by Karen Lamb
In 1962 Astley repeated the social manoeuvre she had used with White, this time making an impromptu visit to the home of Thelma Forshaw who had written a positive review of The Well Dressed Explorer for The Sydney Morning Herald. They had known each other as young writers in Barjai and now Forshaw was also writing short stories Astley admired.21 This would be a more equal meeting of fellow writers than her approach to White. It would be a literary friendship begun in excited sympathy. For Astley, Forshaw was a perfect friend of the moment: a woman of letters but, like her, living a settled married life. She was also a caustic wit who bemoaned literature’s peripheral role in Australian culture. Given the attention Astley had been receiving in the press, a persistent nerviness in her demeanour made Forshaw eventually wonder what did lie ahead.
Astley had much to be hopeful about. Writing and publishing circles were small, which meant the networks of influence affecting the fate of books in the public domain were also tight. Beatrice Davis was the chair of the Miles Franklin Award committee for 1963 and The Well Dressed Explorer was shortlisted. It was a mere six years since Astley had received that first letter from Davis telling her she might be a ‘very good novelist indeed’.
The announcement came: she had won the award, to be shared equally with George Turner for The Cupboard under the Stairs. Later he became known for writing science fiction, but at this stage Turner was well known as a writer of literary fiction, producing a string of novels in the 1960s.
Astley climbed the stairs of the Rural Bank Building in Sydney to collect 250 pounds and a plaque. It was, perhaps, a moment in which to think about how the judges came to be split in their decision; it was natural to look around for her fellow recipient so she was disappointed not to see George Turner. She knew she would write to congratulate him – the only decent thing to do. The ‘after party’, she reassured him in her letter, was ‘dull’ – a nice gesture since Turner had been unable to afford to come.22 What she didn’t say (it would have sounded ungracious) was how dull the actual Miles Franklin Award plaque was, dowdy in its plain wood – a sombre memorial plate.
Some of the press coverage for the award had been disturbing. Astley had been compared to Grace Metalious, the American author of the popular novel Peyton Place. Much was being made of her married status and the fact that she was local and The Epping Roundabout was now claiming her as an ‘Epping writer’. Astley felt she was being publicly undermined; it was a kind of backlash to her success and she would spend much of 1963 feeling this way. She wrote to her friend Thelma Forshaw: ‘Still have not begun next book. I sit and brood and lay obsessional eggs all over the house … Since the reviews I find the neighbours icier than ever – or do I imagine this? Not that I need them – or do I?’23
The friendship with Forshaw was a good antidote to such feelings. Or was it? Astley’s general demeanour often made men uncomfortable and Thelma had reported that her husband, George, found Thea quite odd and a bit threatening, wondering of course whether they might find themselves rather thinly disguised in a novel. Astley wrote in her defence:
Thelma Chum, I laughed till I literally wept over this latest. Thank you, you silly chump for making a manic depressive laugh. Tell George he is bloody wrong and I observe you no more closely than I observe anyone and certainly have not the slightest intention of using you in a novel. So there. Doesn’t he approve of me. I am not a grand seducer and do not intend for you to deceive him, me, us, all pronouns, objective case … I merely crave an intelligent buddy. Can’t talk Vogue patterns and ninety ways with a meringue (That’s Patrick’s joke) all the time.24
The phrase an ‘intelligent buddy’, the put-down quip about domesticated femininity and the inclusion (with a nervy familiarity) of Patrick White’s name all show how much Astley needed to feel she was accepted. It was not only Forshaw whose friendship she could not be entirely sure of; the friendship with White was now also strained, if only in a mute sense. There were still phone calls and letters throughout 1962 and 1963. Even so, the anxiety and effort the friendship cost Astley comes through in this description of a dinner party not long after the publication of The Well Dressed Explorer:
The dinner at Saint Patrick’s was yummy. But felt Manoly slightly effer so slightly antagonistic. To punish him I helped Saint P do up the zipper on his windbreaker. Wow! (My dear, any time you need it renewed simply ask …) There was cold soup in cups and I disgraced everyone by prolettishly attempting to use a spoon instead of quaffing the muck like tea.
