Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  10

  Writing as a neuter

  I don’t even know how women think. I’ve been neutered by society so I write as a neuter.

  Thea Astley, interview with Candida Baker, 19861

  As Astley completed the draft of The Slow Natives she was increasingly aware of living a double life. Her domestic routines sustained the day-to-day process of writing but she found herself engrossed in writing about the duality of the married suburban existence, the very kind she herself was living.

  Years before she had said to Beatrice Davis that she knew the territory she wanted to visit in her work; that had been the Dream Country of her early days in country towns up north. She was claiming new territory now. She was not intent on observing the ‘prying eyes’ of the local gossips; now her novelist’s eye was turned inward, to a corruptible self behind the social mask of life. She discovered and enjoyed American writers who were expert in the form of urban social satire – such as John Updike and John Cheever (the ‘Chekhov of the suburbs’) – whose short stories she particularly admired; and so Astley knew what she was aiming at. While others in Australian letters were debating what was or wasn’t ‘The Great Australian Novel’, it was an irony entirely to Astley’s taste that her epic would be about the ‘The Great Australian Suburbia’. The savagery and pathos Astley injected into this new novel reflected her increasingly disarmed psychic and emotional self.

  Young Ed woke daily to the tapping sound of the Green Hermes ‘Baby’ typewriter. He was now in upper primary school but still needed to be dropped off at 7.30 in the morning so that Astley could arrive ready for a full day of teaching at nearby Cheltenham Girls’. Astley drove the popular German ‘people’s car’, a Volkswagen Beetle. She hated driving but would end up driving more than most people, once Jack’s eyesight became an issue. The sight of ‘Thea in her VW’, emerging with frustrated relief, became a familiar one to her colleagues. From third grade onwards Ed had been letting himself in after school with his own key about an hour before Thea returned home. Ed became aware that this was an unusual arrangement; in the early 1960s working mothers were still in a tiny minority. Jack’s job at the Conservatorium in the city had even less flexibility. He took the 7.43 am train to Wynyard from Epping station, Thea and Jack’s numeric talisman for the ‘grind of life’ they both enjoyed hating. Jack made Ed’s lunches, a cleaner came once a week, and Jack and Thea, with little interest in gastronomy, shared the cooking of some very ordinary meals. Thea would retire for writing in the evening, Jack would go to his music.

  Ed was now quite often playing at the homes of friends; with families who to him resembled the smoothly functional households he saw in such TV programs as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. His home, he knew, was very different. In these shows, not only were the roles of master-of-the-house husband and domestic-duties wife clearly spelled out, but family life seemed to be a model of politeness. The atmosphere at 44a was energised by his parents’ repartee – he could see they enjoyed each other’s sense of humour enormously – but there were spaces, silences and secrets. Slowly he became conscious of belonging to a one-sided family: there were regular visits up north to see Eileen but Jack’s family visited rarely and seemed remote. Information was tightly held. Jack’s former marriage and family were never mentioned; Ed would be nearly twenty before he discovered, by accident, that the story he had grown up with – that his grandmother had died after childbirth – was a lie; she had suffered severe post-natal depression and been institutionalised.

  Jack had always visited her regularly, something Thea let slip one day, much to her husband’s irritation. For at least three or four decades after Jack’s birth in 1915, post-natal depression of such severity was barely understood and spoken of in hushed tones. Electroshock therapy was a common treatment for what was generally called a ‘nervous condition’, with little differentiation about the type of condition and the suffering of the individual. Jack had grown up keeping his own counsel about some very serious matters.2

  All children hover at the edges of the adult world, watching, but Ed negotiated his own little family with an exaggerated sense of truths held just beyond his comprehension. He couldn’t know that Thea and Jack had formed a bond early in their marriage against their respective families, largely because of the difficulties with Jack’s earlier marriage and the Catholic Church.

