by Karen Lamb
The reviews concentrated on the two aspects of her work that had been most unpopular with critics: Astley’s Catholicism and her rather ornate prose style. As the book was full of priests and Catholic rituals it was perverse for Astley to think this criticism was unfair, but she had become adept at attracting this kind of criticism and then crying foul. All four of her novels were in print, and she could even play overseas comment against negative local comment. The year 1967 had been a good one, with a letter from the actor Anne Baxter reminding her that the film of Descant for Gossips remained a possibility – though Astley knew that the world of film was full of well-meant gestures that did not come to fruition – and The Slow Natives had been published in the United States.23 This was particularly satisfying for Astley, who hungered for attention in the US; she was very pleased when it gained a favourable review in Time magazine. Beatrice Davis wasted no time in telling the A&R London marketing people that her author had been named as the best woman novelist to appear in Australia since Christina Stead.24
It was no doubt on the strength of that comment that late in 1968 Alec Bolton, A&R’s manager in London, sent A Boat Load of Home Folk to Stead for comment. What came back was a disconcerting mixture of flattery and criticism.
Dear Mr Bolton,
… I have now read the book and would say that, without presuming to give a serious opinion, Thea Astley is a vigorous emphatic writer, very much steeped in the idioms of modern success writers, Maugham (background and interpretation), Graham Greene (persons and themes), and even James and Woolf: she imitates them and quite powerfully, though at times with pretentious clutter. She has real originality in description of sight and sound, vigorous and striking; her hurricane is good; and it is delightful to have original poems in a novel. These white shadows in the southern seas (to quote) are more Maugham (himself a fading shadow) and Greene, now theme-weary, than ‘native’ – it seems to me. Everyone has a right to ply tunes on the old harp of course and sometimes the old airs please more than unheard tunes. Perhaps that is what she wants. But does she? She is a gifted writer and could see with her own eyes.
The frenzied cruel pursuit, for example, of old maids ‘angular’ and ‘withered’, the contempt for middle-aged married men (I won’t quote the descriptions), the sympathy, sole sympathy for the erring cleric, a homosexual, is really too Maughamesque; it is a parody. (He deserves it.) I believe she is gifted. Probably this is just a sketch, an experiment, such as everyone does.
Kind regards,
Yours truly, CHRISTINA STEAD25
Nothing in Stead’s letter could be used by Angus & Robertson for publicity. Astley did not see the letter until the mid-1990s, when this author gave her a copy; obviously nobody at A&R had felt inclined to risk her reaction. Bolton wrote to Davis about ‘C. S.’s incisive comments’, obviously in agreement with the thrust of them.26 He didn’t much care for the work, and even wrote to his senior editor John Abernethy at the Sydney office.
Dear John,
I’ve been meaning to say to you how aghast I was at the awfulness of the new Thea Astley. It’s not just that her view of personality is so anarchistic, it’s the mannered, arid style that she affects all the time. I dragged myself right through it and hated every word. If there are going to be any more of her novels, perhaps we should come right out and promote her as an utter bitch? We’ve got an ad in the Bookseller tomorrow which I believe will sell this book to the libraries, but it’s misrepresentation.
Yours,
Alec27
Astley would have been devastated by Stead’s criticism, for she felt an affinity with her. In 1981, without having seen this letter and fifteen years after it was written, Astley expressed this herself:
Perhaps it is because I am a woman – and no reviewer, especially a male one, can believe for one split infinitive of a second that irony or a sense of comedy or the grotesque in a woman is activated by anything but the nutrients derived from ‘backyard malice’. Assuming these particular qualities – sense of irony, the eye for the comic or the grotesque – are indications of intelligence and believing a priori that no woman is intelligent, critics assign the evidence of humour, irony or comedy to darker forces at work; the Salem judgement comes into play and the lady writer is most certainly for burning. It is hard to understand why else a writer of Stead’s calibre could for so long be ignored in her own country.28
Boat Load was clearly not to be one of Astley’s great books but there is something in its savagery that was to remain important in her work. Classically educated, Astley would have understood this as an Orphic descent. But even as she wanted her words to be ‘vernacularly right’, as she often said, her aesthetics belonged to ancient traditions in mythology and literature, particularly the myth of Orpheus, which is founded on the seduction of sound.
