Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  However, when they were alone together and away from the city Don and Thea could relax. They bought a small ramshackle house together at Killcare on Broken Bay, north of Sydney. It was tranquil and rural, decades before the area became suburban and dotted with expensive houses. What it offered in 1966 was privacy and isolation. Weekends shifted to accommodate these new arrangements.

  It is not possible to know exactly what led to the final parting between Don and Thea after about five years but Richard had noticed a worrying acceleration in Thea’s nervous compulsions, including her constant apologising and paranoia she had done something wrong. When Astley visited her Dorset Street friends the Smiths, she said ‘hurriedly Thea-style’: ‘I didn’t run over one of the boys, did I?’ Margaret Smith was concerned for her friend:

  [At her worst] she couldn’t walk twenty metres without saying something about what she’d done. It was bizarre. I was worried but I thought it best to laugh it off if I could. I knew things had to be worse at home.50

  They were. Thea was now constantly agitated, worried about switching things on, and off, then on again. Thea kept asking, genuinely fraught, ‘Have I put glass in the dinner?’ Ed, who was already used to his mother’s volatility and the hostility between his parents, now saw his mother weeping and talking of suicide. ‘It was scary at the time. Jack stayed as calm as he could but it was hard for him.’51

  Astley’s circumstances were deeply distressing. Guilt had become her entire world; she even felt guilty for being miserable. But apart from that, she was confused by her success as a writer. It didn’t feel real; it didn’t feel right. She did not know whether she deserved it. For the first time in her life she was unable to laugh off tedium and routine. Suddenly the source of her creativity – the place where she had found expression of herself – was terrifyingly out of reach. And after more than twenty years of effortless classroom management, she was now finding teaching near impossible.

  Jack and others knew that some accommodation had to be made urgently. It was decided that Astley should take on some correspondence teaching – a holding pattern of sorts – with the hope that other possibilities might gradually emerge.

  Thea’s troubles virtually paralleled those of her brother. Only a year before, he had been sent to Loyola College in Watsonia, Victoria, allegedly for a fresh start, but Astley knew his Order had arranged for him to be hospitalised for depression. His was proving a long and difficult journey out of the darkness, but the entire body of Jesuits stood by him, visiting so often that he was rarely alone. Astley heard that he was recovering confidence slowly with the help of his brothers in faith. Phil then made a very important decision: he would return to music as the central expression of his faith; he had always loved church music, especially Bach. Phil discovered a new life within the Order, playing for church services and ceremonies, and here he found his niche. He became known as a fine musician with a special talent for the organ.52 It was an important reminder to Astley of the music she and her brother had loved as children. Perhaps her own suffering might also find its salve in music.

  Her neighbour Margaret Smith was studying piano and offered to put Thea in touch with a good local teacher. Astley grasped the opportunity as if her life depended on it, which for the moment it did. The piano was moved into her study so she could practise all night if necessary and she started playing once again, starting with calming Beethoven sonatas.53 For years after this she was candid in radio interviews about this ‘therapy’: ‘I’m trying to learn thirty-two Beethoven sonatas – I’ll be around 120 when I get there.’54 In this particular interview she can be heard lighting up cigarettes, and her voice is shaky.

  There was another saving grace. Towards the end of 1966 Astley saw an advertisement for a tutor in the English Department at the brand new Macquarie University, so new that it had not even been built. The site was fairly close to where she lived. Astley acted quickly, asking Beatrice Davis for a reference. As Astley was the author of four published novels, two of them Miles Franklin winners, it was no exaggeration for Davis to describe her as one of ‘the most talented of contemporary Australian writers’.55 Any reference hardly seemed necessary but Astley was diffident: this was ‘university’, not a writing award, and certainly not high school. However, she instinctively felt that the change could save her. Those closest to her witnessed conflicting reactions as a result of this: a renewed sense of self-belief, diffidence, a sense of insecurity, defensiveness. This was not an equation that lent itself to being solved.

  PART 3

  NORTH OF NOSTALGIA

  11

  The oldest senior tutor in the Commonwealth

  It is now abundantly clear to me, the oldest senior tutor in the Commonwealth if not in living memory, that the school has neither the wish to make me a lecturer nor the slightest intention of doing so.

  Thea Astley to the Head of School, Macquarie University, 19761

  Astley’s time as a senior tutor at Macquarie University would prove to be one of the most personally satisfying and productive periods in her life. Under its benevolent influence she produced five books and won a third Miles Franklin Award. Sydney’s third metropolitan university had ambitions for a new, more democratic age in education. Even the name was telling, after Governor Lachlan Macquarie, a Scot known for his humanitarianism and keen interest in education. A university proud of its Australian heritage would have impressed Astley; the university motto ‘And gladly teche’, from the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, even more so.

