I for Isobel

by Amy Witting

  AMY WITTING was the pen name of Joan Austral Fraser, born on 26 January 1918 in the inner-Sydney suburb of Annandale. After attending Fort Street Girls’ High School she studied arts at the University of Sydney.

  She married Les Levick, a teacher, in 1948 and they had a son. Witting spent her working life teaching, but began writing seriously while recovering from tuberculosis in the 1950s.

  Two stories appeared in the New Yorker in the mid-1960s, leading to The Visit (1977), an acclaimed novel about small-town life in New South Wales. Two years later Witting completed her masterpiece, I for Isobel, which was rejected by publishers troubled by its depiction of a mother tormenting her child.

  When I for Isobel was eventually published, in 1989, it became a bestseller. Witting was lauded for the power and acuity of her portrait of the artist as a young woman. In 1993 she won the Patrick White Award.

  Witting published prolifically in her final decade. After two more novels, her Collected Poems appeared in 1998 and her collected stories, Faces and Voices, in 2000.

  Between these volumes came Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, the sequel to I for Isobel. Both Isobel novels were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award; the latter was the 2000 Age Book of the Year.

  Amy Witting died in 2001, weeks before her novel After Cynthia was published and while she was in the early stages of writing the third Isobel book. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia and a street in Canberra bears her name.

  CHARLOTTE WOOD has been described by the Age as ‘one of the most intelligent and compassionate novelists in Australia’. Animal People, her latest novel, was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize and won the People’s Choice in the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She edits The Writer’s Room Interviews magazine and is working on her fifth novel.

  ALSO BY AMY WITTING

  The Visit

  Marriages (stories)

  A Change in the Lighting

  In and Out the Window (stories)

  Maria’s War

  Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop

  Faces and Voices (stories)

  After Cynthia

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  Copyright © Amy Witting 1989

  Introduction copyright © Charlotte Wood 2014

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Penguin Books Australia 1989

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetting

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147745

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148742

  Author: Witting, Amy, 1918–2001.

  Title: I for Isobel / by Amy Witting; introduced by Charlotte Wood.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  A Potent Victory

  by Charlotte Wood

  I for Isobel

  A Potent Victory

  by Charlotte Wood

  FOR a girl, to be hated by your mother is surely the most savage knowledge with which to begin your life. It’s this fact that attaches itself to the child protagonist in the opening pages of Amy Witting’s best-known novel, and follows her, pitilessly, into adulthood.

  I for Isobel was first published in 1989, the year I began learning to write fiction. I have always known of this book, which stands as one of the landmarks of my literary heritage. Alongside Jessica Anderson and Thea Astley, Witting is a kind of grand aunt to contemporary Australian writers interested in stories of intimate psychological spaces—and in the lives of women.

  So why, until this year, had I never read I for Isobel and its sequel, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop? I’d read Park and Stead, Anderson and Astley, Hewett and Jolley, but somehow I never found the time or the inclination for Witting’s works. That they were long out of print made it harder, but there must have been some other resistance in me. Only now do I realise, with striking clarity and a little shame, that their titles had turned me off. I confess that even with the obvious picture-book irony, they sounded embarrassing to me: girlish and flatfooted, giving off a cutesy, floral whiff.

  How wrong I was.

  I for Isobel opens on Isobel’s ninth birthday with her mother’s words, the same words she has heard every year of her life: ‘No birthday presents this year!’ And with that, a dangerous theme of Witting’s world is introduced: that there can be a psychic violence in the bonds between women, and it is a violence of which they must never speak.

  Conflating life and fiction is always a mistake; Isobel is not Amy. The author maintained a lifelong privacy about her own childhood and mother, making only oblique references to family difficulties. But Isobel’s fight for personal, intellectual sovereignty against brutal resistance was familiar to her creator, and there’s little doubt that the two novels were Witting’s exploration of what Flaubert called ‘the deep and always hidden wound’.

  In one sense I for Isobel is a simple coming-of-age story: the tale of Isobel Callaghan, who must pretend to be nicer, stupider, duller than she is, because the reality of what she is—intellectually gifted, powerfully desiring—is a threat not only to her family but to society itself.

  It’s a small, pinched society that emerges, spreading out from Isobel’s family to the wider world, the city of Sydney and Australia as a whole. At the start, even on holidays, Isobel is forbidden from reading in bed. As solace for the lack of any celebration (‘It is vulgar to celebrate birthdays away from home,’ Mrs Callaghan says, as she does every January), Isobel finds The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on the guesthouse bookshelves, and disappears into it. But she knows this pleasure is suspect; it must remain private, a hidden celebration.

  Here is the novel’s other great theme: redemption through the written word. Isobel’s struggle to be allowed to read in peace is repeated again and again, well into adulthood—at home, then as a young woman living and working in the inner city. Unpacking her books in her single room, Isobel thinks she breathes the air of freedom, but soon learns better. Forbidden from staying in her room (electricity costs!), she takes to a corner of the sitting room, where her bridge-playing fellow boarders are as insulted by her reading as her office workmates are affronted by any sign of independent thought. (In Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, her roommate in the tuberculosis sanatorium responds to Isobel’s peaceful reading with cries of pure rage.)

