by Karen Lamb
Astley knew that, like her, Joan was also trying to fit her writing around job, husband and children. Watching Astley and Joan Levick become close was interesting for the young Abouchar, who observed: ‘Thea admired Joan. She knew she was a strong woman who would leave a man if she wanted to. I felt Thea was more dependent, fearful of being alone. Joan’s husband was very much like Jack, a non-intellectual partner. The way that Joan managed her “happy” relationship and marriage intrigued Thea.’50
It was a balancing act that did not seem to be part of what Astley could manage. For her, everything seemed to exist at the edge: she had to push to achieve what she wanted with her writing, she was increasingly anxious as a parent, even her marriage had developed a sparring quality she couldn’t quite control. Astley’s life seemed like two distinct worlds moving alongside each other, accompanied by the percussion of routine.
Her only links with other writers socially came through Beatrice Davis, and she grabbed them with both hands.51 Davis had a vast literary network, and a linchpin of it was the poet and fiction writer Hal Porter, whom she introduced to Astley. Astley wrote him her first fan letter, praising his work, though she was probably as impressed that he worked full-time as a librarian in Shepparton, Victoria, while also writing himself. Perhaps Davis passed on some of the generally unfavourable critical chorus about Astley’s ‘style’ – which Astley may even have guessed at the time – but she must have been flattered by Porter’s comments on Girl with a Monkey: ‘I’ve bought three copies of your novel for the library and read it twice with admiration and delight. For one who lives in an eternal slipstream of the latest books this is no gesture – it was for my own pleasure.’52
Such events formed a welcome bridge to the world beyond the classroom. Astley was the staffroom wit but her colleagues did not particularly take notice of her burgeoning career as a novelist, though they paid her more attention after her second novel was published.53 While Astley waited for Descant to appear in print in 1960, she returned to thinking about her own family’s attitude towards her writing. Barbara Abouchar found herself the confidant of a woman who seemed increasingly persecuted, and who particularly wanted the approval of her father. Abouchar noticed that Astley often spoke about her father, but never about her mother.
And Jack’s status as a previously married and divorced man was still causing entanglements with Church bureaucracy.54
None of this appeared to affect Astley’s energy for writing. Early in 1959, before Descant had been published, Astley embarked on a third novel. She wanted to be recognised as a writer not simply by Davis: Australia’s leading literary figures and opinion-makers were men. So far, almost all of her correspondence about her writing had been with male literary editors of newspapers; the leading figures in academic study of Australian literature – including those who had sent appraisals of her work so far – were also men. The list from as far back as Barjai included Martin Haley and Paul Grano from the Catholic writing groups, her male lecturers at university, more recently Vance Palmer, Frank Dalby Davison, Douglas Stewart. So were the senior publishing house editors and managers. The Australian writers Astley had read and admired were also mostly male; it would be a long time before Astley could clearly identify herself with an Australian literary female tradition, which existed historically but even so had not yet been fully appreciated publicly.
Astley’s need for male approval was complex: in these new intellectual and literary friendships there was a sexual frisson. For a woman of Astley’s conservative background, one who had been sexually inexperienced before marriage and was now settled with a family and domestic commitments, this was extremely appealing. She was very much enjoying her ‘enchanted’ and regular correspondence with Hal Porter, whose letters came to Angus & Robertson and were redirected to Dorset Street. There was something exotic in receiving these epistolary literary attentions on the domestic doorstep. Marriage, work and motherhood sent Astley, often compulsively, chasing esteem. She was prone to infatuation; partial to praise. Theatrical in gratitude and defensively modest, she was learning to adjust socially to being a ‘writer’.
