Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  Astley was distracted, but her earthy casualness surprised and appealed to her neighbour. The two women soon found they had a lot more in common than being housebound. Betty had avoided needing to leave her job setting up libraries by marrying late. She then had to move to be close to her ailing parents. Like Astley, she intensely disliked the postwar pressure to get women back into the home.

  A firm friendship began, with a candour that surprised Astley. Before long she felt she could talk about her writing seriously, even when she and Betty were in the mess of young children. Betty was a good listener and she knew that Astley was ‘someone different’.7 Life in Dorset Street would now be different for both of them.

  Astley warmed to the new possibilities of this friendship. She had enjoyed some of her women teacher colleagues but this experience was different. Gradually she met other women who lived nearby, and Dorset Street became ‘quite a little island of people getting to know each other’.8 Astley soon met another kindred spirit in Yvonne Wyndham, also a teacher (whose sister, the writer Gwen Kelly, corresponded with Astley over the years). Before long Astley found herself in a group of women who mixed freely, while the children played together in the safety of the wide streets or at each other’s homes. There were quite a few parties where couples had the chance to be couples; Astley even played tennis with her neighbours. She somehow managed to be inside the situation while she maintained her listening-observer perspective of old. She could see other marriages close up and was fascinated, though she was naturally drawn to the wives who either had, or had wanted, careers outside the home.

  Astley did appear to the other inhabitants of Dorset Street as quite eccentric. This wasn’t necessarily obvious in her behaviour; Yvonne had already noticed that Thea was not aloof as much as seeming to want to set herself apart. The women of the street, in fact, thought of her as generous, always willing to help. But Astley’s tongue got in the way too often. She was frequently unable to control her desire to shatter the cosiness of life in Dorset Street. She held back a lot from others. ‘You never knew what she was thinking,’ Yvonne commented, meaning that an essential part of her didn’t seem to be present in the moment. And besides she was often ‘outspoken and cruel in her assessment of other people’.9

  Astley chose to be close to those who did not judge or take offence. This was not always successful: some neighbours decided to keep their distance as whispers got around about the ‘writer at number 44a’ who intruded into people’s lives, asking questions, collecting material. It is easy to see why some thought her prurient, though good friends who knew Astley were aware that she enjoyed playing with words, that her ‘fascination was as much with words and particular phrases’ as it was with people.10 The cleverness of a phrase was in some ways overwhelming in the moment for her, to the point where she could be genuinely surprised by the effect of her words, if negative. The more conservative couples began to distance themselves; the men claimed to be ‘terrified’. To them a sharp-witted woman openly speaking her mind made Astley the ‘Gorgon of Epping North’, as she later dubbed herself.11

  The quiet times with the Dorset Street women and children did contradict something fierce happening in the background of Astley’s life. She was still preoccupied with Catholicism and its effect on her for she and Jack were still not yet married in the eyes of the Church. Betty Judd, who was not a Catholic, thought the strength of Astley’s loyalty to Jack was admirable, despite all the religious objections to their union.

  But Astley was struggling with guilt, not from a rational sense of acknowledging wrongdoing – she didn’t really think that – but the culture of conscience she had known from childhood had permeated her psyche.

  But she was also writing. When she managed to get Ed to sleep Astley was immersed in her notebooks, in the world of her Dream Country. She had continued with the same writing methods she had already established: phrases and notes of significance jotted down (sometimes anywhere – back of a postcard, a shopping list – which only she could decipher as part of an idea). Sketches, plots and character lists would then emerge all over and inside the covers of her favoured lined exercise books, which she would fill with careful, handwritten prose. Most of this could then be transferred almost unaltered to the ‘typer’.

  This way, without sitting formally at a desk, Astley knew she could secure time for writing – even for fifteen minutes a night – because the words inevitably added up. It was a story of writing that she kept telling for her entire life, encouraging beginner writers to write in such a way, regardless of their current work circumstances, to believe that it was possible for a novel to emerge thus. She had moved far beyond the safety nets of home and convent, yet it was all still so near, and writing brought it even closer.

  She was shaping a novel that would explore the exercise of will, and her mind went back to the time when her view of sexuality had parted way with the Church’s. Astley did not want this first book to be merely a critique of the Church; it was her own consciousness she wanted to navigate. She would base this on her first teaching appointment in Townsville.

  She chose to condense this first autobiographical narrative into a twenty-four-hour time frame, describing the young teacher Elsie Ford’s last day in the town, with her farewells almost entirely described through the prism of her own self-absorption. This could be balanced by a third-person narration exposing the shortcomings of the townsfolk and the misery of Elsie’s half-hearted romantic mishap with the unsuitable roughneck Harry.

  Astley re-created all the details of her life back then: the shock of the hot, wet, ramshackle world; the mundane realities of the job. Elsie feels lonely and the ‘false heartiness’ of the people in the boarding house where she has lived appals her. There is a brief affair with a town road-worker, and she is ogled by the prying townsfolk, much as Astley had felt herself to be when she and Jack first courted. Elsie is ‘held in the still centre of egotism’, and gains ‘pleasure from the process of her ego’. In some ways Girl with a Monkey seems a guilt-laden portrait of the author when young.

