Echoes From An Author World
The Sunday Age
Sunday March 17, 2002
Our Jack he was a cunning chap
Who sailed across the water
To have a crack at the wily Jap
And try his hand at slaughter.
WHAT, you might ask, was I doing last week, reclining on the grass in the sun, listening to this doggerel? Working, of course. It's hell out there at the coalface of literature, sipping coffee or chardonnay in the tents and taking in the words of wisdom at Adelaide Writers' Week.
The quality of the poems read aloud, I should say, was generally much higher. But this fragment of verse by some anonymous politically incorrect writer got an outing from Gerard Windsor. It was in an essay on poetry he had to study at school, and it was supposed to show the boys what was not poetry.
"I thought, 'Why not?' and have continued to think that," he said. ``It's lived on in my memory much more than those I was told were authentic poems. I acquired a taste for comic verse of the deadpan macabre variety and it made me wary of accepting what authorities told me was literature."
Windsor was speaking in a series of sessions, Writers on Writers, which was one of the brighter ideas of the week. Australian writers were asked to talk about the authors - preferably Australian - who had had a big influence on them.
This was a splendid opportunity to kick a few sacred cows, including the slow torture of set books. Windsor said he couldn't nominate any Australian writers because at the crucial stage of his life, he didn't read any. Later, as a teenager, he had to read We of the Never Never, which he found utterly boring, and The Devil's Advocate, which taught him that if you want to be a priest you shouldn't take a mistress.
The journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks (author of Year of Wonders) said she didn't like Patrick White because he made fun of ordinary Australians like her family and neighbors. Antoni Jach, who writes novels in the European modernist tradition, found a certain tradition of Australian writing - the kind that could be summed up in the flat sentence "It was a hot day" - left him not wanting to write at all. It was too clear, direct, unpretentious and familiar, and he could add nothing to it. He found his inspiration instead in Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot.
Novelist Monica McInerney had the nerve to claim one of the biggest influences on her writing life was her role model for the strong, silent hero of romantic fiction: Humphrey B. Bear. It was once her job to write scripts for him, an odd task for a bear that doesn't speak.
There was, to a surprising degree, a yearning to go back to the old frontier literature of the bush. "Who has read any Steele Rudd in the last 10 years?" Frank Moorhouse asked his audience of hundreds, and about four or five hands went up.
Moorhouse confessed that as a young writer, he and his contemporaries had turned against the bush tradition: "We were city people ... we wanted to be published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review." Then the University of Queensland Press asked him to edit a book of Steele Rudd stories. He re-read them all and his selection was published in 1986. It sold "virtually no copies", and he doubted whether anyone would publish Rudd today.
We were missing something, Moorhouse told us. The stories weren't just autobiographical stuff about a family carving a farm out of the Australian bush. "What he was writing was a fable about the first farm, the first family upon the face of the earth." Rudd was a great storyteller, and his character Dave (in the Dad and Dave series of stories) was a silent man who ``understood the malaise of reality" and preferred to answer all questions by telling a yarn.
Kim Mahood (author of Craft For A Dry Lake) spoke up for an even less read and remembered writer, Tom Ronan, who specialised in fiction set in the frontier country of northern outback Australia. He was the first writer she ever met, when she was about nine: "He was an old rawboned fairly lugubrious fellow with very big ears. It occurred to me it was possible to grow up to be a writer. I also got the impression it wasn't much fun and you didn't make any money at it."
Recently she re-read his 1956 novel Moleskin Midas (now out of print) and couldn't put it down. The central character, an unscrupulous cattle king, was ``one of the great anti-heroes of Australian fiction". His books would no longer appeal to a wide audience, partly because they weren't objective enough, partly because of the racist language and the lack of female points of view. But there were a few moments when they had the touch of a Faulkner.
Gerard Windsor warned us that the favourite books of our youth wouldn't survive just because we wanted them to. But is that necessarily a problem? All the writers had discovered books to inspire them and books to kick against, and the next generation of writers will no doubt have a different, longer and more diverse list of Australian books that influenced them.
The clear winner in all this reminiscing was not an Australian writer, but an Australian institution: the state libraries' delivery service. Two country kids, Monica McInerney in the Clare Valley in South Australia and Frank Moorhouse in Nowra in New South Wales, both recalled the thrill of getting their parcels of books, right down to the smell of the cardboard. There had to be at least one Australian book in each parcel. To subscribe you had to tick off your interests on a form, so they both ticked every box.
Monica McInerney got books on everything from breeding newts to science fiction, but her favourite was Enid Blyton. Geraldine Brooks was another Blyton devotee. She remembered laying out all the Adventure books (Castle of Adventure, Island of Adventure and so on) when she was eight. "Suddenly I had this feeling in my throat and I was a little bit breathless. I had that feeling later and by then I had a word for it: it was lust." As a former mad Adventure books fan, I know exactly what she means.
e-mail: jsullivan@theage.com.au.
© 2002 The Sunday Age