True Stories

by Helen Garner

  Any writer in Australia who feels hard done by should take note of White’s struggle. ‘He deserved a VC for it,’ one well-known novelist here has claimed. The Tree of Man was rejected by twenty English publishers. ‘What is it about?’ asked his London agent. ‘It is about life,’ he helplessly replied. Attacks on White by Australian critics have entered legend, of course; but it’s easy for us, a luckier generation, to forget how painful his disappointments were. When The Aunt’s Story, his third novel, was coldly received—dismissed, in fact—in Australia, Marr says that ‘a fissure of bitterness opened in him’. His impulse to write was dying.

  But he learnt—or was it already in his nature? he relished a fight—to use hostile critics as spurs and Marr shows us, above all, how absolutely White was a natural writer: blessed (or cursed, as White often said) by characters and stories that were not willed but ‘boiled up in him’. Marr reveals brilliantly, and with the lightest touch, how each novel, as White slaved over it, provided him with a clue to the next, as if his work were an immense chain composed of linked and constantly developing obsessions.

  Illness (asthma and its eternal complications) was always intimately entwined with his work. In reveries of fever and medication his characters would haunt him, talking themselves into life, and White would return to himself from these hallucinatory episodes armed with fresh material to labour on. (I laughed out loud to read that Brett Whiteley refused to believe, on meeting White after reading his work with delight, that White had never done acid.) He loved and needed music and painting: he envied painters especially, for being able to work direct with colour ‘instead of grinding out novels greyly’.

  Unlike many Australian artists, White went on producing powerfully original work till late in his life. He was nearly seventy when he published that audacious and weirdly beautiful novel The Twyborn Affair. Perhaps its clarified style was possible because White could now vent his spleen in public statements, the fierce political preaching that made him famous to people who had not read any of his books and which drew off and redirected his itching savageries, allowing him, in his last great novel, to reach a more dignified resolution of conflicts: in particular, as Marr points out, to produce something ‘unprecedented in (his) writing: the entire acceptance by a mother of her child’.

  Marr is scrupulous in documenting the decencies of White’s domineering mother Ruth: ‘like Patrick,’ according to Lascaris, ‘but with pearls’. She was the one who sponsored Lascaris as a migrant to Australia. She gave money to Inky Stephensen’s tottering firm so he could publish Patrick’s first book (of poems, which White later abominated, as he did his first novel Happy Valley). White battled Ruth all her life. It was apparently a fruitful struggle. Not a week passed without his writing to her. If I have one bone to pick with the biography, though, it is to do with Ruth. For all Marr says about her, for me she remained a puzzling presence: I did not really understand her, and I was never sure of what this often-mentioned mutual love between them consisted. They laughed together, it seems, at people who picked up the wrong fork at dinner, and when she was dying he entertained her with long recallings of all the servants who had ever worked for their family: but I have a much sharper picture of White’s ineffectual father, who hardly plays a part in the story at all, except as a provider of money and, on one electrifying occasion, an object of suppressed desire.

  White was, as he said himself, a monster: unbearable at times, and of merciless cruelty. But there are countless tales, some documented in the biography, others with word-of-mouth currency, of his generosities grand and small. When he was old and terribly recognisable, he would go into a bookshop and ringingly buy a dozen copies of some young struggler’s latest novel. He bought a typewriter for someone too shy to show anyone what he had written. He gave away immense sums of his money to charity. He staggered along to hospitals to visit people who were hardly iller than he was. He used his Nobel Prize money to set up an annual award for writers who he considered had not received the recognition they deserved.

  Marr’s detailed account of the Nobel Prize workings gave me cold shudders. The matter of public recognition is a vexed one, bad enough within a writer’s own culture, but when it reaches international proportions it becomes a nightmare of committees, hints, rival factions, baits dangled tantalisingly and then snatched back. There is a pathos in the human compulsion to rank, something scrambling and undignified which makes a mockery of the labour and meaning of art. I kept thinking of Thomas Bernhard’s slashing attack on state prizes in Wittgenstein’s Nephew; but I also thought of the painful fact that all our lives, in vain, we go on laying tributes at our parents’ feet.

