by Karen Lamb
Astley was becoming increasingly resentful that issues of domesticity, juggling commitments to family, holding down a responsible job, finding time to write, were not, by and large, faced by male writers. She was cautious about seeking sympathy from other women, especially if they thought she was trying to be all things: wife, teacher, writer, mother. She hadn’t forgotten the offhand gibe from one of her female neighbours: ‘Still scribbling, are you?’ And so the CLF grant was enormously important. Sympathy came, for Porter had heard of Astley’s CLF grant and wanted to congratulate her: ‘The grant should be wonderfully useful to you – though, of course, it’s rather different for women with kiddies (oops!) I was able to cut-and-run … Will you be able to do the feminine form of cut-and-run?’14
The phrase ‘cut and run’ would always remind Astley of this exchange with Porter: it impressed her that a bachelor knew how different the literary life of a woman was compared to that of a man. No, she was unable to ‘cut and run’, but the fantasy of escape appealed enormously to her imagination: she would write many such escapes into her novels. The fantasy was made more exquisite because she knew she could never do such a thing herself.
Bohemia came across as a very masculine domain. Astley and Amy Witting had many staffroom conversations about the libertarian ideals of the ‘Sydney Push’ of the 1950s and how such ideals seemed to be ‘off duty’ when it came to gender.15 The group, which met regularly in inner city pubs, included a wide range of well-known intellectuals and artists, including at times Clive James and Germaine Greer – and others outside the academy committed to social and sexual freedom. There were many philosophical arguments conducted by interested heavy drinkers, amid lively all-night parties. None of it was consistent with the kind of domestic circumstances Witting and Astley understood as the lot of women. Astley’s own quiet married life and the despondency arising from it drove her view that there was a set of ancient and unchangeable contracts of sexual and social inequality, which no one is ever going to change’.16 The novel she was now writing, on the subject of adultery, found her considering her own choices.
As Porter had said, one did need to be mindful of the ‘kiddies’. Love dictated this as much as any diligence or sense of responsibility. Porter had intuited that the emotional responsibility in Astley’s family (as for so many women) had fallen on her shoulders. There were problems: Cecil’s cancer was advancing and nobody was talking cures. Astley did not speak about her father’s ill-health, and since her mother had briskly returned that acidly marked-up copy of A Descant for Gossips Astley had said little to her about writing or the literary life. Eileen was beyond pleasing on matters of value and faith and it was no time to broach such subjects with Cecil. Perhaps Astley quietly resolved to stop trying to please either of them quite so much, but in her mind the gloves were off. In her writing she was beginning to give vent to deep anger and anxieties.
The widespread reviews of Descant in 1960 provided a welcome distraction. There were notices in all major Australian broadsheets and Australian literary journals, and notices in Astley’s old favourite magazine John O’London’s and the Times Literary Supplement. Overseas reviewers did not miss the ‘caustic and convincing satire’ but thought Descant an otherwise ‘workaday novel’.17 Locally, too, her imagistic style was reprimanded as ‘overwriting’. In The Sydney Morning Herald, Sidney Baker was more generous but still patronising: ‘With discipline, and a sense of direction, Miss Astley could go a long way.’18 It was more than twenty years later before a reviewer would capture Astley’s own feelings at the time of writing the novel, seeing that ‘though carefully constructed, it is sad’.19 Buried in the passion of the prose was a sense of loss, not just nostalgia for Queensland: Cecil was close to the end of his illness and Eileen had been telephoning every few days with regular updates.
At the same time Astley had no doubt been relieved to report that an important service, conducted simply and behind the altar of her local church, had finally taken place. The 1948 civil marriage of Thea Astley and Jack Gregson was validated at Our Lady Help of Christians Church, Epping, on 1 March 1961, with Claude and Barbara Abouchar as witnesses.
The year 1961 would be one of the most eventful and difficult in Astley’s life. Perhaps it was inevitable that some of her frustrations would spill over into her relationship with her publishers, despite the relative success of Descant. Even Davis’s support, Astley was about to discover, had limits. The previous year Astley’s third manuscript, ‘The Little Lie’, had been turned down for publication.
This story of a female university researcher falling in love with an insane and dangerous fortune-telling shyster who takes off for America with her sounds like the kind of ‘cut and run’ situation Astley loved. But according to A&R readers’ reports the novel was ‘a pretty far-fetched melodrama with too many foreign names and too little credible action’. Astley suspected correctly that Beatrice Davis agreed. The clues were there: after minimal editing, Davis wanted major revisions and Astley had simply refused to make them. She was absorbed in a new novel about a philandering journalist (The Well Dressed Explorer).
Astley was very annoyed about having her novel rejected and sent it to none other than Patrick White. In the last year they had become friends through phone calls and occasional dinner parties but it was a brave, if not reckless, thing to do. White held on to the manuscript for what must have been tense months for Astley. Eventually, in late March and from the safety of New Zealand, he sent his reply to Dorset Street.
