Westerly Volume 63 Number 2, 2018 New Writing from 63.2 Western Notice of Intention Publisher Fiction Westerly has converted the full backfile of Westerly Centre, The University of Western Australia, Australia Creative Non-Fiction Westerly (1956–) to electronic text, available General Editor to readers and researchers on the Westerly Poetry Catherine Noske website, www.westerlymag.com.au. This Essays work has been supported by a grant from Associate Editor the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Josephine Taylor Limited. Editorial Advisors All creative works, articles and reviews Cassandra Atherton (poetry) converted to electronic format will be correctly Rachel Robertson (prose) attributed and will appear as published. Elfie Shiosaki (Indigenous writing) Copyright will remain with the authors, and the Editorial Consultants material cannot be further republished without Delys Bird (The University of Western Australia) authorial permission. Westerly will honour any Barbara Bynder requests to withdraw material from electronic Westerly Caterina Colomba (Università del Salento) publication. If any author does not wish their Tanya Dalziell (The University of Western Australia) work to appear in this format, please contact Paul Genoni (Curtin University) Westerly immediately and your material will Dennis Haskell (The University of Western Australia) be withdrawn. John Kinsella (Curtin University) Contact: [email protected] Ambelin Kwaymullina (The University of Western Australia) Susan Lever (Hon. Associate, The ) Westerly acknowledges all Aboriginal and John Mateer Torres Strait Islander peoples as First Tracy Ryan (The University of Western Australia) Australians. We celebrate the continuous Andrew Taylor (Edith Cowan University) living cultures of Indigenous people and their Corey Wakeling (Kobe College, Japan) vital contributions within Australian society. David Whish-Wilson (Curtin University) Terri-ann White (The University of Western Australia Publishing) Westerly’s office, at the University of Western Australia, is located on Whadjak Noongar Administrator land. We recognise the Noongar people as the Asha Ryan spiritual and cultural custodians of this land. Commissioning Editor Lucy Dougan

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All academic work published in Westerly is peer-reviewed. Copyright of each piece belongs to the author; copyright of the collection belongs to the Westerly Centre. Republication is permitted on request to author and editor. Westerly is published biannually with assistance from the State Government of WA by an investment in this project through the Culture and the Arts (WA) division of the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. The opinions expressed in Westerly are those of individual contributors and not of the Editors or Editorial Advisors. A Unique and Necessary Form David Malouf has written and chronology altogether, where the past is forever ‘once upon a time’ and published novels, short stories, the opening address of the Australian the future ‘ever after’. This, surely, is not just one of our earliest pleasures poetry, essays, memoir and for but one of our earliest and most enduring forms of psychological healing: Short Story Festival, 2018 theatre. He won the International this stepping into a place where our deepest anxieties and fears can David Malouf IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996 for his novel Remembering be embodied and faced, and what appears to be fate can suddenly be Babylon. He has also been reversed. Where rescue and recovery, and even rebirth are possible, and awarded the Neustadt the most elusive forces wrestled with in the form of giants, or genies, or International Prize for Literature goblins, or trolls, or wolves—even if we have never in fact encountered (2000), the Australia-Asia such creatures in the world around us. We see in the small children we tell Literary Award (2008), was stories to—and in the children we ourselves once were and recall—how shortlisted for the powerfully, how easily but mysteriously this works. Children, without ever and received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime having been told of such a world, already know it, as the earliest humans Achievement in Literature (2016). did, from dreams, and from the archetypal images and events that belong, as Jung saw, to inherited memory and our collective consciousness. A long history of such story-telling, and of the stories told, comes down This speech was delivered as the Opening Address to us in what we know, here in Australia, of Indigenous story-making. In of the 2018 Australian Short Story Festival. The Greek myths and the animal fables of Aesop. In Scandinavian legends of event was supported by the Institute of Advanced Baldur the bright and beautiful. In stories from the Arabian Nights like Ali Studies, The University of Western Australia; Baba and his ‘open sesame’, and the adventures of Aladdin and Sinbad the Gallery Central, North Metropolitan TAFE; and Sailor. In the fairy-tales gathered in the seventeenth century by Charles Silverstream Wines. David Malouf was an invited Perrault—‘Cinderella’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping guest and speaker at the Festival, which took place Beauty’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Puss in Boots’—and in the folk-tales at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge, WA. In gathered half a century later by the Grimm Brothers: ‘Hansel and Gretel’, 2019, the Festival will be located in Melbourne— ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. see: https://australianshortstoryfestival.com.