  The memoir Flaws in the Glass, with its ferocious settling of accounts and its intimate revelations, appalled many people, not least the modest Lascaris; but, like White himself when Marr brought him the manuscript of the finished biography, Lascaris bit the bullet. He made no complaint and demanded no changes; and nor did White of Marr, though the biography made him weep. It is impressive how little White cared to control other people’s images of him.

  At the end of the day, monster though he was, White had the runs on the board. This nobody can deny. And the highest achievement of Marr’s biography, with its subtle and enriching examination of the genesis of work in life, is that it turns us back, again and again, with eagerness to the novels.

  1991

  * David Marr, Patrick White: A Life, Random House, 1991.

  Sing for Your Supper

  THE FIRST WRITERS’ festival I ever went to was Adelaide Writers’ Week in 1978. My first novel, Monkey Grip, had been published the previous spring, but in my ordinary life I didn’t hang out with other writers. I was thirty-five, bringing up a child in a big communal household in Fitzroy, and the people I spent my time with were musicians and performers and photographers. I didn’t even know there were such things as writers’ festivals, until I received the invitation to Adelaide. I was flattered and rather awe-struck.

  I owned a car but no suitcase, and I carried my clothes to Adelaide in a cardboard box. In a tent under the plane trees I gave my first reading, and delivered a stiff little paper which I read out in what someone I knew described later as ‘best reader grade six’ voice, taking up obediently the exact ten minutes I’d been permitted by the organisers’ letter. An English writer on the same panel was surprised to learn that ‘one’ was expected to give a paper. He had not prepared anything. In a relaxed manner he cracked a few jokes about Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, then sat back smiling, leaving his Australian panel-partners looking earnestly provincial and over-anxious. We said nothing, but we had lips of string.

  I spent whole days in the tent, listening eagerly. Best of all was a man from I forget which Eastern European country who read a wonderful short story about a wife, a husband, a child, an apartment and a light bulb. I have forgotten his name but the story is still fresh in my mind. It wasn’t even spoilt by the brief encounter I had with the writer in the hotel lobby. Seeing him standing outside the lift, I ran up and tugged at his sleeve. ‘I wanted to tell you how much I liked your story,’ I panted, red as a beetroot; ‘it was beautiful.’

  His eyes glazed over, he opened his mouth, and out poured a stream of stunning cliches. ‘Ah yes—it was a story about the alienation of the working-class family in modern society, blah blah blah.’

  I let go his sleeve and stepped back. But I’ll never forget the story. It was probably the first time I was struck by the power of minimalism—and by the way something read out loud can enter the mind and flourish there.

  At night, in my tiny room, like a chambre de bonne, on the top floor of the Grosvenor Hotel on North Terrace where the writers (those of my low echelon, anyway) were lodged, I had to stand on a chair to see out the window; but the lights on the horizon twinkled fiercely in the dry summer air, I felt the thrilling proximity of desert, and I thought, ‘How lucky I am! What a marvellous way to hear writers from other countries, and meet other writers from here, and h
ave a little break from home!’

  In 1992 I was in Adelaide again. Because of a contretemps with the organising committee I wasn’t a guest of Writers’ Week. My publisher paid for my plane ticket and my hotel room and I slaved away all day doing publicity for my novel Cosmo Cosmolino which had just come out. I had a minder from the publisher’s PR division who put sandwiches in my hand and pushed me in and out of taxis.

  Heavy rain fell without a break, day and night. I had so little free time that I heard only two sessions in the tent, and carried away one serious memory (Miroslav Holub saying, ‘It is so hard to exterrrrminate somesing’) and one flippant (Orhan Pamuk talking about ‘the engaged Turkish writer who bravely goes to jail—by comparison I seem to be a spoilt young bourgeois who has fun and writes a lot’). A tight-lipped audience contemplated the young Turk’s playful cynicism, but I couldn’t help laughing. Feebly, out of exhaustion. When I looked out my hotel window I saw grey streets shining with rain. I thought, ‘How miserable this is! I wish I could go home.’

