The Boy Behind the Curtain

by Tim Winton

  Even Elizabeth’s jacket photographs began to change, reflecting a new confidence. She was captured gazing levelly at the camera, specs off, no smile, nary a twinkle. In a tribute to her published in the now defunct journal Indigo the poet Philip Salom suggests that this new direction might have cost Elizabeth critical support, which would be sad if true, but hardly surprising. Either way I can only concur with his assessment of these late works as her best. They seem to me the work of someone in deadly earnest, at full stretch, beyond any need of approval.

  But in the late 1970s, when I spent most time with her, Elizabeth probably had more determination than confidence. She was yet to be liberated and quickened by the affirmation of readers and critics. In those early years at WAIT, I think many of us who were Elizabeth’s students learnt to write alongside her, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say in her wake. We were there to witness the way she learnt to teach, and to publish. And her publishing career was every bit as instructive as her classes. Long after that single year I was in her class she was still teaching me how to be a writer.

  Writing, the act itself, remains a personal mystery – Elizabeth taught me that early. Its processes and origins are hard to articulate and are sometimes best left to explain or conceal themselves. Whether writing can be taught with any rigour or by any system or with any realistic expectations is an open question. But publishing the stuff is something closer to a political science. This can be learnt. The public and procedural aspect of the writing life involves negotiations and accommodations bewildering to the innocent arts apprentice but hardly unfamiliar to, say, the employee with hopes of advancement. A peculiar suite of skills, which have nothing to do with art, needs to be acquired in order to survive honourably. When it came to such things as discretion, charm and oblique professionalism, Elizabeth had no peer. She had a passive-aggressive genius, a gentle way of patronizing while appearing to be patronized, indulging while seeming to be indulged, and I have no doubt that her years in the academy, about which she could be scathing in private, armed her well in this regard. She might have looked the fey old lady in sandals but her survival instincts were keen. For someone with such an unbusinesslike mien, she was rather good at taking care of business – and then covering her tracks. In one form or another she saw the value in deft representation. In life and in work, she’d been forced to take the long view.

  I’m often asked what it was like to be taught by Elizabeth Jolley and I’m hesitant to answer, because many who ask have already formed a settled impression and they don’t like you mucking it up. In terms of the mechanics of craft, I learnt much more at the feet of people I never met. I also learnt plenty from teachers at WAIT who didn’t write fiction or poetry at all. I certainly didn’t learn to write dialogue at Elizabeth’s feet, especially not in the vernacular. For someone so musical she had a tin ear for talk, unless characters spoke Edwardian or Mittel-European. To her, anyone less cultured must have simply sounded cockney. She was good on atmosphere, with interiors, and the natural world; good at alerting you to what you could do with them on the page. Some Australian and American writers have been better teachers than practitioners of their craft: Elizabeth wasn’t one of them. In my experience, particularly of those early years, her writing far outstripped her skills as a teacher.

  Yet the student of writing often learns despite what they’re being taught, either by defiance or by watching the teacher rather than engaging with the lesson, and I think the latter probably applies to much of my time with Elizabeth. She had no enthralling program, no killer technique, no charismatic presentation. She did have an eccentric persona, but for a young student this was as much an obstacle as a delight. Several of my classmates, some of whom became considerable writers, might now be glad to have been in Elizabeth’s classes, but I know that at the time they felt they’d learnt nothing useful from her. I am likewise glad to have been in her strange orbit, for though I was often bewildered by her in class I did learn things from her that are still important to me.

  In the teaching of writing she focused on the thing itself, the story or the poem before us. She didn’t entertain much talk of theory; at that time her sensibility owed more to the English and German Romantics than to anything modern, let alone postmodern. Her awe for the mystery of language was tempered by the practical realities of the artisan, and this combination had an enduring effect on me. She was cautious with words and stories but not ideologically suspicious of them. She politely resisted the pseudoscientific discourse sweeping through the department. These were the early days of semiotics, the Cuisenaire rods that preceded the murkier calculus of cultural studies. When it came to music, however, she was a believer, almost a mystic. She held to it as a life force, and again this was instructive and sometimes also sweetly stubborn. For her it seemed to literally inspire story and language, and she often tried to ‘work us up’ with it. To many of us the Lieder were a bit of a stretch, but Neil Diamond was a bridge too far.

  She took her work as a teacher seriously. That meant, God bless her, she took our work seriously too, and that decency must have cost her something. When she commended you faintly on an image or a line of prose you had the sense that she’d dipped briefly into the same reservoir of respect – for nature, for human experience, for language – she reserved for Goethe or Rilke. But she was thrifty in all things, and praise was no exception; she offered it carefully, with a sense of proportion. Despite her daily encounters with the gormless, the mulish, the self-deluded, the shiftless and the hopelessly untalented, she maintained a kindness and consideration that strike me now as heroic. I’m not just referring to her courtesy – she was courteous whether courtesy had been earned or not – but to the way she gave credit for the work and intentions and efforts of others. While most of us were surely wasting her precious time she nevertheless gave us her full attention, she sought and fixed upon whatever flicker of promise she could detect in our generally dreadful offerings, and she offered her comments with a delicacy and tact that seemed to belong to another time and place. I know from my own brief and undistinguished months of trying to teach that a similar generosity was beyond me.

