on for a few weeks more than usual, now’s your chance to pick up a high quality black cotton ABR tshirt, available in various sizes for men and women for just $25 plus postage and handling.
And do you need something to carry your books (and copies of ABR) in? You can also now purchase a stylish ABR tote bag. Visit our ABR Merchandise page for more information: australianbookreview.com.au/ subscribe/abr-merchandise
ABR Arts
Anwen Crawford
Ian Dickson
Helen Ennis
Morag Fraser
Fiona Gruber
Michael Halliwell
Susan Lever
Louise Martin-Chew
Peter Rose
Dina Ross
Zoltán Szabó
Harry Windsor
May 2018
Alan Atkinson
Morag Fraser
Shaun Crowe
Richard Martin
Billy Griffiths
Kirsten Tranter
Gillian Dooley
Essays
Barry Hill: Reason and Lovelessness Patrick McCaughey
Literary Studies
Lyndall Gordon: Outsiders Dorothy Driver
Poems
Anne Elvey
Julie Manning
Ian Patterson
Politics
Tim Shipman: Fall Out Ross McKibbin
Robert Dallek: Franklin D. Roosevelt Andrew Broertjes
Elaine Tyler May: Fortress America Max Holleran
Biography & Memoir
Craig Brown: Ma’am Darling David Rolph
Jonathan Dollimore: Desire Dion Kagan
Fiction
Lionel Shriver: Property Chris Flynn
Roger Averill: Relatively Famous Shannon Burns
Robbie Arnott: Flames Amy Baillieu
Fyodor Dostoesvsky, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater: Crime and Punishment Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover
Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J. Epstein: Apple and Knife Lisa Bennett
Tracy Sorensen: The Lucky Galah Josephine Taylor
Laurie Steed: You Belong Here Gretchen Shirm
S.A. Jones: The Fortress Anna MacDonald
A remarkable study of the Bible in Australia
New essays from Marilynne Robinson
Late musings from Robert Manne
The cultural politics of native title
Our immensely overdue republic
Once Again: Outside in the House of Art
Gregory Day’s new novel
Poetry
Fiona Wright: Domestic Interior
Carolyn Abbs: The Tiny Museums Joan Fleming
Fred Sasaki and Don Share (eds): Who Reads Poetry
David McCooey
Ryszard Krynicki, translated by Alissa Valles: Our Life Grows
Benjamin Ivry
Adam Aitken: Archipelago
Elizabeth Allen: Present David Dick
Cultural Studies
Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens: Normality
James Bennett
Tom Mole: What the Victorians Made of Romanticism
Michael Falk
Law
Jessica Lake: The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits
Marama Whyte
History
Robert Haldane: The People’s Force John Arnold
Art
Hannah Fink: Bronwyn Oliver Brigitta Olubas
Tiffany Jenkins: Keeping Their Marbles
Christopher Allen
Interviews
Poet of the Month Pam Brown
Open Page Justine Ettler
ABR Arts
Gemma Betros
Ian Dickson
James Ley
Paul Watt
Anwen Crawford
Michael Halliwell
Ben Brooker
Au revoir là-haut (See You Up There)
The Children
Richard F. Thomas: Why Dylan Matters
David Tunley et al.: Destiny
The Death of Stalin
Don Quichotte
After Dinner
THANKING OUR PARTNERS
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; The Ian Potter Foundation; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
Australian Book Review
May 2018, no. 401
Since 1961
First series 1961–74
Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)
ISSN 0155-2864
Registered by Australia Post
Printed by Doran Printing
Published by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006
Editor and CEO Peter Rose
Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu
Deputy Editor (Digital) Dilan Gunawardana
Business Manager Grace Chang
Development Consultant Christopher Menz Poetry Editor John Hawke
Chair Colin Golvan
Treasurer Peter McLennan
Board Members Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Andrea Goldsmith, Sarah Holland-Batt,Vanessa Lemm, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder, Gub McNicoll (Observership Program)
ABR Laureates Robyn Archer, David Malouf
Editorial Advisers
Bernadette Brennan, Danielle Clode, Des Cowley, Ian Donaldson, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Fiona Gruber, Margaret Harris, Sue Kossew, James McNamara, Julian Meyrick, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Craig Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Simon Tormey, Terri-ann White, Rita Wilson
Media
Progressive PR and Publicity: darren@progressivepr.com.au or (03) 9696 6417
Volunteers
Caroline Bailey, David Dick, John Scully
Cover design by Judy Green featuring stills from The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson.
Correspondence Editorial matters should be directed to the Editor; advertising matters to the Deputy Editor; and subscription queries to the Business Manager. Major articles are refereed.
Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters. All letters are edited. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter. Correspondents must provide a telephone number for verification.
Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is the first time that he or she has appeared in the magazine.
ABR Arts Reviews are rated out of five stars () with half stars denoted by the symbol
Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soybased, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.
This issue was lodged with Australia Post on April 27.
hoW To suBscri Be www.australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822; Fax: (03) 9699 8803 business@australianbookreview.com.au or post form below
individual PrinT raTes
Current individual print subscribers can access ABR Online for free as part of their subscription. Contact ABR to set up access.
individuals – ausTralia:
One-year subscription (ten issues + ABR Online) Standard: $90
Students/pensioners: $80 25 and under: $49.95
Two years (twenty issues + ABR Online) Standard: $165
Students/pensioners: $150
Five years (fifty issues + ABR Online) Standard: $400
Students/pensioners: $360
individuals – overseas:
One-year subscription (ten issues (airmail) + ABR Online) Standard (Asia/NZ): $145 Standard (Rest of World): $160
Two-year subscription (twenty issues (airmail) + ABR Online) Standard (Asia/NZ): $265 Standard (Rest of World): $295
individual
ABR Online raTes
One year: $60
Six months: $40
Two years: $100
Five years: $220
One year (25 and under): $25
insTiTu Tional raTes
One year print subscription (ten issues): Australia: $120
Secondary schools (Australia): $100
Standard (Asia/NZ): $175
Standard (Rest of World): $205
One year’s access to ABR Online: All institutions, including schools and municipal libraries, can purchase a one-year subscription to ABR Online for $150, except the following, for which a one-year subscription to ABR Online costs $500: universities; university libraries; government auspices and departments; and national and state libraries and their international counterparts (in terms of status and reach).
To organise an institutional subscription to ABR Online, please contact ABR. Trial access can be arranged on request. Print and online subscription bundles also available. All prices include GST. For more information about rates refer to www.australianbookreview.com.au
This work was developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program.
Subscribe for as little as $25
This month, thanks to Village Roadshow, twenty new or renewing subscribers will have the chance to win a double pass to Breath, directed by Simon Baker and based on the novel by Tim Winton (in cinemas 3 May).
Full name on Credit Card: ................................................................................................................... Expires: ............................. Signed: ................................................................................................... Which issue would you like your subscription to start with? ..............................................................
To subscribe to ABR Online visit www.australianbookreview.com.au or contact ABR
ABR PATRONS Supporting Australian writing
Generous donations from Patrons have transformed Australian Book Review in recent years, with major benefits for writers and readers. These donations have enabled us to expand our programs, to diversify the magazine, and to be more ambitious and outward-looking. Most importantly, we have once again increased our payments to contributors at a time when paid freelance opportunities are relatively few. Our literary prizes, Fellowship program, and ABR Arts are only possible because of cultural philanthropy. With support from Patrons we look forward to securing and improving the magazine for another forty years.
Parnassian ($100,000 or more)
Mr Ian Dickson
Acmeist ($75,000 to $99,999)
Olympian ($50,000 to $74,999)
Mr Colin Golvan QC
Augustan ($25,000 to $49,999)
Ms Anita Apsitis and Mr Graham Anderson
Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie
Peter Corrigan AM (1941–2016)
Ms Morag Fraser AM
Ms Ellen Koshland
Mrs Maria Myers AC
Mr Kim Williams AM
Anonymous (1)
Imagist ($15,000 to $24,999)
Mr Peter and Ms Mary-Ruth McLennan
Ruth and Ralph Renard
Vorticist ($10,000 to $14,999)
Mrs Helen Brack
Emeritus Professor David Carment AM
Professor Ian Donaldson and Dr Grazia Gunn
Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO
Mrs Pauline Menz
Professor Colin and Ms Carol Nettelbeck
Lady Potter AC CMRI
Peter Rose and Christopher Menz
Mr John Scully
Anonymous (1)
Futurist ($5,000 to $9,999)
Mr Peter Allan
Hon. Justice Kevin Bell AM and Ms Tricia Byrnes
Dr Bernadette Brennan
John Button (1932–2008)
Professor Glyn Davis AC and Professor Margaret Gardner AO
Ms Marion Dixon
Professor The Hon. Gareth Evans AC QC
The Hon. Peter Heerey AM QC
Dr Alastair Jackson
Mr Allan Murray-Jones
Ms Susan Nathan
Estate of Dorothy Porter
Mr David Poulton
Ms Mary Vallentine AO
Ms Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO
Modernist ($2,500 to $4,999)
Ms Gillian Appleton
Ms Kate Baillieu
Professor Jan Carter AM
Mr Des Cowley
Helen Garner
Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC
Ms Cathrine Harboe-Ree
Professor Margaret Harris
Ms Elisabeth Holdsworth
Mr Neil Kaplan CBE QC and Ms Su Lesser
Mr Geoffrey Lehmann and Ms Gail Pearson
Dr Susan Lever
Mr Don Meadows
Mr Stephen Newton AO
Margaret Plant
Professor John Rickard
Ilana Snyder and Ray Snyder AM
Dr Jennifer Strauss AM
Professor Andrew Taylor AM
Dr Mark Triffitt
Mr Noel Turnbull
Ms Nicola Wass
Ms Jacki Weaver AO
Anonymous (7)
Romantic ($1,000 to $2,499)
Mr Peter and Mrs Sarah Acton
Professor Dennis Altman AM
Helen Angus Bardas Foundation
Professor Frank Bongiorno
Mr Brian Bourke AM
Mr John H. Bowring
Ms Michelle Cahill
Mr John Collins
Ms Donna Curran and Mr Patrick McCaughey
Mr Hugh Dillon
Ms Johanna Featherstone
The Leo and Mina Fink Fund
Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick
Mr Reuben Goldsworthy
Dr Joan Grant
Professor Tom Griffiths AO
Professor Nick Haslam
Ms Mary Hoban
Ms Claudia Hyles
Dr Barbara Kamler
Professor John Langmore
Dr Stephen McNamara
Professor Stuart Macintyre AO
Mr Alex and Ms Stephanie Miller
Dr Ann Moyal AM
Dr Brenda Niall AO
Ms Angela Nordlinger
Ms Jillian Pappas
Mr M.D. de B. Collins Persse OAM MVO
Professor John Poynter AO OBE
Dr Trish Richardson and Mr Andy Lloyd James
Dr Della Rowley (in memory of Hazel Rowley, 1951–2011)
Ms Gillian Rubinstein (Lian Hearn)
Mr Robert Sessions AM
Dr John Seymour and Dr Heather Munro AO
Mr Michael Shmith
Dr John Thompson
Ms Lisa Turner
Dr Barbara Wall
Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM
Professor Terri-ann White
Mrs Ursula Whiteside
Mrs Lyn Williams AM Anonymous (6)
Symbolist ($500 to $999)
Ms Nicole Abadee and Mr Rob Macfarlan
Ms Jan Aitken
Dr Gae Anderson
Help ABR to further its mission
ABR is a fully independent non-profit organisation. Publishing a quality literary review in a small market is challenging. To further its mission and to expand its programs, ABR seeks donations that will benefit Australian writers and reward bright new literary and editorial talent. Patrons have the distinction of making a tangible contribution to Australia’ s independent literary review. Our future is in your hands.
ABR Bequest Program
Gillian Appleton
John Button
Peter Corrigan AM
Peter Rose
Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis Anonymous (3)
Mr Douglas Batten
Mr John Bugg
Mr Joel Deane
Ms Jean Dunn
Dr Paul Genoni
David Harper AM
Dr Max Holleran
Dr Barbara Keys
Mr Marshall McGuire and Mr Ben Opie
Ms Muriel Mathers
Mr Rod Morrison
Professor Brigitta Olubas
Mr Mark Powell
Ms Natalie Warren
Dr Ailsa Zainu’ddin Anonymous (3)
Realist ($250 to $499)
Dr Delys Bird
Ms Donata Carrazza
Ms Blanche Clark
Professor Paul Giles
Dr Anna Goldsworthy
Professor Brian McFarlane
Mr Michael Macgeorge
Ms Diana O’Neil
Mr J.W. de B. Persse
Professor Wilfrid Prest
Professor David Rolph
Emeritus Professor Susan Sheridan and Professor Susan Magarey AM
Mrs Margaret Smith
Joy Storie
Professor Jen Webb
Mr Robyn Williams AM Anonymous (2)
ABR Patrons support
• Better payments for writers
• Annual literary prizes
• Literary fellowships
• ABR Arts
• States of Poetry
• Fiction and poetry in the magazine
• Discounted subscriptions for young readers
How to become a Patron
The Australian Government has approved ABR as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR). All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible. These donations are vital for the magazine’ s future. To discuss becoming an ABR Patron or donating to ABR, contact us by email: development@australianbookreview.com.au or by phone: (03) 9699 8822.
(ABR Patrons listing as at 12 April 2018)
REVIEW OF THE MONTH
The legend of the Bible
How the Bible has shaped
Australia
Alan Atkinson
THE BIBLE IN AUSTRALIA: A CULTURAL HISTORY by Meredith Lake NewSouth, $39.99 pb, 439 pp, 9781742235714
The Bible in Australia is an unpretentious title for a remarkable book, and yet it is accurate enough. The Bible has been an ever-present aspect of life in Australia for 230 years, but no one has ever thought through its profound importance before. By starting her argument in a place both strange and obvious, Meredith Lake comes up with startling possibilities, and they keep surfacing all the way through the volume.
Just sixty years ago, in 1958, Russel Ward published his equally important text, The Australian Legend. No account of the Australian collective character and experience has, I believe, remained so long in print, and none has been so thoroughly influential in explaining Australians to themselves. The Australian Legend was always a more accessible book than, say, Manning Clark’s History of Australia, though the latter was designed to be read as a legend in itself. Australians, said Ward (and Clark more or less agreed), are, and always have been, sceptical about ‘religion and of intellectual and cultural pursuits generally’. The Bible in Australia turns this long-held understanding inside out. In fact, Lake makes a good case for thinking that the Bible, as an amalgam of stories, has had a power like Ward’s legend, and a similar nation-forming impact.
During the last few decades there have been many indications that First Nation stories might somehow do the same. This was the implication, say, of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines (1987) and Barry Hill’s Broken Song (2002), and a globally significant outpouring of new Indigenous painting, song, and dance offers such hope. A title such as The Bible in Australia sounds retro, but this book takes the effort further forward, which explains its deep importance now.
Early on, in explaining the Australian impact of the Bible, Lake distinguishes between the ‘globalising Bible’, the ‘cultural Bible’, and the ‘theological Bible’.
In fact, these categories overlap a good deal, especially ‘globalising’ and ‘theological’, which merge especially on issues of ethics and sanctity. From generation to generation, ethical issues are well explored, and so is the idea of the Bible as ‘a treasure trove of cultural riches’. Theology, on the other hand, and the Bible’s impact on the Australian intellectual world view, is not one of the book’s particular strengths.
Lake argues that for most of the period of nonIndigenous settlement the Bible has shaped and to some extent driven the Australian experience. So she says, in dealing with the early colonial period: ‘The Bible nourished notions of place and providence that went to the heart of the emotional and psychological history of white settlement in Australia.’ God’s Word, so called, affected common imagination not just directly but also indirectly, through various winding ways and through all degrees of Christian piety. A longer book might have been more precise as to just how this happened, detailing not just result but also process, including the ways in which other cultural traditions were variously interwoven with biblical understanding. With more room, finer distinctions might have been drawn between the influence of the Bible, the influence of Christianity generally and the influence of religion and spirituality in a generic sense. But then, who reads longer books than this, especially on what seems at first to be a specialist topic?
The middle decades of the nineteenth century Lake calls Australia’s ‘great age of the Bible’, all the more important because those who grew up at that time were leaders at all levels during the period of Federation and World War I. This is where Lake’s account works most incisively as a recasting of the national story. By the 1860s, high standards of literacy and a surge in print publication coincided with a remarkable degree of shared religiosity, and as a result by the 1880s, when
the question of Federation began to engage the public imagination, ‘levels of biblical literacy were at an historic high’ in Australia. ‘The Bible was a shared point of reference, a part of common life … It readily produced transformative engagement with society and its members.’ In other words, the Bible shaped both questions and answers about Federation. The Old Testament created a sense of Providential direction. The New Testament determined moral purpose, clarifying the ways in which constitutional change might reinforce social justice and ‘the good society’.
So too, ‘[t]he Bible was crucial to the ways Australians experienced the First World War’. It was ‘part of the material, emotional and intellectual lives of many service men and women’ and it ‘informed the ways the legacies of the war played out in Australian culture’, especially in the ceremonies of remembrance. Again, biblical understanding created a pathway through common imagination along which national understanding might travel.
Lake makes a good case for thinking that the Bible has had a power like Ward’s legend, and a similar nation-forming impact
What explains the strengths and limitations of the Bible’s impact, in Australia and elsewhere? What puts the Bible in a particular class of literature, almost in a class of its own? In the end, Lake does not offer an explanation. The American literary critic Harold Bloom, on the other hand, points to the Bible’s literary power, which, as with Shakespeare, Bloom says, seems superhuman because abnormally and endlessly rich. There is a level of human creativity or mental reach, from Homer to Stephen Hawking, which takes the bulk of humanity out of its depth. In pre-modern terms, such work seems to deserve reverence, even worship. Lake’s book illustrates the process well. What Ward saw as scepticism among Australians, may have been more like taciturn bafflement. And then, on the contrary, we have Helen Garner’s response to a first reading, as quoted by Lake: ‘there were passages … that made my hair stand on end – with horror, bliss, and technical awe’.
Again, Lake’s book raises more questions than it can reasonably answer. But surely we do need a larger discussion about the way in which a mere piece of writing enters into the realm of the apparently supernatural. That in turn would depend on our willingness to imagine the supernatural, which is now rather hard to do – a loss of competence as tragic, surely, as the loss of a great language.
Shakespeare’s plays are performed everywhere. Similarly, one of the particular strengths of The Bible in Australia is the open-minded way in which it deals with the uptake of the Bible for various reasons among a wide range of people, not all of them by any means churchgoverned. Weaving right through The Bible in Australia are questions about the impact of the Bible on Indigenous peoples, and their impact on it. Lake begins with Boorong, a girl who lived with Mary Johnson, wife of the first chaplain, until she went back to nakedness and the bush. Later, her son, Dickey Bennelong, was to be a fervent preacher of Bible lessons. Towards the end we hear of activists (Don Brady, Charles Harris, David Kirk, Anne Pattel-Gray, and others) who used the Bible to shape an Australian version of Black liberation theology in the 1970s, and others (Jarinyanu David Downs, Shirley Purdie, Gurrumul Yunupingu) who made biblical reinterpretations of Indigenous culture, in a merging of legends. Eddie Mabo was likened to Moses among his own people. The liberating and enlarging power of the Bible is central to Lake’s argument. She writes also of Australian feminist theologians, such as Marie Tulip, who saw it also in that light. The collective character that Ward’s legend attributed to Australians was slow moving, slow talking, and largely reactive. The Anzac story, which overlaps with Ward’s legend, adds to that traits of extreme courage and stoicism. The legend outlined by Lake suggests a national character larger than both and, potentially at least, more proactive and less predictable. As she shows very well, there is room in her legend for endless variety of usage and interpretation.
The last chapter includes reflections on the Bible in the twenty-first century. Among other things, the digitised, searchable Bible promises new methods of biblical criticism and interpretation. The fifteenth-century printing of the Bible brought about the Protestant Reformation, but it is too soon to tell if these new means of access will have an equivalent impact. Implicit in the end is a conviction that even such mighty changes can hardly exhaust the Bible’s power. g
Alan Atkinson, who taught Australian history for many years at the University of New England, is the author of The Europeans in Australia and The Commonwealth of Speech. He held ABR’s inaugural RAFT Fellowship.
‘Some sheltering consensus’
The Calvinist writer who ‘personifies unhipness’
Morag Fraser
WHAT ARE
WE DOING HERE?: ESSAYS
by Marilynne Robinson
Virago, $27.99 pb, 331 pp, 9780349010458
At a recent Passover Seder in Melbourne, I caught the word ‘Gilead’. ‘My favourite book!’ exclaimed the woman opposite me. I was a Catholic guest at a gracious Jewish table, so I whispered my query: ‘Marilynne Robinson’s novel?’ ‘Of course!’ came the emphatic reply. The Seder ritual was suspended for a moment (informality was part of the evening’s graciousness) while people asked about Robinson, about American literature, and what a Calvinist might be.
If I’d had multiples of Robinson’s new book of essays, What Are We Doing Here?, I would have handed them around gratefully, not just for her eloquent explanation of what it means to be a Calvinist in today’s America, but for her profound articulation of what it means to be a writer and an exemplary human being in an age and a country (a world?) where language and truth are daily traduced. Robinson’s spare, luminous novels – Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) – saw her justly heralded in literary circles and beyond. Their subject matter – the plain, profound lives of people like herself who live in the vast centre of the United States – struck a chord that was quiet but resonant. As a professor of English and creative writing at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and as a guest lecturer at universities at home and abroad, and occasional preacher in churches and cathedrals, she has earned such a high reputation for her stringent and timely cultural commentary that it was perhaps inevitable that Barack Obama, while still president, should seek to engage her in public conversations in Iowa in 2015 (subsequently published in The Givenness of Things: Essays [2015]). Robinson is now famous interna-
tionally and unrepentantly unfashionable. In a central essay (‘Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself’) in this latest volume, she quotes from an overview she found on the internet:
It said that that if someone were bioengineered to personify unhipness, the result would be Marilynne Robinson. The writer listed the qualities that have earned me this distinction – I am in my seventies, I was born in Idaho, I live in Iowa, I teach in a public university, and I am a self-professed Calvinist.
Characteristically, she both savours the ‘unhipness’, and apologises for none of its constituent ‘qualities’: ‘Ah, well. I will only grow older, I am happy in Iowa, my religion is my religion.’ But she agrees with her critic that readers of her ‘will find thinking that is very unlike their own’. But then, ‘The article did make me think, though, how inclined Americans are to find their way to some sheltering consensus that will tell them what to wear, what to eat, what to read, how to vote, what to think.’
Robinson’s critique of that ‘sheltering consensus’ is the core of these essays. She is aware of the potential paradox: ‘I know it is conventional to say we Americans are radically divided, polarized. But this is not more true than its opposite – in essential ways we share false assumptions and flawed conclusions that are never effectively examined because they are indeed shared.’
The essays anatomise a formidable list of ‘false and flawed conclusions’, from the assumption that America invented capitalism, to blinkered conceptions of Puritanism and its legacy (American higher education!), adherence to
Marxism and social Darwinism (‘two tellers of one tale’), to manipulation of the meaning of ‘élite’, and the consequences of conforming to a belief in the genetic inevitability of human selfishness. ‘We have surrendered thought to ideology,’ she writes. Self-interested competitiveness has become accepted as the primary American motivation. But ‘Where in all this is wisdom, courage, generosity, personal dignity?’
There is a cadence of exasperation in Robinson’s rhetoric, and a disgust with the theoretical dance of America’s contemporary left and right: ‘Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness. I say this because I am too old to mince words.’ As a lifelong educator, she has seen a radical shift in American aspiration: ‘We have, in our supposed opposition, gone a long way toward making class real – that is, toward cheating people of opportunity. Historically, education has been the avenue by which Americans have had access to the range of possibilities that suit their gifts. We have put higher education further out of reach …’
Robinson taught for years in Iowa (she is now professor emeritus) and knows the value of the opportunity her public institution offered. She has seen her students flourish there. When she laments the increasing social and economic stratification that will exclude future students from similar opportunity, she is echoing a current American anxiety. But what distinguishes her, amid the general clamour of grievance and blame, is clarity and independence of mind, a formidable work ethic
The Bernstein Songbook
A Musical Theatre Celebration
Come out on the town with Leonard Bernstein in a concert of musical theatre highlights from Candide to West Side Story and more!
John Wilson conductor / Lorina Gore soprano
Kim Criswell mezzo-soprano / Julian Ovenden tenor
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
10 MAY, 6.30PM / 11 & 12 MAY, 8PM
Sydney Opera House
Lukáš Vondrácˇek Returns to Sydney
The winner of Brussels’ 2016 Queen Elisabeth Piano Competition and Jury Prize winner of the Van Cliburn Competition returns to Australia for another bravura performance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, performing Prokofiev’s 3rd Piano Concerto.
John Wilson conductor
APT MASTER SERIES
16, 18 & 19 MAY, 8PM
Sydney Opera House
Royal Fireworks
SSO Brass Ensemble
Experience the brilliant sound of the SSO Brass Ensemble as they perform great works of the symphonic repertoire, including Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations
Robert Johnson conductor
18 MAY, 11AM
Sydney Opera House
Mozart and the Piano
Australian pianist Daniel de Borah makes his SSO mainstage debut playing Mozart’s divine Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, K.467.
Andrew Haveron violin-director
Daniel de Borah piano
24 MAY, 7PM
City Recital Hall
evident in her depth of scholarship, and a commitment to her country that transcends patriotism. Robinson has a clear, proud, and well instantiated understanding of what has been ‘great’ about America. She will not stand by and see ‘a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use’. Hence, these fifteen essays in What Are We Doing Here?, each of them worthy of serious contemplation. Writers will find her account of the way she constructs characters intriguing, and perhaps be gratified, as I was, by Robinson’s natural progression to a discussion of aesthetics, including a resurrection of that neglected word, beauty. ‘Beauty disciplines,’ she writes, and then proceeds to explain – convincingly – what she means. Historians and theologians (or general readers like me, content to follow the movements of Robinson’s mind) will discover much to ponder, sometimes to disagree with, in her reflections on American history, in her conception of the sacred, the human, the divine, freedom of conscience, and the corrosive effect of fear when used as a political weapon. Robinson is as well read in science and in modern physics as she is in theology, so her essays are never reductionist defences of religion against science. Rather, they are assertions of a complexity in the universe and in humankind that we all ignore at our intellectual peril.
Don’t be put off by the philosophical density of Robinson’s essays: they reward patient attention. But for bite, turn to the concluding piece. Its title, ‘Slander’, conjures a malevolent allegorical figure striding across the American stage, sowing discord – not far from the present truth. It is a poignantly personal essay: Robinson’s mother, late in life, became a consumer of Fox news, convinced that her ‘liberal’ daughter was one of those who had ruined America and would go to hell for it. The tone of the essay is dark, and the daughter’s sadness manifest. But the writer is adamant: ‘If we are to continue as a democracy, we must find a way to stabilise the language and temper of our debates and disputes.’ Amen to that. g
Morag Fraser was for many years Editor of Eureka Street
Anvil and axle
A collection of essays by Barry Hill
Patrick McCaughey
REASON AND LOVELESSNESS: ESSAYS, ENCOUNTERS, REVIEWS 1980–2017
by Barry Hill
Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 511 pp, 9781925377262
Barry Hill’s collection of essays from the last four decades is commanding and impressive. Few could match his range of subjects: from Tagore to John Berger, Lucian Freud to Christina Stead – all, for the most part, carried off with aplomb. He catches the ‘raw’ edge of Freud’s studio – ‘worksite’ as Hill calls it – ‘the sea of bare boards that rise into so many paintings, the tatty chair, the piles of used rags on the floor and up the walls, the soiled flotsam of a painter’s toil, tossed aside like offal in an abattoir’. He characterises so well ‘the ambiguous aura of melancholy’ in Freud’s figures, with their paradoxical mixture of ‘implacable vigour’ and ‘their listlessness’, the latter the product of the exhaustion of the models compelled to pose for extended periods.
No less striking is Hill’s contrariness, descending at times into truculence. Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987) is seen off the pitch as ‘that product of late-Empire metropolitan culture’. Hill takes such exception to ‘the enormous weight of Chatwin’s English condescension’ that it reveals a sliver of Australian defensiveness. How dare the Brits comment on our sacred sites?
