Well-known to Lindsay enthusiasts, Cranny-Francis has written articles and organised conferences about his life and work, maintains a website, arranged the publication of his “political autobiography” The Fullness of Life and edited a volume of selected poems. In this first book-length single-author study of Lindsay’s life and work she has hit on an elegant solution to the problem of the hyperactively full life of her subject. He was someone whose works demand attention to his ideas, and whose ideas demand attention to his life. Jack Lindsay is structured around a core of six chapters, each dedicated to Lindsay’s book-length studies of English authors: John Bunyan (1937), Charles Dickens (1950), George Meredith (1956), William Morris (1974) and two on William Blake (1927 and 1978). This frame is filled in with chapters that provide biographical and intellectual context and discuss his other relevant works, helping the reader to understand, without being overwhelmed, how Lindsay’s approach to writing was influenced by his experiences and ideas.

This structure works well to illuminate Lindsay’s eclectic, self-fashioned life-philosophy, with its associated preoccupations, values and imagery: the struggle for unity, culture as expressive work, the archetype of death and renewal. The system evolved over time, but many elements were present from the first.

Inevitably Cranny-Francis omits or barely glances at much of Lindsay’s output. She makes barely a mention of his forty-three novels and seven biographies of artists. It would be hard to guess from it that Lindsay’s most cited study is about alchemy in Roman Egypt, or that the one most discussed by academics is a historical novel set in the British civil war.

Depending on what counts as a book, Lindsay published about 160 in his lifetime, as well as hundreds of articles, stories and poems. About a half of his writing was historical and biographical, a quarter fiction, and the remainder criticism, social theory, translations, polemics and poetry. Most of his publications were concerned with the past, usually the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Lindsay’s classical training is apparent in the eclectic character of works in which history, mythology, philology, archaeology, anthropology, aesthetics and philosophy are seamlessly blended.

All of Lindsay’s mature writing was underwritten by a self-fashioned philosophy or credo. Its most fundamental principle was what Cranny-Francis describes as the “embodied connectedness” of things. He often called it “vital unity,” “wholeness,” “Life” or “the fullness of life.”

In Lindsay’s thought the concept of vital unity assumes as many guises as energy does in physics. One of his symbols for it was Dionysus, the mysterious deity of wine and rebirth, leader of a disorganised band of enthralled creatures — satyrs, maenads, nymphs, centaurs, Pan the god of shepherds — who found no place on Mount Olympus. Another symbol was the figure of “the people,” which he sometimes called “the folk,” and occasionally “the masses,” each term with its particular political inflection. Human unity implied solidarity, equality, ethical responsiveness and mutual aid.

As Cranny-Francis observes, Lindsay extends the idea of unity to all spheres of human activity, including the natural world. John Bellamy Foster, noting Lindsay’s evocations of a “patient earth… ‘eternally reborn’ through labour and ritual practice,” identifies him as a forerunner of Marxist ecology.

Lindsay found the origins of the idea of unity in Plato, or even further back in Parmenides and Pythagoras, but a slightly less distant inspiration was the sixteenth-century excommunicated priest Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who melded Renaissance humanism with materialism. Lindsay was stirred when he encountered Bruno in the early 1930s, subsequently writing a novel about him (Adam of a New World, 1936), and translating De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle, Unity, 1962). Later he would claim that reading Bruno led him directly to Marxism.

Lindsay’s intense awareness of the interconnectedness of the living world had implications for his everyday life. Cranny-Francis quotes from an episode in The Fullness of Life during his years with the poet Elza de Locre in the early 1930s, when he lived in desperate poverty.

A local farmer had gifted a couple of rabbits to them as a neighbourly gesture. Confronted with the reality of having to skin and disembowel the animals before cooking, Lindsay found himself unable to proceed. He contemplates the economy of death on which a meat-eating society is based, particularly when social organisation has reached a point where meat protein is no longer essential to the diet: “One’s symbiosis with the earth is therefore in terms of unceasing violence and murder; and one knows, deep in one’s being, that one lives only by a system of blood-victims.”

“A communist society which is not vegetarian,” he concluded, “seems to me a hopeless contradiction.”

The young Lindsay called the absence of unity abstraction or dissociation; later, under the influence of Hegel and Marx, he favoured the word alienation. He argued that alienation has always been present in human life and has always provoked resistance. Throughout history that resistance has taken many forms — initiation rituals, shamanic flights, alchemy, art and poetry, and political revolt. The struggle against alienation shapes people’s relationships with one another and the world, motivates the protests of the wretched and exploited, and underlies attitudes to nature. Great thinkers and creative artists throw light upon its diverse manifestations.

Blake’s prophetic books explore the “world of false consciousness, of alienation,” according to Lindsay, and he praised Dickens for “the discovery of dissociation and the alienation of man from his fellows and his own essence, the stages of struggle against the dissociative forces, and the intuition (uttered in symbolic forms) of the resolving unity.”

Lindsay regarded religion as both a product of alienation and a form of protest against it. His vision of the world was also infused with hope for a fulfilment somehow always just out of reach. In a letter to Edith Sitwell on her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1955 he confessed to having been at times “very close to the catholic creed… indistinguishable perhaps from ekklesia of the faithful — the people who are Christ.”

Affinities between his system and Christianity are not difficult to uncover: sin as alienation, humanity crucified, Life the Eucharist, Paradise a vision of love and freedom. He was familiar with such syncretisms in the Ancient World: in a book about Roman Egypt he references a tomb in the Roman catacombs of Pretextatys on which Dionysus is identified with the Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, and burials in the Vatican Necropolis of Christians who also worshipped Isis and Bacchus.

Alienation has become all-pervasive in the modern world, chiefly because of money and science. Following Thomas Carlyle, Lindsay often referred to the institutions and customs associated with money as the “cash-nexus.” From all the possible elements of human relationship associated with the exchange of goods, money abstracts a single factor, that of utility, and makes the remainder redundant. The dehumanisation implicit in the use of money reaches its apogee with capitalism, which turns life itself into a commodity. In his study of William Morris he declares that “a genuinely new society can be born only when commodity-production ends, and with it division of labour, money, market-systems, and alienation in all its many shapes and forms — above all alienation from labour.”

The other powerful alienating factor of modernity is the scientific method stemming from Galileo and Descartes, which Lindsay consistently attacked as “mechanical,” “divisive” and “quantitative.” Cranny-Francis notes that “Lindsay returns repeatedly… to Blake’s criticisms of science and the post-Enlightenment rationalism on which it is based.” Lindsay was not at all opposed to scientific inquiry, nor wholly dismissive of the achievements of post Enlightenment science. But in Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949) and a later trilogy on alchemy, astrology and physics in Greco-Roman Egypt he refused to separate knowledge of “nature” from other kinds of knowledge. There is a single interconnected world, and all ways of knowing it are likewise interconnected. The “sciences” discussed in Marxism and Contemporary Science are not physics, astronomy or chemistry, but biology, anthropology, art criticism, psychology and history.

For Lindsay, decisive proof that contemporary science has taken a wrong turning was the atomic bomb, the culmination of alienation’s will to self-destruction. Today he would no doubt make the same criticism of the digital revolution and genetics.

But there is a nagging problem with alienation, though Lindsay, more of a poet than a philosopher, seems never to have addressed it, and neither does Cranny-Francis. It parallels the problem of evil in religions that postulate a benign creator. Where does alienation come from? How can the world be a vital unity and at the same time a site of struggle against division?

Some cosmologies have an explanation. An idealist can say that the world of the senses is a flawed copy of a perfect and eternal world that is glimpsed only in thought. The unity is “above,” the struggle “below.” But Lindsay was trenchantly opposed both to idealism and to hierarchy. For him mental and spiritual phenomena are autonomous, but in the final analysis dependent on matter. Cranny-Francis mentions his debt to the Sydney-born philosopher Samuel Alexander. Alexander was an early twentieth-century advocate of emergence, the theory that complex systems produce attributes and activities that do not belong to their parts. Could emergence explain the origin of alienation? It isn’t clear how.

At a psychological level, though, Lindsay’s biography provides a paradigm case of a conflict between longed-for unity and actual division. Lindsay’s father was the writer and artist Norman Lindsay, one of Australia’s best-known humourists and artists in the first half of the twentieth century, notorious for his sexual libertarianism and hostility to Christianity. Cranny-Francis dwells sensitively on Jack’s difficult relationship with Norman. “The story of father-son relationships threads through all of Lindsay’s writing, fiction and non-fiction,” she writes. When Jack was nine years old, Norman left his wife and three sons. The fatherless family moved to Brisbane, where young Jack lived in a state of genteel but disorganised impoverishment, loved but neglected by his vague and increasingly alcoholic mother until her sister’s family finally took charge and sent him to school. Unsurprisingly, the theme of a lost birthright appears often in Lindsay’s novels and histories.

Norman renewed contact with his son only after his academic achievements had earned him scholarships to Brisbane’s elite Grammar School and the University of Queensland. Lindsay, ecstatic to be restored to his famous father’s attention, was Norman’s devoted acolyte for the next decade. Then they fell out bitterly.

Norman’s entire life was a fierce act of will to sustain the exhilarating freedom of his adolescence, when he had followed his older brother out of a shabby mined-out gold town to marvellous Melbourne and lived in careless poverty, pursuing a self-directed course in drawing, reading, flaneuring and witty companionship until Jack’s conception brought that delightful life to a sudden end. For the rest of his life Norman acted out his ambivalence, alternately praising and denouncing his son. In 1967 he wrote to him, “I can’t help but laugh when I think of what our biographers are going to make of the break and reunion of our relations. They will have to do the best they can with its human dramatics for it is quite impossible for them to realise the compulsions behind them.”

Jack Lindsay did not have children until his late fifties. He was an anxious, self-critical parent, and never ceased to yearn for his father’s distracted attention.

Turn for a moment I say
Turn from your obdurate place
In that clarity of stone,
That terrible folly of light,
Turn for a moment this way
Your abstracted face.

Lindsay understood the importance of this personal history for his literary career, confessing to a close friend that “if my parents hadn’t parted I doubt if I should have become a writer at all.” Cranny-Francis suggests that his description of William Morris also applies to himself:

From one aspect there never was a more impetuously frank man than Morris; he lives restlessly in the open and follows his convictions out without concern for the consequences to himself or anyone else. From another aspect he appears a hidden figure, moved by a passion of which the multiple effects are plain but the central impulse obscured. I suggest that along the lines I have sketched we can bring the man and the artist into a single focus, and see the way in which his personal dilemma was transformed into a dynamic of acceptance and revolt, of deepening insight into the nature of his world and into the ways in which the terrible wounds of alienation can be healed.

A succession of recent British scholars has sought to recover Lindsay as a forerunner of practitioners of cultural studies, an influential field of interdisciplinary research instigated by British theorists — among them Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams — in the 1970s. Although they didn’t reference Lindsay, the founders of cultural studies were almost certainly familiar with some of his work, and there are strong points of similarity in their ideas. In particular, they all affirmed the political significance of culture.

Marx had suggested a base–superstructure model of social formation, according to which economic relationships ultimately determine the organisation of politics, law, religion and creative expression. The implication was that economic interests always trump cultural factors. The practical effect was to concentrate efforts to build socialism in workplaces, which in effect meant and trade unions. This left little place for cultural creators. Like cultural studies, Lindsay steadfastly rejected that model.

Another tenet of cultural studies that Lindsay anticipated was the idea that significant cultural change comes from “below.” Lindsay believed that plebeian practices and values, and their fraught and contradictory clashes with the practices and values of ruling elites, are the major source of cultural innovation. He made the point forcefully in a letter to his friend and fellow critic Alick West:

The concept is that culture is created by the expropriators, fundamentally expresses their position and needs, and has no close relation to the concrete labour-processes and the producing masses. I should like to suggest that something like the reverse is the truth. The people are the producers and reproducers of life, and in that role are also the begetters of culture in all its shapes and forms — though in a class-divided society the ruling class expropriates culture.

Lindsay’s view stemmed from the conviction — shared with Ruskin and Morris — that work and aesthetic production had once “been harmoniously united, and that they still ought to be, despite the general movement towards degradation and mechanisation.” Before commodity production alienated workers from the products of their labour — in this historical sketch uncommodified slavery is conveniently forgotten — work was done in order to create both necessary means of living and pleasing or profound emotions. Each was a joyful undertaking. Once, communal work had always been accompanied by singing and chanting. Understanding this had motivated William Morris to take on, in Lindsay’s dated language, “the full political and social struggle which alone could have as its aim the achievement of brotherhood and the ending of commodity-production.”

In A Short History of Culture Lindsay traced the essential identity of art and work back to the movement of bodies in space. From the classicist Jane Harrison he took the observation that the repetitive, rhythmic behaviours that create the necessities of life — poundings, liftings, plantings, weavings, cuttings, stalkings, throwings — are shared with dancing. Like her, he considered dance to be the primal kind of cultural creativity. Citing another book of Lindsay’s criticism, After the Thirties, Cranny-Francis writes:

Lindsay identifies in dance the rhythmical control of movement that characterises human activity and being. It bodily enacts the purposive behaviours that enable the group to maintain social coherence, engaging them through the rhythm of the breath: ‘Body and mind are thus keyed together in new adventurous and interfused ways.’ The dance becomes an exploration of the embodied being required to achieve a specific purpose, such as a hunt. It lifts the dancer (and observer) into the realm of ‘pure potentiality’ where ‘desire and act are one’; where the bodily disposition required to engage successfully in a particular activity is achieved and communicated. In this process, Lindsay argued, human beings imaginatively engage aspects of everyday life and rehearse the modes of being, thinking and acting that enable them to achieve their needs and desires. For Lindsay this is the role of culture in the formation of being and consciousness, whether it be the ritual art of early societies or contemporary literature, visual art, theatre and dance.

If communism means opposition to capitalism and desire for a future free of oppression and exploitation, Lindsay was certainly a communist. No one seems to know exactly when he joined or if he ever left the British Communist Party, but he was actively affiliated with it from the late 1930s until at least the 1970s. MI5 put him under surveillance. He stayed in the party when it demanded he recant his ideas, and again after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s brutality in 1956. There is no doubt about the strength of his allegiance. But was Lindsay a Marxist communist? He certainly called himself one. Cranny-Francis, along with just about everyone else who has written about him, takes it for granted.

Yet there are grounds for wondering about Lindsay’s Marxism. What kind of Marxist converts on account of a Renaissance philosopher? Marxism profoundly shaped his thinking but it was not Lindsay’s foundational postulate. He came to it as a plausible derivation from a more fundamental constellation of ideas about culture and history that he had already arrived at. Some of his creed was shared with Marxism, some was dissonant with it. If, in the manner of a party apparatchik, one were called on to prepare a list of his heresies, it would be an easy brief: he largely discounts or ignores economic forces, flirts with idealism, sees revolutionary potential in “the people” rather than “the working class,” and has a Romantic, even reactionary, understanding of Communist aims.

Late in life, Lindsay began to concede the point. The Crisis in Marxism (1981) is highly critical of most prominent twentieth-century Marxist theorists, particularly Adorno and Althusser. In one of his last essays he declared that he was “diametrically opposed to all closed systems,” including Lenin’s. “I have found all Marxists, orthodox or not, to be hostile.” Among an eclectic list of influences ranging from Keats to Harrison to Dostoyevsky, only two Marxists appear: Lukacs, and Marx himself.

