by Helen Trinca
She would slightly pick an argument with you and then would go on and on and on and she would turn it around and say that you had picked the fight and she would flounce off. She did that with me a couple of times and there would be no communication for weeks or maybe months and then a little postcard through the post saying, shall we meet up? After a while I got used to it so I knew the method.43
Unless her friends were prepared for a permanent breach, they had to allow Madeleine to control the rhythm of the relationship.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Essence and the Booker
Madeleine called her third novel, the ‘Nicola book’. The title had changed from Little Lambs Eat Parsley to Learning to Talk to become The Essence of the Thing by the time Fourth Estate began work on its publication. Christopher Potter liked his new author a great deal and enjoyed their meetings to discuss the manuscript:
It was really about the rhythm and I tried to be sensitive to the fact that with such short words, even minute editing is not insignificant because any slight change sends the wrong idea…She was very pernickety about punctuation and that made it quite interesting [but] I could never tell what she would be absolutely adamant about and what she didn’t care about.
Potter respected her subtlety and her certainty. Madeleine never expressed doubt: her books were finished products when she handed them over. Potter saw her as a serious person with a strong spiritual centre. ‘It seemed as if she was here to find something out.’1
Madeleine proved a demanding client for Lutyens & Rubinstein, but she was delighted by Sarah, who was so well read and prepared to give a great deal of attention to her newest client. Soon the professional relationship of agent and author became a friendship. The women met for coffee or lunch at Raoul’s in Notting Hill, and Madeleine sent postcards almost daily to Sarah or dropped in at the office. They visited each other’s homes and went together to the British Film Institute screenings at Southbank, Madeleine becoming angry if Sarah did not appreciate a film.
‘She was incredibly powerful; she made you do things,’ Sarah recalled.2 When Sarah took a trip to Sydney, Madeleine insisted she ride the bus from the city to Watsons Bay, retracing a journey Madeleine knew well. She wanted to know what had happened along the route in the time she had been away. Sarah did the trip, but by car. Back in London, Madeleine was furious that her agent had not followed instructions: Sarah had had the wrong perspective and ruined the entire exercise.
But Madeleine’s wit and unique way of looking at the world compensated for her prickliness. She was very fond of Sarah’s young son and worried about whether he was receiving the correct musical education. ‘Are you teaching him music? Has he got access to the right kind of music teachers? Are you doing singing with him, are you? How often?’ Madeleine hunted down the best guitar teacher in London and insisted Sarah employ him.3
Sarah and Felicity Rubinstein worried about the precarious finances of their client and sought foreign language publishers for her books. Barry Humphries had written enthusiastically about The Women in Black in the Spectator. His endorsement would help create interest in the new novels. In May 1997, Felicity sent him a copy of A Pure Clear Light and a proof copy of The Essence of the Thing. Susannah Godman, a young assistant at Lutyens & Rubinstein, was sent around to Colville Gardens with the books for Madeleine to sign. Felicity wrote to Humphries:
I do hope you will love them as much as you loved her first novel and it would be wonderful if you could mention her in your Spectator column around publication time. I can’t tell you how thrilled Sarah and I are to have found a fellow fan in you.4
Madeleine was anxious: ‘What if Dame E doesn’t like PCL or E of the T? Anything is possible…even life after death,’ she wrote to Felicity.5
In August 1997, The Essence of the Thing was published. Madeleine dedicated it to Judith McCue. The novel covers an episode in the life of Nicola Gatling, a thirty-something-year-old Londoner working in publishing and living contentedly with Jonathan, a banker. Her life is turned upside down when on an ordinary weekday night, she comes back from a brief outing to buy cigarettes to Jonathan’s announcement that their life together is over. The novel is a stand-alone piece but readers of A Pure Clear Light were reintroduced to some of the key characters, who play bit parts in the new novel. Madeleine was creating a micro-world in a London populated by members of her fictional ‘family’. Friends and acquaintances in the two books overlap, joined by the thinnest of threads at times, but nonetheless connected. There’s even a gentle joke at her own expense in Essence: Jonathan hears a radio book reading of ‘some footling tale about some shop assistants in an antipodean department store, fretting about their wombs and their wardrobes and other empty spaces—ye gods!’6
The Essence of the Thing is perhaps the most autobiographical of Madeleine’s novels.7 Its cigarette-smoking heroine of limited financial means, but infinite style and goodness, almost by accident finds domestic happiness with a tall, handsome, phlegmatic man, who suddenly one day ends the thing without explanation.
