Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  Travel in trains and buses gave Astley ample opportunity to observe people and their idiosyncrasies, and to begin working them up as characters. Travel on public transport added to her long list of petty irritations: loud music in buses joined grainy breads that couldn’t be properly chewed and snooty descriptions of food on restaurant menus. These fired up many of her award speeches. And when asked as a member of Paul Keating’s Creative Nation panel in the mid-1990s what was the most important thing she would like to see change in the arts, she replied, ‘Lowering the volume of rock music on buses.’35 Rodney Hall, who was there at the time, remembers how it broke the whole solemnity of the moment.

  Astley liked planning adventures on public transport. ‘Don’t forget writers on trains,’ she wrote to Laurie Muller. ‘I keep thinking more and more that I want to attend a train conference on Aust.Lit. heading out to Charleville or Cunnamulla. Doesn’t the west deserve something. Maybe Kingaroy, even! How about that Joh …’36

  Trains gave her one of her most characteristic short story titles: ‘Diesel Epiphany’ was pure Astley, with its odd yoking of a classical word and sluggish locomotive. Titles were very important to Astley, though she was not always good at picking commercially successful ones: ‘Come Home People’ became the much better A Kindness Cup. In the early 1980s D’Arcy Randall, her editor at UQP, had worried about the title of An Item from the Late News but agreed to it when Astley suggested ‘Myth-fits’ – which Randall thought appropriate but too cute.37 When Penguin tried to change the title of her early novel The Slow Natives, she would have none of it. It’s Raining in Mango was unusual in being a working title that was retained. It was good, and nobody questioned it.

  Astley needed that certainty, worried that Penguin might consider the novel’s family saga too much like Peter Carey’s novel Illywhacker. Given the brouhaha about the coming 1988 bicentennial year, Astley didn’t want to appear merely modish – ‘Hell, are all writers on the same wave length!’38

  By now Astley’s insecurities were a kind of pathology that couldn’t be shifted by facts. She was, however, more in charge of the commercial decisions about her work than she had ever been. She might protest that legalese made her eyes cross and that contracts made her think of Chico and Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera, but she now understood a great deal about writer–publisher commerce.39

  While in the US she had engaged American literary agents Arnold and Elise Simon Goodman of Goodman Associates. Elise soon discovered that Stacy Creamer, editor at G.P. Putnam’s Sons, loved Astley’s writing, seeing it as entirely fresh and a welcome break from the recommended lists of the New York Times Book Review. Creamer would go on to publish many Astley titles in the US. Elise Goodman and Thea became firm friends; as contracts and documents flowed across the hemispheres, Elise would look out from her desk in her Manhattan apartment, ‘wondering what Thea was doing all the way over there’.40 She did not know that the leaves on the locust tree outside her apartment in New York were almost identical to the Australian jacaranda Astley had grown up with.

  In the next few years Astley acquired an Australian agent and was published in the US and UK, with a steady stream of new paperback editions of her earlier works by Penguin and UQP, and even A&R who had retained some rights to her early novels.

  Astley had encyclopaedic recall of the editions and sales of her works. She remembered how even the two editions of the 1967 US paperback of The Slow Natives had pretty much sank without a trace: she would not let that happen this time. She insisted on hardback publication and reprints for her titles in the US. In this she had the support of Elise Goodman, who wrote to Penguin: ‘It does still – alas – make a difference to the reviewers.’41 In late 1986 as Astley was working on the third draft of It’s Raining in Mango, Penguin was asked to ‘hold off’ sending Astley paperbacks to interested US publishers to make way for the serious hardback career in the US that Astley longed for.42

  By early 1987 the drafts of Mango had taken their toll and Astley found herself with ulcer problems and exhausted, ‘like a returned serviceman from Beirut when I got to Xeroxing stage’.43 After four or five drafts she certainly did not wish to re-read the novel or make any more major changes. Within a month of her finishing, she had signed a contract for paperback publication with Viking/Penguin in the US. Chasing up details of contracts and royalty statements was preoccupying and made writing feel like ‘drain-digging fitted in between’ but Astley kept a keen eye on how transnational rights operated.44 She was also dealing from time to time with film treatments and rights, which troubled her even more – she’d had ‘hell with Descant’ – and Item’s treatment had been like ‘a junior high school boy’s masturbatory fantasy’. Astley also wondered why a scriptwriter’s name should go ahead of the writer whose idea the book had been, and why putting together a screenplay might take five years to complete.45

