More thoughts on writing, gender and statistics

Here's a thing I've just noticed about this week's copy for the column of short book reviews I'm currently writing for the Sydney Morning Herald (what I'm writing, this week, I mean -- won't be published till early Feb).

It's something I think to check from time to time and I'm glad to say that even when I'm not doing it consciously I usually manage, over the course of four book reviews, to mix up genre, gender and nationality pretty evenly. The literary editor does the first cull of the books that come in for review and sends me more than I need, and then I choose from them.

(I'm always startled to realise how many people think reviewers choose their own books, at least for hard-copy publications. Books for review, and reviewers for them, are chosen by the literary editor, though reviewers will often make a pitch to review this or that book.)

Mostly when people are counting statistics about whether men or women are getting more coverage, they don't look any further than the numbers. This week's copy features three women writers and one man. With four books to review per week, the most frequent gender ratio in my own columns (as I say, not often deliberately: frankly I'm proud of having internalised this to the point where I usually don't even think about it) is 2:2. Sometimes, as this week, it's 3:1, one way or the other. Very rarely is it 4:0 but when it is, again, the all-male and all-female weeks are pretty equal in terms of numbers.

Recently I compared stats with a fellow writer of multiple short reviews per week, over a period of months, and was astounded to see that of 88 books I'd reviewed in that time, 45 were by women and 43 by men. Not chosen deliberately; the cards just fell that way.

However.

Part of my job is to select a Pick of the Week, which gets twice as long a review as the others. It's usually pretty easy to do, especially in a weak week. Sometimes a book just leaps out at you; other times it's a tossup between two, or even more. Usually I pick the one that has the largest number of positive things to be said about it, which would seem to guarantee that the largest number of people won't feel as though they have been misled if they ever get round to reading the book.

This week, I happened to notice that the Pick of the Week is the only book out of the four that was written by a man. It's a clear winner, though the others are fine and none of them is downright bad -- although this isn't always the case. I have no problems with this choice at all.

But if I looked at my column for, say, four weeks in a row, or over a period of six months, and noticed that I had reviewed more women writers than men but that the men's books were consistently being featured as Pick of the Week, I would. I would have a problem with it, and with myself. There'd be some ferocious self-interrogation going on. But it's not a thing that the raw stats would pick up.

In which a beginner thinks about Twitter

The brevity that is the soul of Twitter is not, I feel, entirely my thing.

It's enough of a struggle writing four short fiction reviews a week, into which one must somehow cram just enough of the plot to make one's subsequent remarks about the book comprehensible and then try to say two or three acceptably useful things about it, in a space the size of a hummingbird. For me, trying to fit pithy observations into 140-character Tweets is a sort of busman's holiday in triplicate.

What I'm enjoying very much about it, however, is following people. There are those who were already bloggy mates, who greeted me so warmly on my arrival in the Twitterverse that it felt like arriving at some gigantic cosmic party and catching sight of a group of one's mates waving to one over by the canapés. And there are those to whom I am unknown but of whom I am a fan at a respectful distance.

People in the latter category who have taken to the form like ducks to the proverbial include Crikey's brilliant First Dog on the Moon ('Poodles! I have seen them!'), ABC political reporter and incidental comedienne Annabel Crabb, the inimitable Stephen Fry, the dazzling Margaret Atwood and the incomparable Alexander McCall Smith, whose specialty seems to be poetically encapsulating complex yet common moral dilemmas in 140 characters or less.

I have discovered from reading his tweets that he is a fan of Auden and Vermeer, which makes me love him even more, and among other things he is the master of the gem-like obituary: 'Alas, alas Patrick Leigh Fermor is dead: a writer who was a master of elegant prose, Latinate in its feel; a beautiful voice is silent now.'

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus

What are the odds of reading two new novels in 24 hours that both reference this painting, I wonder. But having done so, I felt compelled to find it online and have another look at it. Breugel died in 1569, when Shakespeare was five. Imagine still haunting human imagination 550 years later.

If you're wondering where Icarus is, click on the picture to embiggen and then have a look in the bottom right-hand corner.

W.H. Auden was a profoundly political poet and his work, more than most, was written for and about his own times. But he didn't go in for knee-jerk rejection of any universalising thinking, either, and in 'Musée des Beaux Arts' he uses this painting to say something about his own times that is probably true of any place and any age.

On crying

I hate crying. Not only am I one of those people unable to cry prettily (red-eyed, blotchy etc) but it doesn't even help, as it is popularly supposed to do; on the contrary, it makes me feel exhausted, headachy and stupid. One of my favourite 19th century characters (he was a real person), one Reverend J. Haweis, is quoted somewhere as saying -- to me quite unforgettably, so I don't need to look it up -- 'A good play on the piano has not infrequently taken the place of a good cry upstairs.' Give me a good play on the piano any day.

Here in the second half of my fifties I'm horrified to find that if anything I cry more instead of less. I remind myself more and more of Waker, the emotional twin in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters -- 'Tell Waker it looks like rain and his eyes all fill up.'

It never takes much, and the minute it starts I feel split in two as neatly as an apple, with one half blubbing away and the other, cool and scornful, observing this intemperate creature and thinking Oh for God's sake, what is it this time? It's usually not about 'being upset', more something that seems both glancing and visceral, like being accidentally knifed by someone who wasn't even aiming for you. It reminds me, in fact, of that great line of Dorothy Dunnett's: 'Music, the knife without a hilt.'

It is indeed most often something to do with either music or animals, which brings me to my real point, which is that one of the reasons I'll feel very pleased to have finished this book about Adelaide is that I might stop crying so much; not only is the writing of it an unexpectedly emotional exercise, I think probably closely akin to a form of auto-psychoanalysis, but in the reading for it (yes, I'm almost finished, but one keeps finding new things while checking the old things), I keep coming across stuff that gets me going, like the item about the War Horse Memorial in Simon Cameron's lovely little book about Adelaide's statues, Silent Witnesses.

