09 Tue Dec 2014
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I’m reading through twenty-six years of weekly letters from Katharine Susannah to her son, Ric Throssell. There’s thousands of pages of handwriting to decipher, and if I did nothing else for a whole day’s work, it would take two days to get through one year. I have made it from 1943 to the end of 1947 in the first few weeks of the endeavour. With so much of her correspondence lost or destroyed, these letters are Katharine at her most revealing. Continue reading
05 Fri Dec 2014
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, links
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I missed Katharine Susannah’s 131st birthday yesterday, although I did spend several hours of it in her company, deciphering her handwriting in her letters to her son, and feeling I was in her company. Thankfully Loredana at Random Phoughts marked it by selecting KSP for her remarkable daily colourisation project. Here is KSP, in colour! (It’s interesting what a distancing effect black and white photographs have. They make me so conscious of the gulf of time that separates me and the subject. Colour reminds us that the people of the past were as alive as we are.)
Day 211 of Colourisation Project – December 4
Born this day, 4 December in 1883, Katharine Susannah Prichard was an Australian author, journalist, political activist and co-founding member of the Communist Party of Australia (1920) as well as one of Australia’s greatest novelists and literary figures.
In spite of the strong anti-communist sentiment pervading Australian politics and society before and after the second world war, Prichard remained a committed member of the Communist Party up until her death in 1969. She worked tirelessly organising unemployed workers and writing speeches and articles on behalf of the party. She delivered many public addresses on world peace and socialism, always working tirelessly for the cause. She founded left-wing women’s groups, and during the 1930s she campaigned in support of the Spanish Republic and later for nuclear disarmament.
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04 Thu Dec 2014
Peter Fitzpatrick, Pioneer Players: The Lives of Louis and Hilda Esson (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Other times, she is a ghost in all the things I read: I know the people I’m reading about knew her. I know that if the “camera” panned just a little to the left or a little to the right, or if it moved back to take in the whole scene, Alice would be there.
Before I started writing a biography, I wrote a novel about biographers. (It’s how I do things – I imagine them, and then I become them.) I’m revising it at the moment, and I added those sentences to it the other day. I’m reminded of them reading Peter Fitzpatrick’s Pioneer Players: The Lives of Louis and Hilda Esson. Hilda was Katharine Susannah Prichard’s best friend; they lived next door to each other as children. The few surviving letters between them show an intimate friendship. Katharine is not exactly a ghost in this dual biography of Hilda and her first husband, Louis; rather, she is one of the major characters. But, naturally, she is out of focus. She is there to help us understand Louis and Hilda better. And I’m so glad for the existence of this and other works evoking the same world Katharine was moving through. Continue reading
03 Wed Dec 2014
Posted in book review
Each of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead trilogy has a different protagonist, but if there is one central character, it would be John Ames. He has spent his life in the town of Gilead, devoting himself as a minister to the people of the town. Robinson has a similar devotion to the town, insisting that in the small lives of the people of this non-descript Iowan town can be found much of what we can hope to know about existence. As well as beautiful literature. Robinson has created a landmark in American literature with this triptych, and it will be remembered in a century’s time.
Lila (2014) is the story of Ames’s eponymous much younger wife, an itinerant woman brought up on the road by an adopted mother, Dolly. She is haunted by her time in a prison-like brothel in St Louis. She is full of shame of her background, her ignorance, and her poverty. She is drawn to the lonely Ames, tending the graves of his wife and child, listening to his sermons, while always on the verge of running. She cannot let go of the shame; her past takes the form of the knife she carries everywhere, Dolly’s knife. Even after she is baptised by Ames and then married to him and carrying his child, the knife sits in the kitchen, and she wonders when she will need it again.
The novel is steeped in the Christian story. Like Gilead, it narrates grace, making plausible a world where a loving Creator can be glimpsed in sacramental moments. If some atheist readers will find this off-putting, it is still amazing that many (judging from reviews) do not.
One of Lila‘s great accomplishments is to sustain a novel so deeply concerned with the meaning of existence solely through the narrative voice of a woman with limited education and a narrow experience of the world.
She knew a little about existence. That was pretty well the only thing she knew about, and she had learned the word for it from him. It was like the United States of America – they had to call it something. The evening and the morning, sleeping and waking. Hunger and loneliness and weariness and still wanting more of it. Existence. Why do I bother? He couldn’t tell her that, either. But he knows, she could see it in him. Why does he want more of it, with his house so empty, his wife and child so long in the ground. The evening and the morning, the singing and the praying. The strangeness of it. (75)
Lila ponders what is life for, and the largely educated, elite readers of her story will find new clues and a new angle on existence for seeing these things through her eyes. And that is something the best fiction does.