An intense period of contradictory drives and anxieties was just beginning for her. The past would remain troublingly present. She had sent a signed copy of Girl with a Monkey to Cecil and Eileen, who had made no comment. A friend later sent her this same copy, inscribed ‘To Mum and Dad’, having discovered it languishing in the library of the Toowong seminary in Brisbane.55
Astley also sent an advance copy of Descant to her parents. One day she received a parcel from her parents’ Ashgrove address, containing her novel. Eileen had fiercely crossed out passages and phrases she considered sacrilegious. Astley understood her mother’s attitudes towards sex and other matters, and constantly reminded her about her marriage outside the faith, but her reaction was still a shock.
Astley said nothing. Cecil and Eileen were shortly to visit Sydney, and Eileen wrote afterwards of how the visit had been ‘a real tonic’.56 Thea had written to Cecil asking for some information as a resource for the novel she was now writing – The Well Dressed Explorer – with a journalist as a central character. His reply seemed a bit blunt, and she didn’t care for his remarks on playing with ‘fact and fiction’. In a letter addressed to her and John (Jack) he wrote: ‘I wish Thea would NOT use actual place names; Condamine is … on the Downs or near west, only 30 miles from Chinchilla.’57
Cecil said he was ‘rather in the dark’ about what she was writing, and after the return of the marked-up copy of Descant Astley hoped to keep things that way. Still, it was pleasing that the letter was signed affectionately: ‘Daddy’. Cecil also wrote, ‘I’m personally looking forward to hearing that you’ve got that old marriage business firmly settled.’ Official news from the Church via Phil had come through that made a marriage possible, and Jack and Thea began to plan a simple wedding; Cecil’s health was deteriorating – he had inoperable cancer – but would at least have this satisfaction even if he couldn’t attend. Astley was aware, too, that there were equally pressing anxieties for her parents in the trials of her brother. He was nearing the end of his Tertianship at Sevenhill in South Australia and worried about his future. Eileen had scribbled ominously at the bottom of Cecil’s letter: Phil was still ‘waiting to hear from his superiors’.58
8
An armed neutrality
These days, Bernard decided during the few seconds a perfunctory wave took to his wife, we are an armed neutrality.
The Slow Natives by Thea Astley, 19651
In the new decade of the 1960s, people believed that life for women would be changed, largely due to the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1961. Not much else was different, or so it must have seemed to Astley. Like others of her generation, she would not be part of a counterculture when it did arrive almost a decade later. She was thirty-five, married for more than ten years, a mother and in a responsible professional job with a duty of care to young people.
Women like Astley were already halfway to following the life patterns of their parents. In Dorset Street Astley watched some of the women silently – and vocally – question their personal choices. How much choice had they really had? To these wary souls, to Astley herself, new social freedoms lacked credibility, looked more like a selfish escape from the shackles of maturity.
Social change as it is lived will always be slower than history remembers it. The so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s did not take place with the rise of the women’s movement in Australia, which came later. Initially, ‘feminism’ tended to be greeted as an overseas phenomenon. Another decade would pass before Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was published.
For fun, Astley, assuming a fruity voice higher than her own, would read aloud the current social pages at get-togethers with the Dorset Street women. The popular press was full of advice for them all, and Astley found particularly amusing the Pix magazine advertisements and advertorials
such as ‘Doctors Tell How to Stay Happily Married’.2
These gatherings of women in each other’s homes offered a rare chance to share private things they wouldn’t tell even family. The women were all ‘stayers’ in marriage, but full of rueful whimsy about its monotony, in contrast to the idealistic women’s-magazine portrayal of the marital state. Astley, who tended to push things in this setting, was provocative; although she was a member of the group she liked to offer the commentary of the outsider, often sending up popular culture. She was enthusiastic about the daily TV soap operas from America (The Bold and the Beautiful became a favourite). When Australia began producing its local versions Astley could be found every day, on cue, sitting in front of Home and Away. Years later, neighbours Bryan and Jennifer Bruty – just retired from the ABC – were bemused by what seemed to them her inexplicable taste.3
Yet these dramas were full of highly exotic sexual liaisons and the outrageous plots had the overblown quality Astley loved. Watching them was not only fun, it provided material for her own writing. She loved ‘rubbish’ for being just that. At the same time Astley was capable of intellectual snobbery, too, which made her attitudes perplexing to some: she would blurt out something about a particular school class being stupid.4
Astley scoffed at the hypocrisy of most social attitudes but as a writer she knew it was important to tackle the social agenda. At the same time, she knew she needed a new direction; she couldn’t go on writing about north Queensland schoolteachers forever. Where to from there, in terms of social commentary?