The ballast of this heterogeneous collection lies in the section, Inland. Central Australia is the arena of the never-tobe-reconciled tension and relationship of black and white. Tellingly, it is the ground of Hill’s being as poet and novelist, historian and critic. In a mildly tendentious essay on Baldwin Spencer’s Through Larapinta Land (1896), Hill disputes John Mulvaney’s claim that Spencer’s narration of the Horn Expedition ‘ranks among the few distinguished works of literature in the history of Aus-
tralian exploration’. Hill, however, ends the piece with the startling and moving, assertion that ‘central Australia [is] at the living heart of our culture’; the place where ‘our connectedness with all living things and places’ is made manifest.
If you fall short of such a recognition, as Hill believes Baldwin Spencer does, you are seriously at fault. Spencer never mastered Aboriginal languages and, according to Hill, could not distinguish between the tribes. Nevertheless, Spencer’s collection of Aboriginal bark paintings remains one of the cornerstones in the recognition of Aboriginal art as art, not just ethnographic specimens.
In a succession of essays on W.E.H. Stanner, T.G.H. Strehlow, and John Wolseley, among others, Hill outlines his argument of the Centre as anvil and axle of the Australian cultural experience Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia (1971) is accorded an honoured place in the recovery of Aboriginal culture for white Australia. No doubt his contrarian reputation as ‘a cranky, mysterious anthropologist’ appealed to Hill. But none shall ’scape whipping. Hill regrets that Strehlow’s version of the Songs ‘[sounds] like Rossetti’ – whether Dante Gabriel or Christina, he does not specify. Heinrich Heine, so familiar to the German Strehlow, might be closer to the mark. Although Hill hails him as ‘Strehlow the Magnificent’, the contrariness cannot be entirely subdued. When Strehlow seeks to place the Songs of the Centre on the same shelf as other collections of ancient poetry, Hebrew or Greek, Old Norse or Old English, Hill finds it ‘laudable enough’, then expostulates: ‘but only after one has repressed the question: why shouldn’t the Australian poetry be on the world map, how could it
be anywhere else?’
The biographical essay on John Wolseley, ‘Holding Landscape’, is one of the finest in the collection – intimate, affectionate, uncensorious. Wolseley was born into the Somerset squirearchy on a 300-acre estate, ‘Nettlecombe’. He was the eldest son but his childhood was blighted and tragic. His mother committed suicide when he was a child. His father drank and had to be disestablished from the estate before it went under. ‘My greatest comfort was in the countryside itself, in the valleys and bosomy hills of Nettlecombe.’ Through the agency of Samuel Palmer, the visionary romantic painter and friend of William Blake, and his twentieth-century follower Graham Sutherland, Wolseley found his voice as an artist. Burdened by the responsibilities of running the estate, Wolseley came to Australia in 1976. He took to the landscape immediately: first, the dramatic littoral of the Great Ocean Road; then the dense bush of the Heartbreak Hills in Gippsland. They gave rise to his inspired reportage of the landscape. The paintings were like explorers’ sketches, maps, and diaries.
Inevitably, Wolseley ventured into the interior where his engagement was so intense and so sustained that he was adopted by an Aboriginal tribe. As with Barry Hill, so with John Wolseley, ‘Central Australia is at the living heart’ of his enterprise and culture.
Perceptive and stirring as these essays from the interior are, Hill is equally impressive when he turns to George Orwell, the Ezra Pound of Cathay, and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence. The Orwell essay takes the honours, however, and would make a good introduction to any anthology of his writings. To the conventional wisdom of the transparent prose mirroring Orwell’s moral clarity, ‘clear of cant’, Hill connects it to his contemporaries, to William Empson’s lexical literary criticism. A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936), and, more surprisingly, to D.W. Winnicott, practising what Hill calls ‘a very English version of psychoanalysis’.
In a book of such high seriousness, one is all the more surprised by the lapses in critical language. We are treated to the banality ‘treasure trove’ more than once, and in a remarkable
historical essay on the escaped convict William Buckley, we are told that ‘in our hearts of hearts we know how the Buckley story sits’ – hardly a precise location. His admiration for Tagore passeth all understanding, and his strident selfdramatisation that he once travelled on ‘the albatross of an Australian passport’ puzzles the will. g
Patrick McCaughey and Barry Hill, fifty years ago, were briefly colleagues at The Age: as the Art Critic and Education Correspondent, respectively. They passed like ships in the night.
T-Shirts and tote bags
To celebrate our fortieth birthday, ABR is now selling branded T-Shirts and tote bags
T-Shirts: High quality fitted black cotton T-Shirts in three sizes (small, medium, large) for women and men.
AU$25 (plus $8.50 postage*)
Tote bags: High quality black tote bag, featuring the Australian Book Review logo.
AU$10 (plus $8.50 postage*)
*Postage within Australia only
To purchase, visit: www.australianbookreview.com.au/subscribe/abr-merchandise
Undiminished voice
Robert Manne’s latest essay collection
Shaun Crowe
ON BORROWED TIME
by Robert Manne
Black Inc., $34.99 pb, 365 pp, 9781760640187
By now, the Robert Manne essay is a well-established form – four decades at the centre of public life will do that. Whatever the topic, his pieces tend to possess certain qualities: an almost lawyerly emphasis on fact and argument over style and rhetoric; a professor’s sympathy for the world of ideas over the muck of institutions; an unfashionable willingness to change his mind without worry or shame; and an overwhelming focus on public questions over private struggles.
Manne’s latest collection, On Borrowed Time, begins on a different note. In late 2016, after a lingering soreness, Manne learned that an earlier cancer had returned to his throat. This time the oncologist offered him a more barbed choice: remove his voice box, or face probable death. For a man who lived for debate – ‘lecturing, tutoring, speaking at writers’ festivals, launching books, appearing on radio and occasionally television’ – the answer wasn’t immediately obvious. The title essay is about Manne’s decision to operate, and the slow attempt to rebuild a life without his distinctive voice.
There are echoes here of Tony Judt’s later writing, particularly The Memory Chalet (2010). Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, the great European historian chronicled his gradual physical incapacitation – what he called his ‘slow imprisonment without parole’. With this abrupt confrontation with mortality, Judt, an intellectual driven by the biggest political questions of his day, was drawn inwards and backwards, to the world of postwar youth;
remembering the small personal details that came together to make a big public life.
While Manne’s condition might be less debilitating – Judt spent the last years of his life paralysed from the neck down, with almost no power of movement – the change produced a similar, if tentative, shift in focus. How could it not? On one level, though, it’s the same old Manne. The essay explains the timeline of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery in dispassionate detail; so too the practicalities of life after a laryngectomy. Although initially dreading hospitalisation, Manne finds it a sociological experience, and he expresses his growing appreciation for these ‘secular cathedrals’ – public institutions built to heal and console the sick.
At the same time, the essay offers a different, more personal side of the man. If he ever truly contemplated choosing death over a voiceless life, the trump card
was obviously his wife Anne Manne, journalist and philosopher. The author writes beautifully of ‘what the marriage of two bodies and minds can mean’, particularly under the strain of illness. Movingly, he records his last original voice message to the ‘love of his life’, before being rolled into surgery. When he finally returns to their home in Melbourne, mobbed by their cats, the relief is overwhelming. On New Year’s Eve, the two watch It’s a Wonderful Life together, tears in their eyes.
The title essay is the collection’s newest, and might indicate a new turn in Manne’s writing. The older essays, however, follow a more conventional form. While lacking the narrative arc of a book like Left, Right, Left (2005) –which mapped his shift from a youthful social democrat to a middle-aged anti-communist, to an older critic of neoliberalism and reactionary culture warriors – they also confront some of the defining debates facing human society, though now from a more orthodox left perspective.
Manne (Black Inc.)
The biggest of these issues, and the book’s most urgent, is climate change. After the Berlin Wall fell, Manne said he felt ‘liberated’, able to focus his energy on new questions. In some ways, climate change feels like a substitute for that era’s existential battle over authoritarianism. It is certainly as apocalyptic, as Manne makes clear:
There is nothing in history even remotely as momentous as what humankind is now doing with full knowledge of the facts – gradually destroying the habitability of large parts of the Earth for humans and
Robert
other species by burning fossil fuels in ever increasing quantities to meet our ever increasing energy needs.
Here, Manne’s forensic style is compelling. The evidence is so crushing and neatly presented that, in good faith, it feels wilfully dishonest to accept any other conclusion: that the world is warming, that current policies are completely insufficient to stop it, that society is refusing to acknowledge the structural changes it will require, and that our blindness is being deliberately promoted by a corporate campaign of denialism.
But where does this leave us? To read Manne’s climate essays is to go through a series of emotional stages: first rage, then impotence, and finally apathy. The problem is so monumental, the forces stacked against it so powerful, that the whole thing starts to feel futile. Manne hints at potential responses, but clearly doesn’t put much faith in them.
A similar sentiment shadows his essays on the media. In Manne’s depiction, The Australian is truly the ‘country’s most important newspaper’ – crusading, conservative and responsible for a trail of progressive failures. Again, no one could accuse Manne of being glib. Evidence, backed in by the truckload, traces the paper’s coverage of the Stolen Generations, climate science, and the invasion of Iraq.
The risk here, however, is falling into a kind of fatalism. By focusing so overwhelmingly on the world of public ideas – newspaper columns, magazine essays, broadcast debates – Manne’s approach can sometimes ignore the other, more active side of politics. For one, The Australian has not won all of its recent battles. The paper’s campaign against same sex marriage failed spectacularly. As things stand, its long fight for free market capitalism, and its opposition to economic intervention, look similarly vulnerable. Political decisions respond to institutions and social movements as much as they do opinion pieces.
In 2012, Manne interviewed Malcolm Turnbull, at that stage a mere shadow minister for communications. Published in The Monthly, the profile makes Manne’s strengths and limitations especially clear. Concerned with big ideas, from the rise of China to the
nature of liberalism, we get a fascinating tour of Turnbull’s mind. Afterwards, Manne concludes that Malcolm is the ‘heir to the Deakinite tradition in the Liberal Party’.
Revisiting the topic five years later, Manne now ‘realises what a fool I was’. Deakin did not rise again, as Manne had hoped. Instead, we have something far more common: the leader of a conservative party trying to survive, making the compromises deemed necessary to endure and govern. Manne might look
to character for explanation, but the answer is deeper than that. By elevating individuals and ideas above all else – and relegating politics as it exists in the world, among institutions and movements and messy groups of people – he missed half the story, and the main one at that. g
Shaun Crowe recently completed his doctorate at the Australian National University, writing about political parties and Australia democracy.
‘The roar on the other side’
The will to womanhood in five authors
Dorothy Driver
OUTSIDERS:
FIVE WOMEN WRITERS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD by Lyndall Gordon Virago, $32.99 pb, 348 pp, 9780349006345
In 1787, at a time when literary culture was shifting from private patronage and coterie circulation into a new professionalism, the London publisher, bookseller, and journal editor Joseph Johnson offered the position of staff writer to Mary Wollstonecraft, who had already published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), the first of several books leading to Wollstonecraft’s being named Britain’s first feminist. Fully aware of taking a position hitherto occupied only by men, Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister Everina: ‘Mr Johnson assures me that if I exert my talents in writing, I may support myself in a comfortable way. I am then going to be the first of a new genus –I tremble at the attempt.’
The idea of a ‘new genus’ tracks its way through Outsiders, a group biography of the five women writers whom Lyndall Gordon sees as Wollstonecraft’s descendants – her actual daugher Mary Godwin (later, Mary Shelley), Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, and Virginia Woolf – who became wellestablished literary figures without hav-
ing had the advantages given middleclass men, including access to institutions of learning. Gordon devotes a chapter to each, labelling them ‘prodigy’, ‘visionary’, ‘outlaw’, ‘orator’, and ‘explorer’, and providing fresh and lively literary biography along with acute critical commentary on their key fictional works as well as letters and journals.
Gordon’s biographies of Wollstonecraft, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf have received much praise for their meticulous research, acute insight, and storyteller’s eye for the telling detail. Her two memoirs, Shared Lives and Divided Lives, also well received, give a poignant depiction of a young Jewish South African woman on her way to an academic and writing career without sacrificing marriage or motherhood. Outsiders expands on the tendencies of the previous biographies and, intriguingly, picks up moments from the memoirs as well, placing the writer herself as a ‘secret sharer’(Joseph Conrad’s term, used in Divided Lives ): ‘lifewriting’, to quote again from that book, ‘demands that we come to know ourselves
through our subject’. A bonus for the reader, then, is the intermittent glimpse into what drives Gordon as a writer and concerned individual.
As a literary study, chapter by chapter, the book can hardly be faulted, although readers familiar with Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926) will be surprised to hear that the offspring of the white male character’s sexual union with the black domestic worker is male (that the child is female is a crucial aspect of the novel). However, even readers already well acquainted with Gordon’s five writers are likely to come away with a new sense of the intertwined lives and writing, a fresh appreciation of the different ways each writer experienced her own status as outsider, or even outcast, and a new understanding of what Gordon calls these women’s ‘inner voices’. Chapter by chapter adds to the imaginative multistrand network Gordon creates between the five writers, as she treats the key commonalities and differences in their social and familial situations, their often shared reading, and, in many cases, their reading of one another. All this gives a sense of what Gordon’s subtitle alludes to: a ‘world’ in a continual if gradual process of change.
One of the connecting strands between the writers is the set of male–female relations that either encouraged or hindered their literary production and, in complex ways, entered the actual writing. Gordon gives a particularly lively reading of the startling relationship between Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley, entangled as it was with other liaisons, both sexual and literary, both familial and social. Reading Frankenstein (1818) along with Godwin’s Journal allows Gordon to present an extraordinarily nuanced treatment of the ambivalent relation between creature and creator, and also to point forward to the voice she finds in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), what Gordon calls ‘thwarted desires and rage and bared utterance knocking at the windows of our souls’.
This in turn connects up with Schreiner’s tortured epistolary responses to Karl Pearson, after he rejected her romantic advances; the closest Schreiner came to a productive literary and sexual
partnership was with Havelock Ellis, – Gordon refers to Schreiner’s ‘sexual bravery’, given the unusual forms of love-play – but this too was given up, and Gordon sees the writer’s courage directed, finally, into political oratory instead of fiction. In contrast, George Eliot thrived in her partnership with George Henry Lewes. Here, a literary and sexual partnership was possible, but became productive only on account of Eliot’s earlier passion for Herbert Spencer. This passion, unrequited, gave rise to a ‘surging’ of sexual possibilities in Eliot’s writing – female sexual possibilities that were usually effaced in women’s selfrepresentations as well as in men’s representations of women. Ultimately, then, Eliot gave birth to what Gordon identifies as the ‘subtlest essence’ of a ‘developed woman’, which she carefully distinguishes from sentimentality (it is an important aspect of Gordon’s argument that these writers’ ‘ inner voices’ were not decorous). The sexual passion of Eliot’s writing is matched by Woolf’s exhilarated apprehension of hitherto ‘unknown modes of being’ as she trod the edge of insanity (‘one visits such remote strange places, lying in bed’, Woolf wrote about her compulsory confinements as a neurasthenic).
Following Eliot’s, Schreiner’s, and Woolf’s explicit interest in what Eliot termed the ‘psychological difference’ of sex, Gordon reinvigorates the concept of a ‘separate sphere’ as a space not just of women’s marginalisation but, rather, of radical creativity – a will to womanhood beyond what contemporary society offered. For these writers, and Gordon herself, the reading and writing of books functions as self-renewal, even self-creation, ‘seeding a new kind of woman’. The use of botanical and evolutionary terminology throughout the book suggests the gradual ‘unfurling’ of a suppressed capacity in these five women that Gordon trusts will survive into the future, so that, as she puts it, women ‘will soon find a concerted voice of our own’. Gordon’s polemic, if this is not too strong a word, itself unfurls quietly enough not to disturb the narrative threads, but it does mean that when one considers the book as a whole, rather than chapter by chapter, the overall
argument demands a degree of problematisation. ‘Our’ mostly means ‘women’s’, but since Gordon also speaks of ‘the civilised of both sexes’ and puts male civility down to the development of ‘domestic affections’ in male education, as Wollstonecraft did, she resolves this potential contradiction: men become ‘civilised’ through hearing or reading the voices of women. Hence the difference between Godwin, whose creativity thrived, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, whose did not: the former had the good fortune to love and be loved by a man already under Wollstonecraft’s influence, whereas the latter’s creativity was truncated by Lord Byron, who, Gordon claims, was capable of no more than a predatory interest in women.
Since Woolf’s death in 1941, the understanding of gender has undergone a sea change: the public recognition of diverse sexualities – along with social awareness of how deeply transformed gender might be by race, class, religion, generation, geography, and so on –means that it is difficult to speak today with any authority about the singularity of ‘women’s voice’ and women’s ‘separate sphere’. However, Gordon rightly gives play to the ‘counter-story [that] waits in the wings’, the ‘untried potentialities’, the ‘unsayable’ and the ‘unspoken’, and she concludes her book by using Dorothea Brooke’s words from Middlemarch: ‘the roar on the other side of silence’. That astonishing word ‘roar’ runs through the five writers’ lives and writing, and estranges what Gordon means by a ‘concerted woman’s voice’, making the very concept tremble, then, just as Wollstonecraft herself did on the brink of defining a ‘new genus’. Gordon identifies a ‘concerted woman’s voice’ as oppositional to a world of male domination: warmongering and militarism, self-aggrandisement and self-interest, a world ruled rather more by hate than by love. For Gordon, women’s ‘inner’ voice is the bearer of a continually emerging sensibility as it strives to articulate its desire and rage. g
Dorothy Driver is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. Her publications include an edition of Olive Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man
We now offer multi-year subscriptions to the print magazine and to ABR Online. Subscribe to ABR and enjoy some of Australia’s finest arts journalism at very competitive rates.
LAW AND SOCIETY IN A NATIVE TITLE CLAIM TO LAND AND SEA
by Katie Glaskin
UWA Publishing, $39.99 pb, 302 pp, 9781742589442
The year 2017 marked the twentyfifth anniversary of the High Court’s 1992 decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (Mabo) , which recognised the existence of Indigenous people’s traditional ‘native title’ rights over the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait. This finding, and the passage through parliament of the Keating government’s Native Title Act the following year, dramatically changed the legal position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australian society. Since then, there have been 338 determinations that native title exists in different parts of Australia, delivering significant benefits to a substantial proportion of claimant groups.
However, native title remains controversial among Indigenous people. In the words of the Kokatha Aboriginal woman Sue Coleman Haseldine, or ‘Aunty Sue’, the subject of Eve Vincent’s Against Native Title: Conflict and creativity in outback Australia : ‘Native title throughout the years has been a really shocking experience … first we had to choose one tribe … [and then] we were demanded to prove to the government our continual existence to the land for the past 200 years.’
Against Native Title presents a bracing critique of native title via an ethnographic biography of Aunty Sue. In the period that Vincent describes (from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s), Aunty Sue and her relations (the ‘Aunty Sue Mob’) were in dispute with other Aboriginal people involved in
the Far West Coast native title claim around Ceduna in South Australia. As Vincent describes, this dispute arose as a result of research findings which distinguished Ceduna people with Kokatha ancestry, like Aunty Sue Mob, from those with Wirangu forebears. To Aunty Sue Mob’s dismay, research identified the Ceduna area as having been traditionally occupied by Wirangu people, resulting in those with Kokatha ancestry being seen as members of a historically incoming group. As a result, Aunty Sue Mob came to ‘resent the rise of locally prominent Wirangu figures, perceiving that [Wirangu people’s] recognition and valorisation occurs at [Aunty Sue Mob’s] expense’.
Vincent deals sensitively with the politics of this intra-Indigenous dispute, explaining her reluctance to include material that will ‘expose Aunty Sue Mob to more pain’. The real target of Vincent’s critique is the ‘state effects’ and ‘imaginings’ involved in native title. She argues: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that Aunty Sue Mob have experienced native title as a powerful incitement and unwelcome imposition – as something that has emanated from the state, that has resulted in their own affective dispossession, and out of which they have gained only enemies.’
For Vincent, native title forecloses alternative possibilities for Indigenous empowerment, creating conflict among Indigenous people by encouraging them to re-identify with what Vincent depicts as antiquated ‘tribal’ identi-
ties like Wirangu rather than more contemporary identities like ‘Ceduna Nungas’. Vincent’s preference is for novel articulations of indigeneity, which include coalitions of Indigenous people and ‘greenies’ working to ‘reimagine and invert the established social hierarchy’ and ‘forge, shape and inhabit … [an] alternate reality’.
There is an element of utopianism in this critique, which some readers will find attractive, but it risks providing an overly simplistic account of native title – a problem compounded by Vincent’s alignment with a single faction in the complicated social field created by the Far West Coast native title claim. In presenting a critique of ‘the state’, Vincent diverts attention away from the symbolic as well as material stakes of Aunty Sue Mob’s dispute with other Aboriginal people involved in this claim, and the broader Indigenous politics associated with claiming native title. Consequently, Sue Coleman Haseldine’s decision to join the Prescribed Body Corporate set up in the aftermath of the successful Far West Coast claim – which seems to contradict Vincent’s view of the ‘resolutely colonial nature’ of native title – is left unexplained.
The anthropologist Katie Glaskin’s Crosscurrents: Law and society in a native title claim to land and sea presents a more nuanced account of native title’s social effects. In this ethnography, Glaskin describes the Bardi and Jawi peoples’ native title claim Sampi v State of Western Australia over land and waters near Broome in the West Kimberley. Her account of this
case shows how complicated and ambiguous native title can be ‘as legislation and as process’.
Sampi began in 1993, when Bardi and Jawi people issued instructions through their lawyers to lodge the claim. This initiated a process that continued through a Federal Court hearing in the early 2000s (determined in 2005), and then an appeal before the Full Federal Court in 2007 (determined in 2010). Drawing on her experiences as an anthropologist commissioned by the claimants to provide expert reports and evidence in this legal process, Glaskin analyses the ‘paradoxical’ ways Bardi and Jawi peoples’ connections to country were affected by their participation in this claim.
As in the Far West Coast claim, the relationship between different Aboriginal peoples involved in Sampi was the focus of much research interest, with respondent parties seeking to limit the recognition of native title offshore by emphasising the differences between Bardi and Jawi peoples. For native title to be recognised by the Courts, traditional Indigenous ‘laws and customs’ must be shown to have continued ‘substantially uninterrupted’ since the time of British colonisation. If Indigenous traditions are shown to have been abandoned and revived or otherwise significantly changed from their pre-colonial content, native title is deemed to have been ‘extinguished’, and claims to hold rights and interests under Australian law are dismissed by the courts. Respondent parties in Sampi sought to achieve this by seeking to show that the Jawi had ceased to exist as a ‘society’, and that the Bardi had only acquired access to mangrove log rafts enabling sea navigation after contact, resulting in the extinguishment of native title offshore.
Glaskin’s book offers a subtle account of the great complexities of Indigenous culture and history, and the tensions, ironies, miscommunications, and contradictions – or ‘crosscurrents’ –that native title creates. In Sampi, these ‘crosscurrents’ were particularly strong, as the case dragged on and new jurisprudence changed the kind of questions being asked of Bardi and Jawi people, such that strategic decisions taken in
the early 1990s came to have an impact on conceptualisations of Bardi and Jawi people’s relationships to one another as the case proceeded towards determination some fifteen years later.
In the first Federal Court judgment, Justice French found that Jawi people had been incorporated into Bardi ‘society’, meaning that native title could not be recognised over Jawi country, notwithstanding what the judge saw as the Jawi people’s ‘substantial body of traditional knowledge’. In the end, this decision was overturned on appeal, with the Full Federal Court finding that the Bardi and Jawi peoples constitute a single society, allowing the Jawi country under claim (islands and sea) to be included in the determination of native title. The ‘paradox’ of such recognition is that the Bardi and Jawi peoples came to increasingly present themselves as the ‘Bardi Jawi’ people over the period that Glaskin describes, with Glaskin depicting this conjoined identity as arising from the interaction of Indigenous cultural
politics and Australian law.
This is the ‘paradox of recognition’, whereby Indigenous understandings and practices are subtly yet profoundly transformed by native title. Twenty-five years after Mabo and the Act, these two books offer diverse insights into the fission and fusion generated by this curious feature of post-colonial Australia. g
Richard Martin’s research focuses on the politics of indigeneity in post-settler societies with a particular focus on the Gulf Country of northern Australia.
Natality
body’s habitude begins with buoyancy, a saturated skin and musculature that urges toward this interface with air, insisting itself
inward, prompting a cry. a complex exercise of flesh this chemistry and bellows, this ear to tongue, whatever bids.
mud pies. hands gloriously soiled. they find their ends in play
Anne Elvey’s latest collection is White on White (Cordite, 2018).
Anne Elvey
The outstanding digital skills of Flinders University and its partner CDW Studios Adelaide saw them crowned the world’s #1 Best Digital Illustration School in this year’s prestigious global Rookies rankings. The competition attracted 3,000 entries from more than 600 schools in 42 countries. For Flinders and CDW to be named the standout performer in the Best Creative Media and Entertainment Schools in the World 2017 Global Rankings Report is no small feat, but one we’ve worked hard to achieve.
As a national leader in creative arts and media, we’ve long inspired a legacy of artistic excellence. World #1 is further confirmation of Flinders University’s commitment to collaborative learning as we inspire one another to realise our ambitions and Go Beyond.
flinders.edu.au/creative-arts
It’s time!
Billy Griffiths
THIS TIME: AUSTRALIA’S REPUBLICAN PAST AND FUTURE
by Benjamin T. Jones Redback
$22.99 pb, 222 pp, 9781760640347
In the lead-up to the 1999 republic referendum, historian John Hirst published a short guide to Australian democracy and law. ‘This is not a textbook,’ he wrote in the preface; rather, he intended it to be a ‘painless introduction’ to the system of government that had formed in this country under the British monarchy. He did not hide his republican tendencies: ‘The book will still have served its purpose if readers quarrel with it.’
Almost twenty years later, with the failed referendum now a fading memory, historian Benjamin T. Jones has written a short, passionate book in a similar spirit. This Time: Australia’s republican past and future is not a textbook; nor a history of republicanism: rather, it is ‘one long argument’ about why an Australian should be Australia’s head of state. And although there is plenty to quarrel about within it, it will serve its purpose well if it ignites a national conversation about an Australian republic.
In the first half of the book, ‘The Past’, Jones offers a rich, anecdotal overview of the republican movement in Australia, a subject intensively analysed by Mark McKenna in The Captive Republic (1996). It is a story of fantastic visions and unfulfilled dreams, and the book moves rapidly from John Dunmore Lang’s plans for a ‘United Provinces of Australia’ to Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘deafening silence’ about the subject today.
Britain’s withdrawal from Australia’s sphere of interest in the mid-twentieth century catapulted the nation into a crisis of identity. Jones draws on Stuart Ward and James Curran’s book The Unknown Nation (2010) to navigate Australia’s fumbling efforts to find national meaning and symbols in the new post-imperial void. But unlike The
Unknown Nation, which emphasises the lingering ambiguity about Australian identity in the wake of empire, Jones asserts a clear vision of ‘what Australianness really means’ today. ‘New Australia has no clear birth-date,’ he argues, ‘but surely we can agree it has arrived.’
So what does ‘New Australia’ mean to Jones? What is his particular brand of patriotism? We get some more answers in the second half of the book, ‘The Future’, which is a series of practical essays on the necessary next steps in the republican movement.
Jones’s national vision echoes that of an earlier generation of republicans. He delights in the ‘sunburnt soil’ of ‘this diverse and lucky country’, and he identifies a ‘sense of pride and uniqueness … even among the first generation of native-born Australians’: ‘Their heritage was British but their Australianness was palpable.’ He sees a republic as an opportunity to ‘adorn this nation in symbols that speak of freedom, justice and inclusion’, and he urges his fellow citizens to ‘get better at celebrating our achievements’, such as our democratic system. To stimulate discussion, he puts forward ideas for a new preamble to the Australian constitution, a new flag, and a new title for Australia’s head of state.
But how are we to agree on this new republican regalia? Jones’s answer is a simple, recurring mantra: let democracy rule. He will support whichever symbols the Australian people choose. ‘I sometimes joke that you could make a flag with Shane Warne eating a meat pie and smashing a VB and I’d salute it.’