  As a couple they were naturally inclined to secrecy from the start. When he was much older, in his late teens, Ed worked out that their shared secrets were part of their bond, and that they often seemed at their best when teaming up against others. Only occasionally did he get to team up with his parents as the Astley family. This happened when Eileen telephoned, all neurotic fuss and concern, in the years immediately after Cecil’s death. Eileen now represented to Thea and Jack a more extreme form of the conservatism of Epping, from which they had set themselves apart: the married couple out of step in a Barry Humphries-style suburbia.3

  Since winning her Miles Franklin Award Astley’s life had become more public and she was more inclined, and more confident, to speak out on various different subjects. If she was trapped by her particular writing style, as the critics said, she would still have her say. She enjoyed opportunities to undo what she saw as misrepresentation, trying to explain publicly what she was doing in her writing. In 1963 The Bulletin had proved the perfect place to express her need for distance from those ‘Joe-meets-Mary, Joe-loves-Mary sort of Australian novels … the old Vance Palmer sort of thing’.4 The interview had been a particular success: she had declared herself ‘intensely interested in style’ (claiming White’s influence). By differentiating ‘story’ from ‘style’ Astley was trying to stake a very personal claim to the aesthetics of composition, which was also partly a reply to her critics, but also the aspect of writing that still interested her intensely.

  Personally, however, Astley was feeling stifled. Scribbled notes for the novel, to herself, on the back of postcards, lay all about: ‘One of the exciting things about committing adultery … was knowing it would not last, a knowledge that gave clutching the moment an acidic sharpness.’5

  The idea of marriage with its repetition and tedium had proved great material but Astley obsessed over her avenues of possible escape. She could see none. Much as she was arguing a lot with Jack, he was not really the issue – it was beyond that. The tenor of their tiffs bordered on comedy, she knew: ‘Even if you’re in the midst of a domestic row you think, “God, this is awful, isn’t it?” and you start laughing.’6

  Astley was in fact thinking deeply about marriage, this ‘primary magic’ that didn’t last, but it would take another thirty years – when she was well into writing books about old age – before she would ever publicly describe the extent of her disillusionment about love and marriage at this time in her life. Broadcaster and publisher Louise Adler, who published Astley’s later novels, knew enough to enter the fray:

  Louise Adler: ‘Only you could come up with “we bore each other rancid”. Why are couples so endlessly entertaining for you?’

  Astley: ‘Well, I think marriage is an unnatural relationship, don’t you? It’s gotta be – two young people get together – we gonna be together – not look sideways, forwards or backwards, we’re gonna be together for ever – next 900 years – not gonna get bored, gonna find you totally fascinating …’7

  In The Slow Natives Astley had disguised her frustrations, perhaps to protect Jack, by adopting a male narrative perspective. In her satire of the hypocrisies of suburban couple Bernard and Iris and their problematic adolescent, Astley allows Bernard to comment about their marriage: ‘There she is, he thought, and we have known each other in romantic, disgusting and boring attitudes for twenty years.’ He is aware of but unmoved by his wife’s relationship with another man: ‘They would discover that the relationship they had rejected and the one they now enjoyed and the one each might enjoy later on all went the same way.’8

&nb
sp; It is this man who comes to reflect on love between men and women, between parents and children: ‘Parental love, he told himself sourly, the only damn love affair that goes on and on. After all, loving only has to be active to exhilarate, and you accept that fact and they love you back sparingly because there is a natural wish to escape.’9

  ‘To find love, not that you are loved’ was the most crucial thing, according to Astley, ‘the only fulfilment a person can have’.10 The unconditional love of a child was the kind of love she had found, making her ‘old slipper’ version of marriage seem by contrast more stark and despairing.

  Astley was obviously concerned about Ed, old enough now at ten to be affected by her relationship with Jack and the arguments in the house. What she suspected he saw appears in The Slow Natives, a world in which ‘adults talked and corrupted each other, slandered, hated, betrayed, remained pathetically loyal and pretended self-containment, assurance’.11

  Ed was leaving the hinterland of childhood but Astley was still at heart the ever-watchful and anxious mother. She was, as the poet Fay Zwicky recalls, a ‘typical mother of an only son’.12 Zwicky and Astley had talked as wives and mothers more than as writers, and it was hard for Fay not to notice how anxiety about Ed’s welfare dominated Thea’s conversation.