These stories belong to our communal life. Long before they were gathered and written down, they were told and listened to in company, Institute of and their shared and endlessly repeatable events and formulae—‘once Advanced Studies upon a time’ and ‘ever after’—create in us a shared response. As for the moment of communal story-telling itself, we get examples of that in such self-conscious literary works as The Decameron of Boccaccio and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century, Story-telling, the pleasure of sitting in close company and listening to and a century later, The Heptaméron by Marguerite of Navarre: formal a story, allowing oneself to float free in the moment and enter, both occasions of story-telling in which we come face-to-face, in each case, in the senses and in imagination, into the story’s events so that the with the story-tellers and their fellow listeners themselves. All of which story becomes our own, must be one of the oldest and earliest of our is a useful and perhaps even necessary place to begin. pleasures—a function of that uniquely human faculty in us, the capacity But the stories we have been considering are very different from short to step beyond the actual into the possible. story as we know it today. There, the exchange of telling and response To step out of our own skin and know what it is to experience the between writer and reader is an individual and private affair, that involves world as ‘another’. To step free of the bounds, the bonds, of chronology, a more intimate engagement and tone, and has for the most part a quite and the ways in which we are bodily subject to it, into another version of different subject and range of interests. The world this modern form of

10 | Westerly 63.2 11 | David Malouf short story deals with is the immediate world, or a close mirror of it. The Intimacy of tone, economy but intensity of detail, a pace that demands events it presents us with are unique and actual rather than archetypal, slow and attentive reading, is what characterises a form that is meant to though the story as it unfolds, I’d suggest, may uncover archetypal images be taken in at as single reading, then re-read: as opposed, I mean, to the that arouse, even in a modern reader, archetypal responses. Much of the novel, with its longer arc and more leisurely pace, and a looseness that reader’s pleasure, and why he or she is drawn back to it, may have the leaves room for what Nabokov calls those ‘lovely irrelevancies’ in which, same liberating and healing quality as that older form of ‘listening’ we often enough, a novel’s deepest truths are to be found. The short story is have already alluded to. Certainly, the same quality of imagination is at closer to the poem in the sparseness and necessity of its detail and the work in it. intensity of its language; in its slower pace, and the depth of attention it So, what do we mean by the ‘modern’ short story, and how and when demands, line by line, in the reading. did it evolve as a unique art form? In the one hundred and forty years of its existence, the modern short The immediate trigger was the emergence in the late 1820s, simul­ story as I have called it—in the shorter works of Henry James and Conrad; taneously in the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia, of a new in Kipling, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, form of publication, the monthly magazine, and the short story, in its first V. S. Pritchett and William Trevor in Britain; in Stephen Crane, Hemingway, publication, has continued ever since to be associated with the literary Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Raymond magazine. Think of The New Yorker, and in this country, of the Bulletin in Carver and Alice Munro in North America—has added to our reading-life the early days, and later of Southerly, Westerly, Overland, . some of the most moving experiences our language has to offer. The same In the late 1820s, Pushkin and Gogol, who till then had been on the is true here, of course, where the short story has been, and remains—from one hand a poet and on the other a beginning novelist and playwright, Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton and Marjorie Barnard through to Frank wrote their first short fiction for such magazines, and so did Balzac in Moorhouse, Beverley Farmer, Joan London, and Helen Garner France and Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville to Fiona McFarlane and Cate Kennedy—one of the most generously and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States. But these early works were not appreciated of literary forms, and one of the richest and most rewarding called short stories. They were tales in the case of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or insights into our local world and beyond. It is interesting to note that the grotesqueries as in the title of one of Poe’s early volumes. This points both short story in English has for the most part flourished in regional places: to their subjects, which were often the macabre or fantastic, and their Ireland, the American Deep South and Middle West, and here in Australia. appeal, but also to their form, which was a business of ‘effect’ as Poe put A few words about my own engagement with the short story and its it: of sensational detail and a surprise or shock ending. This means that place in what I see as my body of work. they were largely, like the tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer, a matter of Most fiction writers, if they begin with the short story, soon move on event and anecdote. It was de Maupassant, under the influence of Flaubert, (at their agent’s or publisher’s prompting) to the novel, which seems like a who purified and perfected the minutely observed and realistic elements natural progression; and that, for the most part, is where they stay. Some of such anecdotes. His story ‘The Necklace’, along with the stories of writers, and they are rare—notably Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and in Kipling, remain classic examples of a form that later became little more our own day Alice Munro—take the short story so seriously, or find in it than an empty if popular formula. But it was Turgenev, in his Sketches from so much of what fits their individual talent and interests, that they never, a Hunter’s Notebook in the 1840s, and Gogol in ‘The Overcoat’, followed as it were, ‘move on’. thirty years later by Chekhov, who established the short story as we mostly My own case is peculiar. I had published two novels, Johnno (1975) and know it today. Not as an anecdote—a series of events with an effective An Imaginary Life (1979), and four collections of poetry before I wrote and memorable, but unrepeatable, twist at the end—but as a work of quiet a short story I felt happy with. One, that is, that seemed to me to have and close observation of the ordinary. A work that through engagement a necessary relationship to what I was discovering about myself in the and empathy—a process shared equally by writer and reader—produces a novels I had written, and which belonged, I felt, to what I had come to think moment of revelation (an epiphany as James Joyce would call it) that takes of as my body of work. The story was ‘Southern Skies’, which would be the the reader by surprise because it has surprised the writer, and is what the opening story four years later to my first short story collection, Antipodes. story has quietly and inevitably been working towards. I did with it what I generally did with poems. I put it, and the stories that