  From childhood, Isobel’s struggle for the mental privacy and the spaciousness of literature is a battle for the right to think—and to endure. Whatever other punishments she tolerates for being a girl with a brain, she will not give up books. They are talismans and religion; they are solidity, survival, and, at last, liberty.

  Her mother’s hatred is commonplace and devastating. It manifests not in physical violence but in dismissal and disregard, in horrible childish competitiveness, and the scoring of petty points so transparently vindictive that even nine-year-old Isobel can empathise with the infant in her mother. When Mrs Callaghan’s spitefulness is singled out by the other adult holidaymakers, stunning her into a moment’s humiliation, Isobel ‘felt an ach
e of sympathy, knowing how it felt to be the last to be chosen, or even left out of the game’. Soon the child discovers that her mother’s greatest fear is Isobel’s own hard-won composure under fire.

  ‘Tell me.’ Her mother’s voice, which had been rising to a scream, turned calm and gracious again. Like somebody getting dressed. Isobel looked up and saw that her eyes were frantic bright. She doesn’t want me to tell her, she wants me to scream. I do something for her when I scream.

  Then she saw that her mother’s anger was a live animal tormenting her, that she Isobel was an outlet that gave some relief and she was torturing her by withholding it.

  This portrayal of a child’s guilt and sympathy for a loveless parent is compelling because it rings true. Distressing as it may be to those of us with loving mothers, still we recognise its veracity. For those with Isobel’s kind of mother, there is a depthless relief in having brute reality shaped into art, having darkness brought into light. It is the relief of hearing the clear and unashamed statement of the unspeakable: not all mothers love their children. Perhaps even worse, some mothers love some of their children and not others.

  But telling the truth, even in fiction, is dangerous—and part of this novel’s story is the story of its rejection. Witting’s first novel, The Visit, was published in 1977 to good reviews. She finished I for Isobel in 1979, the start of feminism’s flourishing years. It was accepted by her publisher, then ‘unaccepted’ for being too dark, too weird. The highly respected editor Beatrice Davis rejected it with the words, ‘No mother has ever behaved so badly to her own child.’ A gobsmacking claim, and one that speaks of a sexism still at large in the myth of feminine virtue.

  Other rejections followed and, despite Witting being the only Australian short-fiction writer to be twice published by the New Yorker, her novel lay unpublished for a decade. When it was finally released it became an instant bestseller and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award (many felt it should have won). Witting was seventy-one. Between then and her death at eighty-three she published four more novels, as well as story collections and books of poetry.

  But Witting had been writing all her life. Born Joan Fraser, then marrying as Joan Levick, she spent her years at Sydney University as an intimate of the poet James McAuley and his circle, saying later, ‘I spent my life trying to emerge from that group.’ She adopted the pseudonym Amy Witting—a sly rebuttal of society’s preference for naive young women, and a promise to herself to ‘always be witting’—but literary success eluded her, and she spent most of her working life as a gifted and beloved teacher.

  The chauvinism that writers of her generation faced cannot be understated. In the mid-1970s she published a story about sex from a woman’s point of view in Tabloid Story, an alternative literary magazine. Not only was she named in parliament as a ‘scribbler on lavatory walls’ by an outraged state education minister, but the editors who asked for her author photograph were apparently so aghast that a woman in her fifties could write such material that they published her story with a sultry shot of a heavily made-up twenty-year-old, identified as Amy Witting.

  Towards the end of her life, in an interview with the critic Peter Craven, the eternally modest Witting displayed just a glimpse of anger about the years she fought to be heard as a writer. ‘You have no idea what it was like. It was like a woman preaching. It was like words said by a parrot. It was beyond belief.’

  It seems to me a particularly Australian kind of punishment that a writer of Witting’s talent was destined to spend most of her life in service to other people’s words, as an English teacher. Characteristically sanguine, she explained, both in fiction and interviews: ‘It’s the eleventh commandment: thou shall not be different.’

  And different she was. In this novel, Witting’s self-determination as an artist mirrors Isobel’s as a woman. The stylistic and tonal shifts in the last section are an exhilarating shock. With a new focal distance comes a shift in sympathy, and a leap into prose with the density and ruthless compression of poetry. This is the risk-taking of a real artist. Here is not someone who wants to be liked, but a writer in pursuit of her own expansive imaginative truth. It is thrilling.

  I am often disheartened by the use of psychologese to discuss literature, for those dreary stock phrases (childhood trauma, family dysfunction) can only ever homogenise and flatten. But the best writing defies such labels and shows how uncontainable is real human experience. I for Isobel is a feminist work partly because it refuses to pretend that women are higher beings; all through the novel are uncontainable women, from Mrs Callaghan and the boarding-house mother Mrs Bowers to the shamelessly emotional student Diana and—finally—Isobel herself.

