Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather
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Astley really did want to support the view that anyone anywhere is capable of creating Art; this suited her own determination to write from what she knew. Even poetry, she insisted, arose from nothing more glamorous than the need to express ‘emotions suppressed by the monotony of habit’. Nor were those emotions to be taken for granted as the springboard: technique, process, craft were all. (‘I always commence a sonnet thinking out a fine first line,’ she said.)18
Was Astley simply being difficult?
She had the final word in her poem, published in the university magazine Galmahra – not Barjai – suggesting that she needed to go outside of her group’s influence to exercise her brand of satire:
Culture, 1945
It’s symbolistic, dear, that’s what it is!
You’d never guess at first, I know. But see,
It’s merely self-expression. What? My dear!
Of course there’s no repression these days. Art
Is what the artist cares to give us. Look—
That eye behind the swan’s wing on the right
Is meant to represent a breadth of vision
Such as all these great Bohemians have …
You wonder that the artist called it ‘Life’?
Then note the hand that clasps a little dust
(Of bone, no doubt.) It’s clear that you must read;
We’ve Freud and Nietzsche at our finger-tips,
And all that sort of thing. O darling, stop
Gaping at the Holbein! Here’s the finest—
And that ghastly ‘Sunset on a Hill’—
Picasso right behind you, and Matisse.
Must you, dear?—da Vinci makes me ill!19
Astley was now utterly disaffected by what she increasingly saw as the abstraction ‘culture’. As far as she could see, modernism was removed from a felt sense of being human, of people’s inconsistencies; it was too removed from the local. For her this was also déjà vu. Just as Catholicism set itself above the human and the vulnerable, here was another ‘-ism’ that seemed to be doing the same thing. She felt this keenly because the poetry she was writing, and the writing she was thinking about, came directly from her own life and her own emotional reading of experience. Pushing to the surface, always, was an urgency to reveal the essence of the human, the truth of things.
This is why she loved Gerard Manley Hopkins, his auditory particularity, and the sound-sense of French symbolist poets like Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. When it came to Australian poets, what one critic described as Kenneth Slessor’s ‘exceptional gift for creating sound patterns’ would have appealed to her. She and Slessor were alike, too, in being vitally connected to musical forms; Slessor was also known to have possessed a ‘deeply responsive but sceptical mind’.20 Her quest to produce poetry of the ‘flesh and blood’ kind even in her best work was obscured by intellectual abstraction. Astley’s challenge was what to save and what to give up in the interests of her quest for an authentic voice.
Artists and writers responded to the enormous changes in society in the first half of the twentieth century by moving from representations of external ‘real’ life to a fascination with the inner life. They were exploring feelings of alienation and despair in a new way, often doing so in a new language. Astley responded to the emotional heart and simplicity of some of this new writing but she was still obsessed with finding her own style. Writing could not – no contemporary writer could – afford to stay working in one style. This openness to creative change, which she first confronted here in the 1940s, probably added many years to Astley’s writing life.
Slowly Astley’s poetry did reflect these cultural shifts. The imagistic satisfied her aesthetic preferences but she added her own version of the modern. There is a little of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ in the following poem by Astley, revealing a susceptibility to the modernism she liked to satirise.
I.
Boringly repetitive the night
Takes up the tale, and streets reveal,
Lamp-posts polished by the moon to steel,
Elms of ebony and fences white—
Gaspingly unreal.
Eyes and lips, and lips and hair become
Ash-grey daubings. Breath and bone
Chilled, magic-killed, can now disown
The sun’s disquietudes, and moon-mad-numb,
Repress day with a groan.21
The wordiness, the clutter! This would become the chant of many a critic of Astley’s writing. The auditory effect is strong but the odd disjunctive word (‘disquietudes’) is too elaborate; then there are the fierce image-struck invented compound phrases (like ‘moon-mad-numb’); and climbing scales of adjectives (‘Boringly repetitive’, ‘Gaspingly unreal’), the alliterative listing of the sensory (‘Eyes and lips, lips and hair’) seem obsessive, as if something uncontainable needed expression. The poem and others like it were virtually prose experiments.
Was this a kind of emotional subterfuge? Twenty years later Astley herself answered that question. ‘Can you imagine reading your poetry to a live audience? It would be like exposing yourself in public,’ she said.22 She was uncomfortable about personal self-revelation in a public confessional sense: there could never be enough mannerisms to hide behind. But in these early poems she was satisfying an urge to dramatise. Later she read poetry as ‘a stimulus to write prose’ but now she had no sense that prose would be the form that offered more space to explore her emotional and psychological self.23
The aura of the Barjai group was not infected by modernism’s preoccupation with bleakness – they wanted life too much. Astley empathised with Reid when he wrote ‘… to us who are still young the experiences of living, eating and loving and sleeping, are sharp and important, more important than subtle speculations about the nature of death’.24 In Australia there was ‘little sense of modernity being an issue other than on the grounds of stylistic decadence’; there was still ‘the essential belief in something’.25
At the tail end of her time with the group, in 1944, there was the Ern Malley hoax – a spoof against modernism now legendary in Australian literature. Well-known Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart invented the ‘undiscovered’ genius Ern Malley, creating poems for him in a surrealist style. The hoax was supposed to fool the modernist Angry Penguins editor, Max Harris, and did so – as well as many other respected writers and critics of the time. Barjai felt the ripple effect since Reid and Collinson had connections to this fiasco: Collinson’s own work had been in the same issue of Angry Penguins, and Reid had been the magazine’s Queensland representative from 1943 to 1947. It was a savage time. Years later Reid recalled just how personal the whole issue became: ‘Immediately friends, relatives became not so much agin the poems as agin the kind of person who could read such poetry or believe in it, the kind of experimental mind that wasn’t conformist.’26 A radical taint had attached itself to the Barjai group; the hoax would prove to be a fissure in its demise.