In a sense, of course, debating whether Lindsay was “really” Marxist is as futile as debating whether Mormons are Christian or Alevis Muslim. In another sense, though, it matters. As long as Lindsay is seen as first and foremost a Marxist, his ideas remain submerged beneath the complexity and weight of a hundred and fifty years of Marxist theorising. To perceive what is most original in his thought, it needs to be disentangled from what has become a distracting integument.

Promised a scholarship to Oxford after he graduated from the University of Queensland but told that he would have to wait a year, Lindsay refused to enrol. For most of his life the lack of a higher degree and his oppositional politics would have made it difficult if not impossible to work as an academic. He gave no sign of wanting to. Even his most esoteric books were not aimed primarily at academics, nor did they please many of them. Ironically, today it is chiefly they who keep his memory alive. Anne Cranny-Francis’s book is no exception, but it deserves a broader readership. We need not agree with Lindsay’s controversial opinions to hope that this remarkable thinker will become better known. •

Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary
By Anne Cranny-Francis | Palgrave Macmillan | €119.99 | 416 pages

The post A dynamic of acceptance and revolt appeared first on Inside Story.

While Lumby was working on her book Matthew Lamb was embarked on something different and quite unusual: a two-volume cultural history of Moorhouse. Lamb’s project is also a biography, but the extra length allows him room to explore in more detail the writer’s intellectual development and his role in challenging the restrictions on Australian publishing in the years he was active. Lamb’s first volume, Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths, has just been published.

Both biographers spent time talking to Moorhouse before his death in 2022 and both combed through his extensive archives, so their books raise questions about the role of writers in creating their own lives. In recent years, we’ve seen Ann-Marie Priest’s detailed biography of Gwen Harwood, written after the poet’s archives were opened after many years of restricted access, Brigitta Olubas’s meticulous study of Shirley Hazzard, written with the approval of Hazzard and her friends, and Bernadette Brennan’s sympathetic account of the novelist Gillian Mears, so closely based on the writer’s archive that it reads almost as if Mears had written it. All these subjects clearly wanted a biography to be written, even when, like Harwood, they played off the various aspirants to the role of biographer.

Moorhouse certainly wanted his life examined, and he had a keen understanding of his own role in Australian social and cultural change. But the relationship between a writer’s life and their fiction can present difficulties for a biographer who wishes to secure the facts but can’t afford to ignore the parallels. While a biographer is bound by the records, the subject’s memories so often prove unreliable when they’re compared with the documentary record or the memories of their friends and colleagues.

Lamb has written elsewhere about the peculiar difficulties of recording the life of an author whose stories were often based on real events. As Moorhouse told a friend, a fiction, once written, obliterated the real memory on which it was based. And sometimes Moorhouse was not the only writer using the material: Lamb offers examples of Michael Wilding writing counter-stories to those of his then friend.

One of the effects of this fictional use of real life has been an underestimation of the art in Moorhouse’s stories, to the point that he felt the need to constantly insist on it.

Lamb set out to read all Moorhouse’s work, including the short stories he wrote in high school, his journalism and his essays for the Workers’ Educational Association, and place them in the context of the author’s life. He also tries to encompass Moorhouse’s own reading and the influence of his various mentors to build a narrative of his intellectual development. And he keeps an eye on the shifts in Australian cultural life and the legal restrictions it faced.

Strange Paths is as much about changes in Australian print culture and sexual attitudes as it is about Moorhouse’s life. It is this contextual material that justifies this second, extended biography.

Beginning with a short account of governments’ restrictive controls over local publishing from the very beginning of European settlement, Lamb traces the evolution of censorship and copyright laws in parallel with the lives of Moorhouse’s forebears in the colonies — in his father’s case in New Zealand. Young Frank was born into a society in which publishing was tightly restricted and writers were forced to accept low royalties from a British-controlled book trade.

Lamb makes Henry Lawson’s and Joseph Furphy’s difficulties relevant to Moorhouse’s later struggles for authors’ rights. Despite his popularity, Lawson battled financial difficulties; Furphy’s novels satirise the impossibility of recording Australian speech under the prohibitions on obscenity. The book’s treatment of the two men signals Moorhouse’s position in a tradition of Australian writing and sets up his later challenges to censorship and his part in the campaign for author royalties.

Moorhouse’s education in country public schools might appear limited, but Lamb reveals that encouraging teachers gave him access to magazines like Southerly and Meanjin. At home, he could read his firmly anti-communist father’s copies of Free Spirit, the forerunner of Quadrant, and discuss cold war politics. Though he was expected to follow his two older brothers into the family’s agricultural machinery business in Nowra, his parents were ready to accommodate his aspirations to be a writer. His mother even consulted the poet Rosemary Dobson when she visited Nowra for a talk.

Though Moorhouse later became known as a sexual adventurer he was as ignorant about sex as any other school student growing up in Australia at the time. Like so many Australians of his generation, he and his girlfriend Wendy gathered what information they could from biology textbooks and “hygiene” instruction books that often relied on euphemism. He might have appeared more liberated than the rest of us, but he negotiated the same conventional upbringing, churchgoing and smalltown values that dominated Australian life in the 1950s and 1960s. An exceptional high school student, he learnt the importance of self-education and self-discipline early, writing stories that Lamb reads as evidence of his teenage preoccupations.

The influence of his parents’ devotion to self-help, the philosophies of Rotary and the guidance of the scouting movement was obvious in Moorhouse’s fascination with theories of living. As a young man he was distinguished by an eagerness to learn and a curiosity about people and their behaviour. He read the available books on psychology and sexuality by Hans Eysenck, Alfred Kinsey and Sigmund Freud, and was committed to the “spirit of enquiry” advocated by his journalist mentor, John Penfold, though a long-term homosexual relationship undermined the “Frankness and Sincerity Theory” he advanced as the basis of his relationship with Wendy, now his wife.

He also understood that fiction offers a way for a writer to describe and speculate about human behaviour, including intimate desires evaded in journalism and academic writing. His experiences as a journalist in Sydney, Lockhart and Wagga Wagga gave him the chance to make stories from small events (jellyfish on the beaches of Sydney in one case) but also convinced him that he needed to break free from the cynical, heavy-drinking culture of journalism.

A position with the Workers’ Educational Association in Sydney gave him the chance to explore his ideas about changing print media, sociology, film and folk music. Explore he did, at one point participating not only in the WEA but also in the Film Study Group, the Sydney Left Club, the Libertarian Society and the Push, though he resisted the libertarian view that literature was only an illustration of a philosophy or directed at some didactic goal.

According to Lamb, he regarded the literary imagination as “a form of inquiry in its own right,” a means of exploring reason and its limitations. In practice he also embraced it as a means of examining social taboos and the sexual lives hidden behind prevailing social and censorship conventions.

Strange Paths provides details of Moorhouse’s several encounters with the law. In 1967 his quite unerotic story about a young man’s disappointing visit to a prostitute, “A Barmaid, a Prostitute, a Landlady,” led to a Melbourne bookstall being charged for selling obscene material. In 1969, when the banning of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint brought the censorship controversy to a head, Moorhouse was part of the Tharunka editorial team that challenged the obscenity laws. In 1973 he was convicted for distributing The Little Red Schoolbook and assaulting the police who had found copies in his car.

Also that year Moorhouse and his publisher agreed to take up the cause of authors’ copyright, successfully suing the University of New South Wales for breaching his copyright by allowing staff and students to photocopy his story “The Machine Gun.” This, too, was an important breakthrough for Australian writers’ freedom to publish and support themselves.

Two things stand out in this account of Moorhouse’s life. One is how his study of popular culture, sociology and the media developed ahead of any interest in such subjects among academics. His time as a university student had been curtailed by his commitment to writing, as a journalist and as a writer of fiction, but he immersed himself in the range of areas that interested him.

Like so many other brilliant Australian writers who didn’t finish university — Hazzard, Harwood, David Ireland, Peter Carey and many others — writing was itself a form of self-education. But the outreach elements of university campuses — the libraries, the magazines, the clubs and visiting lecturers — have provided essential support for the intellectual life of these outsiders; as universities increasingly adopt utilitarian practices they may need to be reminded of their duty to artists and other intellectuals beyond their boundaries.

The second element is Moorhouse’s commitment to fiction writing as an intellectual pursuit free from the demands of political ideologies or moralities. When fiction so often appears to be either mere entertainment or didactic instruction from those who know better than the rest of us, Moorhouse understood that art offers the freedom to explore ideas and areas of life that challenge prevailing conventions. Of course, his work provokes arguments about feminism, sexuality and personal behaviour. That, too, is a role of fiction. Lamb’s book is not a work of literary criticism but his care in placing Moorhouse’s writing in a detailed historical context is revelatory. It places literary writing at the centre of social change.

This first volume takes us to the end of 1974, with the publication of The Electrical Experience and the release of Between Wars, the film Moorhouse wrote for director Michael Thornhill when he was thirty-six. So Lamb’s project has quite a distance to go. Impatient readers will choose to read Lumby’s more concise account, but historians of the recent past will find plenty to absorb their interest here. I may be the ideal reader for this version as I try to make sense of A.D. Hope’s negotiation of Australian censorship at an earlier time. Lamb’s book shows one way that a writer can be placed in an extensive cultural context. •

Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths
By Matthew Lamb | Knopf Australia | $45 | 480 pages

The post Writing life appeared first on Inside Story.

How rare it is then to read a collection like Alex Miller’s A Kind of Confession: The Writer’s Private World, a rich blend of letters and notebook extracts by one of Australia’s most loved novelists who is still here and still writing. We may mourn the loss of the paper trail since the advent of the internet, but one thing this book demonstrates is that emails can be crafted as carefully and thoughtfully as letters written by hand on the finest notepaper.

Stephanie Miller, who skilfully and sensitively selected and arranged the pieces, notes in her introduction that this book can be read as a complementary volume to her earlier edited collection of her husband’s stories, excerpts and commentary, The Simplest Words, the two books forming, in her words, a kind of autobiography. A Kind of Confession may be seen as a form of life writing as it delves into the inspirations, joys, struggles and frustrations of the storyteller behind Miller’s thirteen (to date) novels and one biography.

In this different kind of confession from most memoirs, Miller’s friends and fellow letter writers share his private world and play a crucial role in it. Most of the words are Miller’s — only occasionally are his friends’ responses included — but the warmth and inclusiveness of his letters create the illusion of multiple voices. Stephanie Miller has also included succinct notes introducing each of the correspondents.

Organised chronologically from the early 1960s to 2023, the letters and notes are diverse and engrossing. As they are written in the perpetual present, time becomes both immediate and retrospective for readers — who may be familiar with many of Miller’s novels — as they observe his ideas developing and dive deep into his life, his beliefs about the writing process, the background to the production of his books, and his reactions to their reception. The journey is absorbing, touching, at times funny and always enlightening.

The correspondents are too many to do justice to in a review, but among them are familiar names, such as writer and philosopher Raimond Gaita, biographer Hazel Rowley, historian Tom Griffiths and artists Rick Amor and John Wolseley. Miller also corresponds with friends he gathers during the writing of his novels and biography. Some appear briefly, others recur.

One with whom Miller discusses literature, politics, his writing highs and lows, and life in general is Ron Sharp, an English professor at Vassar College in New York State, whom Miller met at the Mildura Writers’ Festival in 2004 and with whom he and Stephanie have become close friends. “Ronaldo” is the first to hear about Miller’s tentative plans to research the life of his long-term friend and mentor Max Blatt, as well as his reservations about writing the book that would eventually become the acclaimed biography, Max.

An academic but also a confidant, Sharp is a friend to whom Miller can confess the “zones of emptiness” he is sometimes plunged into or the vulnerability he experiences, familiar to many writers who work outside the academy: “that tightening of the gut every time I see an academic looking sideways at me, as they do.” Another academic correspondent with whom Miller has a warm relationship is Robert Dixon, an Australian literature specialist from the University of Sydney, who organised a 2011 symposium on Miller’s work and later produced an edited collection from it, The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction, to which several of the correspondents in this volume contributed essays.

Another regular correspondence is between Miller and his long-time publisher, Annette Barlow, who share such a trusted relationship that he can respond to her suggestions about revisions to The Passage of Love with a pleasant but firm “I hope you won’t be too upset, but I’ve decided not to delete the first twenty or so pages of the book.” Her reply shows a respect and engagement with her author’s work that any writer would envy: “And the ending, Alex! ‘She is one of my present dead. There are a number of them’… evocative, meaningful and stunning.”

A different side of Miller’s personality is shown in an exchange with artist John Wolseley, who lives in the Whipstick Forest in central Victoria, not far from the Millers in Castlemaine, as the two friends enjoy discussing books and jokingly reminiscing about Somerset life and language. “Dearest Alecko the old Gecko,” writes Wolseley, “Begorrah that were a wonderful and nourishing email wot you sent.” A response of Miller’s begins: “Maister, I be delighted to ear from ee! It do my hart much goode. I see that even as a boy, when you painted this lovely picture, you had the soul of colour in your eye already.”

If there is one slight disappointment it is that only one of Miller’s letters to Hazel Rowley is included. Their close friendship was conducted mainly by email between Australia and the United States. Sadly, she died suddenly not long before they were due to meet up in 2011 for a conversation about her joint biography Franklin and Eleanor at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre. Miller shares his sadness at the silencing of her voice in a letter to Ron Sharp, who had sent him her New York Times obituary.

Alex and Stephanie Miller’s family form a delightful personal thread through A Kind of Confession. He encourages their Berlin-based daughter Kate in her creative ventures and chats about her brother Ross and his family, who live near Castlemaine. “Steph” is a steady undercurrent through the book (we even catch a glimpse of her in one letter, sitting at the breakfast table in her green dressing-gown, the cat on her knees). In an email following a discussion at their local cafe about material from The Passage of Love that Miller is working on, he offers this heartfelt tribute to his wife and true collaborator:

I feel very encouraged from what you said this morning at Apples to begin reworking the ms [manuscript] as Lena in the third person — the standard story-telling voice…

What would I do without you! I think I’m writing a certain story and you read it and see not the story I thought I was failing to write but the story I’m actually writing despite myself.

What can I say? Alxxx

Stephanie literally became Miller’s life support a few years ago when he suffered a serious but puzzling decline in his health. For eighteen months she persevered doggedly in hunting for a neurosurgeon who could diagnose the problem. Eventually they met with a specialist about to retire — “the first one who had observed his patient rather than his screen” — who was able to diagnose the issue. He contacted his son, also a neurosurgeon in Melbourne, who performed the necessary brain surgery successfully.

James Baldwin’s observation that “all art is a kind of confession” is an apt epigraph for this book. Miller emerges as a kind and compassionate man, a humanitarian, whose determination to write underpins his notebooks and correspondence. He notes despairingly in 1971: “I’ve been committed to writing since I was twenty-one, thirteen years. Quite a stretch considering I’ve yet to publish. Still, the seed is eternal.” Publication did not come until 1988, when he was over fifty.

He is a novelist who looks beyond himself to research widely, in books and in person. He even borrowed money to take his wife and young son to China when he was seeking insight into the suicide of his friend Allan O’Hoy, the inspiration for The Ancestor Game. He is a keen and intelligent observer too — of people, of landscape, of the world around him — drawing on the lives of his friends for his characters. Friendships with both white and Aboriginal people form the basis of memorable characters in Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell, novels that are even more relevant today, since the failure of the Voice referendum, than when they were written.