It's a granite horse trough inscribed WAR HORSE MEMORIAL 1914-1918. Not an actual horse to be seen. On the contrary, what it evokes is the poignant absence of horses. It hasn't always; it was originally situated in Victoria Square and connected to the water mains for the use of the working horses of the Central Market. The memorial was moved to its present site on the south-east corner of North and East Terraces, next to the Light Horse Memorial obelisk, in 1964 when Victoria Square was redesigned. It's got an inscription on it from the Book of Job.

He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength. He goeth on to meet the armed men, he mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted, neither turneth his back from the sword.

Perspective

One of the many lovely things about reading fiction for a living is that it tends to make you an armchair (time-)traveller. Just in the last few weeks I've read books set in the 1990s, the 1970s, the 1950s and the 1760s; books set in Scotland, Leningrad, Berlin and Buenos Aires, the Netherlands, the English Midlands, Chennai, Chicago and country Victoria, just off the top of my head.

Many of the novels I read for review are partly or wholly set in times and places of brutal regimes. One juxtaposes 1970s Argentina with the German Democratic Republic (so-called) of the same era. Another is set in Leningrad in 1952, where survivors of the wartime Siege of Leningrad are now living under Stalin, speaking in whispers, fearing their neighbours, watching their own every move. A third is partly set in India, where everything that happens is immediately politicised and a herpetologist knows better than to try to find out who it was, knowing that he would come home that night exhausted and therefore not thinking or moving quickly, who left a deadly snake in a basket on his verandah.

So every time I see people snarling and squabbling over Rudd v Gillard, or even over Gillard v Abbott, much less get irresistibly drawn into said squabbling myself, I think of a phrase that has been much in my thoughts ever since I first came across it, one that has had a calming effect on many occasions and has reminded me again and again how extraordinarily useful and powerful a psychoanalytic angle can be in explaining our behaviour to ourselves: 'the narcissism of small differences'.

Another day, another blog

Loth to let the litblog thing go altogether, though one has tried and failed to keep it up at more than one site, one is having yet another go. Now that I've learned to export and import on Blogger, this newish blog incorporates all of Australian Literature Diary (2005-2010 on and off) and all (three whole months but gee it was fun while it lasted) of Ask the Brontë Sisters (May-July, 2007).

I originally called it 'Read, Write, Think' but on reflection decided that sends a terrible message, as one should think before one writes. It might be better entitled 'Read, Think, Write, Draft, Edit, Proof-read, Argue With Editor, Review, Fisk [which we of literary academe used to call 'close reading' before it began to be frowned on as ideologically unsound, and were taught, compulsorily and unrelentingly, to do many years before blogging was born or thought of, harumph, you kids get off my lawn, etc], Rave About Writers You Like and Whinge and Bitch About Other People's Terrible Ideas and Excruciating Spelling, Grammar and Style', but this should do to be going on with.

It's meant to be a sort of journal, in which track is kept of what I read and write from day to day, what I notice in the reviews pages, little magazines, trade journals and lit gossip columns, and what I hear from my mates. Much like this blog, in fact, except without the cooking and cats and gardening and Tony Abbott and so on. Whenever there's a new post over there, I'll put up a link from here.

Two things I've learned already today and it's not even lunchtime yet

(1) If you're trying to think through/develop/write a complicated argument about Aboriginal writing and its relationship to ideas about 'literary merit', a 180-word book review being written to deadline is not the place to do it, and anyway you're far better off waiting for your dear friend L, co-author of Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature, to arrive tomorrow to give her seminar at Adelaide U so that you can pick her brains about the current state, if any, of academic debates around this question and her own ideas about it.

(2) Work really does expand to fill the time available.

On weather, fear and reading

The Weatherpixie in the sidebar there, at this moment anyway, is telling me that at Adelaide Airport, 20 minutes south of here, there is currently a totally clear blue sky and the sun is shining brightly with his whole face. Yet chez moi all is dark and gloomy both inside and out. Thunder rumbles roll past in waves. Whistling and pattering, not unlike the whistling and pattering in the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, is coming from outside, and I do so hope it's just the irritating wind and the small rain. It's the sort of day that makes you think you should go straight back to bed and stay there, but if I did that I'd have to finish reading my current bedside book, the new Val McDermid, and that's much much scarier than any scary weather.

My other fear is that the next book in that pile, the new Kathy Reichs (bedtime reading is strictly non-work-related), is going to continue the downward slide that began two or three books in from her debut when her publishers (or so I surmise; maybe her agent too) first told her to dumb down the science, bland out the prose and ramp up the lerve story, which is getting INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS. It's probably too much to think she might have defied them, at this level of success, and write however she damn pleases, the way she did when she first started. But we live in hope.

... and a bad bad review ...

There are four kinds of book review. There's the good good review, which is both favourable about its subject and skilfully, knowledgeably written on the basis of a careful, thorough reading of the book in question. There's the good bad review, which is well executed in all respects but unfavourable. There's the bad good review, which is favourable but a bad example of the book review genre.

(There are many ways of badly writing a review: not reading the book properly, making opinionated and magisterial assertions instead of properly arguing your case, getting your facts wrong because you haven't actually read the book, pushing your own pet writers and ideas at the expense of the book you're supposed to be reviewing, blowing your own trumpet about your own achievements, not distinguishing between your personal opinions and the actual facts, making wildly offensive statements, and so on and so forth.)

And finally there's the bad bad review, which is ... Well, you know.

A few years ago I was invited to participate in a forum at the University of Sydney on the subject of book reviewing. Allotted a generous amount of time for my talk, I needed to come up with an infinitely expandable structure for it, something with a strong backbone that I could sketch out and then amplify here and there, both at the keyboard and then again, if called for, on my feet.

In the end, I came up with a way of doing it that meant I had a single central line of argument and organising principle: the text of the talk was a heavily annotated list of the people and entities to whom/which I believe a book reviewer has a responsibility. It was a list whose length surprised even me (for over the decades I have given these matters a great deal of thought), as I thought about just how many people and things I have at the back of my mind, or even halfway to the front, whenever I review a book. The list looked something like this:

1) To the readers of the review, to

(i) describe the book accurately,
(ii) tell the truth as you see it, and
(iii) provide entertainment and useful information.

