by Karen Lamb
Any female contemporaries who dismissed Astley as being of no special interest to men had been talking to the wrong men. Astley was not conventionally good-looking, but many men did find her appealing. She had always had a strong physical presence, being slim with easy body movements. Even in her hand gestures, or the modulation in her voice when she delivered an unforgettable remark, there was a frank sensuality.
This was not the self she necessarily presented in her public appearances as a novelist, where she was careful with her diction, but she was toying with ideas and consequences in her books that were very relevant to her own life. She had after all created a husband in Natives who condones his wife’s affair, accepting it as both cause and symptom of his own inertia.
The manuscript of The Slow Natives was now ready. Astley always put her work through several drafts, so that by the time it reached Beatrice Davis at A&R it had been reworked many times. The esteemed editor’s faith in Astley was now well and truly paying off. The letter came back straightaway: Davis considered the new book a ‘technical advance’ and Astley’s first ‘properly constructed drama’. Astley’s keen eye would have settled on the postscript: Davis was pleased with the ‘more sympathetic tone’.26 She read on and discovered a ‘but’: Davis found the ‘happy ending’ (the disaffected youth loses a leg but regains his parents’ attention) too literal and over-explained. Astley bristled. She didn’t agree and felt she had earned the right to have the words and story the way she intended. As she had before in a similar moment (with White and ‘The Little Lie’), she decided to seek a second opinion – this time from Amy Witting.
Witting was strong enough to openly agree with Davis, not her friend, but Astley still backed herself, and stayed friends with Witting as well. In another seven years she would dedicate her favourite book, The Acolyte, to her: ‘For Amy Witting, who also knows how the work goes naked to the weather’.27 They both did. The Slow Natives went to print unaltered late in 1965. Astley watched the reviews with interest to see whether any of the critics said anything about the ending. Only one reviewer expressed concern about the novel concluding ‘a shade too prettily’.28
She was now seen as a writer of the ‘Australian suburban agony’: serious, stylish and amusing. She was hailed as ‘world class’ and the novel as ‘brazenly stylish’ and ‘limned with wit’. Only the prose style was still the sticking point – ‘prone to pointless extravagance’.29
‘Style’ notwithstanding, Natives won both the 1966 Miles Franklin and Melbourne Moomba prize for fiction, a combined sum of $2,000. This was about a third of an average yearly income, enough to buy any large household item, and a good windfall to buffer the cost of the in-ground pool that had been completed only the previous year. These were now serious sums of money for ‘wage slaves’ but Astley had lost none of her resentment about the financial exploitation of writers. Success meant that she had a chance to advertise these deficiencies: ‘I make only $400 from the sales of my books – if I’m lucky,’ she told one reporter. On the subject of her reputation, she commented, ‘You never build a reputation here by winning prizes.’30 The prizes were hardly hurting hers.
The prevailing view of her prose style, her tendency to ‘sprinkle’ novels with ‘words that need dictionary interpretations’ didn’t go away.31 Astley was now personally affronted by this reaction, claiming high standards of literacy in her defence, but her views on the virtues of ‘style’ were and would always be about the poetry of the word, the importance of making the best and most particular words dance together in new ways. Turning meaning around, to make a perspective swivel until it appears fresh – fundamentally what metaphor does – is what Astley regarded as all-important.
It was about this time, around 1966, that the young writer Tom Keneally first met Astley as a fellow guest at a literature conference at the University of New England. She had just won her second Miles Franklin Award. He was struck by this well-known writer who was absolutely ‘obsessed with word play and imagery’. Minutes into their conversation, Thea leaned towards him and asked, ‘Can I have that?’32 That was a word, metaphor or odd phrase he had hardly remembered using but he could see that it was being stored up for the next book.
From Astley’s point of view the meeting was well timed as Keneally understood completely her obsession with style – even if he thought she took criticism too personally. They both belonged to a group of writers within a generation for whom style was paramount. It was ‘Patrick White territory but also Randolph Stow, Hal Porter’ and, Keneally knew, himself.33
They were straining to conjure a mystical and visionary world with the use of evocative imagery but this way of writing was rapidly earning the dubious reputation as an Australian ‘malaise of excess’.34
A long critical overview of Astley’s novels by J. M. Couper appeared in Meanjin in 1967 and she eagerly bought a copy. It was the kind of serious attention she had been waiting for, but it was not what she had hoped to read:
The writer is still succumbing to the temptations of writing, straining after terms and metaphors that are picked up like pretty shells, for they do not serve what she has to say … It is possible that in Astley’s style the distraction does serve her, not only in the pleasure of writing poetically. Heavy handed and hammering as her metaphors may be, they also serve as a mask to the nakedness of her pessimism …
It is unevenness that mars Thea Astley’s novels, and it is caused by straining after effect to catch a suspected loss of attention, an application of zeugma, a bizarre metaphor, poetical fine writing, willful flashback, thought impressions by means of a mockery of cliché, the escape of any character in exigency into cultural parade, or of the plot into sensation.35
This was adding to a chorus of past censure: Beatrice’s early warning about ‘preciousness’; White’s 1961 letter; any and all of her less flattering reviews over the years. Astley had grown up loving poets such as Hopkins and Baudelaire who believed in the auditory imagination as the most direct route to melodious writing and therefore to the heart. Astley saw words, poetry and music as a continuum and would have loved Ezra Pound’s remark that ‘music begins to atrophy when it gets too far from dance … poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music’.36 Astley, like Hopkins, was trying to get at the essence of a thing. When she wrote she lived with the rhythms of the physical world, heard them pulsate in the heads of her characters. Character and landscape were inextricably linked in her Dream Country.