Miller is also an introspective writer, searching deep within himself to find the elements to create his characters with truth and honesty. “I live alone in a world of my imagination,” he writes, “contemplating the motives of my characters (who are, I dare say, no more substantial than shadows of myself) that become apparent to them only in the deep interior of their most intimate thoughts and actions.”

Thus, the characters in Miller’s novels have a complex genesis, created from various external sources and from his own profound questioning of himself until they are transformed imaginatively into fictional beings. He warns readers against making too-literal connections, of equating Autumn Laing with Sunday Reed, for instance, writing that “Autumn Laing is the story of an examined life. Autumn’s examined life.” Writer Brenda Walker suggests in her essay in Robert Dixon’s edited collection that “Alex Miller may be Australia’s greatest living novelist,” a claim about which readers of A Kind of Confession can make their own judgements.

Miller’s generosity in reaching out to people leads me to a confession of my own. I am privileged to have a few letters to me included in this book. He contacted me a few years ago after finding inspiration for a character in the novel he was writing in a blurry portrait of Aileen Palmer, glimpsed behind a photo of her better-known parents, Vance and Nettie Palmer, in my biography, Ink in Her Veins. The novel was published as A Brief Affair in 2022. I have only met Alex and Steph a couple of times at book launches, but an epistolary friendship has developed between us that has enriched my life and my writing, for which they have my heartfelt thanks. •

A Kind of Confession: The Writer’s Private World
By Alex Miller | Allen & Unwin | $39.99 | 360 pages

The post A kind of autobiography appeared first on Inside Story.

Thus, in 2013, while working on his biography of David Cornwell — known the world over as John le Carré — Sisman understood immediately what Cornwell was saying to him in the following letter:

It is no coincidence that in Spy [Who Came in from the Cold], A Perfect Spy, and A Constant Gardener [sic], the protagonist kills himself. Ditto The Tailor of Panama. Enough?

As Sisman writes with considerable understatement in his latest book, The Secret Life of John le Carré, “I was alarmed.” His project was at risk and his subject was hinting that he might kill himself.

Cornwell’s letter was triggered when Sisman revealed that he had accumulated evidence of Cornwell’s repeated infidelity during his marriage to his second wife, Jane Cornwell (née Eustace). Some of the relationships in question were shortlived, some never even consummated. Some were conducted almost entirely via letters, with only one or two meetings in the flesh. More than a few were of a long duration and had a significant effect on both Cornwell and the women with whom he had the affairs. Common to all was fervent passion on Cornwell’s part, an insistence on secrecy, and evasion and dissembling as he extricated himself from relationships when they came to demand he make honest choices.

Sisman had not gone hunting for this material. Word of one affair arrived during a drunken discussion at a party about the merits of various Proust translations. Word of another came from Cornwell’s half-sister. Another Sisman came across while reading letters in Cornwell’s home. He heard of more still from Cornwell’s friends. Sisman was not wholly interested in this part of Cornwell’s private life, per se, and nor did he initially think that the affairs were important. And yet he saw a connection with Cornwell’s oeuvre: “I could scarcely ignore the fact that betrayal was a current theme of his work.”

Over time, as he learned more about these affairs and detected their influence in Cornwell’s fiction — in how characters resembled lovers and how Cornwell took new lovers for each new book and discarded them shortly afterward — Sisman became convinced of their importance. Cornwell’s behaviour was a key to his fiction, unlocking a duality and tension that seemed necessary for Cornwell to write. According to his lovers, Cornwell went out of his way to provoke this tension: he insisted on using dead letter boxes for correspondence, recorded his lovers’ addresses and phone numbers in code, would mislead taxi drivers about their destinations, and would give the women cash to book trips and holidays so that he could evade his wife’s scrutiny.

Sisman and Cornwell had enjoyed a relatively fruitful relationship since Sisman’s proposal, in 2010, to write the biography. Cornwell, cautious at first, had been “very divided about how to respond.” His messy private life was in conflict with his wish that Sisman write “without restraints.”

His fears had been assuaged by a formal agreement between the two men in which Cornwell agreed to grant access to his archives, offer introductions and be interviewed at length. Sisman, in turn, agreed to allow Cornwell the opportunity to correct factual errors and advise whether “any passages should be amended or removed on the basis that they do not give due respect to the sensitivities of living third parties.” Introductions that Cornwell readily supplied testified to his willingness to live up to this agreement. “I have put my trust in him,” Cornwell told an old friend and former lover. “I have no editorial control over what he writes, beyond checking dates, places, & bald facts.”

In the early days, Cornwell seemed pleased by Sisman’s efforts. “Wherever you’ve been, you’ve left a benign impression, for which I am very grateful,” he wrote him, in January 2012. “I can’t imagine how I will come out of it, but I think that’s what drew me into it: the notion that this was never something I could do for myself, & that somehow, whatever the outcome, this was going to be a gift of sorts to my children; a gift of truth, insofar as there ever is one, & it can be told.”

And yet, by the end of the year, as Cornwell learned that Sisman had contacted at least one former lover, Cornwell’s pleasure and peace of mind vanished. “I admire your work & your tenacity; I would wish that in your position I would show the same acumen; I have a genuine respect for your tact & integrity. I also have a sense of, on the strength of recent experience, of impending disaster in my life — i.e. in the lives of those I hold most dear — and I can’t allow any more time to pass without expressing it to you, and indicating to you the heavy footmarks of your recent explorations.”

Cornwell wanted to revise the terms of their agreement, principally to make the biography “authorised” and thereby, presumably, denuded of the material about his infidelities. Sisman resisted, but Cornwell’s intimation of suicide meant he couldn’t ignore the grave implications of continuing without compromise. An uneasy détente followed when Cornwell seemed to “calm down” and recover his composure. Sisman continued to work, but there was no denying that the relationship between biographer and subject was changing.

Sisman mentioned he had met with another of Cornwell’s lovers; Cornwell mentioned that he was contemplating writing a memoir — a book that could overshadow or gazump Sisman’s biography. Sisman responded by proposing a shorter first volume that would be published before Cornwell’s memoir and then, after Cornwell’s death, publishing a second volume that would cover Cornwell’s life after the end of the cold war. Jane Cornwell, meanwhile, suggested her husband’s patience with the whole project was flagging: “The constant pressure for more sessions with David may make him feel that he has to draw a line and say, That’s enough.”

“We feel we are living with a ticking bomb,” Cornwell soon told Sisman, and over the year that followed Cornwell made repeated efforts to dispose of the bomb. He took exception to the proposal for two volumes (from fear that it would suggest, as many critics already did, that he had lost his subject when the cold war ended), pushed again and again for a change in the agreement with Sisman, then shelved his memoir and agreed to go back to the original plan.

When he was given the draft manuscript, Cornwell was predictably dissatisfied with its conclusions, tone and implications. “You can’t expect me to enjoy, least of all applaud, my own trivialisation,” he wrote. At one point Cornwell complained that the book was “all warts and no all,” and became suspicious and panicked: “There are glaring omissions that almost seem deliberate. There are a string of small calumnies and one or two large ones.”

Cornwell used every advantage he could, it seems, to push Sisman into changes. He claimed that the biography could hurt the forthcoming “sensational years” in his career and implied that Sisman’s project was responsible for the limp, heartless novel that he had laboured over and then shelved: “It’s pretty clear to me that my (exaggerated) apprehensions about the biography played a part.” In the background of these negotiations and arguments, for Sisman, lurked predecessors who had failed to produce the goods: the journalist Graham Lord, whose effort had been sued into disappearing, and Robert Harris, the journalist-turned-novelist who had been encouraged, then discouraged, then monstered into silence. There was also the possibility of Cornwell’s withdrawing his cooperation and waiving of copyright, which would all but kill Sisman’s book.

In the face of all this, Sisman hedged, acquiesced, resisted. He compromised on little things, deleting references to “Huns” and “Krauts” in Cornwell’s correspondence out of deference to his German readership. He took in edits, tweaked passages. At times he pointed out to Cornwell that, in taking exception to something, he was disputing himself: “You asked me in your list of the questions what my source was for saying that you had fallen out of love with Ronnie [Cornwell, David Cornwell’s father], and at the time I couldn’t remember, so I took this out,” Sisman wrote, in May 2015. “But I have just stumbled across it, at the beginning of the last section of your wonderful New Yorker article…”

Sisman was understandably feeling “divided in two.” He was grappling with the competing duties he owed — to truth and transparency, to his subject and the imperative to ameliorate the prospect of harm, to the ownership of the book he was writing — yet he also simply wanted to get the job done. His work was being chipped away, his energies were flagging. He wanted “simply to get to the end of the process, one way or another.” He got there in October 2015, when John le Carré: The Biography was published by Bloomsbury.

“I’m sure you’re having a great time, so enjoy it,” Cornwell wrote him, on the day of publication. “What’s done is done.”

Cornwell had, in many ways, won out. As Sisman recounts, reviewers of John le Carré, while otherwise praising it, noted that the detailed and relatively open account of Cornwell’s life changed profoundly in its second half, just as Cornwell married Jane Eustace. “At a certain point,” wrote Theo Tait in the London Review of Books, “the reader is banished from Cornwell’s life.” Certainly, from page 320 — exactly halfway — the book becomes repetitive and distant: yet another novel, yet another dust-up with publishers and literary agents (Cornwell was perennially dissatisfied with the publishing industry), yet another award, yet another film or television adaptation, and yet more grumblings from Cornwell about snubs from the “literary establishment.” Hanging over all this were two weighty paragraphs, full of portent but shorn of the information and evidence that might have backed them up, on page 320:

In Jane [Eustace], David had found a helpmeet, a companion, who would support and encourage him in his writing for the rest of his days. She recognised from early in their life together that she would have to share him with other women. The restless, self-destructive search for love is part of his nature. It has led him into impulsive, shortlived affairs; none of them has threatened the stability of his relationship with Jane. “I think we’re more monogamous than most couples,” he told one guest. For him, she would always be his best friend, his wise counsel and his anchor through every storm.

David’s infidelities have created a duality and a tension that became a necessary drug for his writing, often brought about by deliberate incongruity. The secrecy involved and the risk of exposure have themselves been stimulating, bringing a dangerous edge to the routine of everyday existence. From an early stage in their relationship Jane has suffered David’s extramarital adventures, and tried to protect him from their consequences. Though it has not been easy for her, she has behaved with quiet dignity. “Nobody can have all of David,” she said recently.

That comment of Jane’s, Sisman suspects, was dictated to her by Cornwell as an answer to the indignities she had been forced to bear by her husband and his biographer. It was, of course, also a message to Sisman — that he would not be permitted the full life he was hoping to depict. Perhaps too it was a message to the public-at-large that, no matter the claim John le Carré: The Biography made to being definitive, it was not the whole story,

If that message was too subtle, Cornwell made sure to underline it. Within ten days of publication of Sisman’s book, Cornwell announced the revival of his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, to be published the following year. Sisman knew immediately that the announcement’s timing had been designed to damage his biography. Correspondence in the posthumous A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (2022) confirms this: writing to Tom Stoppard, Cornwell called his memoir a “sort of antidote to Sisman,” and in the introduction to Pigeon Tunnel he conspicuously pulled rank on his biographer:

A recently published account of my life offers thumbnail versions of one or two of the stories, so it naturally pleases me to reclaim them as my own, tell them in my own voice, and invest them as best I can with my own feelings.

Yet Cornwell still hadn’t exhausted his ambivalence about Sisman’s biography. It is possible to detect his feelings in A Legacy of Spies (2017), in which an aged Peter Guillam, former right-hand man to spymaster George Smiley, is called from retirement to answer for the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1962), the book that made Cornwell’s career. Amid interrogations and documents exposing again and again the gap between reality as recorded on paper and as Guillam recalls it (or, at least, is willing to explain it), Cornwell writes of the fugue that sweeps over the former spy:

Humiliation, certainly. Frustration, bewilderment, no question. Outrage at having my past dug up and thrown in my face. Guilt, shame, apprehension, any amount. And all directed in a single blast of pain and incomprehension…

For Sisman, this and the other novels that Cornwell was now writing were “less interesting and more formulaic” than his earlier works and unwittingly betrayed the absence of tension in Cornwell’s life as he aged. By now in his eighties, his lovers were infrequent. “Without a new muse for each book, his inspiration dried up.”

And while the le Carré novels kept coming — angrily railing against Brexit and the dangers of populism, each one more uneven and slighter than its predecessor — Sisman was aware that his dealings with Cornwell were likely soon to change. Since 2010, his relationship with Cornwell had fulfilled a basic tenet of biography. As he puts it: “The subject is, almost by definition, the senior figure; the biographer is in a subordinate position. Each is thinking about posterity. In any agreement between them there will be an element of quid pro quo: while the subject remains alive he or she retains some measure of control, even if the restraints are rarely visible.” Once the subject was dead, however, that changes: “The biographer is likely to have the last word.”

Thus, three years after Cornwell’s death and two years after Jane’s, we have Sisman’s Secret Life of John le Carré. The book is not a substitute for the biography, nor a condensation of that book. It is, Sisman writes, a supplement to it, containing the material he felt obliged to cut and information that has come to light since. The idea was seeded by Cornwell’s eldest son, Simon, back in 2014–15 when tensions between Cornwell and Sisman were at their height: “He fully agreed with me that David’s relations with women were key to a full understanding of his work, and proposed that I should keep a ‘secret annexe’ for eventual publication in some form after both David and Jane were dead.”

At its most obvious, the Secret Life goes a significant way to backing up the pregnant paragraphs that Sisman wrote but could not provide evidence for in the original biography. In considerable detail, he tracks Cornwell’s infidelities and their influence on his fiction. He establishes correlations between lovers and characters — journalist Janet Lee Stevens was central to The Little Drummer Girl (1982), activist Yvette Pierpaoli was the model for Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener (2001) — and shows Cornwell’s awareness of their influence on him. His infidelities, Cornwell admitted to Sisman, were not a “dark part” of his life, separate from his work, “but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.”

A good deal of it is dark. While still married to his first wife, Cornwell lured Liz Tollinton, a typist in MI5, to become his secretary and then seduced her. After six months during which she attempted suicide, he bought her a ring that she wore on her engagement finger — then he dumped her as both lover and secretary. He seduced the family au pair, who fell pregnant and suffered a miscarriage, and accused her of wanting to sell his secrets to newspapers. American journalist Janet Lee Stevens had an affair with Cornwell and was killed in the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut while pregnant with a child that might have been his.

Cornwell was also mercurial with Sue Dawson, a researcher who met him during recordings for his audiobooks and become his lover afterward. During a long-running affair, he once leapt onto Dawson, pinned her down with his forearm on her throat and accused her of walking in such a way that his wife might hear, through the telephone, her heels clacking on the floor. Dawson observed that Cornwell took as much satisfaction from reading his own work as he did from sex; after their affair, when she considered writing a memoir, he sued to ensure it would not see the light of day (it was published in 2022 under a pseudonym).

“Much of David’s behaviour described in these pages is reprehensible: dishonesty, evasion and lying, for decade after decade,” Sisman writes. “Does it lower him in our estimation to know that he lied to his wife? Yes, of course it does; it is natural to feel dismay when those whom we admire behave less than well. But few individuals would be comfortable in subjecting their private behaviour to public scrutiny.”