2) To the potential readers of the book (some overlap there, obvs),

(i) not to mislead them about its contents, and
(ii) to save them $30+ if that's what you think.

3) To the writer(s) and/or editor(s) of the book,

(i) to read the book carefully and comment on it thoughtfully,
(ii) not to misrepresent it, and
(iii) not to say anything that will actually make them want to slash their wrists.

4) To the literary editor who saw fit to commission the review from you, to

(i) justify her or his faith in your (suit)ability and expertise,
(ii) write to the word length you were given,
(iii) provide clean copy in the requested format (e.g. not phone it in, say) and
(iv) provide said copy on or before the deadline you were given.

5) To the publication for which you are writing,

(i) to pay attention to its house style,
(ii) to fit in with its general editorial approach and standard of writing,
(iii) not to write anything that will either require extensive and expensive legalling, or, in the absence of said legalling, get the publication sued, and
(iv) not to compromise, or indeed trash, its reputation.

6) To the people who are paying you to do a decent job of work, to be worthy of your hire.

7) To the literary culture in particular and indeed to the culture in general, to make a worthy contribution to it and not demean or devalue it by adding junk rather than good useful stuff.

8) To yourself,

(i) to maintain your standards, not just professional but also moral (say, turning down editorial requests to review books by friends, rivals, enemies or old lovers),
(ii) to refuse to say anything you don't mean, and
(iii) not to make yourself look like either a wanker or a dickhead, or both. 'Both' is possible but not attractive.

In which she finally sees why people kept telling her to read Salley Vickers

She was wondering whether it would be nosy to ask Miss Foot why she was on the ship when her companion said, 'I am travelling to New York to visit my sister. We've not met for fifty years. She has cancer and would like to see me again. I shall try to help her but I fear she is resistant to help. That is the true sin against the Holy Ghost -- the refusal of grace and mercy.'

'Yes,' said Vi. 'I think you might be right about that.'

'She is intense,' Miss Foot went on. 'But intensity is not an index of spiritual depth.'

'Certainly not.'

'I would not be surprised, though naturally I shall not say this, if it were not the intensity that led to the cancer. Misdirected it can be malign.'

'I am sure.'

'Well, I'll be off to my bed. I am reading Moby Dick. I felt I should acquaint myself a little more with the Americans in preparation for this trip. The writing is very energetic -- the Americans are energetic, I admire them for that -- but it could do with some editing. There is far too much about harpoons.'

'Yes,' said Vi. 'I agree with you about that too.'

'Well, goodnight, dear.'

-- Salley Vickers, Dancing Backwards (2009)

Help!

Assistance is sought from the gentle reader (and all the others, whoever you may be) on a project I dreamed up twenty minutes ago that has already become a full-length book in my head.

I would love it if people would leave in the comments box an account of their earliest memory of reading. Not of being read to, but of reading themselves: of seeing the letters on the page (or whatever; in my case it was a shoebox) and recognising sounds or words. Do you remember the moment that you realised you could read?

Post anonymously, or not, or whatever you prefer. If you'd like to be identified and given attribution (see how confident I am, in the first flush of inspiration, that this will become a book in the fullness of time?), you can email me, including your own email address for verification, at pavlovdotcatatgmaildotcom.

My own earliest memory of reading is of standing in my parents' bedroom with my back braced against their high bed, in my raspberry-coloured velvet dress with the ecru lace collar, so we must have been going out somewhere very flash indeed, possibly the Minlaton Show, while my mother did up my shoes. The wardrobe door was open and the shoeboxes were stacked up high in there on a shelf. 'MIMI', one of them said on the side.

'Mmmeeemmmeee', I said.

'What?' said my mum. 'What did you say? What is it?' But I couldn't explain it. MIMI. It wasn't a word. It was the same thing twice. It had nothing to do with shoes. It was a mystifying, symmetrical, seductive set of signs that meant sounds. My mum often read to us -- but out of books, not off the sides of shoeboxes in wardrobes. I had no idea that "reading" was the name of what I was doing.

What's yours?

Why it really doesn't feel like work

I sit on the sofa and I read one novel after another: good novels with bad bits, bad novels with good bits, good novels in whose subject matter I have no interest and bad novels whose subject matter interests me very much. The bottom line is not judgement (even though as a reviewer it is my job to judge, at least up to a point) but rather analysis and discovery: what works, in fiction, and what does not. And how, and why. If I ever get the time to write a novel of my own I will come to the task equipped with a vast armoury of brilliant models and cautionary tales.

Working through the pile, I come to a novel of almost 500 pages that is more sugary than all the iced tea in the whole of Louisiana, where it is set. But there is one irresistible quality that has kept me reading for over 300 pages and will sustain me to the end: an almost magical lust and passion for dancing, singing, eating, drinking, colour, life and beauty that never seems to desert the people of Louisiana, black or white, urban or rural, rich or poor, despite the residual dark horrors of the South and even when life has been blasted by a natural disaster that an indifferent, incompetent government can't or won't deal with adequately. It's a quality that mesmerised me in the first blog I ever followed properly.

(And one that I saw again in the Louisiana blogs (now sadly defunct) of the amazing Liz from Granny Gets a Vibrator, miraculously still well three years after the killer cancer and, though no longer blogging AFAIK, still findable as Wachendorfia on Flickr for those of you who miss her.)

And I have been rewarded for persevering with Calla Lily Ponder Chalon, a character born the same year I was, who reminds me of a cross between Magda Szubanski's Chenille (from Chenille's Institut de Beauté and House of Hair Removal), and Julia Roberts' hairdresser character in Steel Magnolias: 'Ah will not let mah own personal tragedy interfere with mah ability to do good hay-uh.'

I say 'rewarded' because on page 350, Calla Lily sits down and writes this letter.

May 22, 1977
New Orleans, Louisiana

Dear Mr President and Mrs Roslyn Carter,

I am a beautician. I work at a salon called Ricky's in New Orleans, Louisiana. I am a happily married woman who pays taxes, even on tips.

Now, Mrs Carter, you have chosen the perfect cut for your hair type. You especially have lovely hair for a woman your age, and it is very well kept. Mr President, you're thinning on top, so I think you'll strongly relate to what I'm about to say.

