by Karen Lamb
Adler knew Astley to be a complex and intelligent woman who could be highly critical and prone to resentment. She felt that her reputation had been hard won and she could seem jealous of other writers getting prizes.42 Her feelings could take a perverse form if modish ideas about her work irritated her or she just didn’t want to be there. At the 1992 Melbourne Writers Festival, Astley sat grimly, and was terse in her interview with Rosemary Sorensen (who later confessed to tears afterwards), stonewalling her polite and engaging questions about the writing life and Astley’s books in particular. It was impossible – on a public stage – for the interviewer to dig herself out of such a predicament with such a well-known writer, especially as Astley would turn to the audience with a facial expression that invited them to join her in frustration at the stage-managed life of the literary festival. But it was Astley’s conduct that became the talk of the festival.43
However, she could demonstrate a genuine rapport with interviewers, for example with the ABC’s Caroline Jones on the radio program The Search for Meaning. (‘Caroline, the hotel they’ve chosen for me certainly isn’t the answer to the search for meaning.’)44 And ABC radio’s Books and Writing presenter Robert Dessaix had appreciated Astley’s support for his autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace. He wrote to her, grateful for her conviction that he could go on to write something else. Astley had also been personally kind to his mother when they met.45
Astley should have been sanguine: a new wave of scholarly interest in her was happening and the academics were moving in. Letters arrived regularly about books, her work, and books about books; there was talk of research grants. Then there was that blonde woman who was starting something biocritical. It was ‘always strange to see whimsy in a blonde’, Thea had said when they met. This woman had brought home-made lamb shank soup, soft white bread and real butter to Astley’s hotel apartment, causing Thea to whisper to Jack: ‘This girl’s gotta really want something!’46 These new younger readers meant well but Astley was still bored or affected boredom with theoretical debate about feminism, for instance. But she was still angry about women and about men’s control over women’s lives. For her feminism was about justice, not ‘-isms’. What gave her public remarks such a snarky aspect was of course her own sense of having been hard done by.
Astley was now approaching seventy. She had spent her sixties turning on its head her comment that ‘women are sad things after forty’. It remained to be seen what the next years would bring.
17
Curving
Tracking a peculiar logical sorites he attached the infallibility of the Lord to himself.
The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow by Thea Astley, 19961
Though all readers and writers are obviously on a journey towards old age, it takes a brave novelist to tackle the subject of nursing homes. But Thea Astley almost ran towards the topic. Though she had already dealt with ‘granny dumping’, in Coda (1994), she was still collecting advertisements featuring aged-care facilities with ‘Special Spring Offers’ and resort-style activities. It was as though Astley saw the final descent into old age as her last writerly high point, an opportunity to visit the ultimate self-delusion.
Old age may be the saddest expression of unfounded self-belief: we forget in the moment – we have to – that we don’t live forever. To Astley death was predictable, boring even, and pretending it did not exist was pathetic, if human. It wasn’t death that bothered Astley; it was the extinction of consciousness. Death was much on her mind, as it had been for a long time. In one poignant scene from Beachmasters, published in 1985 when she was sixty, the vulnerable teenager Gavi Salway is in conversation with his grandfather:
‘… as we get older it’s as if we draw a circle round ourselves, make the boundary smaller and smaller until maybe, one day we find ourselves at the very centre.’
‘What’s that?’ the boy had asked. ‘What’s the centre?’
‘It might be death,’ grandfather had said, softening the word with a smile.2
The naming of death could be softened with a smile – but the fact of it could never be changed.
Astley had long since ceased attending Mass, but still prayed to a God – not necessarily the God of the Catholic Church.3 Remembering, being remembered, was important. In Astley’s new 1996 novel, The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, the schoolteacher Vine muses how the memory of lost relationships is ‘as fragile and unmemorable as most fiction is’.4 Her words perfectly capture how Astley felt about relationships – beyond the very few she had maintained – during this period in her life.