… He and Manoly have been losing thousands on the stocks and shares poker machines so should be bitter, but P was the most genial I have seen for a long time. And suddenly, tho I love him dearly, I DON’T CARE ANY MORE. I mean the friendship suddenly seems easy-pleasant. I don’t have mental post mortems, duzze want to be pals or duzznt he. Nice this way. 25
The business of ‘that letter’ from White of nearly two years prior stayed in the background, for there did seem to Astley a generosity in the friendship. She and White enjoyed each other and had a rapport. Dinners would end with Astley cross-legged on the floor, a quirk White and Manoly celebrated with a gift of a huge red and white striped drugget on their first visit to 44a. It was a kindness Astley found ‘melting’.26 White was overseas for most of 1963 and wrote her superb long letters describing his travels or sent a card virtually every month.
Astley was particularly pleased with White’s letter after she had won the Miles Franklin Award. He had picked up The Sydney Morning Herald at the office of the Australian consulate in Greece and wrote to say, ‘I’m glad you won some of it, even though it made you look sour – I’m sure it was only officially sour.’ White had, of course, been the first recipient in 1957. He and Manoly had been to a house in Kavala full of rugs and commented to each other, ‘Wouldn’t this be just the thing for Thea. No chairs, only rugs, so that you could start sitting on the floor right at the beginning.’27
Later in the year, when his play A Season at Sarsaparilla was running, he made sure that there were tickets waiting for her at the box office. Astley loved the performance but White was frank about its commercial loss: ‘It looks as though the lousy Australian public won’t leave their television sets for anything but My Fair Lady.’28 They shared a disillusionment with Australian cultural life. There was a certain kind of frisson to be had from bemoaning this – together as fellow sufferers – which both probably understood, a resigned repartee about the writing life in Australia.
The most important thing for Astley about White was now more personal. They had had many conversations about love, marriage, and selfishness. White shared his thoughts with her, including his thoughts about his Anglo-Saxon emotional repression, and knew she would understand. He had left Greece amid emotional farewells from Manoly’s family and had been forced to reflect on how different he was – he couldn’t join in. ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote, ‘that is what turned me into a writer – to get rid of my feeling through the bodies of other people.’29 No remark could have been more simpatico with Astley.
This did not mean White had abandoned the issue of her Catholicism and her writing that he had raised in his earlier letter about ‘The Little Lie’. He and Astley discussed Graham Greene – White found Brighton Rock ‘horrifyingly evil’ – and wrote that he was ‘not a buyer of these Catholic conflicts’. White could really tease; it was better not to react. He was now regularly referring to her as ‘a lapsed Catholic lass’, but taken the right way, the phrase could sound like an endearment, couldn’t it? The fact that White hated ‘any kind of pretending, avoidance of the realities’ brought him and Astley closer together. But she was always and forever sensitive to perceived or imagined slights, and there was still the sense that some of these were slipping through.
Laurie Collinson, her old friend from Barjai, copped his own drubbing from White for his criticism of the painter Sidney Nolan. White dismissed Collinson in a letter to Astley.30 Astley must have wondered if the end of her own
friendship with White was also nigh, so easy did it seem for White to be critical in this way. White was not quite right about how ‘lapsed’ the Catholic lass really was; Astley still attended local Mass with Ed, though he attended the local non-Catholic state primary school and would later go to Epping Boys’ High. In the late 1960s Ed would also be confirmed, with Tom Keneally acting as his sponsor. Jack, officially accepted in ‘the flock’ but not having had to convert, never attended. Phil’s personal trials had led to another mission overseas: his love of the Church’s liturgy, music and ceremony made him fit for Benedictine life, or so it was thought. In 1963 the letterbox at 44a could be an oddly contested space as anti-Catholic postcards and letters from White mingled with those from someone questioning his vocation as a priest.