  Astley’s direct manner and occasionally waspish tongue could cause offence – like telling the Penguin rights editor ‘her telephone voice was brunette’ – which she would try to smooth over with a joke.46 Astley was still unsure of what banter she could take for granted between women. It was easier with writers: Helen Garner hadn’t seemed to mind when Astley observed that she looked as if she had ‘a new bloke’.47

  When the cover for the Australian Penguin edition of It’s Raining in Mango finally arrived, she already had Putnam’s US hardback version as a comparison, which she preferred, complaining that the Australian cover was ‘too busy in all its gloss’.48

  She continued to be – without really needing to be – an agitator for her work. When Brian Johns left Penguin in 1987 Astley lost another key publisher–author relationship. She admired his successor Susan Ryan, former federal Minister for Education, and ‘longed to have a good debate’ with her ‘on the Education bit’ – but had not actually met her.49

  In the meantime, Elise Goodman was angrily questioning some Penguin decisions about the sales of Astley’s earlier titles. This was enough to rattle Astley and make Penguin invite their US publisher to explain the rights and sales of Astley’s works as they stood. Australian authors were increasingly agitating for separate contracting of works by US publishers but were not necessarily going to find publishers willing to pay a separate advance. It was a lost opportunity with past titles, something Astley did not forget.

  Response to the publication of Mango consumed Astley; so much depended on it because she wanted to honour the American interest in her work. She was to be a writer-in-residence at Memphis State University early in 1988, where Fay Zwicky would later report that she had been ‘a smash hit’.50 In another ten years the novel would be selected by a German publisher as part of a collection exploring Australian identity.51

  When the novel was reviewed positively in The New York Times Astley immediately wrote to UQP begging them to let Putnam’s UK produce a hardback ‘Two by Astley’, a joint volume of The Acolyte and A Kindness Cup. Penguin asked her for an old copy of Natives to work from for the paperback but she said – pointedly – that she really must hang on to the ‘last American hardback published by M. Evans in 1967’.52 Astley was well into her ‘post-book low, why-do-I-bother-writing mood’.53 At the same time she was endorsing books by other writers, such as Kate Grenville’s bicentennial novel Joan Makes History.

  Her mood was real. She and Jack were ageing. Ed was now working in television as a music producer, researcher and scriptwriter, putting in long hours at the Channel Nine network in Sydney. It wasn’t a secure job in the way that she and Jack would have preferred. Despite their love of music and encouragement of Ed’s musical talents, Thea and Jack shared a suspicion of the entertainment industry, a view common to many parents of their generation. To others, Ed’s working life would have seemed a successful one – he was now being offered jobs at other studios. Ed and Michelle were doing what they had always done, travelling, working, and there were no grandchildren on the horizon. Astley never me
ntioned this to either of them.

  Writing was her ballast, perhaps especially now. In the years to come it would give Astley little breaks from caring full-time for Jack, and there was continuity in seeing so many literary people she knew in Australia and the US. Late in 1989, serendipitously, a new fan emerged – ‘a skin specialist who came into our lives from the blue,’ Astley wrote. Geoff Cains collected Australian first editions and wanted Thea to sign his books. He and his wife, Sarah, invited Thea and Jack to spend a weekend at their bush home in Mittagong. Astley delighted in ‘sneaking out to pee in early morning Mittagong on the salubrious lawns and dodging the affronted glances of joggers’.54

  When the Cainses had first met Jack and Thea at Cambewarra, it seemed to them that Thea ‘was lacking in stimulation’, although entertaining, ‘it was as if she didn’t want to discuss the books at all, as if she’d said everything’ and she could be quite ‘repetitive in her conversation’.55 Like Helen Garner, Geoff had picked up Astley’s tendency to act out set scenes. Astley even revisited projects: in a letter to Garner, Astley suggested a joint writing exercise, much as she had with the novel she had mentioned more than twenty years before to Thelma Forshaw.56

