by Barry Oakley
After I found my seat up the back the whole row started to tremble. A giant was heading for the one next to me. It was Ray Gabelich, huge in his Collingwood playing days and even bigger now. He sits, and my seat sinks into his, and I spend much of the evening leaning against him. But what was going on? Ray can’t work it out. Why is this white-haired guy taking notes all the time, like some kind of football coach? And why is he pressing up against me?
Fitzroy, the Royboys, eternal losers, get some goals on the scoreboard at last. Beryl and Roy Noble have stuck with them to the end. Roy is sixty and alcoholic, the old Australia personified, the Australia that’s going up the street in a removalist’s van. He’s battling the pink-helicopter entrepreneur who wants to shift Fitzroy to Tokyo. He fails, collapses and dies, his face falling into a plate of rissoles. (‘Don’t die yet, love, you haven’t done the lawns.’)
Roy might lose, but the play’s a winner—even Roy’s old blue heeler behaves itself. She barks at their quarrels, chases any actor that runs, sniffs the set, and falls through the floor. It’s a great night, and Dickins celebrates by kicking a football across the foyer, narrowly missing the Jeffrey Smart murals.
A few weeks earlier, I went over to the other side myself. I’d been commissioned by Angus & Robertson to devise what they called a presentation to celebrate their centenary. It would be at the Opera House, and must be centred around their founder, George Robertson. But—Scottish and thrifty to the end, like Robertson himself—the budget was modest, and costs ‘mustn’t get out of hand’.
George Robertson, I soon discovered, was the most underrated figure in Australian literature. A Scot, big, bearded and blunt, he was as unsparing of the talentless (‘Dear Sir, Your stories are quite hopeless and we feel sure that you will never do anything worthwhile. Give it up and take to gardening, or something else that’s useful, in your spare time’) as he was nurturing of the gifted. He started his publishing career with a whip crack: Banjo Paterson became the most popular English-language poet of his time (apart from Kipling) and he went on to build an unmatched Australian list—C.J. Dennis, May Gibbs, Norman Lindsay, Christopher Brennan and Henry Lawson, who both delighted him and drove him mad. He had a hiding place at the back of his bookshop to which he retreated whenever Lawson came in, begging for booze money. From 1900 until his death in 1933 he dominated Australian publishing.
It wasn’t easy to suggest all this with half-a-dozen actors reading from their scripts, but under Nick Enright’s direction they moved backwards and forwards in rhythmic patterns to the music of Elgar. But it was intimate theatre, in constant danger of disappearing into the whale-gape of the Opera House.
It was around this time that I saw Valerie Lawson, now the paper’s editor, at the Paddington newsagency, rearranging the disturbingly high stack of Times on Sunday in the hope more people would notice it. If it’s not selling in Paddington, then where? A few days later, a call from the most recent arts editor. ‘This is strictly between you and I. I’ve just resigned.’ (Between you and I? That’s a sackable offence in itself.)
The paper kept sinking, the deck sloping slightly, but I was allowed to stay on board. I can remember little of the plays reviewed for the rest of 1987. But I still have some of the cuttings, now turning brown. ‘Lights up on Jennifer Clare as Lillian Hellman’ began one. No recollection of that whatever. ‘The situations are slow-paced and unsubtle, the language flavourless basic English.’ So much so that the play, The Impostor by a Chinese playwright called Sha Yexin, has disappeared entirely.
There’s an irony here. When scholars write the theatrical history of the time, the only evidence they’ll have to go on will be the reviews. The productions will have submerged, all their lights gradually extinguished, leaving on the surface only a thin slick of type. The reviewers’ accounts of the plays become the authorised versions. All that vividness and fire collapsing into the ash blackness of print.
There were vividness and fire in the epic production of Manning Clark’s History of Australia, a perhaps foolhardy attempt to transform Clark’s vast six-volume work into dialogue, dance and song, staged in the faded French–Empire finery of Melbourne’s Princess Theatre. The proscenium arch disappeared into a wraparound set that brought gum trees and action into the audience. Eighty-eight characters came and went, taking the audience on a boisterous ride through two centuries of history. Something almost as spectacular followed—a tremendous party in the Melbourne Town Hall, at which Bob Hawke, that legendary theatre-lover and patron of the arts, gave a speech.