In the age of Brexit, Donald Trump, and Boaty McBoatface, it is surprising to find someone with such absolute faith in national ballots. The cause of Jones’s magnanimity is twofold. He is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1999 referendum, where internal division derailed a popular movement. Unity is key. There is also an undeniable sense of righteousness to his cause: a missionary zeal. As he writes of his republican heroes, ‘Fighting for an Australian republic is a supreme act of patriotism, and future historians will honour the women and men who did the heavy lifting that transformed a noble dream into a glorious reality.’
In an earlier, co-edited book, Project
Republic (2013), Jones wrote with Mark McKenna of the republican movement as an opportunity for ‘national renewal’. A republic, especially a ‘reconciled republic’, could ‘make us feel differently about one another and the country in which we live’. In This Time, however, Jones’s focus seems to have drifted to a tamer republican vision: a simple matter of ending an anachronistic system and updating our national paraphernalia. Indeed, Jones even questions the centrality of Indigenous history and culture in forging new national symbols. ‘Our current flag reserves a privileged position for Britain,’ he writes. ‘It would be against the spirit of a flag for all Australians to replace that with another privileged position.’
Jones makes a powerful case that a republic is overdue, but there is little sense in This Time that it could be a transformative moment for Australia. He is primarily concerned with the mechanics of the republican movement – with winning the argument. His approach comes through most clearly in the chapter ‘Muddled Monarchists’, which is written as a debating playbook. ‘I challenge you to put this to monarchists when you speak to them,’ he urges his readers. ‘Be relentless on the point. Do not let them change the topic.’
John Hirst’s 1998 volume, Discovering Democracy, is still used in schools today. Whether This Time endures so well will have a lot to do with whether Jones wins his argument.
A road to the republic has been mapped out before us. But what kind of republic do we want to be? We desperately need a new narrative in the twenty-first century. g
Billy Griffiths is the author of Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia (Black Inc., 2018).
A‘Strong ‘n’ Unstable’ Mayhem in Westminster Ross McKibbin
FALL OUT: A YEAR OF POLITICAL
MAYHEM
by Tim Shipman
William Collins, $57.99 hb, 592 pp, 9780008264383
t present it is virtually impossible to make any confident prediction about the future of British politics, or indeed of the British state. The future lies in a fog where shadowy figures can be discerned but none is readily identifiable. Nothing should surprise us, but it now always does. This has been true since the 2015 general election when the Conservatives won an unexpected parliamentary majority, and, as a result, forced David Cameron to have a referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU –a referendum he did not want and which he grotesquely mismanaged. Its result, of course, was also more or less unexpected. The referendum was technically non-binding and had no conditions attached to it. The majority of those who participated simply voted to ‘leave’ the EU. Their decision brought down Cameron’s government and with it all the Conservative Party’s alpha males, including those who desperately wanted to be prime minister. The candidate of the Daily Mail, Theresa May, was bizarrely and unanimously elected Tory leader. Having been a lukewarm remainer, she became a full-blooded leaver. She interpreted the referendum result in the ‘strongest’ possible way –the way the right-wing of the Conservative Party’s MPs and the living fossils who now mostly comprise what is left of the Party’s membership interpreted it. She therefore severely constrained herself in negotiations with the EU and with the remainers within the Conservative party. She knew this and decided that a second general election in two years was one way of freeing herself. This was an understandable decision. May had a huge lead in the polls; Labour was encumbered with
an apparently unelectable leader; and a big victory would strengthen her leadership of the Conservative Party, increase in parliament the number of those who wanted a hard Brexit, and allow her to reconstruct her cabinet as she wished. We know, of course, that she, too, unexpectedly failed. In fact, the opinion polls were pretty accurate in their predictions of the Conservative vote, while May did very much better than David Cameron had ever done. What they did not predict – though their raw data did – was the huge surge in the Labour vote. This, in my view, was due to an accidental confluence of political circumstances and little to do with Jeremy Corbyn – though he and his supporters reasonably enough took the credit. To all these events there was a certain weird logic. Things unfolded naturally but with consequences quite the opposite of what was predicted.
Fall Out is concerned with the year 2016–17 (‘a year of political mayhem’ as the subtitle puts it): roughly speaking from the EU referendum to the general election of 2017 and its immediate political outcome. Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Sunday Times, is perhaps Britain’s best-informed journalist: he is the man all insiders will talk to or leak to, as is apparent from this large and detailed book. In bigpicture terms he doesn’t tell us much we didn’t know; and what we don’t know simply cannot now be plausibly guessed at by anyone. But Shipman’s book is very revealing about the processes of government, and does much to undermine whatever confidence we still had in the way Britain is ruled.
At the centre of the story are the ‘spads’, the special advisers (who include press secretaries). They are everywhere:
young men and women fascinated with the business of politics, but with little political experience or wider knowledge, for whom what really matters is tomorrow’s opinion polls. They ‘protect’ their ministers; that is, they marginalise them and often usurp their functions. Negotiations between departments are often, in practice, conducted spad to spad. Policy is frequently what the spads think it is, or wish it to be, and they report it as such to the press and their favourite journalists. They act to frustrate the senior civil service who are not regarded as friends.
The arch-spads, who are rather the stars of the book, are the ‘gruesome twosome’, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, originally May’s advisers who were appointed her joint chiefs of staff when she became prime minister. They were devoted to May and what they took to be her interests. To them she had qualities others had not detected. But they almost infantilised her. As ‘gatekeepers’ they decided whom she should see, and usually only in their presence. On occasion she would absolutely not see a minister or civil servant in their absence. They were not altogether alike. Timothy was more thoughtful and interested in policy, whereas Hill seems to have been not much more than a political bully. But their combined behaviour (and their language) towards ministers and civil servants could be appalling. There is little doubt that even before the election they were widely disliked; and since someone had to be blamed for its comparative failure it was agreed that they were to blame. It was made immediately clear to May that they had to go, and they went. For May, this was probably no real loss. To the extent that she has gained some self-confidence since the election
it is possibly because they are not there always to tell her what she should think and how she should behave.
How far they were responsible for the disappointing election is disputable. Timothy wrote the party manifesto, which was thought to have been hopelessly ill-conceived. But he seems to have believed that the Australian twosome, Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor (who do not come out of this story very well), were equally responsible. It was they who insisted that May rather than the party should be the absolute leading actor in the Tory campaign, a role for which she was not personally suited (as she knew and said so). It was they who also insisted that the utterly banal slogan ‘Strong ‘n’ Stable’ should be central to the government’s rhetoric: a curious echo of the equally vacuous ‘Jobs ‘n’ Growth’ that nearly did for Malcolm Turnbull. Shipman’s revelation of the extent to which the spads had inserted themselves into the business of government without anybody ever really deciding how and why they should has important implications for our political life. In their behaviour they have something in common with the referendums to which British politicians have resorted in the last few years. They are destabilising additions to a system of government, parliament, and civil service, for which these institutions were never designed. Recent evidence suggests that the spads are having the same effect on Australian government, which was equally never designed for them. There is little sign that politicians recognise this or that their reliance on the spads has in any way diminished.
Historians will no doubt make hay with the last eighteen months in British political life. Whether they will adequately explain it is something else. What they must explain is how a traditionally well-functioning and well-ordered state system should have gone so wildly off the rails. They cannot escape the utter recklessness and irresponsibility of the fantasists, xenophobes, and charlatans who have led the campaign to leave the EU; or, indeed, the wilful ignorance of those voters who made no attempt to understand exactly what the EU actually did or what the
consequences of leaving it might be. The Brexiteers have never bothered to define exactly what they wanted or what alternatives were realistically available: one reason why the current negotiations with the EU have been so chaotic. For many the vote to leave represented a powerful emotional release which overrode, at least temporarily, any of the claims of economic or political reality. All you need is faith, and faith after all will move mountains. It was rather like the sense of emotional release that overtook the British cabinet in 1956 when it decided to use force to deny Egypt ownership of the Suez Canal. It was an emotional release to all those who found (and now find) the modern world and Britain’s reduced place in it too distressing to bear.
For others in the Parliamentary Conservative Party it is a game. And winning
the game is all that matters since games are outside the reality of life. Westminster systems of government, Australia’s included, are very susceptible to gameplaying. Indeed, the Anglo-German sociologist Norbert Elias argued that modern sport emerged from the moment in the late eighteenth century when Britain allowed alternation of government according to the rules of a game. That was when the idea of political life as a game of the ins and outs took hold. If you lost a game you lived to play another day; and so on for as long as you wished to play. What the game is about, the serious business that the players ignore is, alas secondary to the game itself and the pleasures of apparently winning. g
Ross McKibbin was educated at the University of Sydney and is a historian of modern Britain.
Colossus
A reader-friendly biography of an indomitable president
Andrew Broertjes
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: A POLITICAL LIFE by Robert Dallek Allen Lane, $69.99 hb, 712 pp, 9780241315842
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is consistently ranked alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as one of the greatest presidents of the United States. His greatness rests on two pillars. Elected in the midst of the Great Depression, he permanently changed how Americans viewed government: as a force that would intervene aggressively in the economy to relieve the burdens of millions. From 1940 onwards, he led his nation through World War II, altering the historical trajectory of the United States and establishing it firmly as a global superpower. Elected for an unprecedented and never to be repeated four terms, Roosevelt remains the dominant presidential figure that his successors have to measure up to.
Other, darker threads emerge when examining the Roosevelt presidency. In an era of racial strife across the South, Roosevelt largely ignored the crimes and lynchings committed against black citizens. Despite seeing off attempts to subvert or overthrow democracy, he nevertheless practised his own underhand tactics at preserving his power, most notably the attempt in 1937 to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court with more justices who would implement his New Deal agenda.
Covering the longest-serving US president (1933–45) in one volume is a formidable task, one for which Robert Dallek is well equipped. A political historian with five decades of writings on the echelons of power behind him, Dallek has crafted a lively, reader-
friendly narrative perfect for the Roosevelt neophyte, one that is far from essential for those well versed in the field. Dallek’s challenge is finding something new to say about Roosevelt. Straight out of the gate there is a stumble, as Dallek presents the book’s central argument: ‘Roosevelt, like his cousin Theodore, was an instinctively brilliant politician … I believe that my emphasis on his political judgment goes far to set my book apart from other biographies.’ Most Roosevelt biographers, however, stress Roosevelt’s political artistry. It would be difficult to avoid. A more interesting point comes later in the introduction, as Dallek stresses that he will examine Roosevelt’s health towards the end of his life, emphasising that he became ill earlier than claimed. There are shades here of Dallek’s previous work on John F. Kennedy (An Unfinished Life, 2003), which made an original contribution to the historical literature by exploring in exhaustive detail the various illness and medications that Kennedy dealt with across the course of his life. Examining Roosevelt in a similar way, particularly in the crucial years from 1942 to 1945, provides much needed insight on the conduct of World War II and the origins of the Cold War.
Mostly, Dallek hits the same beats as other Roosevelt biographers. No matter how many times the story gets told, however, it continues to fascinate. Born into New York aristocracy in 1882, Roosevelt grew up surrounded by wealth and power. Determined to follow in the political footsteps, if not the party affiliation, of his distant cousin Theodore (president from 1901 to 1909), he rose rapidly and in 1920 became the Democratic nominee for vice-president. While that race was lost to the Republicans, the future looked bright. Then, disaster struck. While holidaying with his family, he contracted polio which rendered him unable to walk properly; he relied on metal calipers, a wheelchair, and sheer bravado to be erect.
Roosevelt refused to bow out of politics and won the governorship of New York on the eve of the Great Depression. As the country plunged into crisis, and with Herbert Hoover failing to provide leadership from the White
House, Roosevelt was able to make a successful bid for the Democratic nomination for president, breaking with generations of tradition by flying to the convention to accept his party’s banner in person, exemplifying an energetic, forward-looking leadership. Winning an electoral college landslide against the hapless Hoover (who maintained a sullen silence throughout Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933), this scion of New York privilege promised a ‘New Deal’ for the American people, radically transforming the economy through government programs that laid the foundation for the welfare state. In doing so, he attracted criticism from the right and the left, with the former accusing him of dictatorial tendencies, and the latter accusing him of not going far enough with social change. Dallek deftly draws out these fights, showing how FDR’s middle ground prevented a possible revolution and essentially saved democracy in the United States.
The outbreak of World War II presented a difficult challenge for Roosevelt. Convinced that he was the only one who could lead the United States, he won an unprecedented third term in 1940, as well as trying to nudge a significant proportion of isolationists both in Congress and the wider American society to allow aid to be given to the embattled Allies. Dallek’s accounts of these fights make for gripping reading, although readers of his Bancroft Prize-winning Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (1979) will hear echoes of that work in these pages. The attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 brought the United States decisively into the war, establishing it by the end as a superpower.
These were also complicated years when considering Roosevelt’s historical reputation. His decision to run for a third and then a fourth term brought accusations of dictatorship. The relationship with his estranged wife, Eleanor, was tense, as she had established herself as a formidable public figure in her own right. More problematically, his internment of Japanese-Americans during the war years was a grotesque violation of the constitutional rights of people
who were American citizens. Like many Roosevelt biographers, Dallek moves quickly past this part of Roosevelt’s time in office, preferring to focus on equally troubling questions like Roosevelt’s health. While still sound when he ran for the presidency in 1940, it was obvious by his tilt in 1944 that he was dying. Playing upon the themes that dominated his earlier work on John F. Kennedy, Dallek here argues that Roosevelt was probably much sicker, and earlier, than historians have commonly accepted. The cardiologist report in March of 1944 paints a grim picture of: ‘A sixty-two-year-oldman in declining health with symptoms of significantly elevated blood pressure … classic signs of long-standing hypertension; an enlarged heart; congestive heart failure; an ashen countenance and blue lips … as well as pulmonary disease; acute bronchitis…and severe anemia.’
This was Roosevelt’s condition only months before Yalta, the conference with Churchill and Stalin that formed the blueprint for the postwar world order. It remains debatable if the end of one global conflict and the start of another in the form of the Cold War would have been different if Roosevelt had lived. His death on 12 April 1945 (just weeks into his fourth term) marked the end of an era. Robert Dallek has written a lively, fast-moving narrative ideal for those yet to be exposed to the life of one of America’s great presidents. In a time of international turbulence and economic dislocation, the lessons of the Roosevelt presidency still have relevancy today. g
Andrew Broertjes teaches at the University of Western Australia.
Thy neighbour in the crosshairs
Max Holleran
FORTRESS AMERICA: HOW WE EMBRACED FEAR AND ABANDONED DEMOCRACY
by Elaine Tyler May Basic Books
US$30 hb, 256 pp, 9781478920274
On a Saturday afternoon shortly before Christmas in 1984, Bernhard Goetz was riding the New York City subway. Goetz, who is white, was approached by four black screwdriver-wielding teenagers who asked him for five dollars. Goetz drew a 0.38 pistol from his jacket and shot each of the boys once, then turned to one of them on the floor of the subway and said, ‘You don’t look so bad, here’s another,’ firing again into the boy’s chest. He was convicted only of the most minor charge (possession of a handgun) and served eight months in prison. In a city increasingly gripped by fear, Goetz quickly became a New York folk hero: a real-life civilian Dirty Harry.
Since the Goetz shooting, the United States has become much safer, with crime plummeting in nearly every city. Yet, gun ownership is even more sacrosanct, private security is flourishing, nearly ten per cent of the population live in gated communities, and fear pervades every aspect of contemporary American culture: from nanny cams to hysteria over border-jumping ‘rapists’ and ‘murderers’. Elaine Tyler May, in her new book, Fortress America: How we embraced fear and abandoned democracy, explores how the United States got to this point of paranoia and how Americans made themselves prisoners in a world where security precaution is not just an industry but a lifestyle.
From bunker-builders to zombie apocalypse preparedness groups, it can be easy to find mirth in American paranoia. However, May urges us to understand how this strain of thought is eroding the most basic social fabric of communal trust as well as having a dev-
astating psychological impact on people who ponder school shootings, home invasions, and total social breakdown as if they were breakfast choices. May traces the development of this culture of fear from the onset of the Cold War to the ‘war on terror’, chronicling the suburban segregation, mass incarceration, and the militarised police that came along the way. She also adds a powerful gender dimension to the familiar story of America’s descent into fantasies of perpetual danger: it was only with the disruption of the nuclear family of the 1960s – and the reactionary reassertion of masculinity which followed – that fear came to dominate US culture.
During the 1960s the Cold War led not just to duck-and-cover drills, municipal fallout shelters, and the widening of suburban streets to allow for military vehicles to pass but an increased understanding that the home was under threat from the Soviet Union as well as from shifting racial, political, and gender norms. May shows that the Leave It to Beaver suburban aesthetic was not so much a reflection of the times as a desperate attempt to freeze domestic life in the immediate postwar era without the complications of women entering the labor force, declining marriage, and increasing rates of divorce. ‘As the family faced new challenges, the home itself became a site of vulnerability. Houses that once provided protection became places that needed protection. Homeowners transformed their houses into barricaded fortresses with alarm systems, metal grates, fences, and locks.’ The architecture of fear was not just to keep out the world but to buttress the nuclear family from internal disruptions.
After the outbreak of urban riots in the late 1960s, fear quickly shifted from ‘red to black’, with police forces increasingly using some of the same military hardware from Vietnam in places like Watts, Newark, and Detroit. Two decades later, the rhetoric had intensified: politicians and criminologists diagnosed a scourge of ‘super predators’ at the same time as Ronald Reagan eroded general trust in the government. This led to an explosion in the DIY protection industry, a field increasingly
represented in media depictions of rogue men determined to hunt down those who threatened their family and deliver vigilante justice as police and prosecutors dithered. The American male in search of rough justice comes from a cowboy legacy but it has been well marketed to suburban dads who want to simultaneously live in high-walled McMansions while celebrating their own agency as masters of self-reliance. However, gates are not just about protection. With other aspects of the Reagan era, they represented the privatisation of everyday life: prep schools, gated neighbourhoods, private security, and even pension reform. As people guarded their assets and families more fiercely, they also divested in state programs meant for the public good.
The irony that May captures is that Americans have more to fear now than they ever have: they are just fretting over the wrong things. The country is economically unequal to the point of near uprising, the infrastructure of the world’s richest country is in tatters, and climate change, ignored or mocked by many Americans, will drastically reshape life in the next century. Especially after the 2008 financial crisis, fear of a statistically unlikely home invasion compared to a far more likely predatory mortgage default is highly misplaced: ‘While citizens were distracted by street crime that harmed relatively few people, unregulated private enterprise and a rapidly widening gap between the very wealthy and everyone else were at work producing profound insecurity for millions of Americans,’ May points out. One would think that fear could have a potential unifying effect, but not in individualistic America.
Early in the book, May recounts a Twilight Zone episode in which a doctor and his wife deny their neighbours entry into their private shelter during a nuclear attack (later revealed to be a false alarm); she ends by describing a new bunker for billionaires, of which the crucial architectural element is a sniper’s nest. g
Max Holleran is Early Career Fellow in Sociology at the University of Melbourne.
Bumped
David Rolph
MA’AM DARLING: NINETY-NINE GLIMPSES OF PRINCESS MARGARET
by Craig Brown
Fourth Estate
$39.99 hb, 423 pp, 9780008203610
My earliest memory of Princess Margaret is flicking through my grandmother’s copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly and seeing photographs of a middle-aged woman, in huge sunglasses and a colourful kaftan, on a tropical island. I surmised she was famous but did not know why. My grandmother explained, somewhat primly, that she was the queen’s sister and left it at that. To young eyes, the woman in the photographs seemed to be at once gaudy and dowdy. As I grew older, I became increasingly aware of her more bohemian prime, at the same time as she was declining from middle age into a long period of illness and a relatively early death at the age of seventy-one. It seems apposite to begin a review of Craig Brown’s new biography of HRH The Princess Margaret (she would have insisted on being referred to by her proper title) with an anecdote. After all, virtually every major figure –and many minor ones – who featured in British life in the second half of the twentieth century had an anecdote or two about PM. Early in Ma’am Darling, Brown demonstrates the eclectic company she kept by pointing out the names between which she appeared in the index of a number of memoirs and diaries. Unfortunately, the same exer-
cise cannot be carried out with Ma’am Darling ; frustratingly, it has no index. Ma’am Darling is not a conventional royal biography, and it is all the better for that. There is really no need for another one of those for PM. A straightforward biography would run the risk of being not very interesting: Apart from her colourful private life, she did not actually do much. The younger sister of the queen, descending in the order of succession with the birth of each new nephew, niece, great-nephew, and greatniece, she had to content herself, often petulantly, with the second-order, and later third- and fourth-order functions and charities. The timeline of her life is less interesting than her personality.
Ma’am Darling approaches PM’s life in a broadly chronological order. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, however, Brown breaks his biography into ninety-nine chapters, each providing small glimpses into PM’s life and personality. Most of the glimpses are derived from synthesising stories from the histories, memoirs, and diaries of a wide range of people. It covers all of the major events of PM’s life: her doomed romance with Group Captain Peter Townsend; her tempestuous marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones, aka Lord Snowdon; her affair with Roddy Llewellyn; her life on Mustique. To maintain the reader’s interest, interspersed between the more straightforward glimpses into PM’s life are counter-factual chapters (What if Princess Margaret had married Pablo Picasso, or Peter Townsend, or Jeremy Thorpe? The latter is hilariously rendered as an ‘at home’ interview with Lord and Lady Thorpe in Hello! magazine in 1999); a chapter rendering the one anecdote in thirty-one different modes, from the journalistic through to the alliterative to the tragic, including as a recipe, a haiku, a limerick, and a multiple choice test; and the current online holiday rental listing for Les Jolies Eaux, PM’s property on Mustique. This approach to biography as bricolage is very effective; it is consistently funny and engaging, as one would expect from a writer known particularly for his work in Private Eye magazine.
Ma’am Darling is not just a biography of a haughty princess. It muses
upon the difficulties of writing biography and particularly royal biography. How should a biographer approach an anecdote which is recounted in multiple sources, when the varying accounts cannot be easily reconciled? How does a biographer deal with a subject who is removed from everyday access and is unknowable at close proximity? How does a royal biographer avoid sycophancy, wild speculation, and pop psychology?
The book charts changes to the monarchy but also to the nature of celebrity. As a young woman in the 1950s, PM was lauded as one of the most glamorous women in England. In many ways, she was the first celebrity princess. By the time she was sharing a stage with Boy George in 1984, he is the most famous person in the United Kingdom, according to a then recent poll, with the queen being placed second and PM failing to make the top 100. Over thirty years hence, Princess Margaret’s celebrity has been somewhat revived by Vanessa Kirby’s portrayal of her in the first two seasons of Netflix’s The Crown
The portrait of Princess Margaret which emerges from Ma’am Darling is complex but overall unflattering. She appears, by turns, difficult, bored, lonely, hierarchical, always standing on ceremony, funny, catty, caustic, and camp. (Brown is incisive in his analysis of the varieties of camp expounded by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret respectively.) That may be ultimately her enduring public image, but it was not always thus.
There is a famous photograph of PM, taken by Snowdon early in their marriage, which Brown refers to in his book but which is not reproduced in it. Princess Margaret is in the bathtub, smiling broadly and wearing the Poltimore Tiara, which she had famously worn at her wedding. The louche, cross-legged figure of Snowdon is partly reflected in the mirror behind her head. A waggish acquaintance has suggested the bathtub was filled with gin. She seems to be enjoying herself. The viewer gets a glimpse of a relaxed, glamorous Margaret. If only there had been more glimpses like this. g
David Rolph is a Professor of Law at the University of Sydney.
After the fact
Dion Kagan
DESIRE: A MEMOIR
by Jonathan Dollimore Bloomsbury
$39.99 pb, 192 pp, 9781350023109
In one of my pedagogical fantasies, I design the curriculum for a course called ‘Modern Theories of Desire’. My students read Marx, Beauvoir, Foucault, and Butler. They study Hegel on desire’s organisation of the everyday relationship between the self and the world; some critiques of developmental psychology, a sociology of addiction; Freud, of course. I also screen films –Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai – set a novel or two, and in class we read poetry. It may seem a whimsical curriculum, but by semester’s end my students have a rigorous working knowledge of ‘ways of thinking about desire’, their assumptions have been questioned, curiosities aroused.
Jonathan Dollimore’s Desire: A memoir could easily be on my curriculum. Indeed, it could be the subject primer. The book is intimate, as its title promises, but it also collects informed philosophical speculations on desire. It is a kind of auto-ethnography, with Dollimore mining his own life story for insight into the amorphous mechanics of desire: lust, longing, affection, and love; also depression, melancholy, boredom, and loss, all part and parcel of desire’s cravings and cathexes.
Dollimore is the right man for the job. His career as a key figure in literary studies and social theory, with works on Renaissance literature, decadence, art, censorship, transgression, gender, and death, has steeped him in the ways artists and thinkers have tried to capture desire’s elusive complexities. Less well known are the facts of his own life: from a formative road accident that brought the working-class adolescent motorcyclist close to death (but also close to his first amour fou), to some years as a regional journalist where he cultivated the literacy, literary fascination, and productive ambivalence he would even-
tually bring to his first post at Sussex University in the late 1970s. There Dollimore discovered that ‘philosophy was not only more important than the academic study of it allowed, but … as a subject it needed to be turned against the academy which diminished it’. His career developed during the Liberation movements and urban gay male subcultures that would form an important backdrop to his own polymorphous sexual trajectories.
You might expect a book titled Desire: A memoir to burst with the exploits of an insatiable lusthound, a dizzying notching-up of the bedpost that moves toward a climax of selfunderstanding. Well, there are plenty of revealing memories here, variously arousing, cute, funny, and bleak, the most elaborate of which occur later in the book and during a chapter devoted to time spent in Sydney in the 1980s. But despite its utterly frank, unexpurgated self-dissection and sharing, Desire is not ‘confessional’ per se. ‘I’m not attracted to the confessional for its own sake,’ Dollimore tells us; ‘to be worth writing about the personal needs to have a meaning beyond me.’
Dollimore is also a Foucauldian from way back so he is suspicious of the thought nexus that welds sex to essential truths of identity: the deepest and truest self is neither inscribed nor revealed through one’s desires. This is a fiction invented by modern sexual scientists and capitalised on by mundane ideological norms. Like the breed of queer scholars associated with ‘the anti-social thesis’, including Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, Dollimore is inclined to see in sex a dissolution of the self – the potential for a shattering of identity – rather than the revelatory moment in which personhood falls into coherent relief.
Undoings aside, what can’t Dollimore illuminate about desire? – how what remains unconsummated is so often the most ‘beautiful wound’; how the most accomplished seducer is so often vulnerable; how desire may be the mangled reincarnation of parental grief. In this way, his memoir is revelatory indeed.
By the time we arrive at the fifth chapter’s explicit turn to depression, we
have an inkling of why this is important alongside the knowledge that our memoirist has survived multiple suicide attempts. ‘Why does a book about desire and memory include these reflections upon depression?’ he preempts. Foremost among the answers is something that has already been made plain: ‘depression … is a sickness of desire’. It is ‘inseparable from memory, and … memory, too, is potentially a kind of sickness; of desire turned destructively back on itself’. If there is a central thesis, this is it: loss, desire’s obverse, is at desire’s heart. For Dollimore, desire is a backwards feeling, a state underwritten by ‘lack, an absence, a baseline of permanent dissatisfaction, verging on pain’. In this he joins Heather Love and other queer writers interested in the relationship between backwardness and sexual feelings.
Foucault famously said in an interview that, ‘For a homosexual, the best moment of love is likely to be when the lover leaves in the taxi. It is when the act is over and the guy is gone that one begins to dream about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice. It is the recollection rather than the anticipation of the act that assumes a primary importance.’ While conventional romance scripts are traditionally organised around anticipatory modes – expectation, flirtation, courtship, the dance of seduction – homosexual eros, due to its particular historical and social context, has had a different grammar of love: ‘complications are introduced only after the fact’. On this and much more, Desire has stirring, eloquent lessons to teach us all. g
Dion Kagan is an erstwhile lecturer in gender studies who is now a book editor and arts critic.