I speak as a beautician when I ask you to think, "How would you look as a bald couple?" One nuclear bomb would melt out all your hair. I am a professional in the field of beauty, but I don't know any cures for radiation-melted hair. And as far as I know, no one else does, either.

The human body is not a Styrofoam wig stand. I, for one, will not think you are a ninety-pound weakling if you get rid of the twenty-megaton bomb. I would like to go on waking up and cooking and doing hair and loving my husband.

If nothing else, please: Think of your looks.

Yours Very Sincerely,
Calla Lily Ponder Chalon

A question

On page 263 of John Grisham's new novel The Associate, which in most respects I'm enjoying for all the usual Grisham things, there appear the expressions 'second-tier' (referring to schools) and, two paragraphs later, 'C-list' (referring to Hollywood agents).

Can anyone who knows either Grisham or contemporary America (or, ideally, both) better than I do give me a clue as to whether there is any authorial irony at all attached to his use of these expressions? I'm damned if I can tell whether he shares his characters' unquestioning acceptance of these hierarchies as gospel or not. I'm hoping that the way the plot turns out will give me a clue.

Reading note: Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

Alexander McCall Smith, who as I write this is just across town in the lovely old Capri Cinema charming the pants off a no doubt full house, packed to the gunwales with his Adelaide fans, is wont to produce paragraphs like the following in all kinds of contexts. But tonight it has sunk its pointy little teeth in deep.

Somewhere in this country ... that day, somebody had been given news that would end their little world. Somebody, some unknown person somewhere, was being told that somebody else was not coming back. And all that stood between that poor person and oneself was chance, and luck, and forces that we would never master nor understand. What if it was she who would be the recipient of such news this night? No, she could not think about that, she would not.

The act of reading: so much more than looking at the page

This is a post for Stephanie, scholar and medievalist extraordinaire, who probably knows these pictures.

Last week I read a horror novel by one F.G. Cottam, called Dark Echo, about a boat with a curse on it. Horror is so hard to do; readerly disbelief is so much harder to suspend, and can collapse into giggling at any moment. But Cottam is a sufficiently good and knowing writer for this not to happen. He is interested in direct manifestations of traditional evil: in a word, the Devil, or at the very least his emissaries, has haunted these last two books. I smiled at this idea right up until I remembered Rosemary's Baby; if it's a good enough story about the Devil it will still frighten you senseless, even if you mentally re-label him Basement Cat as you watch or read.

At the beginning of Dark Echo there's a prologue set in 1917 in Rouen, where French soldiers are guarding the cathedral. When they see American uniforms coming towards them out of a very strange mist or fog, the last thing they are expecting is to be attacked by these allies, but they are hypervigilant nonetheless:

The men had been hand-picked for their piety as well as their prowess in combat. They believed the thing they protected was worth the fighting and, if necessary, the dying for.

But you cannot turn a cathedral into a fortress, as Destain kept repeating afterwards in his grief and shock, as the gangrene slowly devoured him in his hospital bed. ...

The Americans came grinning through the mist. The defenders of Rouen cathedral and the sacred relic it housed smelled before they saw the Americans ... At their centre was a man taller than the rest and bare-headed. His white-blond hair picked him out ... He was a glimpse, a phantom. ... Of course I knew what he had come there for, Destain said.

The Prologue over, we are catapulted into present-day England, where the hero Martin's self-made millionaire father has bought a wrecked schooner called Dark Echo. Martin is very unhappy; he's just been down to the boatyard -- inexplicably dark and deserted -- where Dark Echo is being expensively refurbished, and he believes he's had a run-in with the violently malevolent ghost or presence of the boat's original owner Harry Spalding, an unnaturally tall, white-blond American playboy with a shady reputation, who committed suicide in 1929 at the age of 33. This may be the moment to mention that the stolen sacred relic is nothing less than the spear of Longinus, the Roman centurion guarding the Cross who took pity on the dying Christ and speared him through the side, and afterwards became a Christian. Harry Spalding wants it for ... well, never mind what Harry Spalding wants it for.

So anyway, Martin's asking his father why it has to be this boat of all boats, and his father replies with a story about his own deprived childhood, about his mother's struggle to bring him up by herself, and her gift of a set of encyclopedias found in a barrow outside a second-hand shop in 1963:

'There was an educator in the 1930s. A man named Arthur Mee ... Mee compiled a children's encyclopedia. By the time I encountered it, it was thirty years out of date. But its volumes were packed nevertheless for the child I was with exotic and spellbinding vistas of a world for which I was not just eager, but greedy.' ... He led me to the library where he took a key from a bureau drawer and opened a locked display case. Behind its carved oak and scrolled-glass doors I saw Arthur Mee's encyclopedias on their shelf, his name on their worn, blue cloth spines...

He reached for a volume, thumbed out a spine. Volume six, it was. He held the spine of the heavy book in the palm of his hand and it fell open. I took a step back and looked at the open pages.

And I saw a picture of Harry Spalding's schooner rounding a buoy in brilliant sunshine on sun-dappled water ... 'Dark Echo,' my father said. There was an inset picture on the page of text facing the full plate of the racing boat. It was a grinning Harry Spalding ... with a trophy in his grip and his blond hair a halo of gold...

'When I saw these pictures, Martin, I swore that I would own and sail this boat. And I do and I will. And nothing will stop me.'

Now this alone is enough to induce a bit of a shudder. Hubris meets the supernatural and defies it: it's like a variation on Macbeth and every bit as creepy. But what was more creepy was my own living room, in which I sat reading this novel. For it was very late, and beyond the rim of the reading lamp's light I knew what was sitting in the bookcase: my own father's set of the very same Arthur Mee encyclopedias, battered and well-read by him as a child in the 1930s by the light of a kerosene lamp on the farm.




I nearly didn't look. The fancy of being wound into this story at a meta-level for my own amusement was pleasantly scary but not quite pleasantly enough. Harry Spalding may well have been a real person and Dark Echo a real boat, and they might have been there in the book, and I was alone in the house and it was, as I have said, very late. I held out for about thirty seconds and then went to the bookcase, carefully took out Volume Six, and braced myself.