Past writers did not prove much of a signpost. In the 1930s and 1940s Katharine Susannah Prichard and Henrietta Drake-Brockman had described the plight of Aboriginals; later Dymphna Cusack and Kylie Tennant had written with compassion about the aged. Much as each of these writers had developed a prose style to suit their purpose, Astley was more self-conscious about that aspect of her work in a way that for the moment put her aesthetically out of kinship with these social realist writers: she would have to find her own way.
A Descant for Gossips would be the last of Astley’s self-when-young novels. She now wanted to write about relationships of dependence and inter-dependence, about marriage and family: her life now. The canvas had to be life itself; that set of perennial dynamics of need and power – the world divided, as she would one day say, into ‘feet, and boots and mats’. This was what really fascinated and appalled her. She was convinced by now that her Catholic background had handed her the ultimate prototype.5 Her creative animus came from this very personal confrontation, and nostalgia gave way to anger.
A third novel was emerging. Astley was very aware that she had been handpicked by the doyenne of Australian literary publishing and did not want to disappoint Beatrice Davis. She was especially grateful to her mentor for helping her develop literary friendships. Not since the university days of Barjai had Astley felt among such kindred spirits. Here she could mingle with writers and poets such as Hugh McCrae, Kenneth Slessor, Hal Porter, Xavier Herbert, Ion Idriess, Kylie Tennant and Douglas Stewart. The social gatherings at Beatrice’s house would have seemed a bit risqué – with a more relaxed and daring use of language and behaviour than was common in the ‘couples’ socialising she was used to. Unlike most of those at Beatrice’s parties, Astley was not a ‘drinker’ (nor yet a smoker). She drank as occasional smokers smoke: only when the occasion demanded it – except for one rare session drinking late afternoon vodka with tired mothers, when she had to be carried home.6 Her very slight frame was not equipped to handle excess alcohol but she could manage an elegant wine or two. Astley must have wondered how on earth she would fit into the literary world.
Her own vulnerabilities she kept well masked. Sometimes, however, Astley’s confidence played destabilising tricks on her. She could muster a surprising degree of front but it could collapse suddenly under strain, turning into a radical pessimism about herself, about her life, about her writing. Davis saw this tendency when she requested a brief biography from her new author. Astley’s brutal self-assessment came rocketing back: ‘Apart from a few poems in Australian Poetry and some in The Herald and other lesser places, I’ve made no impact on Australia’s literary life … I assumed you wouldn’t just want a list of my friends. It wouldn’t be very long either.’7 Davis could tell it would take this writer a long time to feel confident in owning the title of author.
In years to come, Astley’s self-deprecation would take other forms, twisting and turning around a sense of persecution about reputation. Was she or wasn’t she making an ‘impact on Australia’s literary life’? ‘I’ve never had many reviews from the literary people,’ she was fond of saying, even when it wasn’t true.8 Astley’s anxiety could also make her shy and nervously awkward in company. As such, she developed a life-long habit of bursting in on friendship (presumably so she could slam the door in its face when she chose). She developed the habit of fronting people she wanted to get to know.