  Germs were an issue. The local swimming pool was out of bounds. Bike riding was too dangerous (Ed was thirty-five before he got his first bike). Like many only children, he was often conscious of too many eyes upon him. Both Jack and Thea imagined the worst; other parents would be asked to watch out for him.13 While they were undemonstrative as a couple and Jack was not an effusive parent, Thea was a very physically affectionate mother. As he wriggled free of her embrace, Ed would look to Jack, and sometimes catch him ‘looking on, worried’.14

  Jack’s concerns were manifold. They came from a deep knowledge of the anxieties and neuroses his wife had always suffered. Nobody understood her compulsions better than he; early in their marriage he had worked hard on getting her to stop sucking her thumb. With Ed getting older, Jack was concerned about how Thea would cope once the tightly knit mother–child relationship changed. Jack also received disturbing news about his own daughter from his first marriage and the advance of her leukaemia. All these things exacerbated his natural tendency to withdraw into himself.

  The previous year – 1964 – just before finishing The Slow Natives, Astley had become aware of her growing battle with nerves. She was not sleeping, and in the day was beset with phobias about small things, worrying, over-worrying, and returning to check on switches and the like. When she read Cheever’s short story collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, she couldn’t help admiring how he detailed such phobias, placed them at the centre of life.15 Astley particularly liked the story ‘The Seaside Houses’ with its ‘thrilling finality’ of a long marriage. Reading it had worked in perfectly with Natives; she had luxuriated in the dialogue:

  The wife: ‘Oh God, you bore me this morning.’

  The husband: ‘I’ve been bored for the last six years.’16

  It was almost as if Cheever knew her mind. She was not the only one fascinated by that double perspective of being and not being, of partners resenting but enjoying the safety of society’s most prized bond. This fascination had once taken the form of a rather arch self-consciousness in her writing, as with Helen Striebel in A Descant for Gossips, who watches herself ‘enjoying the externals, I had not given myself completely’.17 Was Astley watching herself now? Was she concerned about giving herself completely?

  Astley struggled with opposite needs, a psychic schism in which extremes of emotion are bound to flourish. The novelist Jessica Anderson once wrote about the way a human being can have twin needs ‘for the shell, and the emergence from the shell’, needs that are ‘strangely one’.18

  She could have been writing about Astley. Like so many of her fictional characters, Astley’s needs and passions were out of balance with her opportunity to express them. Writing was a way of enacting her own boredom, an exercise in abjection.19

  There was much boredom to draw upon. Astley had amused herself in The Slow Natives with the character of Father Lingard, describing his boredom with Mass and himself as ‘the symbol of a yawn. A great yawn incarnate’.20 For such moments, of course, Phil’s life was always useful material. He was finding his second teaching role as a Jesuit very challenging. Increasingly, as he continued to struggle, Astley could see that the Church was taking its time with Phil, but also taking his time, his life. Writing a broad canvas of failing faith was a way to deprecate more subtly. She wrote it into the novel: ‘This is death, Sister Matthew thought, to have confessed and feel no relief.’21 It might not have been at all what Phil was experiencing, but it was something Astley herself was determined to put into words.

  Astley had always had a preternatural sense of Time but now it was truly her enemy: she appeared to others worryingly anxious, rushing always to the next task – or just rushing – as she had along Dorset Street as a young mother pushing Ed. She was struggling a great deal with her own nervous energy; she needed a physical outlet. Something to do with her hands, perhaps? Some might take to needlework but Astley simply announced, ‘I think I’ll take up smoking.’ Now she would be like Beatrice, with her own aid to conversation. Drawing on cigarettes made Astley’s hands seem like extensions of her thoughts and smoking completed her conversion to one of those speakeasy dames of American popular culture she and Davis loved, deep-throated heroines with crackling wit.

  It was the beginning of a breaking out that was also sexual. Astley was nearing forty. From this vantage point it was not difficult for her to see how marriage as a virginal convent girl to a man more than ten years her senior had retarded her sexual maturity. Astley was still conscious of her good looks, if not actually vain. Here she was writing about the corruptions and compromises of love and marriage, all the while experiencing a growing frustration about her own limited experience.