If there is a picture of a racing schooner in it, or one of Harry Spalding, then I have yet to find them. But, as with Martin's father, the heavy book fell open in my hand. And here is what it fell open at.



'This little gallery of pictures,' says the accompanying text, 'is from one of the oldest picture-stories of the Life of Jesus. They were drawn probably by English monks early in the fourteenth century. They are part of a manuscript which Robert de Lyle gave to his daughter Audere on November 25, 1339; we like to think it was a birthday present. The manuscript then passed to the nuns of Chicksand Priory, in Bedford, and afterwards came into the hands of the Earls of Arundel, from whom it passed to the British Museum.'

Captioning the above pictures it says 'Jesus in the manger and in the temple: the shepherds and the Wise Men: and the flight into Egypt.'



'This page shows the massacre of the innocents: the wedding feast at Cana: the raising of Lazarus: the entry into Jerusalem: the Last Supper: and the betrayal.'



'This page shows Jesus brought before King Herod: the mocking of Jesus after the arrest: Jesus before the high priest Caiaphas: the scourging of Jesus: and the burden of the cross on the road to Calvary.'



'This page shows the Resurrection: the women at the empty tomb: the meeting of Jesus with Mary Magdalene: and the breaking of bread at Emmaus.'

This week's reading

The blurb says this person has already published six books so you are expecting a degree of professionalism, a sign that here is someone whose medium is language and who will therefore have also read a lot, have learned from editors and publishers, have made an effort to understand how language works and to master the medium of his/her art and craft. But no.

It's a set of uncorrected proofs, but these are errors of ignorance, not typos. In less than 300 pages, we have

'sprung' for 'sprang'
'lent' for 'leant' or 'leaned'
'he gave it to Ermintrude and I' (for 'to Ermintrude and me')
'slither' for 'sliver' ('bamboo slithers' -- I think this one is a sort of eggcorn: some slivers are sort of slithery)
'vocal chords' for 'vocal cords' (so is this one: there's an association of meaning between voice and music)
'cohort' for 'companion' (singular -- the sense in which it's used here is, oh, say, 'this wine is a perfect cohort for this cheese')
'inferred' for 'implied'

With one exception, all these errors have been made more than once. Then the finished copy of the novel arrives in the next batch of books and I check to see how many of these clangers have been fixed: two. But there are lavish thanks to editors on the Acknowledgements page. And it's a big major well-known international publishing company.

Perhaps said company has survived by doing away with the services of competent editors. On the other hand, considering how little editors get paid, you'd think it would make no visible difference to the bottom line.

As with all these usage whining posts, the point is that people who use language for a living -- writers, journalists, radio and TV presenters -- have a responsibility to use it professionally. There's no difference between this and the bathroom tiler being eight centimetres out, the pro tennis player being fifteen kilos overweight, the surgeon being a tad hazy about the difference between livers and kidneys. This is not a whine about the language of the alleged person in the street, who often knows better in any case.

Besides, page 19 of the next book restores your faith:

Inside, the diner is meant to look like the 1950s, but it doesn't look anything like how I remember them. Somewhere along the line, people became convinced that the decade was all about sock hops, poodle skirts, rock and roll, shiny red T-birds, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis. It's funny how a whole decade gets reduced into a few seemingly random pictures. For me, that decade was about diapers and training wheels and miscarriages and trying to house and feed three people on $47 a week.

This is another set of uncorrected proofs. But somehow I just know that any errors in it will be typographical or otherwise mechanical; that the person responsible for this seamless marriage of style and content within a vividly realised character's narrative voice is not going to say slither or lent or inferred. This is someone who understands his craft and has worked to master it.

Quadrant and Wimminz: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

In the wake of the Windschuttle hoax there's been a lot of discussion around the online traps, in the course of which I observed as part of an argument about something else that Quadrant was not a particularly woman-friendly space.

Along with other people who have been familiar with Quadrant for decades, I should have though this observation on a par with 'The sky is blue' or '2+2=4', but of course there was angry reaction from the sorts of people one expects to react angrily to any mention of gender whatever, a phenomenon fascinating in itself.

One of these people worked himself up into such a monumental tis-was that one would think he had been personally insulted, though he has no visible connection with Quadrant apart from reading it. So much so, in fact, that he could have done (as we all so often could in life) with a gentle reminder that this was not all about him.

Then, in the course of a discussion with a far more reasonable chap whose interest is in statistics rather than in defending Quadrant, I discovered that Quadrant does in fact publish more poems and fiction by women than I would have expected, although the same names recur again and again even within single issues, and I retracted accordingly. The reasonable statistics chap used a comparison with Meanjin to make his point, saying that in the respective current issues of Meanjin and Quadrant there were more poems by women in the latter than in the former, which was true.

In the course of this exercise I spent a bit of time at the home pages of the respective magazines, and it gave me an idea: each mag has a 'current issue' page listing all contributors, and it was reasonable to expect that other magazines would as well. So here are some numbers I gathered, as at last night, from the 'current issue' pages of Australian magazines -- monthly, quarterly, bi-annual -- that are partly or wholly literary in content.

In one or two cases there was one name on the page whose gender could not be determined by even the most assiduous Googling -- but no more than one, which is nowhere near enough to skew the order in which the mag titles appear here. Each contributor has been counted only once, though occasionally the same name appears twice or more. Let me repeat that these numbers are based on the contributor names listed in the magazines' own online home pages, on the evening of 12 January 2008 2009.

(*Sighs and reflects that one always does this at least once in the first week or two*.)

Please note that this does not claim to be an exhaustive list of magazines.

The numbers show the ratio MEN:WOMEN. I offer them in a spirit of scientific curiosity, without comment.


ISLAND MAGAZINE 1:2

HEAT MAGAZINE 11:13

SOUTHERLY 9:7

CORDITE POETRY REVIEW 17:13 [update]

OVERLAND 4:3

MEANJIN: 23:16

GRIFFITH REVIEW 3:2

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW 9:5

THE MONTHLY 2:1

QUADRANT 13:4

A very long post about Charmian Clift

Over at Pea Soup, Suse has a lovely holiday post including a snap of her summer reading, Nadia Wheatley's superb biography of Charmian Clift.