Sometimes the play took off, and sometimes it was as chaotic as the period it was depicting. Knowing the time, effort and money the producers, writers, composers and performers had put into it, my review focused on the good—the vigour, the energy—but the Melbourne Sun was savage, and the Age’s Len Radic, the Easter Island obelisk, was stony. It closed after thirty-seven performances. Later, the journalist Ben Hills pecked away at it like a crow at roadkill, carefully avoiding the central point: Manning Clark’s History of Australia was a heroic enterprise that deserved admiration, not cheap journalistic contempt.
A month later, it was another heroic enterprise’s turn. I wrote a review of a now-forgotten Melbourne Theatre Company play on the forty-second floor of the Regent Hotel, working until 3 am, and watching the lights of the city shrinking far below me. A few hours later, I rang the Times on Sunday to file. ‘Don’t bother,’ said my contact, Sharon Hill, who was in tears. ‘The paper’s folded.’ Was it my room service bills that did it?
By May 1988, when I was still luxuriating in the fact that I’d never have to manhandle 800 words out of a brightly lit couple of hours whose meaning eluded language, we began to run out of money. We were still getting free tickets, but—the crucial part of a theatrical experience—couldn’t afford interval drinks. ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ said my mother during one of our regular Sunday night phonecalls. ‘When one door closes, another opens.’ If she suspected I might have been hinting about a short-term loan, she was right.
Her venerable apothegm turned out to be right too. In June, I went to a lunch organised by Geoffrey Dutton for what he called key figures, to meet Christopher Pearson, soon to launch a Sydney equivalent of his successful Adelaide Review. Pearson, rotund of figure and orotund of speech, took me aside and offered me one hundred dollars a review for his new monthly. Despite our indigence, I declined. The next day he doubled the offer. ‘Please say yes,’ he said. Though I was flattered (by the pleading, not the pay) and told him I’d think about it, I knew I’d have to take it on.
But we couldn’t live on $200 a month. Carmel keeps us afloat managing a rug shop and writing video scripts for the Education Department. From now on we eke—a verb that sounds better without a predicate. I agree to be strapped once again into theatrical harness and drag 1200 words behind me once a month for Pearson’s Sydney Review. While I was straining at my task, I got a phonecall from Anne Fussell, features editor of the Australian. ‘Is it true you’re interested in being literary editor of the paper?’ (I had my friend Dick Hughes, who worked then at News Limited, to thank for this masterly piece of networking.) Saved! I wanted to shout, but managed a sober affirmative instead.
‘You’re going to be what?’ said my mother, when I phone her with the news. ‘You’ll be the literary? It was my prayers that did it.’ Try as I might, my mother persisted in using literary as a noun.
Frank Devine, soon to become the Australian’s editor, rings from New York, sounding more serious than the roaring rollicker I knew from dinner parties. He wants my ideas in a letter straight away. ‘See ya, kid,’ he signed off, with a friendliness that had a slight undertone of menace, which sent me into a depression. I’d failed at film, I’d failed at radio, I’d taken to the lifeboats with a sinking newspaper—could this be the quadrella?
The terror of the machines
About a month later—it’s July 1988 now—I had lunch with Geoffrey Dutton. He was giving up the literary editorship and passing
it on to me. We talked books and gossip and then, over the coffee, he asked whether I could use ‘the machines’.
‘The what?’
‘The VDTs.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Video Display Terminals.’ No I could not. ‘Don’t panic—if you can type there’ll be no problem.’
But there was a problem. I couldn’t type. I was a longhand man, a vestige, a fossil, and as he took me back to the office I felt afraid. The fear grew when we entered the fluorescent vastness of the newsroom, swelled as we sat down in front of a Video Display Terminal—and, as Dutton’s fingers pecked at the keyboard in accordance with codes I didn’t understand, terror turned to panic.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the good friend who’d helped me get the job. ‘I’ll teach you at night when there’s no one around.’ Every night when I arrived for tuition, my friend would insist on going first to the Evening Star for what he called the theoretical work. Five or six beers later we’d go back for the practical side—but his words would go in one ear, float across to the other and out again.