Enjoyment of despair was now the core of Astley’s aesthetic energy. There was pleasure to be had in indulging the irony of even the worst of things, and her own peculiar mixture of bombast and anxiety could leave her real pain hidden. Colleagues were diverted by her wisecracks but Joan Kirkby, closer to her than most people, realised that this style of relating to other people made her seem fiercer than she really was. Kirkby wondered whether this kind of deflection prevented Astley from taking her own pain seriously.29
To Astley compassion was a gift of the imagination. And to her, whether a person possessed a soul depended on their sensitivity – sometimes, it must be said, on their sensitivity towards Astley. Early one morning a fellow staff member walked past Astley’s open door and saw her sitting weeping at her table. He went away, made a coffee, handed it to her and closed the door quietly. Later, she remarked to her colleague John Ryan, whom she considered a fellow outsider, ‘I know one person on staff who has a soul. I know nothing about him but I know that.’30
To be so vulnerable while being accused of cruelty must have been very taxing for Astley, but the psychological nakedness of Boat Load had left her nowhere to hide: inevitably there would be inferences about the writer behind the work. She became more self-conscious in interviews, endlessly wrangled over the perfect photo, asking journalists what was wrong with the expensive publicity shot she had already paid for herself.
It was harder to hide from Eileen, who had made plain her concern about the world’s view of her daughter. In early November 1968 she wrote to Thea:
I found it [Boat Load] quite interesting but sad and unhappy. I seemed to be reading episodes from your life in some of the disguised characters. But Thea why spoil such good writing with such awful sexual details? Love means self-sacrifice, not sexuality, which is lust. And I feel quite ashamed about how you wrote about Fr Lake, whom I remember was in one of your other books. You certainly do hate everything Catholic. What a pity. There are lots of beautiful and lovely good people to write about. And things. After all what gifts and talents you have are given to you by God.31
Eileen didn’t like her daughter using the word ‘lousy’ in a Women’s Weekly interview. ‘People will say you must be like the way you write,’ she said, adding for good measure, ‘I have read Charles Dickens’ works … 800 pages in small print and not one foul suggestion and every page full of interest. Perhaps you have not heard of him. However I wish you every success and happiness as you truly are a hard worker.’32
Eileen’s was a pinched version of well wishing, her letter a curious mixture of scornful pride and open disdain. It had been nearly ten years since the return of the marked-up copy of Descant and this response made the wounds raw again. Some questions were silent and unanswered still. If Eileen assumed from the tone of Thea’s novels that their author was a tough customer, then did she know nothing of her daughter’s true nature?
Possibly feeling guilty, Eileen wrote a week later about being on the lookout for mentions of Thea or reviews of her books. Astley maintained her apparent resolve not to quarrel with her mother. In their still very regular correspondence (
almost weekly), she was careful to talk lightly of life, of how she liked the new ‘university work’, filling the required pages with news of Jack and Ed. She would work on The Acolyte over the next three years, all too aware that Eileen would probably find fault with that novel too.
There were lighter moments, weekend trips to Killcare on the NSW central coast or to the beach with Don’s friends, but some of the strain of the last couple of years was breaking through with an intensity that affected that relationship. Don had bronchial problems (like Thea, he was a committed smoker). A warmer climate might help, but less than a year later he moved permanently to Canberra, where Richard attended the Australian National University. By mid-1969 Richard had left university and returned to Sydney. The Woollahra house had been sold. Everyone’s life seemed to be taking a different path; that year was the last time Richard recalls seeing Thea.
The years of contact with Don’s son had given Astley a glimpse of the late teen years that lay ahead with Ed. How would she handle his emerging sexuality? The university world meant she was in close contact with young adults who were already exerting pressure on the sexual mores of their parents’ generation.