Nor would all biographers be so comfortable exposing the ups and downs of their relationships with their subjects. In this vein, The Secret Life of John le Carré fits into an admirable tradition of biographers writing, with apparent candour, about the tensions and ethical problems of the form. If he is not as self-flagellating as James Atlas in The Shadow in the Garden (2018), nor as revealing of his own doubts and regrets about his own choices during the years working on Cornwell’s biography, Sisman is remarkably forthcoming about his subject’s interventions. Excerpts from letters are abundant, and photos of these and typescripts of his own manuscript — with Cornwell’s handwritten edits — offer insight about the long and wearying struggle of writing the biography of a living person.

It is frequently fascinating, always salutary, and a fitting reminder of Samuel Johnson’s declaration of the biographer’s duty: “If we owe any regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.” •

The Secret Life of John le Carré
By Adam Sisman | Profile Books | $32.99 | 208 pages

The post The biographer’s last word appeared first on Inside Story.

The link: over a period exceeding fifty years the two have collaborated on five volumes of biography, four of them dealing with the same man. One a decade. Big, fat books, each a thousand pages or more in length. Doorstoppers.

Outside work, they have little contact. They aren’t particularly close. Each lives a quiet life, working, sleeping, seeing his family.

That’s it. That’s the story. That’s the movie.

And yet from these unlikely materials, Lizzie Gottlieb has made a wonderful film, Turn Every Page: a witty, loving portrait of two lions in winter, one of whom — Gottlieb — is her father.

In some ways the two men are quite similar. Urbane New Yorkers, each with his memories of reading books as a child in Central Park. And yet they are very different men — Gottlieb is opinionated and dripping with self-regard; Caro is quiet, thoughtful and modest.

Gottlieb is the former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and the New Yorker. He’s been responsible for hundreds of books and a stable of authors that has included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Bob Dylan. He’s fun, charming.

Caro is the winner of multiple Pulitzers and National Book Awards. He has written just five big books (along with a slim memoir); each of his bigger works is incredibly detailed, immersing its reader in particularities of times and places, and describes in great detail the ways in which talented, driven individuals — US president Lyndon Johnson and New York planner Robert Moses — made things happen that would not otherwise have happened (or that would perhaps have happened more slowly, and slightly differently).

This ability — of making things happen — Caro calls “power.” It is for his deeply informed and sensitive analyses of the particularities of power — intoxicating, deeply evidenced, personality-driven — that Caro is famous.

The title of the film nods to the lengths Caro goes to in researching his books. “Turn every page,” his first editor told him; certainly, that is the advice he has followed.

The accusation can be made — reasonably in my view — that Caro’s work sometimes verges on “great man” history, because it focuses so heavily on the acts of pivotal individuals, of men who sat at the heart of formal power structures, and pays too little attention to structural shifts and history-shapers that lie further out of the focus of state archives.

This criticism is not entirely fair; Caro’s greatest strengths lie in the deep effort that he puts into contextualising the lives of his subjects and explaining the cultural and political constraints — the power blocs, institutions and hidden barriers to change that locked in the status quo — within which these ingenious and creative people worked.

Caro is very popular; and the way he breathes life into these topics — which can seem so abstract — is the reason for that popularity.

Turn Every Page is at its best when it seeks to show how Caro went about adding this texture and depth to his research.

It describes, for instance, his decision to move from Manhattan to the Hill Country of Texas so as to better immerse himself in the world from which Lyndon Johnson came. It shows Caro and Ina, his wife and lifelong research partner, visiting the LBJ Memorial Library, home to forty-five million pages of documents. The two are filmed poring over document boxes as Caro talks of how happy he and Ina are working there, bathing themselves in presidential minutiae.

Interspliced through the whole is (wonderful) archival footage — snapshots of a past when these men were handsome, young and ambitious. When they were shapers of the future, rather than survivors from the past.

The film’s pathos lies in how it captures these elderly men continuing — fighting against the dying of the light — to live deeply analogue lives. One scene involves Caro and Gottlieb wandering around their publisher’s office looking (in vain) for a pencil. In others, we see Caro, dressed as always in a full suit and tie, sitting at his desk writing longhand drafts, before transcribing them, two-finger typing on an ancient typewriter.

We see him stuffing carbon copies into a cupboard for safe keeping.

Perhaps the best insights the film has to offer are at the level of craft. “He’s a word painter… he paints with words,” says Gottlieb of Caro. Gottlieb is certainly a man who knows a little about word artistry, and what he says is true.

Caro talks of finding writing hard, of how he struggles to get the details right. Of how important that struggle is. Non-fiction that lasts, he says, is non-fiction in which mood, setting and context are given as much attention as they are in the best novels.

Turn Every Page is a great little film. Nearly two hours long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I watched it on a train journey from London to Edinburgh, ears hidden under big noise-cancelling headphones, and I laughed the whole way through. •

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Directed by Lizzy Gottlieb | Streaming on Amazon Prime and other services

The post Does anyone have a pencil? appeared first on Inside Story.

To research and write queer history before living memory — without oral testimony, that is — is to enter a much darker place. The last man to hang for sodomy in the British Empire was in Tasmania in 1867, and in 1997 Tasmania became the last Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise male homosexuality. Relationships and life choices that are criminalised, stigmatised and pathologised are unlikely to leave much of an imprint on the public record, and surviving historical evidence is often patchy, obscure and cloaked in euphemism.

In 1990 I wrote an honours thesis in the history department of the University of Tasmania on the Tasmanian writer Roy Bridges. It wasn’t a piece of literary criticism, for that would have been a short thesis indeed. Most of Bridges’s thirty-six novels were adventure stories for boys or middle-brow historical romances and melodramas dealing with the early days of Tasmania and Victoria. Frequently he was inspired by stories his mother, Laura Wood, told of her family history on their farm near Sorell, east of Hobart, going back to the earliest days of white settlement.

Bridges was Tasmania’s most prolific novelist, successful and admired in his time, but his reputation didn’t outlast his death in 1952. I wasn’t interested in the quality of his writing so much as his interpretation of Tasmanian colonial history, and how his own deep connection with the island was refracted through his works of fiction and memoir.

Born in Hobart in 1885, Bridges started publishing in 1909, and at first wrote prolifically for the gutsy little New South Wales Bookstall Company. Time and again he sold his copyright for fifty pounds per novel, whenever he was hard up (“which was often,” he once observed), grateful for the support the Bookstall gave to new Australian writers.

In his mature period his novels were published in London by Hutchinson or Hodder and Stoughton, but during and after the second world war his output declined. The gratifying success of That Yesterday Was Home (1948) eased his final years. Part history, part family history and part memoir, the book is a passionately expressed meditation on memory and connection with place. He died in 1952.

Roy Bridges in 1937. Inscription reads, “To my friends at Robertson & Mullins. Roy Bridges. 1937.” State Library of Victoria

By the time I started work on Bridges he was remembered mainly by enthusiasts interested in the literary culture of Tasmania. As a thesis project, though, he was perfect. No one else was claiming him, and significant collections of his papers were held in libraries in Hobart, Melbourne and Canberra. Methodologically I had Bridges’s memoir as a guide, which, unreliable as any memoir always is — and I knew this — was at least a place to begin.

I bought a 1:25,000 map of the Sorell district and pinned it to my wall in the history department. I drove out to meet Bridges’s nephew and his family, who were still working the property that Bridges had named “Woods” after his mother’s family.

The town of Sorell has always been a stopping point for travellers from Hobart heading either to the east coast or to the convict ruins at Port Arthur. To get there you must first drive across Frederick Henry Bay via the Sorell causeway at Pittwater. “All my life,” Bridges wrote in 1948, “Frederick Henry Bay has sounded through my mind and imagination. Like drums… or like cannonade in storm, or in the frozen stillness of winter’s nights.”

Every time I drive across the Sorell causeway I think of him, and did so again one brilliant day in February this year while heading up to Bicheno on holiday. With the sun sparkling off the bay I shouldn’t have been brooding on old stories, but suddenly I knew that the time was right to tackle again a biographical dilemma I had evaded, all those years ago.

The few others who have written about Bridges have struggled to understand the source of the loneliness and sorrow which, towards the end, amounted to torment. His journalist friend C.E. (Ted) Sayers first met Bridges in 1922 and remembered him as a haunted, “tense little man,” a chain smoker, embarrassed in the company of women, who had allowed a streak of morbidity and violence to enter his fiction. I developed my own suspicions about this haunting, and in my thesis in 1990 I speculated, briefly and carefully (because this was Tasmania), that Roy Bridges had been a closeted and deeply repressed gay man.

I wouldn’t have thought of this except for a conversation I had with the one friend of Bridges I could still find, a well-known local historian named Basil Rait. I visited the elderly Mr Rait in a tumbledown house in north Hobart somewhere near Trinity Church. Just as I was deciding that his recollections weren’t going to be particularly useful, he astounded me with the remark that one day, Roy Bridges had been seen emerging from the Imperial Hotel on Collins Street in central Hobart, and that the Imperial was a known place for homosexual men to congregate.

When did this occur? And did Rait see this himself? I was too amazed — and too timid, I think — to ask enough questions and, rookie historian that I was, I did not record the conversation. Why was Rait so frank, and what did he think I would do with his information? Perhaps I’d gained his trust because I had arrived without a tape recorder. I don’t know.

But I did consider his revelation very carefully. The once-elegant Imperial was rather seedy by then, which seemed to lend plausibility to what Rait had said. I had gay friends and I asked if anyone knew anything about the Imperial’s reputation. No one did.

Unable to verify Rait’s assertion, I turned to the textual sources. Although I was aware of the danger of reading too much into odd snippets of evidence that might have signified nothing, I was also unwilling to ignore what I had been told, which, if true, might explain everything. To speculate about Bridges’s sexuality in the thesis, or not: my thesis supervisor left it up to me. On an early draft I can see in his handwriting: “You decide.”

Royal Tasman (Roy) Bridges came from a family of prosperous wicker manufacturers and retailers. His father Samuel and uncle James ran Bridges Brothers, in Elizabeth Street, Hobart, which had been founded in 1857 by their father, Samuel senior. After graduating with an arts degree from the University of Tasmania, Bridges joined the Tasmanian News as a cadet in December 1904. Journalism was his career for most of the next twenty-five years. He accepted a job with the Hobart Mercury in 1907 but soon became disaffected by poorly paid sixteen-hour days on what his memoir described as a “rotten sweat-rag” and headed for Sydney.

He got a job immediately on the Australian Star under its editor, Ralph Asher. Sydney was a relief from Hobart’s “superficial puritanism, social restrictions and moral repressions of human nature,” but in 1909 the chance of a job on the Age lured him to Melbourne, where he settled in happily for a decade. Then, between 1919 and 1935, when he retired permanently to the farm near Sorell, he switched between freelance writing and journalism, mostly with the Age but also, briefly and unhappily, with the Melbourne Herald in 1927.

A shy man, Bridges did love the companionship of other journalists. Keith Murdoch, future father of Rupert, was one of his early friends on the Age, although they didn’t remain close. There was Neville Ussher, of the Argus and the Age, who died during the first world war and whose photograph Bridges kept close to him for the rest of his life. And then there was Phillip Schuler, son of Frederick Schuler, editor of the Age.

High-spirited, charming, handsome: Phillip Schuler’s nickname was “Peter” because of his Peter Pan personality. Friendship “blossomed” during a bushwalk on a “golden August Sunday at Oakleigh,” then only sparsely settled, and after that the two young men spent many weekends together. They read the same books, roistered in restaurants and theatres, and tried their own hands at writing plays.

On a walking holiday in Tasmania in 1911 the two men tramped from Kangaroo Point (Bellerive, on the eastern side of the Derwent) down to Droughty Point, “the way of many of my boyhood days.” They climbed Mount Wellington to the pinnacle and spent two nights at the Springs Hotel, part way up the mountain (sadly burned to the ground in the 1967 bushfires). From an upper window they watched the “glory of the sunrise,” looking across to Sorell and Frederick Henry Bay. In 1948 Bridges wrote:

The beauty and wonder of the island rolled on me, possessed me, and possesses me yet. We were talking and talking — life, Australia, journalism, literature; always we planned; always we hoped. We were worshipping life, the island, the sun.

If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, then no. Schuler returned Bridges’s friendship, but as his biographer has made clear, Schuler was thoroughly heterosexual and Bridges knew it. This could have been one of those passionate platonic friendships between men, but in 1990 I thought, and I still think, that Bridges was absolutely in love with Schuler.

After brilliant success as the Age’s correspondent during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, Schuler enlisted for active service but was killed in northern France in June 1917. His last letter to Bridges ended: “Keep remembering.” Schuler’s photograph was another that Bridges cherished always, and indeed he had it reproduced in his 1948 memoir, but Bridges himself was no Peter Pan. He had to carry on facing the disappointments that life inevitably brings, and he was not stoic. In his fifties, living with his sister Hilda back at Woods, he felt the loneliness deeply and became a demanding, querulous, self-pitying man who drank too much.

He did still have many friends though, and in 1938 he began corresponding with Ted Turner, an amateur painter whom he met through their membership of a Melbourne literary society known as the Bread and Cheese Club. Bridges was only a distant member because he rarely left Tasmania by then, but he took a fancy to Turner and found great entertainment in the younger man’s letters, which reminded him of his own Bohemian days in Melbourne. Bridges heaped affection and confidences on Turner, requested a photograph and was delighted with it. He was cross if Turner delayed writing and begged him to visit Tasmania (“Ted old son… I wish I had your friendship — near me!”), but Turner never did.

The two men met only once, in April 1940 when Bridges made the trip to Melbourne, but Bridges went home hungover and with a bout of influenza. He admitted to Turner that the trip had been “a series of indiscretions.” What exactly that meant I couldn’t tell, and their correspondence declined later that year.

Did I indulge in absurd speculation in my thesis about domineering mothers and emasculated fathers? No, but it was impossible to ignore the breakdown of the marriage of Samuel and Laura Bridges, Roy’s parents, in 1907 when Roy was twenty-two. Samuel was pleasure-loving and extravagant, and eventually the house in north Hobart where Roy and his sisters were brought up had to be sold. Of Laura, Samuel apparently said that she “may as well” live with Roy because “it’s plain she’ll never be happy without him.”

Laura managed the household while Hilda became her brother’s amanuensis, writing or typing all his novels from his rapidly scrawled sheets. Roy supported them all financially, although Hilda earned an income as a musician and fiction writer. Only now does it occur to me that there might have been an understanding among the three of them, tacit one would think, that Roy would never marry. Before Laura died in 1925 she begged Hilda, “Whatever happens, look after Roy,” which Hilda did. She never married.

Hilda Bridges, probably in the 1910s. State Library of Victoria

Did I mine Bridges’s writings for autobiographical clues to his sexuality? Yes, for no one warned me against mistaking writers for their characters, and anyway there was so much material to work with. Convicts, bushrangers, and the endeavours of the early colonists to establish a free and democratic society on Van Diemen’s Land: Bridges wrote obsessively on these themes for years.

Novel after novel, especially in his mature period, features a misaligned relationship between a beautiful, passionate woman and an unsuitable man. A son of the relationship will turn up as a convict in Tasmania, and the plot revolves around whether the mother’s folly can be forgiven and her son redeemed by love. Bridges despised hypocrisy and religious intolerance, and his clergyman characters are tormented by unsuitable desires and undone by having to preach Christianity to convicts who are not inherently evil but victims of an unjust society.

Symbolic of society’s condemnation of a convict were the physical scars left by flogging, for which Bridges seemed to have a horrified fascination. In his final novel, The League of the Lord (1950), the Reverend Howard France sits in his study in Sorell picturing an illicit meeting between a beautiful young local girl and her convict lover, which he knew was occurring at that moment. France is jealous of them both. “[Joan’s] eyes are deep blue… her mouth is red, her hands long and white… exquisite…” Further down the page France imagines the couple being caught, which would mean the triangles for young Martin: the “hiss and crack of the lash across strong young shoulders… red weals… red flesh… red running… red.”