I reviewed this book for ABR, along with a couple of reissued volumes of Clift's writing, back in 2001. Because I am currently too mired in work to blog properly and because I quite like this review and because Suse's post has reminded me that I think everybody should read Clift's writing and Wheatley's biography, here it is again.


No Comfort in the Stars

'At night,' wrote Charmian Clift one summer in the late 1950s on the Greek island of Hydra where she lived with her husband and children, where the harbour village had been invaded by summer tourists, where teams of local Greek matrons invaded the kitchen in relays to monitor the foreign woman's housework and mothering techniques, where the water supply was rapidly drying up, where she and her husband George Johnston worked too hard and worried too much about the inadequate royalty cheques that continued to fail to arrive — `At night,' she wrote,

the water slides over your body warm and silky, a mysterious element, unresistant, flowing, yet incredibly buoyant. In the dark you slip through it, unquestionably accepting the night's mood of grace and silence, a little drugged with wine, a little spellbound with the night, your body mysterious and pale and silent in the mysterious water, and at your slowly moving feet and hands streaming trails of phosphorescence, like streaming trails of stars. Still streaming stars you climb the dark ladder to the dark rock, shaking showers of stars from your very fingertips, most marvellously and mysteriously renewed and whole again.

`Pagan' was one of Clift's husband's favourite words for her, and one of her favourite words for herself. But it was precisely her own passionate capacity for nature-worship that made her such an empathetic observer of Christianity as practised in Greece. Transcendence and ecstasy were real things for her and, when she uses words like marvel and mystery, that is exactly what she means. `In the strange, still world of hot noontime,' she had written on Kalymnos three years before,

the burning grey beach is deserted, and the sea is still … Brilliant against the dazzling stairs a barefooted woman climbs slowly up from the sea, her head erect under a pile of black and crimson rugs … Without lifting my eyes I can look directly at the gilded cross surmounting the green dome of Agios Nikolas. The sound of chanting that wells up with the wide ascending stair seems inevitable, a vocal utterance of worship to the source of this pure incandescence that is pouring down on the world — Be still and know that I am God! The fringed brazen standards, the spindly black-ribboned cross are molten gold, drawn to the source of light, defying gravity, flowing up the cracked concrete steps.

Mermaid Singing (1956) and Peel Me a Lotus (1959) are Clift's two `Greece' books, generic hybrids somewhere between `travel' and `autobiography'. She wrote them in time stolen from her duties and pleasures as the mother of three small children and the junior partner in the marital, collaborative writing team. These two books have now been published together to form one of two companion volumes to Nadia Wheatley's biography. The other, Selected Essays, contains an assortment of Clift's columns and articles written between the family's return from Greece in 1964 and her death five years later. Most of them first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, where her weekly column rapidly acquired cult status. In choosing eighty from Clift's 225 published essays, Wheatley has tried, she says, `to give a representative sample of her concerns and interests'.

This must have been more easily said than done, for Clift writes about everything from conscription and the Vietnam War and the shabbiness of the education system and the repressive and sexist liquor licensing laws (she was passionately opposed to all these things) to the sight of her old friend Sidney Nolan unpacking paintings he hadn't seen for years:

I had one of those strange flashbacks that everyone has some time, to a hot, dusty, workaday street in the Piraeus in 1959. There was a big trench dug in the street, and shovels leaning everywhere, and out of the trench … came an archaic Apollo, lost for two thousand years.

It wasn't Apollo who came out of those wraps, though, but Sergeant Kennedy, dead at Stringybark Creek. Mr Nolan looked surprised, as though that wasn't what he had expected. He said the pink hill had got a lot pinker in the twenty-one years since he'd seen the painting last. He ran his fingers exploratively over Sergeant Kennedy's spilt blood and suddenly grinned and said `Still fresh'.

Reading these essays, it's easy to see why Clift became a cult figure. The chatty, charming and sometimes slightly dippy persona distracts attention just enough from the steely intelligence, the sophisticated sentence structure and the passion for causes that characterise these pieces but might otherwise have rather alarmed her readers.

As it was, she showed them that it was possible to be properly `womanly' and at the same time to care passionately about things beyond your house, beyond your city, beyond your borders, and not just to care but to do something. In an era that hadn't yet thought too much about these things, her columns demonstrated that a woman, even a comfortable Australian woman hedged about by the legal, social and cultural restrictions of her time, could and should be an active citizen of the world.

Towards the end of Nadia Wheatley's massive and complex biography, she comments on the critical response to Garry Kinnane's George Johnston: A Biography (1986):

A tendency to retell the myth would emerge in reviews of Kinnane's book, in which the subject under review would by and large be the life of Johnston and Clift, rather than an assessment of the biographer's presentation of it.

Wheatley is referring here to the accumulation of sensational stories that grew up around Johnston and Clift; her comment is part of a larger argument about the way that media representations of them have always tended to focus on the sensational material at the expense of their achievements as writers, helping to produce and prolong the `myth' to which the title of her biography refers.

And it's clear, though she doesn't spell it out, that Wheatley fears not only a similar reception for her own book, but — even worse and even more ironically — that it might have the opposite effect to the demythologising one she has worked for two decades to produce: that it might precipitate yet another round of rehashed tutting in reviews and articles, a further reinforcement of the myth.

As a reviewer of this book and a reader who honours the gifts of both Clift and Wheatley, I am determined not to fall into this trap. Unfortunately, the sensational material needs to be sketched in order for the story to make sense, so let's get it over with. Clift was a beautiful young woman who in 1946 began a scandalous affair with her journalist colleague George Johnston — an older man with a wife and child — which resulted in their joint departure from the staff of the Melbourne Argus (later The Age). Four years earlier and long before she met Johnston, Clift had already, at nineteen, given birth to an illegitimate daughter who had been adopted out. Clift and Johnston married and left Australia; they were away, living mainly in Greece, for ten years, during which time Johnston was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would finally kill him in 1970.

They wrote a number of books, some collaboratively and some individually; they had three children; they were often desperately worried about money; and progressively wilder stories came drifting back to Australia with returning travellers about the marriage disintegrating in a fog of alcohol and infidelity.