  Somewhere between 1978 and 1992 the gilt had worn off the gingerbread. Festivals had lost their festiveness and turned into work. Their magic had fled. Publishing in the ’80s became internationally monstrous, and the festivals reflected this. Publishers and agents became as important as writers—behind the scenes anyway. The pleasantly daggy mucking in together of big and small names is a thing of the past. Internationally known writers—the male English ones, at least—tend to travel in tight groups of friends from home. They do their gig, fill the boot of the hire car with Grange Hermitage, and shoot through to the outback.

  Writers are no longer humbly grateful for being noticed. These days ‘one’ would flounce home in a pet if one were shown into a chambre de bonne on the top floor of an old hotel. Nowadays ‘one’ expects at the very least a vast, impersonal room at the Hilton. I have learnt, through watching Ken Kesey stack on a turn at a Toronto reception desk, that international hotels have a certain number of rooms with openable windows: that ‘one’ does not after all have to endure meekly the choking claustrophobia of North American central heating.

  When you think about it, there’s something peculiar about the very idea of a writers’ festival. Writers, in my experience, are not extraverts. They tend to be what Joan Didion calls ‘lonely, anxious rearrangers of things’. Their work is by its very nature solitary—and when they’re not actually in the workroom with bum on seat and door closed, they’re mooching around the streets staring at people, listening in on conversations, sucking incident and meaning out of what’s going on around them. Writers don’t tend to hang out together. In fact, they repel each other. How can writers sit in a room together? They understand instinctively each other’s horrible detachment and, out of what few manners are left to them, they struggle not to turn that dry-ice stare on each other. Thus, when they are together, their conversations tend to the trivial, to shop-talk. They talk about contracts, money, agents, sales figures. It’s awful. But what can you expect?

  It’s a fantasy that writers discuss their work with each other. I remember a funny Frank Moorhouse story about a woman who comes from some blighted part of the outback to live in Sydney, and searches keenly for the pubs where, she is sure, people discuss. The narrator, astonished, touched, and perhaps slightly ashamed, is obliged to disillusion her. No one talks to anyone, round here! Perhaps occasionally an acknowledgment, a swipe, a furtive compliment, once in a blue moon a sudden phone call of warm admiration…but to imagine that writers sit around talking about how to do it, or about themes (those things which exist only in the minds of high-school English teachers), or what they meant or what they’ll tackle next, shows a mistaken idea of what writing itself is like.

  (Exception: I once had a short and fascinating conversation with Murray Bail and David Malouf, at Malouf’s kitchen table, about punctuation—an occasion so rare that it felt almost indecent—we were blushing; we couldn’t look at one another.)

  ‘Everything you have deciphered,’ writes the Israeli novelist Amos Oz in To Know a Woman, ‘you have only deciphered for an instant.’ Writers don’t know how they did it. They certainly don’t know how they’ll do it next time. And when they’re put into a group with three random strangers and called a panel, then given a topic and asked to discuss it in front of an audience, what they produce is some kind of strange heatshield, or smokescreen. Not lies. But everything ‘one’ says, however hard one is trying to tell the truth or say something useful, comes out askew, a little bit blurred, ever so slightly exaggerated or glib or beside the point.

  This explains, perhaps, why writers rarely go to hear one another read or speak, at these events. At a festival in New Zealand not long ago another guest laughed incredulously when I said I was going to hear the session of a writer I’d just met and liked. ‘Surely you don’t think people expect you to go! I wouldn’t dream of asking anyone to come to mine.’ When the American poet August Kleinzahler (who’s my friend) spotted me in the audience of his panel at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival one year, his face went blank for a second, with shock; I felt embarrassed, as if I had breached protocol. Part of this is the same neurosis that makes teenagers hate ringing up a stranger while someone they know well is in the room with them—someone who will register the exact amount of falsity in their special phone voice, their public persona.