  Good literature shows us that one person’s escape from or surrender to the forces which shaped her is always specific, always shocking, always new. Isobel’s is a potent victory, a powerful claim for selfhood. It is a thunderous, irrevocable statement of I. I for Isobel.

  In her interview with Craven, Witting praised Auden and Byron, saying: ‘I love that kind of verse. It’s so dead tough serious.’ I love this book for the same reason. It’s sharp, funny, clear-eyed, humane—and so dead tough serious.

  I for Isobel

  1 • THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT

  A week before Isobel Callaghan’s ninth birthday, her mother said, in a tone of mild regret, ‘No birthday presents this year! We have to be very careful about money this year.’

  Every year at this time she said this; every year Isobel chose not to believe it. Her mother was just saying that, she told herself, to make the present more of a surprise. Experience told her that there would be no present. As soon as they stepped out of the ferry onto the creaking wharf and set out for Mrs Terry’s lakeside boarding house, where they spent the summer holidays, the flat reedy shore, the great Moreton Bay fig whose branches scaffolded the air of the boarding-house garden, the weed-bearded tennis court and the cane chairs with their faded flabby cushions, all spoke to Isobel of desolate past birthdays, but she did not believe experience, either. Day by day she watched for a mysterious shopping trip across the lake, for in the village there was only one tiny store which served as a post office too; when no mysterious journey took place, she told herself they must have brought the present secretly from home. Even on the presentless morning she would not give up hope entirely, but would search in drawers, behind doors, under beds, as if birthday presents were supposed to be hidden, like Easter eggs in the grass.

  Mrs Callaghan, too, kept the birthday in mind and spoke of it now and then.

  ‘January,’ she said, ‘is too close to Christmas for birthday presents,’ and later, serenely, ‘It is vulgar to celebrate birthdays away from home.’

  Whenever she found a new argument against birthday presents for Isobel, a strange look of relief would appear on her face, and Isobel would be forced to accept, for the moment, that there would be no present.

  Well, this year she would remember. This year, one week before Margaret’s birthday, she would remember to say, in her mother’s own tone, ‘No birthday presents this year!’ and see what they would make of that. But she knew, even as she muttered bitterly to herself, that she would not remember. She had no grasp of the calendar yet; holidays surprised her and the seasons were not attached to the names of months. Only Christmas could be foreseen, because of the decorations and Santa Claus in the shops. She got presents at Christmas, being lucky enough to have Christmas the same day as everyone else. Margaret’s birthday, with the present—the real present wrapped in paper—was a black day for Isobel, but it always came without warning. It was not talked about beforehand, like her own.

  This year, the day before the birthday, her mother said in her real voice, ‘Now, Isobel, you are not to go about tomorrow telling people it’s your birthday. I could have died of shame last year, with you running about like a little beggar telling everyone it was your birthday. We don’t want any more behaviour of that kind.’

  Last year she had disgraced the fam
ily, that was true. On a giddy impulse she had run into the garden among the deckchairs, shouting, ‘It’s my birthday! Today is my birthday!’ Skinny, crinkled Mr Daubeney had shouted back, ‘Catch this then!’ and spun a two-shilling piece in the air. She had caught it in the lap of her skirt—she hadn’t had time to begin to be clumsy—and somebody else had cried out, ‘Here’s another!’ ‘Over here!’ ‘Here you are, Isobel!’ She had held up her skirt like a pouch and had caught all the coins, spinning round and laughing, and the grown-ups were laughing too, as she called out, ‘Thank you very much!’ and ran inside with her treasure.

  Her mother was standing watching inside the long glass door of the bedroom. She dug her fingers into Isobel’s arm and hissed, ‘Let your skirt down! Let it down!’ She took the coins Isobel had gathered, stared at them in her hand and moaned, ‘Asking for money, asking for money. How could you shame me like this?’ When her father came in, her mother pointed to the money and said, ‘She’s been going about begging for money, telling everyone it’s her birthday. Oh, what shall we do? Can we give it back?’

  Isobel was sitting on the bed, not allowed to go out in case she disgraced the family again, and subdued because her mother was too upset even to be angry.

  ‘Can you remember who gave it to you?’

  She shook her head.

  Her father said, sounding tired, ‘I don’t think we had better say any more about it. You mustn’t ask people for money, you know, Isobel.’

  Last year, the day had been terrible, and the worst thing about it was that the lovely moment of the spinning coins and the laughing voices had turned out to be bad behaviour. Thinking about it, she wondered what had become of the money, but that didn’t matter very much. The money had been real treasure when it was flying through the air—after that it had been only a cause of shame.

  She forgot about last year when the meaning of her mother’s words sank in, that she was not to tell, not to tell anyone that it was her birthday. She was by nature timid, anxious only to know what was required of her so as to keep out of trouble, but she didn’t think she could do that. It was like being asked to walk into a crack in the wall—it was just not possible.