Martin is deeply ashamed of being a convict and struggles to accept the love offered by his (free) family in Tasmania. He recalls his journey there on a transport ship, hoarded below decks with hundreds of other convicts:

The faces, the eyes, the voices, the hands; the loathsome, pawing, feeling, gliding, gripping hands… the squeaking laughter in the obscene dark… the foul perverted horde that [had] been men and boys… the brooding, breeding evil, the bestiality, lifelong contamination, incurable, malignant, cancerous.

I underlined this passage in my copy of The League of the Lord but didn’t know how to use it. Now I see it two ways. It could simply be an evocation of Marcus Clarke–inspired Tasmanian gothic. Or it could be evidence that Bridges’s many convict characters are studies of profound shame, self-hatred and alienation. In this reading, those convict characters were versions of himself, their alienation his own, and homosexuality his source of shame. Either interpretation is possible.

Roy and Hilda Bridges’s return to Woods in 1935 fulfilled a promise Bridges had made to their uncle, Valentine Wood, who’d died in 1930, to take on the old place. He knew that Woods meant more to him than Melbourne: “that I was of this land; that it was stronger than I, and that when it willed it would call me back.” Still, brother and sister missed Melbourne terribly, even though overstrain and a nervous dread of noisy neighbours had driven Roy to the brink of a breakdown.

It might have been in these years that the Imperial Hotel incident occurred. Did it? Bridges disliked Hobart, but if it was casual sex he needed, where else could he go? And yet, if the Imperial was a known place for gay men to meet, the police would surely have been there too. Put that way, the incident seems unlikely.

Bridges’s heart condition worsened in the late 1940s and he had a chronic smoker’s cough. He refused to go to Hobart for tests and hated doctors visiting from Sorell. One doctor threatened to have him certified to get him to hospital. “He implied my not liking women about me in such treatment was an abnormality,” Bridges grumbled to a friend. The burden of his care fell as usual on Hilda. Eventually he had to be rushed to hospital in Hobart anyway, and he died there in March 1952 aged sixty-six. Hilda stayed on at Woods for many years until she moved to a Hobart nursing home, where she died in 1971.

I never spoke with Bridges’s family about his possible homosexuality because I was relying on them for recollections and photographs. I drove out to Woods for a final polite visit to give them a copy of the thesis, and after that, unsurprisingly, I never heard from them again.

My research had not included any reading on the ethics of biography so instead I learned it the hard way. I’d gained the trust of my subject’s family only to betray that trust in the end. However, this time — for this essay — I contacted a relative a generation younger and did have an open conversation. There is nothing new to say except that Bridges left a complex personal legacy that is still being felt.

Some people blame homosexuality among male convicts for the long shadow of repression and homophobia in Tasmania that delayed gay law reform until 1997. Perhaps. Such a thing would be hard to prove, and in any case, what is “proof”? What constitutes “evidence” of a queer life? When found, how do we assess its significance? The thing is to not shrink from the task, because with patience and honesty we might still open up some of these painful histories to the light. •

The post Lifting the shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

But the typewriter’s appeal for children isn’t surprising. The journey from fingers to printed text is direct, the type appearing on paper before your eyes as you compose. When it works smoothly, the writer can feel in full control, from idea to tangible text. There’s no waiting for a printer to finish the task.

In his new book, The Typewriter Century, Sydney historian Martyn Lyons reckons that this machine shaped how we write from the 1880s up to the mid 1980s, when the word processor established its superior claims. He marks this neat century with photographs of a Remington No. 1, the model bought by Mark Twain out of curiosity in 1875, and of Len Deighton in his London flat, hemmed in by a massive IBM word processor, in 1968. Twain “wrote” Life on the Mississippi by dictating to a typist, and Deighton called in the services of an operator for the IBM.

Lyons begins with a fascinating overview of the typewriter’s development, detailing many of the technical difficulties overcome along the way. Of the various people with claims to be its inventor, he gives most credit to Christopher Sholes, whose ideas were incorporated into that Remington No. 1, which came encased in a wooden cabinet with a foot treadle for returning the carriage.

Lyons soon moves from the typewriter’s technical development to its role in changing how fiction, especially popular fiction, was created in the early twentieth century. While literary writers like Twain and Henry James quickly adopted the typewriter as a way of easing the process to publication — dictating to stenographers who transformed their work into legible copy for publishers — the typewriter also made possible a commercialised form of writing, with a new generation of writers learning to type as part of their work in offices or newspapers. Some successful popular writers even replicated the office hierarchy, with several “typewriter girls” at hand to process their work. The task quickly became gendered.

Along with a rising mass literacy, the typewriter made possible the “pulp fiction” phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s, when writers like Georges Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner and the Australian Gordon Bleeck could bash out a new novel in less than a week, selling them for a few pence on the railway stands. Some, like Simenon, were so prolific that they wrote under several pseudonyms to avoid flooding their own markets. Gardner referred to himself as the Fiction Factory. These writers made money by the sheer quantity of what they produced, not its quality, though both Simenon and Gardner longed for some literary recognition. André Gide thought Simenon a “great novelist” but his literary reputation was largely posthumous.

When he examines individual relationships with the typewriter, Lyons finds a range of responses. Some authors were worried by the “distancing” effect they felt when composing by machine. Rather than the intimate, physical experience of pen on paper, the typewriter transformed thought into impersonal, standardised print. Some authors who dictated their words were surprised by the impassive responses of stenographers trained to concentrate on the words rather than their meaning. James, for example, was disappointed when his most frightening passages in the Turn of the Screw made no impression on the demeanour of his typist. Others felt that the presence of the typist disrupted the privacy of composition, making them self-conscious about their creativity and alienated from their own work.

Many, of course, quickly went back to handwriting their first draft, creating a further distancing by handing copy to a typist. John le Carré replicated the elaborate office procedure of the civil service, where he had trained, by writing each draft in different coloured ink before passing it to his wife to type on different coloured papers. He then revised the typed text by hand in the appropriate coloured pen before handing it back to his wife for a further complete draft.

This process could continue for thirteen drafts, as for The Tailor of Panama, and must have slowed the process down rather than hastening it. Le Carré may have resisted acquiring a word processor, but his wife no doubt appreciated its arrival.

Writers trained in typewriter skills appear to have been more likely to develop what Lyons calls a “romantic” relationship to the typewriter, seeing it as an extension of their bodies and even a source of inspiration. The film cliché of the writer ripping paper from the typewriter, scrunching it up and throwing it on the floor appears to have no place in real life. Jack Kerouac, of course, is the archetypal romantic typist, but others, including Enid Blyton, felt freed by the responsive movement of the typewriter.

The Typewriter Century, with its amusing stories about the practices of many writers, is based on wide archival research. But it can hardly be exhaustive given the writing multitudes who have typed their way through the century. As the book progresses Lyons concentrates in detail on the typewriting careers of a handful of popular writers who could not have been so prolific without the machine: Simenon, Gardner, Agatha Christie, Richmal Crompton and Enid Blyton. This allows him to give some sense of the processes and self-mythologies of the writers. Simenon promoted himself as a speed typist, and Gardner became successful enough to supervise banks of female typists to produce his work. Christie, Crompton and Blyton professed to fit their writing around domestic routines — Christie is photographed sitting in a dining chair while she types on a drop-sided dining table.

All of these writers knew they were addressing distinct markets and the typewriter was the essential tool for them to meet their readers’ appetites for more of the same. The effect of the machine on literary writers raises more complex considerations. Lyons speculates that Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper experience, including the necessary typewriter, influenced his notoriously succinct and direct writing style. Yet there are examples of typewriter prolixity — perhaps those long and exuberant novels by Christina Stead and Miles Franklin were encouraged by their familiarity with the typewriter as office workers. The shift to dictation, too, must surely have influenced the writing style of James’s masterly later novels, or Twain’s later books. As Lyons concludes, “There is no single answer to the question, what was the impact of the typewriter?”

The book does invite readers to consider how their own favourite writers adapted to the typewriter. An obvious Australian example would be Joseph Furphy, the foundry worker who bought a typewriter in 1897 and revised the manuscript of Such Is Life himself. Scholars are often excited by handwritten manuscripts, as if they offer immediate contact with a revered writer; despite its visual anonymity, though, the typescript may be just as direct a product of a writer’s thoughts.

Readers of The Typewriter Century are likely to reflect on their own writing practices, too. The computer turned writing into a rather mechanical function called “word processing,” but its advantages as an editing tool were obvious and quickly embraced. It may be that it has encouraged different kinds of creative thinking and Lyons cites several writers, such as Cormac McCarthy, who resist it. The typewriter still has its uses, even if it is simply to avoid the distraction of the internet, as Zadie Smith says.

My ten-year-old granddaughter wrote her first film script on the second-hand Olivetti she was given for Christmas, but in the long run she found the keys too hard to press and the ribbon change too difficult. The laptop looks like winning out. •

The post Feeding the machine appeared first on Inside Story.

Garner began as a novelist of small observations, a recorder of how women try to live out feminist principles in love relationships and domestic life. As she says several times in her diaries, she will never win the Miles Franklin award, yet she has become a major literary figure of her generation. She works close to life, crafting her own responses to the world around her. At this stage of her career, it appears logical for her to throw off all pretence and offer readers her notebooks as well.

There is pretence of a kind at work here, too, of course. This material from manuscript notebooks has been selected carefully to provide us with entertaining and revealing glimpses of the writer’s life.

Yellow Notebook records Garner’s self-doubt and struggle to establish herself as a fiction writer while trying to maintain family life in Melbourne. It is full of the kind of observations that appear in her stories, alongside a growing understanding of the nature of her own art. Amid frequent reflections on her own failings are sharp insights into her approach to art. As far back as 1981 she wrote that “meaning is in the smallest event. It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.”

Admirers of The Children’s Bach and Postcards from Surfers will enjoy Yellow Notebook’s account of the creation of those stories and notice the many elements of Garner’s life that would contribute to the screenplay for The Last Days of Chez Nous. The French husband, the father, the daughter and the student boarder, even some of the most memorable dialogue, are on display as Garner’s second marriage falls apart and she leaves the rented house to her daughter and her friends.

For those anxious to know, Garner answers a question she is frequently asked — “Where do you get your ideas for fiction?” — as generously as possible. We see her developing a clear-eyed understanding of her own strengths and limitations as an artist. On the one hand, there is the constant pressure to “make things up”; on the other, the joy when the stories come “pouring out.”

One Day I’ll Remember This reveals a more confident writer, defiant in the face of the condescension that both critics and casual acquaintances frequently offer her. She retains her optimistic commitment to sexual love and begins a new relationship with V, a married novelist from Sydney deeply interested in the visual arts. Despite all her misgivings, this develops into her third marriage to Murray Bail (an identification obvious to any curious reader). The joys and struggles of their relationship give this book a narrative arc that makes it read like a novel.

Together, the two writers struggle to work and maintain their individual confidence in what they do. Garner’s sociability and domestic instincts conflict with V’s need for solitude and resistance to the routine demands of housework. V, a creature of Sydney and its art world, takes Garner to meet famous artists and their put-upon wives. She realises that she belongs in Melbourne, in her own house with a garden, mixing with her wide circle of friends. While Sydney supports the visual art elite that V admires, Melbourne offers a more open and communal music scene where even amateurs like Garner can dance and play instruments. V obligingly moves to Melbourne, but their different perspectives continue to drive the marriage towards its inevitable end.

This relationship produces some significant arguments about art as the two writers engage in an almost parodic acting out of the traditional positions of men and women artists. As the Australian literary world, influenced by poststructuralist theory, moves against realism in the 1980s, Garner acknowledges that her own talent is low on the hierarchy: “I need to devise a form that is flexible and open enough to contain all my details, all my small things. If only I could blow out realism while at the same time sinking deeply into what is most real.”

Bail’s interest in mythic and modernist form fits a more respected artistic mode, and he would go on to win the Miles Franklin in 1999 for Eucalyptus, a novel he began while living with Garner. In their various homes, the argument about artistic hierarchy is symbolised by ongoing disagreements about the placing of V’s cherished painting by the New Zealand modernist, Colin McCahon. In one hilarious scene, Garner cleans the bathroom while V stands at the door advising her to stop writing about that “bullshit” period, the 1970s, and she responds that the portrayal of relations between men and women in his work feels like the 1950s rather than the “no place” and “no time” he believes it to be.

This pattern of self-criticism and mutual criticism, with casual, gratuitous criticism from friends and acquaintances, makes published literary criticism seem superfluous. With friends like these, who needs reviewers?

The publication of Cosmo Cosmolino causes an estrangement from her old friends in Sydney, O and R. It is not the fact that real people can be identified in the story, “The Recording Angel,” that causes the breach but its analysis of Garner’s relationship with O. No one seems to regard the story as fiction. In her defence, Garner insists that it is a loving picture of the complexity of a long friendship, though she also sees that it is “brutal.” She is distressed to have caused her friends pain but finds “a hard nut of something in the centre of my heart,” a kind of ruthless honesty. Eventually, they forgive her.

Garner’s declining interest in fiction may have hastened her movement towards journalism and the subjective non-fiction that has become her forte. The diary reveals the background to many of the essays that were collected in True Stories (1996), including her Walkley award-winning “Killing Daniel.” We learn that Garner’s first experience of a murder trial was to support a friend whose daughter was a victim. She finds the trial of Daniel’s killer harrowing, as indeed is the essay she wrote about it. In keeping with her interest in domestic relations, Garner chooses to write about how the courts handle the intimate crimes of sexual and domestic abuse that are increasingly the concern of public feminism. It is salutary that she rejected the possibility of writing about Ivan Milat’s random murders of strangers.

Garner’s “hard nut” arms her against the critics of The First Stone, soon to lead to her alienation from a generation of feminists. She includes a fateful note about her initial response to the charges against the master of Ormond College: “I wrote the guy a letter. Hope I won’t regret it.” The various legal injunctions before publication draw out what V calls her street-fighting quality, making her more determined to see the book through.

When the storm breaks, Garner receives a mass of letters, many from young women declaring she has betrayed feminism and they will never read her work. She is reviled in cafes and praised in supermarkets. Is any other Australian writer so recognisable? In the course of these diaries, the woman in the post office and the man at the bank declare themselves as her readers, and on one occasion she gets her hot water connected early because the supervisor has read all her books. When The Last Days of Chez Nous appears, she is grateful for the anonymity of the screenwriter.

These diaries reveal the social nature of literary life in Australia, especially in the heyday of publishing in the 1980s and 1990s. In a small community, writers can’t help but meet each other and their critics. Patrick White, Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley and Tim Winton (thinly disguised as J) all make appearances. Garner also takes some cheeky swipes at the big names — Saul Bellow is a windbag; Australia’s mighty poet attacks her in his column then insists on walking home with her from a festival reading. Some characters are designated simply as the great reader or the biographer.

Life is so much more complex than any written form can possibly encompass. These cleverly selected fragments gesture towards the many things that happen contemporaneously in every life — family irritations, spiritualism, operations and dental work, motels on the Hume Highway, Sydney’s mighty thunderstorms, the ownership of country cabins and dogs. They can be read as an autofiction of domestic life, as the background to admired books and films, as an account of the life of art at a certain period in Australia, or as an apologia for Garner’s work and a demonstration of it in action. Garner declares that she can only do what she does, asserting the value of her own subjectivity. She insists that one can be an artist and still love ironing. •

The post A hard nut in the centre appeared first on Inside Story.