What remained? Astley was asking. Was it family? Was it books? She had just received a strange parcel from Michael McGirr. He had found a copy of her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, in the Toowong Jesuit library, her hand-written inscription to her own parents still intact. She did not like to think about how it got there. But love was never simple: ‘First rule of family. Love is loathing,’ she scribbled on her manuscript. Astley was currently ‘finding writing sheer effort’. ‘These days I wonder why I bother. Something drives me, I guess.’5
In 1988 Thea and Jack bought a house at Sussex Inlet on the New South Wales south coast, and in 1999 they decided to move there. It was a godsend. The place was only half an hour away from Cambewarra, but it offered a complete change of scene. The house was like their first home in Dorset Street, being clad in a similar style of timber and of similar proportions. The exercise of tasteful remodelling was a journey back in time for Thea and Jack. It was another opportunity, too, to be a couple among couples, with pleasant neighbours. It was an escape: a quiet home by the water in old age was an ironic celebration of the predictable.
‘Vanishing points’, as Astley called them, had become a set of skilfully placed allusions throughout her books. The phrase dates back to her first novel. To Astley the phrase came to stand for the singular and disturbing moments of a terror of consciousness, which she confronted in her work, as she did here in her first novel: ‘There was some vanishing point for all these things, a point where they actually met with dagger-like acuteness and drove the mind further than it dared.’ 6
In this Astley is being true to the credo of the Orphic artist, concerned to map, reach, or breach historical time and the poetic infinite. Astley’s ‘vanishing point’ (and much of her other mystical symbolism) is thus an overriding Orphic metaphor that supports the other numerous Orphic ‘moments’ throughout her work. Perhaps this is best illustrated in the epigraph she chose from ‘Le Voyage’ by one of her favourite Orphic poets, Charles Baudelaire, which she used in Vanishing Points. It illustrates Astley’s sense of the phrase, but also perhaps the poetic company she liked to keep:
Ah! que le monde est grande à la clarté des lampes!
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!
Ah! How large the world is by lamplight!
In the eyes of memory, how small it is!
In The Well Dressed Explorer she had written of the ‘merciful vanishing point of perspective that in its alchemy causes the fact to become insubstantial. Remaining. Vanishing. Both at once’.7 That was the key: being present and absent. Everything had its equal and equivalent opposite. These phrases inverted beautifully to reflect the central paradox of consciousness Astley experienced. It would become a trademark of her later prose style: ‘Peace is explicable. Is inexplicable.’8 This was her mathematics of despair – she was miming Charles Baudelaire, who also wrote of ‘certain delicious sensations which are no less intense for being vague; and there is no sharper point than that of Infinity’.9
Astley’s metaphors for life more or less suspended between the two tendencies. The rather ethereal images of vanishing points have their energetic counterpoint, in ‘a natural synchronism in the world. All things crash together’.10 Indeed at this time, for Astley, they certainly seemed to.
Heinemann was in a state of corporate flux, with Louise Adler about to depart after f
ive years, as she did in 1994, to become arts and entertainment editor for the Melbourne Age. Theirs had been an important personal relationship for Astley; professionally, it had changed the way her books were published and built her readership by drawing in new readers. Much as she liked the journalist Jennifer Byrne who was taking over, things would not be the same. Other pressures edged in too. Phil had cancer and was facing a protracted terminal illness; Jack had prostate cancer, not itself a killer but needing to be managed; she and Jack were now ‘an aged pair’, she wrote in a letter; and always there was the concern about moving closer to Ed.11 The tone of complaint meant that this was a letter the seventy-year-old Astley could have written at any time during the previous five decades of her life. Doubtless she knew it.
In Donal O’Shea’s book The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe, he writes that ‘nothing illustrates the tension between precision and dreaminess better than Euclid’s The Elements …’ Writing about the universe and the way we imagine space and time, he asks the question: ‘If our universe doesn’t go on forever, and if it has no walls, doesn’t that mean that the universe must be bent or curved somehow? … Come to think of it, what do we mean by curving?’12 Thea Astley, who once said the Catholic Church stimulated ‘metaphor glands’, was writing a geometry of living more in keeping with Euclid.