They returned to Australia in 1964, partly to capitalise on the runaway success of Johnston's novel My Brother Jack. With Johnston critically ill and in hospital for long stretches of time, Clift was obliged to run the household on her own and largely to support the family; for four years, she wrote a weekly column which rapidly acquired a huge readership and generated a flood of fan (and, occasionally, hate) mail. On 8 July 1969, at the end of a day of heavy drinking and bitter argument with her sick husband, Clift took an overdose of his sleeping pills and died at the age of forty-five.

Wheatley evokes the complexity of Clift's character with the care of a mosaicist, and often with much the same technique: she builds up a portrait partly by amassing and arranging fragments of testimony in patterns of complement and contrast. `I mean,' says a female colleague from her days at the Argus, `every man who looked at Charmian just, you know, wanted to go to bed with her. You didn't put it like that in 1946, but that's how it was.' The ABC's Storry Walton, who worked with her on the production of the 1965 television series of My Brother Jack, said: `Had she lived longer, Charmian Clift would have been one of the best screenwriters that Australia has ever produced.' And Leonard Cohen's memory of the Johnstons on Hydra in the late 1950s, when he was a poverty-stricken and unknown young poet, places Clift somewhere different again from these extremes of siren and genius:

They had a larger-than-life, a mythical quality. They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more and they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration. They had guts.

Their `mythical quality', however, was something at which they both worked quite hard, for both Johnstons were self-mythologisers from childhood. Clift wrote and rewrote an idealised version of her childhood all her life: the story of the wild little girl running free on the beach at Kiama, her small home town on the south coast of New South Wales. Johnston's myth of self is the Golden Boy of My Brother Jack, the oppressed child from a shabby suburban Melbourne house who became the glamorous, much-travelled war correspondent. They both kept the habit of incessantly rewriting the stories of their own and each other's lives and selves. They dramatised what was already dramatic, romanticised what was already romantic, and edited out the bits that didn't fit the stories they wanted to believe about themselves.

And it's this dense accumulation of different versions — and the multiple Clift-masks those versions produce — with which Wheatley has to deal, quite as much as with the periodic waves of sensationalising media interest. The prefatory Author's Note is itself an intriguing piece of intellectual autobiography that could easily have been three times as long as it is, and still have done this already excellent biography nothing but more good; but, as Wheatley explains in it, she was determined to keep herself off the pages of the book as much as she could.

This biography has been a long time in the writing; after its genesis in Wheatley's partnership with the Johnstons' older son Martin, with whom she lived for seven years, there were numerous setbacks, dramas and unexpected developments. One can only guess how Wheatley felt (for she honourably does not say) when Clift's first child, the adopted Suzanne Chick, discovered her birth-mother's identity and decided that she wanted to write a book about Clift herself; Chick's Searching for Charmian was published in 1994, predictably provoking another round of tutting in the press.

Wheatley is a trained historian and an award-winning writer for children, which means, among other things, that this book is both eminently readable and exhaustively researched. She makes no rhetorical fuss about her own politics beyond stating what they are in the Author's Note and making the occasional quiet point in the course of the story. She explains her position and her methodology in a way that reveals just how much intellectual sophistication went into the decision to write a traditional biography with an invisible narrator and a straightforwardly linear chronology, a `sober accumulation of information'. Her Author's Note manages to indicate the complexity of her position while remaining lucid, modest and brief. The book glows in a subdued way with the intelligence and style of its author quite as much as with those of its subject; the writing itself is as finely crafted as Clift's own.

The final section, the fifteen-page Epilogue, is a brilliant feat of lucidity and compression: Wheatley sums up the stages of the `myth', managing neither to shy away from nor to be judgmental about the fact that Clift herself was the myth's first and most ardent architect, beginning with the idealisation of her childhood. One of the things Wheatley has had to struggle with in the task she has set herself of disentangling myth from fact is that most of the myth is factual; it's not a simple case of, to pinch an image from Peel Me a Lotus, `sorting through the lentils for the stones and black beetles that always make up a quarter of the weight'.

But the thing she's stuck with, the thing that will not go away, is that Clift's whole being — the things she said, the things she did, the way she looked, the effect she had on other people — lent itself irresistibly to myth-making. What else are you to make, after all, of a child in small-town Australia in the middle of the Depression who would go down to the rockpools at night while her father and brother fished, take off all her clothes, lie down in the water under the clear night sky and `starbake in the confident expectation that she would turn silver'? The starbaking ritual, says Wheatley:

expressed the sense of being at one with the universe, which was part of Charmian Clift's own pantheistic religion of childhood: throughout her life she would remain to some extent a spiritual mystic, who worshipped the elements of the landscape around her.

I remembered this passage when I came to read Peel Me a Lotus, where Clift records that in March 1956, heavily pregnant with what almost everyone assumes is her third but is in fact her fourth child (and how haunted a woman like Clift, or indeed any woman, would have been by her absent first-born), wide awake in the middle of a Mediterranean spring night, she finds herself back under the stars:

My face is cold turned up to the cold stars. Inexorable and orderly they move across heaven, star beyond star, nebula beyond nebula, universe beyond universe, wheeling through a loneliness that is inconceivable. Almost I can feel this planet wheeling too, spinning through its own sphere … There's no comfort in the stars. Only darkness beyond darkness, mystery beyond mystery, loneliness beyond loneliness. Wrapped in its own darkness and mystery and loneliness the child in my body turns, as though to remind me of mysteries closer to hand. And I go spinning on through space ...

This is Your Life

As almost everyone who comes here knows for themselves already, a life spent reading fiction produces a swag of paragraphs that are not exactly committed to memory, more that the memory of the act of reading them stays with you, because they are as useful as proverbs in the help they give you. I remember Hilary McPhee on a panel at some Writers' Week or other in the mid-1980s, saying with passion that one of the reasons we read fiction is to get ideas about how to live our lives.