  Elizabeth said that when she sensed something promising or exceptional in a piece of student writing she would read it to her husband Leonard for his comment. She told me she did this with several of my stories, and I have no doubt she meant it as a compliment because she was still reminding me of it decades later. She read to him once she’d settled him in bed, hours before she turned in herself. As a youth, and even as a man in middle age, I could barely picture such a scene because the Jolleys were not ordinary folk. To a boy from rough-and-ready Karrinyup they were larger than life, like characters from Thomas Mann: physically unprepossessing, crippled in Leonard’s case, but cultured and sensitive people for whom art was vital business.

  Elizabeth appeared to defer to Leonard in all things. He was an imperious little man with good taste and a notoriously sharp tongue, and as the librarian at the University of Western Australia he’d enjoyed considerable status within their social circle, but these were the years in which Elizabeth’s reputation began to match and then eclipse his, and her apparent deferrals were not nearly as straightforward as they seemed. So it wasn’t the idea of these grand figures bothering to waste time on my raw divots of prose that impressed me so much as the prospect of my lumpen fictional world intersecting with the complex dance of their domestic life, for theirs was a peculiar milieu indeed. And as we were later to discover, partly fictional in itself. When a bit of work got the nod from both of them you took it seriously – well, I did. I don’t know whether, in those early years, Elizabeth ever really deferred to Leonard’s judgement or if she just liked to mask her own praise in his, but their combined verdict of approval felt like approbation from the board of governors.

  In those writing classes, once I’d reconciled myself to Elizabeth’s cultural and generational strangeness and learnt to negotiate her scything wit and the shielding genius of her persona
, I wrote my first real stories. Some were published in magazines and one I later included in my first collection. Under Elizabeth’s surveillance my first novel began life as a radio play, a form I’ve always hated and in which she excelled. The genre was her idea but the script was all my own miserable doing. After the book’s publication in 1982 she was gracious enough never to mention its squalid origins. She understood, as few others can, the art of literary salvage.

  As a teacher she had the kind of humility that allowed her to stand aside. She didn’t feel the need, or perhaps the entitlement, to wade into your work or your fictional world with her gumboots on. She looked for what you were trying to do, not just what you’d failed to do. She did not require you to write like her or to address her special fictional concerns. But she expected you to take your work at least as seriously as she did.

  Elizabeth wrote to be published. As a result of her own long and often thwarted apprenticeship she had more practical advice about the business of submitting work for publication than anyone else I ever encountered. Like Tom Keneally on the other side of the continent, she was a pro trying to lift herself from the swamp of amateurism that still prevailed in Australian letters. Her ideas were pragmatic, her outlook seasoned by disappointment, by the cycles of fashion, and by politics and personality. She had plenty to say about endurance and self-belief, about editorial pettiness, geographical hubris, and deep prejudices surrounding age and gender. She let you know which editors to avoid, which magazines to try repeatedly, who was asleep at the wheel, who ‘forgot’ to pay, who was an out-and-out liar, and how fickle the entire enterprise was. In sending manuscripts to editors you had to be systematic, even cold-blooded, keeping distance between yourself and the work. You had to understand the virtues of order; you did your homework about who it was you were submitting to. And there was plenty of solemn chat about clean envelopes and good staples.

  She was a mine of information, and in a publishing sense a class warrior along with it. She took the business of publishing as seriously as she did the art of writing. She was not an amateur, was not content to be viewed as one, and she refused to be coy about being a pro. Elizabeth believed in craft – absolutely, passionately – but she also relied on tradecraft. It’s so hard to make a living as a writer, and much harder if you’re too precious to find out how publishing works. To Elizabeth this was simply good housekeeping, and any interest you showed in this kind of professional development – the grubby, industrial side of being a writer – was eagerly rewarded. Within her teaching environment and the writerly ecosystem of the period, this made her exceptional, and was a brisk antidote to the evasive boho insincerity about publishing that still wafts around writers’ gatherings. Elizabeth was a romantic with discreet but steely ambition. She couldn’t abide dabblers or pretenders. She’d never call you a wanker to your face, but she had a certain distant look, a pursy set to the mouth at times that did the work for her.

  I don’t mean to imply anything mercenary here, only that Elizabeth had good strategic impulses. Even while publishing from the wrong side of the country, she managed to negotiate the strange undertow that prevails closer to home. She had an unholy knack for wrong-footing the locally embittered or envious, and she always did it with a smile. A writer from an anxious provincial city like Perth could hardly have sought better counsel.