Astley’s own life was removed from all of this because of her teaching commitments, which involved her working during the day most days. She was being affected by quite different experiences – was open to such experiences – some that meant a lot to her emotionally: ‘I have stirring memories of my teaching career … teaching at Shorncliffe primary school. A state string quartet came down and played a movement from Dvorak – American Quartet – to fourth grade – superb playing.’27 This was the memory that popped up fifty years later when she was asked about culture – classical music for kids in bayside Brisbane.
Some Barjai poets were personally affected by the talk of styles and hoaxes; some became ‘cagey about emotions in their writing’.28 Perhaps to soothe such spirits, Reid discussed other things: the progressive educational theories of A. S. Neill or transactional analysis (reflecting Collinson’s interests). Collinson, however,
became more radical and would join the Communist Party in 1947. Socialism and communism were endorsed in print and there was a transparent anti-Catholic sentiment in Reid’s quoting of Thomas Hardy’s post-World War I poem as part of his scathing review of a new Catholic journal (View):
Christmas: 1924
‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.29
If Astley secretly wished that she had written this she could never have publicly owned it; in any case her own anger against the Church had not become fully realised in her own mind. She also had Cecil and Eileen to consider and didn’t want to hurt them, nor Phil, who was still interstate studying with the Jesuits. What would her family make of her affiliation with a group that publicly declaimed Catholicism? Astley distanced herself a little, knowing that many would understand her personal reasons. She was not alone, as her friend Vida Horn later summed up: ‘Some – but not all – of our fathers worried, [was Barjai] left-wing? Poetry readings might lead to communism. Most of our mothers would worry. Poetry readings might lead to sex – though they never said so bluntly.’30
There is no way of knowing whether Astley had any sexual relationship at this time but it seems unlikely. In any case, 1946 brought these Brisbane Barjai days to an end. How would she remember them? She penned her farewell thoughts with a prescient sense of how such times do pass:
Juvenilia
All we regret, we singers in the sun
Is the long age coming after, wasted days,
Senility of withered mind. No ways
Lead to avoidance save the mortal one—
And we have no thought of death, and death is done
With, but for that regret—the sixties’ haze
Of graveyard gossip, harmless teas, and praise—
Fruit bitter for the fact youth gave us none.
We are afraid of age—not for its lack
Of physical advantage, like a flower
Wrinkled and sapless; not that we must track
Into a place of pain; but just because
We may forget ideals, as in an hour
Even the rose forgets what once it was.31
Members of ‘The Barjai Gang’ were all still very young and bound to take different paths. Meanjin Papers, with Clem Christesen, had moved to Melbourne University in 1944, joining ‘what amount[ed] to a Queensland colony – writers, artists, musicians, sculptors, scholars …’32 Reid followed. Within a decade he would hold a key position in the public library system; Collinson went overseas. After the war Astley was obliged to resist these pilgrimages. She lived in a vast rural state and had already committed herself to the lottery of teaching posts.
In the city, many Brisbanites longed for a return to sanity and peace. But not all: in one of his last Barjai pieces Reid lamented the return of the sleepy prewar town: ‘The Americans have left … the prevailing influence is one of inertia. Brisbane has had culture.’33 In the next few years Astley’s life would be very different from the lives of her Barjai comrades: she, as well as ‘culture’, would be relocated. It was something she never quite forgave.
PART 2
DREAM COUNTRY
5
Dream Country
Actually I don’t like the heat, but I like that do-it-tomorrow feeling. And I like the plants, the rainforest, the water cobalt off the shore, the tropicana. It’s my dream country. And you know – the dream country is always where you aren’t!