  Geoff thought Ed and Michelle’s money-making activities in real estate were greeted without much joy; to others it seemed bizarre that these successful ventures were bitter disappointments to Thea. It was as if she viewed people almost with cruelty, even when she loved them. He also wondered whether Thea felt personally exposed by her writing – she had said to him ‘it’s almost as if I have no self left’. Thea and Jack as a couple now seemed ‘totally dependent’ by this stage of their lives. Thea was beginning to panic about Jack’s health, including his frequent skin cancers; Geoff helped organise health cover.57

  By the beginning of 1989 Astley had a draft of the next novel, ‘Rubbertime’ (it would become Reaching Tin River), and she had already begun to think of finding an Australian agent and offering her work on the open Australian market. Susan Ryan at Penguin was bitterly disappointed to lose Astley but it was well known in publishing circles that there could be further changes at the Penguin helm.58 Astley chose to give the new manuscript to literary agent Jill Hickson of Hickson Associates in Sydney. The agency had begun more than five years before and had quickly established a reputation for energetic promotion of Australian authors. Hickson’s written response was warm, intimate and emotional; to Astley it must have seemed irresistibly simpatico, with its deep understanding of ‘the artful yet unselfconscious and completely satisfying way you have told Belle’s story’ and, ‘the tension in the telling of the sexual epiphanies’.59

  A new voice of support had come at just the right time: Astley now had someone who understood her work and who would promote sales of her books overseas. She knew the agency already handled many key Australian writers such as Tom Keneally, Janette Turner Hospital, and Robert Drewe, as well as more commercially popular writers such as Bryce Courtenay. Hickson astutely avoided the question of the manuscript’s title, a further sign perhaps that here was someone with the kind of clever tact that Astley still valued so much, the kind Beatrice Davis had always had.

  Davis was now in hospital enduring hip surgery, but she still handwrote a letter of thanks for Astley’s ‘generous praise’ on an ABC arts show. She remembered that almost thirty years before she had experienced ‘the shock of finding a real writer springing out of the general stodge: the individual imagination that marked Girl with a Monkey’. Now she wrote, ‘I’m very proud of you Thea Deah’, a sentiment that almost nobody but Davis could have expressed without Astley taking offence.60

  16

  Inventing her own weather

  I must tell you: I have invented the weather. My personal weather.

  Vanishing Points by Thea Astley, 19921

  The 1990s brought more success to Astley than she had known for thirty years. Her personal weather was changing; she was now surrounded by approbation that even she could hardly ignore. Astley had often joked that to write about Queensland she would have to leave the state first, but in 1988 It’s Raining in Mango picked up Queensland’s Steele Rudd Award for short story collections.2 Penguin paperbacks of her earlier works were in production, including reprints of Mango, the earlier Beachmasters, and in the next year A Kindness Cup; the cover of The Slow Natives featured Queenslander houses, which pleased Astley.3 She had accepted an honorary degree from the University of Queensland. The momentum of success was sweeping Astley forward.

  In her new agent, Jill Hickson, Astley had chosen someone with excellent overseas publishing contacts (though this would lead to the end of the US Goodman connection) as well as local influence: Hickson was married to New South Wales Labor Premier Neville Wran, which suited Astley politically. Agency commissions were settled efficiently and an invitation to the exclusive Woollahra home of the Wrans was in the offing. Hickson worked quickly, placing Astley’s new novel, Reaching Tin River, and tracing the position of all rights to her new author’s books.

  Overseas rights sold through Penguin in the US and in the UK led to editions of most of Astley’s works being published and available in those countries. These included Mango, but also Beachmasters, An Item from the Late News, A Kindness Cup, The Acolyte, A Boat Load of Home Folk, The Well Dressed Explorer and Girl with a Monkey. No author, let alone one like Astley who had been writing for forty years, could fail to appreciate this moment: her entire oeuvre was in print and highly visible across the world.

