by Karen Lamb
It all seemed so useless, as foolish as trying to put ‘Tintern Abbey’ into iambic hexameters. He had come with a zealot’s earnestness, believing a place such as this might need him. And there was, after all, only loneliness: he was cut off from the pulse of town, although he insisted to himself, rationalising furiously, he had been regularly to meetings of the Separation League and had blown only occasional cold air on their hot.10
But Astley didn’t attend any meetings and her small Townsville Central School was devoid of like-minded souls. The school, which catered for very young first-graders through to early adolescents, was run by a petty and officious headmaster with whom Astley fell naturally into disagreement. Apart from teaching, her duties were disconcertingly trivial – she spent a part of each week making the school glue. An Arts degree, published poetry, her membership of Barjai – and glue making. What a trajectory! She was developing a habit of making lists, counting, and luxuriating in the absurdity of the humdrum, and this would stay with her: there are few Astley characters who don’t indulge themselves in making such lists.
She tried to rally herself but she was genuinely disillusioned and unhappy. She wrote to Martin Haley, her old friend from the Catholic Writers’ Movement, threatening a novel about ‘the lovely rut’, as she now referred to her teaching job.11 The thought of writing prose was becoming attractive: perhaps she might become a north Queensland version of that ‘butter magnate’ from her Barjai essay, whose sonnets could be found ‘hobnobbing with butter consignments and quotas’.12
Haley had guessed how things might be for Astley in such a remote place and before she left Brisbane had given her the names of some of his friends in Townsville. Astley was surprisingly diffident about approaching strangers; she longed for the informalities of the ‘Aquinas gang’ (CWM) and Barjai. Eventually, she wrote a note to one of the suggested contacts but with such obsequiousness – for having to ‘[force her] presence upon him’ – that it hardly augured well for friendship.13
This over-diffidence went hand in hand with a jerky forcefulness, making Astley seem odd to others. Haley, for his part, was a good friend. She valued his friendship, all the more because he did not ply her with ‘dogma or doctrine’.14 She didn’t know it but she was speaking too soon: in the end their differing degrees of allegiance to Catholicism would cause them to fall out. For now, Haley was a life-saver. Astley looked forward to her favourite walk each week, to the little local post office where she knew she would find the John O’London’s Weekly magazine sent to her by Haley. The English literary magazine featured a mix of established and lesser-known writers, something that would have appealed to a young writer such as Astley.
Astley was becoming depressed. It was difficult to know who best to talk to and she was missing home and family. Phil, who would also soon go on to teach, was at this stage engaged by full-time Jesuit studies in Melbourne. She had missed him now for years. When he left, Astley was just finishing school and had written a tender poetic dedication:
To My Brother
Sunlight and spires are strangely tangled
With plane trees and elms in a Monday memory
Of fat brown horses, listless waiting,
And laughter waltzing from a woman’s lips.
You were the serious one, who gravely
Listened to snatches of dreamy Debussy
And arrow-like echoes from old Lamartine,
Smiling the moments away in a prayer;
Fathomless, even. But this day remembers
Your feet on the pavement of three people’s hearts,
Strangely confused with a cold rain and elms,
And a red-headed child in a sunlit street.15
Phil would have his own problems with teaching, but for now reports of his progress floated back via a proud Eileen and Cecil. Astley’s parents were not only a long way away in Brisbane; their conservatism meant that they didn’t talk openly about feelings with their daughter, nor would they have wished to worry her about her brother. What they communicated of Phil’s life conveniently excluded the events and experiences that were troubling him. Astley, who had flirted with the idea of becoming a nun when she was a child, knew she could never have endured life in any enclosed religious order. However, in the 1940s, Phil’s choice of vocation was not as uncommon as it is today, which also would have tempered Astley’s view of it. She could see that at least Phil was part of a social, even intimate, society chosen by him, that he was not a misfit in a rural town, as she was.
Astley had great respect for Phil’s sacrifice, just as she had for the nuns at All Hallows’, but she was looking for some less extreme version of giving to others, to life. She found it herself years later by inventing a breakaway order of nuns in the late novella ‘Inventing the Weather’, expressing a combination of self-sacrifice and non-conformity that she came to find irresistible.
Away from the city, Catholicism wasn’t a prominent feature of Astley’s daily life but its legacy held fast, quietly circumscribing her behaviour. Had Phil known of his sister’s loneliness, his own similar plight might have been a sympathetic echo, but actual contact between them was limited. They had more in common than they could know: Phil was also being forced to make adjustments that proved very taxing for him. Already, he had been observed as not the usual type of novice.16 He displayed no interest whatsoever in sport and made his fervent nature known in prayer and in endless walks conducted at high speed across the grounds. His superiors watched, concerned.