Now that is not one of my conscious reasons for reading fiction but every now and again I am reminded of how very helpful it can be. I've headed more than one disaster off at the pass by heeding the voice in my ear of E.M. Forster, as channeled by the fey Mrs. Wilcox (not Margaret Schlegel as was, but the older and, as it were, original Mrs Wilcox, Vanessa Redgrave not Emma Thompson) -- 'Separate those people who will hurt each other the most.' Which was also very helpful during the terrible week of my mother's death.

But I appear to have reached a stage of life where some books remind me of other books that have provided these lifelong aids to sanity and quiet reflection. It's bad luck, on the eve of Christmas Eve when I am way behind with everything, that one of this week's work novels is so rivetingly engaging and charming that I feel compelled not only to read it very slowly in order to honour its virtues but to blog about it as well, all of which might mean pulling an all-nighter which I haven't done for several years and may now be too old to survive intact.

Anyway, I'd only got as far as page 17 of Julia Glass's I See You Everywhere when I found this:

Whatever Lucy knew, she kept to herself. When I asked Dad why he didn't get her to tell the whole story, he said "Louisa, we live in an age when keeping secrets is out of fashion, and that's a shame. If she wanted to tell us, well, she would."

Which immediately brought to mind the bit in The Once and Future King that has been my rule for the keeping of secrets since I was twelve:

The morning when they were to set out for Bliant arrived, and the newly-made knight, Sir Castor, stopped Lancelot in the Hall. He was only seventeen.

"I know you are calling yourself the Ill-Made Knight," said Sir Castor, "but I think you are Sir Lancelot. Are you?"

Lancelot took the boy by the arm.

"Sir Castor," he said, "do you think that is a knightly question? Suppose I were Sir Lancelot, and was only calling myself the Chevalier Mal Fet -- don't you think I might have some reasons for doing that, reasons which a gentleman of lineage ought to respect?"

Sir Castor blushed very much and knelt on one knee.

"I won't tell anybody," he said. Nor did he.

(The power of that quotation, I see for the first time as I type it here, may lie in the scansion of that last sentence: three heavily stressed monosyllables, a sound like the slow but firm closing of a door.)

But Glass was (and is; I'm only up to page 55 as I type and have no doubt there are further revelations in store) not yet finished with me; on the same page, indeed in the next paragraph and regarding the same character -- an ancient aunt whose tale in the family lore is that she gave up her whole life to look after her damaged older sister -- there's this:

I believe she was swept along on a tide, like most of us. There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, that currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.

Which for reasons that are about to become apparent reminded me of this, from A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, which refers to a character with a severely autistic son:

" ... But I think it's possible Mrs Haydock'd just come to pieces without him. Having made him her life. Funny thing, the variety of lives, you can't know what accident won't set yours in some very simple terrible deep channel for the rest of its run."

(Again what has appealed to memory, I now see, is the rhythm of one phrase, that unstoppable run of adjectives with its string of insistent stress: simple terrible deep channel.) Byatt has been rescuing me from dark places since 1984, when I first read this and put it, with desperate gratitude, to good use:

She did not see why he should preserve his good opinion of himself at her expense. It was refusing these small encounters that exhausted her ... She walked away from him. She did not think he had expected this precisely; but all that was left, as she saw it, to do, was to uncreate him in her mind. If she could have worked through the relationship, unhindered, if she could have cast him off, and held him as an interesting memory when they had nothing more to say to each other, she would not now feel so stunted, so trapped in his view of her ... There was nothing to do but behave as though he had never been.

As I say, I'm only up to page 55 of the Glass book, which is where I found this next bit, which cracked me up with happiness and recognition so much that I decided I had to blog it and make myself even later with everything than I already am and God knows whether there'll be a decent fillet of beef for the buying anywhere by tomorrow but never mind. Louisa, one of the heroines, makes a living by editing obscure, pretentious, grandiose and/or unreadable essays on art into publishable form, negotiating all the while the internal politics of who follows which school and who is whose nephew or protegé or enemy. Here she is on the beach, working as she wonders with one part of her mind why she hasn't heard from her rat-bastard boyfriend Sam:

"Articulata" was a piece on the proliferation of text in photography. Might we see this as a symptom of visual insecurity, or is it the strident, declarative end to our long-running romance with lensmen such as Adams, Weston, and even Walker? Might we venture so far as to interpret this trend -- nay, this turning point -- as an invigorating divorce of sorts? I looked up to see a gull eyeing my knapsack, venturing so far as to interpret its bulk -- nay, its grease-stained belly -- as a food station. "Well," I said loudly to the gull, "might we indeed?" I squawked, and the gull scuttled away. I lay back and put the essay aside, weighting it down with my sneakers. I fell asleep in the sun. I dreamed that the author of the pompous essay turned out to be Sam. "That we is not royal," he told me angrily. "It's entirely actual. Look in your Chicago." It turned out that somehow I had the wrong edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, that my copy was way out of date. I would lose my job. When I woke, the gull was back, standing at the edge of my towel and staring at me. The obvious question on his mind was Is she edible?

Back to work.

You never know where you'll stumble across some homespun

Call me unimaginative but I would not have predicted that a 'novel' by 'Belle de Jour', author of The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl, would prove to be so densely stuffed with pithy and useful observations about Life.

This one, for example: 'Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.' Now what you have right there is a recipe for a happier life. As mantras go, combine it with 'This is not about me' and you'll never find yourself reaching for medicinal brandy or indeed any other spirit or combination thereof (another beauty from Belle*: 'I'm so bored of** cocktails. Made for people who don't like the taste of alcohol: in a word, children') for therapeutic purposes again.

I particularly liked this one because I myself have been intermittently stomping round the house shouting 'S/he's got to be either malicious or stupid, it has to be the one or the other, there's no other explanation' for several decades now. Despite the facts that (a) I am old enough to be her mother and (b) she enthuses about a number of sexual practices that I find icky or, worse, pointless (why would you want to ... Oh never mind), I think Belle and I would get on.


* See what I did there?

** Can anyone pinpoint the year people started saying 'bored of' instead of 'bored with' or 'bored by'? Was it around 2000? Some kind of millennial prepositional transformational thingy? Unusually it appears not to be nation-specific but rather to have sprung up spontaneously and simultaneously right across the English-speaking world.