by Karen Lamb
Astley loved being literal in this way, deliberately flagging the trivial and the domestic in the face of important-sounding talk of ‘the work’. It became her way of shining a torch on what she considered the petty and venal practices of publishing. By insisting on the ordinariness of such a transaction, she hoped to expose the extraordinary penuriousness of publishers when it came to literary fiction. It was also a deflection, part of her complex about ‘being a writer’. She also had other questions that needed answering, when she wrote to Davis in June of 1958:
Dear Beatrice,
Can you bear this question? I know how pestered publishers are by writers, but could you give me, please, a definite publication date for Girl with a Monkey? I know you think I’m over-anxious about the book – but it does seem an awfully long time.
I have started something else – very slowly. I want this one to be good – as good as I can make it. So far I can’t feel really satisfied with anything I’ve written. It’s a fearful thing to have de luxe standards and be limited by technique and self. I know the country I want to explore but I only seem able to chart its coasts.29
She could express herself like this because she trusted her rapport with Beatrice Davis, knew that her editor was sensitive to how much authors needed care and encouragement. Years later in her retirement tribute to her editor, Astley observed that Davis’s skill was to ‘advise without hurt, to correct without making the author feel ashamed or inadequate’.30 She also knew how and when to be firm, correcting Astley’s hyphens and inconsistent use of ‘which’ and ‘that’ pronouncing, pen in air: ‘I think we’ll have a teeny piece of comma just there!’31
Davis did not hold back from mentioning some of her reservations about her new author’s prose style, which Astley acknowledged: ‘Have written 1,000 words of the new opus – only 79,000 more to go! However, long before that goal is achieved I will be only too thankful to come to discuss it with you. My prose style seems to be the same as in “G with a M”. Is that all right? Or should I strive for something a little different?’32
Davis picked up Astley’s anxiety straightaway, and responded: ‘Can think of no especial fault to find with your style – which is imaginative and vivid; except perhaps to warn you against preciousness. And if you do have a crack at some arty people, please let them be merely noises off to some real and likable character.’33
Astley placed enormous confidence in Davis’s judgement. At this time she couldn’t have changed her ‘prose style’ if she’d wanted to – it had been enough to leave poetry behind. Yet having no children herself, Davis did not understand the very real struggle entailed in writing anything while caring for a child aged two. Even so, Astley liked the company of this independent woman who had lived a full life inside and outside her marriage, feeling that her own life was staid by comparison. She had been married for more than ten years; she and Jack were less close now that they had a child. Marriage forced arrangements on people that made it seem routine, leading often to dullness, and Thea wondered whether this was the fault of the state of marriage itself, or the individuals within it.
Astley was making progress with the second novel and had once again returned to her experiences as a teacher, this time in the Mary Valley towns of Queensland. The title A Descant for Gossips, she decided, would be an apt reminder of those small-town eyes looking at and judging the self-contained young woman in their midst. That tight social world she had known, and her outsider status in it, came flooding back. She pencilled a map of Pomona (a town close to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast) at the back of her orange-covered writing exercise book. In it she added possible teachers’ names and grades. Here, words fought for space with numbers: long lists of words (crossed off when used) and regular morale-boosting word counts vied with each other.
It all seemed so laborious and dispiriting. Might it all lead nowhere after all? Astley quickly scribbled a gibe to herself on the back leaf: ‘A portrait of the artist’s wife in middle-age.’ Astley was thirty-three years old. She would always see herself as older than she actually was – by about a decade. It was a deflection of a very complex kind: she never quite inhabited the present. When she was in her late sixties her view of herself as ‘aged’ caught one radio interviewer off guard. It came as a surprise that ‘this vital women in her sixties thinks of herself as elderly’ – but Astley did.34 A year before, she had said, ‘I didn’t think I was mortal for years. I’m sixty-eight. I feel the tumbrels rolling more closely.’35
This backwards-forwards perspective of her writing was proving to be (and would always be) for Astley a sobering lesson in the work of Time. She added to herself in her notebook: ‘Time, the great heel!’36 The pun shows how the ephemeral nature of life was continually present in her mind. It meant that she imagined the future as a version of the past, in itself an extraordinary in-the-moment layering of human experience. It seemed so odd in one so young.
Astley’s acute self-consciousness about action and guilt now returned with vigour. The story she was writing about Helen Striebel, another alter ego, involved visiting the origins of her own neuroses. Astley was remembering censure in the context of her own upbringing. She had been angry at having being controlled, then guilty for being angry, then resentful for being made to feel guilty, then ashamed for feeling this way, as she was also grateful for many aspects of her schooling and childhood. Talk of Phil and the Jesuits, the fact of Jack being a divorced man not accepted to marry within the Church, the fuss over Ed’s baptism, made it difficult not to dwell on such things.
Phil’s concerns were radically different: his problems were about his own disposition, with himself, not with his faith. The writer Michael McGirr, who was for a time a Jesuit, came to know both Phil and Thea, and remembers thinking of them as being subject to a kind of ‘big soul and little soul’ view of faith: here, he thought, are a brother and sister whose souls had been ‘bonsaied’.37
When Astley wrote in the quiet of her Epping home study, this was the emotional legacy that unrolled in her mind, now shaped and controlled by her imagination. Writing about it gave her a cathartic sense of relief perhaps, but nothing would make it go away.