CALIBRE ESSAY PRIZE
Once Again: Outside in the House of Art
by Kirsten Tranter
The setting is a gorgeous, somewhat decayed, many-roomed Georgian mansion in upstate New York, near the Hudson, in 2012. Nine screens placed around a darkened gallery space each show a room of the house, most of them occupied by a person and a musical instrument: a willowy woman in a slip on a chaise longue, arms wrapped around a cello; a dark-skinned man seated at an ornate desk leaning intently over a bass guitar. There is a man at a grand piano in a room with densely patterned wallpaper, at a drum kit in a kitchen doorway, on a bed with a guitar next to a naked woman. A naked man in a bath-tub holds a guitar, not seeming to mind that it dips into the bubbly water. They all wear headphones, listening attentively, mostly unmindful of the camera. One screen shows the front verandah on which a disparate group of people are gathered, standing, sitting, straddling the balcony rail. One by one the musicians take up their instruments.
For sixty-two unbroken minutes they play, sit, listen, gaze, and sing a spare, mournful lament with the repeated refrain: Once again I fall into my feminine ways. The music swells to a crescendo of sound and feeling, drops away to silence, and begins again.
This is The Visitors, an installation by celebrated Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. The lyrics are taken from a poem by Kjartansson’s ex-wife, artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir; The Visitors was recorded in the wake of their break up. Kjartansson is the guy in the bath. It is
hard to tell whether he has any kind of role as conductor or leader; the music progresses in a way that feels organic, almost spontaneous, with that electric sense of shared consciousness between the musicians that happens when a group is in perfect synchrony.
The setting is a dark room in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where I have come to see and hear this work for the second time, on the third last day of 2017, just before the show closes. It is a busy day at the museum, the building packed with adults and children in the last week of school vacation. We are here en famille, with the twelve-year-old and the two-year-old, already exhausted by the journey from Berkeley on the train. It is an ambitious idea; we have not planned in advance how we will juggle the competing attentions of these children, and I am hoping that the baby will be accommodating in The Visitors. He likes music, after all.
In the crowded elevator a man says to a young boy, probably his son, ‘I’m going to show you something amazing.’ I try to interest our twelve-year-old in other elements of the museum’s collection – they have paintings by Munch and Frida Kahlo, sculptures by Calder – but he is already bored.
Inside the space of The Visitors, the baby fails to be accommodating. He does not like the darkness, the press of people. ‘All done,’ he insists after a minute or two. ‘Bye bye!’ My husband takes him out of the dark room; we
agree to take turns. The baby wants me, and I cringe at the way his cries disrupt the music on the way out. Before long I will be summoned to attend to him.
The first time I saw The Visitors was at the Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea, New York, at the work’s first US exhibit in 2013. Unassuming industrial glass doors led off the street into a darkened space almost exactly like this one in San Francisco. My husband and I were alone for most of the time. We stood and wandered around the room, pausing in front of one screen and another, marvelling, enchanted. Speakers are positioned in alignment with each screen so that the sound changes subtly as one moves, highlighting the voice and sound of one musician then another. The musicians are separated from one another in different rooms in the one house; they are connected to each other through headphones, sharing a single sonic space, a physical space at once divided and conjoined.
The music is beguiling, unashamedly sentimental, the lyrics a circling loop of love and loss. It is heaven for me, who loves to play a new favorite song over and over and over to death (or watch a favourite movie repeatedly, or reread a favourite book). One of my regrets about our time in New York is that I did not make it to Kjartansson’s other show that year, in which the band The National sang their song ‘Sorrow’ over and over again for six hours.
Kjartansson’s art deals frankly with cliché and sentiment: in his work,clichés seem to collapse,explode,and reach
a pitch of sublime transcendence under the pressure of extreme repetition and duration. He grew up in the world of theatre in Reykjavik, watching his parents rehearse scenes on stage again and again, and understands the trance-like state, the surprising twists of emotion, the catharsis that repetition can bring. In pieces that blur the line between video art, performance art, and theatre, musicians perform a single chord (Woman in E, 2016 ), singers repeat a single song, phrase (God, 2007) or Mozart aria (Bliss, 2011), actors repeat a simple interaction (Bonjour, 2015), painters paint the same painting (The End, 2009), over and over again, for hours. The lyrics in The Visitors gain some of their power – for me, at least, who loves self-reflexivity – from the way they trope the principle of Kjartansson’s own method: Once again ...
The work elicits a desire for repetition – apparently people came back again and again to The Visitors at the Luhring Augustine. I have come to see and hear it again for a number of reasons. The work was so charming the first time I saw it that I became suspicious of its allure, its lasting emotional hold on me, its striking ability to call forth tears. (I am not the only one who has cried in that dark room; the work is renowned for its ability to make viewers weep.) Had I fallen for a cheap trick, I wondered, me who loves irony above all things except sentiment and selfreflexivity? Was The Visitors basically a long, really good music video for a long, really good pop song (it is, after
A still from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012) Nine-channel HD video projection with sound; jointly owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of Mimi Haas and Helen and Charles Schwab; copyright Ragnar Kjartansson; photograph by Elísabet Davids, courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
all, named for Abba’s last album)?
And so what if it was? Was it as good as I remembered? Was it clever as well as extremely good-looking? Could I return to the magic space of enchantment, transcendence, emotional surrender and supplication to beauty that it offered? My own longing for that return disturbed me and yet I went after it thinking only of how lovely it would be, not prepared for how complicated it might turn out to be, or how painful it might be to find the door to that place closed to me. We have come here today to the San Francisco museum at my firm insistence, in the face of complaints about taking the time out from work when there are deadlines to be met and syllabi to be written, all the endless, relentless work of academia.
The pretty rooms, the soft light, the tenderness of the musicians towards their instruments, are all just as lovely as I remembered. I have stayed with the twelve-year-old while my husband minds the baby, but the twelve-yearold is restless and unimpressed. The work provokes tears again, but too quickly, frighteningly fast. I agree to leave the room after only a few minutes, and a slow wave of something begins to break in me that takes a very long time to register as a form of grief.
Ifirst saw The Visitors in New York in the middle of a six-month sabbatical in the city in 2013. We had lived there as graduate students in the late 1990s and early 2000s, first in downtown Manhattan, then in Brooklyn, pushed further out by rent and the need for space. After our first son was born we moved back to Australia in 2006 with reluctance, compelled by the attractions of universal healthcare; our insurance ran out along with my fellowship that year. We came back to the United States in 2008 for a fellowship for my husband at Cornell University in upstate New York, and back to Australia two years later when that fellowship ran out and a job in Sydney turned up for him. Life has been a swinging pendulum between these places, each move bringing its own peculiar sense of exile, loss, excitement, return. Sydney presented its own particular impossibilities related to work, money, life; we missed New York, and a sabbatical gave us the chance to return. We landed in Manhattan in 2013 in a strange land: an insanely luxurious sublet apartment across from Central Park on the far Upper West side near Columbia University, miles from the world we knew in the East Village and Park Slope.
We sent our son to the least worst public school we could find nearby. Just weeks after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that killed twenty children, every morning we walked by the police officer wearing a gun at her side who sat at the entrance to the school. Our son told us about how they practised lockdown drills in class. He didn’t really know what they were for, and we didn’t want him to know. You have to hide in the cupboards, he told us, you have to see how quiet you can be.
It was only for a few months, I told myself. Each school day became an exercise in not thinking about guns. I walked to the exquisitely beautiful Avery Library of Art and Architecture every day, showed my visiting scholar card to gain admission, and sat alongside Columbia students researching their various projects. Pig anatomy, classical architecture, statistics. I did my own research for a book I would never write, learned about ancient Chinese art and how easy and how hard it is to forge ancient jade carving. I started work on a different book that I did eventually write, tried to resign myself to never writing about anything else except death and sorrow over and over again. I walked the blocks that never stopped feeling alien and told myself I would put myself back together, put my marriage back together after years of mistakes and failures; I promised myself that this time we would not waste our time in New York altogether, we would make it to shows and galleries and the museum across the park.
One morning when our son was at that not totally terrible school, we took the subway down to Chelsea to see the Kjartansson show I’d read about. It was what we were here for. My husband is a guitarist as well as an academic, and writes about music and sound; he would either like or hate it, and I worried about it on the way there.
In one of my favourite novels, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, the narrator Richard is invited for a weekend at a beautiful old rambling country house that belongs to some friends, a pair of twins in a close-knit group of Classics students he has fallen collectively in love with. It is the apotheosis of the seductive, picturesque, old-world East Coast moneyed élite ideal that he fetishises, and his invitation there cements his belonging to this exclusive clique. (It is also the site of the worst betrayals and the most disturbing violence, but that is revealed much later). The house is filled with antiques, gorgeous rugs, vintage wine, heirloom dinner services and the like, complete with its own miniature lake and an old sleigh in the basement. When I saw Rokeby Farm on screen in that dark Chelsea room, it was familiar in a half-remembered way that I later recognised as my image of that house in the novel, that imaginary ideal, that fulfilment of a fantasy. I have always identified with Richard Papen, the hapless self-deluded Californian fake who longs to escape his shallow West Coast origins and find acceptance in the rarified intellectual history-drenched world of New England. I read The Secret History while I was an undergraduate, and I thought of Richard when I sent off my applications to US graduate schools a year later, delighted by their brochures showing old stone campus buildings littered with red fall leaves, or artfully dusted with snow.
Rokeby Farm evokes just this sort of fantasy. Innumerable rooms, each as beautiful as the other, shabby and glorious. Velvet-covered furniture everywhere. Not one but two grand pianos. Tapestries gleam in corners.
Elegant sculptures rest on delicate side tables. On the wall above the guitarist’s bed, where his naked lover lies with her back to the camera, painted birds take flight. A luminous green expanse of lawn extends beyond the house.
It is a kind of artistic utopia, the musicians all alone and yet together, solo and playing in harmony, utterly immersed in their work. We can join them, for a while, in the dark space of The Visitors. Standing in front of one of those screens, you can imagine that you are there in the room with them, or one of the group on the verandah. It invites you in.
In that Chelsea gallery I allowed myself to sink into a fantasy of inclusion. This was a version of what I sought, every day for those few hours between school drop off and school pick up, at the exquisitely beautiful gated library, working alongside others also working on their own peculiar undertakings.
In San Francisco I heard a person next to me begin singing along with that refrain – Once again I fall into my feminine ways – and it was lovely to feel part of a collective experience of art in which we could all participate. I moved around the room to the next screen and realised that what I had heard was an illusion; I had stepped into and then out of the range of one of the speakers, and one of the recorded voices had stood out for a moment. This did not stop me singing along with the singers on screen, for a few seconds.
Iam not embarrassed to be moved to tears by this work of art, but that exquisitely sharp sense of longing that I remember from Chelsea cut in new ways this time around. How could I have imagined that the work invites one in, or have been fooled by the illusion that the viewer could be part of this group, included, inside the house with them? I am separated from their playing more profoundly than they are separated from one another by the walls of the house. I am inside the house of art, yes, but in all senses that matter I am outside, looking in.
I have come here to relive that sense of immersion I experienced in Chelsea, but it now feels like a terrible mistake. In the intervening years we have moved to California for a different job and the baby has been born, bringing all kinds of joys and frustrations.
The time I have for writing or anything else has shrunk to a fragment that makes those days in New York feel like unbelievable luxury. Back then we watched The Visitors the whole way through, and stayed to watch it start again; is it possible that we spent hours just standing there in a gallery together? It almost feels like another life, although that doesn’t quite get at it; it feels like what it is, which is the past, and it is unrecoverable. Now I have become that thing I see women everywhere, all around me, with PhDs and advanced degrees, becoming: the spouse of the academic (or the lawyer, or banker, or tech worker) who puts her own lesser-paid work aside
to care for the baby, and turns into one of those statistics. From here it is hard to see a way back to Rokeby Farm, my own version of it, or a path forward to whatever its new instantiation might be. Like Jenny Offill’s narrator in her poetic, anguished novel Dept. of Speculation, I once wrote a book and dreamed of being what she calls an ‘art monster’, a creative force, and instead, like her, became a mother consumed by motherhood and irrelevant piecemeal freelance work. She managed to make something brilliant out of all that, though, turned it into that little jewel of a novel.
I begin to hate this naked man in the bath with his guitar, this artist. Who does he think he is? Where is his daughter, the daughter he had with his artist exwife whose words he has taken to make this indulgent masterpiece?
Yes, where are the children, I find myself wondering, as I watch the musicians play in this beautifully decorated house of art and artistic autonomy? Who is looking after the children, and listening to the music being played, and not playing music herself? Is she down in the garden somewhere, off screen, or out of sight on the other side of the verandah, instructing the children to be quiet so that they do not spoil the recording? Does she hum along herself? This is what motherhood has done to my imagination. Just as now I reread Monkey Grip by Helen Garner and find myself reading a bewilderingly different novel from the one I read at eighteen, which was a mind-blowing evocation of desire and self-destruction. Now I find myself noticing the child at the edges of the story, and feel disturbed by her neglect, horrified when she stumbles on needles and heroin; it is as though a new character has been introduced into the story in the intervening years.
This is not the insightful analysis of artwork, the sophisticated response I was trained for and praised for, I tell myself, and it sickens me. This too feels like an artistic and moral failing. I wish I could be like Rachel Cusk, with her sharp, blazing, splendidly bitter evocations of parental life, an art monster whose art depends on her motherhood and yet seems to transcend it in a mysterious, enviable alchemy.
Once again, the singers sing, and it is only later, after we have left the museum, after I have tried to reflect on that wave of grief, those unstoppable excruciating tears, that it feels as though they might be offering some kind of absolution:
Once again I fall into my feminine ways
By the side of the verandah, a middle-aged man in overalls and a hard hat sits glumly in a director’s chair under a garden umbrella; he does not look like one of the artists. He may or may not be asleep. A young man who does look like one of the artists sits next to him on the grass; at one point, in response to some
signal in the music, they both rise and begin to prepare a small iron cannon resting on a low stand on the ground in front of them. The older man seems to be in some way responsible for the technical operation of this weapon.
I have come back to the exhibit with the twelve-yearold. I remember this part with the cannon from seeing it in Chelsea, and being delighted by it. My husband is off with the baby in another part of the exhibition but he might like to see this part. I send him a text.
Cannon coming up
Do you want to see it
But the preparations happen in more of a hurry than I remember, and seconds later the cannon has exploded, firing confetti across the lawn. I text him again.
Boom!!!
He has missed it. There is no way we can wait another hour this time around for the cannon to be fired again. He is missing other things too, such as most of the bigger exhibit, which is focused on sound and involves subtle installations in dark or quiet spaces, things requiring time and concentration and often headphones, not accessible while encumbered with children, not enjoyable when rushed to take over from the other parent attending to the urgent need for nappy changing or eating or screaming.
Next to me is the man from the elevator with his son. ‘There!’ the man says in rapture after the cannon has been fired.
‘Why did they fire the cannon?’ the boy asks. The father searches for an explanation; to me it seems that perhaps it
echoes a line in the lyrics about stars exploding,but the cannon appears basically to have been fired for fun. How can an adult explain this to a child who has asked this question?
My own twelve-year-old is equally unimpressed. It is a small cannon and has not been fired at anything in particular. The whole thing makes no sense. The twelveyear-old has had enough.
I was dragged around art galleries and allowed to wander around by myself or with my brother at art openings as a child, or left to explore the beer gardens and pool tables at pubs for book launches and poetry readings, spending hours in a corner with a book or at the pinball machine, trying to avoid lecherous older male writers. I feel a momentary anger and impatience with the twelve-year-old; what is he complaining about? But this is short-lived, since I have promised myself not to inflict those things on him, and remember how much I would have liked the idea that anyone would actually listen to my complaints at the time.
There is probably a recording of The Visitors online, I tell myself, and then feel depressed at the idea of watching this on my computer screen, alone, without the ability to walk around and hear the different sounds attached to different screens, or look across the room and see how the bass player is responding to the piano, or enjoy the cinematic luminosity of the images in the darkness. I am all out of acceptance, suddenly, helplessly crushed by the accumulated stresses and exhaustions of the holidays and the whole year, the whole last two years.
My husband takes pity on me and takes the children
A still from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012) Nine-channel HD video projection with sound; jointly owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of Mimi Haas and Helen and Charles Schwab; copyright Ragnar Kjartansson; photograph by Elísabet Davids, courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
to see the Frida Kahlo paintings and the fountain across the road, and leaves me alone for half an hour so I can go back to The Visitors. Despite my efforts, I cannot bear to be there with the consciousness of minutes passing, the sense of time running out, that constriction, in the face of this languorous performance.
The rest of the museum is startlingly bright as I pass through it on the way out. A painting by Gerhard Richter of a blue wave breaking on a shore looks almost exactly like a photograph, which is the point of it.
My friend tells me about a saying she attributes to a Chinese proverb: the days are long but the years are short.
Remember, another friend writes on Facebook, when you wanted all those things you now have?
It won’t be long until the baby is in preschool, my husband says. Remember what you did last time when we got just a few hours of childcare, he reminds me, when the twelve-year-old was this age. I finished my dissertation, wrote a novel, all in the space of a year. This discipline would not have been possible without the very constriction that now feels so wrenching: with a small, strictly limited time in which to write, I wrote with desperate intent, just as I try to do now with the few precious hours of childcare we can afford.
Later that evening I find an image from The Visitors on the museum’s website. The musician with the piano accordion is the one I like best; I wonder whether this is
because she cradles her instrument on her lap in a way that reminds me of how one holds a baby, and it is both similar to holding a child and utterly different. She sits upright with her strong legs and bare feet planted firmly on the floor, her face turned to the gentle light spilling in through the open French doors. The sun illuminates the wings of an alabaster angel on a table beside her and it seems as though the statue must have been made with exactly this effect in mind. The accordion is not a dominating instrument in the mix of sound, but her voice is soft and lovely and uncertain as she sings the refrain. The music comes to an end. Along with all the other players, she lays down her instrument and leaves the room, unhurried. She joins the rest of the household as they all file out of the house and wander down the grassy slope towards a line of trees in the distance in the fading northern light. The artist has wrapped a red towel around himself and walks along with them. Their voices grow faint. The film ends and starts again. g
Kirsten Tranter grew up in Sydney and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of three novels, including Hold (2016), longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Kirsten completed a PhD in English Literature at Rutgers University in 2008, and publishes essays, journalism, and literary criticism. She is a founder of the Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing. Her essay was runner-up in the 2018 Calibre Essay Prize.
Singular Reads from Text
A woman rises from the dead covered in ferns and a brother searches for his missing sister in this spellbinding, pageturning debut novel about love, loss and the bonds of family.
‘A strange and joyous marvel.’ Richard Flanagan
textpublishing.com.au
Only by returning home to the scene of her grief can Jessie recover from the trauma of her father’s and sister’s suicides.
A profound, beautifully written memoir about healing and forgiveness.
‘A wounded, lovely, luminous book.’ Tim Winton
Featuring outstanding Indigenous voices including Stan Grant, Tony Birch and Alexis Wright, Griffith Review
60 is a nuanced, timely collection of essays, memoir and fiction: a call to listen and respond to questions of constitutional recognition.
NEW TEXT CLASSICS BY THEA
ASTLEY
With new introductions from
Art historian Noah Glass is found dead in his swimming pool. He’s a suspect in an art theft, and his adult children must uncover the truth. A layered, mesmerising novel from the critically acclaimed author of A Guide to Berlin.
Jennifer Down, Kate Grenville, Chloe Hooper and Emily Maguire.
‘No schmaltz, no spin’
Gillian Dooley
A
SAND ARCHIVE
by Gregory Day Picador
$29.99 pb, 302 pp, 9781760552145
‘And so I patch it together … I take the liberty of seeking not only an explanation but a connection between what at first might appear to be disparate ingredients.’ The narrator of Gregory Day’s new novel, A Sand Archive, takes many liberties. Enigmatic in various ways, apparently solitary, nameless, and ungendered, this character is nevertheless full of fascinated admiration and affection for an older man who is virtually a stranger, and candid about the feelings and impulses that compel the creation of an intimate account of his life and career. The patchwork is composed of clues found in an obscure publication titled The Great Ocean Road: Dune stabilisation and other engineering difficulties by FB Herschell, along with an archive in ‘the small prime ministerial library at the university on the edge of the water’ in Geelong.
I will admit that this novel sent me, from time to time, to atlases, library catalogues, and Wikipedia. It is absolutely anchored in its place and time, as befits a novel about a civil engineer employed by the Victorian Country Roads Board in Geelong in the second half of the twentieth century. To foster the illusion of historical plausibility, there are illustrations dotted through the pages
– grainy greyscale photos of sand dunes, car factories, and, tantalisingly, scraps of manuscript from Francis Herschell’s ‘diary’. But he is not in the author catalogue of the State Library of Victoria and no book with exactly that title exists. Gregory Day’s novel is, like the narrator’s construction of Herschell’s biography, built from a powerful mixture of established historical circumstance and imagination.
A road that is built on sand dunes is both an engineering problem to be solved and a potent metaphor for the human predicament. In A Sand Archive, the young Herschell – familiarly called ‘FB’ in the novel – travels to France in 1968 to meet the experts and report on the suitability of a species of grass to solve the problems of the Great Ocean Road, which periodically collapsed.
In the exultation and chaos of Paris in May 1968, FB meets Mathilde, a student from the very coastal area of France he is about to visit. Their affair is brief and intense, constrained not by convention or family disapproval, but by Mathilde’s sense of the historical moment, which makes her ‘return to the fray,’ away from her undoubtedly strong attraction to the shy young civil engineer from Australia. FB’s encounter with a passionate French woman becomes his defining moment. He never marries, spending his life in Geelong wrangling with his unimaginative and suspicious boss in the CRB, quoting Hélène Cixous to the seagulls, frequenting ‘the bookshop in James Street, Geelong’ where one day he meets the narrator. He writes his book, an obscure volume in which the narrator finds ‘no schmaltz, no spin, only knowledge, technique, experience, and, every now and again, an unexpected glimmer of poetry’.
Poetry glimmers in the novel, too. Often enough I found myself gasping with delighted surprise at an apt and original phrase. Paris in 1968 is alive with ‘a festivity of discontent’. When FB is with Mathilde, everything felt ‘both electric and ambiguous’. At his moment of plenitude, ‘this quickening convergence of his heart and mind’ in France, he wonders if he is ‘suddenly homesick for the astringent and slightly defensive version of existence which
he led in Australia’. This is a beautiful description of the life of an intellectual in the provincial Australia of this period, when the life of the mind tended to be regarded with suspicion. The narrator writes, ‘Perhaps for my generation in Australia it has been easier to live the examined life, easier at least to find friends who would be excited by Proust’s theatrophone, or Marguerite Duras’s honesty, or the creative experiments of Georges Perec and Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo).’ But we are warned against pitying FB as ‘a single man shut away with his intellectual obsessions in a quiet house on a quiet street in a small regional city’. The narrator emphasises that this is not the man he met only briefly in person but got to know through the written word, in manuscript and print. ‘My feeling upon meeting him was that he was a man who had fully digested the absurdity of human endeavours, in the sense that we as humans so repeatedly get things wrong.’ He could live with knowing that his great contribution to Victorian road safety was doomed to be condemned by later generations as environmental vandalism: ‘that even as we attempt to rectify our old mistakes we are destined to make new ones’. The introduction of European marram grass to stabilise sand dunes in Australia is perhaps not a mistake on the scale of the introduction of rabbits or cane toads, but the grass is nevertheless now regarded as an invasive species. This novel about sand and engineering is also, of course, a novel of ideas and passions; a novel about writing a book about sand, engineering, ideas, and passions. ‘Can I presume?’ wonders the narrator. For the biographer, inevitably the question arises as to ‘whether the FB I have created, or re-created, in these pages bears any real resemblance to the man who actually lived’. For the novelist, there are other questions. This is an ambitious, multilayered novel, a novel for intellectuals, for bibliophiles; a book to contemplate, to burrow into, to enjoy with ‘a thinking heart’. g
Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Flinders University.
Battles of wills
Chris Flynn
PROPERTY
by Lionel Shriver
The Borough Press
$29.99 pb, 320 pp, 9780008265236
The sadly departed Terry Pratchett once said, ‘Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.’ While it is difficult to imagine anyone claiming that the great fantasist had no right to tell the stories of witches, orangutans, and sentient luggage, authors of literary fiction have lately been held to a different standard. Lionel Shriver has been foremost in the cross-hairs, a fact she addresses in Property, her thirteenth book and first short story collection.
Shriver’s public pronouncements on cultural appropriation and defence of imaginative fiction condemn her new work to intense scrutiny, which will not always be conducted in a spirit of critical objectivity.
Property is an especially cohesive story collection: each of the ten shorts and two novellas examine the bête noire of ownership in some form or other. The book opens with ‘The Standing Chandelier’, an eighty-page novella about friendship, and culminates in ‘The Subletter’, a seventy-five-pager set in Northern Ireland. With the other ten stories, the standard short fiction compendium review disclaimer that there must forcibly be a variance in quality does not apply. There is a measured excellence in Shriver’s work, and the use of a unifying theme makes Property feel like a novel.
Shriver’s characters provoke a visceral response. They are often reasonable yet maddening. In ‘The Standing Chandelier’, long-time friends and tennis partners Jillian and Weston reach an impasse when Weston chooses to marry. After years of comparing sordid notes on their respective sexual adventures, Weston’s new fiancée, Paige, objects to the intimate nature of his relationship with obnoxious artist Jillian. It is hard to argue with Paige’s logic, and yet the notion of treating friends and partners as possessions to be discarded
is disquieting. Matters are complicated further by an enormous piece of installation art given to the couple by Jillian as a wedding present. Does she have the right to ask for its return when the friendship sours? Who owns art? Who owns anything, for that matter?
People and property are conflated further in ‘Negative Equity’. When Graham and Rosalind Landers break up, they are obliged to continue living together because of a shared mortgage commitment. A battle of wills ensues as each enters the dating scene. ‘Vermin’ similarly sees a young creative couple pressured into buying their run-down rental when a bossy neighbourhood matriarch threatens to steal it out from under them. ‘She seemed one of those modern mothers who are sanctimonious about having made the gallant sacrifice of reproduction, and always wanted credit for it.’ Laid-back musician Michael changes completely once he is a homeowner, transforming into the sort of obsessive renovator you want to throttle.
Empty-nest baby-boomer anxiety is given full throat in ‘Domestic Terrorism’, the satirical story of a returned Millennial fledgling who resists his parents’ attempts to force him into a lifestyle similar to their own. Armed with a viral social media campaign that shames his parents into handing over the keys to the kingdom, Liam’s strategy will give any reader with an adult child living at home the cold sweats.
‘Kilifi Creek’, which won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2014, is worth mentioning, if only because it reads just as well now as it did four years ago. Despite having the weakest link to the theme, the story of a narcissistic American brat almost coming to grief in a Kenyan river is a powerful one. Liana’s subsequent penchant for mentally compiling all the moments she could have been killed lends the story a humorous slant in its final pages.
Shriver’s enemies will doubtless scour Property seeking indiscretions. They will be hard pushed to find any. The sole story that might have them in a lather is ‘The Subletter’, in which American journalist Sara Moseley openly appropriates the conflict in Northern Ireland to become a pseudo-Loyalist who
peppers her speech with local aphorisms. Those who see Ireland through emerald-tinted glasses may also be offended. Moseley is a conflict junkie whose opinion of Belfast tailspins as the story progresses. She describes the people as ‘developmentally stalled at about the age of thirteen’. As a native of that city, I can say with confidence that every excruciating Shriverian detail of quotidian life in Belfast is spot on. Little wonder, given the author lived there for twelve years.
Not that she had to do so in order to write about it. That readers are increasingly unable to separate the lives of authors from those of their characters is indicative of a faultline in modern literature. The ubiquity of confessional social media platforms and the publishing industry’s increased reliance on memoir as a means to stay afloat have created a vast army of commentators determined to prioritise personal narrative storytelling over works of imagination. Authors of invention are dismissed as being out of touch and irrelevant, while in the opposing camp J.K. Rowling gamely decries those who, ‘choose to remain comfortably within the boundaries of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are’.
Whatever your opinion on the subject, it makes sense that Shriver leads the charge for the imagination. Her work balances empathy and discomfort in a way that infuriates and excites readers. Her lush sentences are replete with wit and tension. The attention to detail is second to none. She may like nothing more than turning up to bourgeois dinner parties swinging a baseball bat, but Shriver’s characters are undeniably complex and flawed human beings with their own stories to tell. g
Chris Flynn’s most recent novel is The Glass Kingdom (2014).
