The Well in the Shadow’, and This Meaning for The
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Award-winning Australian author Chester Eagle journeys through Australian literature offering engaging essays on the works of writers including Miles Franklin, Patrick White, George Johnston, Beverley Farmer, Helen Garner and Alexis Wright. As Eagle says in his introduction: ‘The essays are not introductory. T I consider them rather as a sharing of one writer’s reflections with the thoughts of h e The Well in readers who are looking for something new to add to their thinking. What the fellow-writer has to offer is the insight that comes from having also been at the W heart of the risky business of creating and imagining. Writers can see what other ell ell writers are up to because they face the same problems and use the same tricks.’ the Shadow These entertaining essays are linked by the essential notion of what it means to be a writer in Australia, and as such offer up valuable insights into our literature i and country. n A Writer’s Journey through Australian Literature th e e sh adow Chester Eagle Chester Eagle Chester www.transitlounge.com.au Essay/Literary Criticism Ozlit Chester Eagle Books by Chester Eagle Hail & Farewell! An evocation of Gippsland (1971) Who could love the nightingale? (1974) Four faces, wobbly mirror (1976) At the window (1984) The garden gate (1984) Mapping the paddocks (1985) Play together, dark blue twenty (1986) House of trees (reissue of Hail & Farewell! 1987) Victoria Challis (1991) House of music (1996) Wainwrights’ mountain (1997) Waking into dream (1998) didgeridoo (1999) Janus (2001) The Centre & other essays (2002) Love in the Age of Wings & other operas (2003) Melba: an Australian city (2004) The Wainwright Operas (2005) Oztralia (2005) Cloud of knowing (2006) Benedictus (2006) Central Station Sydney & other operas (librettos, 2006) O Vos Omnes (libretto, 2006) The Sun King and other operas (librettos, 2007) Mini mags Escape (2004) Hallucination before departure (2006) Mozart (memoir, 2007) Travers (memoir, 2007) Ozlit Chester Eagle Ozlit is published by Chester Eagle, 23 Langs Road Ivanhoe 3079 Australia, operating as Trojan Press. Phone is (03) 9497 1018 (within Australia) and email address is [email protected] Copyright is held by Chester Eagle. The book was electronically published in 2008 and remains available on the trojanpress.com.au website, from which it can be downloaded free of charge. Contents Introduction 1 Interlude 5: some reasons for writing 154 Unfortunate affairs 3 Story and the effacement of story: Jack and George: who owns a life? 9 Beverley Farmer’s The Bone House 156 Habe dank! A writer’s release 20 Judith Wright: the basis of our nation? 28 Interlude 6: the otherness of Australia 167 Most theatrical when most personal 37 What tree is that? Eucalyptus by Murray Bail 168 Private Manning & Private Bourne: Her Privates We 48 A desert song, or is it? Voss by Patrick White 179 Possession, dispossession, what about re-possession? 190 Interlude 1 57 Singing the country: a first look at Carpentaria by Alexis Wright 201 The teller of tales presents The Fortunes of Richard Mahony 58 Gippsland’s first great book 210 Keeping it in the family; one way to interpret the past 69 Strangely humble: The Tree of Man by Patrick White 219 Capricornia 228 Interlude 2 78 The un-loving of Coonardoo 79 Interlude 7: The writer and the culture 235 Sally Morgan’s My Place 92 Questions of scale: a term in Geneva, starting in 1926 237 Another journey with another Frank 245 Interlude 3: Marshall & Porter, Alan & Hal 100 How the world failed the League of Nations, then began again 254 Where certainty lies; his father’s world 102 A broth of gems; the skies without mother 113 The Eye of the Storm: but what is the storm? 122 Interlude 4: Something of a divide 131 Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Sydney burns, and a future is revealed 133 A ring that’s lost; is there something better? 143 Introduction In 1981 Patrick White published an autobiographical book called which a writer cannot provide. The critic is likely to have chosen Flaws in the Glass; the Melbourne Age commissioned two reviews, his or her reading shrewdly over many years in order to have a vast one of them from Hal Porter, who said, among many things and well-judged background against which to form opinion. The unflattering to ‘Mr White’: fellow-writer’s reading, if I am any example, is more likely to be sporadic, with gaps all over the place, unlikely ever to be filled in. Writers of my sort can be said not so much to read as to Almost any professional operates within a framework, a discipline, examine another writer’s work rather as one car freak to which the individual is responsible, whereas a writer may, by examines the vehicle and driving of another car freak. comparison, be