While she continued with the new novel Descant, Astley was annoyed that it was had taken until past mid-year in 1958 for Girl with a Monkey to be released. She was especially keen for this first novel to do well. She lost her reservations about the autobiographical nature of the book and sent an advance copy to Martin Haley. Astley also suggested to Davis that her former teacher Dr Robinson at Queensland University might help publicise the book. A bemused Davis replied that she could not ‘imagine the dear good man doing anyone any great service as a publicity agent’.38
While Astley was wondering about the first novel’s publicity and, as she wrote, becoming ‘sordidly interested’ in sales, she was also more conscious of how her next novel would fare.39 Davis politely reminded her of the limitations of literary publishing:
… we find it [A Descant for Gossips] perfectly acceptable as to standard plus sensitive and imaginative, though no bookseller’s dream of a best-seller. If only we could find that a first-rate talent like yours was also a spinner of beautiful money – for you and for the firm (not for us).40
Her words fell on deaf ears: Astley never accepted that writing fiction and money-making did not coincide. She had finished the manuscript of Descant – what more could an author do? Davis, of course, didn’t want to mislead authors about the possible financial gains. It would take the better part of thirty years but Astley would prove Davis wrong: money would be made by the writing and publishing of Australian literature, if not always in the grand sums Astley hoped for.
Davis was herself a product of a set of attitudes towards publishing that had existed in Australia for generations. It was hard to interest that market in Australian titles. Many writers tried to get published overseas, for these reasons. Attitudes towards being published were different too, with
less emphasis on the commercial transaction. This suited the conservative style and tastes of Davis and then poetry editor Douglas Stewart.41 The close author–editor relationship it engendered was exactly what Astley was enjoying and directly benefiting from. It was years before she would reconsider the virtues of such a dependent relationship between publisher and author. For now it was clear there were few alternatives: there were no ‘bidding wars’ between rival commercial publishers. It mattered who you spoke to and once a manuscript was declared ‘out of favour’ you had little chance of resuscitating it.
In the meantime, reassurance was what Astley longed for. Letters and critiques came via Davis’s office – with her circle of influence she knew they would be from important figures in the local literary scene – and so passed them on to Astley.
Congratulations on Thea Astley’s little novel. It is the promise that strikes one: there is not much solid substance in the people other than ‘I’, but she can write. And how few can! (Vance Palmer)
A recent publication that interested me greatly was Girl with a Monkey, by Thea Astley; a remarkable short novel, beautifully sculptured, and with the final impact of a short story, or a theatre curtain. It had a few faults but they were minor and superficial, a tendency to the unnecessary use of the sort of words that set ordinary people like myself reaching for the dictionary; perhaps a little bit culture-conscious – but they are of small account set beside the author’s real achievement. There is human insight as well as great skill in handling narrative, and that tight final chapter is like the swift and correct totalling of a sum whose respective items have excited interest. (Frank Dalby Davison)42
Palmer was an influential writer and critic, which was flattering interest perhaps, but his remarks smacked of faint, even patronising praise of the kind Astley had feared for years. Dalby Davison warned of ‘preciousness’ that had also concerned Beatrice from the beginning, but his review was otherwise very positive.
In August 1958 a letter arrived from Douglas Stewart, literary editor of The Bulletin, saying much the same thing. He was influential in this role at the magazine for over ten years, between 1950 and 1961, and his advice was worth noting. Writing to her about Girl with a Monkey, he urged Astley ‘to simplify, since I feel your whole intellectual drive goes the other way’, ‘moderate stylism’ to make the words more ‘natural’, more ‘her own’.43
Astley now waited to hear from Martin Haley, who was reviewing the novel for The Catholic Leader. She wondered whether he would include the criticisms he had sent to her shortly after receiving his advance copy. She had written detailed responses, so she hoped not. Astley was particularly sensitive to criticism but because Girl with a Monkey was so closely based on her life – something Haley knew better than anyone – she had taken his response as an oblique personal slight. In years to come, interpreting criticism as personal abuse would become de rigueur for her.
In his review Haley quibbled over which elements were factual and which were invented. He thought the characters lacked depth, but his most hurtful objection was to what he saw as Astley’s uncharitable toughness. Hedge as he might, the conflict that lurked in the shadows of their friendship stepped into view: he objected to her negative attitude towards Irish Catholicism (had even said she was only hard on characters with Irish names!).44 Astley did not think she had been ‘uncharitable’, protesting to him: ‘Do you mean graceless, or disgraceful? I wrote about my social life as a teacher, as I saw it. I thought I was being honest – a little bitter perhaps. I can’t say I ever found scores of polite, generous, friendly people opening their doors to me. Still, the fault was probably mine.’45
It was a disingenuous remark: she was ‘sticking her ground’ in repeating her claim not to have found ‘scores’ of ‘friendly’ people and she did not think the fault was hers. Revisiting the ‘material’ in this way only proved to her how easily she could still be wounded by the very memory of her experience. It would be late in life before Astley could control this reaction. Wanting the last word, she attached favourable comments about her sympathetic ‘handling of the Catholic moments’ made by the literary editor of an overseas Catholic paper.46
In these private exchanges Astley was able to own her story but she still felt uncomfortably ‘outed’ in the public domain. Despite Vance Palmer’s remarks and the fact that any experienced reader would expect a first novel to be based on the writer’s experience at least to some extent, Astley was inclined to blame Haley for introducing the personal into the situation. She took him to task for a betrayal of trust, for what she saw as his insensitive retailing in public, through his review, matters she had revealed to him in private. Another friend from Barjai days, Laurie Collinson, had been far more subtle in his review.