As Thea battled heat, humidity and the tropical skin conditions of irritable schoolchildren, Phil suffered painful chilblains in the unaccustomed cold of Melbourne. Brother and sister were both beset by anxiety, Phil more so at this stage. From the start he suffered self-doubt about his calling, which made him feel less worthy before his God, and his was a very exacting God. These inward troubles only underlined that his was a disposition unsuited to social interactions (especially the schoolteaching he would agree to try), whereas his sister’s instincts for teaching were healthily intact. Tucked away as she was in the far north missing city culture and yearning for people, she did not know that a cloud had well and truly settled over her brother’s life. Later she discovered the extent of this, and would capture such agonies in her novels with whimsy; a character at a low ebb could be at risk of ‘committing sideways’ (‘Inventing the Weather’) or perhaps just watching his own ‘personal weather’ sink to temperatures ever closer to zero.
Astley was psychologically stronger than her brother but she did not have his social protection. If Phil stood out among his peers he was not ostracised for it, whereas Astley was discovering that in small country towns people like her were considered outsiders in every sense.
In 1948, after one year in Townsville, she was moved to Imbil, near Pomona, a quaint Mary Valley town 140 kilometres north of Brisbane, but she was still alone.
Despondency coloured her thoughts and she wrote poetry of her days filled in too-familiar ways: ‘As today, and hours more empty/ And a lovelessness, and the little town.’17 Her thoughts had nowhere to turn except upon themselves, or to find their place in her writing. She wrote disconsolately to her old friend Martin Haley:
I’m commencing to hate this forced introspection that seems to descend on one in the country. Time here floats lazily by, and the slow music of the trains – and I feel useless and defeated. If I could think that at the end of this brief time I could go out assured of one thing well done I’d be content. As it is Martin I view my shortcomings and mediocrity with horror. The confidence I possessed at nineteen has been leaped over by an accumulation of loneliness, country hotels, with all their paraphernalia of potted gumtips, symbolic of mealtime, smells, of the sound of feet following upon the dinner gong. Sorry, I shouldn’t mope. It’s not that I dislike the country, it’s just that I miss people and books, and music, and the interchange of ideas.18
Astley had foreseen that
she might lose the vitality of those old days she had written about in ‘Juvenilia’, her final poem in Barjai magazine. She wasn’t summoning the requisite Astley family ‘stickability’ of Cecil’s cheery ditty ‘Comin’ into Work’ – not that she minded hard work. As there was no immediate prospect of escape (much as she fantasised about it), she knew she must survive somehow.
Her mind focused on what escape there could be within the prison itself. In this small town she would let her powers of observation roam free, at the school, in the dining room of the town pub, in the streets. Practising the ‘art of self-containment’ the locals so disliked, the self-described ‘priggish’ city girl could behave according to their rules, knowing that there were no rules in the house of the mind. It was like daydreaming in Latin Mass at school, years where the hum of ritual nurtured her secret, separate self.
In her life now the lazy, predictable routines in the little country hotel gave Astley an unexpected opportunity. She found herself in a world of ideas for writing about her current life. She gleefully faced tedium with irony and became obsessed with the ‘paraphernalia’ of mealtimes, partly a reflection of her own nervous habits. Drawn in detail from this period are the exact conditions of the dining room, taken from her second novel, A Descant for Gossips:
The repetition of the cottage pie drove Helen from the green cave of the dining-room earlier than usual … the six permanent boarders had sat tense in their dislike of each other’s eating habits … The sucking action of one mouth dreaded and fought back the clicking dentures of another. One pair of hands chopped all the food into prissy segments, another forked in clumsy gobbets, angry plugs. Conversation was sterile for two meals a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, curving its full cycle through weather and politics and local scandals back through weather and scandals and local politics. Mouths minced or pursed or dogmatised or vanished altogether in refined outrage and jaws became prognathous over unimportant points of view.19
Later in life Astley’s views softened; she would see warmth, friendship, kindness and intelligent society in the towns of regional and remote Australia but in the Pomona of 1948 the young teacher cut adrift from the fellowship of intellect was shuttered in as much as she was shut out.
Being on the outer was something Astley had already embraced. From the time she had been the pupil who read out loud perfectly to a resentful peer group, she had been prepared to form a set against her circumstances, even if it precluded the warmth of inclusion. Her fascination with the lives and conversations of the people she met meant she could be privy without necessarily being party. It was the perfect insider-outsider role, the twin modes of existence that by now were habitual to her.
At the same time she was pleasantly surprised to find that the chat of ordinary people appealed to her enormously. She was moving a step closer to the life she wanted to capture in her writing. Her egalitarian instincts drew her to the larger canvas. She now knew that her impulse to listen was intimately tied to creative freedom, that gossip gave her the oxygen for invention.
