Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  Could the debt-harried Bacon, with his grandiose ideas of his own position in life and his high-flown intellectual aspirations in philosophy and the sciences of his time, have written such a stunningly varied and large output of plays? Plays that, no matter what their style or subject, always struck their audiences as true to the life of ordinary thought?

  Bacon too was a genius, but of a different kind. His very birth and background shaped his genius to thrill at the concept of breaking new ground in philosophical thought; as well, he hungered to devise an entirely new system that gathered all human knowledge into one gigantic relationship.

  That’s not a mind could be interested in crafting what were, after all, mere entertainments. I don’t think Shakespeare ever regarded his plays as earth-shaking advances in any kind of philosophy: they were, plain and simple, entertainments. Money? What profit the plays made couldn’t even begin to dent Bacon’s debts. Shakespeare’s history is of spending precious hundreds, Bacon’s of forever needing an income of thousands. Bacon spent much time securing this boon, particularly from James Stuart, who seems to have both needed and despised him. His own uncle, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was another who seemed to despise him, as he was never quick to help Bacon and had a tendency to ignore his letters of supplication. It also beggars imagination that no one ever referred to Bacon as a dramatist or dramaturge, if indeed he had visited that world.

  When it’s all boiled down, perhaps the strongest argument against Bacon as the author of Shakespeare’s works lies in the fact that it took 250 years for the allegation to be made at all. What the allegation implies is sheer snobbery: that the mind of one capable of grasping so much about human behavior could not possibly have belonged to a very ordinary man of no real ancestry or importance.

  There really is very little more to the Baconian Theory than that, and common sense gives the lie.

  Just because we today revere William Shakespeare far ahead of Francis Bacon is no argument, let alone proof, in itself. What matters is the kind of world they lived in, and it would be hard to visualize two men more different than they. One was a court creature, the other an entertainer: that was the social contrast. But a Francis Bacon, with his dreams of devising a new way to catalogue all human knowledge, prostituting his education and his apirations to write plays? It doesn’t bear thinking of!

  Our trouble — even the trouble of Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Smith — is that we have hindsight. We can see Shakespeare’s output for what it is, sheer genius. At the time? I imagine that Viscount St. Albans sniffed impatiently, and dismissed it as the prating maunderings of some actor.

  In his time, Francis Bacon was extremely important.

  COL ON THE WRITING OF HER BOOKS

  Geographical accident and an occupation far removed from the writing of fiction combined to produce a fact most people have long forgotten: that Colleen McCullough never did have an Australian writing career. I was an Australian who wrote novels set in and about Australia, but always with a wider audience in mind than Australians. My primary publisher was American.

  How did that come to be? Geographical accident certainly played a large part: when I embarked upon my writing career, I was living seventy miles from the world centre of publishing, New York City. My neurosciences had led to a position at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, so when I finished my first novel, Tim, it never occurred to me to send it anywhere else than to New York City, a mere two-hour train ride away. I could be a part of the publishing process if it found a niche.

  Some writers and their books travel; others do not. This yea or nay depends entirely upon how easily the readers absorb the material in a book, and to illustrate my point I’ll use my own book, Angel Puss. Of all my works, this one describes the smallest, most individualistic world; even though Melbourne and Perth are as Australian as Sydney, someone from Melbourne or Perth doesn’t get full enjoyment from it. Angel Puss is a book for Sydneysiders of a certain age. In other words, it doesn’t travel. Whereas The Thorn Birds traveled the world effortlessly, so much so that it crossed all the barriers of race, creed, color. And most of my books travel; if they don’t, I know it beforehand.

  Patriotism takes peculiar forms. Because I never lived in Australia after my twenty-fourth year, and given that my present age puts this date in the 1960s, when the world was an extremely different place, my patriotism took the form of trying to make people who didn’t know much about Australia see that country’s magic, its customs and traditions, its people in their homeland. My work took me elsewhere, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t homesick, or fleeing from a place I hadn’t liked. I loved Australia, and I thought it a marvelous place to set a novel, fresh and new.

  But all those years away from home had counted for much: I understood what people in other countries knew about Australia, and what they didn’t. Having this grasp of foreign perceptions, I was in a wonderful position to write about Australia. Had I not lived ten years abroad before I commenced to write novels, had I written my first novel still living in Australia, it would have failed to find a foreign audience back then. Homebodies take too much for granted. If the writer is Nobel Prize material, that doesn’t matter, but it matters hugely for a writer whose talents and ambitions are less exalted.

  I had always written, but purely to entertain myself in my spare time. Always novels; short stories are the province of different minds than mine. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that I must have written a hundred novels between my first effort at five and the death of my brother, a total of twenty-one years. After Carl died, I stopped, and the next few years lie unremembered deep down somewhere. Grief cannot be catalogued or described; the closest I can get is that to lose someone loved unconditionally is a spiritual amputation.