None of the students Astley taught knew more than the barest details of how she lived her life. The younger students seemed to her selfish in their freedom and what she saw as their escape from any responsibility. Her hearty endorsement of individual will was pitted against resentful censure. Students of the time talked about ‘dropping out’ in the great quest of self-discovery but Astley couldn’t relate to it – ‘an entirely immoral philosophy … a very selfish philosophy’.33 She couldn’t see how her own version (‘I’ve always thought myself to be a bit of a misfit’) was in some ways quite similar.34
Astley became known as a crusader for language and in public would deplore what she saw as a collapse in literacy standards: ‘Half of Macquarie were going into teaching and I used to wonder what would happen.’35 Her idiosyncratic views emerged from her own experiences. Her misfits were outsiders excluded by the group because their individuality affronted the status quo, mirroring her own predicament as a young woman. This was all in her mind; outwardly Astley was socially conservative in her conduct, very much so. All of it was tied to Church and society, to the ‘congregatory aspects of abrading’.36 If she wrote about self-involvement it was only to prove, as she would later say, that ‘looking inwards … is the death of the personality’.37
Astley was witnessing big social changes but they only led her to concentrating on the aspects of human beings that stayed the same, which was the theme of her story ‘The Scenery Never Changes’, her contribution to It Could Be You, the anthology of Australian stories Hal Porter was editing.38
Astley was preoccupied by a ‘geometry of living’, some kind of ‘single theorem’ that could explain what human beings did to each other and why.39 She could summon mathematical metaphors with surprising ease. Paul Vespers’s description of his relationship with the musical genius Holberg and his ménage in The Acolyte is an early example: ‘Take four points, A, B, C, and D, and join them with lines that connect but never never never intersect. You have us, a trapezoid of needs that pass from point A to point B to point C to point D and that is all.’40
Henceforth, ideas for Astley would always need to be logically connected. In fact, this went back to her early poetry, a bringing together in words of ‘The wanting and the will at variance’.41 It became a special kind of mathematics for her; in later books her ‘vanishing points’ would draw on Euclidean geometry, parallel lines that could never meet. These were her emotional and intellectual sorites, that is, forms of argument with each premise leading to a conclusion, which then forms the premise of the next argument. For Astley, it offered a set of endless alternatives with which to map the genealogy of character.42
All this careful plotting in her writing was at variance with Astley’s public face. When she rushed to take up a position on something she often became a victim of her own angry persona. A colleague at Macquarie remembers her response to a young male student wearing a fashionable chest-revealing shirt. ‘You’d walk into the staffroom and Thea would be complaining about the flaunting of flesh … There was something contrived in that anger, I always thought.’ It was as if her response had been designed to attract attention rather than to express any real disgust.43 Astley’s response to openly discussing sexuality was complex and ambivalent.
But Astley was learning to harness anger creatively. A picaresque sweep of revenge pranks can be found throughout her novels (slingshots, models of ‘The Big Developer’, after the real-life Big Pineapple in Queensland), characters firing ‘cannons of classical music’ in protest. Not that Astley was really angry – the Macquarie years were proving vital for her wellbeing. Three years of university teaching had alleviated her nervous energy but there were signs that life was still taxing. Eileen wrote, glad that Astley had a ‘day bed’ in her office to help her relax ‘mentally as well as physically’ but she had ‘no confidence in psychiatrists’. Eileen was referring to Phil, whose whole personality in her view had changed since he had ‘electrical treatment in Melbourne’.44
Astley had been in regular contact with Phil, had recently sent him a clipping of a newspaper profile on her. Phil’s position in the Order and the closeness to Eileen must have made it difficult for him to openly support his sister, at least to his mother. His sister’s critique of Catholicism had been an embarrassment: there was gossip about him having asked for her books to be removed from the Campion House library.45
As the years passed, however, Eileen had become more capable of praise. In 1969 she confessed in a letter that she read Thea’s books ‘often’ and thought the ‘satire brilliant’.46 Perhaps this praise was too little too late, but it is one the few letters Astley kept, a rare tangible sign of maternal support long withheld.