To Astley all of it was symphonic, as close to the ‘essence’ of human life as language can get, the reason she had always loved the sound-sense poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Why did nobody seem to understand?
She was despondent. The people reading her scores were deaf to the music. Was it because she was a woman? Astley thought of other Australian writers – men – whose prose was not so different, but they were not criticised as she was. More than twenty years later she was still bitter: ‘I used to get a lot of criticism … when the most ornately rococo prose was coming out of people like Hal Porter. I don’t know whether it was a sex thing or not – people just fell back with joy at Hal’s prose, and I seemed to drive people into a frenzy of rage. Maybe I should have been called Theo or Jerry or something.’37
But despite this, Astley was receiving the kind of recognition that she wished for. A long personal letter arrived from noted Australian poet and critic Arthur Phillips praising The Slow Natives as ‘a bloody good book which kept me out of bed too late’.38 Other letters arrived from readers, the first she had received. Such careful commentary on her work by ‘ordinary folk’ – as she would call her admirers – was a pleasure Astley would come to appreciate more and more.
The most surprising letter, though, came from her past. Her old teacher Sister Mary Martin asked Astley whether she would like to write the preface of a book for teachers about how they might inculcate the principles of Christianity in their teaching. This was bizarre: per
haps Sister Mary hadn’t read The Slow Natives, set as it was in a convent of deranged nuns and priests. Pious folk had already criticised it, though she hadn’t heard a word from her mother.
If Astley really believed she had been neutered by society, she soon discovered there was much interest in her ‘female’ point of view. These were to become rather excruciating showdowns for her, struggling as she was with contradictory thoughts about her own life. No, she said, she didn’t hate men. She just thought they were ‘illogical and devious, and emotional exploiters of women’. At the same time she would hate to see Australia become a matriarchy. Under the pressure to justify her words, Astley would often pick up speed, running with her argument to bag an entire collection of often unrelated ills. She railed against the new permissiveness of ‘arty’ parents; about ‘women’s new approach to sex morality sponsored by the Pill’. She didn’t believe ‘sex equality’ could really exist because she thought ‘most women still want their men dominant and virile’. Men, for their part, had to accept that women ‘had ideas’ – were not just ‘wives or mistresses’.39 It was a farrago of ambiguity and defensiveness.
Astley looked like a most reluctant feminist, despite a lifetime of bemoaning the lot of women. Her ambivalence was complicated by an inbuilt distaste for dogma, which made it hard for Astley to say ‘yes’ to anything that looked like an ‘-ism’. The effect was to make her seem more conservative than she actually was, for behind these postures of grievance were softness and vulnerability. However, these shadows of self-doubt were hidden, at least for the moment.
In 1966 Robert Drewe was a twenty-one-year-old journalist on his first job at the Melbourne Age when he met the prize-winning novelist for a newspaper story. The woman he met was very self-conscious, obsessed with her age and looks; there had been several phone calls about the best photograph to be used in the profile.40
He tempted Astley into what he suspected was a self-commentary: ‘Women are very sad things when you think about it. When they reach forty-five or so their marriages are usually pretty arid and they command no respect in any sphere at all.’ (Astley was forty-one.) ‘They aren’t sex objects, as Western society demands, any more and they usually have no intellectual pursuits. If they are intelligent they’re regarded as screwballs.’41
This was not the mood Thea was in when Tom Keneally met her at the University of New England. Thea Astley, he thought, was a ‘very good-looking woman’. She was accompanied by the well-known political journalist and author Don Whitington, who was not himself a guest at the event.42
Thea found it necessary to explain to him that she was not really ‘with’ her husband, leaving the young Keneally to decipher exactly what that might mean.43 For most of the next five years afterwards, whenever Keneally saw Thea socially, she was nearly always with Don. As chance would have it, not long after the conference meeting the whole Keneally family moved near the Astley home in Epping, so they would be close neighbours as well as friends.
Don Whitington was fifteen years older than Thea, and had divorced some years before, in 1961, leaving the marriage for another woman – but that had not lasted. At this time he was a well-known public figure, widely considered courteous and highly principled. Don had published novels, written plays, and his lively group biography of Australian prime ministers, titled The Rulers, had been published in 1964. He revered Astley professionally and respected her achievements. As a writer himself, he certainly knew her worth. They could also share the experience of the ‘settled suburban existence’. Don had spent the last few years of his marriage rushing between hard drinking after work with other journalists to quiet domestic weekends with family. Thea understood why he wanted a life more about ideas, the arts.