The guest might have passed up the invitation altogether had she not been intrigued. Her hostess is engaged to a well-known Australian writer — the oddest couple imaginable, according to the gossip — and the fiancé will be there. On such whims, great stories are born.

Predictably, the talk around the table is about money: the size of advances, the prospective returns. Book people, probably more than most people, like talking shop. Publishing is a risky business, and in Australia is rarely underwritten by independent incomes as it is in England. All this the guest knows well after several hungry years nibbling at the edge of the London book world.

Surprisingly, the writer-fiancé has little to say about this, or much at all in fact. He sits in near silence, detached from the company. He gives the impression he is doing all he can to resist the temptation to get up and leave. Even when asked about his own writing he says only that he’s working on a couple of projects. The guest cracks a joke at his expense but he seems to take no offence. On the contrary, she has piqued his interest. And so the story takes flight.

Kenneth Cook, or Ken as he was known in these circles, wrote twenty books, but his reputation still rests on Wake in Fright, his first published novel. On its strength he could give up his work as a rural journalist, reporting on everything from Country Women’s Association meetings to sheep sales, and devote himself to fiction full-time.

If he’s remembered at all today it is because of that book, a bleak, frankly horrific depiction of the rampant, unthinking savagery of the white man let loose in the outback, a book that turns the traditional Australian bush tale on its head. In 1968 it came out as a movie, directed by the Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, a film so violent it was almost too difficult to watch.

The closest parallel I can think of is John Boorman’s film Deliverance, also based on a novel, in that case by the American author James Dickey. Deliverance garnered several Oscars and found its place in the pantheon of revered American movies. Wake in Fright had appeared two years earlier, scandalising Australian audiences, and only after its recent remastering has it come to be considered a classic.

At the time of his first meeting with Jacqueline Kent, the author of this engrossing memoir, Ken Cook knew his star had faded. He was fifty-five, a member of a passing generation of writers, and his approach to his craft was resolutely old-fashioned. He prized above all the narrative art, the ability to turn out a story and turn it out well. He was contemptuous of language deployed for its own sake, the language of, say, Patrick White, whose influence on younger writers was at its peak at the time.

Cook had read none of the works of those who had emerged in the seventies and eighties — writers like Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Frank Moorhouse and Tim Winton — nor did he feel obliged to. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Kent’s memoir is her sensitive record of the waxing and waning of literary fame. Also, if obliquely, she reminds us of how difficult writers’ lives were before government-funded systems of grants and festivals and university creative writing degrees. All these have contributed mightily to the efflorescence of the Australian book culture we celebrate today.

In short, there’s a certain heroism to Ken Cook’s story. Few writers’ lives are easy; even today, contrary to the hype over huge advances, film options and overseas publication, the average author’s annual income from writing is a bit over $13,000.

Beyond Words opens with this revealing description of Cook’s last exercise book, an emblematic beginning if ever there was one:

On the shelf above my desk is a battered exercise book, the kind used by generations of Australian primary school children — one that, in defiance of calculators, has tables of cubic tonnes and hectares and other measurements marching across the back cover. On the front cover is a small panel with these words printed carefully by hand: Name: Kenneth Bernard Cook School: Fort Street Boys’ High Age: 56 and 3/4.

All his writing life Cook wrote his novels in books like this, using a fountain pen. Not so unusual, even today. What was distinctive, however, was his fluency, and what he did on the rare occasions when it failed him. He either embellished the page with cartoon portraits of Australian animals, or filled the margins with numbers. The numbers related to his money troubles, which were plenty.

Typically, Wake in Fright never made him much. After its publication he kept afloat by repeatedly selling the film rights until the book found the producer who actually went ahead with the film. But he said he was diddled grandly by another Australian writer — Morris West — who refused to write an endorsement for the cover of the American edition but then took up the film option and reaped the profits for himself.

Cook’s first novel, accepted by Hodder and Stoughton, had been pulped before it appeared, owing to libel concerns. As his family — a wife and four children — grew, he tried to support them with a host of ill-starred ventures, including a company producing children’s films and a butterfly farm on the Hawkesbury, which was wiped out by two massive floods. It was this disaster that bankrupted him, shackling him through to the end of his life and binding his family, including Kent, for years thereafter.

All the while, stoked by cigarettes and whiskey, he kept writing books, some of which were less than he was capable of, others never receiving the critical praise they deserved. Like many writers who punished themselves as if they were machines for spurting words — Balzac comes to mind — he died an early death, not long after he’d started that last exercise book. Had he lived longer, the market might have been kinder to him.

But that’s just it, Cook was a man of contradiction, proud but self-deprecating. Passionate about politics (he ran for office twice, protesting Australia’s involvement in Vietnam), only to learn he hadn’t the temperament for it. It’s not hard to see his attractiveness, or why a woman years younger, like Kent, could find herself loving and marrying him. The shock of his death in 1987 reverberated for years, compelling her to write this memoir.

All I’ve given is the nub of it, but little of the powerful strength of its weave. It’s what might be expected from an experienced editor and author in her own right — a beautifully woven tale of love and loss, with a fascinating figure at its centre. Worthy of mention too is the quality of the production. Beyond Words is also a tactile experience, a book as all books should be, a pleasure to hold in the hand. •

The post A kind of heroism appeared first on Inside Story.

Frank Moorhouse’s The Drover’s Wife occupies similar territory. Its collection of stories, parodies and critical essays riffs in various ways on the Lawson short story. Some of the pieces are “genuine” items of literary criticism and journalism, some are fictions that do no more than reference elements of Lawson’s story, others shift into the double imaginary world of metafiction and parody. O’Neill is represented in this collection by an extract from his 2014 PhD thesis on experimental short fiction in Australia, one of the straight critical articles Moorhouse features. A 1980s atmosphere is present here, too, in the games the writers play with Lawson: the frolic documented here began back in 1975 with a story by Murray Bail.

Moorhouse begins with the thirteen-page 1896 version of Lawson’s story, which must then bear the weight of the accumulated speculations and fictions that follow it. He takes an editor’s privilege of writing five introductory pieces about the background to the story, its representation of women and “sexual tension,” Lawson’s “gender precariousness” and the changes to the original versions of the story, in particular its depiction of Aboriginal people. These culminate in Moorhouse’s own take on Lawson — that his intense friendship with his mate Jim Gordon may have been sexual.

Moorhouse argues for a gay Henry Lawson whose relationship with Gordon, recently examined in Gregory Bryan’s Mates: The Friendship that Sustained Lawson, represented an intimacy never broached directly in his writing. He imagines a kind of Brokeback Mountain relationship, giving a romantic gloss to mateship on the track. While their wives stay home with the children, the mates are imagined enjoying a consoling sexual intimacy. Moorhouse is open about his reasons for seeking this reading of Lawson: it speaks to his own experience of a sporadic sexual relationship with another man through their years of marriage to, or uncoupling from, women.

Another recent book on Lawson, Kerrie Davies’s A Wife’s Heart: The Untold Story of Bertha and Henry Lawson, reads the writer’s life from an opposite direction but with an equally personal perspective. Davies projects her own experience of a retreating husband and single motherhood onto Lawson and his wife, Bertha. She does sterling archival research to expose Lawson as a drunken wife-beater, incapable of supporting his children. Bertha comes out of this version of their story as a heroic survivor, rather than the widely accepted figure of the vengeful wife who put her husband into prison for his failure to provide maintenance.

It seems futile to protest that these readings are ahistorical: that the frequent comments during his lifetime on Lawson’s “effeminacy” do not imply homosexuality, or that Davies’s recent experience of single parenthood is a cakewalk compared to Bertha’s battles in the days when women’s access to work was restricted and social services virtually non-existent. Of course, it is possible that Lawson could have beaten and confined his wife, abandoned his children, run off with the maid, drunk himself to incompetence, and also had an enduring sexual relationship with his mate. How does this change how we read his stories? Reading emerges from these books as a various, individual experience in which a reader can select whatever he or she likes from a story. The pieces collected in Moorhouse’s book offer us a series of these readings, most of them ironic and skewed to a sexual interpretation of the story.

The story by Bail that set this metafictional game in train was inspired by Russell Drysdale’s 1945 painting, a painting that has nothing to do with Lawson’s story of a woman abandoned in an isolated bush hut with her children, apart from its name. Drysdale’s woman is on the track with the drover. There are no children in sight, and Bail writes in the voice of her abandoned city husband, who has been left to care for them. The story wipes away all Lawson’s concern for the isolated and endangered woman, turning it into a comedy of masculine indignation. In 1980, Moorhouse replied to Bail’s speculations with a “conference paper” by an Italian-Australian literature expert, Franco Casamaggiore, who had fallen for the sex-with-sheep jokes of visiting Australians. The poor Italian scholar elaborates on the links between the painting and the story and the identification of the wife with a sheep. Lawson’s fragile story sinks beneath the weight of this boyish mockery.

Women writers challenged these parodies, with Barbara Jefferis publishing her version later in 1980, and Anne Gambling writing a contemporary version in “The Drover’s De Facto” in 1986. That year, Damien Broderick joined in with the voice of the dog, who begins: “Call me Alligator.” Ten years later the game was taken up by Mandy Sayer and David Ireland, both writing about the painting, with another flurry of parodic stories dating from 2006 to the present. I fervently hope this hasn’t become a standard exercise in Australian creative writing courses.

Moorhouse brings together all these versions and variations, regardless of their merit or interest. Most of them are fun to read, with Louisa Lawson’s essay “The Australian Bush-Woman” standing out as more detailed and impassioned than her son’s famous story — though we know that he based it on his mother’s experiences in the bush. The longest piece in the collection, Madeleine Watts’s “Afraid of Waking It,” is also the strongest, though its story of the exploitation of a lonely young woman by a pair of old artists makes only tangential allusions to Lawson as it tracks its way around the inner west of Sydney.

As one might expect, Moorhouse emphasises sexual rather than political responses to Lawson and his writing. He takes little note of the reference to the drover’s being a failed squatter, a “careless” man like Middleton in Lawson’s poem “Middleton’s Rouseabout”: “Type of a careless nation/ Men who are soon played out/ Middleton was.” I would like to speculate that the drover’s wife followed Louisa Lawson’s example and headed for the city with her children, like so many others, as drought and economic depression took hold by the 1890s, but then I would simply be adding my own contribution to the thread.

Much more important is the postcolonial, Indigenous reading Leah Purcell brought to the story with her 2016 play of the same title. Moorhouse includes the notes by Purcell and the play’s director, Leticia Cáceres, from the recent Currency Press edition of the play. The play must have been produced just as Moorhouse was completing his book, and one can sympathise with his difficulty in trying to include some notice of it here.

These notes give only a sketchy idea of Purcell’s drama, which blows previous versions of the story out of the water. She imagines her drover’s wife armed with a gun, facing up to the swagmen and troopers who come her way and ready to protect the Aboriginal man who calls on her for help. She is both a more abused and a much more formidable figure than the women in the other stories, and the secret she is hiding is redolent with anger and violence. Her son’s declaration that he “won’t never go drovin’” amounts to a commitment to join her in outlawry.

Moorhouse struggles to come to terms with the racism evident in the changes Lawson made to his original story, which expanded the references to the midwife “Black Mary” sent by “King Jimmy,” and described the Aboriginal man who built the wood heap as “the last of his tribe and a King.” He calls these additions “coarsened music-hall caricatures” and is disappointed that Lawson seems to have approved them. He recalls that he accepted, as a child, the conventional wisdom that Aboriginal people were dying out, despite the presence of Aboriginal children in his primary school class, but he undermines his good intentions by adding, “Now it is the Anglo-Saxon tribe that is dying out,” with an unfortunate echo of the familiar white nationalist rhetoric.

This proliferation of writers writing on writers suggests that publishers have lost faith in the ability of academic critics — the people Moorhouse generously calls scholars — to offer interesting or helpful readings of Australian writing. Perhaps all the arguments about literary theory and identity politics have drawn them away from the task of clear explication of the fiction of their compatriots. Perhaps it is simply more exciting to publish a creative response to a work of literature rather than a close reading by a self-effacing critic. This is a matter of personal concern, as I edit a series of books intended to give academic scholars the chance to examine the work of Australian writers at length; it seems to be pushing against an overwhelming preference for personal responses from other fiction-makers.

With its series of essays by writers on writers, Black Inc. has joined this trend, beginning with Alice Pung on John Marsden and Erik Jensen on Kate Jennings. Each of them addresses the writer in question, making a sustained case for admiration of the work. At a time when some parents have criticised the gloominess of the texts set for high school students, Pung insists that it is important that teenagers are exposed to the darker side of life, especially when they are likely to be struggling with difficult personal circumstances.

Jensen wears his heart on his sleeve, declaring Jennings’s Snake to be “the great Australian novel.” His interviews with the writer suggest a friendship that extends to sympathetic reading of her fiction. His essay is clear, entertaining and full of interesting context that will send readers looking for Jennings’s work. “Snake failed to find an audience,” he tells us. “It never had a good cover, its subject was unfashionable. Several times it was described as a descendant of Henry Lawson’s short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’.” Of course, a section of Snake appears in Moorhouse’s book.

These essays appear to be a return to what was once called “literary appreciation,” criticism that engages with the writing and reads it sympathetically in context. They are a welcome addition to the array of responses to Australian writing, most of all because they are an invitation to go back to the original writing and read it for itself. ●

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But I wonder if students in New South Wales undertaking their Higher School Certificate in English would know what he was talking about. For on their curriculum, the words “writer” and “author” have been replaced by “composer.” Composers write — or, I guess, compose — plays and poems and novels. Or rather they would, if those literary forms themselves had not been rebranded “texts.” In NSW classrooms, Pride and Prejudice is a text composed by Jane Austen.

The Australian Music Centre represents this country’s creators of “art music” (a term deserving an article to itself), and it has been inviting its members to discuss their own feelings about the word “composer” in its online magazine, Resonate.

This is not as solipsistic as it sounds. Most people would accept, for instance, that there’s a difference between composing and improvising, even if they only believe that the latter is a real-time version of the former (there’s generally more to it than that). And what about those art galleries that are increasingly full of art that makes a noise — sound sculptures and installations that emit what sounds a lot like music? Are they the work of composers?

Anri Sala, whose work is presently installed in the Rotunda on Sydney’s Observatory Hill, is not a composer, yet his Kaldor Public Art Project, The Last Resort, while visually arresting (a ceiling full of suspended side drums with drum sticks attached), has more to do with sound than image. Not only do the drums patter out their little tattoos in the breeze, they do so against the slow movement of Mozart’s clarinet concerto. The solo part and different sections of the orchestras have been individually recorded, with tempos that fluctuate according to the details of weather conditions written down in a log kept by James Bell, a Scottish migrant sailing to Australia in the 1830s. These strands of the music are heard via numerous small speakers placed inside the drums, and since they all obey their own tempos, Mozart’s Adagio continually loses and regains its focus.

The result is oddly poignant — and purely musical. Yet Anri Sala — visual artist and film-maker — wouldn’t call himself a composer.

More surprisingly, some of the Australian Music Centre’s members wouldn’t either, and I understand their general reluctance. Mozart was a composer. Bach and Beethoven were composers. “Composer” can feel like a high-status label in the way that “writer” or “painter” or even the generic “artist” seldom do, and you don’t have to be a social-media humble-bragger to resist it. It was years before I was able to use the description of myself, and I’m still hesitant.