  In 1967 Macquarie University consisted of a set of ideals, sketches and building works. Astley negotiated a trip to the MLC building in North Sydney – Macquarie’s temporary campus – where the situation was refreshingly ad hoc. There couldn’t have been a better way for Astley to start this new phase of teaching, for this was what it was to her. No personal challenge had changed her deep instinct for the profession. The staffroom was cosy, with only five or six in the fledgling Department of Literature and Linguistics, most of whom were Oxbridge-educated academics. Despite this, the inaugural professor Herbert Piper was utterly committed to Australian literature – a focus still reasonably foreign to Australian universities in the late 1960s. Piper, a graduate of Adelaide and Oxford, was a specialist in the Romantic period – and originally had the kind of British-imported vision of university life one might expect from such a background and interest. Yet as head of the English department at the University of New England, he had invited Australian writers such as novelist Frank Hardy and the poet Kenneth Slessor to visit. By the time of his 1966 appointment to Macquarie, he was more than ready to embrace new areas of interest in English studies such as American and Australian literature.

  The department that Astley joined differed significantly from those of other Australian universities, both in terms of its members’ intellectual and creative interests and their attitudes to students. From the start, management planned for students to have mentoring support from staff. In time attempts to formalise this within the teaching structure broke down, but the effect of the original intention remained in the teaching culture.2

  The new Macquarie students were often women with family responsibilities, free to study for the first time. Astley at forty-two could identify with them. She might invite a busy young mother to meet her for a coffee if that was more convenient than a university office interview. In this setting, and mindful of the problems many women faced in returning to study while still carrying out domestic duties, she might unveil her ‘three washing basket’ philosophy. There should be one basket for the mother, one for the father, and one for the kids, and Astley instructed: ‘You must only wash clothes in your basket.’3 This was a special kind of mentoring, kindness, too, since Astley had scarcely enjoyed this privilege in her own young adult life; no older women had been there to guide or support her.

  Astley’s American-born colleague Joan Kirkby had not been long in Australia
, and remembered the excitement of these early days when teaching students seemed like ‘having a lot of friends’. However, Astley was never completely comfortable with her position at Macquarie; she never quite resolved the tension between literary scholarship and her position as a writer.4 She felt accomplished but undermined from the start because she was ambivalent about her status as an academic. As an American, Kirkby had also felt she was being put down and that she and Thea were both outsiders. The two women formed a bond as friends rather than colleagues. During their lunches in the city Astley enjoyed sending up the imagined superiority of academe.5 Kirkby was surprised to see Australian anti-authoritarianism displayed in a woman who was also reserved, even polite. In the staff common room, she watched Astley enjoy the frisson she created with what colleagues saw as her ‘penetrating assessment’ of various pomposities.6

  Not everyone appreciated this; some were irked by what seemed like defensiveness. The duality in Astley’s role – a creative writer teaching alongside academics – was awkward for others to negotiate. In its way this served Astley’s interests well: her creative self, as always, depended on being both inside and outside the group. Astley’s relationship with literature was emotional, which made her inherently suspicious of literary criticism ‘the starmakers, not the stars’ as she called critics. She was still smarting from the recent Meanjin overview-article of her work by the well-known Scottish-born critic and poet J. M. Couper, who was to become a senior lecturer at Macquarie, right in her area.7

  When the journal’s editor, Clem Christesen, asked her to write an article on a planned issue discussing the ‘temperament of generations’, Astley declined due to work commitments and the novel she was trying to finish, but used the opportunity to vent: ‘After reading Dr Couper maybe I’ll chuck the novel away. He was kind to devote space to me but he made me feel I’m wasting my time. I couldn’t understand all [sic] his article … But then I’m not academic, so it was probably over my head.’8

  This kind of capricious response made Astley’s university position more than problematic, since she also appeared to desire scholarly critical appraisal. Nobody felt inclined to engage with her over this point, but few academics would have joined in with her irreverence for the holy grail of academic publication. To her friend Joan Kirkby, however, it was all part of ‘Thea’s way of being in the world’, which seemed to her not only legitimate but also embodied the very best of Australian character.9

  Astley was fun, and fun to be with. Her nerves had recovered a little and she was ready for engagement; she was also one of those people who become energised by an audience without necessarily being an extrovert. Macquarie offered relief to Astley from the difficulties of her own life, which often seemed such plain hard work. Some of it still was: getting around Sydney could be exhausting. She had always hated driving but Ed needed to get to music lessons and elsewhere. He was also now reaching an age where he needed some separation from her. He escaped from the house when trouble broke out at home, which still happened, though less frequently than before, and he would go on long walks to neighbouring suburbs.

  Neighbours Tom and Judy Keneally were close to Astley. In Tom, Astley had someone who could understand her upbringing from the inside, a fellow Catholic and a Queenslander too. Together they talked frankly about the compulsions that had lately become so acute for her: ‘One thing we had in common and talked about explicitly and implicitly was the obsessive-compulsive thing,’ recalled Tom.10 They swapped theories about it, not always seriously: was this kind of obsessive compulsion caused by the ritual and repetition of the Church? Did the Church instil it, or just make it worse? Ex-Jesuit Keneally believed that the Church actually encouraged obsessive-compulsive behaviour: ‘Not only is there concern about hygiene, but concern about sin, about being morally culpable for everything that goes wrong.’11

  Very few people could have provided this kind of bracing criticism, allied with laughter. Their relationship meant a lot to Astley. Keneally, too, was indebted: he loved Astley’s writing, had felt ‘succoured by it’. As a relative novice in the writing life, he had felt encouraged that ‘she had been doing it for some time. It could be done’.12 It is hard to think of Keneally as ever having been a novice in the writing life; at this time he had already published two novels and was on the brink of winning his own first Miles Franklin Award for Bring Larks and Heroes in 1967.