Astley was becoming increasingly defensive, answering these criticisms and aware that her second novel was also closely based on this same period of her life. She wrote to Davis that in her third novel there would not be ‘a teacher in sight’. In the meantime, Astley decided to take another good look at Descant while she could. She quickly changed characters’ names and the original (and real) setting for the published version, so that they would be harder to recognise.
Her struggle with the ‘ritual difference between real and false’ was not over yet. Knowing how much she was drawing on her own life, she became aware of another problem: all this talk about real or accurate details was obscuring the emotional nature of her Dream Country. She tried to make Martin Haley understand:
[Girl with a Monkey] wasn’t meant to be a novel in the strict sense, more a landscape with figures. It was a study in emotions. Technique interests me far more than characters, or plot, just at the moment. And until I find a style that I feel happy about, I shall probably go on labouring with insipid people performing routine tasks. You know, to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve looked at that book myself lately, and I feel rather ashamed of the whole thing: the style, the dialogue.47
By the time Astley returned to teaching, she would be a published writer, with her first novel having appeared in 1958, and her next due to be published in 1960. She was nervously anticipating staffroom gossip. Davis understood and appreciated her talents, but that did not mean others did. Astley felt self-conscious about her persona as a writer, worried that her colleagues would judge her because of that. However, she was not the odd one out in her own group of friends: Yvonne Wyndham was also about to return to teaching and Betty Judd was looking forward to returning to her career as a librarian.
Because Astley knew she could expect no financial reward for her writing, she was in fact glad that the teacher shortages had continued. She had heard that the brand-new Cheltenham Girls’ High School in her area was almost ready for its first student intake, and that the school’s foundation headmistress in 1958, Bessie Mitchell, was a very unusual woman. Word got out that she was actively drafting teachers who were highly regarded and recommended to her, and the staffroom was starting to fill with highly qualified, experienced, mainly mature women. Astley applied and was accepted. When she joined this select group she was in for a very different teaching experience from her last appointment.
The difficulty was finding someone to look after Ed, who was not quite four. In Dorset Street most of the young mums were homemakers and Astley did not feel comfortable leaving Ed in their care, nor were they necessarily interested in caring for the children of women who returned to work. However, the school principal and the new teachers, some of whom had young children, got together and worked out a way to make use of the kindergarten on the corner of school’s site. A gate was cut into the fence, giving the mothers easy access to their children without having to leave the school grounds. Timetabling was then organised so that teaching commitments for these women ended in time for the 3pm pick-up.
Astley could hardly believe her luck: she could pop down in her breaks to spend time with Ed. Cheltenham GHS in the late 1950s became a charmed place, somewhere he
r teaching abilities – especially in her main subject area of English – were appreciated and where she could express her feelings about things, including the lot of women, and be heard rather than resented.
The warm atmosphere at Cheltenham Girls’ made it possible to overlook the austere physical conditions. New buildings and facilities were emerging very slowly; Barbara Abouchar, a young convent-educated music teacher, remembers having to use her cello to teach in the absence of a piano. She also recalls the kindness of this extraordinary staffroom full of older women. ‘We were all together in a close-knit group. The school was being built around us. There was virtually nothing there.’48
One day Barbara noticed Astley, known in the staffroom for her wisecracks, eating a cream bun (a second was lined up) with ferocious intent. Astley had trouble gaining weight, a condition bound to draw mock-envious remarks from the other female teachers. Over the cream buns, Barbara and Astley became friends. A convent education and love of music made it inevitable that Astley would share a special bond with this young teacher: before long they were sharing thoughts on Catholicism, the struggles with conscience that still engaged Astley. Barbara and her French husband, Claude Abouchar, would visit Jack and Thea. On the way home, they would discuss their hostess. ‘She was unsophisticated – a Queensland girl with a Queenslander’s view of things.’49 It was difficult to see where Astley thought her writing fitted in – she didn’t seem self-assured about it. Everyone at school knew Astley had published a novel, but there was no sense of her being part of the ‘literary scene’.
Astley met and befriended Joan Levick (who wrote under the pseudonym Amy Witting), who was also on staff. One day she noticed that Joan always carried a lot of cash in her purse. Joan explained that during the Depression she had not been able to afford shoes and so was determined to have enough money at the ready to buy them, whatever happened. It was the kind of character-in-a-gesture that Astley loved. Witting was also writing a novel, which Astley immediately read.