There are also people who create musical works, for whom the term doesn’t quite fit. These are not only the improvisers and the makers of installations such as The Last Resort, but also sound artists who deal with actual sound — recorded or synthesised — by shaping it with software, say. And then there are songwriters — especially singer-songwriters — who generally don’t embrace the “composer” label. Many jazz musicians, on the other hand, perhaps tired of the world thinking that they make up all their music in the moment, seem happy to identify as composers.

Over at the Resonate website, which perhaps I should say is edited by my wife, articles have been commissioned (the first two have been published) and the AMC’s members have begun to respond. So far the improviser Jim Denley is wary of applying the word to himself because it puts him “too much at the centre,” the composer Gordon Kerry argues that the term is a useful way to describe the professional creator of music (“There are composers, and there are people who compose”), and the young Tasmanian composer Rhys Gray, taking issue with Kerry, reckons you’re a composer if you say you are, which might turn out to be the most sensible approach of all.

There is, of course, an argument for referring to all music creators as “composers,” just as the NSW Department of Education uses the word to describe all creators of “texts”: this is more or less Denley’s position. But the word also has a specialist application — one that has nothing to do with status.

When I’m asked what I do, I generally reply that I “write music,” which is literally true. Most days, I sit at my desk or sometimes at the piano, and write on large pieces of manuscript paper. I plan and sketch. I write down notes, then rub them out and write new notes. I move the notes around, I put the second note up an octave, the third note down an octave; I take a phrase and turn it upside down. I calculate rhythms and cross-rhythms. Sometimes I cut the paper up and rearrange the pieces. This is, beyond doubt, composing, and I imagine is what most people think of when they hear the word. So I must be a composer.

For some reason, though, I have yet to muster the swagger of Wonder Boys’s Q and use the term about myself unflinchingly. ●

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At first glance, Draft No. 4 appears to be a fairly standard writing book — its chapter titles include “Structure,” “Editors & Publisher” and “Frame of Reference” — but it quickly becomes apparent that it is much more than a simple textbook. To a certain extent, it invites comparison with two of the most famous autobiography-cum-writing texts of recent years, Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, but Draft No. 4 is more about McPhee the writer than McPhee the person. While reading it, in fact, I was reminded less of other writing books than I was of sitting in a dusty lecture theatre at a university listening to an experienced professor reflecting on his lifetime’s work. This image is rather apt, because as well as spending decades as a staff writer for magazines such as the New Yorker, Time and the Atlantic, McPhee is also a long-time writing professor at Princeton. Draft No. 4 is, put simply, a masterclass in long-form narrative journalism, with vignettes and techniques rubbing shoulders. It is also a collection of essays rather than a single book, each previously published as a standalone piece in the New Yorker.

Although the layout makes sense in terms of structuring the collection roughly around the writing process — from development to drafting to editing — things unfortunately get off to a slow start. The first and second essays, “Progression” and “Structure,” are by far the weakest of the book, peppered with barely comprehensible line diagrams representing the structures of pieces of writing, alongside excerpts from the finished products. These diagrams, and McPhee’s explanations, are often clunky — there is the sense that, like laws or sausages, there are some parts of articles that you don’t want to see getting made. The essay is also quite self-referential, so that a reader unfamiliar with the article being discussed may find it difficult to piece the structural diagrams together in context. The short excerpts, however, are the saving grace, simply because of the sheer beauty of the writing. I confess I hadn’t read any of McPhee’s work before, but partway through Draft No. 4 I went out and bought his book Looking for a Ship, solely on the basis of a one-hundred-word excerpt. His prose sings.

Thankfully, after “Structure,” McPhee seems to get back onto much more comfortable turf, and the book proceeds apace. He clearly has a passionate curiosity about people, and he is a deft observer. His third essay, “Editors & Publisher,” about his experience at the New Yorker, gives a lovely insight into the magazine in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and paints especially dexterous portraits of its long-running editors, William Shawn and Robert Gottlieb. At times, McPhee’s exquisite turn of phrase just leaps off the page, as with this description of Shawn: “Mr Shawn was in the class of leaders who see no succession, like certain dictators, publishers, headmasters. Yet of course, as he advanced in years, the question of what would happen next grew around him like a rind.”

Other aspects of life at the New Yorker also weave their way through the book. “Checkpoints” is devoted to the magazine’s army of fact-checkers, whose sole job was (and still is) to verify all aspects of the writer’s assertions — sometimes spending weeks doing so. In the era of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the rise of “fake news,” such a job seems both critically important and remarkably quaint; there is a sense that, for all the benefits that technology has brought in terms of media production and consumption, a level of quality has also been irrevocably lost. There have always been newspapers and magazines that subsist on scandal rather than substance, and whose standards are nowhere near the level of the New Yorker’s, but the insistence on quality — in terms of both writing and accuracy — as described by McPhee is now the exception rather than the rule.

Indeed, there is more than a hint of nostalgia to Draft No. 4, a sepia-tinted longing for a time when the business of writing was less frenetic and more straightforward. To be fair, it’s sometimes hard to judge how much of this is inherent in McPhee’s writing, and how much of it I’ve overlaid as a reader, based on my own experience. I began my writing career in the early 2000s; I’ve never used a typewriter (although, like McPhee, I do sometimes handwrite to combat writer’s block) and the internet is my natural home. The point at which I started writing seriously for publication also coincided with the decline of the traditional media and the subsequent drop in remuneration, especially for freelance writers. A career like McPhee’s, built predominantly on being paid by magazines to spend months or sometimes even years building stories into book-length manuscripts, seems utterly foreign to me, as does the army of fact-checkers and the editors who genuinely invest in writers’ careers.

It’s possible, however, that a reader of McPhee’s generation may not have quite the same sense of cognitive dissonance, and herein lies the book’s missed opportunity. McPhee is in a unique position in that he began his career during print’s golden years in the 1960s and has continued on through the digital revolution, all the while teaching up-and-coming writers, but in none of his essays does he reflect on the monumental changes to the industry and the effects these have had on writing as a profession. If this were indeed a face-to-face masterclass, someone would surely ask about what future he sees for long-form journalism, particularly as magazines and newspapers cut their budgets and online media fills the gap, but he doesn’t engage with this topic in the book. Consequently, there is a bit of a “back in my day” feeling to some of the essays, and a sense that, for the younger writer, aspirations of a similar career trajectory are all but impossible to fulfil.

That said, Draft No. 4 is also packed with wisdom on the more timeless aspects of the writing craft. The subject matter of the titular essay, which comes towards the end of the book, is hilariously familiar to anyone who has ever stared at a blank page or screen and willed words to fill it. There is immense reassurance in seeing a writer of McPhee’s calibre and experience assert, “If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.”

It is this recurring good humour, as well as McPhee’s candour about the complexities and challenges of the writing process, that prevents Draft No. 4 from descending into pomposity. One enduring image for me, from the essay “Structure,” is his description of how he overcomes writer’s block: “Get away from the computer, lie down somewhere with a pencil and pad, and think it over… Sooner or later something comes to you. Without getting up, you roll over and scribble on the pad. Go on scribbling as long as the words develop.” Picturing McPhee lying on the floor scribbling out his articles makes me feel rather better about the fact that most of this review was composed while walking aimlessly around my neighbourhood.

Draft No. 4 is, at its heart, a charming book. McPhee’s authorial voice is witty and engaging, and his turn of phrase is sublime. His natural humility shines through, giving the reader the sense that, despite his achievements and status in the literary firmament, he is also an everyman. For the reader it is a lifting of the veil on an often-opaque process, and for the up-and-coming writer there are also plenty of practical gems regarding the craft, such as relying on the dictionary for synonyms rather than the thesaurus: “At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.” McPhee also emphasises the importance of redrafting; indeed, the book’s title is a reference to how many drafts he believes it takes to develop a decent piece of writing. Unlike the popular culture image of the writer, who just sits down, bangs out a book and then sells it to great acclaim, McPhee notes that, “Actually, the essence of the process is revision. The adulating portrait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes Express Mail from fairyland.”

This book is both a reflection on a long and distinguished career, and an homage to great writing and those who make it happen — not just writers themselves, but editors, fact-checkers, “grammarians” and, of course, subjects. If you aspire to great writing, or even if you just enjoy reading it, then you could do a lot worse than spend a few hours with John McPhee. •

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I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember, but it was only in 2014 — after two decades of practice — that I finally finished my first novel, Greythorne, a Gothic mystery set in Victorian England. The writing process itself had been relatively short, just twelve months from the idea to a manuscript I was comfortable submitting to publishers. In November 2014 I took it to an Australian Society of Authors Literary Speed Dating event in Sydney, where I pitched to various agents and editors, and five months later one of those contacts bore fruit.

My contract was with a digital-first imprint of one of the Big Five (the five biggest book publishers in the United States: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Pan Macmillan and Simon & Schuster). Digital-first meant it would be available only in ebook and print-on-demand formats, so there’d be no big print runs or distribution to bookshops unless it happened to do very well. At the time I didn’t care; it was a foot in the door.

What followed was a stripping away of any illusions I might have had about the traditional publishing industry. I thought publishers were in the business of marketing books — because they presumably want them to sell. Once upon a time they were, but those days are long gone. These days, a new release has to fend for itself, and if it doesn’t strike paydirt within the first month, then it’s done its dash. But getting lucky is far more likely to happen in some genres than in others — romance and crime, for instance, have hugely dedicated readerships. It certainly doesn’t happen in Gothic mystery.

I baulked at the thought of going indie; deep down, it still felt like the easy way out, or second best to endorsement by a traditional publisher.

Of course, I was lucky to have been offered a contract at all. The market for my kind of book is relatively small, and Greythorne is short as novels go, at only 55,000 words, or a bit over 200 standard paperback pages (most publishers prefer them to be around the 80,000-word mark). The development of digital-first imprints — which several major publishers have started in an attempt to tap into the ebook market — means that publishers will sometimes take chances on books like mine, whereas they wouldn’t necessarily consider them for a traditional print run. But these imprints are also often tiny, run by a dedicated but small team of people within a very big company, without the resources to properly market their wares. Essentially, they’re often set up to fail, and this failure then reinforces everything the publishers think they know about the ebook market, namely that it’s impossible to make a go of. (It’s not — trade publishers just don’t do it very well — but more on that later.)

In mid 2016, the imprint I’d been contracted by closed down unexpectedly, or at least it was unexpected for those of us on the outside. A number of authors, me included, were left stranded. On the one hand, our contracts were with the parent company, so they were still valid as long as our books continued to be made available for sale. They were, but what little marketing support there’d been had disappeared. On the other hand, the publisher offered to give us back our rights, but then we’d have to decide what to do with them. I queried an agent about the possibility of pitching the book to another publisher and was basically told not to bother — it’s extremely difficult to resell an already published novel unless it’s a bestseller. I decided to leave Greythorne where it was for the time being, because at least people could still buy it. Then I started looking at options.

In the meantime, I’d begun working on another novel, The Iron Line. This was another Gothic mystery, this time set in Australia in the 1880s. The imprint’s collapse had taken away any temptation to take the path of least resistance by pitching it to them, but it also meant I was essentially back to square one in terms of finding a publisher and/or an agent. It was a demoralising thought.

Around the same time, an author friend introduced me to a Facebook group for “indie” authors. Indie, or independent, authors are what used to be known as self-publishers — people who produce and publish books themselves, in this case using ebook and print-on-demand technology. Indie publishing is very different from vanity publishing, where unscrupulous companies charge inexperienced authors to publish through them, often to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, for little or no meaningful return. Indie authors subcontract services like editing and design themselves, and retain full control of all their intellectual property.

The indie scene underwent a renaissance in the late 2000s, spurred on by Amazon’s release of Kindle Direct Publishing, which allows authors to publish directly to Amazon’s Kindle ebook platform rather than having to go through a third party. In the ten years or so since then, indie publishing has developed into a thriving industry, with an array of services blossoming out of nowhere to support it. Self-publishers are no longer stereotypical narcissists with thousands of badly printed books in their basement; these days they’re businesspeople, and often quite successful ones at that.

Discovering just how many options are available to the modern author — far beyond the “contract or bust” model of yesteryear — was a revelation. But at the same time I baulked at the thought of going indie; deep down, it still felt like the easy way out, or second best to endorsement by a traditional publisher. So I left Greythorne languishing there in limbo, but nevertheless decided to find out exactly what this indie publishing thing was all about.

Entering the indie publishing world is a little bit like entering a parallel universe. Up in the firmament are a whole host of superstars you’ve probably never heard of — Hugh Howey, Joanna Penn, David Gaughran, K.M. Weiland, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, James Scott Bell — many of whom are making five-, six- or occasionally seven-figure incomes from their writing. Further down are the mid-list — people who aren’t quite indie superstars but who are making perfectly respectable money through savvy marketing. Of course, there are still traces of the old self-publishing problem evident in those books that lack decent design and/or editing, but that’s what happens in a democratic marketplace. You could sit the best-quality indie books next to traditionally published books and most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

One characteristic of the most successful indie authors that I noticed early on is that they’re not just authors — they’re businesspeople. Many of them run mini-empires, built around not just their fiction work but also non-fiction, speaking gigs, workshops and other services. To succeed, indie books need to harness a whole marketing ecosystem — an email list, free giveaways, a spot in the coveted BookBub newsletter (which sends free or discounted deals to its subscribers every day and can add thousands to a book’s sales), and so on — and the most successful authors have learned how to make this work for them.

Hybrid strategy: Hugh Howey capitalised on his self-publishing success by striking print deals with major publishers but retaining lucrative ebook rights.

Strangely enough, though, techniques that would be a closely guarded secret in other industries are willingly shared in the indie world. Whether it’s through free sources such as Facebook groups and podcasts, or through non-fiction books, webinars and other media, indie authors are almost always ready to help each other out. In the indie Facebook group I’m part of, members regularly (and constructively) critique each other’s covers and blurbs, offer feedback on drafts, and answer questions about platforms and marketing strategies, even sharing the results of particular promotions they’ve launched and offering lessons learned. You might think that an industry in which members are competing to get their own work noticed would be incredibly vicious, but in fact indies across the board are really nice.

Even those who’ve had enormous success seem to see value in giving back to the community. Hugh Howey became famous as the first indie author to sign a print-only deal (retaining ebook rights because he’d done so well with them on his own) after his dystopian science-fiction trilogy, Silo, was picked up by Simon & Schuster for a six-figure sum. But he’s also known in the indie community as the brains behind the Author Earnings website, which is one of the few sources of sales statistics that don’t come from the major publishers (which don’t usually include ebooks or indie books). It aims to crunch the data across the entire marketplace and give a more accurate snapshot of exactly which types of books are selling and who’s producing them.

The traditional publishers hate this kind of thing because sales figures have always been a tightly held secret, but Author Earnings is in keeping with the openness of the indie community, which is all about sharing information to help authors make informed decisions. Likewise, one of the longest-running podcasts on indie publishing, The Creative Penn, run by British author Joanna Penn, regularly hosts guests from all over the world who share information on all aspects of indie publishing, from writing techniques to exploiting audio rights to getting the most out of Amazon ads. The amount of information available, often for free, is simply extraordinary.