Until this point Astley had experienced gossip as an expression of powerful moral censure, one largely conducted by and against women. In these small towns it still played a part in the relationship between men and women. Her own life as a single female was an object of curiosity. Astley felt under constant idle surveillance by bored, disapproving local inhabitants who were ‘small, nosy’. As she later remarked, ‘You didn’t dare put a foot out of line. They knew everything you did.’20 Conducting any sort of private life under these conditions would be, she knew, extremely fraught. She disliked intensely the usual rituals of courtship and marriage, critiquing them in a poem written about this time:
Love in Our Time
Always, and reasonably, it is sad
That one should so impersonalise
Question and answer in the flesh,
Reducing to a brief schedule
Form-to-be-filled-relationship
Woman with man
The woman questing in the truth
Acts out the essence of a lie
To please the partner who must see
Himself more willing than she wills,
While both behind their guarded eyes
Know truth for lies.21
Love in her time was subject to caveats. A woman could not live a life like a man, with sexual freedom and freedom from negative social consequences. Her early autobiographical novels (Girl with a Monkey and A Descant for Gossips) dramatise her views about this. Both have young female characters who suffer because of an affair keenly observed by town gossips. In her first novel Astley has the young woman character casting off her male suitor against stereotype. Even in her later work, with the novelist’s voice disguised in male narration, a character marvels at the marriage contract and women’s acceptance of the poor bargain: ‘Loneliness and a carefully organised social stigma that applied most heavily to single females.’22
This was not in fact a new sentiment for Astley. She was not quite twenty when she had written about ‘love’ with what seems like preternatural melancholy:
Revelation
Enter – harshness
The facing of the world.
And you who say you love me, Wanton, hurled
Your pretty little love-arts to the air
And said – ‘There –
‘Love is cheap, and I have little money,
‘Buy me a brazen word or two
‘And dip in honey.
‘Press
‘With a caress
‘My sweetened offerings of bliss,
‘And swear eternally
‘To one’
Meanwhile between this and thou kiss
You boast of other women you have caught,
Then come to me
And swear with eager eyes
That you are the ardent seeker
I, the only prize!23
What the gossips did not realise, and what Astley did not broadcast in her letters to family and friends, was that she had recently met the man she would go on to marry. ‘I’m missing your mouth,’ she wrote in the first line of her poem to him.24 If love was a kind of self-delusion (‘My subject is self-delusion and the pity of self-delusion … the point … of all my books’), then for a certain young woman stuck alone in rural Queensland it was one worth having.25 Even in love Astley was a doubting believer, the kind of romantic who can be lost in the moment of love, while distrusting the shape she suspects that ordinary living might give to it. The same tendency can be seen in the ‘watching the self’ role she gives to her early female characters, even ‘in love’. A perfect example of this is Helen Striebel in Descant, who believes, ‘Loving should not be so sad … nor seek in the inevitably cruel way it does a sort of nostalgia in fine weather, in days of irresistible blueness and greenness, as if the rain that was not visible in the physical world were gently falling within the mind. Nothing, not even the most pellucid of moments, was ever recalled without a certain misting in the effect, a regret for loss, for the impossibility of repetition.’26
As Astley, the self-described ‘stickybeak’ and ‘people freak’, watched this enclosed society from which she herself felt alienated (and perhaps a little superior), she was storing away mannerisms of personality and the social dynamics of groups. This was synchronous with the writing: ‘Gossip is the creative process in action,’ she would say. ‘It’s just like making up jazz on the piano, it’s improvisation.’27
This social claustrophobia of the boarding house was liberating Astley creatively while her own social self was on hold. All she could do was make mental notes, keep writing, trying to keep alive the vivacious Thea the Barjai set had known. She still needed to see herself in relation to intellectual and literary life. She was desperate to hang on to a sense of being a writer, not someone with a dilettantish interest in the arts, and Ba
rjai had been and remained an important part of that.
Once again, it was Martin Haley of the CWM who came to the rescue. Astley picked up a copy of The Bulletin he had sent and a letter of good wishes. This issue, she said in reply, reminded her of ‘the warm camaraderie of the magazine’s early days’ and she daydreamed about those old times: ‘Do you think that special quality the writers of the 1890s and early in the century possessed of being able to dramatise situations, weaving a little magic into the commonplace, was a fault? I often wonder about it, and the lack in the modern realists like Auden and Spender.’28
There was comfort yet to be found in the old arguments about modernism and nationalism in literature. The days of the Dawn and Dusk Club of the old Bulletin – reminding her of her maternal grandfather, Con Lindsay – reignited her interest. She was toying with the possibilities of ‘weaving a little magic into the commonplace’ in her own writing. She had promised herself late in 1946 that, whatever the demands of her job, the following year she would begin writing a novel. She stuck to her plan and in 1947 started ‘Moontower’.29
Each night Astley removed herself purposefully from the downstairs noise of the dining room. Alone in the quiet of her own room she pondered, imagined the whispering behind her back. None of that mattered once she sat down to write. She was also listening to herself: writing did not come at all easily. It seemed to her a rough apprenticeship when she wrote to Haley of ‘the infinite erasings and scratchings needed to obtain a glimmer of style’ and the burden of having to deal with ‘the ritual difference between the true and the false’.30
Eventually she would go on to use real places strongly connected to her own life but with altered names: Reeftown in It’s Raining in Mango (Cairns); Sugarville in Girl with a Monkey (Townsville); Condamine in The Slow Natives (Warwick); Allbut in An Item from the Late News (Cairns tableland); Kristi in Beachmasters (Port Vila); and Doebin Island in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (Palm Island). She was starting to fashion her own community where what was true or false would be under her control. She did not mind working during the day and writing at night: this was a discipline she would retain for over thirty years, whatever her other full-time occupation. Writing her novel, her satirical comedy of manners away from prying eyes, Astley found herself relaxing more than she had imagined. Her work had the allure of distraction with a purpose.