Astley continued not to know where she fitted into the literary world. In late 1959 she began planning an approach to none other than Patrick White for advice, feeling that he at least would understand her dedication to style. White was to her – to many writers of the time – the ultimate prose poet, so she knew she would be seeking advice from the best. A few years later, when Tom Keneally moved into the Epping neighbourhood and became close to Astley, he realised the enormity of White’s influence on both of them. White already had an international reputation as a novelist and playwright. In Australia his fifth novel, Voss, had won the inaugural Miles Franklin Award in 1957; in 1961 Riders in the Chariot would win him another. White’s prose, Keneally recalled, seemed to them like this ‘gorgeous jungle you had to penetrate – a sort of veil – in front of the characters, but a delightful veil, undergrowth – you knew you’d been on a hunt but a fulfilling kind’.9
As Keneally reflected years later, ‘it was as if [Australian writers] were writing flash prose in attempt to show the world that we weren’t a debased race – not convict-class’. But he also understood Astley’s ‘cultural yearning’. Like her, he had grown up in Queensland, where there had been few high schools and a single university. ‘If Australia had cultural envy and yearning, it was easy to see how it would be multiplied in places like the Queensland of Thea’s youth. It was powerful stuff.’10
Astley set off for Patrick White’s Castle Hill property, ‘Dogwoods’, hoping to have a cup of tea with him. His partner, Manoly Lascaris, answered the door and told her that White was working, as he always did between nine and five, and she would have to come back another time. Colleagues at Cheltenham Girls’ watched amused as a furious Astley stomped into the staffroom cursing in her frustration. Finally, in the New Year she was able to visit, and she left White with a signed copy of Girl with a Monkey.
White wrote back a few months later. He had ‘too, too enjoyed’ the visit, and though he could not immediately read her novel, ‘From thumbing through it, I feel it looks like the real thing, not just another novel by an “Australian writer”. That terrible phenomenon!’
He advised her to ‘ignore other people’s books’ and to ‘write more and more’. He added: ‘In fact, after the age of thirty, the less one looks at fiction the better, if one happens to be a novelist. But perhaps you have some years of pleasure before you.’11
This was not exactly praise but perhaps something better: a possible friendship, though evidently not one on equal terms. Astley treasured the present of a book – Selected Writings of Gérard de Nerval – that White sent to her in September 1960, inscribed playfully: ‘For Thea Astley Gregson the Dropper-in from the Dropped-in on’.12 She also treasured his letter’s all-important phrase: ‘if one happens to be a novelist’. Their friendship would always be close to idolatry on Astley’s part, but she was hardly in a position to mind.
Astley noticed, too, the worryingly negative use of the term ‘Australian writer’: White’s disparaging tone was not unique. E
ight months later she received a letter from Hal Porter, also disdainful of the ‘Australian writer’ tag: ‘There’s very little quality in 97% of Australian writing – it’s good that your Quality is receiving its meed.’13 These were rather defensive gestures from writers she admired, especially given the talk in literary circles about recognising ‘Australian writing’.
The assumption that only a select few could discern this elusive ‘quality’ was no problem, of course, if you happened to be considered one of them. Astley was lucky to be hearing that she was one of the chosen. She had her own ambivalent attitudes towards such things: she loved White’s deep aestheticism but she was also the girl who had satirised modernism in Australia in her poem ‘Culture, 1945’.
It was a confusing time. Astley’s relationship with writing was fundamentally emotional: intellectual debates about art were not and would never be for her. In any case, she risked looking conservative when she argued for hierarchies of value in literature. Writers needed encouragement as well as being valued. Astley privately craved both and in sympathy was often supportive of anyone trying to get their work published.
She found literary life convivial. She enjoyed going to literary soirées by herself and was glad that Jack was happy about this. Porter’s 1960 Sydney farewell party had been fun and it had been a thrill to meet the poet Kenneth Slessor, introduced to her by Porter. But she found Beatrice Davis’s literary parties useful too. Writers might hear something about their chances with this or that publication, or how a grant might be coming their way. Astley had applied for a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant. Slessor, who had some inside information, approached with the news: her CLF grant had come through. She probably assumed this would help restore dignity to her sense of how she should be viewed as a writer, after her ‘run-in’ with the A&R publicity department. Astley had written to complain about the review list they had concocted: she’d expected, she said, that they’d send her books somewhere better than the Women’s Weekly!