‘Something more than nothing’
Shannon Burns
RELATIVELY FAMOUS
by Roger Averill
Transit Lounge
$29.99 pb, 304pp, 9780995409897
In Relatively Famous, Roger Averill combines a fictional memoir with extracts from a faux-biography of the memoirist’s Booker Prize-winning father, Gilbert Madigan. The biography amounts to a fairly bloodless summary of the events of Madigan’s life, and his son’s memoir is similarly sedate. This makes for a limp but sensitively conceived novel about paternal failure and the extent to which parents remain the authors of their children’s lives.
Michael is Gilbert’s eldest son. His father rose to prominence with a début novel that was widely admired for its stylish, modernist framing of working-class concerns. While writing the novel, Madigan Sr relied on the financial and domestic support of his wife (who gave up a teaching degree to support him). He also borrowed his protagonist’s working-class expressions and sensibilities from his father-in-law. Despite these personal and aesthetic debts, Gilbert left his first wife and son soon after achieving celebrity status and went on to live a life unburdened by conventional adult responsibilities. Michael, by contrast, is stuck-onthe-spot. He envies his father’s talent, ‘And the clear line of purpose his sense of vocation accorded him, which meant that, unlike me, he never had to
wonder what it was he should be doing with his life.’ Unlike Gilbert, Michael’s artistic pursuits (music and painting) hit a dead-end in early adulthood, soon after he married and had children. Michael is a decent and attentive father, but his transformation from artist to stay-at-home-dad and schoolteacher, alongside a pathological wariness of conflict and lack of personal ambition, render him sexually unappealing to his career-driven wife: ‘In bed, the expanse of sheet between us became a vast desert which my longing fearfully traversed. As often as not, my advancing hand would be brushed aside – from tiredness, for sleep. Repelled, my desire for connection shrivelled within me. Resentment blooming in its place.’
Because Michael is an extraordinarily passive protagonist, his wife speaks for Averill’s readers as much as herself when she says, ‘I need a reaction, Mick. I need something – action, reaction. Something. Something more than nothing’. Inertness is hard to admire and rarely seductive. The central theme of Relatively Famous is articulated more than once. Michael writes: ‘Whether they are present or not, it seems we are destined to live out our lives in response to our parents’; and later, ‘I can now see that I have spent most of my adulthood trying to wrest back authorship of my life from the distant, omniscient narration of my father’s story.’ At other times, he is more expansive:
Surely, though, if the antecedents of all our failings can be laid at the feet of our parents, then they too should be thanked for having given us the capacity to live with the damage, to shape it in creative ways, to form relationships and raise kids, to hold down jobs. At what point can those of us who feel neglected be expected to jump our own shadows and face the reality that inherent to inheritance is the begetting of frailty and failure? For me, the answer is now, writing this. The arc it describes, my shadow leap.
Instead of being a supplementary figure in a great man’s life, Michael wants to take charge of his own story, come to grips with his father’s legacy, and take ownership of his own failures
in the process. In essence, he wants to finally become a fully formed adult, and the story we read is his method of writing that adulthood into being.
Early in the novel, Michael recalls a time in his boyhood when his father attempted to rescue an injured bird and was bitten in the process: ‘Looking back, I am struck that the bird was forced to hurt my father in order to gain its freedom, and I wonder now if that is why I remember it.’ This suggests that Michael might have to do something similar if he is ever to emerge from his father’s shadow.
But Michael’s memoir is far from combative, frantic, or desperate; instead, he is commendably sympathetic to all of the people who ever wounded him and the inner forces that drive them, and he is equally tolerant of his own failings. For example, while recounting an uncharacteristic act of aggression on his own part, Michael acknowledges that ‘Resentment, defiance, rage, resignation’ were largely responsible, while ‘drunkenness’ and ‘thoughtlessness’ also played a role, before concluding: ‘It was an act, to be sure, but an act of casual madness’. Instead of amplification and intensification, he favours mollification and magnanimity.
Even a cruel twist of fate, which threatens to energise the story, is quickly deflated by Michael’s sympathetic reasonableness. Of course, he is right to be judicious where others might become enraged and impulsively destructive, but such overt level-headedness seldom translates into a compelling story. A flesh-and-blood Michael might be a pleasure to know, but as a character in fiction he is dreary. When Michael’s wife says, ‘You’re pathetic, Mick,’ the impatient reader may be inclined to agree.
Relatively Famous contains a handful of well-made and memorable vignettes, and Averill’s examination of fatherhood from the perspective of a man who fully embraces his domestic and parental responsibilities rings true, but that isn’t enough to rescue it from the lethargy of its narrators. g
Shannon Burns is a former ABR Patrons’ Fellow, and has published short fiction, poetry, and academic articles.
Kaleidoscope
Amy Baillieu
FLAMES
by Robbie Arnott
Text Publishing
$29.99 pb, 226 pp, 9781925603521
Robbie Arnott’s Flames is an exuberantly creative and confident début. Set in an alternate Tasmania, Flames’s kaleidoscopic narrative crackles with energy and imagination. This is a world of briefly reincarnating women, gin-swigging private detectives, wombat farms, malevolent cormorants, elementals and nature gods, fishermen who form lifelong bonds with seals, and coffee-table books about coffins; a world in which the complex bonds of love and family are further compounded by enhanced abilities, supernatural influences, and unusual genetic legacies. While some characters and developments are inspired by real events and people, this is a story that sparks with invention.
Arnott sets the tone from the opening sentences: ‘Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern gorge. She was definitely our mother – but, at the same time, she was not our mother at all.’ As the reader swiftly discovers,‘This kind of thing wasn’t uncommon’ in Levi McAllister’s family. After cremation, ‘around one third’ of the McAllister women are ‘re-spawned’ by the landscape where their ashes have been spread to complete ‘unfinished business, old grudges, forgotten chores’. After their mother returns with ‘her skin carpeted by spongy, verdant moss and thin tendrils of common filmy fern … [her hair] replaced by cascading fronds of lawncoloured maidenhair’, Levi starts to worry about his sister Charlotte and contacts the reclusive author of The Wooden Jacket to provide her with an alternative postmortem fate. When the grieving but otherwise healthy twenty-three-year-old discovers Levi’s plans for her bespoke coffin, she flees. For ‘all she has left of her mother are photos and memories and a family tradition of flames, and she won’t let him take them from her. Charlotte will burn … And she might
return. Though that isn’t the point.’
Fire, regeneration, and transformation are central to this multifaceted novel. Each chapter is narrated from a different perspective and in a variety of styles. Arnott plays assuredly with generic conventions and expectations. ‘Ice’, his take on the hardboiled detective genre, is particularly entertaining. At one point, the unnamed private detective Levi has hired to look for Charlotte laconically lists some of the more unusual people she has encountered: ‘blackmailers who’d stolen souls with highpowered cameras; thieves who’d sold their shadows to puppeteers; adulterers who’d swapped faces with gargoyles. You name it, I’d seen it. And I’d investigated it, solved it, and been home by nine with a glass of gin and a thick sandwich.’
The epistolary chapter ‘Fur’ is less convincing, thanks to one correspondent’s inexplicably vitriolic rages and melodramatic Victorian style: ‘Mr Idiot, You scum. You ill-mothered baboon. You parasitic swineherding subhuman mongoloid’ opens one letter. The reasons behind Thurston Hough’s huffiness are unclear, and his fussy locution breaks the narrative spell.
Other chapters include diary entries that detail a descent into madness and gothic horror on a remote wombat farm; a gossipy extract from a memoir by ‘Avoca matriarch’ Mavis Midcurrent (which, fittingly, appears midway through the book); two chapters written in the present tense in an almost incantatory style; and a moving origin story that encompasses several thousand years of Tasmanian history, including (briefly) the traumas of colonisation. ‘Salt’, ‘Iron’, and ‘Coal’ are affecting in their explorations of love and grief, joy, and rage, and the lingering aftershocks of unexpected events. The impact humanity has had on Tasmania’s natural environment is another recurring motif, and woven through each layer of the novel is the increasingly tense story of the McAllisters.
Although the main plot is compelling, Arnott’s descriptions of the Tasmanian landscape and its inhabitants (eldritch and otherwise) are the real highlight of this invigorating, strange, and occasionally brutal novel. The legendary Oneblood tuna is ‘a missile of
muscle and scales’, while the sky is a ‘hard blue smear’, and a window shows ‘the peeled tide and oozing mudflats of the river’. A memory is ‘sharp as snapped glass’, and one character wonders at ‘the swishing luminescence of the southern lights, painting the winter nights loud. He saw it all, all that was small and huge and wild and strange.’
Arnott’s dialogue doesn’t have the same spark as his narrative voice, and the originality of his descriptions, particularly those of the natural world, sometimes eclipses his characters, whose motivations and personalities are not always fully developed. The shifts between playful parody, affectionate homage, and relatively straightforward storytelling can also be jarring. However, the various permutations of love in Flames from the bond between man and seal and the mutual devotion of river and cloud gods, to the complexities of familial love and the slow burn that develops between two colleagues, are deftly handled.
Arnott’s alternate Tasmania, with its wry humour and pragmatic, allusive approach to the supernatural, is sometimes reminiscent of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and has parallels with Angela Slatter’s Brisbane-based Verity Fassbinder books, while his gradually evolving fire elemental wouldn’t be out of place in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001). However, some of the rules governing the reality of the world that Arnott has created in Flames are unclear. Is Tasmania simply a metaphysical crucible, or are there minor deities and people with unusual gifts everywhere?
The novel comes to a satisfying, if somewhat pat, conclusion which nevertheless manages to leave several questions unanswered and plenty of material for Arnott to explore if and when he decides to return to his captivating version of the ‘strange southern rock’. g
Amy Baillieu is a Deputy Editor of ABR.
Connotations
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
by
Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater Oxford University Press $34.95 hb, 545 pp, 9780198709701
On its first appearance in Russia, Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment was the hit of the season. It was serialised throughout 1866 in the journal The Russian Messenger. Nikolai Strakhov, Dostoevsky’s first biographer, described the novel’s effect on the reading public as spectacular: ‘[A]ll that lovers of reading talked about was that novel, about which they complained because of its crushing power … so that people with strong nerves almost became ill, while people with weak nerves had to leave off reading.’ Other contemporaries testified similarly: that the novel, even for Russian readers, was not an easy read.
For English translators of the novel, their renditions should reflect the stylistic and conceptual sophistication of the original, transposed into the linguistic potential of the target language. Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s new translation, with notes and an introduction by Sarah J. Young, tries to do just that, and mostly succeeds. Stylistic precision and neatness are qualities of Slater’s translation, which is the best we have in English. It surpasses, in terms of English prose and sentence rhythm, recent predecessors, with the exclusion of the old David Magarshack translation (1951). While this neatness entails some omissions, these are in the interest of good English, a feature of which is economy of expression and directness. In terms of sentence structure and lexicon, Slater’s translation reads like an original English text. But this can have a price, with respect to central motifs in the novel and the rendering of Dostoevsky’s stylistically loaded Russian lexicon in key passages. For example, inside the old pawnbroker’s flat, ‘a lamp was burning before a small
icon’. The Russian word lampada / лампада, used in the original, means ‘icon light’, not a generic room lamp. A religious artefact, the icon lamp adds mystery and spiritual tension to the scene. The fear of repetition probably motivated the omission of ‘icon’ in the complex noun ‘icon lamp’.
A similar discrepancy between the original and the translation occurs in the old pawnbroker’s fictional portrait, in which Slater perpetuates a lapse made by earlier translators, though he tries to add more softness to the description than his predecessors: ‘She was a tiny, dried up little old crone of around sixty, with sharp evil-looking eyes and a short pointed nose.’ Dostoevsky’s use of diminutives makes for a ‘softer’ portrait in the original; the impression is that of a frail and vulnerable, but feisty, old lady, not a ‘crone’. The Russian diminutive form starushonka, with the suffix ‘-onka’, does have a pejorative connotation, but it is not as strong as the English connotation of ‘crone’. The old lady’s eyes, described with another diminutive –glazki/глазки (‘little eyes’) – reinforce this impression of vulnerability, even if it is tinged with malice. The narrating voice in the original is thus patronising towards this potential victim of Raskolnikov’s fantastic project, rather than demonising her.
On the other hand, Slater’s translation can be too mild with respect to the force of a psychic state described in the original. For example: ‘At that point he hadn’t yet started believing in those dreams of his – he would just tease his imagination with their repellent yet tempting audacity.’ In the original, Raskolnikov lacerates himself with these fantasies of his; he is in a state of irritability akin to hypochondria, established in the opening pages like a leitmotif. Here, his fantasies are described as obscene, in the sense of formless (bez obraza/без образа – without form), hence unimaginable, the very antithesis of ‘teasing his imagination’. These fantasies return, like the repressed, and are ‘insistent’ and more than just ‘tempting’: they are like contagion. The Russian derzost/дерзость (impertinence), too, is a word with only negative connotations, whereas ‘audacity’ in
English can be positive. Derzost, on the other hand, implies not positive but transgressive daring.
For every such inadequacy in conveying the stylistic force of the original, Slater’s translation often hits the mark and fulfils his intention: to produce ‘an easy readable English style that does not smack too much of translation’.
This is the only recent translation Crime and Punishment with a substantial critical apparatus. Sarah Young’s explanatory notes, surpassing all those of earlier translations (those by David McDuff, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in particular), are based on the notes in the thirty-volume Collected Works of F.M. Dostoevsky (1972–90) and the lifetime research on the novel by the Russian Dostoevsky scholar Boris Tikhomirov, a world authority on Dostoevsky and this novel in particular. This is an ideal edition to prescribe for senior high school and undergraduate teaching.
While the critical apparatus of the notes is a major scholarly achievement of this edition of the translation, the criticism on Dostoevsky’s poetics and his novel in the introduction is traditional rather than innovative; it engages with the content rather than the form of Dostoevsky’s opus. Especially since the fall of communism, the reclamation of Russian Orthodox belief has seen a wave of Christian interpretations of Dostoevsky’s opus in general and Crime and Punishment in particular. Such interpretations do not engage with critical approaches that might connect Dostoevsky’s works with the broader field of phenomenological thought, including psychology or psychoanalytic theory. Nevertheless, Young’s Introduction lays a good foundation for readers who are new to Dostoevsky, and neatly covers all the major aspects of the novel in its historical context, within the editorial constraints of a translation. g
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover is chief editor of The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review. She is Adjunct Associate Professor (Research), School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University. ❖
APPLE AND KNIFE
by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J. Epstein
Brow Books
$27.99 pb, 208 pp, 9781925704006
There is an observation in the titular story of Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha’s first collection to be published in English, which can be read as the thematic spine of the book: ‘Sometimes it seemed like there was nothing new to talk about. It was the same old story, repeated over and over, all stitched together.’ This notion can be applied quite literally to the first piece in the collection, ‘The Blind Woman Without a Toe’, a feminist revisionist retelling of Cinderella that treads well-trodden ground. This is a story – told from one stepsister’s viewpoint – that readers of revisionist fairy tales have encountered many times before. It is a rather safe choice to open with such a familiar narrative.
The following twelve stories, though likewise imbued with recognisable tropes drawn from folktale, myth, gothic, and horror fiction, are far less safe in approach or content, but equally concerned with how perpetually unjust the world can be, how ghosts will insist on haunting us, and how powerful the desire is to circumvent the roles that society has enforced upon women in particular. Set in the Indonesian everyday, these stories twist the familiar until it is uncanny, unsettling, even startling. Standouts in this respect are ‘Scream in a Bottle’ in which an old woman in the cliff-side town of Cadas Pangeran fills a cupboard with mothers’ screams; ‘Blood’, a mix of the mundane and the horrific in which a copywriter recalls a blood-eating hag while working on a new maxi pad campaign; and ‘The Well’, which reads like a surreal dream as a favourite daughter, desperate to escape nursing her elderly father, discovers a labyrinthine forest inside a room in their Dutch-era house.
Epstein’s fine translation of Paramaditha’s stories is also worth noting. The prose is sharp, the rhythm lively, and words have clearly been chosen carefully so as not to obscure the original work’s strong narrative voice.
Lisa Bennett
THE LUCKY GALAH
by Tracy Sorensen Picador
$29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781760552657
In 1969, in a quintessentially Australian town on the remote north-west coast, the locals prepare to celebrate their role in the moon landing. In 2000, as the townsfolk brace themselves for a cyclone, Lucky, this novel’s pink and grey narrator, uses transmissions from a satellite dish tuned to galah frequency to make sense of what she saw and heard from her cage in the 1960s. Quirky? Unbelievable? Tracy Sorensen’s The Lucky Galah upsets preconceptions in a smart and charming account of a human population on the cusp of radical social transformation.
Permutations of luck drive the narrative. The Johnson family arrives at Port Badminton in 1964, the same year in which Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country was published, with electronic go-to man Evan Johnson – a ‘practical’ man ‘wearing horn-rimmed glasses in the style of Donald Horne’ – enjoying the benefits of white male privilege as he helps ready the tracking station for its part in the space race. Linda Johnson, however, having quickly perfected her façade as a ‘Better Than Normal’ housewife, is bored and unsatisfied. As plot complications develop and Evan’s fortunes fall, some of those marginalised by gender and race – even species – find a better, companionable fate.
Sorensen plays adroitly with the sometimes fine distinctions between truth and fiction in narrative strategies that rarely feel forced: Lucky might seem voiceless – an outsider – but she crafts an engaging story from her observations and the ‘rueful thoughts’ of humans beamed to her by the Dish, sifting and shaping, inventing scenes, giving tantalising hints of events to come.
The Lucky Galah can be appreciated on many levels – as an affectionately ironic commentary on a generation, an investigation into the nature of luck, a prompt to examine what constitutes ‘an Australian’, a contemporary redressing of past imbalances, or as a delightful flight of fancy.
Josephine Taylor
YOU BELONG HERE by
Laurie Steed
Margaret River Press
$25 pb, 256 pp, 9780648203902
Interwoven short story collections are often at their best when they offer multiple perspectives on the same event. Laurie Steed does this well in his début novel You Belong Here, as he captures the life of a single family through the multiplicity of its members.
Jen meets Steven on her way to a party in Brunswick in 1972; within a few years they are married. Steed shows the way two people bring their respective personal histories to a relationship, ‘a Möbius strip of past and present, with neither gaining traction’. Steven works at Tullamarine in air traffic control, but is unable to quarantine the stresses of his job from his domestic life. By 1980 the couple have three children. One of the strengths of the book is the way that Steed writes about the challenges of parenthood: the weight of the responsibility and the sacrifice of individuality parents make in its name. Moments of love that pass from parents to their children are also rendered nicely.
The structure allows Steed to omit strategic pieces of information, so that when fractures occur they are sudden and shocking. The consequences of the passage of time are also made visible. Betrayals within the family have repercussions that create secondary injuries or, as Steed writes, ‘A hairline crack. Small, but spreading.’ The chapters themselves are paradigms of subtle storytelling, although overall Steed might have made more use of certain events, in particular a shocking deception involving two characters and the subsequent reconciliation, which seems too abrupt.
On the whole, Steed is more interested in exploring the ways in which the family members connect, rather than exploiting the divisions between them. This aligns with the motif of the ‘mixed tape’ that runs through the collection. Overall, nostalgia prevails, even in the way that families view their own histories.
Gretchen Shirm
Confessional intensity
Joan Fleming
DOMESTIC INTERIOR
by Fiona Wright
Giramondo, $24 pb, 93 pp, 9781925336566
THE TINY MUSEUMS
by Carolyn Abbs
UWAP Poetry, $22.99 pb, 120 pp, 9781742589541
The classic lyric preoccupation with interiority, and how internal life touches and changes the outside world, finds expression in two recent collections of poetry: Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior and Carolyn Abbs’s The Tiny Museums. In both collections, the speakers draw the shapes of their internal furniture, while building monuments to the intimate scenes and common spaces that define them.
The poems in Wright’s book have a confessional intensity, even if the particularities of the confession are mostly left off the page. While still in her thirties, Wright became an awardwinning memoirist with a collection of essays probing the metaphysics of hunger. Self-analysing and revelatory, the essays in Small Acts of Disappearance (2015) do not shy away from the details of private shame and struggle. The poems in Domestic Interior were written around the same time; they are strong in feeling and light on narrative. Biographical details, and the triggering context of the speakers’ sorrow and heaviness, are rarely explicit. The poet instead describes with consummate skill the textural particularities of the touched and tasted world: the ‘pelts of peaches’ and the ‘lukewarm wheatgrass’, sampled while walking ‘past the bakery / where all the bread is cheesed and lurid’. The vulgar suburb-scape is finely observed and vividly described in terms of how it feels against the body.
Section titles are deceptively direct. ‘A Crack in the Skin: On Illness’ promises a coherent theme, but leaves the reader to divine the circumstances of a body under threat, growing ‘numb’, ‘empty’, bruised, ‘crushed’, and ‘shivering’. Wright
writes, ‘It thinks in me, / this shadow’, and later wonders, ‘How did it help us, the sorrow in our marrow?’. Monsters lurk in the ordinary corners of the suburban home, its medicine cabinets and fridges. Menace is penetratingly everywhere. The speaker of the title poem has had to learn ‘to walk bruiseless / to the bathroom in the dark’. Mood is undeniably strong, but is mood enough? Without the context of this sadness, so insisted upon, does it read as merely ennui?
An extra-textual knowledge of Wright’s battle with anorexia, and her time in institutional rehabilitation, brings out further dimensions to the poems. The collection is punctuated by a series of ‘conversation poems’. These are lively, sometimes wretched, and often very funny transcriptions of overheard speech. The ‘Tupperware Sonnets’ are particularly diverting: ‘Don’t they go yuck? I mean, I hate using plastic, but always worry, won’t their sandwiches go yuck? They don’t eat their sandwiches if they go yuck ...’ Wright says the conversation poems are among her favourite in the collection, perhaps because they constitute a break in voice – a break from the poet ‘stewing in [her] own sour air’, as Sylvia Plath’s character Esther put it in The Bell Jar. These instances of comic relief are a respite from the pervasive states of anxiety and unsettlement that run like an underground river beneath the terrain of these poems. Carolyn Abbs’s collection is more explicitly autobiographical than Wright’s. It follows the arc of a classic memoir, painting scenes of childhood memories, investigating family trauma and secrets, and staging the adult coming to terms with the imprint of the past
on the present.
The collection’s best poems are charged with narrative intensity and family drama. The speaker revisits a childhood home where now-unimagin able traumas took place; she remembers a sister with tuberculosis being threatened with quarantine.
The Tiny Museums came highly commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. The judges praised the collection as a book that telescopes time: ‘Abbs’ poems … live in the gap between deep time and now … Abbs deftly creates the world of her book through a phenomenological approach. Elegant layers of textures, colours, sounds and movement invite the reader into an experiential sense of this trench between the past and the present.’
A pair of poems at the heart of this book, for example, manage this trick with great skill. The slide into memory, and back into the present, is absolutely liquid:
Outside a shut door I hear a doctor murmur sanatorium
Our mother’s nurse-voice No!
We search through blindness my ring clinks a chrome railing
Old people in parked cars peer through half moons of windscreens sip thermos tea wait for mist to lift hush of the shore sanatorium sanatorium No!
The poem on the facing page, titled ‘The Shrine’, similarly glides the speaker and her sister between temporal realities. In some intimately known woods, the speaker sees a girl in a red dress: ‘I can’t tell if it is our mother as a child / or if it is me running towards her.’ This utterly subjective declaration of impossible fact is beautifully managed. It attests to the realness of memory as it lives in the waking present. However, the adroitness of these examples is not a consistent feature of the collection. Many scene-poems – a grandmother’s dressing table, a father polishing shoes – fail to vibrate without the dramatic charge of a narrative. Abbs’s unpretentious, quiet style has been praised as ‘unsentimental’, but despite the occasional fine turn of phrase – ‘there was a tavern of voices outside’
1.
– the objects described do not seem to hold much more than the plain visual fact of themselves. Epigraphs to the poems – like a line from Simon Armitage: ‘Poetry attempts a dialogue with the departed’ – are overly directional. A writerly tic sees the regular omission of articles, adverbs, and pronouns in otherwise uninflected speech. This does not equal poetic compression.
At 120 pages, the collection is uneven and over-long. This late début exhibits a consistent voice, though there are promising moments of formal experimentation. ‘Piece of Lace’, a prose poem, has staccato punctuation and a rush of single syllable words that aptly deliver an unsettling menace. Such menace is handled less successfully in other poems, where safe rhythms and uncharged
Four Rooms
Your beard intrigues me, its rough mystery, patterned complexity. I imagine burrowing animals under your skin that raise unreadable braille, tiny things my nails disturb – anemone fronds in a sea-borne forest. I could analyse what I know to be corporeal, but my vision retreats to cells and chemicals in the wash of your blood: first capillary then follicle, then rough-honed epidermis. And while this explanation satisfies the forensic detail of science, on reflection, I prefer to dwell in differences, reaching for the other side of the species, and you. I touch your face – a Venn diagram seeking its overlap.
2.
I see you charting the geography of your mouth –lips parted, your tongue divining water.
A crack like small arms fire when you bite is torment. Pain like shot metal cleaves out. We have no automated repair –
no shark’s teeth like a bandsaw wave on primitive wave. The human metronome measures the time it takes
to ponder love, comb your hair, order a meal. Our DNA is stardust, but then – this jagged tor and ruinous smile.
You shrug – another loss on your way to the terminus, one more shard of marble gone to angels.
language make an ending such as ‘You will never escape / the stench of mud and blood’ feel unearned. A stronger editorial hand might have helped shape Abbs’s talent into a more consistently satisfying collection. g
Joan Fleming’s most recent poetry collection is Failed Love Poems (Victoria University Press, 2015).
3.
I don’t cultivate them as I do seedlings or an even temper, and painting them isn’t worth the drying time
or worry that a scarf and bag won’t match three applications of London Bus red. When you lie down and I rake
the inside of your arm, my nails find a fulcrum under the skin, a connection point into epidermal wiring, along a meridian that speaks in a language of dreams. My nails are a catchment of Australian Grey edged with white, my upper lip bruised from a charcoal stick’s last light. Tonight there are unexplained scratches like fine webbing behind your knees. I trace them and ruminate on a recurring dream about a woman who turns to a man she loves, and as he sleeps, leaves the calligraphy of a river in flood on his skin without waking him.
4.
I’d call to you, my voice lost in the rooftop birch and priory windows, the dark Schiele sticks of landscape, yet the wind twirls skinny leaves, and you’d swear a cold spring fed into my wanting you here. Your absence is sultry heat and warm rain, humidity pearling your thighs, the cartography of your spine a stain each vertebrae wears. Bring your breakers with you: bring the red-eyed birds and the rain-soaked cups. Bring the sharp green of a downpour. Darken the level crossing – leave it unsigned.
Egon Schiele is a major twentieth-century Austrian painter whose landscapes echo the dark twisted lines of his figurative work.
Julie Manning is a painter and poet living in Moreton Bay in Queensland.
Julie Manning ❖
Power and play
David McCooey
WHO READS POETRY: 50 VIEWS FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
edited by Fred Sasaki and Don Share
University of Chicago Press (Footprint)
$49.99 hb, 215 pp, 9780226504766
So, who reads poetry? American military cadets, that’s who. And medical specialists. Also, songwriters, journalists, and philosophers. And don’t forget (ex-) poets, priests, and politicians (to quote Sting). But let’s get back to those military cadets. What does poetry do for them? Who Reads Poetry gives us a number of possible answers. When Jeffrey Brown, a senior correspondent for PBS’s NewsHour, asked a poetry class in West Point (the US military academy) about the link between reading poetry and becoming a military officer, one cadet answered that poetry, and art generally, is required because ‘we’re all here training to take lives’. Another argued that poetry is necessary to learning about becoming a leader. Lieutenant General William James Lennox Jr, who also has an essay in Who Reads Poetry, was once the superintendent at West Point. For him, poetry is taught there, in part, because combat leaders ‘must rely on their own morality, their own creativity, their own wits’.