Astley would have loved the concept of curving. But the real attraction of lines, shapes, movements across space was the visual richness it offered Astley. Hers was a visual imagination that she possibly inherited from her grandfather, the artist Charles Astley. Increasingly Astley saw the shape of her writing in images: ‘a series of overlapping photos, negatives … with bits of one view superimposed on the next or others’.13 She moved gently around the territory that she had made hers in her writing, looking for a final resting place. Her return to her old publisher Penguin in 1996 might have had something to do with this. Astley and Bob Sessions, now publishing director there, went back twenty years to the days of Nelson and Beatrice Davis and the Pineapple story collection. She wanted to call her new novel The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow and she discovered a new ally in Meredith Rose, her young editor at Penguin. She and Astley clicked; Rose had her own ‘crazy Methodist upbringing’ to rival her author’s Catholicism, and they shared a similar sense of humour. Astley always knew how to play many roles almost simultaneously: friend-teacher-parent. On first impression she seemed to Rose more like an impish schoolgirl than anything else.14
Author and editor met in a hotel room for a one-off editing session on Rainshadow and Rose brought a teapot so they could have real leaf tea. ‘We spent as much time laughing as editing,’ said Rose. ‘She didn’t need a lot of editing.’ The manuscript had already been worked on in the process of being bought by Penguin. Rose soon understood that she was working with an author who was ‘scrupulously sensible’, not at all the tricky customer she had been warned about.15
Astley was in any case happy about being with Penguin again, ‘loved the whole iconic thing of Penguin’, would laugh at herself for loving also the bright orange bulb that overhung the entrance at the publisher’s large outer-suburban Melbourne office. Rose and Astley enjoyed endless phone calls, catching up on episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful, the plots of which Astley would relate in hilarious detail. But Rose saw that Astley was also suffering. She seemed in fact to be consumed by guilt about Jack and whether she was doing enough for him.
Her sense of responsibility seemed all the more pressing because Phil was now gravely ill. Astley might not have known it, but her brother was struggling with more than illness. In August of 1996 he had asked to be released from the Jesuits, but his wishes were regarded as a temporary aberration induced by stress related to his cancer treatment.16
Ageing makes life seem less linear, more like a series of patterns that crisscross back and forth. Once, years before, Astley had given a speech about writing. The transcript is undated, but mentions ‘Gabby’, the main character from the 1982 novel Item from the Late News, assuming audience familiarity with that text. She mentioned Chekhov’s short story ‘Ariadne’, where one of the characters refers to a novel by Weltmann in which one man says, ‘What a story’; the other replies, ‘No, it’s only the beginning to my story.’ ‘Most of life,’ said Astley, ‘is a series of multiple beginnings. To grasp even a few of those beginnings and weave them into some sort of form is what the writer’s craft is all about.’17
By the end of 1996, as the fortunes of Rainshadow rose, Phil was ill enough to be taking morphine. He scribbled a last note to his sister: he was sleeping a lot, and perhaps it was ‘time for a phone call or two’.18 Ed and Michelle had decided to visit him in Melbourne. Astley was tentative about seeing her brother that one last time; the arrangements, the flights seemed too difficult. She put the trip off for several months. Then a nurse rang her to say that Phil was close to death. Ed organised flights quickly and Astley was in Melbourne that night. Phil was looking dreadful in a way Astley had never previously seen. She was shocked, and escaped for a cigarette outside.19
Just over half an hour later Astley saw Ed walking towards her and immediately knew the worst. As well as dealing with the finality of that news, she was appalled at her selfishness. She went back to Phil’s home in Campion House, Kew – she would be near him there – and three days later, on 19 June 1997, attended his Memorial Mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Hawthorn.