With both of her children experiencing such acute mental suffering in middle age, Eileen’s letter is a remarkable tribute to the powers of parental denial; she had always thought the cure for everything was good food, lots of rest and fresh air and exercise. She was now just on seventy years of age and various irritabilities crept into her letters. The smallest thing could attract attention, such as Ed adding his name as a P.S. (an afterthought not appreciated), or a letter arriving days later than expected. Any cash money sent by Thea and Jack was accounted for in detail in a follow-up letter, all purchases itemised according to their practical use (cloth for dress lengths and cash for a holiday). Astley was like her mother in this way: never tardy in taking great pains to write thankyou notes for kindnesses, no matter how slight.
12
North of nostalgia
North: Some Compass Readings: Eden
Title of first story in Hunting the Wild Pineapple by Thea Astley, 19791
In 1976 Astley gave an ABC radio interviewer a copy of her most recent author biography, asking for it to be read aloud at the start of the program. It is an updated version of the style of biography Astley had given A&R in 1958, almost twenty years before. ‘Astley, Thea, aged 50, mother of one son, Ed, Queenslander who is having a late maturing love affair with the place though she’s been in exile in New South Wales for the last 17 years, teacher, at it for 30 years though being a tutor at Macquarie University hasn’t eased the pain of marking essays and last of all, writer.’2
The deliberate order of the items in this checklist seems especially pointed. Apparently little had changed in the way Astley thought of herself and her writing, at least publicly. Fifteen years later, in a 1990 interview, she said she had been ‘at it’ so long that she was tired. (‘Yes, I’m dispirited. It doesn’t seem worth it really.’) And besides, essay marking was like ‘digging ditches – writing too – from one ditch to another’.3
But she had returned to her Dream Country, literally this time. In 1973 she and Jack purchased a north Queensland ‘shack’ near Kuranda, a ‘wild dream of achieving a Somerset Mau
gham existence – keeping a low profile’, Astley had said. The university semesters afforded the opportunity for extended stays up north. They could live there for a few months of the year.4 By the early 1970s Ed was out of school and independent.
Astley’s rather bleak self-portrait on radio was rescued, even overturned, by a spliced-in segment from her former student Mark Macleod, who was teaching at Macquarie and who knew her well. His words gave listeners a glimpse of an ‘alternative Astley’ – the way she often appeared to others – as a person of extraordinary energy ‘kung-fu-ing the lift button’. Here was Thea Astley as a person of simple tastes, whose favourite food was poached eggs on toast, who admired the then PM’s wife, Margaret Whitlam, not just for her politics but ‘for appearing in public having only run a comb through her hair’. Astley described the university cafeteria as a ‘Clark’s Rubber Store because of its cannelloni and pizza with a wallpaper print on top’ – but went there anyway to buy chips, though she enjoyed complaining about the lack of salt.5
Astley didn’t set out to assert herself in the English Department and in time she formed strong friendships within the broader university. Instead, she concentrated on this new kind of teaching, with small groups, treating her students to a tête-à-tête with Ms Thea Astley, the writer who was their tutor. Astley influenced a generation of young people, a surprising number of whom became writers, broadcasters, editors or publishers.6 Broadcaster Jennie Brockie remembers Astley’s verbal directness, her seemingly ‘huge authority’ within the department.7
University teaching continued to be the tonic Astley had badly needed. Neighbours were seeing the ‘old Thea’ again, enthusing wildly over any of these new students she thought brilliant. She often mentioned Mark Macleod. As a young student he had not expected to be bowled over by the attractive woman in her forties who ‘walked into the room, lit up a cigarette and started talking about D. H. Lawrence and sex’.8 Astley made sure she never presented the face that her students were expecting. As in her previous teaching positions, it was that quality of frankness that thrilled her pupils. Many were young people who were forming their first sexual relationships, and here was an older adult prepared to talk openly and honestly about sex in the literature they were studying. Astley could challenge students to think beyond their own sexual freedom, to the ‘corroding effect that sexual relationships have’.9