Whether or not she is drawing on her own experience of men, Madeleine paints an unflattering portrait of her main male character. Jonathan is desirable, but also emotionally ill-equipped and ultimately rather weak, even pathetic. Madeleine may have called on her memories of the disappointing American years for the disjointed, prosaic exchanges that mark the collapse of love. She strikes a perfect note with her dialogue rendering the way people stumble through intimacy or the lack of it. Nicola’s friends and family find it hard to empathise with her despair but offer what they can—loyalty, tolerance, love and acceptance.
But the most poignant autobiographical element is the pain—the confusion and agony of rejection, the dullness of life without the Loved One. Once again, Madeleine is interested in the transient, unknown elements of life. The need for religious belief is not as overt as it is in A Pure Clear Light, but the novel is about the need to trust and hope in life itself. It is a micro-canvas, what Christopher Potter, referencing Jane Austen, called a ‘tiny little bit of ivory’ pointing to the big moral dilemmas involved in being human. Even if their lives seem ridiculous, her protagonists have a sure, definite line to ‘reckon against’ as does every ‘deeply religious person’.8
The Essence of the Thing attracted limited interest on publication, and Fourth Estate did not put it forward for the 1997 Booker Prize.9 It was the judges who called it in as they assessed what they considered the best novel published in the Commonwealth. It was one of 106 novels read that year by the six-member panel chaired by Cambridge literature don Gillian Beer. The Booker was often controversial, but in 1997 it proved more so than usual. The panel was divided, arguing over whether or not Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love should be on the shortlist.10
When the judges met on 15 September to determine their shortlist, Christopher Potter was on leave at home, keen to know whether Madeleine’s book had made the cut. As the afternoon wore on without a phone call from the office, he assumed Essence had missed out. It was late in the day when he turned on the radio news to hear the list. He was thrilled. The Essence of the Thing was on the shortlist. It was up against Jim Crace’s Quarantine, Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man, Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes, Tim Parks’s Europa, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Enduring Love was not on the list.
Fifty-five-year-old Madeleine St John had become the first Australian woman to be shortlisted for the Booker. Little Lambs Eat Parsley a.k.a. Learning to Talk a.k.a. The Essence of the Thing had prevailed. The Booker Prize was £20,000 that year but Potter knew it would be worth much more to Madeleine and Fourth Estate, delivering status as well as sales and transforming Madeleine’s career. At her home in Chalk Farm, Esther Whitby took calls from former colleagues at Andre Deutsch, congratulating her for the part she had played in discovering the latest Booker candidate. Fourth Estate organised a reprint of 15,000 copies of The Essence of the Thing, and the press in London and Australia started asking question
s about this unknown author with the plummy name.
