Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather Read online

  Karen Lamb teaches literature and communication at the Australian Catholic University and has held teaching and research positions at the University of Queensland, Monash University, and the University of Melbourne, where she taught in literary studies, media and communication, and cultural studies. Her research interests include Australian literature, life writing, and the cultural context of authorship. She has edited a book of Australian short stories, and published book chapters and articles on Australian authors, including a book on Peter Carey. She lives in Sydney.

  For my daughter, Laura

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I THE HINTERLAND

  1The hinterland of childhood

  2Suspected of reading

  3Barjai: A meeting place

  4We’ve Freud and Nietzsche at our finger-tips

  PART 2 DREAM COUNTRY

  5Dream Country

  6Jack

  7The Gorgon of Epping North

  8An armed neutrality

  9I merely crave an intelligent buddy

  10Writing as a neuter

  PART 3 NORTH OF NOSTALGIA

  11The oldest senior tutor in the Commonwealth

  12North of nostalgia

  13Living is serial

  14Jane Austen of the rainforest

  PART 4 PERSONAL WEATHER

  15Pictures from a family album

  16Inventing her own weather

  17Curving

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Further reading

  Index

  Picture Section

  Prologue

  There was never a time when multi-award-winning Australian novelist Thea Astley was not a writer. She began as a child, published on the children’s page of the newspaper where her journalist father worked; as a teenager she wrote for her school’s magazine; at university she joined Barjai, a group of young writers and artists that, in time, became one of the better known cultural organisations of the era, largely for having nurtured talents such as hers and poet Barrett Reid’s. She was able to pursue her ambitions as a writer within this small informal group; by the time Astley was in her thirties the effort she made to ‘carve out a good sentence’, as she called it, was the consequence of more than two decades of writing.

  Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, published in 1958, dazzled with insight and wit. Further novels appeared almost every two years throughout the 1960s. By 1963 Thea Astley had her first Miles Franklin Award for fiction for The Well Dressed Explorer, a humorous but scarifying portrait of a philandering journalist. This firmly established her reputation as a sharp-eyed satirist of Australian social mores. By the end of the next decade she had picked up a further two Miles Franklin Awards (for The Slow Natives and The Acolyte) and a healthy clutch of other major literary prizes. Yet Astley spent her life suffering from an acute sense of being a writer who was out of favour, a sentiment that sits curiously alongside her visible success. When she received the Patrick White Award in 1989 – intended for writers who might not have received the recognition they deserved – Astley regarded it as confirmation of her failure.

  While eccentric, this attitude can be understood. Astley’s early literary role models, even from within her own family, were male (her artist-musician grandfather, her journalist father) and she also began writing at a time when, as Astley would later explain, women were supposed to emulate a ‘masculine style’ to succeed; that is, they were expected to conform to the ideals of strong narrative lines and the superior virtue of brevity. In Astley’s writing there are tensions between the vulnerability of female existence and the manner of its telling.

  It is astonishing to think that even by the mid-1980s Astley was already as much of a household name as any Australian writer can be, that is, in Australia. ‘Australians loathe success that doesn’t take place in a scrum,’ she once said.1 But what becomes of a writer’s work when that writer is no longer alive? The relentless commerce of publishing, the thirst for the new, dictates much of that answer. Thea Astley was being published – and reviewed – in the United States, as well as in Australia. In all she wrote sixteen works of fiction in just under half a century. Drylands, published in 1999 when she was in her seventies, won her a fourth Miles Franklin Award (a feat shared only by Tim Winton).

  Astley’s books offer a rare and sustained engagement with the social and political realities of Australian life over more than forty years, particularly for women. She was no Christina Stead balancing typewriter on knee in shabby hotels across Europe, but at home in Australia Astley established an output in the same class, rarely taking time off before moving on to her next manuscript. She has influenced a generation of Australian women writers such as Helen Garner and Kate Grenville and is known for her support of the many younger writers who came within her orbit as a teacher.

  Astley was a child of the Depression and she lived through World War II as a teenager; she was no stranger to ‘personal weather’, as she called it, the highs and lows that sweep through a life. Early experiences shaped her fiction: the Catholicism of the 1930s and 1940s; the presence of American GIs in wartime Brisbane. She also observed unhappy marriages; absent fathers; bachelor celibates; misfits and ‘runaways’ risking safety for the tropics. Her strong women of the later books (It’s Raining in Mango, Reaching Tin River, Vanishing Points, Coda, Drylands) manage without men but with stoicism and a certain panache. Sometimes Astley’s own anxieties and self-doubt creep into her prose, driving the narrative with particular force. Like the work of Christina Stead, Astley’s novels and short stories have a strong autobiographical element which she readily acknowledged: ‘They are 90% ME,’ she wrote, adding that, ‘When you’re writing a novel, you’re not writing about anything really except yourself’ and, ‘I work from life, as I know it, as I have known it.’2 Astley’s characters can be like members of an extended family, reappearing from novel to novel. A typical Astley protagonist has drifted unawares into middle age (Astley herself once claimed to have been ‘arrested at forty-two’). Their will is seemingly suspended, their memory animated by usually hostile past events, while they await the decline of the ripened body.