Who Reads Poetry brings together fifty essays from the ‘View from Here’ column that appears in Poetry, the famous magazine based in Chicago. ‘The View from Here’ invites ‘readers from outside the world of poetry’ to discuss their relationship with poetry. Some of the contributors – such as Ai Weiwei, Roxane Gay, Christopher Hitchens, and Roger Ebert – might be reasonably well known in Australia, but for the most part the contributors are not celebrities
(though many are artists and writers), and for the most part they are American. Indeed, one might say that this is a very American book. This ‘Americanness’ is not simply a question of where most of its contributors reside, or the fact that in 2003 Poetry received a $200 million grant (from the philanthropist and poetry lover Ruth Lilly). The contributors – who include the previously mentioned retired general, a baseball player, a pastor, activists, and various professionals associated with both élite organisations (academic, medical, or cultural) and less glamourous institutions (prisons, schools, and courts) – make up, it seems to me, an especially American mix. Who Reads Poetry isn’t just another chapter in America’s culture wars, but it does reveal something of both the diversity and stark divisions in American public life.
Perhaps the most basic division here is seen between those who view poetry as a discourse of power and those who view it as a discourse of play. The idea that poetry can teach ‘leadership’, as defined at West Point, is the most obvious example of the former. The Scottish singer-songwriter Momus (Nick Currie) neatly articulates the latter: ‘language is at its most charming when it abandons the will to power and substitutes pure play’. As the essay by the journalist Natalie Y. Moore illustrates, this latter model of poetry (with its links to childhood and maternal speech) also shows poetry to be a discourse of sociality and continuity.
As the lack of a question mark in its title suggests, Who Reads Poetry is largely, and thankfully, uninterested in poetry’s supposed ‘decline’. Nevertheless, the problematic nature of poetry’s cultural status is surely in evidence in the way the essays repeatedly worry over the relationship between poetry and everyday life, and between poetry and other discourses (science, religion, and politics). The artist-contributors here also focus on the relationship between poetry and other art forms. Poetry, these essays suggest, continues to haunt public and artistic life, despite its indisputably marginal status.
The non-poetic art form most conspicuously on display here is a prose one: the essay. However much these
essays extol poetry, they cannot but help simultaneously express the power of prose. Where Alex Ross – music critic of the New Yorker – attempts, and fails, to match the rhetorical power of poetry through a combination of lyrical hyperbole and musical jargon, the baseball player (and journalist) Fernando Perez, illustrates the power of plain prose. His essay begins, ‘I write from Caracas, the murder capital of the world, where I’ve been employed by the Leones to score runs and prevent balls from falling in the outfield.’ Now there’s a sentence.
But where numerous artists seek to celebrate the poetic nature of their artistic practice, Perez is refreshingly attuned to poetry’s profound difference from his day job. Baseball, he writes, ‘like any modern industry’, is alienating, whereas poetry: ‘is less susceptible to circumstance. I’m not especially touched when a poet deals with a ball game; I’m not especially interested in having one world endear itself to the other. Right now I need them apart, right now I’m after displacement, contrast. The thick wilderness of, say, late Ashbery can wrangle with the narrowness of competition.’ I can’t help but wonder how many people in Australian sport would be equally familiar with the poet John Ashbery or his Antipodean equivalent.
But one doesn’t want to end with the whiff of cultural cringe. As a poetry professional myself, I came to this collection with – I must confess – a slightly jaundiced eye. By the end, I was astonished at what poetry was able to inspire. Who Reads Poetry reminded me that poetry, even today, continues to be associated with recitation and memory, music and emotion, and (yes) consolation and resistance. Just read the essays by Etienne Ndayishimiye (a Twa parliamentarian in Burundi) and the war correspondent Chris Hedges if you are in any doubt about the last two.
Not all the essays here are successful, but for the most part this is an extraordinary book. It has much to offer, to both those who are interested in poetry and those who are not. g
David McCooey is a professor of writing and literature at Deakin University in Geelong,
The archbishop
Benjamin Ivry
OUR LIFE GROWS by Ryszard Krynicki, translated by
Alissa Valles
NYRB Poets
$22.99 pb, 120 pp, 9781681371603
My poor son, forgive your mother, my poor son, forgive me for giving birth to you,
I won’t do it anymore.
This poem, cited in its entirety, is ‘My Poor Son’ by the Polish writer Ryszard Krynicki, who will be seventy-five years old in June 2018. Likely the finest poet in the generation after Zbigniew Herbert, the dazzling philosopher of modern Polish verse who died twenty years ago, Krynicki was born in a Nazi slave labor camp in 1943. At Windberg in Sankt Valentin, Austria, his Polish parents were forced workers at a tank factory. These stern origins stayed with Krynicki, along with a certain loftiness and reserve. At university, his classmates reportedly referred to him as ‘Archbishop’. In Polish author Ewa Lipska’s novel Sefer (2009), a character generally accepted as being inspired by Krynicki appears at a party in Cracow, a ‘silent poet who was moving around the rooms like an empty city … I learned that he was born in Austria. His esoteric delicacy did not belong to any of the human elements.’
As with most Poles, Krynicki’s ‘esoteric delicacy’ confronted postwar hardships, starting with repressive Soviet rule. Unlike some of his fellow intelligentsia, he neither fled the country nor retreated into passivity. In the 1970s and 1980s, he boldly signed petitions and circulated samizdat copies of his work. While some compatriots carried on their literary careers overseas, in 1980 he participated in a hunger strike in the church of St Krzysztof in provincial Poland, in sympathy with incarcerated pro-democracy activists.
Only recently has Krynicki’s work become abundantly available in English.
This new translation of a 1978 collection follows his Magnetic Point: Selected poems (New Directions, 2017), translated by Clare Cavanagh. Yet for all his reticence, Krynicki’s work has been known to those attentive to developments in Polish poetry. I recall seeing the translation into German of Krynicki’s poems in 1991 by Karl Dedecius (1921–2016), a star-making translator of Polish poets in Germany, giving them pan-European prominence. Among Dedecius’s previous finds were Herbert and the Nobel Prize-winning eminence Czesław Miłosz. Dedecius’s imprimatur on Krynicki’s poems, collected as Wunde der Wahrheit (Wound of Truth) was validated by their startling aura of purity and concentrated emotion. I reviewed Krynicki’s book in an English-language venue, including some of my own translations of the poems. I then asked a translator with whom I had been collaborating on projects from Polish into English if she would consider trying a volume of Krynicki’s work. She refused on the grounds that she had vowed never again to translate the work of a living poet. Given an international profile, she argued, poets gain hubris and other unattractive traits, citing one author so ambitious for accolades that a few of his fellow Poles had nicknamed him ‘Nobelski’. I argued that Krynicki, from what I had read about his modest, self-doubting personality, showed no signs of developing into a monstrous ego. ‘They all change,’ she replied darkly. That decisive response put paid to my plan to translate Krynicki. Alissa Valles, who has published poetry under the name Alissa Leigh, has deftly retained a lyrical turn of phrase even in his sparsest lines. Previously, in Krynicki’s Selected Poems, Cavanagh, despite admirable diligence and conviction, sometimes dipped into prosiness. By contrast, Our Life Grows has many endearing poems with an air of wonderment, such as ‘My Daughter Learns to Read’: ‘My little daughter, faultless until now, / is learning to read and write / and only now does she begin to err // and I live my old errors of humanity / all over again.’
It is fitting that Krynicki should finally attract the attention of translators,
since he has labored mightily himself to translate such German-language poets as Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs into Polish. Influenced in his own work by writers as varied as Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, the Japanese haiku master Issa, and the Polish modernist Alexander Wat, Krynicki has also run a small literary publisher, a5 Press, for more than two decades. And pace my former collaborator, despite added renown, he has to all evidence retained an admirable diffidence. In a still-untranslated book of interviews published in 2014 by Biuro Literackie (Literary Office), he noted:
I think that it is worth learning silence in art, so I try to learn it in poetry. I think that focused poems are better able to listen to other people … When I do not publish, it does not mean that I stop doing poetry at the time. I deal with it then maybe even more intensively, if only because I translate other people’s poems and publish other people’s books … I really write enough, also because I prefer to put poems in my head and keep them in my memory. I write them only at the end, when it seems to me that I’m ready, or when I’m afraid that I could forget them. Of course, some I forget, but maybe they were not worth remembering? [reviewer’s translation]
Krynicki added: ‘Poems should be written when you have something to say. When you experience a revelation. When a spiritual discovery takes place, or at least you have the impression that it was accomplished … It depends on character. A sense of taste. Sensitivity.’ Remarkably, Ryszard Krynicki’s poems meet his own stringent criteria. g
Benjamin Ivry is a poet, translator, and biographer. ❖
THE FORTRESS by S.A. Jones Echo Publishing $32.99 pb, 277 pp, 9781760407940
This speculative novel is of the Zeitgeist. S.A. Jones imagines a civilisation of women – the Vaik – committed to ‘Work. History. Sex. Justice.’ Although they live apart, in ‘The Fortress’, there is a history of exchange between the Vaik and the outside world. All women are entitled to Vaik justice if they have been violated and, according to a treaty that includes ‘biological guarantees’, Vaik are ‘granted access to men and sperm’. Thus, The Fortress accommodates men: national servicemen; ‘isvestyii’ who, having committed crimes against women and girls, are sentenced to life (and death) at The Fortress; permanent residents; and ‘supplicants’. These men work – in the fields, the kitchens, etc. – and must consent to the Vaik ‘direct[ing] the uses of [their bodies] at all times’.
The book’s protagonist, Jonathon Bridge, is a supplicant who spends a year under submission. Previously a partner at a major software company, Jonathon behaved callously towards the young women he worked with there (in accordance with the company’s corporate culture), using them for sex, and choosing to overlook a rape committed by a colleague. Jonathon eventually agrees to enter The Fortress in light of his wife’s pregnancy and her reluctance to expose their child to his ‘corrupting influence’. While his child – a girl, he feels certain – is in Adalia’s womb, he will be ‘enclosed and reshaped’ by the Vaik; reborn a good father.
It is unclear if Jones intends the analogy between the corporation’s use of women’s bodies and the Vaik’s use of the men who submit to them. In both contexts the question of consent is complicated by the degree to which one can choose to say no. Regardless, it is the Vaik who are vindicated. As Jonathon concedes: their methods ‘turned a man inward, towards himself. What he found there made The Fortress feel just.’
Anna MacDonald
Through the looking glass
Two new poetry collections
David Dick
ARCHIPELAGO by Adam Aitken
Vagabond Press, $24.95 pb, 112 pp, 9781922181947
PRESENT by Elizabeth Allen
Vagabond Press, $24.95 pb, 112 pp, 9781922181848
Both Adam Aitken’s Archipelago and Elizabeth Allen’s Present examine the establishment and mutability of identity in the worlds of objects, histories, literature, and media in which they place their speakers. Of course, the exploration of identity is a common theme of poetry, particularly as it pertains to how the material of language helps shape such a tenuous concept. Admittedly, the theme serves primarily as a useful frame through which to enter two starkly different works. All the same, Aitken and Allen’s books prove rewardingly immersive and surprisingly complex in the different ways in which they handle their speakers’ desire for understanding in the crowded spaces of their poetry.
Archipelago , despite its apparent yearning for ‘plain speaking’, portrays a voice cognisant of a fractured Modernist poetic lineage, particularly as it moves through a France that materialises in classical, artistic, and poetic references. Aitken’s speaker utilises a wry intellectual chat that seems aware of the poems’ slippages between the present and history, between things as they were and as they are made in the poem, between the physical spaces the poems inhabit and the literary traditions they appear to evoke – ‘Both stupid and brave / we walked back into the f Century’. Aitken thus puts to use a fractured lineation that often interrupts the flow of the poems, creating a staccato, paratactic, almost imagist effect, which adds to the simultaneity of things, times, places, and literary figures evident in Archipelago Aptly, the speaker ‘surveyed the process’, perpetually examining the ‘process’ of
writing and making, and what this does to both the spaces the poems inhabit and how this in turn informs the identity, or identities, of the speaker – ‘I can see myself in there.’
Aitken’s speaker is often on the move, like a tourist writing a travelogue or a poet on a ramble seeking introspective understanding. In its restlessness, Archipelago illustrates a process of division and reformation. Time, place, and the self are in flux, under constant scrutiny, subject to, while simultaneously creating, an inexact language that ultimately attempts to bring the disparate strands of the book back together. As the first poem in Archipelago self-reflexively asks: ‘And where’s the source of that?’ It is a question the reader is often led to ask. Aitken’s book seems often driven by its allusions, establishing a variable array of references, material things, and voices that establish and colour the drive-by imagery of the poems. By evoking and directly naming such literary icons as Char, Pound, Ashbery, Flaubert, Shakespeare, and Rimbaud – whose ‘Drunken Boat’ is a significant influence on the shifting, detached speaker of the book –Archipelago wilfully acknowledges its traditions, attempting to find its own voice within its significant influence, co-opted by the speaker to be drawn attention to in the contemporary settings and voice of the book. As the speaker intones in ‘Devotional’, they are ‘our ornaments’ and add a luxurious ‘glow’ to the poems, islands in the ‘archipelago’ of the book. In comparison to Aitken, Elizabeth Allen’s Present utilises a more direct poetic style, it is conversational, shorthand,
and collagistic, a voice of the internet meme and Twitter age that is popular among younger Australian poets. Allen’s ability to imbue the apparent simplicity of her language with humour and pathos, without either overshadowing the graceful directness of her approach, marks her a poet of considerable talent. Allen’s speaker is present, clean, and (for want of a less loaded word) confessional. Her speaker is also very funny: notably Australian in its self-deprecations and asides, both discomforting and familiar – ‘Emma covets my yellow cardigan // I covet her baby.’ Allen’s poems drift between short, punchy, self-contained poetic lines, revealing prose poetry, and
Aitken and Allen’s books prove rewardingly immersive and surprisingly complex
shorter, jokier poems that often expose the hilarious hopelessness of the world. Hers is a voice of wit, warmth, sweetness, anxiety, and all the contrasts of a mind trying to cope with the world of love, social media, writing, moving, maybe just coping, noting, ‘Sometimes I am starring / in the movie of my own life’, though sometimes she is ‘only playing / the supporting role’.
Allen’s use of collage – a technique that can distract the reader from the text itself – performs the delicate tightrope walk between not drawing too much attention to its presence, as her sources fold into the fabric of the work and the world of the poems, while simultaneously drawing enough attention that the reader recognises the pop cultures, internet spaces, and languages Allen puts to use. She examines how these sources inform the concerns of the speaker inundated in a world of media that establish the impossible standard of what we should be and aspire to. The highly amusing poem ‘eHarmony Quick Questions’ mines Wikipedia, Dirty Dancing , seemingly random (real) websites, and lyrics from a Taylor Swift song, all of which amounts to a poem that asks, ‘How romantic are you? / How trusting are you? ’, and answers,
‘Please do not touch // This item has functional sharp points.’ I cannot think of a better way to capture the hyperreal, vulgar strangeness of internet dating.
The conflicted and unsure speaker of Allen’s Present, dealing with not only online disconnect, but dispassionate lovers, loneliness, gardens, memories, and shopping, heads ultimately towards the brilliantly dry final long prose poem, ‘Inpatient (Impatient)’, which is set in the wards of a psychiatric hospital. Despite this slow descent into the whitegrey numbness of quotidian medical routine – standing in stark opposition to the hallucinatory terrors of Artaud and Nerval – the voice of Present maintains its approachability. It is an impressive accomplishment, reaching out to the reader to take them directly into the bright, sometimes shaded worlds of the poems. Present asks for understanding and in its elegance achieves a startling amount of page turning empathy. Rarely have I devoured a book of poetry with such manic appreciation and understanding of the speaker’s quibbles and problems with the world of love and life. g
David Dick recently finished a PhD on John Ashbery’s poetry at Monash University. ❖
The 2018 ABR Film Survey
What is your favourite film of all time? And who are your favourite actor/ actress and director?’
Australian Book Review is surveying its readers to find out their favourite feature film, actor/actress, and director. Your chosen film can be in any language, decade, genre, nationality. If you provide your name and email address you will be in the running for five very special prizes*:
First Prize:
Palace VIP Card - entitling the winner to two complimentary tickets to any session at Palace Cinemas nationally for twelve months**
Second Prize: Ten DVDs, plus in-season double passes to films courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
Additional Prizes:
Three five-year subscriptions to ABR Online (worth AU$220 each).
* The first two prizes are open to Australian residents only. Overseas entrants will be in the running for fiveyear subscriptions to ABR Online.
** Palace VIP Card excludes Platinum, film festivals, special events, or after 5 pm on Saturdays.
To vote, visit: australianbookreview.com.au
The survey closes on 21 May, for a public result soon thereafter.
What’s normal?
James Bennett
NORMALITY: A CRITICAL GENEALOGY
by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens
University of Chicago Press (Footprint)
$67 pb, 464 pp, 9780226484051
The word ‘normal’ and its derivatives permeate our language, but what exactly does the term mean? It is entrenched in contemporary medical discourse (normal blood pressure, normal heart rate, normal body temperature, normal blood sugar levels), shows up in statistics (normal distribution curve), in geometry (normal lines) and even in chemistry as a measurement term. There were once even normal schools – teacher training colleges –originating from the French tradition of the école normale. These definitions of the term (essentially medical or mathematical) are a long way from popular contemporary usage – a vague and highly contested concept that often rests on the notion of mental and emotional order in the individual. A critical genealogy of the normal over time also involves a close analysis of a range of cognate terms including ‘average’, ‘typical’, ‘regular’, ‘standard’, and ‘ideal’ in all their ambiguity, contestability, and even incompatibility.
Once normal had emerged from discrete nineteenth-century professional contexts to enter the everyday lexicon at the same historical moment that biologist Alfred Kinsey published his landmark work, Sexuality in the Human Male (1948), the shifting meaning of normal, with all of its conceptual incoherence, took on enormous cultural power. Kinsey’s famous model of the sexual continuum in itself implies his rejection of normal as a binary but, as the authors argue, the scientist was unable to control the cultural effects of his own work. Thus, the notion of normal became the subject of intense, unending debate and disagreement that would pose a heavy burden for some minorities, notably sexual minorities as sexual behaviour had already become a
major reference point for the concept of normal. The law and medicine enforced standards of normality, often in mutually informing ways, and the rise of the therapeutic state in the twentieth century exposed the sexually ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’ to its catalogue of cures and treatments, including such methods as aversion therapy and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Opposition to psychiatry as an arbiter of the normal was a key platform of gay liberation in the second half of the twentieth century. Even within the profession there was a struggle over how to understand same-sex relations, particularly in the United States where practitioners held deeply entrenched theoretical positions on the subject. Moreover, in the United States and throughout the Western world, medical expertise was not immune from societal attitudes. Eventually, gay activists took command of the kinds of classifications that had been used to construct and control homosexuality.
Only two of the nine chapters in Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens’s book Normality: A critical genealogy directly address the theme of sex and sexuality, although this is unsurprising in the context of the long and complex genealogy of the concept from its first appearance in scientific texts (to be more specific, French medical writing) around 1820 until 1950. By that time, the idea of normal in a modern sense with all of its moral overtones had emerged to lodge firmly in popular consciousness. Their approach is historicist, mapping out in meticulous detail the shifting historical contexts and remarkably diverse fields of knowledge from anatomy to criminal anthropology that have a bearing on the normal (and where they exist, its opposite) to impress on the reader the significance of contingency (not pre-destiny) in its conceptual evolution. The result, as they concede, is a much messier and more contested history than one might have anticipated at the outset of their Australian Research Council-funded project.
Taking their cue from Laura Doan in her book Disturbing Practices (2013), the authors situate their book as a contribution to the (sometimes tense)
dialogue between historians and queer studies scholars. A close analysis of discursive forms of knowledge over time and space that apply to an idea as unstable and inconsistent as the normal, they argue, ‘can serve the purpose of resistant thinking’ more effectively than polemical critiques which have a tendency to reinforce the cultural power and omnipresence of the normal. Thus, they endorse Doan’s challenge of theorist David Halperin’s use of the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant as synonyms.This is to ignore a complex and contingent history that is at the very core of Cryle and Stephens’s history.
To this end, they also follow the argument of Michel Foucault regarding the circularity of words and knowledge formations that requires their rigorous backtracking to uncover the discursive array of antecedents underpinning what we now understand as the concept of normality. Where they part company with Foucault is in locating the origins of contemporary popular notions of the normal. While Foucault identifies the process of normalisation emerging in the disciplinary practices of large institutions in the nineteenth century to exert maximum social control, Cryle and Stephens instead pinpoint this moment in the nascent self-improvement and consumer cultures of the mid twentieth century.
This is not intended to deny the regulatory aspect of normalisation, but rather to broaden its analytical framework. The key site for them, then, is not the nineteenth-century prison but the twentieth-century office, where anthropometric data was mobilised for a multitude of commercial purposes.
This is an impressive piece of scholarship for its magnitude and finegrained analysis that brings together key strands from a vast range of knowledge to produce a unified genealogy. Some of the early chapters are dense in composition, but the reader who perseveres will be both surprised and rewarded. The book will make an important contribution to both intellectual and cultural history. g
James Bennett teaches history at the University of Newcastle, Australia. ❖
T,r,e,e
Michael Falk
WHAT THE VICTORIANS MADE OF ROMANTICISM: MATERIAL ARTIFACTS, CULTURAL PRACTICES, AND RECEPTION HISTORY
by Tom Mole
Princeton University Press (Footprint) $79 hb, 329 pp, 9780691175362
Aquiet revolution is underway in academic literary criticism. Three movements are at the vanguard: ecocriticism, digital humanities, and material culture. At first, they might seem distinct. Ecocritics see literature as a response to the environment. Digital humanists see literature as a repository of machine-readable data. Scholars of material culture see literature as a series of objects – books, libraries, reading glasses, engravings – that exist in the real world. All these movements, however, have a shared foundation, with striking implications for intellectual life today.
What they have in common is an interest in things, in the physical existence of texts. This is a remarkable reversal. At least since Wittgenstein, the pervasive trend among Western intellectuals has been to view literature – and indeed, everything else – as essentially abstract, incorporeal, and symbolic. For a great twentieth-century critic like Roland Barthes, even physical items of clothing are essentially symbols. Our jeans may look like tough blue denim sewn together, but what they are really made of is ideology, the secret language or code that constitutes our reality.
The new scholars could not disagree more. If an ecocritic sees the word ‘tree’ in a poem, they see a live or dead tree, in a live or dead ecosystem, whose existence is determined by immutable physical laws as much as by ideology. For a digital humanist, the word ‘tree’ is a string of four characters – t, r, e, e – that can be counted, measured, mapped, or charted. For a material culture scholar, ‘tree’ is four physical ink-marks on a page, ink-marks a person can hold, see, smell,
buy, find, lose, or ‘remediate’: for example, by quoting the text on a decorated saucer or tattooing it attractively on a forearm. We are in the grips of a ‘material turn’ in literary and cultural studies, and the early results are exciting.
Tom Mole’s new book is a fine contribution to this turn. Indeed it is quite an eccentric and original contribution. It is a study of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott; or rather, it is a study of Victorian-era sermons, illustrations, statues, picture postcards, and anthologies that quote or refer to them. In some ways, it is an old-fashioned reception study, about how later generations responded to earlier writers. But Mole’s analysis of material culture and use of digital techniques lead him down some intriguing rabbit holes.
A classic reception study might describe how Matthew Arnold turned to the Romantics as an alternative to religion, or how Elizabeth Barrett Browning crept out of Hemans’s shadow. In Mole’s book, we instead meet Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Baptist preacher most famous today for declaring that ‘there are difficulties in everything, except in eating pancakes’, and we learn how he misquoted Byron to his huge and adoring congregations. One Sunday, Spurgeon would lambast the atheistical poet for his ‘folly’. Next Sunday he would approvingly quote Byron’s lines on the ‘music of the spheres’, apparently unaware he was quoting the raciest of all poems, Don Juan. Bits of text fly through society, and can find an audience in unexpected quarters.
Another familiar story is the rise of the canon. We know how nineteenthcentury critics and schoolteachers selected a curriculum of texts to impart to their students. Indeed, we have spent much of the last forty years trying to break their selection apart. Mole turfs the curriculum out the window, and discusses statues and postcards instead. The French Revolutionists had promoted the idea of a secular ‘pantheon’, but of course moderate Victorians were frightened of anything that smacked of Robespierre. Instead of building a central structure to house all their worthies, the Victorians constructed a ‘distributed
pantheon’ of statues and monuments all over the country, stretching from the Scott Monument in Edinburgh to the statues of Byron in Cambridge and Hyde Park.
Every statue was controversial. Mole is a precise writer, and navigates thorny politics with ease, for instance when he describes the frequent attempts to have Byron recognised in Westminster Abbey. Every monument was also part of the complex ‘web of reception’. Mole’s attractive maps show how monuments were amusingly juxtaposed in city streets and squares. The Tory Sir Walter Scott was immortalised just up the road from the radical Political Martyrs. The postcards Mole has collected show how these monuments thrust literature into people’s everyday lives. In July 1900, ‘Dearest Aunt’ received a card describing her niece’s trip to Portobello, near Edinburgh. The picture of the Scott Monument also informed her that the novelist was ‘The Wizard of the North’ and died in 1832, facts she was surely thrilled to discover.
What Mole shows is that literature is neither monolithic nor well behaved. It whizzes about the world in a bewildering variety of forms. Teachers, critics, priests, and politicians might try to shape how people read it, but really the ‘media ecology’ is beyond their control.
Two hundred years ago, Schopenhauer claimed that ‘the world is my representation’. A century earlier, Descartes doubted everything except the existence of his own thinking self. Mole and writers like him are slowly reversing such attitudes. Reality is no longer only in the mind, and it is all the more mysterious and exciting for that. g
Michael Falk is a writer and scholar. He holds a PhD in English and Digital Humanities from the University of Kent. ❖
Private property
Marama Whyte
THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND LAWSUITS: THE AMERICAN WOMEN WHO FORGED A RIGHT TO PRIVACY by Jessica Lake
Yale University Press (Footprint) $150 hb, 320 pp, 9780300214222
Privacy is having its moment. Google users have unknowingly permitted the corporation to track their every movement and record every web search, YouTube video watched, and more. Facebook allowed data to be collected from users and their friends via a third-party application, which were then used by data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to target Trump voters with ‘fake news’ in the 2016 US presidential election. And personal data is far from all that can be bought and sold online. In 2014, more than 250 celebrityowned iCloud accounts were hacked, and their explicit personal photos disseminated online. The prevalence of sharing non-consensual pornography (‘revenge porn’) is not restricted to the rich and famous. In the United States, the Data and Society Research Institute reported in 2016 that one in twenty-five Americans had been a victim of ‘imagebased abuse’, to use the terminology now preferred by researchers. In Australia, according to a 2017 RMIT University report, that number is around one in five.
It is this history of image-based abuse that Jessica Lake traces in the timely The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American women who forged a right to privacy. Using almost thirty court cases from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lake chronicles how women attempting to regulate non-consensual use of their photographic portraits through the courts forged our modern understanding of the right to privacy. In doing so, she challenges the traditional understanding that this right was first formulated by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis in their influential
article ‘A Right to Privacy’ (1890). Lake argues that Warren and Brandeis drew on pre-existing public debates about protecting ‘ladies’ in the public sphere, and that women were driving forces within this history. Most pertinently to our current moment, Lake makes clear that while the prevalence and increased distribution of image-based abuse owes a debt to social media, these modern developments are only the latest in a long history of privacy invasions enabled through technological advances.
Modern photography was the invention of George Eastman, who made photography accessible to the amateur when he developed the Kodak camera in the 1880s. By 1896, Eastman had sold more than a hundred thousand hand-held cameras. Amongst these were detective cameras, named for their size and discrete use. Advertisements not only targeted police and detective departments, but also ordinary people who wished to photograph others without their knowledge or consent. There was no sense on the part of photographers that this non-consensual practice ignored the rights of the wouldbe victims. Photographers were further incentivised because they could monetise these images. From 1865 the United States granted photographers all copyright in their images, just as painters and sculptors had over their artistic property. However, as Lake explains, photography altered the contract between subject and artist, particularly when the subject was photographed without their knowledge or consent.
Legal claims based on a right to privacy challenged this doctrine of copyright. In 1900, Abigail Roberson brought legal action in the Supreme Court of New York, Monroe County, after discovering that Rochester Folding Box Company had non-consensually used her image on their packets of flour. Her lawyer claimed she had a ‘right to privacy’ which had been violated by the commercial practices. Roberson lost the case in the New York Court of Appeals, but in 1903 the New York legislature did what the courts would not, and – using language lifted almost entirely from the Roberson decision – passed New York’s first privacy laws. US state Supreme Courts
did not explicitly recognise this right until 1905, when the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first state to uphold a right to privacy in Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. The plaintiff, Paolo Pavesich, was a man, a fact Lake justifiably notes as particularly striking, given how women plaintiffs ‘dominated’ this area of law during this period.