  Astley wrote the novel to give expression to the battle with herself and with the beliefs she had grown up with. She would often speak of writing as ‘a selfish way of writing out things that worried me’.12 She found it easier to dramatise this dialogue between inner and outer self in prose rather than poetry, but it was difficult for her to abandon the highly stylised rhetoric of poetry she loved and was technically good at. She found dialogue difficult too, and would later defend criticism of her characters’ rather stylised dialogue, saying it was better ‘to have characters talking and not sounding totally trivial’.13 She read poetry as a writing stimulus but she no longer wanted its emotional nakedness; she was carving out new creative freedoms for herself.

  Astley had not tried her hand at a novel for about eight years. What she needed was a response she could trust. She knew very few people in Sydney literary or publishing circles and she didn’t want to send any part of the novel to anyone who would easily recognise its factual basis, including her old friend Martin Haley. The writing had been hard work, building slowly from the fifteen minutes a night she had been able to spend on it. She knew there was a literary competition in The Sydney Morning Herald. The only way forward was to test the waters and enter just a section of the novel, which she called ‘Tropic’, under a nom de plume. It didn’t win. Astley turned immediately to the judges’ commendation. It was on the strength of their praise, without any idea whose desk it might land on, that she sent the full manuscript of her first novel to ‘the Editor’ at the Sydney offices of the publishers Angus & Robertson.

  This time she used her own name.14 There would be no pseudonym for this manuscript in what was really a tentative new reckoning of self. Although subsequent correspondence for years was addressed to ‘Thea Gregson’, Astley would within a few years become consistent in use of her unmarried name.

  She could hardly have known from these fir
st steps how blessed her foray into the world of literary publishing was to be. Girl with a Monkey attracted the attention of renowned literary editor Beatrice Davis, who exerted a strong editorial influence over the publishing house Angus & Robertson. The firm had originally established itself as a huge outlet for bookselling as well as a publisher of local titles. It was known for publishing many early Australian authors of the early 1900s. By the late 1930s the firm had opened offices in London, in a bid to expand internationally. This tended to concentrate decision-making overseas, and in 1956 A&R was still struggling with the conditions of an Anglicised book culture: management was inclined to dismiss Australian literature as a poor sales proposition. Davis persisted in a belief that the ‘auld firm’, as it was affectionately known, should publish quality Australian fiction.

  In fact, she was eager to expand the list. She knew she could only break through these negative ideas if she could find ‘fiction writers with imagination’ and she was not blind to problems: too often, she felt, ‘Australian novelists were documentary rather than creative writers’.15 Davis suspected this new author was one of those commended in the Herald competition but she couldn’t guess that she was about to find exactly the kind of imaginative fiction she’d been looking for. Publishing a first novel was always a big decision in-house, so Davis waited until after the readers’ reports were in before writing to Astley. She delicately deleted the readers’ references to ‘obscure wordiness’, perhaps already assuming a protective role towards this potential new author.

  Six weeks can be a long time for an author to wait in such circumstances but that was how long it took before the letter from A&R arrived at Dorset Street. Certain phrases lit up the page: ‘quality of the writing’, ‘evocative and individual’. Then came the crash: ‘rather too slight’ for publication. It was disappointing but when Astley read down to the last statement she was transfixed: ‘I think you could become a very good novelist indeed.’16

  Davis had suggested a meeting. Surely this was better, almost, than publication? A week later Astley made her way into the A&R offices at 89 Castlereagh Street, Sydney. Once there she found a petite, carefully groomed and very reserved Davis, working from a tiny and most unglamorous attic-sized space.

  To say the two women got on extremely well is an understatement. They were simpatico despite a fifteen-year age difference (Davis was then in her late forties). In no time they were exchanging likes and dislikes: their similar university studies in English and French, their shared ironic sense of humour and, even more compelling, their passion for music bordering on devotion. Both women played the piano with skill; each regretted she had not been able to pursue a career in music.17

  Astley observed Davis’s constant smoking with the curiosity of the non-smoker and thought it a great signature of personal style, forming an extension of natural expressiveness.18 More than twenty years later, when Davis was leaving A&R, Astley would write a tribute to her editor’s skill and their time spent together, and how ‘she has, indirectly, and simply by being Beatrice, taught me … much about living’.19

  Astley came to appreciate Davis’s contradictions, which in some ways mirrored her own. Davis sometimes displayed ‘Anglophile gentility, even pretension, at other times uninhibitedly doing as she pleased without apparently giving a damn for anyone’s opinion’.20 The way this behaviour seemed almost scripted when so much else was left unsaid would have been very appealing to a young writer. Davis had a fully fledged career, engaged in flirtation on a grand scale with her male authors – as she did with Hal Porter – and took lovers. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it was Davis who in the years to come would most influence Astley in some of these ways of ‘living’.

  Davis knew about duty and obligation too. Before she had married (a doctor many years her senior) she, like Astley, had taken on a teaching bursary largely as a means of getting to university. Davis was also unfaltering in her commitments and loyalties to those who were close to her.21 But it was the style of Davis that impressed – so unlike anyone in Astley’s orbit. She was, in the parlance of the time, a classy dame.