23 Sun Nov 2014
Posted in film review
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Watching a great film, or an interesting but flawed film, leaves me feeling excited about the world and about life – even when the mood of the film is bleak. Bad films, on the other hand, leave me feeling depressed – even when their mood is optimistic. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of the delightful Amelie (2001) has now made two dud but sunny films in a row – Micmacs and this year’s The Young and Prodigious TS Spivet. A ten year-old genius sets off across America on his own to receive a prize at the Smithsonian Institute for his perpetual motion machine. It has all the ingredients for a quirky, profound exploration of childhood, genius, and the meaning of America (road movies tend to be about the meaning of the places they pass through, and this one is to some extent). Yet from the beginning, it’s confused in plot and tone. It has trouble establishing its scenario, introducing the characters on the eccentric Montana ranch badly. Its picaresque structure doesn’t work, as TS encounters various characters on his journey to little real effect. The actors – including Helena Bonham-Carter and Judy Davis – are trying to inhabit characters that are two-dimensional with dialogue that just misfires in every scene. The finale has that most doomed of set-ups, a showdown between the protagonists on live television. At this point, the host says, “But there’s still another nine minutes to go!”; watching from Montana, TS’s sister slumps down in her seat groaning, as I did too. I wanted to like TS Spivet, I really did, but it’s a mess of a film. It feels like a Disney kids’ movie with a few flourishes. But I should also say it’s completely watchable, with a number of charming moments, and I’m sure many will find it a pleasant couple of hours.
20 Thu Nov 2014
Posted in biographical quests, Katharine Susannah Prichard
Katharine Susannah became instantly famous across the Commonwealth when she won the Australasian section of the great Hodder and Stoughton All-Empire Competition in April 1915 (the very month of Gallipoli) for her unpublished novel, The Pioneers. It was the big break she had been working hard towards for a decade. I think The Pioneers, for all its faults, is genuinely a very good novel, but at the time of the competition, a number of critics were unwilling to take the winning entry seriously because of the judge, British writer Charles Garvice.
The columnist in Wellington’s Dominion wrote, “…to foist such a fifteen-rate novelist as Mr Garvice upon Australasian writers as judge of their work was little short of an insult” (May 29, 1915, 14). Almost no-one remembers Garvice today, but at the time, he could claim to be the biggest-selling British author alive, having sold millions of the romances he produced many times a year. Among serious lovers of literature his name was a byword for dross. It seems that to have him judge a literary competition was a little like inviting Danielle Steel or Dan Brown to do so today. When his own books are so forgotten, it is a beautiful irony that one of his great legacies was to launch the career of such a significant Australian writer. Even if Garvice wasn’t a great writer, could he have been a good reader, able to discern something special in Katharine Susannah’s work? The Pioneers is a romance, melodramatic at times yet with characters more vivid and a plot more interesting than the genre usually produces.
I would love to know Katharine Susannah’s opinion of Garvice’s work, and the complicated feelings she would have felt at being awarded the prize by him. I think she would have been biting her tongue, and a little uneasy amidst the jubilation.
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Garvice has fascinated at least two writers in recent years. In her fine essay “Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist”, Laura Sewell Matter tells of her quest for Garvice, after finding some pages of an Icelandic-language book wash up on a beach in Iceland and eventually tracking it down as a translation of one of Garvice’s novels. She flies to London to read one of only two copies held by libraries in the world. It is a classic biographical quest, the genre I researched for my MA, the quest for Garvice tied up to Laura’s quest to find herself. You can download the essay from her website. Steve of Bear-Alley blog wrote a post on Garvice in 2010, tracking down some biographical details for Garvice, as well as a long (and still incomplete!) bibliography of Garvice’s works.
17 Mon Nov 2014
Posted in film review
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All the crops are failing on a future Earth when a former astronaut leaves on a secret mission to check inhabitable planets on the other side of a wormhole, knowing if he ever sees his children again it will be decades away. There’s an ambivalence to many of the reviews of Interstellar, and I share it. The plot unfolded like the sort of plot I would expect to read from a talented fifteen year old science-fiction obsessive – clumsy, derivative, refreshingly ambitious, with flashes of excellence. The opening is particularly amateurish, as Cooper the astronaut stumbles on the secret NASA base, only for them to decide he’s really the one they need to lead their mission leaving in a few days. (Granted, we learn later the reason behind all this, but it still feels like a scene from a B-movie.) The most dramatic and interesting section occurs when the team must land on a planet that will cause seven Earth years to pass for every hour they spend on it. The tension of this dilemma is played for all its worth, and it is a truly gripping sequence.