Astley was always mindful of Eileen’s reactions, especially concerning her writing career. In April Jack had waited nearby, tense, as Thea opened the envelope with the familiar handwriting. It contained a huge surprise: her mother congratulating her on the Miles Franklin win, ‘I expect you are feeling very pleased with yourself.’31 It was, perhaps, still one step away from a frank congratulation but as Eileen had been fielding various media enquiries herself, and seen the announcement on the ABC and a paragraph in The Courier-Mail, she was immersed in her daughter’s success. In the flush of this public favour, the earlier marked-up copy of Descant became unmentionable. Eileen had other things to worry about. Phil was becoming ill with depression again.
The seriousness of Phil’s situation was of great concern to Thea and satirical writing was her own way of clearing her mind. In this spirit she wrote to Forshaw about a ‘convent novel’ the two of them might write:
… How’s about a series of notes exhangee [sic] by two convent school girls, Thellie and Theie, (other names, of course) just busting out all over with gamps and coifs and throbbing inuendoes [sic] going on under the veils. Could be a gimmick. Don’t think any one has tackled that line. Maybe we could be in separate convents, parted for the semester, smuggling some letters through and some not. Faint story line, developing hinted at scandals of appointment, dominance of horsey nuns and so on. We could work out details and then work roughly to a plan, actually sending each other the letters, waiting for replies, and getting spontaneity that way. Do I hear you throwing up? Is this crummy? Think it has possibilities myself. Nothing like it done here or elsewhere as far as I know. Then we will rush gloriously neck and neck into print with Faber and Secker and Warburg who love off-beat thingos. No illustrations by request and it will sell like Franny and Zooey, I know it.
Listen, Forshaw, I read your letters and they are literally flashing opal mines of wit. You are seriously one of the funniest, no. THE funniest women I have ever met. All I could do would be the stodgy chummo who sparks off the old unpredictable. Think it over, shook [sic]. Could be therapeutic as well.
Love, you old clot,
Thea.32
Astley was, in fact, busily writing a novel (The Slow Natives) into which she would pour scenes just like this. In that novel, set in a convent, Sister Matthew and Sister Celestine confront each other with their ‘inappropriate’ fantasies about the novel’s principal character, Bernard, a music examiner who is visiting the convent.
To Thelma Forshaw all of it was beginning to seem a little more than the search for an ‘intelligent buddy’. Astley may have sensed disapproval in the air, for on her next visit she declared: ‘Forshaw, you are a militarist and a fascist.’ The attack seemed without provocation – some forgotten offhand remark? But Forshaw later reflected she and Astley were ‘never really simpatico’.33 Was Astley poor at reading emotional signals? Did she need something of others that they did not necessarily need as badly as she did? Her compulsiveness and the inability to deal with the consequences would yet cost her dearly.
People were still attracted to Astley as a vital conversationalist, finding her attractive with a great sense of fun. This was rather at odds with a perception of her in press articles as hard-bitten and anti-men. Some men, such as Thelma Forshaw’s husband, found her hard to take, but plenty didn’t. In fact, Astley liked men. At thirty-seven she was still very conscious of her looks and naturally flirtatious. Astley was attractive; her hair was full, had a natural soft wave and was a rich brown. She seemed to need almost no make-up and for a long time looked younger than she was. Her sense of dress was fresh, in so far as she preferred a casual look, plain or checked shirts and pants, but the style suited her easy way of movement and her slim figure. Astley could be disarmingly candid about the renaissance of her social and sexual self beyond her marriage and the suburbs.