  Hidden behind the talk of the boredom of long marriages was sexual frustration. Women friends were treated to declarations – the kind that had become Astley’s conversational stock-in-trade and that were usually amusing, made for effect and not necessarily intimate revelations.

  Margaret Smith, Astley’s neighbour, remembers her friend Thea often holding court on the subjects of sex and marriage; she could spot within a few words or tone of voice that something very personal was bothering her, that a soliloquy was on its way. ‘Thea would say, “Women have their needs. Men are just frightened of them. I’ve talked with Jack, you know, and he said, ‘Go off and do something about it!’”

  ‘Jack did seem aware. He’d say, “Thea’s off with you-know-who somewhere …”’ Reflecting on the entire period decades later, Margaret realised she often did know ‘who’. Astley’s soliloquies revealed how anxious she was about her situation – ‘perhaps there was some impact, too, of Jack having been divorced – not sure’. Yet the more forceful memory her friend has of the time is that at the centre of it all was Thea’s ‘absolute loyalty to Jack’ and their union.22

  Astley was saying nothing she couldn’t say or hadn’t said to Jack; it had always been that way with them and it was important to her that it stayed that way. Jack, usually absent from these candid chats, was nevertheless the most quoted ‘giver of permission’ for them to take place. Thea could ‘look elsewhere’. Listeners were invited to draw some obvious conclusions. Discretion – though not secrecy – was appreciated. It was a strange pact. Paradoxically, Astley’s outward consternations seemed ‘highly moral’.23

  In the end what really mattered to her was the moral code that she lived by, not social or religious dictates. She and Jack had been through all of that in their day, and they had a shared view of what it meant to be truly an individual. They had both wished to be free from institutions that seek to govern the self – particularly the sexual self.

  This common ground pr
obably prevented their antagonism becoming real. They were co-conspirators again, now openly sardonic about their union: ‘till the last instalment do us part’, as Jack was fond of saying. They both had significant and separate interests. Jack had his work and plans to travel; Thea had her writing. They both had music. Their own brand of humour broke the inevitable silences. In the larger matters of life, accommodations had already been made.

  But outsiders found the atmosphere at 44a to be surprisingly convivial. Their place was a Saturday morning haunt for various friends and neighbours who sat around the bar counter planned in the early days as a central feature in the kitchen. Thea’s limitless supply of tea was always at the ready. At these times, anything could and would be said and people loved Thea and Jack together. Jack’s wit was drier but Thea was always ready with the ‘the killer droll remark. It was fun’.24 Jack was spending more time with Ed now that he was older, so on Saturday afternoons they listened to The Goon Show or jazz together, while Thea got on with some writing. If you didn’t know she was writing a novel about the despondency of failed marriages, you could almost sense harmony.

  When she wasn’t writing, Astley read real estate ads. Shacks, shanties and boltholes of all kinds had always appealed to her, the more remote the better, somewhere to house a would-be runaway like herself. The dwellings that interested her were always modest and in north Queensland, a return to her Dream Country in all senses. Astley spent these years idly sketching floor plans, alterations, totting up building supplies and legal costs in her writing notebooks in pursuit of the lusted-after hideaway. Two incomes and the occasional advance from publishers, as well as Astley’s prizes, brought the dream closer.

  In her literary social excursions, Astley was attracted by the combination of ‘intelligent buddies’ and the prospect of sexual interest from men. She tended to think of herself as the kind of woman other women dismiss as offering no sexual competition, safe in the view that men were not attracted to her because she said too much, or said the wrong thing. This was not necessarily the case, but it meant that Astley could always deflect and self-deprecate. She was always ready to compliment the good looks of another woman. Later in life these seemed odd and arresting conversation-starters: ‘God, you look about twelve today, really, you really do!’ People could see she needed to say such things.25 It was not really a way of putting herself down; it was an act of shyness first and foremost, a nervous way of diverting attention away from herself and onto others.