Astley could hardly have been prepared for what she read. Slowly, she absorbed the blows, one after another. ‘It is rather difficult to write about that book, because I did not like it, but imagine you had gathered that already. It was very disappointing, as I had expected this to be the book, and it seems to me such a falling off from A Descant for Gossips.’ Astley’s characters, said White, were ‘flimsy’ or ‘repulsive’, ‘throw-offs’ from an ‘impatient ego’. He added: ‘You have no spiritual values. Even in A Descant for Gossips, moral indignation was as far as you could go, but that was not enough. Spiritual values should have carried you just that extra distance …’
There was even worse to come:
You must just wrestle with yourself I suppose and stop being that bright girl who has escaped from the stuffed lounge suites to a rackety career of novel writing and sitting on the floor. (By this time you will have regretted bringing me the [manuscript] and yet another literary friendship will have been broken.) I think you should write nothing for a bit. Read. Have you read Recherche etc, Le Grand Meaulnes, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Ibsen, Chekhov, The Bible? You should read them all and many others … Read, and think, and listen to silence, shell the peas, not racing to begin the next chapter, but concentrating on the work in hand until you know what it is to be a pea – and drudge at the school, sleep with your husband, bring up your child. That is what I mean when I say ‘Living’, not going to parties and taking lovers. (I don’t suggest you have taken any!) Then, when you have become solid, you will write the kind of book you ought to write. You may even find you’ve come to believe in God – in spite of the fact that you are a Lapsed Catholic Soul – which I personally believe to be the root of all matters.20
For a Catholic girl, convent educated, and deeply absorbed in moral and ethical dilemmas since childhood, this was a devastating letter to receive. Astley knew that White could be difficult, and severe in his opinions, a forbidding personage if the mood took him. The poet Robert Gray described being greeted by White with pursed lips, a ‘mouth … like a folded warrant for someone’s arrest’.21 Worst for Astley was White’s linking of the faults in the writing to matters of belief and soul – the very nexus in which she was already trapped within her own family. The acid of the words etched themselves into her memory. This was one letter that Astley kept but refused to make public. The manuscript itself was the only one Astley ever burned.
White had taken some care to antic
ipate his friend’s hurt: ‘I hope you are all well and that you don’t take the criticism too hard. (One always does though), Yrs, Patrick.’ She liked the way White regarded her as a comrade-in-arms in the ‘rackety career of novel writing’ and she liked it enough to overlook a lot – for now. This is an excruciating example of how Astley was prepared to risk herself personally in the pursuit of critical validation.
Three months after White’s letter, in late June, came more distressing news: her father was close to death. Up until this point, Astley’s mother had reassured her that the ‘Blue Sisters’, Catholic home nursing nuns, had been calling in daily to help with his care, but Eileen gradually found managing at home nearly impossible. Cecil had taken a sharp downward turn: could Thea come to Brisbane urgently? Astley did, but she was too late to see him before he died on 24 June 1961, aged sixty-four.
The day after Astley arrived in Brisbane she and her mother went together to a 6.30 am Mass for Cecil. Both quietly attended the prayer before the formal funeral and later watched as the four pallbearers, Cecil’s colleagues, followed the other mourners to the graveside. Dark-suited men from ‘the profession’ chatted quietly in groups; Thea and Eileen were astonished by the large number of journalists who had come to pay their respects. Thea shook hands with Theodore Bray (later Sir Theodore), Cecil’s editor at The Courier-Mail. When they were dealing with the condolences, they found a telegram from Sir John Williams, who had been managing director of The Courier-Mail in Cecil’s time, and was now managing director of the Murdoch-owned Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, saying how much he had appreciated Cecil’s work for Queensland journalists. It was pleasing recognition for her father and his lifetime of ‘the daily grind’.
Phil had not come to the funeral: he was in England. He had been struggling with his mental state and had written to his superiors about this earlier in the year. Before Cecil died Philip had received an obliging reply telling him not to worry so much about his duties or the opinions of others.22 Thea sent him a cable announcing their father’s death.
Eileen was not one to spare her children the details of Cecil’s final days: when she wrote to Phil some days after Cecil’s death, she described the final ‘collapse of his bowels’ and his pain, without adequate relief, which had caused him ‘extreme distress’. Phil would have understood how Eileen’s reactions had affected Thea, in situ and forced to bear witness, but he himself hadn’t escaped.23 By November Phil was in an ‘enhanced emotional and nervous state’.24
Astley read her father’s public obituaries over the next couple of months. One was particularly important: in The Journalist, the house magazine of Cecil’s union, the Australian Journalists’ Association, Cecil was mourned as ‘one of the last eye-shade journalists’, with his death marking the end of an era. The article mentioned the newsroom in Warwick where Cecil had first worked at seventeen; he had sketched these same newsrooms for his daughter in his most recent letter, details that went into the novel he would never see. At the end of the obituary was a reference to herself and her books. Cecil had died ‘just five days too early to know that film actress Anne Baxter wants to make a film of one of Mrs Gregson’s novels, Descant for Gossips’.25 (An hour-long telemovie of the novel directed by Tim Burstall was made more than twenty years later, in 1983.)
Astley had a hunch Cecil would have appreciated The Well Dressed Explorer, alive as it was with the old-time routines and the hierarchies of the old press. In its way the novel was a tribute to the life of journalism Astley had known as a child. Cecil would no doubt have been awkward about her writing of an adulterous journalist, but would certainly have known men like him. But pride in his daughter’s achievements had been denied to Cecil. His death, coupled with Astley’s letter from Patrick White, were omens of vanishing approval from two men who greatly mattered to Astley.
When Astley plucked up courage to look at White’s letter again she remembered how the tone at the end had been rather practical and friendly in its way. He wrote as a ‘fellow writer’, when he suggested that she hang on with A&R, but be wary of signing up for the next book. Astley had come to suspect he was probably right about the faults of her rejected manuscript too – the votes were already in on that – and sending it to him had been a chance to see what he really thought of her. Hadn’t he taken the trouble – a lot of trouble – to consider her writing? She decided to be flattered.26
Astley drew strength from her own knowledge: she knew White was wrong about where she stood with her writing. She’d never been more certain of what she wanted to write about, even as she troubled over the lingua franca that she was fashioning. The deep domesticity White advocated did not seem to her the best path to a life of literature and the mind. Well, it was and it wasn’t. She knew what he meant: good writing can come from engaging with and describing the ordinary things of life. Yet Astley was still conscious of a gendered aspect to such remarks, could see the way women writers slipped awkwardly between mutually exclusive zones, being accorded a status as ‘less complex’ or of ‘less value’.
White had not seen that she intended to write about precisely this kind of compromise, yet she couldn’t see herself as a member of a vocal political movement about women. The ‘women’s movement’, as such, was yet to gain ground – it did not become forceful until later in the decade. In Australia, women were still not even allowed to drink in pubs. It was thirty years later before Astley openly acknowledged what still bothered her about feminism and writing, even though she was in a profession where she received about sixty-five per cent of the male rate for the same job. ‘I dislike the dichotomies – bringing out anthologies of women writers – nobody brings out anthologies of male writers,’ she declared.27
Astley’s novels were drawing their intensity from the conditions of her own life – they always had. She could no longer write about that single female figure stranded in inhospitable small Queensland towns because she was now fully engaged with the issues of middle life: child-rearing, earning a living, marriage. She had an endless internal debate about the place and value of marriage and family, the genealogy of character and human patterning, the drive to social conformity versus the will to break away from it. She wanted to write about the possibilities for human companionship in the search for love beyond the ‘hinterland of childhood’.28
Was marriage the most prized bond, or was there something else? Astley claimed that marriage – not necessarily her own marriage – was an ‘economic necessity’ for women. It was a subject for tart remarks, perhaps, but was infinitely more complex than that, as her next two novels, The Well Dressed Explorer and The Slow Natives, would prove. Still, Astley’s novels about ‘marriage alternatives’, the kind that would appeal to feminists, were years away. In 1961, her conservative married life in the suburbs did not make her gravitate to the emerging liberalism of the social climate that was becoming noticeable in other parts of the Western world.
How then can one explain the extremes in her writing, her tendency to typecast her characters’ morality almost to the point of caricature? It came from a deeper source than newly raised consciousness about the lot of women. Astley might have personally identified with her beloved misfit characters, but she couldn’t see anything of herself in the next generation of young people who saw themselves as outcasts. Her misfits were characters whose individuality – eccentricity – was threatened by the forces of social conservatism, the status quo and the powerful. The next generation – ‘hippies’ – were to Astley either lazy or egocentric ‘self-seekers’.29 She was happiest when ‘agin’.
The question of self-seeking was certainly on Astley’s mind but she struggled with the terms of such thinking: there had been no such thing as healthy self-interest in her own upbringing. Astley was simultaneously repelled and fascinated by the very concept. Self-interest in one form or another drives most of her characters’ behaviour.
Much of this apparently selfish behaviour was visible to Astley person
ally, as she watched infidelities and the subsequent demise of several long marriages in the tightly knit Dorset Street group. The women were usually left with the responsibility of the children – not much time for healthy self-interest there. Astley thought about the old questions: Did love and responsibility ever meet on equal terms? Was love self-sacrifice, the kind her mother talked about? With Cecil now gone, she could think about her parents’ marriage. Had that been an exercise in Eileen’s self-sacrifice? Still in her thirties, Astley wasn’t yet convinced, but it would be this single idea of Eileen’s that she expressed throughout her life.30
She knew that self-sacrifice hadn’t got Phil anywhere much. He was not managing his teaching easily at St Ignatius in Norwood, Adelaide, during what had been a dreadful year for him. There was talk of a move to Sydney and he was becoming deeply depressed. God, self-sacrifice, need, self-interest, sex, freedom, relationships – all now constantly preoccupied Philip’s sister too.
At the same time Astley found herself enjoying a new sexual frankness, entertaining others with dramatic outbursts about men and women. Ten years later the poet Fay Zwicky, who by then knew Astley well, could sense how a degree of what she termed ‘word starvation’ drove her. She was ‘satisfying her hunger for words in writing what she could [not] get in life’. Astley, Zwicky knew, could be ‘invasive in her studies of people … frightful about men sometimes … with an obsessive need to observe their worlds before they imploded’. Zwicky could see how Thea was ‘so sharp but didn’t want to appear sharp’.31