Don was shy, awkward even, and had a stutter. It was an appealing combination: worldliness and vulnerability. He was slightly built, not particularly tall at less than six feet and not good-looking, but Thea could see why women were attracted to this attentive, patient listener. There was nothing predatory in their encounter; here was a man who appreciated and listened to women, was not afraid if they had ideas. Don liked attractive women, but it was clear to Thea that he did not require them to be silent.
Knowing what she did about the ‘silence of long marriage’ Thea listened sympathetically to the story of his divorce. Don was very involved with his third child, Richard, nine years younger than his other children. While Richard’s siblings were past school years, he was still a teenager. He and Don were living in their small recently purchased terrace in the eastern Sydney suburb of Woollahra. Don and Thea swapped stories about teenage boys, though Ed had barely entered his teens.
Don was in his mid-fifties, while Astley was just over forty, and he had seen much more of life than she had. He had had many jobs, including whatever work he could find throughout the Depression. He was heavily involved in the Australian Journalists’ Association with a fierce regard for journalists’ working conditions, issues about which Cecil Astley had been passionate throughout his daughter’s childhood.
Astley admired her new friend’s determination to write books, not being, as her own father had been, a slave to the daily grind of news deadlines. He and Astley shared a sense of the world being composed of ‘feet, boots and mats’, a larrikin sense of humour and deep empathy for the less well off. Don Whitington, in short, had the potential to enlarge and fulfil Thea’s life in new ways. Their relationship would not be easy, given Astley’s other loyalties, but they had a strong and mutual sense that it might be worth the effort.
By early 1966, on Friday nights, Don and his son Richard would drive from Woollahra to Epping, a long trip across Sydney. Richard recalls that his father never explained why this was happening. It just became the accepted way: have an evening meal, listen to music, sometimes greet Jack and sometimes not – he was usually out at a music concert. Ed, much younger than Richard, had dinner with them but was in bed soon afterwards.
When Richard first walked into 44a he forgot for the moment to be bored by the grown-up company; the Gregsons had the most sophisticated sound system he had ever seen. He soon realised that this visit to this house was different in other ways, though at fifteen he could not quite articulate what they were.44
People who met Don at this time could see not only why Thea liked him, but how Jack might too. Tom Keneally remembers thinking that if he and Whitington had met at a cricket match or a concert, they would have got on like a house on fire.45 Astley’s neighbourhood friend Yvonne Wyndham also recalls how this new frequent visitor to the Astleys’ in Dorset Street had quickly became accepted.46 Astley had no intention of being alone – she could not bear it – and Jack would never leave her. She had worked her way towards being comfortable with a very public secret.
Soon, partly to share the driving, Thea began visiting Woollahra. There was a reason, or perhaps an excuse: she was coaching Richard, a student at Sydney Grammar, in English (finally improving his results). On a Friday or a Saturday Richard could expect to see Thea’s familiar Volkswagen. Richard said, ‘Dad and she would go out in his car to various functions – I was out a lot too at that age – I’d come home, both cars were out front. Thea was never there in the morning.’ On one occasion Richard took Thea’s VW Beetle, started it without keys and crashed the car. Richard commented, ‘The strange thing is I don’t recall any consequences from either of them – insurance claim or anything.’47
Only later in life did Richard contemplate how awkward this must have been for Thea. She needed a car badly, for driving Ed and to get to her teaching job at Cheltenham Girls’. At home, too, there must have been the awkward sense of something overt that was usually unseen.
As time passed, there were trips out of Sydney. In the years after his divorce Don had bought a sailing boat. The vessel appealed to Thea for its ‘knocked-up-from-nothing’ quality. It was the converted lifeboat from a large ship, very plain with a mast and with weight in the keel which made it
less sailable. For Thea, it was the sailing equivalent of her beloved out-of-the-way shack. Friday nights could now extend to some weekends, and Ed, too, could enjoy the novelty of boating and picnics. Literary friends became used to seeing Thea and Don together, although their private time was limited.
One day Astley’s former neighbour Betty Judd, who had moved up north some years before, received an unexpected phone call from her suggesting they all – that is Astley, Ed, Betty and her children – go for a holiday at Red Rock, about forty kilometres north of Coffs Harbour, a relatively unspoiled part of the coastline offering tranquil bush and beach. Settled into the rented holiday house and catching up with Thea about old Epping friends, Betty was surprised when Don arrived; he had not been mentioned in the original arrangements. She didn’t feel like challenging Thea over it. Betty had known Thea for many years: apart from the fact that she didn’t think that whatever was going on was her business, she knew how important Jack was to Thea.48 It was hard to imagine that changing.
Richard found the public Thea Astley, considered to be a woman of forcefully voiced opinions, at odds with the woman he was coming to know. To him she seemed shy, respectful, mostly reserved. He noticed how she was not as comfortable with Don’s set of friends as they all were with each other. He also noticed a nervy, apologetic tendency in her, a sense that she was at fault, often over small things. ‘Thea would walk over to turn off a light, absent-mindedly, then say “sorry, sorry”, as though she’d done something terrible.’49