  In her work as in her life, Thea Astley was a fatalist. In public she could display a strange mixture of bombast and anxiety, be sentimental – reduced to tears by a recalled scene – yet blunt in her opinions, often mumbling a shambolic apology. She was a tangential thinker; her mind darted helter-skelter across an exotic range of concerns, but she was also possessed of a practical logic and an acute mind, and these were the housekeepers of her imagination.

  This picture of a successful Australian woman novelist nevertheless has a shadow across it. There are many full-length literary biographies of Australian women writers, from Miles Franklin and Christina Stead to lesser-known writers like Eve Langley or Jean Devanny. Until now, inexplicably, a biography of Thea Astley was not in this list, ghosting her with the same neglect she felt in life.

  Do writers welcome having their biographies written? History tells us that many have not. F. Scott Fitzgerald called biography ‘the falsest of arts’ and Henry James swore he would avoid such ‘literary scavengers’ as biographers.3 Thea Astley was not strongly in favour of biography or against it, but she did regard herself as a very private person. When I contacted her in the mid-1990s about writing her biography she was happy to be interviewed, but, she said in a smoker’s rasp, ‘Don’t write your address on the back of any envelopes, will you? People might see – might know – that we are in touch.’ But
aren’t we? I couldn’t help thinking. It took a moment to digest conspiracy and invitation in the same breath. I did come to understand this strange and contradictory behaviour but it is worth recalling this moment because it frames the central paradox of a work such as this: the story of a public person whose life was intentionally private.

  Astley’s novels and stories have always fascinated me. They show a masterful blend of whimsy, the absurd and the deeply serious; her prose is energised by her irascible wit and there is a visceral, almost sexual energy in the nature of its swoops and silences that appeals to me. There is a pleasing perversity in the way she could bring seeming opposites into unison. Because writing this book took so many years, and I, too, have experienced many of life’s various upheavals, my enjoyment of her work has deepened.

  When I began, I simply wanted to know more about the public writer Thea Astley. Of course Astley only went public as part of being a successful writer who receives awards and is a guest at book festivals, literary conferences and international symposiums. Astley would have characterised these as necessary obligations, despite the obvious pleasure she took in being part of them – or even being the star attraction.

  Once she had left the working life that meant residing in Sydney, Astley chose remote places to live but she was not a hermit: she loved people, loved gossip. She was married for more than fifty years to Jack Gregson and gloried in recounting what she considered the absurd dreariness of domestic routines. The late-life gravelly voice, the wit, the warmth and engagement that distinguished Astley in person are not easily forgotten. She had the knack of making people feel that they were happily encountered confidants, special people with whom she needed to share herself.

  Those who thought that they had come to know Thea Astley from such encounters were often surprised to find that others had the same experience. This is especially true of those students, writers or other young folk whom Astley tended to regard as protégé-children. Yet there was often a one-way intimacy in these friendships that belied their apparent candour; sometimes the chosen ones could see that perhaps they did not know Astley so well after all. They did and they didn’t, to use a characteristic Astley phrasing. They knew her jokes, her gestures, fronts, defences. They knew how kind she could be – but they did not share in her private emotional world. Few did: from the start it belonged to her writing, as is true of many writers.

  Astley grew up feeling at odds with the demands of her social world. She developed a defensive habit of mind early in life: her parents didn’t especially get on, she had to handle the dictates of the strict Catholicism of her childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, then loneliness as a young woman teaching in remote rural towns in the far north of her home state of Queensland and in the Mary Valley, closer to Brisbane. More than her circumstances seemed to justify, Astley came to see herself as set apart from others. She became guarded, nursed well-worn hurts and humiliations, vulnerabilities, anger and guilt. All these things were expressed in her fiction.

  Thea Astley is one of those writers who invite portraiture – such is the indelible impression of her personality inhabiting her prose.

  This is the seduction of reading, this attraction between writers and readers that biography can give expression to. This book’s portrait of the novelist includes the imperfect, glancing impressions of those who met and befriended Astley, those ‘hints from everyone’, as Christina Stead once called them.4 Beyond skeletal facts, ‘hints’ are often all there is. Like many writers before her, Astley destroyed much of her written correspondence. For most of her life she preferred talking on the telephone. It is only because her death was more sudden than expected that some letters and other items were salvaged. In the end it was Astley who delivered the final instalment of her story, in her last novel, Drylands. It is a loosely assembled collage, but a knowing self-portrait.

  Perhaps many of us carry around a sense of the world as insensitive to us, holding on to a story of ourselves that seems plausible, bearable, all the while pleading a special case: ours. It is true that I have tried to look in on Astley’s private world and can offer only an interpretation of her life, but I have done so in the hope of understanding her lifelong private conversation with herself and how that shaped the distinctive body of work that is Thea Astley’s literary legacy.