Life at 44a Dorset Street was now schismatic: domestic routines harboured unquiet energies. Astley still felt the eyes of the neighbours on her but cared less and less about that. In fact, this reaction only made her want to be more outrageous. The house was divided by silence, between the early morning typewriter tapping and the evening music. When a neighbour mentioned to Astley one day that it was a shame Jack was sitting alone at night, she found herself ‘cut off’ for months.34
Astley was now utterly preoccupied with writing her new novel, The Slow Natives, which would be published in 1965. She’d taken a joke of Ed’s for the title: ‘What’s that black stuff between elephants’ toes? Slow natives.’ As always, the ideas in the new book were exaggerated – ‘overblown’ – versions of what she was feeling. She was writing about the ‘silence of long marriage’ and it was absorbing a great deal of her disillusionment.35 She still badgered A&R about the ill-fated ‘The Little Lie’ but as Explorer had won the Miles Franklin, Davis could argue more convincingly that it was not ‘particularly good tactics’ to follow that success with what she saw as a lesser book. Astley let it go.36
Friends and literary acquaintances were treated to more frivolous asides. A publicity photo arrived at A&R with the quip: ‘Glorious photos of me with my wrinkles smoothed out and my ego trimmed en brosse …’ Astley was already (as if to get in first) on her way to becoming ‘middle-aged coy’ about her age.37
Another year was coming to an end. She was looking forward to seeing Hal Porter at a cocktail party in Sydney to launch Australian Book Week. When they met at the Australia Hotel it would be on pleasingly equal terms. The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony had just been released and Astley and Porter could now enjoy each other’s success. She would not forget Porter’s support of her from the start. The Miles Franklin Award gave her a new confidence, but it also reinforced how important literary friendship and mentorship were and had always been to her.
The year’s end brought an unexpected and sour parting from her most important mentor. Astley had been rattled when she heard that Geoffrey Dutton was not going to take The Well Dressed Explorer for Penguin paperbacks. She found it inexplicable as a commercial decision – always her complaint. Astley wasn’t thinking about the quality of the novel; she was in the midst of her old argument with Beatrice Davis about literary fiction and its commercial prospects. But when she called Patrick White to let off steam, she misread the dynamics. White was a longtime friend of Dutton’s. His on-the-spot reaction was to condemn the book itself, making the kinds of blunt remarks she had first encountered in his 1961 letter.38 It opened the old wound.
In twenty years Astley would have the satisfaction of Penguin republishing the novel, and Dutton himself would have long received his marching orders from White. However, White had been irritated by Astley for some time, ‘lamenting the fact that she lived in a remote suburb and was forced to miss so much’. In 1964 he wrote to someone who would understand his disaffection with her – Laurie Collinson – the very person he had roundly criticised only a year before: ‘I have always found she resented anybody’s having a vacuum cleaner until she had one herself, when she had, she forgot about the vacuum cleaner and went on to something else. I found resentment building up over our move to Sydney, as though we might be doing better for ourselves …’39 White’s reaction put
an end to the Astley–White friendship for decades.
At 44a the routines of life enslaved and liberated. Only the previous year, after trying to write The Slow Natives in her holiday break, Astley had been like the prisoner who misses her chains. She had written to Forshaw that she couldn’t wait for teaching to consume her energies.40
Just one year later, at the end of 1964, things were very different. Astley decided to take two weeks’ leave from Cheltenham Girls’ High – an exceptional act for her – to finish the final draft.
She had now been writing continuously for seven years, under pressure from herself, from Davis, and even from the public success she was starting to enjoy as a novelist. And now, as she was immersed in the last stages of The Slow Natives, Astley found herself beset by a series of irreducible anxieties. There was the state of her own marriage – ‘hypothetically’ marriage itself; the end of two significant literary friendships, one with White and the other with Forshaw; Phil’s worrying predicament; her troubled relationship with her mother and Catholicism. How would that survive a book set in a convent full of priests and nuns behaving badly? She was also still agitated by what she saw as the slipshod treatment of writers by publishers, which had affected even that all-important relationship with Davis at A&R. By 1965, not only marriage, but Astley’s whole existence was a state of ‘armed neutrality’.