  The stimulation of Astley’s new job brought calm at home, and more congenial work commitments meant more time to write. Astley had kept up her weekly tutoring of Don Whitington’s son Richard and had organised a writing-research trip to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) with Don, which ended up being their last close time together. In the last couple of years she had been working on another novel, A Boat Load of Home Folk. She signed the publishing contract at A&R in January of 1968 – as Thea Gregson with Jack as a witness – as was usual.

  If there is a book by Astley that ought not to have been published it is Boat Load. It extended the life of her Slow Natives couple, making a doomed marriage and other dismal partnerships once again centre stage. It is, to quote a publisher’s reader, ‘a study in unhappiness and frustration’ and a ‘depressing, unlikeable book’.13 Yet the book passed through the hands of a significant number of people in-house – odd in itself given the author was by now certainly well known at A&R. Possibly Davis didn’t like the book either but felt too compromised by her past support for the author to say so, and she might also have been aware of Astley’s fragility in the face of criticism.

  The setting of an isolated island (Port Lena) and a bit of cyclonic weather do not in themselves seem plausible bases for despair. The despair, of course, was the writer’s. In this Astley was like the Australian historian Manning Clark, who tended to project his own dark moods onto his versions of Australian history.14 Whether truly forbidding or not, everything came under the same dark spell. It was Astley who felt that ‘everybody was living on a cyclonic edge’.15 This was how she experienced life.

  Like many of us, Astley found no difficulty in accepting her state of mind as reality. In this mood, Time really did cast its shadow. She was creating characters who suffer from life erosion, a state she would later refine in the phrase ‘putrefaction of the spirit’.16 These would become acidly detailed portraits, often in just a few words: ‘Trembling sexagenarians, hearts pausing – but not for joy: eyes cataracted, prostates swollen or excised, livers cirrhosed, hearing dimmed.’17

  The Slow Natives had featured a ‘dried-out version of a society hostess who lived it up with bulk liquors, brass costume jewellery and lots of hair rinse’; in this new novel there were ‘Boutiques. Girls in boutique wear. Old girls in better boutique wear’.18 Misses Trumper and Paradise are ‘two maiden ladies in the sad years’; one has hair that ‘hung like old grass’ and ‘raggedly applied lipstick whose end result was sad’. There are ‘seedy men with their limp manhood between varicose thighs’ who know they are ‘still grandiose because of being male’. Stevenson, a ship’s captain, feels ‘enormously sad for that time of morning’. When his phone doesn’t ring it is ‘silent as old marriage’; Father Lake is ‘a quietly exhausted forty-three’.19

  Astley, not so quietly exhausted these days, was nevertheless also forty-three and seemingly hell-bent on representing abjection of the kind unleashed in Boat Load. This bleakness had been apparent in her other work. It is there in Girl with a Monkey when clumsy Harry calls out to Elsie, ‘I brung ya some fruit’, only to be met with her frozen self-centredness; it is present in Descant when the excruciatingly lonely Vinny Lalor is destroyed by sneering peers; in Explorer George Brewster uses his wife to model a sweater he has bought for his mistress.

  When in Boat Load the unmarried Miss Paradise announces to her companion Miss Trumper that the latter has bored everyone for years, there is also the echo of John Cheever’s dialogue between a bored husband and wife that Astley loved so much. She resisted the accusation that such portraits w
ere cruel, saying she had made her observations in sympathy, that ‘those two elderly women – Paradise and Trumper I felt sorry for – they were not married – and before World War II you just had to marry’.20

  By 1968 Astley had built something of a written dossier of treachery, betrayal and self-loathing. Why? If it was based on self-knowledge, it was certainly not kind – and in her late teens she had written in a school prize book that ‘kindness was more important than cleverness’. She was thinking of kindness to others, not to herself. The belief that ‘self’ was not important had become a spiritual rock around her neck; Astley’s concern for others was genuine enough but it was also a nervous playing out of imaginary or real guilt she associated with herself and her own behaviour. In the end her writing suffered.

  A Boat Load, according to the A&R reader, was not enough like White or Keneally to be attractive to the educated reader and too disjointed in construction for a popular market.21 But it did have one of Astley’s signature characteristics: she knew how to send herself up and she often did. Even in this bleak book there is a wonderful spoof based on her own poor culinary efforts: short on ingredients, a character simply tears up cardboard to make a sauce. This lighter comic strain would yet be redeeming; almost from the start Beatrice Davis had seen Astley’s ability to express anguish through self-mockery.

  While Astley waited for the reviews, a well-timed letter came from Hal Porter suggesting they meet up at the Phoenix Bar in Flinders Street, Melbourne. It was an opportunity before the university teaching year began to celebrate at least getting the book off her hands. Always the tongue-in-cheek flatterer, Porter urged, ‘Keep in mind, young woman, the fact that I am coming 142 miles to keep this appointment.’22