In Sydney it was the middle of the night, too late for the news to make the morning papers, but perfect for radio. At the ABC, producers hurried to find people to reminisce about their old university contemporary. Actor John Bell hadn’t seen Madeleine since their days in campus repertory, but he was called upon for comment, nonetheless.11 In their homes across Sydney, the extended St John family found their phones running hot as friends and relatives called to exclaim upon Madeleine’s news. A friend telephoned Colette’s home on the northern beaches, but she had already left for work. Eleven-year-old Aaron took the call and scrawled a note for his mother before he dashed off to school: ‘Mumma, my Aunt Madeleine has won a book prize.’12 A day later the Australian papers carried stories about the expatriate who had started to write in middle age and was now shortlisted for one of the most prestigious prizes for literature in the English-speaking world. The Australian turned most of its features page over to the story, which included a phone interview with Madeleine by Luke Slattery. Madeleine gave him only five minutes, most of it filled with elliptical self-deprecation that must have left readers wondering what she was on about. ‘It’s mad. They’ll all read it just because it’s being talked about. Quite mad,’ she announced as she sought to downplay her excitement. Slattery talked at length to Colleen Chesterman, who said her friend was unlikely to see herself as an Australian success story.13
The Sydney Morning Herald began its coverage on page one, with a large photograph of Madeleine. Christopher Henning, the paper’s London correspondent, wrote that the author was ‘gob smacked…stunned… appalled’ by the Booker fuss. He quoted Madeleine: ‘These lists, let’s face it…there are squillions of books out there. Who knows what the best six are? With the best will in the world, with the best-chosen judges in the world, it all comes down to a personal taste thingy. It is to such a degree a matter of luck. It’s not about me being brilliant. It’s about me being lucky.’ Even so, she told the Herald, she wished Miss Medway, her principal at Queenwood, ‘could see this’. And what of the publicity whirl she had been thrust into? ‘No, I hate it. I have not had my first cup of coffee, so I am probably going a bit barmy. I could get to enjoy it, but I don’t want to. I know it isn’t going to last.’14 The Herald tracked down Chris Tillam but he said little about the woman who had divorced him thirty years earlier. The paper found Colette at Palm Beach and she was more expansive, claiming that a major contribution to Madeleine’s writing was her dysfunctional relationship with Ted. Their father, she said, had inflicted an ‘enormous amount of pain and suffering’. The paper convinced Ed St John to write a personal piece about his half-sister. Ed had worked as a music journalist and TV producer and was now the CEO of Warner Music Australia. He wrote a fair and honest account of Madeleine, pointing out that he did not really know her:
I knew her once, but not now. It’s hard to explain how familial relationships can deteriorate to a point where people cannot or will not speak to each other, but that is what has occurred. Three years ago, the blood link that joined us was severed by the death of our father. Madeleine and Dad always had a very stormy relationship, one that came to a grinding impasse some time before he died, but it’s ultimately for him that I am writing this.
Ed noted that his father loved writers and writing and would have been ‘immensely proud’ of Madeleine’s Booker shortlisting. He told of her visit to Australia when he was a teenager:
To an impressionable teenager, the Madeleine of the late ’70s was a hugely fascinating figure: exotic, mysterious, worldly. She didn’t actually appear to do anything, but she did nothing with an immense amount of style and great humour. It was always said, at family dinners, that Madeleine wrote a brilliant letter (and she did). It was accepted as an article of faith that it was a Great Shame she had never put her talents to good use.
Now she had emerged as an author. ‘As she would put it herself, it’s a bizarre twist to a peculiar life,’ the piece concluded.15
Ed’s article was generous without avoiding the complexities of Madeleine’s relationship with her family. Annabel Minchin rang Madeleine. The conversation began well but deteriorated when Annabel mentioned the piece. Madeleine fumed. ‘She said something like, “Your complete insensitivity is breathtaking but only what I would expect from an Australian.” It was incomprehensible to her that I would call her and tell her [about Ed’s piece]’, Annabel recalled.16
In London, Madeleine gave a series of interviews. Journalists trooped up to her flat for cups of tea and brief histories of the expat as novelist—not that she was easy to squeeze into the stereotype of the Australian abroad.
In the Age, Andrew Clark picked up on the theme of Madeleine’s dysfunctional family in childhood and described Ted St John as ‘a remote martinet’ at home.17
In the Herald, Christopher Henning wrote a second, longer piece noting Madeleine’s strenuous efforts to be fair to Ted. ‘Problematical says it all. I can add nothing to that. It is a complete description,’ she said. When Henning asked if the relationship had given her anything, Madeleine laughed and said:
I’ve always been so conscious of what it took away. I’ve never actually thought of what it might have given me. No, before he got problematical—in my view—my father gave me lots of stuff. He really did adore books and turned me on to great books when I was very tiny. After he got problematical…really I don’t think one can know. My assumption is that you learn more from being happy than being unhappy, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?18
Madeleine was good copy. Later in her life she said that she hated ‘the whole thing with reviewers and marketing and what’s happened to the novel and the way it’s promoted and discussed’.19 But she performed well for journalists.