The anxiety and the bottleneck lasted three months, partly because I’d made the job a lot harder. Dutton, with whom I was briefly apprenticed, would go in only two days a week, open drawers by now bulging with books, and assign them at speed, like a dealer with a pack of cards. For him it was a part-time job—he was a writer who did this on the side. When Frank Devine took over as editor, he asked if there was anything I wanted. A third page, I foolishly replied. Done, he boomed.
Three broadsheet pages was a frightening amount of space and it was up to me to fill it. I started a feature called ‘Behind the Book’, with a writer or publisher interviewed every week, and columns from London, New York (and Sydney). The books arrived in waves—boxes and boxes of them—and I made two discoveries. Even three pages were inadequate (Frank eventually let me increase it to four) and so were a depressing number of reviewers I’d inherited.
‘Be ruthless,’ said Frank—and there was no other way. The uneditable were never published, and the salvageable rewritten so comprehensively I hoped their authors would be annoyed, and refuse to contribute any further. This disposed of some but not others, and when they got no more books to review and asked why, I had to tell them, using euphemisms like ‘a new look’ and ‘fresh faces’. It fooled nobody. I’d made my first enemies (apart from theatrical ones).
The book review, I now realised, was an art form in itself, and it took months to purge the pages of those who couldn’t do it. A handful survived. It sounds easy, but it isn’t, and I set out in search for those who might have the gift—extending from academic and literary magazines to letter writers in the broadsheets. There were discoveries—the acerbic Kathy Hunt, Gippsland’s Dorothy Parker, a pungent humorist called Greg Flynn who was rapidly terminated by my successor James Hall; and disasters—the most unexpected being a prize-winning novelist whose copy was so bad it was a puzzle how he could have written a novel at all. He expressed himself crisply nevertheless when his review was sent back for a second time—‘Get fucked’.
But the challenge was only beginning. The right book had to be mated with the right reviewer. Out went flesh-coloured novels with embossed titles, airport fiction, cooking, dieting and self-help works, and the bafflingly obscure: The Romance of Milk: The Story of Australian Dairying; Will and Codicil: The Trustee Company Story; From Bedpan to Trepan: Post-war Hospital Policy. (I made all these up, but there were many of this kind.)
Literary editors operate like escort agencies. Matchings need diplomacy (is A a friend or enemy of B? Wasn’t C an ex-lover of D? Didn’t E once get a bad review from F?)
It didn’t take long for the letters and faxes to come in (no emails, mercifully, yet). One outraged author copied the letter he’d sent to the reviewer of his book to me. ‘Dear D, I have just seen your review of my book in the Weekend Australian. Is this the same D who was a colleague and friend at the ABC? Goodness, what a silly old fart you have become.’
But ultimately it’s always my fault. ‘Dear Barry, When I was foolish enough to ask you if you were going to review my book, I had no idea you would send it to X. Surely you must have known that X regards Henry Lawson as his personal property, and that trespassers are shown the gate? His review was motivated by spleen from beginning to end, and parts of it may be defamatory. Thanks for your help. We must have a beer sometime.’
An entire eco-system had to be mapped and mastered. As well as disgruntled authors and sacked reviewers, publishers and literary agents also circled, alert for omissions. There being no such thing as a free lunch, if either of the above took me to one, favours were implicitly expected in return. The longer and more expensive the lunch, the greater the implied obligation. A literary editor must be able to hold his or her liquor.
At the system’s centre is the heave and bubble of Australian literary pond-life. Who are the carps, who the tadpoles? And what of the few that have made the salmon-leap to international waters, and who will henceforth regard any local criticism as small-pond envy and malice?