All the same, indie publishing is a huge learning curve, and it’s not for everyone. Some writers just want to write, and that’s fine. As an indie author you have to do it all, and that means being comfortable with marketing. Once upon a time, highly introverted authors were able to hide behind their publisher’s marketing department, but not any more. Even in trade publishing, authors have to do the lion’s share of the work when it comes to getting their book out there, and in indie publishing this is magnified. If that’s not your thing, or if you’re not technologically savvy, you’re going to struggle as an indie author.

The other thing to bear in mind is that some types of books sell better than others. Romance readers, for example, are voracious and loyal, so romance is the perfect genre for indies because the market is huge. Likewise, crime tends to do well, especially “cosy crime” (think Agatha Christie) and thrillers. Speculative fiction — science fiction, fantasy, horror and all their various sub-genres — also has a pretty strong market, especially because the ebook retailers’ categories go into quite some detail, so readers can browse very specific varieties of the genre according to their taste. Steampunk, for example — a speculative fiction subset that has fantasy or sci-fi elements set in an alternative Victorian-era world — is a growing market, but not big enough for many traditional publishers to touch it.

On the other hand, middle-grade fiction (chapter books for children aged eight to twelve) is generally accepted as difficult to publish independently. Kids’ books in general are hard to sell this way because you have to market to the parents as well as the child, and these works tend not to be so popular in ebook form anyway. Likewise, if you write literary fiction then indie publishing is a bad idea, because it won’t sell — but then, literary fiction tends not to sell very well in any format, which is why traditional publishers use the earnings from genre fiction bestsellers to cross-subsidise it. Literary fiction authors also depend disproportionately on literary reviews and prizes, neither of which are particularly accepting of indie-published books. But for genre fiction authors like me, there are far more opportunities than ever before.

In early 2017, I decided to dip my toe in the indie publishing waters with a non-fiction book, Communications for Volunteers: Low-cost Strategies for Community Groups, which I’d written as an asset for my consultancy business (because, like most writers, I also have a day job). In this case, there was never any question of finding a traditional publisher; I deliberately decided to go indie because I wanted to retain full control over the intellectual property rights. I knew I’d be using material from the book in other aspects of my business, such as training courses, and I didn’t want to have to go running to a publisher for permission every time I wanted to do that. So indie it was.

As an entree to the industry I probably couldn’t have picked a more difficult book. It was full-colour with lots of lists and diagrams, so was a lot more complicated and expensive to format and print than a traditional black-and-white novel. Marketing non-fiction is also quite different from marketing fiction, and there are fewer resources available. But I got there in the end, and it made me realise just how much freedom and control you have over the entire process, from what you write, to design, release dates, sales and giveaways

I watched Greythorne’s sales ranking slide without being able to do anything about it. If you can’t control the price then you can’t run sales, give books away for free, or implement any of the marketing mechanisms that will actually help it to sell.

By this point I’d finished the first draft of The Iron Line and was getting started on rewriting. It had taken longer than Greythorne (it turns out that starting a new business and finishing a novel aren’t always compatible) but it was rapidly reaching the point where I needed to decide what to do with it. I’d been toying with the idea of indie publishing from early on in the process, but had come up against the stigma that still exists around self-publishing. A successful author friend epitomised this when she said, on hearing that I was thinking of going indie, “Oh no, don’t do that — your writing is far too good and it’d be a waste of your talent.”

So I continued to weigh up my options — agent, major publisher, small press — and in July this year I again went to a Literary Speed Dating event. I had some muted interest, but also “we can’t sell Gothic” and some concerns about the length of The Iron Line, which, although slightly longer than Greythorne, is still on the short side. Even the fact that I already had one book published (and so was slightly less of a risk than a debut author) seemed to make little difference.

In the meantime, I watched Greythorne’s sales ranking slide without being able to do anything about it. If you can’t control the price then you can’t run sales, give books away for free, or implement any of the marketing mechanisms that will actually help it to sell. I knew that the dismal sales figures weren’t because it was a bad book — it had got good reviews, and I’d actually made some pretty decent money, albeit by buying print-on-demand copies and on-selling them myself, which is ultimately an unsustainable way of doing things. Finally, I decided that I wasn’t getting anything from the publisher that I couldn’t get myself, so I got my rights back and have recently re-released Greythorne under my own imprint. Suddenly a whole world of possibility has opened up, and I’m cursing having waited so long to do it.

I started thinking about The Iron Line systematically. What could a traditional publisher give me that I couldn’t get for myself? These days, publishers tend to outsource design and editing to freelancers, so these can be obtained at the same quality you’d get if you went through the trade press. Indies obviously have to finance these themselves, but then the potential returns are also far higher.

The one thing traditional publishers can provide is print distribution into bookshops. But the reality is that most books only stay on the shelves for a month or two, unless they happen to take off. Certainly books in niche genres, like mine, won’t hang around for long. And in any case, bookshops (much as I love them as a reader) only give access to the Australian market, which in global terms is minuscule, whereas indies have access to the entire English-speaking world — and beyond just the usual Western suspects. Some of the places I’ve gained the most traction have, oddly enough, been India, Malaysia and South Africa, and one of my longer-term projects for Greythorne is a Hindi translation.

Another important consideration, and the main reason why the indie mid-list is thriving while it’s all but disappeared from the traditional industry, is royalty distribution. On Amazon, which is still far and away the biggest ebook retailer, any books priced between US$2.99 and US$9.99 yield a 70 per cent royalty (for books outside those parameters it’s 35 per cent). This means that for every US$4.99 copy of Greythorne sold, I make US$3.50. I can’t divulge the royalty rate from my original contract, but I can tell you it was a lot less than that. If you choose to publish exclusively with Amazon, you can also enrol in their subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, which gives readers access to an unlimited number of books in exchange for a monthly subscription, with authors paid by the number of pages read as well as for normal sales.

Other retailers, such as Kobo, give authors a 70 per cent royalty regardless of price. Plenty of research has shown the sweet spot for ebooks — the point where the author will move the most copies but still get a decent return — to be around the three-to-five-dollar mark, which is why indie authors who are savvy with their pricing and marketing are often able to make a decent living. In contrast, most trade publishers still use ebook pricing primarily to drive sales to paperbacks (which is where they make their money), ignoring the many reasons why readers might choose to read ebooks instead. This is why you often see ebooks from traditional publishers priced at anywhere between $10 and $25, which means, of course, that they don’t sell anywhere near as well as their more reasonably priced cousins.

Even though most indie authors still make the majority of their income from ebooks, developments in print-on-demand technology have made indie paperbacks a huge industry. Gone are the days when a minimum print run was 1000 books, which you then had to store until you could sell them. These days, you just upload a file and it gets printed as people order copies. Amazon has its own print production company, CreateSpace, while one of the world’s largest producers of traditionally published books, Ingram Content Group, also runs a print-on-demand arm, IngramSpark, designed for indie publishers. IngramSpark also markets indie books directly to retailers and libraries in the same way that Ingram sells its traditionally published books, meaning that it’s easier than ever for indies to get their work out there.

The other exciting area where indies are leading the way is audio. In the last five years, the audiobook market has taken off, driven in large part by the ubiquity of the smartphone and the resultant podcast revolution, which changed people’s listening habits. Most traditional publishers, realising just how valuable audio rights are, will now force authors to sign them over (whereas previously you could choose to retain these and nobody cared), even if they have no intention of exploiting them, which deprives authors of a valuable asset. In addition, unlike with print books, it’s not possible for authors to pitch directly to audiobook publishers such as Bolinda. They deal directly with print publishers, so even if you retain your audio rights, there’s no way you can get an independent deal with them.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon is leading the way in indie audiobook production, like it did with ebooks, through its own platform, Audiobook Creation Exchange. ACX pairs authors with narrators, through either a fee-for-service or royalty-sharing arrangement, and then publishes the audiobook to Amazon’s massive Audible platform, as well as to iTunes. Books published on Audible are also made available for sale on Amazon alongside the ebook and paperback versions, and it’s becoming increasingly common for customers to buy both the ebook and the audiobook, especially as they sync on a smartphone or tablet to allow seamless transitions between the two formats. (You can read up to a certain point in the ebook, and the audiobook will pick up where you left off, and vice versa.)

But ACX isn’t available everywhere — Australia, as you might expect, is one of the places yet to receive it — and other companies such as Findaway Voices are rapidly filling the gaps. The growth of in-home voice-activated services such as Google Home and Amazon Echo is also likely to bolster the audiobook market, and indies are in a prime position to take advantage of it.

Looking at it this way, in cold, unemotional business terms, it was clear to me what the best option was. But if this sounds like an easy decision, it wasn’t. Indie publishing is hard work. It also, strangely, felt a bit like admitting defeat. I hadn’t realised how deeply I’d internalised the idea that the only people who self-publish are those who can’t get a traditional contract.

Thankfully, this perception is gradually changing, especially as more and more well-known authors start choosing the hybrid model — some books published traditionally, some indie. In December 2016, bestselling Australian author John Birmingham (He Died with a Felafel in His Hand) announced that, although he still had some trade contracts, he was going to be indie publishing a lot of his work from now on, after a falling-out with his publisher. Such high-profile defections help give legitimacy to indie publishing, as does the fact that many publishing awards are now increasingly open to indies. In fact, the annual ACT Publishing Awards are open only to books published either independently or by small presses, in recognition of the fact that high-quality work exists outside the publishing mainstream.

For me, ultimately, it came down to freedom. I certainly don’t expect to make my fortune overnight — indie publishing is a long game — but I have control over my own destiny, and that’s hugely important to me. Indie publishing gives me freedom not just in the business sense of deciding release dates, pricing and when to run sales, but also creatively. The accepted wisdom in traditional publishing is that once you publish your first novel you need to keep writing more of the same in order not to confuse readers, but in indie publishing, you can write whatever you want. It’s true that deviating hugely from your normal genre may not be the best business decision, at least under the same name, but if I want to jump from Gothic mystery to steampunk, for instance, that’s not such a huge leap. Realising I have the freedom to experiment creatively and to take risks (some of which may not pay off, but some of which I’m hoping will) is incredibly liberating. And even if I lose the respect of many in the traditional publishing industry, I can connect directly with my readers, which is one of the things I love most about being an author.

For many writers, a traditional publishing contract will still be the pinnacle of success, and others just want to write without the pressure of running their career like a business. And I haven’t ruled it out entirely; if the right trade contract came along, I’d happily be a hybrid author. Considering that just a decade ago everyone seemed to be decrying the death of the book industry, it’s incredibly exciting to realise that it’s not just surviving but thriving. It may not look exactly like it used to, but as both an author and a reader I feel there’s great cause for optimism. •

The assistance of the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund in providing funding for this article is gratefully acknowledged.

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Pinker worries me slightly for fear that I may emerge as something of a purist, if not indeed a pedant, so I should make my position clear. It is physically impossible for me to write “they” instead of “he or she,” or “their” instead of “his or her.” As for the snobbish use (not to say brutal inaccuracy) of “whom” instead of “who” in such a sentence as “The man whom she believed was her uncle said…” or of “between you and I,” words fail me. And as for the endemic misuse of that most repellent four-letter word, “like,” I am working towards having it recognised as a criminal offence attracting a mandatory jail term. And when it comes to punctuation, something similar may be required for those who separate subject and predicate (what is that? I hear people cry) with a comma, let alone the heinous misuse of apostrophes. A friend told me she was taught as a child of the need for the latter via the sentence: “Some of those horses are my nieces’.” Just consider what the lack of apostrophe after “niece” implies.

What Pinker has going for him is, above all and as his title suggests, a sense of style. Style is not for him a matter of self-conscious flourish, nor is he puritanically rigid about what he will and won’t accept (unlike myself in the above examples). For him the overriding prerequisite for a sense of style is that it enable maximum clarity in negotiations between writer and reader. The writer knows what he or she wants to communicate; his or her task (NB not “their task”) is to make this accessible to the reader. As Pinker says, “The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window on the world.” His project here is marked by the way he steers a course between pedantry and anything goes; and he accepts entirely that language changes over time, even if some changes seem to fly in the face of logic. He is not one of those “benighted sticklers” (his phrase) who would rather die than split an infinitive.

Further, and this is one of the most attractive aspects of the book, he writes not only with clarity but with a wit that punctures both sloppiness and pomposity of expression, as in “A sentence beginning with It is or There is is often a candidate for liposuction.” Or in his quoting a wildly meandering, jargon-ridden piece of academic prose as “the winning entry for 1998” of the “annual Bad Writing Contest.” Actually, he is probably a bit too severe about academic writing: he’s obviously well past the stage of submitting densely argued – and even more densely written – pieces to learned journals intended only for other academic eyes. As a recovering academic, I’m trying to give up the use of words such as “hegemony” and “rearticulation,” but if they help those still in the job to get on with their explorations it doesn’t seem worth making too much fuss. He is right, though, to advise academic writers (and Henry James would have benefited from this advice) to “cleave an intimidating block of print with a paragraph break just to give readers’ eyes a place to alight and rest. Academic writers often neglect to do this and trowel out massive slabs of visually monotonous text” – noting, also, that newspapers often go to the opposite extreme.

In positive terms, Pinker really does make his major concerns clear, and in language of some eloquence. In his analysis of three obituaries of writers – Maurice Sendak, Pauline Phillips (of “Dear Abby” fame) and Helen Gurley Brown – he examines how each navigates the crucial journey from writer to reader. All three suggest a clear sense of the potential readership and Pinker shows how, in each, style illuminates the subject. He insists that writing, unlike speech, does not come naturally to us: “Spoken conversation is instinctive because social interaction is instinctive: we speak to those with whom we are on speaking terms.” Writing is not like that: it has to be worked on to make its points with precision, and in his defining of “classic style” he imagines a contract of equality between writer and reader.

But this (and he ditches the old notion that you can’t start a sentence with “but” or “and”) leads him and his readers to reflect on who makes the rules about writing. Or about anything, if it comes to that. Well, on matters of traffic, say, we can see that it is a good idea not to cross a road on a red light when wheeled vehicles are moving swiftly along it, but what of matters such as human behaviour or table etiquette? Who decided we should employ our cutlery from the outside in? On points of style, he wonders if we’ve undervalued the passive as distinct from the active voice in sentence structure, making the passive sound underprivileged when there are functions better served by its use.

Pinker’s text provides plenty of places for the eye to rest from slabs of prose. He makes recurrent use of a series of “tree” diagrams, the function of which is to illustrate how the various twigs of the sentence branch out and how they relate to each other. I found these diagrams scattered through a long chapter titled “The Web, the Tree, and the String” not all that helpful, somewhat at odds with the clarity of much of the surrounding prose. There are, too, odd moments of shock for the semi-pedant. He doesn’t believe we need to restrict “alternatives” to only two possibilities; he is more tolerant than some of us would be of the usage “different than,” rather than “different from” (forty years ago, I asked a colleague in the United States if this was now acceptable and he replied resignedly, “No… but inevitable”); and he is not above writing “we can’t help but,” apparently not noticing what has happened to the meaning in the process. But I’m aware that this may sound like nit-picking in relation to a book which is so lively and so alert to what is going on in the language as writers strive towards a “sense of style.” The tenor of the book’s views and arguments is of course American but, considering that “English” is the language at issue, it might have strengthened Pinker’s position to pay more attention to, say, the Oxford English Dictionary instead of relying so single-mindedly on the deliberations of its US equivalents.

As a result of reading The Sense of Style, I’m going to try to be more flexible about usage. However, if people persist in telling me they were “nauseous,” I’m still going to reply, “I’ll be the judge of that,” and they can just get on with being “nauseated.” •

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