The local London media was as interested as the Australians. Madeleine told the Independent on Sunday that the shortlisting had come just in time: she had been thinking of becoming a tea lady or a check-out chick to make ends meet. She had a crack at Australia as ‘such a monotone place’. Journalist Emma Cook noted the white sixties furniture and white net curtains at Colville Gardens were yellowing from Madeleine’s smoking.20 The Guardian Weekly reported that the flat was ‘cheerfully chaotic’; Madeleine’s face was ‘well-etched’ and the author herself ‘gob smacked’ by the attention. Madeleine talked briefly about her past and her marriage, saying Chris had ‘got distracted by une autre femme, so that was that’. She had ‘never managed to meet another Prince Charming to rescue me from the awful responsibility of running my own life’.21 In the Evening Standard on 14 October—the day of the Booker announcement dinner—Madeleine suggested the shortlisting had saved her from the job centre. Neil Norman wrote that in her flat, ‘frayed rush matting makes a half-hearted attempt to conceal the flaking grey-painted floorboards…a trio of plastic ducks lie stranded in the bath and the loo seat is broken…’ He noted that Madeleine ‘lights a cigarette before putting the pack down next to her asthma inhaler’.22 After the profiles, the Herald’s literary pages sat up and took notice. On 27 September, the chief book reviewer Andrew Riemer looked at The Essence of the Thing and A Pure Clear Light:
St John ignores the great issues most British novelists agonise over nowadays—racism, inequality, the sins of Empire, urban decay. Instead her characters seem wholly preoccupied by the trivia of their class; work, husbands, wives, children, holidays in France, clothes, the pecking order and sex…they are for the most past vapid and shallow and banal…At first blush there is something anachronistic about these short, ironic fables…yet within the confines of her little world, St John strikes me as an accomplished writer…her ear for the pretentious is acute. I found her pared down, minimalist style eminently suited to laying bare her characters’ follies and delusions.23
The London press was less glowing. The Daily Telegraph called The Essence of the Thing ‘the last word in banality…The writing is careless and clichéd. And Madeleine St John’s cast have all the reality and depth of stick
figures on a road sign.’24 The Sunday Times said the novel was ‘tripe…grotesquely inane’.25 Not that the critics were enamoured of other Booker candidates either, with most suggesting that The God of Small Things was the only one worthy of the prize. The Economist noted that half the novels on the shortlist were ‘questionable choices: novels which are generally well written but are somehow smaller and less satisfying than novels which did not make the shortlist’. It included The Essence of the Thing in that half. It was about ‘smart London life and could have appeared any time in the past thirty years…Though cunningly plotted, the whole thing is inoffensive and forgettable.’26
The Booker judging panel may have been divided, but the chair, Professor Beer, felt that some of the critics were against The Essence of the Thing because it was:
concentrated in bourgeois life. There was a sense that this was a kind of trivial world and therefore emotionally trivial…Those of us who liked the book thought it had extraordinary concision and depth. I thought it had paced itself so beautifully; she really has this extraordinary ear for dialogue. One of the other judges commented that he had not heard the language of thirtyish people in London picked up with such accuracy before.27
Few in Madeleine’s camp seriously believed she could win, but they set off with excitement to the Guildhall dinner on 14 October. Madeleine, stylishly dressed and with her bobbed hair freshly coiffured, shared a table with Victoria Barnsley and Christopher Potter from Fourth Estate and her agents Sarah Lutyens and Felicity Rubinstein.28 Also on the table was Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian. The selection committee had met just an hour before the dinner to decide the winner, thus avoiding leaks.
Christopher fretted that Madeleine was not really being given her due by the literary glitterati that night. She had never been part of that crowd and now he thought she was being ignored even though she was in the top six. Somehow, the evening was to be endured. Part of the ceremony was the presentation to each candidate of a copy of his or her novel in a hand-tooled leather cover. Madeleine thrust her copy at Christopher. He could have it; she was not particularly impressed.29