  PART 1

  THE HINTERLAND

  1

  The hinterland of childhood

  There were many corners – she learned a lot about the eternal warfare of couples. It rather put her off.

  Drylands by Thea Astley, 19991

  Nearly thirty years into her writing life, at the 1986 Adelaide Writers’ Festival, Thea Astley was, as always, preoccupied with weather: not the furnace-like heat so characteristic of Adelaide in March, but what might be called ‘personal weather’, part of the climate people created around themselves, their mark on the world. She had written about this, in various ways, for many years. Her preoccupation with physical weather, its strictures, limitations and effects on her characters, had always been deeply metaphorical. She liked to describe her characters charting what she called ‘the approximate geography of the dream’ while dealing with the inclement elements of life.2

  At the time she was living near Cairns in the tropical north of her home state of Queensland. She had already entertained an audience about her strange love-hate relationship with that particular region’s climate: we ‘wait for the big wet’, she said, and it comes ‘striding over paddocks and hits roofs like gravel trucks emptying’; ‘landscape and sky are like a boil waiting to burst, skin crawls, salt stings your eyes and you itch’.3

  At the age of sixty Astley was an arresting figure, her agility as she moved to the microphone giving a clue to her energetic personality. During that festival she could be spotted around the tents, among other writers, the familiar cigarette in hand, at ease.

  This was an exciting and important time for her: she was balancing her public exposure as an established novelist with the potential she still saw in her future as a writer. She was a guest at major arts festivals, the winner of three Miles Franklin Awards and she was also achieving longed-for recognition overseas. The publication of her most recent novel, Beachmasters, in the United States would be followed in less than a year by It’s Raining in Mango.

  This particular festival was therefore a special moment in an already long writing life, and Astley had been writing long enough to appreciate how few and far apart such moments were. Her voice, a deeply accented rasp with more than a hint of the broad vowels of her home state, was a world away from the plummy politeness of her early television and radio performances in the 1960s. She knew how to use that voice: her ability as a performer lit up public readings. If Astley hadn’t been a writer, she could have made it as a stand-up comic – she had that kind of timing. So when she leaned forward and nervously lowered her voice to the crowd, ‘I should explain, I suppose, that I’m not a very accomplished traveller’, this unusual candour sent a ripple of excited interest across the audience. Astley used the personal pronoun in a casual, familiar way; it was an intimate sharing of what it might be like to be Thea Astley, Australian novelist.

  She talked about the writing of her short story ‘Diesel Epiphany’ about a journey in a ‘rail motor’ – a motorised railway carriage very common in Astley’s youth – perhaps because it was so characteristic of her own preoccupations. Rail trips across Australia’s vast state borders had always held all the elements of narrative for Astley: human beings in a small spaces forging strange alliances, all with a rueful acceptance of their own banality. In a railway carriage anyone could be a ‘people freak’ – Astley’s favourite term for herself – could listen in on the frank conversations which were natural theatre to her ear. She was no doubt irritated (perhaps with a high sense of drama) by all the inconveniences typical of ‘cattle class’ travel, especially other people’s selfishness. ‘Diesel Epiphany’ is a story that is supe
rficially about train travel, but is really about having the last word. After the travellers alight and head to town, the climax of the story describes a different kind of banality. Bored people are standing in a bank queue when the sound of a light baritone, the music of a Bach cantata, breaks through.4 The singer is a typical Astley ‘screwball’ and in her work she would give voice to them all: hippies, unfrocked priests, outcasts. Couples, with their ‘hissed domestics’, were a special case. Above all else, Astley loved to observe that most familiar of human relationships up close.5

  It was a fascination that grew quite naturally out of Astley’s own childhood. By the time she came to know her parents beyond the familiar ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’, Eileen Adeline Lindsay and Cecil Bellaire Astley had taught her a lot about marriage, or at least a certain kind of marriage. At a very young age, then, she had the central preoccupying theme of her novels. It was not the success or otherwise of such unions that fascinated her. Rather it was marriage itself that delivered to Astley, complete, the small-world whole-world perspective so essential to her as a novelist.

  For Astley, the endless negotiation of the self with the other, intrinsic to marriage, came to stand for all the negotiations inherent in the passage through life: with family, with the Church and belief, with the social world and the politics of it, and inevitably with the personalities who would enter and leave her world. Astley, who had a lifelong affinity with numbers and logic, saw marriage as the perfect algorithm for a lifetime of experience, containing sex, choice, boredom, inertia, entrapment, despair, acceptance and love.

  Looking back at Astley’s childhood, it is easy to see why she, like her parents, stayed married and lived a regulated domestic existence much like theirs. She wrote sharp social commentary into her novels, but their emotional strength lies in the way Astley captured the nuanced, intimate, fallible moments of couples living a humdrum existence, together yet apart.