  Davis didn’t appeal to everyone but Astley didn’t know that yet, nor did she care. Years later she would learn that Patrick White had little time for the editor’s ‘most artificial – refaned’ way of speaking.22 The quiet young author in front of the renowned book editor loved the theatricality, the Sydney North Shore hauteur that would always be such a feature of Davis’s personality, both personally and professionally. Davis also entertained elegantly, was a good hostess, knew all the right things to eat and say and serve. In this way, she was in effect teaching Astley lessons in being a successful social person.

  Astley might have been enchanted but Davis must have been equally impressed by her ‘find’. Her misgivings about Girl with a Monkey evaporated less than two weeks after their meeting. Astley had made no revisions when Davis wrote ‘pleased to advise’ that the manuscript had been accepted for publication.23

  Not one inclined to dwell on good fortune, Astley set about correcting what had slightly peeved her in all of this. She got out Davis’s original letter and homed in on the word ‘slight’, which she took to mean too short to be a ‘proper’ novel, then scribbled some careful calculations of figures on the back. Nobody, she must have thought, should ever underestimate writers (well, not her anyway) on the subject of numbers. She estimated her manuscript to be about 35,000 words. By the time Davis wrote the in-house memo the word ‘slightness’ had disappeared from the description. Publication was to be of a ‘short novel’ of ‘about 45,000 words’.24 Astley had not added those extra words, but what might seem petty – the totting up of words – enabled her to make her first strike, nor would it be the last time she would take an editor or publisher to task. Her editor was merely being conciliatory: she had no idea that this new author intended to take the writing business as seriously as the business of writing itself.

  On 14 March 1957 ‘Mr and Mrs Gregson’ went into the A&R office to sign the contract: Astley was determined that Jack, especially given his expertise in bookkeeping, would always be on hand for these occasions. She enthusiastically signed her contract as ‘Mrs Thea Gregson’, with Jack as witness. At home in Dorset Street they celebrated quietly. This was a huge step forward, yet both suspected it would make little practical difference to two busy working lives, with a young child to support. Money was still tight. Jack, who was very proud of his wife and wanted to show his faith in her, splashed out on a surprise present of a brand new Green Hermes ‘Baby’ typewriter, and Astley would use it for the next twenty years. This was a substantial cost, beyond their means.

  Davis made it clear that even well-known writers could not expect to make much money from their work: it was a privilege to be published. The new author could not see why this should be so, or why it was such an accepted part of publishing life, and she simply never accepted it. One day Astley would be proven right. Making a living out of writing fiction was, perhaps, not likely but it was possible to achieve commercial respect in small but not insignificant sums. Her attitude would become a thorn in the side of her publishers.

  For the moment, Astley decided these issues were best left alone in what was already a blooming friendship with an influential editor. Davis thought they should address each other by their first names in letters. Astley was undoubtedly flattered to be so invited, replying that she did ‘want to’ but ‘thought it seemed a bit “fresh”.’25

  Compared with Astley’s day-to-day life, her persona as an author was odd. Wasn’t she still just a teacher who had written a book, a mother with a toddler who would need her regular job back? Was she a teacher or a writer? These questions brought self-doubt, which shadowed her success. Astley was not comfortable with the concept of ‘being a writer’; she hated what she saw as its pretension. She found it hard to resolve these conflicting ideas about herself, as if something she had longed for had suddenly arrived too soon.


  She was certainly taking writing seriously. The question of a writing persona was difficult because it brought together roles she was used to keeping separate: woman, wife, mother, writer. Creatively, too, she struggled with ‘voice’ – was she writing as a man or a woman or, as she would later say, ‘a neuter’? She was defensive about the possibility of being typecast as a ‘women’s writer’, which she felt meant being robbed of due recognition.

  Beatrice understood the concerns women authors had about being valued; she was already known for her support of women writers. Astley had counted – as she would – eleven out of the thirty contributors in the anthology Davis had edited were women. Davis was the force behind reissues of out-of-print titles by several women authors including Christina Stead. She championed women writers of intellect: being recognised in that company was what mattered the most to Astley – struck the most ‘sympathetic chord’.26

  Davis found little to change when editing Girl with a Monkey and quickly became ‘an urger’.27 Astley was excited by this, but also extremely anxious about how to meet such expectations. It was a mixture of exhilaration and compulsion; this sense Astley gave to some friends, of ‘having a huge burden to shoulder’ and it was often inexplicable to others.28 Astley confided to Betty Judd that she felt nurtured but a bit ‘pushed’ by Davis, who was already talking about a deadline for a second novel. Where would she find new material? How could she complete it in time, with Ed still so young?

  Astley was suffering from second-novel nerves. Success was now tied up with liking but also pleasing Davis, who had managed to give Astley the not-altogether-welcome idea that Davis was depending on her author. Astley knew she could not afford to write her second novel without some assistance, and applied for a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant. She was not successful, as she wrote to Davis. In the first of many such letters, Astley also wondered whether there might be a further advance on Girl with a Monkey so that she could buy air tickets to visit Cecil and Eileen in Brisbane.