The disconnect between copyright law and the right to privacy is at the heart of many of the case studies that Lake has resurrected from the archives, involving both still and moving pictures. Rather than remaining passive subjects of the photographer’s gaze, women used the courts to challenge the exploitation of their image and invasion of their private space and person. Stella Kunz sued when an interaction with her was filmed without her knowledge and later used in a moving picture advertisement (Kunz v. Allen). Katherine Feeney consented to her caesarean operation being filmed for educational viewing by medical societies, but sued after it was included in the film Birth (1917) without her knowledge, and screened across the United States (Feeney v. Young). These claims were filed against a background of burgeoning discussions of women’s roles and women’s suffrage, when women had limited citizenship rights. The courts provided an avenue of redress when women had few others, and Lake demonstrates that even when their cases were not successful, women plaintiffs pushed the language of privacy into the public sphere and influenced legal and political debates.
In 1890, the Ladies’ Home Journal warned that ‘women should always know the standing of the man to whom they entrust their negatives’. That this same victim-blaming advice is still offered as a precaution against modern image-based abuse exemplifies how much progress is needed in this realm. Yet The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits reveals the great strides already made by pioneering women, who continue to inform modern privacy debates, even if their names had been – until now – long forgotten. g
Marama Whyte is a PhD student in History at the University of Sydney. ❖
Police life
John Arnold
THE PEOPLE’S FORCE: A HISTORY OF VICTORIA POLICE
by Robert Haldane
Melbourne University Press
$49.99 pb, 544 pp, 9780522864953
Australians tend to have an ambivalent attitude to their respective police forces. We automatically expect that they will be there in an emergency. We share their grief when one of their number is killed while on duty, yet we regard Ned Kelly as a folk hero, even though he was responsible for the murder of three policemen in 1878. Many of us are affected either directly or indirectly by serious road accidents, yet we will curse under our breath the police officer who pulls us over for speeding or using our mobile phone while driving.
Robert Haldane was a career policeman. He retired in 2001 with the rank of superintendent after nearly thirty years in the force. While a constable, he undertook a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) followed by a PhD on the history of the Victorian police force, the genesis of the first (1985) and subsequent editions of this book. This new edition revises the text where appropriate and chronicles the twenty-one years since the second edition was published in 1996.
A policeman with postgraduate qualifications was most unusual at the time, less so now. But Haldane was no desk-based theorist. He was just as capable at locking up a drunk as he was writing an article for Police Life, the service journal he edited for many years.
It is these dual qualities that make The People’s Choice such an admirable and readable history of the Victorian police.
The arrangement is understandably chronological, beginning with the three policeman sent down from Sydney in late 1835 to help with law and order in the infant settlement of Melbourne. The ensuing history of what became the Victorian Police Force in July 1853 is told mainly through accounts of the tenure of its successive commissioners. Some of them had long periods in office, but in recent times tenure has been much shorter. The current commissioner, Graham Ashton, stated in a recent press interview that the pressure and demands of the job are so high that it can only be done for five years, a statement backed by his taking three months’ stress leave in 2017.
All of the commissioners have left their mark – good, bad, indifferent – on the force. Some were innovative, but most followed a policy of steady as she goes. With promotion based for a long time on seniority, conservative attitudes amongst the force and its leaders has generally prevailed. One commissioner, Rupert Arnold, appointed in 1963, publicly stated that ‘no reforms are contemplated by me’.
The most high-profile commissioner has been Christine Nixon, the first female appointee and arguably its first celebrity one. Nixon was a very good public speaker, popular with the media, and adopted a ‘call me Christine’ persona both within and outside the force. Haldane, however, although detailing the many good things Nixon did to help modernise the force, has reservations about her tenure.
Nixon’s successor, Simon Overland, was appointed in 2009 from four shortlisted candidates, one of whom was Ken Jones, a senior British policeman. Upon taking up his role as commissioner, Overland surprisingly appointed Jones as one of his assistant commissioners. It was an adventurous decision, but one that would come back to haunt him.
The senior hierarchy was split and became disunited, arguably dysfunctional. Jones even held meetings with the police minister behind Overland’s back before announcing
his resignation in May 2011. The infighting and political interference cost Overland his job. He in turn resigned a month later at the relatively young age of forty-nine. His successor, Ken Lay, appointed from within the ranks, did much to reunite the force with his calm and open manner.
Several recurring themes come through in The People’s Force. The role, personality, and management style of the commissioners has already been mentioned. Others are the problem of recruiting suitable men, and later women, to join the force (especially those from non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds), adjusting to social change, the challenges of the digital age, and ‘policing’ the force.
Corrupt police have always been a problem for law enforcement agencies. Haldane deals with examples of corruption squarely and strongly, knowing that the activities of a few bad eggs will always skew the public’s perception of their police force. A notable case discussed is the abortion kickbacks scandal of the 1960s and early 1970s. Reading Haldane’s account refreshed my memory of the trials and sentencing of three very senior policemen, and of the almost heroic behaviour of the abortion law reformer Bertram Wainer.
Some forty or so years later, senior Victorian police worked with, rather than against, another public hero, Rosie Batty, and her campaign against domestic violence. Here, Police Commissioner Ken Lay strongly supported Batty, insisting that police and the wider community recognise and deal with domestic violence.
On the opening pages of The People’s Force, there are quotes from laudatory reviews of the previous editions, including one from another former member of the force, Jim Cairns. These may entice browsers to read the book. And it should be read by every police officer, lawyers involved in court proceedings, and politicians who exploit crime and law enforcement as an election issue, happily ignoring statistics that show a drop in crime, for the benefit of a headline or a twenty-second digital soundbite. g
John Arnold edits the La Trobe Journal.
Conjuring Brigitta Olubas
BRONWYN OLIVER: STRANGE THINGS
by Hannah Fink Piper Press
$59.95 hb, 240 pp, 9780975190159
Almost twelve years after her death, Bronwyn Oliver (1959–2006) remains one of Australia’s best-known sculptors; her artistic legacy supported by the prolific outputs of an intense and high-profile studio practice across three decades, by public, private, and corporate commissions, and by a string of prizes, awards, and fellowships. She is admired now, as she was throughout her career, as an artist of signal intellectual depth and aesthetic complexity, her work carrying appeal across a broad public.
Bronwyn Oliver’s name conjures the wildly intricate metalwork, the spiked or furled and swirling forms of her sculptures; it also brings to mind the still shocking news of her suicide in July 2006, news which pushed questions of mental health, the individual and private costs of art, of talent and achievement to the forefront of a larger public understanding. The ‘strange things’ to which Hannah Fink directs us in the title of her very beautiful book on Bronwyn Oliver, refer us not just to the otherworldly lyricism of Oliver’s sculptures, but also to the troubled matter of her life; the mix of her talent, her industry, her intense fragility, and her at times inexplicably pitiless treatment of those around her.
Oliver emerges from this first sustained account of her life and work as emphatically an Australian artist, in the sense that the designation might indicate the location of her art practice, rather than any imagined limitation of reference or indeed of achievement. Fink quotes Oliver contemplating her first return to Sydney, after studying at the Chelsea School of Art in London, on the prestigious Travelling Art Scholarship: ‘I’ve always been a stranger … Being in England made me realise that Australia was the place where my
foreignness felt most comfortable.’ The book traces the extensive reference points of Oliver’s art; the ways it was subtended by meticulous and inventive research undertaken on or proposed for a series of international fellowships. She notes that Oliver ‘had long wished to visit China, since discovering the ceramics and bronzes in the Musée Cernuschi in Paris’, and that she proposed for the Helen Lemprière Bequest ‘a program of independent travel and study focusing on a cross-cultural comparison of Eastern and Western metalworking techniques during the Bronze Age [and] included an encyclopedic potted history of ancient metalwork, so detailed and comprehensive it seemed already to answer her proposal’. Alongside this scholarly intensity, we read of Oliver’s acute and engaged response to her artist contemporaries, seen compellingly, for instance, in her discussion of Rosalie Gascoigne for Art & Australia in Chapter 7. Such connections with diverse artist worlds continue to inform and complicate the perhaps more immediately apparent local associations that bind Oliver’s sculptures to their sites, setting her work in the context of a wider world.
Fink’s account of Oliver’s development as an artist is grounded in a capacious understanding of the terrain of Australian art in the postwar decades. Particularly engaging is the sense she gives of the making-do ethic of 1960s Inverell as a form of art training: ‘Everyone in Bronwyn’s family made things. Grandma Gooda was always busy crocheting doilies, knitting jumpers, and making “funky stuff, poodle doorstops and beer-bottle covers with pom-pom ears”. She taught the girls how to make crepe paper flowers and how to knit.’
Fink also accords a centrality to the question of art pedagogy that is quite telling, not just for the importance of teaching across Oliver’s own life, but in the ways it informs and inflects more broadly the cultural history of postwar Australia, reminding us of the ways that education transformed Australian society and culture through those decades. There is a resonant arc being drawn between the Saturday morning art classes that the young Oliver
attended at Inverell TAFE, taught by Ian Howard, ‘a twenty-two-year-old art school graduate in his first year out for the Department of Education’, and her later position as art teacher at Sydney’s Cranbrook School, with the work of teaching an essential and ongoing dimension of formal art practice across the social spaces delineated by these two locations. Oliver was quite explicit about this; Fink quotes her in a speech made towards the end of her life: ‘In my education classes at college I had been most interested in what drives human
Oliver’s name conjures the spiked and swirling forms of her sculptures
beings to make an image. What compels us to make art works? Spending time in a classroom with young children was the perfect place to try and understand this need.’ The account of Howard’s Inverell TAFE art classes is quite inspiring in the ways it focuses on an unfettered and often comedic creativity at once very much of its regional setting and at the same time unconstrained by it. It is a lovely instance of the broader work that the practice and teaching of art can achieve, of, that is to say, their larger value.
This is an important book about a great and mysterious artist. Hannah Fink draws on extensive biographical research to present Oliver’s life – the motivations and lacunae, the diverse perspectives and eddying influences –but just as valuable is the depth of her understanding of contemporary visual art, which informs the fine and detailed commentary on the works of art themselves. Fink notes in her final paragraph that it is now ‘time for the life of her sculpture – for new generations to encounter her works, to wonder how they were made, and what they might mean’, a compelling invitation which is made quite real by the work of this book. g
Brigitta Olubas teaches English at the University of New South Wales. She is currently writing a biography of Shirley Hazzard for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Surrendering to tribalism
Questioning who owns the past
Christopher Allen
KEEPING THEIR MARBLES: HOW THE TREASURES OF THE PAST ENDED UP IN MUSEUMS ... AND WHY THEY SHOULD STAY THERE by
Tiffany Jenkins
Oxford University Press, $29.95 pb, 383 pp, 9780198817185
There are cases in which it seems, on the face of it, unambiguously right to restore stolen or misappropriated cultural objects to their original setting or at least to their last known address: we can think of the lamentable looting of museums and archaeological sites during the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and the riots of the pitifully misnamed Arab Spring. And yet because their original sites may still be extremely insecure, some such artefacts are best preserved in the safekeeping of Western institutions until stability returns to their homelands.
There are other instances in which the collection and removal of artefacts, especially tribal ones, have certainly saved them from destruction: the Aboriginal items lent to the National Museum of Australia by the British Museum for the Encounters exhibition (2015–16) were collected by missionaries and travellers from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, and would otherwise have been discarded and allowed to perish. Unless one is committed to the idea of tribal cultures existing in a prehistoric present without past or future, continually repeating and remaking and re-enacting, preserving examples of their arts and crafts seems commendable.
Then there are the more difficult cases, in all of which the demand is for the return of objects that were acquired legally in the past, but to which some group or nation now claims a moral right. Some are more questionable than others, like the Turks claiming Greek antiquities as part of their national heritage, when the Turkish peoples were nowhere near Anatolia until many centuries later. The
biggest and most vexed case of all is the Greek demand to return the frieze and pedimental sculptures removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin with the permission of the then Ottoman government, and housed in the British Museum for just over two centuries.
These are the sorts of questions canvassed in Tiffany Jenkins’s book, which is full of fascinating material, both about the origin of museums and more recent controversies about their vocation in the contemporary world, and the ultimate legitimacy of holding the artefacts of other nations or cultural groups. Some of Jenkins’s historical survey, however, is marred by inaccuracies that undermine the reader’s confidence. Thus the Studiolo of Francesco I is in the Palazzo Vecchio, not the Medici Palace. The characterisation of Sir Joshua Reynolds as Neoclassical, as opposed to Winckelmann as a Romantic, is odd. The destruction of Athens by the second Persian invasion was in, not ‘around’ 480 bce. Napoleon’s army was not yet known as the Grand Army in 1798. Cuneiform was impressed, not ‘chiselled’, into clay. There are many other things like this, as well as numerous repetitions and some inconsistencies, that could easily have been avoided with a good editor; it is surprising that Oxford University Press could not do better than this.
The most interesting and useful part of the book is in the author’s coverage of recent controversies concerning two related matters: the restitution of cultural materials, and their exhibition in the great universal museums of the world, which happen for historical reasons to be in the principal cities of Europe and
America. The works in question were gathered into these museums during the period, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, when Europe surged ahead of the rest of the world in technological development and military power and extended its control over much of the world’s population.
Colonisation, the subject of so much angst today, was historically speaking the first stage in the transfer of the new technology to less developed peoples, whose way of life has been dramatically transformed, for better and for worse, since that period. At the time, almost all peoples, and especially those still at a tribal stage of culture, lived entirely enclosed in their own world of beliefs and practices. The Western mind, which had inherited the dynamism and the spirit of enquiry of the Greeks, was fascinated by the idea of an encyclopedic understanding of nature and of humanity: archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics were fields of study that grew spectacularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the process, archaeological and anthropological material was voraciously collected and served the unprecedented development of historical, prehistorical, and ethnographic knowledge. Some of the means by which artefacts were acquired at the time may now seem questionable, but the great museums into which they were gathered are themselves monuments to a stage in the broader history of humanity. Today, though, they are under constant attack from two sides: nation-states seeking the repatriation of objects; and tribal peoples demanding a say in the way that their cultures are presented.
The first demand raises the question of who ultimately owns monuments of the past, especially when the ethnic groups now dominant in many places (Turks in Anatolia, Arabs in Egypt) have no connection with the ancient populations, and when the civilisation of the Greeks and the Romans has become the common heritage of humanity. In this regard, Jenkins’s conclusion that the Parthenon marbles are probably best left as they are –divided between Athens and London – is slightly anticlimactic but not implausible.
The other set of demands raises all the questions of ‘identity politics’, where minorities of various kinds feel they have a right to determine how, and even whether, cultural artefacts made by their forebears are displayed to a wider public. In effect, they want to reassert their inherently self-centred perspective, resisting the more open and inclusive one which the museum fosters by the juxtaposition of different cultures; in the same way, religious zealots and members of cults resist the study of their beliefs from the point of view of comparative religion.
It clearly makes sense, of course, to engage in a dialogue with any surviving culture that we are sincerely trying to understand. The tendency today, however, widely supported and even initiated by museologists, is simply to give in to tribalism; our sense of universal humanity has been debilitated by decades of relativism and self-doubt promoted by feminism, post-colonialism, and other academic ideologies. But as Jenkins rightly points out, identity politics has flourished in an age when real political questions of class and wealth have been obliterated by the irresistible momentum of globalised economic and technological development. Identity politics allows people to get angry on social media, to indulge in self-pity and resentment, to call themselves activists and even to silence their critics, but these charades have no effect on the forces that determine, and are rapidly changing, the way we all live today. g
Christopher Allen is Senior Master in Academic Extension at Sydney Grammar School, where he teaches Classical Greek and Art History, and National Art Critic for The Australian
The Field
There is a field that will persist in everything: what means cr ucial means if there never was a thought deflected not to be a path so far gone?
High in the blue a buzzard or two gone, mind or brain looks down or sees impediments as trees inside the skull’s plain journey on foot.
Finches dart over lavender, the play of light becomes dogmatic even blotchy like bubbling water or white c louds gathering crisply
Over a valley. There was a path breathy with things unspeakable or words for them, prickly bushes in the way from a time to time
Pushing you to go south. Or somewhere radical without ice and its antique functions, chipped syllables in a need le case
You could say, to disconcert the writer as the path vanishes. Ants and lichen on a tree trunk occupy a mind at work or at rest
Thinking like a glimpse. Over the next hill a hot-air balloon or something floats, a far concept finally attains its rhythm
As the clouds grow. Wild plums also grow visible c lusters at any rate, small fruit happily found in another par t.
Ian Patterson teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His most recent poetry collection is Bound to Be (Equipage, 2017).
Ian Patterson ❖
Poet of the Month with Pam Brown
Which poets have most influenced you?
Influence is transient – it changes all the time. I can’t always pinpoint it directly or say which poets might be most influential on my poems. From the mid-1960s I read everything – the French, the Dadaists, the Eastern Europeans, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Gertrude Stein reigned supreme for me, then Mina Loy. I was energised by many North Americans from Emily Dickinson to Diane di Prima and the Beats, to the so-called ‘New York School’, to Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the so-called ‘post-avant’, to Claudia Rankine’s cutting lyrical documentaries. The Sydney Women Writers Workshop (aka the ‘No Regrets’ group) in the late 1970s had a significant effect. Over the years my poetry has been under the influence of plenty of Australians. Ken Bolton is my best critic.
Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?
I don’t like either word. I used to write poems quite quickly, but for a few years now my process has become a slow accretion and assembly of lines or fragmentary stanzas. It’s hard to get poetry right – to have it look, sound, and read as you intend. I can spend ages adjusting punctuation and spacing and lineation, though I usually avoid deliberate formal or structural difficulty (pantoums, sonnets, sestinas, and the like). Of course, material or content also figure.
What prompts a new poem?
A mis-hearing, a line from someone else’s poem or song, a ridiculous statement, an ad, a photo, an injustice, a joke, a movie, a place, a feeling (anxiety, anger, shame, irritation, pleasure, and so on). As you can see, I sample bricolage.
What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry? Poems can be made anywhere at any time in waking life. They just need to be noted down.
Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?
Oh, the fiddling just goes on and on. My recent poems are thirty-five A4 pages long; they took months of revisiting to ditch or repair the terrible parts. The tiny changes are beyond counting.
What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?
A bit of both, depending on your mood.
Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why?
My dream a drink is with Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Her books are clever, meticulous, clear, compositionally strategic, complicated, political, and sometimes epic. Nervousness would probably silence me, so best that this remains a dream.
Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?
Many – but lately I often return to the poems in Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Bonny Cassidy and Jessica L. Wilkinson, published by Hunter in 2016.
What have you learned from reviews of your work?
That everyone reads everything at slight variance to everyone else.
If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?
The Morning of the Poem by James Schuyler.
What is your favourite line of poetry?
‘Is it true that poets see a piece of filthy paper at the time of their death?’ Kim Hyesoon, ‘Marine Blue Feathers’ (translated by Don Mee Choi).
Is poetry generally appreciated by the reading public?
Apparently it is, by 9.2 per cent of readers, according to a Macquarie University economics department survey published in March 2017. But sometimes I think they’re appreciating the wrong poetry.
Pam Brown has published many chapbooks and nineteen full collections of poetry, most recently Missing up (2015) and Click here for what we do (2018) – both from Vagabond Press. Pam has earned a living in a range of occupations and has been writing, collaborating, editing, and publishing in diverse modes both locally and internationally for over four decades. She lives on unceded Gadigal land in Alexandria, a busy suburb in the perpetually reconstructing city of Sydney.
ABR Arts
Ian Dickson on The Children
Film
The Death of Stalin
Anwen Crawford
Opera
Don Quichotte
Michael Halliwell
Theatre After Dinner
Ben Brooker
ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation and the ABR Patrons.
Sarah Peirse, William Zappa, and Pamela Rabe during rehearsals for Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company’s The Children (photograph by Deryk McAlpin)
Au revoir là-haut
(See You Up There
by Gemma Betros
Based on Pierre Lemaitre’s Prix Goncourt-winning 2013 novel of the same name, Au revoir là-haut (See You Up There) is a French film about World War I that takes aim at a society more interested in commemorating the war’s dead than in looking after its survivors. Albert Maillard (Albert Dupontel, who adapted the novel for screen and who also directs the film) is a humble former accountant who makes it to within days of the armistice, only to be caught in a battle uselessly reignited by the bloodthirsty lieutenant Pradelle (Laurent Lafitte, best known for his role in the 2016 film Elle). Buried in an explosion, Albert takes his last breaths from the carcass of a horse entombed with him, but is hauled out by his friend, the young artist Edouard (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). Edouard himself then suffers a hit that sees his lower jaw and throat blown to pieces, rendering him one of the gueules cassées (‘broken faces’) of the Great War.
It is a breathtaking opening. Dupontel, a one-time medical student, does not balk at showing the brutal nature of Edouard’s injury, nor the clumsy attempts of the medical world to mask it. But Edouard – sheltered by Albert, who prepares his food, steals morphine for him from other veterans, and reluctantly helps him to convince his wealthy family and despised father that he is dead – decides to use his artistic skills to create his own mask in preparation to take on the world that has cheated him.
Away from the battlefield, the film changes from serious drama to something more farcical. With the livewire urchin Louise (Héloïse Balster) acting as assistant and translator, Edouard launches a plan to sell to local councils designs for war memorials that he has no intention of ever building. He enlists the help of Albert, whose fundamental decency is worn down by the daily humiliations that accompany his efforts to earn a living by more honest means. Edouard’s plan is a success, and the fortune the friends make allows them to take up a champagne-fuelled residence in the Lutetia (a nifty piece of advertising for the soon-to-be-reopened Parisian hotel) while they prepare to flee the country.
Throughout, Edouard designs an increasingly more elaborate series of masks that express emotions he can no longer voice and that allow him to try on alternative identities to counter the destruction of his own. Albert, meanwhile, keeps encountering the odious Pradelle, profiting from his own scam of filling the state’s war cemeteries with coffins of dubious dimensions and even more dubious contents.
The film’s change of tone, which exploits effectively the director’s own background in comedy, helps brings something fresh to the subject of war. Watching Lafitte’s Pradelle leap jauntily from coffin to coffin to avoid the mud, for example, only highlights the horror of the swindle he is effecting, while the ridiculousness of Albert’s too-small hat or newly purchased canary-yellow suit displays the story’s fundamental fury towards capitalism. The striking cinematography also deserves a mention, although Dupontel’s penchant for inventive takes and quirky angles (of the type that seem to feature in any post-Amélie film wanting to signal its comedic intentions) can become slightly wearing.
While the sets are sumptuous and the costumes outstanding, a few details jar. Louise’s Gallic-inflected ‘Wow!’ is better suited to a young parisienne of the twenty-first century, as is the regular face-palming of an inept local mayor, which comes across as more smartphone emoji than bumptious dignitary. The masks worn by Edouard (designed by Cécile Kretschmar) are spectacular but distract with their implausibility: art lovers will notice that the masks tell their own story as they mimic the style of different artists of the period ranging from Constantin Brâncuşi to Picasso. Where the novel makes Edouard’s homosexuality clear, the film creates a misleading ambiguity that could cause viewers to question his relationship with the young Louise. Audiences may also struggle with the narrative’s many coincidences.
Yet it is difficult not to like this film. The casting is exceptional, with Argentinian actor Biscayart, star of another recent French film, the stunning 120 BPM, especially memorable as Edouard. It is no surprise that the film received thirteen nominations at this year’s Césars (the French version of the Oscars). As we continue through the fourth year of commemorations of the hundredth anniversary of World War I, it is, moreover, refreshing to see a film that shows something of the anger and resentment felt by men shunted off to a war in which they discovered they could either expect to have their existence ended or have what was left of it changed irrevocably. Dupontel’s adaptation takes a light-spirited approach to Lemaitre’s winding rocambolesque, but beneath the humour – in Edouard’s mutilated face, in the commodification of the war dead and their commemoration, and in the heart-rending attempts of survivors to go on surviving after the war – it offers an alternate, more poignant remembrance of wars past. g
Au revoir là-haut (See You Up There), 117 minutes, directed by Albert Dupontel, screened at the 2018 Alliance Française French Film Festival.
Gemma Betros is Lecturer in European History at The Australian National University.
The Children
by Ian Dickson
After the vast proportions of her 2013 play, Chimerica (seen here in 2017) – a large-scale exploration of American–Chinese relations – Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children – a one-set, three-character play – might seem like something of a chamber piece. But if it is physically small in scale, thematically it is even more challenging.
It takes place in a dilapidated cottage on the east coast of England, just outside the exclusion zone of a ruined nuclear power station. As the play begins, we see a woman attempting to staunch a ferocious nosebleed. This, we discover, is Rose, a nuclear scientist who used to work at the plant and who has unexpectedly appeared at the cottage of two erstwhile colleagues, Hazel and Robin. Kirkwood, who is adept at drip-feeding her audience relevant information and dropping hints like depth-charges which explode at the play’s climax, gradually reveals the details of the disaster. An earthquake followed by a tsunami echoes the Fukushima catastrophe, and the devastating results are much the same. Hazel and Robin have retreated from their ruined house to this cottage and are attempting to live as normal a life as possible. The super-efficient Hazel keeps the house running while Robin heads off each day, Hazel tells Rose, to tend their cows, stranded in the exclusion zone.
At first it appears that Kirkwood is channelling Harold Pinter’s Old Times (1971), and Rose’s sudden appearance does indeed cause as much disruption as does Anna in Pinter’s masterpiece. But where Pinter’s play is an exploration of the power of memory and sexuality, Kirkwood is more interested in the concept of responsibility – the responsibility of her characters’ generation to the environment, to following generations, and to one another.
Kirkwood shows in chilling fashion just how quickly the abnormal – the Geiger counter which is run over everything, the electricity which is strictly rationed, the need for ‘clean’ water rather than water from the tap, the separate toilets for ‘number ones and number twos’ – become normal. Kirkwood’s touch is both devastating and light, and director Sarah Goodes adroitly balances the comedy and horror in the play. Designer Elizabeth Gadsby’s cottage feels both
lived in and temporary. Steve Francis’s sound design is sparing and effective. Most prominent is the sound of the sea, a constant reminder of the tsunami and the ruined village which, according to legend, crumbled into the sea and whose bells Rose still claims to hear. Despite our arrogant efforts to tame it, nature remains uncontrollable.
Goodes has an extraordinary cast to work with and has produced a superb example of ensemble performance. Pamela Rabe’s Hazel is a woman whose veneer of supreme competence hides deep reserves of fear and anger. Never has a loaf of bread been sliced with such concentrated ferocity. The most vulnerable of the trio, she clings to her daily routines as a way of attempting to normalise the unbearable. The motto of this paragon of self-improvement is, ‘If you’re not going to grow: don’t live.’ By turns imposing, uncertain, and distraught, Rabe captures the essence of this complex creature. In a presumably deliberate plan to lighten the mood, when the electricity finally returns, Rose plays music to which, at a party many years ago, the three of them had performed a routine which Hazel invented. Rose dances alone, then Robin joins her. Finally, they cajole the furious Hazel to join them. She agrees reluctantly, only because they are performing it incorrectly; for Hazel, everything must been done properly. Gradually, she relaxes into it. Until reality once again intrudes, we get to see the free spirit that has long since been crushed. In the play’s final moments, Hazel speaks for so many of us when she admits, ‘I don’t know how to want less.’ Typically, she is the one to make arrangements for an outcome to which she herself is not yet committed.
William Zappa’s Robin still has remnants of the larrikin, boyish charm that would have attracted both women to him forty years earlier. As Zappa careers around the stage on a rediscovered tricycle, Kirkwood’s title takes on extra meaning. Does The Children refer to the generations that followed the baby boomers, or is it a comment on a generation that never really grew up? As the play progresses, Robin reveals himself to be a fatalist; the tenderness with which he comforts the distressed Hazel is very moving.
Sarah Peirse’s Rose presents herself as scatty and impractical, but she is the moral centre of the play. Peirse imbues her from the start with a sense of mystery. There is obviously subtext to which we are not at first admitted. It is she who, after a lifetime of irresponsibility, is aware a reckoning needs to be made. As she says: ‘We can’t have everything we want because we want it.’