At the service Astley was confronted by the past that she and Phil had shared. The liturgy, rightly or wrongly, was also a litany, an honest account of Phil’s life and his many stages in the Church, at odds with himself, struggling with his God and his religious responsibilities. Why, Astley wondered, was there such sanctimonious insistence on the ways the Church had helped him in all the phases of his misfortune? Did they think his life was a failure? Astley sat silently fuming, unable to see quite how the Church had been a place of nurture for her brother.
Conversations after the ceremony didn’t help, with one or two brothers offering accounts of Phil’s naïve approach to cheeky primary schoolboys and how the boys had outsmarted him. Michael McGirr remembers Astley pronouncing defensively, ‘Well, at least he tried.’ Back in the car, she blurted out to McGirr, ‘He suffered for fifty-five years, so much loneliness.’ But McGirr knew this was not so: Phil had touched lives, made genuine friendships. Astley was projecting her own feelings about Phil’s life: she knew she could never have stood it.
McGirr also knew that Astley was protective of Phil and he could see how much of a strain the day had been for her. In the car, every conversation seemed to turn on guilt. After coffee, Astley and McGirr went to a bookshop, where McGirr was a little astonished to see Astley taking her books off the shelves to sign them. He heard her lean over to the girl behind the counter: ‘I’ll give you a piece of advice. A signed book is a sold book. Once they are signed, they can’t be returned to the warehouse.’
Business on the day of your brother’s funeral: it was very odd behaviour, thought McGirr. After the funeral Astley wanted to visit Helen Daniel, the editor of Australian Book Review, whose partner had just died. They arrived at the office in Carlton unannounced and Thea immediately embraced Helen and said, ‘You feel like you did it, don’t you?’ It seemed she did. It was a rapport, but it was built on guilt; McGirr could see this was Thea’s way of ‘drawing poison from the wound’.20 By the time they travelled out to Penguin’s offices, Astley’s defences were falling away. Meredith Rose was called down to the foyer to find Thea distressed and in tears.
It was one thing to travel back in your own mind, another to be propelled there by the fates. Astley, who had lived largely outside her home state, found that despite Rainshadow’s main award being the Melbourne-based Age Book of the Year, many things continued to take her back to Queensland. There was to be a plaque with her name in the Albert Street library trail in Brisbane; Diane Cilento was hoping to perform an adapta
tion of It’s Raining in Mango with her community theatre group Karnak in north Queensland. It only took one letter like that for real estate fantasies to bubble to the surface. A house had been bought in Cairns three years before, in 1994, and sat empty. When Astley heard Meredith Rose was going up north for a holiday, she asked her to bring back the real estate brochures for Mossman where Cilento lived.
Increasingly, signs of multiple endings – rather than the ‘multiple beginnings’ Astley had previously been concerned with – were now the norm. People Astley had known well for many years were now leaving publishing or other roles, reminding her that time was doing its work. The most significant was Irene Stevens’s departure from the Literature Board. For more than twenty years she had seen Astley throughout the stages of writing, all her ‘before and after’ moods. Even closer to home was the question of Jack’s various illnesses – involving his eyesight, prostate and heart, the long-term effects of two hip replacements he had had as far back as the 1980s – and how best to manage the end. Would she even have the chance to write just one last book? Astley’s near contemporary, the short story writer and novelist Elizabeth Jolley, had said that the writing in Rainshadow was ‘poetical and musical’, ‘vivid and haunting’ and above all endorsed the title.21 ‘Haunting’ was the word that stood out for Astley.
The house near Sussex Inlet was still a refuge, from Jack’s health problems as much as for Astley’s writing. Ed’s wife, Michelle, and her sister had stayed there for long periods after Thea and Jack first bought it in 1988 but before they had moved in, and suggested that near neighbours Kevin and Pat McHugh were people she and Jack might befriend. By 1996 Thea and Jack planned to live there permanently. The house had been gradually altered, with the addition of a bedroom and a bathroom that had a bath – a necessity in Astley’s view – so it was now suitable for friends to make it their own from time to time. Above all it was the best house for family.