  Overseas exposure was much on Astley’s mind, not least because she was now in regular contact with a number of writers and academics outside Australia. Letters and cards arrived regularly from University of California writer and academic Carolyn See, who wrote an occasional ‘Literary Letter from Australia’ for The New York Times Book Review and promised, ‘You’re in it and you’re wonderful.’4 See admired Astley’s work and was thinking of teaching A Kindness Cup in her Australian literature course – all reminders for Astley that she had made her mark and would be welcome when she went to the US again.

  Most significantly, Astley had won the Patrick White Award for 1989. This annual award had been established by White with his money from the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature, and was given to a writer who has been creative over a long period but has not necessarily received adequate recognition. Astley was at lunch with Rodney Hall when the news came through. She said quietly to Hall, ‘Ya know what it’s for; it’s for people who fail … question is do I take it or not? Think I’ll take the money and run.’ Her response did seem perverse but Hall knew some of the undercurrents here. Astley had talked dismissively of prizes before; she was happy to have them but according to Hall ‘she felt her serious purpose had not been recognised’.5 Of course, this had by now simply become an idée fixe.

  What did Astley want? She had won all major literary national awards, her work was being published outside Australia, academic scholarship on her novels and short stories was increasing (it had never been as thin as she liked to imagine). By the end of the 1980s, it was true to say that Astley’s novels were not widely set on school or university syllabuses, but some were. Hunting the Wild Pineapple was a particular success, set as a senior text for the New South Wales HSC in 1986, 1988–89 and 1994. The growth in postcolonial literature university studies saw Beachmasters appear on several courses. Astley had become a much-fêted interviewee, as well as featuring in two prominent collections of interviews with Australian writers (Candida Baker’s Yacker collection and Jennifer Ellison’s Rooms of their Own), published in 1986. Critical attention of her novels via academic journals now included articles in nearly all of the major ones: Westerly, Australian Literary Studies, Southerly, Hecate and Ariel. Robert Ross, the US academic, was now working on an edited book of essays, one of which would be about Astley, to be published in a year or so. All of this activity had emerged despite the fact that she had always professed scorn about literary scholarship; in 1972, when
asked to speak at a conference on Patrick White, she replied, ‘I’m not able to dig out those transcendental themes university critics are so good at; merely able to discuss form.’6 Patrick White had personally endorsed the award in his name – something he knew Astley would know – and it was the final reparation for White’s letter to Astley nearly thirty years before.7 It was an acknowledgement that Astley had survived what he had called ‘the rackety career of novel writing’.

  There were many endings now in Astley’s life. Hal Porter had died in 1984, and Douglas Stewart had gone the following year, a loss that affected Beatrice Davis badly. Other friends were becoming frail, including Beatrice, now eighty (she had been born in 1909), who had suffered a fall at home and was in hospital. There were tales of Beatrice smuggling cigarettes and whisky into the hospital, but within a year she would be in a nursing home. Barrett Reid from Barjai days was dying, and of course Jack’s health remained the dominant issue at home. He had recovered from his hip replacement surgery in 1989 but that seemed like the beginning of health issues, not the end. Astley often made light of the situation: ‘He has X-rays of the prostheses that would make a cubist foam with envy,’ Astley observed.8

  Astley was still writing. As letters of congratulation for the Patrick White Award poured in from writers from all over the country, she concentrated on what was happening with her new work. It’s Raining in Mango and now Reaching Tin River extended a whole visionary landscape that she had begun to explore decades before. Now, the practical question that played on Astley’s mind was what to do about an Australian publisher.

  Penguin had played an important role in her US visibility and her sales figures were seriously growing. But the change of publishing director in the company had made her a little less comfortable there. A new publisher, Louise Adler, had been appointed at Heinemann. She was already well known as an arts broadcaster, but now she was planning a strong Australian fiction list. Adler, who had considered Astley a loyal Penguin author, was surprised when Astley decided to break away, which she knew was a big decision. Jill Hickson was strongly in favour of the move, and they both liked what Heinemann was trying to do for Australian authors. Astley also liked the fact that Heinemann was prepared to offer a better deal than Penguin. Adler suggested that it wasn’t just about the money, and Astley did feel loyal to Penguin, but she cared about being a professional writer and the money was tied to that.9