There were also literary lunches, arranged in partnership with large department stores, and as a result offering authors one didn’t always admire. Like the absurdly popular Ken Follett, whose prose I sample before introducing him to an admiring crowd of North Shore and Eastern Suburbs matrons. I stumbled through his new novel until reaching a sex scene: ‘This was not what was supposed to happen, she thought weakly. He pushed her gently backward on the bed, and her hat fell off. This isn’t right, she said feebly. He kissed her mouth, nibbling her lips gently with his own.’ As a general rule, the more adverbs, the worse the writer. In four sentences, Follett had cobbled in four of them.
At another, I had to introduce Sidney Sheldon, an even more successful writer, before an even larger admiring crowd. Sheldon’s novels are written in sentences like processed cheese, but have sold, according to the press release, 300 million copies (I don’t believe it). Some of my incredulity must have shown when I introduced him. As I came down from the podium and he came up, he whispered, ‘You took that off the press release.’ It was true—I could think of no compliments of my own—but I denied it. He had trouble fixing his features into a smile.
Pretending to enthuse (in my capacity as Literary Editor of the Australian) about the processed-cheese prose of US author, Sidney Sheldon.
One must also be alert for the Richler Effect. I admired the novels of the Canadian humorist (Solomon Gursky Was Here) and his publishers organised a lunch for him. At the table I was introduced to a small, sour figure who I assumed to be the author’s father, but who turned out to be Mordecai Richler, the author himself. The open-faced forty-year-old of his new novel’s jacket photo had undergone a Dorian-Gray transformation into someone elderly and sullen. Maybe he was aware of the effect, because he spent most of the lunch turned away from us, puffing on smelly cheroots. And when I later met Joseph Heller, the keen-eyed kibbitzer on the Good As Gold flyleaf had metamorphosed into a copper-skinned Gold Coast retiree.
Though the literary editor isn’t high in the newsroom pecking order (real journalists see it as a sheltered workshop) I learned to use what little power I had to delegate unpleasant assignments—especially interviewing writers. With rare exceptions (Amos Oz for one) writers are solipsists who believe their work is a nebula at the centre of the universe. (I know—I’m one myself.) The more important they think they are, the harder they play to get. Gore Vidal—the last of the American Puritans, for whom political life is irredeemably corrupted—fortunately said no. Sliding down the significance scale, Murray Bail, who’s taken up residence in literature’s cold store, also refused. (The literary journalist Michele Field told me that when she was doing a series of writer interviews, Bail would only consent to leave the coolroom if he could be assured he wouldn’t encounter any other writer going out or coming in.)
As well as the Richler Effect, another principle soon established itself. The less the talent, the more the self-p
romotion. A poet sent me a monthly newsletter of his activities, expecting to get an occasional mention in Lyn Tranter’s column about local literary life. When she did mention him (critically) I had a call from the offended poet. ‘I don’t want to threaten you, but steps might have to be taken if something isn’t done. She could well affect my chances of getting grants.’ ‘Threaten away,’ I said, and hung up.
His poems didn’t get in either. Poetry editorship came with the job, which led to the formulation of a third literary law: the White Mice Syndrome. When our children were young, they had white mice, which, tormented by their confinement, sometimes turned on one another in a flurry of squealing. Poets, maddened by obscurity, can sometimes do the same.
Novelists and playwrights resent their more successful colleagues, but poets coalesce into hostile camps. The modernists and traditionalists hate one another, and on at least one occasion have come to blows.
All over Australia, I soon discovered, bad poetry was being written. Some aspirants couldn’t even get my title right: ‘The Littery editor’, ‘The Lisenary editor’, ‘the overall editor of literature’. Some were so bad a certain majesty crept into them:
How is one to loosen up the serious
boondoggle of the species from afar?
From a Japanese poet (‘I enclose some my manuscripts and expect your good answer’):
I might was selfish
I might was coward
Please don’t forget our life
Teardrops of elephant.
Even when a poem was published, you weren’t safe. ‘Dear Barry Oakley, I have been contacted by Mr X, in relation to his poem Apology to my Father. I gather from Mr X that there was a misprint in the third verse, and he would like a correction published.’ Sincerely, Lynne Spender, Executive Officer, Australian Society of Authors.