Interstellar is a film of big questions; most of all, whether humankind (or as it keeps saying “mankind” – what is wrong with people that they are using such a word in the year 2014?) is capable of acting for the good of the species, or only as individuals seeking the survival of themselves and their direct descendents. I found it moving and frightening; it made me ponder death and space and time, and lose myself in its world. It is also visually and aurally spectacular.
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Some random thoughts:
14 Fri Nov 2014
Posted in book review
Richard Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North has immense scope. Perhaps some readers will avoid it, thinking it a war novel, but it is actually a novel about all of life. At its centre – literally and metaphorically – is a lengthy account of the characters’ lives and deaths on the Burma Railway during World War Two, but it extends before and after that period to show the full impact of war. One of its significant achievements is to show how living and dying in a prisoner of war camp is an intensification of the drives and dilemmas all of us live with.
Appropriately, in telling of torture, starvation and cruelty, it’s a brutal novel. The novel’s brutality means it earns its kindnesses and moments of love so much more than other novels. One particular scene shines with love, and that is the generous hospitality of the Greek fish and chip shop owner; to describe it would give too much away, when I do hope you read it. In the world of this novel, it’s these moments of light which are the best one can hope for in life.
Despite its brutality, it’s also a novel of compassion, and an important source of this are the convincing chapters from the point of view of Japanese officers and a Korean guard who were overseeing the camp. Flanagan performs a remarkable feat of empathy to make their worldview and behaviour explicable, to give us a sense of what it might have been like to have been inside their minds, and in this to re-humanise them and remind us that we may not have been as heroic as we think in the same circumstances.
It is a narrative unusually driven by co-incidence. I think it works; it reinforces the novel’s random universe. While the co-incidences often drive the plot forward, it’s not in a convenient way. Instead, the co-incidences make the characters think there must be some meaning when there is not. Dorrigo happens to run into Amy in the bookshop, before he knows that she’s the new wife of his uncle. It helps draw them into an affair this time, but the next time he runs into her by chance, giving an opportunity to resolve so much, nothing is resolved. Instead, the cruelty of life is reinforced.
It’s a powerful novel, and I found it compulsive, if not brilliant. Why do I feel it falls short of brilliance? Perhaps it takes on more than it can accomplish in its length, and its attempt to convey the whole course of so many characters’ lives means none of them are conveyed fully enough. Even with Dorrigo Evans, I felt I was only beginning to see him fully painted when the novel ended. But that’s an initial judgement – I may need to let the dust settle on this one.
12 Wed Nov 2014
Posted in music
My song of the week is Lily and Madeleine’s “Blue Blades”. It’s a haunting, slow pulsing thrall, a patient melancholy voice over beautiful electronic shudders. It sounds like it could be from Air’s soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides, only sung by PJ Harvey or MS MR. “This heavy sleep will never cease to be / The earth is still / The chill does not affect me.” It’s hard to believe it’s the work of two teenagers, and easy to envy. I only wish I liked the rest of the album as much, but perhaps it will grow on me.
12 Wed Nov 2014
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard
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Tributes to writers who are dead always sadden me. I know how much better it would have been to appreciate their work when they were alive. But, today, I am happy to be talking about Miles Franklin, whose novels are among the finest written in Australia, and who still lives and works among us – glory be!
It’s Katharine Susannah Prichard, in a 1944 ABC broadcast about her friend Franklin. Captured in print in the year 2000 in Delys Bird’s edited selection, KSP: Stories, Journalism and Essays, it sounds ghostly: the “today” is ghostly; the “lives and works among us” is ghostly. Franklin had ten years left to be celebrated before she died, and Prichard a whole twenty-five. I hope they felt appreciated enough in their lifetime, but I don’t think either of them did.
Did Prichard imagine the posthumous tributes the people of the future might pay her? Would these imagined tributes have been any comfort to her, or only a sadness?
The Christian tradition talks of the “great cloud of witnesses” observing the living. The cloud is a metaphor but the concept is meant quite literally – the dead await the resurrection in the New Testament; their story is not done, their awareness is not finished. Yet even the NT does not talk much of a duty to remember the dead, beyond remembering the example of their faith. We remember them for our sake, not for their sake.
Prichard didn’t believe in life after death; she regarded all supernatural beliefs as superstitious. I can’t be paying tribute to her, then, for her sake. Or not exactly. Not “her” as a living being, but possibly “her” as our cultural memory of her. I can pay tribute to her as a dead person, occupying that peculiar state all the dead occupy. (It’s overwhelming to start trying to conceptualise just what a dead person is.)
We pay tribute to the writers of the past for other reasons than how it makes them feel. We do it because it deepens us. It recognises the reach of the dead into the present. It recovers a piece of the past, the best we can hope for, snatches and scenes of stories from the rubble.