Kirkwood is proving herself to be an extraordinarily ambitious playwright. Having previously explored the machinations of superpowers and here the results of nuclear apocalypse, Kirkwood, in her most recent play, Mosquitoes (2017), has taken on the universe. It will be interesting to see what comes next. g
The Children (Sydney Theatre Company/Melbourne Theatre Company) continues at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until 19 May 2018. Performance attended: 3 April. (Online: 4 April)
Ian Dickson is our Sydney theatre critic.
The answer from Oslo
Ghosts of the past haunting the present
James Ley
WHY
DYLAN MATTERS
by Richard F. Thomas
William Collins, $24.99 hb, 368 pp, 978000824598
There was a certain predictability to the arguments that flared when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. For the most part, they were variations of the arguments that have shadowed him from the beginning of his career, twisted echoes of a million late-night dormitory discussions about whether his lyrics are ‘poetry’. The oddly revealing thing about them was the extent to which those who disapproved of the decision seemed unable or unwilling to disentangle the question of whether or not he deserved the award from the question of whether or not it was appropriate to bestow it upon someone like him which is to say, a mere songwriter, someone whose work falls outside a traditional definition of ‘literature’, someone with the temerity to have succeeded in a popular medium that has allowed his work to reach millions of people and exert a huge cultural influence.
Galling though it appears to be to some of his detractors, the case for the latter is overwhelming. Dylan’s existence is one of the reasons it is no longer possible to speak of ‘literature’ in exclusive or generically narrow terms. The earnest brow-furrowing about him being a poet that started as soon as he began writing and recording in the early 1960s (and which was mocked by Dylan in the early song ‘I Shall be Free No. 10’: ‘I’m a poet / and I know it / hope I don’t blow it’) was really just a clumsy recognition of the fact that he was writing songs of such startling precocity that conventional distinctions seemed inadequate. Like all influential artists, Dylan created the conditions for his own reception, forced the culture to bend itself into a new shape that could accommodate his singular talent. Seen
in this light, the decision to award him the Nobel Prize, though unprecedented, is a lot less radical than it looks. The Swedish Academy wasn’t unilaterally redefining the concept of ‘literature’; it was catching up with reality.
The large and ever-growing body of critical writing about Dylan’s work is a testament to its enduring fascination, but also to the intellectual respectability it has attained. As Richard F. Thomas observes in Why Dylan Matters, Dylan scholarship has become ‘part of the academic mainstream’. Thomas is himself a professor of Classics at Harvard University, who teaches a course on Dylan’s work on the side. In Why Dylan Matters, he situates his subject within literary tradition in the widest possible sense, arguing that Dylan is ‘part of that classical stream whose spring starts out in Greece and Rome and flows on down through the years, remaining relevant today, and incapable of being contained by time and place’.
In support of this claim, Thomas develops an argument about the nature of Dylan’s creativity, which he proposes is remarkable for its ‘intertextuality’. The force of this insight is somewhat diminished by the fact that Thomas doesn’t seem to know what intertextuality means. It is not, as he claims, ‘the creative reuse of existing texts’. As originally defined by Julia Kristeva, intertextuality is not an artistic practice; it is a property of all texts. It refers to the inherent plurality of language, the way in which texts will inevitably contain echoes of other texts because the creation of meaning depends on repetitions, formal conventions and pre-existing networks of reference. Whether these intertextual doublings are deliberate is beside the point. If intertextuality was simply
a fancy way of referring to allusions and quotations, as Thomas claims, the concept would be redundant: we already have words for those things.
This lexical quibble aside, Thomas does identify an important feature of Dylan’s art. It has long been recognised that his songs are full of allusions and borrowed lines from all manner of sources. Critics such as Greil Marcus and Michael Gray have established
Dylan’s existence is one of the reasons it is no longer possible to speak of ‘literature’ in narrow terms
just how deeply his work draws from the well of the folk and blues traditions that emerged from what Marcus called the ‘old, weird America’. Dylan’s creative practice is steeped in the fluidity of that folk culture, in which it is common for melodies and chord progressions and lyrics to be freely adapted or repurposed or transformed into entirely new works. Dylan has done this more or less openly throughout his career. The tune of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is adapted from a slave’s lament called ‘No More Auction Block’; ‘Girl from the North Country’ is based on ‘Scarborough Fair’; ‘Maggie’s Farm’ is a ricochet from an old folk song called ‘Penny’s Farm’; ‘Blind Willie McTell’ takes its melody from the blues standard ‘St. James Infirmary’; the title track from Tempest (2012) rewrites an obscure Carter Family number called ‘The Titanic’. Many of Dylan’s later songs acknowledge their debts in their
titles. ‘High Water’ is a tribute to Charlie Patton; ‘Sugar Baby’ was originally the name of a Dock Boggs song; ‘The Levee’s Gonna Break’ draws its inspiration from Memphis Minnie.
How you regard these kinds of borrowings, observes Thomas, ‘depends on how you think literature and art in general should work, particularly on whether you insist upon notions of “originality”, as if anything rooted in folk, blues, and poetry at large is ever wholly original’. There is a world of difference, he argues, between plagiarism and the creative process he calls ‘transfiguration’, which he explains with reference to the numerous allusions he finds in Dylan’s songs to the work of classical poets such as Ovid, Virgil, and Catullus. Thomas builds a compelling case that Dylan, who is notoriously cagey when it comes to discussing the meaning of his songs, has a longstanding interest in classical antiquity that dates back to his membership of the Latin Club at Hibbing High School. Why Dylan Matters proposes that his use of classical sources is not only purposeful, but that he wants them to be recognised, or at least sensed: he wants us to feel the ghosts of the past haunting the present.
T.S. Eliot’s famous maxim ‘mature poets steal’ came with an essential qualification: the good poet will transform what he takes ‘into something better, or at least something different’. Dylan has been doing this for more than half a century. Why Dylan Matters argues, with a welcome emphasis on his under-appreciated later work, that the essence of Dylan’s genius lies not simply in his linguistic flair or his deep appreciation of literary and musical tradition, but in his transformative recognition that there is nothing new under the sun, that in art all invention is reinvention, that a great song can conduct the expressive energies of the past in a way that reverberates across the centuries. In this quite literal sense, his greatest work is timeless. g
James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne. A former Editor of Sydney Review of Books, he has been a regular contributor to ABR since 2003.
Clarity and vitality
Paul Watt
DESTINY: THE EXTRAORDINARY CAREER OF PIANIST EILEEN JOYCE
by
David Tunley, Victoria Rogers, and Cyrus Meher-Homji Lyrebird Press
$55 pb, 219 pp, 9780734037862
Eileen Joyce’s name is not to be found in books about the great pianists, but a great pianist she was nonetheless. Born and raised in rural Tasmania and Western Australia, she studied in Leipzig and London and eventually found fame as a versatile pianist with an unusually robust technique and a wide repertory (including ninety concertos). The new reissue of her studio recordings (Decca/Eloquence), which includes performances of chamber music and works for harpsichord, will pleasantly surprise listeners with their clarity and vitality of playing.
Joyce was not a specialist in the works of one composer or period. The ten CDs display Joyce’s familiarity with the usual suspects, including Brahms, Liszt, and Mozart, but also her interest in non-canonical repertory, such as works by Bernhard Stavenhagen, Joaquín Turina, Harry Farjeon, and Cyril Scott. Although the recordings date from the 1930s and 1940s, they have been reissued extremely well for CD, and there
are few muddy, unclear, or distorted moments.
Biographers and critics of Joyce have struggled to find the right words to describe her playing and have been quick to either praise or condemn her interpretations. Some critics find her Mozart and Grieg recordings dull, but I found them energetic, precise, and rhythmically adventurous, if sometimes a trifle rushed. Most remarkable of all is her exceptional technique in passages of pianissimo: this might stem from Joyce’s habit of practising quietly on the keyboard – or away from it – to avoid annoying the neighbours.
Coinciding with the release of this set is a new biography of Joyce by David Tunley, Victoria Rogers, and Cyrus Meher-Homji. Richard Davis’s Eileen Joyce (2001) – thoroughly researched and honest about Joyce’s many personal foibles and failings – is a hard act to follow. However, this team of authors has given us a wider musicological framework in which to understand Joyce’s career.
The opening chapter, an overview of Joyce’s biography, relates the various musical cultures of rural Western Australia that might have been particularly influential on the young pianist. It provides a compelling picture of the vibrancy and eclecticism of the musical milieu in regional and remote areas that was not uncommon in the early part of the century. It is a timely reminder that Australia’s musical culture – both élite and popular, if they are the appropriate words to use – was not contained to capital cities.
Tunley’s chapter on the development of Joyce’s technique is an intriguing account of the theory and practice of piano technique that Australians such as Joyce encountered in local and imported training manuals. Tunley provides an excellent context in which the ‘weight’ and ‘rotation’ methods of technique were imparted to Joyce. Other Australian pedagogues such as Ignaz Friedman and Mack Jost also gave these techniques, in varying degrees of emphasis within their pedagogy, to generations of Australian pianists.
Victoria Rogers provides a well-balanced account of Joyce’s life and career in London, and of the social and musical
obstacles that stood in her way. Some of these obstacles Joyce was brazen enough to overcome by herself, such as in her assertive ploy to meet London’s leading piano pedagogue Tobias Matthay. Other circumstances Joyce could not control, such as waiting for invitations to come her way for such opportunities as her concerts with Sir Henry Wood and for the BBC.
The repertory of the CD collection suggests that Joyce was not afraid to try new things. Her career as a harpsichordist is of especial note; also, her willingness to broadcast and perform for the cinema was risky for her reputation. After studying the harpsichord for a number of years and making her début she made an impression right away and
performed regularly with fellow harpsichordists and early music enthusiasts and scholars such as Thurston Dart. However, her performances of music for the cinema (even Brief Encounter in 1945) were seen by some as ‘cheap’ and cast doubt on her seriousness as a concert pianist. Joyce was not deterred.
Meher-Homji provides the background of commercial and musical politics behind the recordings and their oftenglowing appraisals in the press, particularly in Gramophone, but also details some of the less favourable reviews, especially of some of the piano miniatures. It is a surprise to hear that Joyce became a celebrity: even magazines such as Woman’s Day were reporting the commercial successes of her recordings. This media
The Death of Stalin
by Anwen Crawford
Madnesses pile up in The Death of Stalin, too fast and numerous to itemise. Victims of tyranny are snatched away in the dead of night, locked in basements, or pushed down staircases at Chaplinesque speed. The terms of engagement change halfway through a conversation: forbidden thoughts are now doctrine; the condemned rise again. ‘I’ve had nightmares that make more sense than this,’ laments one lackey.
Those familiar with the work of director and co-writer Armando Iannucci will know, to some degree, what to expect from The Death of Stalin: a part-improvised, expletiveladen ensemble comedy, its tone black as tar. But the film also represents a departure for the director, whose bestknown works, The Thick of It and Veep , are television satires of contemporary British and American politics, respectively, shot vérité-style in drab and interchangeable backrooms. The Death of Stalin, adapted from the French graphic novel by Fabien Nury (2017), is Iannucci’s first historical comedy, and his most cartoonish. These corridors of power are marbled and cold; military uniforms and grandiose moustaches
attention was no doubt carefully arranged by Joyce and her public relations team. There is much good listening in the CD set and this latest Joyce biography is well crafted. Both projects leave one wishing that Joyce had recorded many more works and that more noted Australian pianists were the subjects of scholarly research. g
Paul Watt is a senior lecturer in musicology at Monash University. His research interests including musical biography, criticism, and nineteenthcentury music and intellectual culture. He is the author of The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth Century England (2018) and Ernest Newman: A critical biography (2017).
abound. But there remains, for the contemporary viewer, a queasily familiar sense of being exhausted by the pace of daily outrages.
The film opens with a prelude that is also a study of the dictator’s power to recast reality on his own terms. One night in 1953, as a Mozart recital is being broadcast live by Radio Moscow, Comrade Andreyev (Paddy Considine), a station employee, takes a phone call. Comrade Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) wants a recording of the performance. A small problem: the recital hasn’t been recorded. Cue panic as Andreyev, the orchestra, and the audience collude to construct a false documentary trail. Truth isn’t an option; all must dissemble, and so all are caught in Stalin’s surreal and infernal machinery.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, members of the Central Committee try to win favour with their leader. Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) blusters; Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) bows and scrapes. Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), ostensibly Stalin’s deputy, is nerve-wracked and incompetent. The only real power aside from Stalin’s lies with Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), the head of the NKVD, the Soviet interior ministry that oversees the mass arrests, the forced labour camps, and the extrajudicial killings. Russell Beale, who never met a role he couldn’t knowingly underplay, moves through every scene as smooth and deadly as a shark in deep water.
In a world like this, cir-
Jason Isaacs as Zhukov in The Death of Stalin (Madman Entertainment)
cumstances can only go from bad to worse, and so they do when Stalin, shortly after receiving his Radio Moscow recording, suffers a massive stroke. He is not quite dead, and then he is, and then he isn’t. And then he is. It takes a hastily assembled committee of bad doctors to make a final determination. As Stalin’s body lies on the autopsy table, a newly desperate scramble for power gets underway amid his underlings.
Iannucci has been faulted for the historical liberties he has taken in the script (the Radio Moscow incident, for instance, took place a few months before Stalin’s stroke), but The Death of Stalin is obviously a farce, in the best sense; the primary aim is never verisimilitude. The film shares something of the attitude and atmosphere that pervades a work like Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), where a funhouse distortion of real events also reveals the fatal cost of a world run on lies. ‘This is just fucking wordplay,’ complains Malenkov during one argument with his Central Committee comrades, but this wordplay is also a terrible kind of world-making, and unmaking; to speak the wrong word here could be fatal.
The farcical, tongue-twisting nature of proceedings is only heightened by Iannucci’s decision to have his ensemble cast speak mostly in their own accents, as if they were playing sinisterly exaggerated versions of themselves. Adrian McLoughlin, an East Londoner, plays Stalin as a
Don Quichotte
by
Michael Halliwell
Desdemona’s plangent, soaring phrase at the end of the ‘Willow Song’ in Verdi’s opera Otello has been described as the last despairing cry of the bel canto. The great actress Eleanor Duse, mistress of Verdi’s librettist Arrigo Boito, observed: com’ è triste la tua commedia (‘how sad your comedy is’). A similar claim might be made for the final scene in Jules Massenet’s comédie héroïque, Don Quichotte. Sancho Panza’s brief Act V arioso: ‘Ô mon maître, ô mon grand!’ (‘O my master, o my great!’), is a moving farewell to the age of chivalry, but might also be seen as a farewell to French Romantic opera. By 1908, Massenet was the eminent father figure of French opera. Many considered his musical style somewhat outdated, but he still enjoyed great respect and popularity. Yet in 1909 his new work, Bacchus, was an un-
crude Cockney, while Buscemi does Khrushchev in his Brooklyn whine, as if this Russian were a minor player in the Mob. Tambor demonstrates the same well-spoken Californian fastidiousness that previously marked his performance in the television show Transparent. Jason Isaacs, a native Liverpudlian, hams it up just a bit as Field Marshal Zhukov, head of the Soviet Army, who now speaks like a Yorkshire yeoman. All these characters and more come together for the climactic set-piece of Stalin’s funeral, where abundant red drapery can hardly hide the bloodiness of the various plots and counter-plots being pursued by the mourners.
The Death of Stalin isn’t quite an allegory for contemporary politics; if it were, it would probably be more didactic than funny, and it is hideously funny, right through to its inevitably grotesque end. But the film’s banning in Russia, for ‘violating the dignity of the Russian people’, is a pertinent reminder of the intolerableness of laughter to those, like Vladimir Putin, whose power depends upon the maintenance of fear. Nor can one rest easy in the thought that an authoritarian strongman is the preserve of distant countries, in distant times. g
The Death of Stalin (Madman Entertainment), 107 minutes, directed by Armando Iannucci. (Online: 26 March)
Anwen Crawford is a Sydney-based writer and critic.
expected flop. This saddened Massenet, and in some ways it coloured Don Quichotte. Perhaps he saw something of himself in the title figure.
Cervantes’s immortal novel of 1615 is one of the pillars of European literature and has been adapted countless times into a variety of art forms. The theatrical adaptation, Le chevalier de la longue figure (The Knight of the Long Face), was written by poet and shoemaker Jacques Le Lorrain in 1906. Raoul Gunsbourg, general director of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, attended the performance and commissioned Massenet to create an opera based on the play, to be performed at Gunsbourg’s opera house in 1910. Musically, the opera looks backwards rather than ahead. It is staggering to think that Strauss’s Elektra was premièred a year earlier. Verdi liked to talk about his operas as each having a distinctive tinta – a dominant tonal colour mainly provided by the orchestra, but also created by his choice of particular voices and their vocal ranges and timbres. Don Quichotte is dominated by the dark bass voices of the Don and Sancho, but also by a particularly light orchestral texture that is both transparent and warm – an Italianate chiaroscuro.
Warwick Fyfe as Sancho Panza with the chorus in Don Quichotte (photograph by Prudence Upton)
The opera is unusual in that Massenet’s overall predilection for the soprano voice gives way to a mezzo. Thus the three principals all have lower voices. La Belle Dulcinée is an earthy character, unlike Cervantes’s Dulcinea, who is a figment of the Don’s imagination. There are strong ‘Spanish’ elements in her music, with much use of typical rhythmic devices and guitar-like accompaniment. Debussy saw in Massenet an ‘untiring curiosity in seeking in music the data for the history of the feminine soul … The harmonies are like enlacing arms, the melodies are the necks we kiss; we gaze into the women’s eyes to learn at any cost what lies behind.’ Dulcinée is one of Massenet’s most vivid female characterisations.
The brief final scene, introduced by an orchestral interlude dominated by a beautiful cello solo, is one of the most noble and moving in all late romantic opera. This scene could so easily descend into sentimentality and mawkishness, but the simplicity, craft, and warmth of Massenet’s music capture perfectly the nobility of both these characters. It is almost a parodic upending of the final scene from so many operas where the dying soprano lies in the arms of the tenor. Here, Quichotte lies in the arms of the everfaithful and noble Panza; the interweaving of the two bass voices provides a majesty and grandeur supplemented in the final moments by the rich off-stage mezzo of Dulcinée.
Of course, the Don is nothing without his Sancho Panza, here sung by Warwick Fyfe in one of the finest of his many performances for Opera Australia. From Alberich to Sancho seems a vast chasm, but Fyfe’s versatility is on full display. Fully in control of the many textual felicities of the French language, he brings a warm and incisive vocal tone to this musically and dramatically rewarding character. It is a buffo role, but also has several moments of warm lyricism in which Fyfe reveals the full beauty of his voice. Elena Maximova has all the vocal opulence required for Dulcinée – very much a flesh-and-blood figure as opposed to Quichotte’s ideal vision. Much of her music has a Spanish rhythmic bite, but her burnished tone provides poignantly lyrical moments of empathy for Quichotte and draws much sympathy from the audience for the mercurial, but ultimately warm-hearted character.
It is a treat for opera audiences to have a chance to see this rarity. One needs a singer of both vocal authority as well as theatrical charisma; Massenet certainly had it in his Don – the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin. This production has Ferruccio Furlanetto – long one of the most celebrated and beloved basses in contemporary opera. Furlanetto (indisposed on opening night in Sydney, and replaced by Shane Lowrencev), captured the nobility of the character with his rich and expressive voice and striking physical presence, perfectly suited to the requirements of the role. The final moments of the opera were profoundly moving as he, for the last time, invokes the image of Dulcinée who is ‘la lumière, l’amour, la jeunesse’ (the light, the love, the youth) of his life. The voice possesses reserves of power and vocal freshness that defy Furlanetto’s more than forty-year career; his vocal incarnation of the dying knight was superb.
The Opera Australia chorus provided both a striking physical and vocal background to the action – they are one of the central glories of the company –and the relatively small number on stage created a remarkably full and vivid sound. Hugh Halliday has directed this revival of the 2009 San Diego Opera production with highly functional sets by Ralph Funicello and costumes by Missy West. It is an unfussy, visually engaging, and dramatically coherent staging; the windmill scene in particular is entrancing. Conductor Guillaume Tourniaire, always a welcome visitor to these shores, brought out all the orchestral fire in the score while providing plangent orchestral tone underpinning the sweetness and pathos of much of the vocal writing.
Don Quichotte, soon to be repeated in Melbourne, is certainly a work that deserves to be heard when the right constellation of singers is aligned. It provides a most enjoyable and often deeply moving couple of hours in the theatre, and has the musical and dramatic power to bring a furtive tear to the most cynical eye at the end. g
Don Quichotte (Opera Australia) was performed at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House from 21 to 28 March, 2018. Performance attended: 19 March. The production moves to Arts Centre Melbourne from 3 to 12 May. (Online: 20 March)
Michael Halliwell’s latest book is National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths reconsidered (2017).
Ferruccio Furlanetto as Don Quichotte (photograph by Prudence Upton)
After Dinner
by Ben Brooker
Thirty years old is a difficult age for a play in this country. Australian cultural memory is not exactly short, but it certainly tapers in the middle where such plays lie, flanked by The Canon and The Next Big Thing. Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner – initially a melancholic one-acter for three women, later expanded and recast by the playwright for his drama school peers as a sort of boulevard comedy – feels exceptional in this regard: a not-quitenew, not-quite-old Australian play that has nevertheless entered the repertoire. On its completion in 1988, it played in Melbourne for almost half a year and seems to have been produced uninterruptedly since, including by Sydney Theatre Company as recently as 2015. In Bovell’s program note for this solid revival by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, he describes it as ‘a classic comedy of the Australian theatre’.
No doubt the play’s endurance owes something to Bovell’s bankability – at fifty-five, he is one of the country’s most popular storytellers for both stage and screen – but its emotional truthfulness and grasp of human fallibility remain undimmed, even as the whole landscape of dating, post-AIDS, post-Tinder, post-#MeToo, has radically changed since the late 1980s. For all its broad comedy, now unavoidably seen through the softening lens of period nostalgia, the play’s sexual frankness and shocks of recognition still register. It is remarkable to think that Bovell was just twenty when he wrote its first iteration. Which is not to say that the play is ideal: there is a kind of unreflecting quality to the writing, and there are moments when the male characters, Gordon and Stephen, feel underdrawn or tacked on, sometimes disappearing from the stage altogether for jarringly long periods of time. It is its humanity, its unrelenting but ultimately sympathetic, and even redeeming, portrayal of vulnerability and isolation that makes it of a piece with Bovell’s later, more assured and structurally sounder work.
I approached this revival, directed by Corey McMahon, with some trepidation in the light of Melbourne Theatre Company’s recent, much-reviled production of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, which several critics have dismissed as a hollowly camped-up 1970s nostalgia trip. Like After Dinner, Leigh’s play makes comedic hay out
of a sort of aspirational lower middle class, but threatens, in the hands of the wrong director, to simply look down its nose at such people, reduced to caricatures to be laughed at rather than with. That these plays can only function on the contemporary stage as nostalgia pieces runs a further risk: by pandering to the wincing pleasure audiences take in recognising period trappings – the music, clothes, food, and décor that, seen in a certain light, all seem hopelessly parochial and unsophisticated to us now – they become the theatrical equivalent of those cheap television shows in which celebrities reminisce about how wacky everything was in the ‘good old days’. As it is, McMahon’s only misjudgement is not one of emphasis or tone – the performances he draws from his cast, most of whom have worked together before, are pitched at about the right level of heightened naturalism – but of casting. Despite their comic flair, Nathan Page and Rory Walker, as the Lothario Stephen and the beta male Gordon respectively, are clearly older than the mid-thirties age range Bovell’s script stipulates, which makes for some uneasy pairings with the women (who themselves, it must be said, appear somewhat age-disparate). Nevertheless, each of the actors impresses. As the unstable, recently widowed Monika, Elena Carapetis once again demonstrates her talent for portraying psychologically troubled women, exactingly tracing her character’s journey – via a hilariously recounted off-stage escapade fuelled by Valium – from existential crisis to sexual liberation. Seemingly channelling Jane Turner’s Kath Day-Knight, Jude Henshall provides the night’s broadest performance in the shape of the obstinate Dympie, while Ellen Steele, as the flirtatious Paula, does well to find the underlying sadness of the least well-drawn of the female characters. After Dinner may, after all, resemble a comedy of manners, but these are not happy people. Rather, as this production’s opening image – Gordon alone, marooned among a sea of empty tables in Jonathon Oxlade’s wonderfully dowdy pub bistro set – makes clear Bovell’s play characterises the mid-thirties as a lonely, socially fraught place. Underneath the characters’ literal and figurative jockeying for various positions can also be detected Bovell’s keen grasp of status anxiety. Meanwhile, many of the play’s jokes both amuse and discomfit, taking for their subjects marital and sexual dysfunction, and, at a deeper level, our difficulty in meaningfully connecting with each other. (There is even, in Gordon’s fleeting confession about the behaviour of a school teacher, the suggestion of a traumatic but repressed sexual assault.)
After Dinner is certainly very funny, but the script’s final image, faithfully replicated by McMahon, tells a different story. Monika and Stephen having left the bistro for a no doubt unsatisfying one-night stand, Dympie and Gordon embrace, the latter gazing longingly not at his partner but at Paula, dancing alone to the band. g
After Dinner (State Theatre Company of South Australia) was performed at the Dunstan Playhouse from 7 to 29 April 2018. Performance attended: 11 April. (Online: 13 April)
Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, and playwright.
Justine Ettler
Why do you write?
Because I love doing it and because at times I’ve been changed for the better as a result of reading great novels. Bohemia Beach is about a successful woman who is also an alcoholic. My love of Prague aside, I was inspired to challenge the novelistic cliché of the happy-go-lucky female drunk: bad things can happen to women who drink.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Yes. I go through periods when I record them on a notepad I keep beside my bed. I dream of adapting my novel The River Ophelia for the screen.
Where are you happiest?
At the beach with my dog.
What is your favourite film?
To Walk Invisible (2016), because of its depiction of the woman writer’s lot. Also, I love Sally Wainwright’s dialogue.
And your favourite book?
Two books I recently enjoyed for their so-called ‘unlikeable’ protagonists are The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl Despite being mainstream works, Paula Hawkins’s Rachel is a great woman drunk, and Gillian Flynn’s contemporary romance as Mr Narcissist meets Ms Sociopath is bang on.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Sally Wainwright, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen.
Which word do you most dislike, and name one you would like to see back in public usage.
Dislike: ‘I get that’ when ‘get’ is used in place of ‘understand’. Bring back: ‘democracy’, which is a word that has no meaning today, given the psychopathic behaviour of global multinationals.
Who is your favourite author?
I’m in a Austen, Brontë, Eliot phase. Probably Elizabeth Gaskell, though, because of North and South (1855): so topical given the way the digital revolution has impoverished so many and enriched so few.
And your favourite literary hero and heroine?
Jane Eyre, because she gets away despite her childhood, and because I agree, a little money and some divine intervention certainly help if you love an older, divorced/ widowed man.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
I tend to prefer truth – fictional, authentic, emotionally complex – over beauty. Justine comes from justice; and I like other writers who are just.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
The last time I tried answering this question I ended up with a PhD. The writer I’m thinking of is Bret Easton Ellis and my love–hate relationship with American Psycho.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Bullying.
How do you regard publishers?
I think it’s important for aspiring writers to talk to other writers before signing up with a publisher. Not getting that right can result in author-hell. Finding an editor/ publisher who understands what you’re trying to do and who is in it for the long haul is the key.
What do you think of the state of criticism?
Criticism, to my mind, is when a professional responds to a text’s strengths and weaknesses in a way that is useful to the writer. More of that please – and how about some big international prizes for some Australian women authors?
And writers’ festivals?
Strange, staged events – though given that I come from a musical background I actually enjoy them and come alive in the excitement of performing my work. I’d like to see bolder programming.
Are artists valued in our society?
Less so in Australia than in other countries I’ve lived in, but it’s complicated. I rarely felt valued in London as an Australian writer, but I often felt valued as a Czech one. The place I felt most respected as an Australian writer was in Europe. I felt most supported as a writer in New York, but I found that positivity unsustainable in the face of the tsunami of American content we consume in Australia.
What are you working on now?
My fifth novel. I’ve almost completed the second draft, the writing’s at an exciting stage. It will feature another complex woman protagonist named after a famous literary character.
Justine Ettler’s latest novel is Bohemia Beach (2018).