  Elizabeth pioneered the servicing of reading groups. Before these became mainstream they were a pretty daggy, if badly understood, part of civilian reading culture, and in the west most of them were in the bush. In the early 1980s Elizabeth drove gamely all over rural Western Australia to meet isolated book clubs, to drink their tea, dazzle them, answer their questions. There was a generosity about this as well as a lack of preciousness, and these readers became her first constituency. Without publicity or publisher support she developed a broad and loyal readership, one that became rusted on for life. The people who met her in those farmhouses and tiny country halls quite rightly adored her, and she slyly flogged them books from the boot of the car while she was at it. She was a one-woman literary festival, a roadshow, returning with stories to tell, a few bob extra, and an acute understanding of her audience.

  Although she was modest and self-deprecating, Elizabeth did have a very strong sense of her own dignity, and of the value of her work as both teacher and writer. You failed to see this at your own peril, for when she was offended or angry her disappointment was, despite its quiet expression, quite chilling. I can testify to this from the day I owned up to withholding my best work from class. I’d been sending stories to magazine editors without showing her. In their stead, to satisfy course requirements, I’d begun handing in things I knew were second-rate but good enough to pass. I was disillusioned with the broader course and keen to make some kind of headway in what I thought of then as the wider world. The long view was beyond me.

  She’d noticed the inferior work and puzzled over it, and I was quick to explain and very slow to see how she felt about it. How could it matter? I thought. Why waste good stories to pass some crap unit in some mickey mouse course? What was her problem? Callow and self-absorbed as I was, I couldn’t see how disrespectful and unnecessary this substitution was, how lacking in mutuality. Elizabeth had given of her comradely best, and she expected mine in return. She offered respect and had a right to have it reciprocated, regardless of how I felt about the degree. She’d never once made an obstacle of herself. She always kept the faith, served the work. And here I was, treating her like some tenured time-server. She was hurt, and told me so in language so genteel it flew by like birdsong. I was halfway home before I began to understand what a bollocking she’d given me. In the decades afterwards it pleased her to remind me of this episode, with an affectionate and vicious twinkle of the eye, preferably with an audience. I had to take every wild embellishment, every fictional flourish – and, believe me, there were plenty of them – as my just deserts.

  The launch of Elizabeth’s second collection, The Travelling Entertainer and Other Stories, in November of 1979 was my first experience of a book launch. The Fremantle Arts Centre hosted a gathering of citizens from the requisite three postcodes of the day and there was the kind of riesling on offer that has happily since gone the way of the flagon. There were fine speeches by Ian Templeman and the author herself, and piles of the handsome book, which cost $4.50. To me everyone seemed very old and venerable and alien. My girlfriend and I were excited and wildly uncomfortable. I’d written a novel myself by then and had begun another. I wondered if this was what lay in store. In truth it didn’t look all that promising. We stood in line to have a book signed and Elizabeth was ebullient and tipsy and terribly funny. In that spidery hand, which I would recognize anywhere, she wrote the inscription:

  For an intimate friend

  Tim Winton

  I look forward to your book

  Elizabeth Jolley 14.11.79

  Even at nineteen I got the joke. We were friendly, Elizabeth and I. In time she would dandle my children on her knee. We had friends in common, shared the same agent, and corresponded fitfully over the years. We phoned one another to confer on professional matters because in this we spoke the same language and trusted each other’s judgement and discretion. Yet warm and comradely as our acquaintance was, we were never intimate friends. Her inscription is the sort of thing you scrawl at book launches after a couple of glasses of plonk in a roomful of luvvies, with a nod and a wink and a gentle dig. This, dear boy, she may as well have said, is what lies ahead. Gird yourself. Keep your game face on. Intimate friends, won’t this give them a laugh in a few years’ time!

  Beyond her circle of intimates – and she made good and loyal friends – Elizabeth was too guarded, too performative in her way, to be easily knowable. To the rest of us her battiness was an essential part of the persona. She was always kind, ever funny, but later in life the routine became harder to read. She’d pretend not to remember you for a moment then drill you with some cringeworthy detail from decades previous. Wit
h Elizabeth confusion was expected, a wily comeback only moments away. You sensed a quip in the wings, even when in later years it often failed to arrive. In this, I think it’s fair to say, she gave of herself what she could, as she could. Right up to the end and after it, in person and on the page, Elizabeth Jolley kept us guessing.

  Sea Change

  In the early light of morning I back the dinghy into the water, jerk it free of the trailer and leave my father holding the painter while I park the vehicle at the foot of the dune. As I walk to the water’s edge I see the bait truck rolling onto the jetty a few metres away beneath a haze of gulls. Out at the edge of the lagoon, a crayboat steams in through the passage in the reef.

  The old man has the outboard running, but he’s still standing in the shallows. He’s over eighty now and climbing aboard isn’t the simple matter it once was. We get him in, one stiff leg at a time, and before I can leap in after him there’s a swirl and a huff behind me as one of the local dolphins surfaces an arm’s length away. It sidles in, cocks an eye at me, and familiarity being what it is, I haul myself aboard without a backward glance. The dolphin drifts alongside, rises on its tail, and lets off a few shameless squeaks, but I’m immune to all entreaties. Still, before I can put the motor into gear it leans its scarred head into the boat and tries one last time to charm its way into a free feed.

  ‘Go on, you lazy bugger,’ I say. ‘Get your own.’