  Once at a publisher’s dinner in Sydney where I was grumbling quietly to a fellow-writer about having to get up in a minute and make a speech, he laughed and said, ‘Stop whingeing. Stand up and sing for your supper.’

  Is that what writers’ festivals are all about?

  Everyone knows that these days writers can’t just write books: they have to get out and flog them. There’s a variety of ways to do this. A writer like Tim Winton will cheerfully appear on 60 Minutes or The Steve Vizard Show, because he wants the audiences of those shows—people who wouldn’t go to a writers’ festival in a fit—to know that his book (a) exists and (b) was written by someone they don’t need to suspect of being what Paul Keating calls ‘a hairy-arse who’s just dropped out of university’. He wants a forum where he can show himself as an ordinary bloke who’s written a non-threatening book without any arty-farty pretensions. This, of course, is as false as any other persona. Tim Winton is in fact highly articulate and very widely read in theology and fiction; his books are rich and challenging. But he’s also a family man and a terrific fisherman. With spectacular success he presents himself at the popular end of the publicity spectrum. Writers’ festivals hover at the opposite end. Writers’ festivals are for writers who are squeamish about deep publicity, or who don’t want to get their hands dirty; or for writers escaping from a bout of doing those things in their own countries; or for writers who are tired and jaded, and need a little break from home.

  What sort of readers are they for? What is this powerful urge people feel, that makes them not only buy books but pay even more money in order to clap eyes on the writers themselves, to hear them speak and read? Festivals ‘make you part of something’, one journalist bluntly stated after the Melbourne Festival. ‘To observe and partake in…a discussion between two eminent writers, as though they were somehow in your own living room, is what writers’ festivals are all about.’ I found this oddly touching and tried to recall ever having experienced such a sense of inclusion, myself, while in an audience. I couldn’t.

  But it strikes me that there is a connection between the ever-increasing roll-up to writers’ festivals and the question so often asked of writers by readers and journalists: ‘Is this book autobiographical?’

  Why do people always ask this question? I once saw Doris Lessing cop it, from a woman who stood up and shouted it from the back of a huge audience at the National Gallery of Victoria. Lessing glared. She snapped. She bit the poor woman’s innocent head off, and the woman sat down in confusion. It was a distressing sight; but I had sympathy for both biter and bitten. I think that readers, specially today in a world so crammed with books that choi
ce makes us dizzy, are longing for some guarantee of integrity. They want to know who they can trust. But does seeing a writer at a festival lead readers in the right direction?

  The trouble is that the attractiveness or apparent honesty of the writer is no guarantee of the quality of the work. Plenty of good writers are jerks in person, while others who are charming and generous in the flesh are boring, phoney or feeble on the page. And the risk with festivals is that writers who hop up on stage to be ‘spotlighted’, to speak at length about their work and related matters, may be judged on their perceived performance, their gift of the gab, their persona, rather than on what they’ve written.

  If all I knew of John Ashbery was the casual, stone-walling, rather hungover way he answered his interlocutor’s reverential questions at the Melbourne Festival, I would never pick up a book of his, let alone buy it. I’ve been reading Marina Warner for years in the Times Literary Supplement, always with enormous pleasure and respect; I had her book Alone of All Her Sex on order at a bookshop before I went to her session at Melbourne, and now I’ll have to grit my teeth and force myself to buy it because in spite of her manifest, sharp and ready intelligence in performance, I found her presence chilly and not very likeable. So what? Why should a writer in front of an audience be warm, open, likeable? Yet something about the modern writers’ festival makes us likely to demand this, or to be disappointed if we don’t get it. It’s not fair. It’s a bit ridiculous. It’s got us barking up the wrong tree.