12 | Westerly 63.2 13 | David Malouf followed, aside till I had enough of them to make a collection, and only is done. All this makes for a form of narrative quite different from the when that was in course of publication sent two or three of the stories off novel, or the novella or tale. Something more concentrated, more teasing, to magazines. That was in 1985. In the meantime, I had published Child’s more demanding of writer and reader both. The quality of the writers, Play and Fly Away Peter—which had begun as one of the longer stories over close on two centuries now, from Hawthorne and Turgenev and and only when I thought I had finished it, at 16,000 words, expanded into Chekhov and Conrad and Kafka and Joyce, to Hemingway and Borges and a novella—and Harland’s Half Acre. Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro, who have dedicated themselves to it I say all this to suggest that the short story, as I conceive it, is the most and expanded its possibilities, suggests how completely it has established demanding of all fictional forms, the subtlest, the most precariously itself within the field of fiction as a unique and necessary form. As does an balanced, which is why it took me, at least, so long to feel at home in it. occasion such as this where so many of us have come together, over two What I find particularly challenging and attractive is the variety it offers, whole days, to return a little of what, as writers or as readers—and many and, for all its shortness, the range: of material, of setting, but especially of us here are both—it has given us: pleasure, enlightenment, serious of voice, of narrative perspective and tone. I should also say, in my own engagement and attention. case, that the final emergence of a story—that is, my finding a natural and inevitable conclusion for it—has remained as difficult, after twenty-five or thirty years of practice, as it was at the start. I know that for some writers the first draft of the story, like the first draft of a poem, is the matter of a single rush of creative energy, but that has seldom been my case. There is a single rush of creative energy when the idea for a story first takes me, and I am happy to go with it, but quite soon it comes to a stop. For the moment, I can’t see where the story is going, and if the moment lasts I simply put the story aside and wait till I can see, in a flash, I hope, how the thing must resolve itself. The assumption being that if the story, like a poem, is an organic whole, the end is already there and prepared for in what I have already written. All I have to do is tumble to it. In some cases that takes weeks, or months, or in one or two cases a year or more. Learning to be patient and wait for the writing itself to speak, rather than jumping in and speaking for it, is one of the best places to learn it. What all this makes clear, I hope, is that I do not think of short stories within my work—three collections published over as many decades, the last in 2005—as ‘occasional’, or in any way less significant or demanding of my full range as a writer than the novels, but as belonging to a form that makes its own demands, poses its own difficulties but also offers its own, very generous, rewards. In the precision and plain necessity of its details. In its controlled and intimate tone. In the subtlety of its effects. Most of all in its capacity, within a single occasion or a single situation or ‘slice of life’, to catch the fleeting presence of a larger world—and in spite of Chekhov’s suggestion of its having no beginning or end, in an organic wholeness that gives it a quality of completeness that allows, at the same time, for an ending that remains in some way suspended, so that it goes on haunting the reader, hovering in his or her consciousness, long after the reading

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