Thea Astley, interview with Graeme Kinross-Smith, 19821
Astley’s time at university was at an end. She was now a graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a teaching diploma. Gone were the lively Barjai evenings, a shared comradeship in letters. All of that belonged to time past and she was left to contemplate facing the next part of her life completely alone. Teaching as her future career had made Astley very conscious that her situation was quite different from many in the Barjai set. She was now twenty-one, bonded to the Queensland Education Department; unless she paid back the entire cost of her tuition and left the profession, she had no choice but to go wherever she was sent. It was common then, and for years, for government education departments to require graduates to work regionally within their state. It was a tense time in the Astley household while they waited for what seemed like a life sentence to be handed down to the new graduate. The letter finally arrived and Astley faced Cecil and Eileen with the news: 1947 would take her away to a full-time teaching appointment in Townsville, north Queensland. It could have been worse: Townsville was a regional metropolis compared with other towns she might have been allocated. When Astley much later recalled her younger self as being ‘too sanguine to be filled with despair’, she must have felt optimistic in the last moments of her life in Brisbane.2
Townsville was a shock, both visual and physical. Much of rural Australia was ramshackle but the Queensland variation was several degrees more dilapidated than 1940s Brisbane. Astley could never have imagined the tourist development that was to blight the region, mercilessly satirised some forty years later in her novels. In 1947 ‘old Queensland’ seemed to be in a state of permanent rot. Vegetation clambered all over buildings painted decades before. Houses little better than shacks, although some large and rambling, were on flimsy stilt supports and everything was perennially attacked by humidity and heat. Townsville provided Astley’s first compelling experience of what she later called being ‘outmanoeuvred by weather’.3
Then there was the rain, which was tropical and heavy. As roads in many isolated areas were still dirt, this meant mud and lots of it. There was no sewerage. Schools were mostly sheds without electrical power, telephones, typewriters or copying machines; pot belly stoves and later kerosene heaters provided warmth if necessary. Petrol was still rationed, even though the war was over; farmers grew and fermented tobacco for fuel. Townsville, like other remote and isolated places, seemed to exist in its own space and time. In her novels Astley would re-create the makeshift quality of these towns in caustic tribute to them. In her early twenties, however, she simply missed the city.
There is no point in resenting the physical character of a place, and in any case Astley had other preoccupations. Her first salary was close to two pounds weekly. She had little to spend it on – accommodation accounted for about thirty shillings of it – and it irritated her to be paid less than men in the same situation. Towns needed teachers and socially they were regarded as assets, so lower pay for women seemed like inexplicable exploitation. The local community was obliged to find a suitable place for her to stay, under threat of the department withdrawing her. Astley was eventually forced to take one room in the Railway Hotel. This was not a good start: teachers, she discovered, ‘were treated with suspicion … had to behave very well – couldn’t be seen in a bar’ – not that Astley was a drinker.4
The room in the local pub was a stage-set copy of all such rooms Astley would re-create for her novels, including this one based on her Shorncliffe, Brisbane, boarding house Villa Marina, described more than forty years later in Reaching Tin River: ‘My narrow bedroom. Eight by ten by twelve. The twelve’s the height. One window and a Holland blind, a stretcher, a clothes cupboard, a dressing-table drunk with seventy years of salt air.’5
At the Railway Hotel Astley huddled in bed at night, listening to steps on the verandah passing her room, with just a bolted door between her and possible danger (reflected in the menacing versions of pubs that recur throughout her novels). She was a young and naïve city girl thrust into rough company and it was the first time she had felt physically threatened. Twenty-one was old enough, perhaps, to enter the classroom but perhaps too young to be drafted to an isolation for which her education and upbringing had not prepared her. Astley never forgot the fear and vulnerability she had felt in these places.
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Anxiety pressed in on her. She was not yet the young novelist who could examine with detachment the impression she might have given the locals, a ‘somewhat priggish city girl’ forced into their midst.6 As she wrote years later, ‘The only social life seemed to be in the pub, which would throb until ten at night, when they would lock the policeman inside because that was the official closing time. He would go on drinking with them until everyone fell outward. I found it ugly because I was young and intolerant. I was discovering books, and poetry and good music, and nothing cultural like that was happening in the small towns.’7
One day walking home from work she heard a piano being played quite well and stopped to listen outside the house. The owners saw her and came out to wave. This buoyed her spirits, but these were rare moments.8 Townsville was a world away from poetry prizes and Barjai and the belief that culture and writing were important to life: loneliness was turning her time in the tropics into an ice age.
As Astley would later reflect, ‘It was chilling to be flung out into the world – your own controller – and you’re timorous. You become an observer, not an integrator.’ How, she might have wondered, does one even become an integrator?9 What Astley saw as the narrow-mindedness and conformity of the town life grated on her nerves and she did not see much kinship on offer. But then she was not feeling much like joining. She played tennis but was not a member of the tennis club. She saw this community as dispiritingly familiar, involving a slavish following of customs and social practices, a version of orthodoxy, though not necessarily religious. These views could cause her capricious mood swings that might well have tainted relationships with possible congenial companions. Astley still struggled to be accepted, while at the same time asserting her individuality. It would be difficult to balance those needs in Townsville.
She was forced back to the interests she could enjoy out of town, in Brisbane, and was building up a healthy resentment about being the sole representative of city civilisation in ‘enemy territory’. The feeling stayed with Astley. Thirty years later she gave these feelings to the character of Tom Dorahy in A Kindness Cup: