by Karen Lamb
But Astley did sometimes ‘appear sharp’. ‘When Thea … called in for coffee,’ recalled a neighbour, ‘she would burst forth with the bluntest of statements about men being unable to cope with “women’s needs”,’ and even about [her] and Jack. ‘He’s dried up,’ she said one day.32 Not long after, at a party one night Jack (after many whiskies) confessed to a troubled physical side to the marriage.
If it was Freud who commented in as many words that ‘in the world of sexuality the weather is always bad’, then it is a style of remark Astley would have loved. Yet for her and Jack, married for almost fifteen years, the sexual weather had often been good. A new cooler air stream that had begun to drift through the marriage threatened only a cold spell. Then and for many years to come, Jack and Thea seemed very wedded but estranged. Their relationship could seem abrasive, with full and frank disclosure the order of the day.
The ‘Jack and Thea’ show was not to everyone’s taste and could be quite confronting. Ed, their son, took almost a lifetime to understand this marriage organism and how it survived. He said: ‘By the time I was old enough to understand, their relationship seemed fairly prickly; they bickered a lot. In the early1960s they were fighting a lot, especially on holidays … mostly about petty irritants … but you got the sense that was not really what it was about.’33
Ed grew to see that both his parents were short-tempered, with Jack particularly ‘irritable and goading Thea, who would flare up, boiling over without caring what she was saying or of the consequences’.34 Did Jack provoke Thea because he knew she needed a safety valve? It is unclear. Thea and Jack were not openly physically affectionate with one another and maybe both understood, certainly better than a child could, that antagonism can be a form of sexual intimacy.
Long marriage is about more than years; buried within it is the accumulated understanding of the unsaid. Thea and Jack went in for a peculiar kind of bickering, an armed neutrality that they both understood. In antagonism they could be the co-conspirators of old. When Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became a hit stage show in the mid-1960s, Thea and Jack rejoiced in the version of themselves they saw in George and Martha’s volatile sniping. They saw their best chance of survival as a couple in a naked, if excoriating, honesty. Thea liked to think that Jack gave as good as he got.
For Astley, the only kind of marriage to countenance was between equals, conducted by negotiation and agreement, as theirs had always been. While they argued over money, there was no argument about their equal contributions, and they were meticulous about this. It was certainly unusual for onlookers: Astley would return from shopping with an itemised list, precise calculations of ‘owings’ for Jack. Around the house, on the kitchen bench, tucked away in drawers, at the back of Thea’s notebooks, were similar running tallies. Ed began to notice that his parents always referred to objects, and even houses, as individual possessions: ‘that’s Jack’s’ or that’s ‘Thea’s house’.35 It was odd, but like the division of upstairs/downstairs into Jack’s and Thea’s spaces, it was absolutely mutual.
In the early 1960s Astley began to seek out something of the same uncompromising candour in other friendships. It was hard to find and it might have been a strange pathway to a reappraisal of her bond with Jack.
In The Paper Chase Hal Porter had described ‘the versions of self compelled into existence by others’: Astley already understood the social falsehoods enacted in the name of friendship.36 What Astley craved was escape from her own life routines, yet she disliked the pretension of the literary ‘game of the writer-taking-himself-seriously seriously’.37
Astley was now very comfortable with female friendship; being a mother and at home had made that possible. Men mattered equally to her but only certain kinds of men, as with women. Even Beatrice Davis was not ‘a writer’ nor a creative person in that sense, and talk with thinkers and writers was what Astley most needed. Even as she clung to the stability of her marriage she was fascinated, even obsessed, by partnerships, particularly how intellectual or creative women managed marriage. Colleagues at Cheltenham became used to Thea nudging conversation towards what they assumed were her own neurotic concerns. A caustic remark about men and women was enough to set things off. Astley’s colleagues saw how intrigued she was by Witting’s apparently happy marriage to a non-intellectual partner; it was hard for those listening not to draw inferences about the Astley marriage.38
Behaviour is always fashioned by present needs, and sexuality and sexual freedom were never far from Astley’s thoughts. However, though she openly spoke of such things she certainly didn’t want to write in an explicit way about sex, not about the ‘calisthenics’ of sex but of ‘what is in the heart’ and about ‘the corroding effect that sexual relationships have’.39 It gave Astley a necessary distance from which to view the sexual mores of her own upbringing. Sexuality in her writing is ever-present, but as a drive (and a foil) to character. Privately, Astley was in the grip of her own scepticism: she wrote sombrely to Porter (whom she felt at least understood these things) about how the age-old and virtually unchangeable contracts of sexual inequality were a ‘constant in society’.40
That inequality, Astley knew, was expressed in hypocritical double standards about female sexuality. Women of her generation had been infected by the same views; she had grown up seeing that women with ideas were a social curiosity, not feminine, not perhaps quite female. Even Miles Franklin believed in sexual continence as the source of intellectual energy and had been amazed by Dymphna Cusack’s female characters with sex drives the equal of men’s.41 Astley knew she had not shaken this particular monkey off her back: it was impossible for her to think of sex without revisiting those restrictive edicts about sex that had been part of her young adult life and her Catholic upbringing. This left her in her late thirties struggling with her own feminine identity, complicated by her emerging social identity as a writer. Astley would remember the extraordinary power of this confusion: ‘[If women] did express any thoughts then either no attention was paid to them or they were considered brash and aggressive … women writers were ignored, or whatever women did was ignored … I don’t even know how women think. I’ve been neutered by society so I write as a neuter.’42
Astley had spent the last two years thinking obsessively about marriage and infidelity while writing The Well Dressed Explorer. Being ‘neutered’ as a writer was the last thing she planned for herself when she asked important questions of her novel: Was there an ethical way to commit adultery within a marriage and avoid deceit? Is discretion really secrecy? There was no way around the fact that women with children were not free in the way that men were: single parenthood was becoming more common but she could see the enormous post-divorce burdens for women, even when the women made the decision to leave. If she did that herself, she knew it would be difficult to write.
9
I merely crave an intelligent buddy
I merely crave an intelligent buddy. Can’t talk Vogue patterns and ninety ways with a meringue.
Thea Astley to Thelma Forshaw, 19631
Astley saw herself as trapped; dissatisfactions bled into each other. Jack’s strength and stability did little to ward off her unhappiness. She still felt let down by Beatrice Davis and A&R over ‘The Little Lie’ and White’s drubbing was hard to entirely forget; there was Cecil’s death and anxiety about her continuing relationship with Eileen. At least this fourth book, The Well Dressed Explorer, was to be published in the New Year, so 1962 could be a good year. Davis had given her every reason to believe in herself as a writer but Astley started to grumble about the ‘unbusinesslike’ treatment by management at A&R. There was just the whiff, it seemed to her, of writers coming last in the list of priorities – especially with the forward planning of publishing timelines and publicity. Astley also resented that the important decisions in planning and marketing books were made by men.
Astley wrote a detailed letter of complaint to A&R’s managing dire
ctor George Ferguson before the publication of The Well Dressed Explorer. As a relative newcomer to authorship, with two short novels that had received good reviews but had not been great marketing successes, Astley’s letter must have been startling, for despite adding to numerous complaints, it set out the issues with confronting acuity. Publishers, let alone male publishers, were not so accustomed to demands from a ‘literary’ writer asking them to respect the commercial contract of publication. Astley was sick of the lowly commercial status accorded to all literary fiction and try as she might, Beatrice Davis had not reconciled her to this in any way. Astley thought A&R’s ‘poor sales treatment’ was deliberate and believed that publishers did not reward authors adequately for their work, while at the same time – paradoxically – they failed to exploit it commercially.2 These unhappy arrangements between publisher and writer seemed to her another version of what she called ‘the tacit war between men and women’.3
Within five years, in November of 1967, she was saying all of this to a live television audience. An ABC panel, which included publisher Sam Ure Smith and George Ferguson, then regarded as the doyen of Australian publishers, joined Thea and Tom Keneally, representing writers. Interviewer Bill Peach was enquiring about Australian books and the publishing industry; he asked Astley, ‘Are you blaming publishers for what is really a small public demand?’ Astley replied, ‘Well, I’m not sure about this. It’s sort of a love-hate relationship I have with my publisher. I find publishers like husbands – whenever you ask about money they become cagey, you know, rather evasive, you know. I feel I have a certain indebtedness to my publisher because they took a risk on me in the beginning.’4
It was a fair retrospective assessment of the mixed feelings she had developed by the early 1960s, which represented what many writers also felt. In publishing male power was entrenched at senior level with few staff changes. Astley wondered whether what she saw as A&R’s lack of serious commitment to her as a writer was because of some attitudes about men in her novels. And the division she saw between the literary and commercial aspects of publishing became a lifelong irritation. It made for awkward moments in her relationship with Davis when those things were on her mind. Instead, she wrote of the restraint in expressing dissatisfaction: ‘Knowing you and liking you makes it extremely difficult for me to ring up and go crazy or write and go crazy, both manifestations which seem to be a natural part of the publisher-author relationship.’5
When Astley began announcing that she had ‘never had many critical reviews from the literary people’ – not true then or ever – she was thinking of A&R’s lacklustre approach to the promotion of literary titles.6
A&R were, in fact, convinced that Astley’s next novel was a considerable advance in maturity and technique. Davis had already been at pains to point this out and would later tell Astley that The Well Dressed Explorer was the novelist’s ‘first big break’.7 But Astley was still vulnerable and moody. She was dangerously tempted to compare her achievements with others – something that never worked for her. In 1957, when she had been rejected for a first Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship grant, she said she was ‘embarrassed’ to be competing alongside Xavier Herbert.8 Later, when Amy Witting ‘cracked the New Yorker’ with her short stories, Astley wondered whether she, too, should concentrate on short stories for a while.9
This volatility was now very much part of Astley’s response to life. The publication of The Well Dressed Explorer would bring out the best and the worst of it. The novel, with George Brewster as the male protagonist, was described by one reviewer as ‘a scarifying and richly amusing portrait of a completely selfish lover’ and would establish her as a satirist of sexual mores, but not without cost.10
Jessica Anderson’s novel An Ordinary Lunacy was published only a year later and dealt with many of the same themes, but was more concerned with female vulnerability – especially of one of its main characters, the beautiful Isobel, doomed to male disrespect. In Astley’s case, her view of men attracted negative commentary. Even favourable reviews by writers Kylie Tennant and Thelma Forshaw saw the book in similar terms. Tennant observed that Astley ‘gives a woman’s view of the life of the Australian man, sweeping over his small and feeble pretences like a crown-fire, exploding and crackling in a withering, twisting verbiage, and leaving a devastated area which was once a comfortable, philandering journalist’.11
Tennant’s brilliant turns of phrase must have pleased Astley. Male reviewers, unsurprisingly, saw the novel very differently; the main character’s behaviour was ‘quite comprehensible in terms of class, occupation and upbringing’; her writing was ‘grey puritanism’ devised purely ‘in order to condemn’.12 It had the ring of a very personal public censure. Astley took it to heart. This transported her back to a crucial problem she had always had with her writing: people misread the compassionate spirit of the work. Astley always argued that she felt enormously for her characters, and expected readers and critics to intuit this. Like Miles Franklin, she often felt that critics ‘[didn’t] see the underside or the innerness’ of what she was attempting.13
This reaction was particularly stinging to Astley since the novel was the extension of one of her first short stories (‘Cubby’), one that meant a lot to her emotionally, the story of a teenage boy who is lonely, lost beyond ‘the hinterland of childhood’. He tries to recapture the ‘primary magic’ of his first love. This was the child-in-the-man who became George Brewster, her unlikeable philanderer in the novel. Casting him as such put Astley in the way of being labelled a ‘man-hater’, as some women writers were then. In fact, an adversarial vision of all human relationships now had her in its grip.
In The Well Dressed Explorer relationships are cannibalistic, formed in dependence, a fusion of unhealthy selflessness and cowardly abuse. If the novel reveals an unrewarding coupling of men and women, it expresses exactly how Astley was feeling herself. Power in relationships fascinated her – that world of ‘feet, boots and mats’.
The relationship between Patrick White and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, intrigued Astley. At dinner one night, trying and failing to be arch, she blurted to Manoly: ‘If you had married, what sort of woman would you choose?’ Astley got an answer to appease and disguise: ‘I would have married her for her brains and lived happily thereafter.’14 The words left unsaid – love, self-sacrifice, service – were distilled into the stunned silence.
Her relationship with Jack had deteriorated. Astley now talked openly – more hypothetically than directly – about what she might do about this. She had heard from Eileen about being the child of a single parent, and she did not wish to inflict this on Ed, so she was not considering divorce. Nevertheless, visitors to 44a Dorset Street were treated to a startling monologue about her marriage. Jack kept his distance by listening to music upstairs, or was outside raking leaves in silence. Astley would say – just loud enough for Jack to hear – ‘There’s no way we can divorce because our lives are too complicated, our assets are too complicated.’15 Jack, used to these utterances, said nothing.
All distractions became a blessing to Astley. She had been impressed with some articles written about depression by a New Zealand journalist, who then sent her a letter admiring her work. Jack declared, ‘Oh, that’s one of Thea’s fantasy love affairs’, ‘a figment of her imagination’.16 When the admirer wrote of coming to ‘Sydney the sin city’, Astley’s friend Barbara Abouchar couldn’t help thinking how naïve Thea was in failing to see sexual intent in this, but she knew her friend lacked that kind of experience. Astley had never really seen herself as especially sexually attractive to men, but she liked to invest something sexual in her intellectual engagement with them.
The marriage of George and Alice Brewster in The Well Dressed Explorer is similarly stalled, but any sexual liaison outside the marriage is short-lived and generally no more satisfying. Sexual unfaithfulness is accepted with resignation or bemusement. When all around her marriages were falling a
part amid jealousy, hurt, fights, and tears, it was perverse of Astley to write in this way. Her work became a lifelong dialectic about the mythology of romance, love and marriage and the delusions that sustain them, and by this stage nobody was more troubled by them than she was.
Testing things to the extreme, playing with reversals, was a freedom she could enjoy in fiction. In The Well Dressed Explorer Astley creates a wife so resigned to her husband’s sexual forays that she gives her blessing in a letter; the husband of another of his conquests comforts his unfaithful wife. Sex displaces the mind in a disturbing way; Astley was interested in this ‘antithesis between the violence of sexual communication’ and ‘this other intimacy required by love’.17 Thinking of the early days of her own marriage, that need for intimacy was really the one that interested her now; it was like looking for ‘primary magic’. There was no going back, or was there?
Her writing was energised by this despair, possessed a dark exuberance. Astley was following her emotional journey, giving it shape in a protean prose that moved as she moved, from anger to compassion, and back to anger. In a few years a similar ‘not-niceness’ would make the poet Sylvia Plath a feminist icon.
In fact, Astley was developing an emotional lingua franca: hurricanes of adjectives whipped into tumultuous fury, then dumped into silence. Boredom – always a subject that attracted her – could be delivered furioso. In this she was like Christina Stead, who in answer to the question of why she wrote once said: ‘My own life is too calm for my energy.’18
Life at 44a Dorset Street was anything but calm, but it was predictable. Beatrice Davis had told Astley that she could be a confronting person to meet, making Astley self-conscious as well as defensive. She had challenged: ‘Do I terrify people?’19 She knew she seemed brash to some people, but candour, she would have argued, was not aggression. She was underestimating her effect on others. Her theatrics were for her about a special form of ‘being’ in friendship, with women and men of like mind, of being herself with others. Patrick White saw these internal struggles surface: he had picked up quickly the sense that here was a woman craving intellectual and social ease beyond marriage and suburban ritual yet anchored to much of it.20 Invisibility was more than a matter of being female and ‘writing as a neuter’ – as Astley would term it: despite her socialising with writers at times, she was still capable of feeling left out of the hub of literary and cultural life.