quite cavalier with his or her procedures of thought, One says, “Splendid vehicle! Superb driving!” Or, “Nice believing, most of the time, that it doesn’t matter if ‘rules’ are broken vehicle! Ghastly driving!” Or, “Can’t stand that kind of so long as the newly offered insight has penetration. Is memorable. cumbersomely pretentious vehicle! And what bewildering Bites. Shows something new, or something old in a new way. I and erratic driving!” think that I am arguing, in this comparison, that a professional critic’s responses to a book are likely to be more reliable, because Hal confesses that the third attitude is his to the novels and plays of resting on a wider base. ‘Mr White’. I will say no more at this point about Mr White or Mr What the fellow-writer has to offer, on the other hand, is not Porter, but I quote this comparison of writer and car freak because reliability, but the insight that comes from having been in the same in the essays that follow I am the freak who comments on others of place, at the heart of the risky business of creating and imagining. his kind. I know I can’t see my essays as others will see them but Writers can see what other writers are up to because they face I imagine some readers accusing me of many things, and others, the same problems and use the same tricks. Like Hal Porter’s car well trained, perhaps, in one or another school of literary or social freaks, they too have put their vehicles together and pulled them criticism, who will think my observations no more than shallow apart; they too have gone looking for weaknesses and failings, or ignorant. To such people I can only say that these essays offer and they’ve fixed them, or they’ve disguised what they can’t make whatever it is that a fellow-writer can offer, and don’t pretend to better. offer anything else. So the following essays are written in the spirit of the A well-informed literary critic, bringing years of training to enthusiast who is wary, experienced, amateur, but knows he’s the consideration of books, may offer an historical understanding limited too. Perhaps the only other thing I want to say about these 1 essays is that I have written them on the assumption that anyone who reads them is already familiar with the works and writers under discussion. The essays are not introductory. I consider them rather as a sharing of one writer’s reflections with the thoughts of readers who are looking for something new to affect their thinking. I hope that readers of this sort will find something of interest here and there. C.A.E. 2 Unfortunate affairs A discussion of Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest of Garner’s characters are not identifiable by their origins which, (Heinemann, London, 1908) and Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip by and large, they mostly keep out of their thinking. They (McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1977). are whatever they are doing at the moment. This is not so in Richardson’s Leipzig, where the city accommodates outsiders who Both of these books are first novels, and both are concerned with come to absorb music, to become masters of an instrument, perhaps loves which turn out to be impossible, but the worlds they show even, like Schilsky, composers. They come to Leipzig for a brief are even further apart than the lifetime separating their publication period, yearning for success. Maurice Guest arrives from England, dates would suggest. Monkey Grip is set in the inner north of but as we see at the end of the book, he fails to return. Madeleine, Melbourne and the people in its pages are members of the counter- the well-organised young woman whom we meet at the very culture, the drug-taking hippy culture, which flourished – if that’s beginning of the book, before the entry of the other major characters the word – in the decade or so before the book’s publication, – a nice piece of disclosure by HHR, and perhaps a direction to the whereas Maurice Guest is set in Leipzig, Germany, at the start of the reader: we will return to this later – Madeleine also comes from twentieth century, before the wars that destroyed Europe’s claim England, though she develops ideas of taking her musical skills to to cultural superiority (Johann Sebastian Bach was kapellmeister in America, and invites Maurice to join her in this venture, an offer he Leipzig for many years, and something of his mighty spirit lingers doesn’t take up. Fate has other things in store. There are numerous in the musical activities of his city). Americans to be found in the book, amusingly presented via their Two books, then, and two sexual passions: Nora and Javo in way of speaking, but the surprise is Louise Dufrayer, who reveals Carlton, Fitzroy and Collingwood, suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, on page 101 her unexpected origins.