  Need for additional income kick-started my second writing career, over the far side of the gulf Carl blasted in my life. I belong to that generation of women who was paid exactly half what her male peers were paid; when Yale brought in equal pay, they decreed that it would be only for new female employees — or those confident enough to quit and hope to be reappointed. We none of us were!

  The fact that I wrote in my spare time was my secret. The nuns of my high school had known, and elicited a promise from me: that I wouldn’t seek publication until I was a mature woman. Their asking this of me arose from Catherine Gaskin, who was a few classes ahead of me at the same school. When she was fifteen she wrote a bestseller called This Other Eden, and it seems the nuns felt she would have done better to have waited a few years. As it was, no one except my mother and brother knew I wrote. If you read “Laurie” in this collection you’ll understand why it was an ordeal to have Laurie know — the snooping, the contempt, the barbed remarks. Not to mention the burning; having read an effort of mine after unearthing it from its hiding place, she would burn it. Later, after Tim was published, I took a leaf from her book and burned all save one of my existing efforts. Our reasons were poles apart: she wanted to hurt, I wanted to make sure nothing existed that was inferior to Tim.

  Had it not been for my financial circumstances, it is even possible that I may never have written for publication at all. Single women of huge energy who do not live with another person have acres of spare time to devote to “hobbies.” I drew, painted, embroidered, wrote and cooked. I was never, never lonely.

  Having made the decision to write a novel for publication, I went about the business with all the systematic precision of a scientist. As I had published nothing and knew no one in publishing, what kind of novel should this first one be? Easy! Since I was female, it would have to be a love story, the female writer’s traditional sphere. The trouble was that personally I found love stories very boring — a sort of fiction I didn’t read. However, needs must.

  Before I go any farther, I should mention that I had decided to write a different kind of novel each time I embarked upon the next venture. My research had showed me that publishers liked novelists to hew to the same line in each successive book; it makes
the product easy to market. It didn’t take a high IQ to perceive that writing different books would prove a stumbling block to my ongoing career if I were lucky enough to have one. However, first things first: write the book!

  My love story would have to be very different, very unusual. Were it not, the writing of it wouldn’t sustain my own interest. I knew I wouldn’t win a Nobel Prize, but I knew I wasn’t going to be a hack either. I had an excellent education, a scientific mind and a massive tally of reading in almost all genres. And, having plotted out a book, delved into its characters, I so loved the physical and mental act of writing. For, no matter how well planned a book is, the characters still persist in galloping off in directions the writer hadn’t counted on. It’s no different from sculpting a statue or painting a picture — what will the end result be like?

  Space doesn’t permit the story of how I arrived at my love story plot, this first novel for publication that had my future career riding on its back. Suffice it to say that I chose to write about how a young, mildly mentally retarded man might have come to marry a spinsterish woman nearly twice his age. The core subject mattered greatly to me, and my neurological career had given me the exposure and the experience necessary to delineate the characters with sympathy and understanding. I called the book Not The Full Quid, then found myself a literary agent by writing her the world’s most irresistible letter (for so I described it to her!). Shortly thereafter, my novel was accepted by the respected publishing firm of Harper & Row. The year was 1972, and I was thirty-five years old. I had been with the research labs of the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School since 1967.

  My editor loved the book, which she called the most polished first novel that had crossed her desk in twenty-seven years — except, that is, for its title, which had to go. This was to be the first of many duels about titles; I always lost them, but I’d always be back for another try next time. The book was published as Tim. It received extremely glowing reviews, and earned me the amazing sum of $50,000. Five years’ worth of Yale pay.

  The next one was, I knew, very different from Tim. So different, in fact, that I doubted whether Harper & Row would be interested in it. Its early chapters were firmly based in my own family’s history, which made a fine jumping-off place for a novel that had a number of phenomena I wanted to explore. One was the habit women have of falling in love with unattainable men. Another was the iron grip the Catholic Church had on rural New South Wales. A third was to investigate the psyche of a kind of woman we all know: the martyr. And a fourth was to paint in big, broad strokes the kind of place rural farming Australia used to be. Its magic too.

  All of which dictated that this second novel would be a far bigger book than Tim, with more characters, a sense of the passage of time, yet basically only one integral character: the central woman, martyr and lover of an unattainable man. I killed a lot of birds with the same stone. I remember writing much of it with deep snow outside my New Haven window, while my pages reeked of heat and dust. I lived between two worlds, each as real as the other.

  My agent loved it; she said it opened like a flower. But when it went to my editor at Harper & Row, I heard nothing for six months. Other writers might have picked up the phone and enquired, but not this writer. I would wait them out, and I did. When my editor did get in touch, she was dubious of the book’s merits — it was far too long, and some of its characters ran tangential to the main thrust of the plot. My answer was literally to unborn one character, lift him holus-bolus out of the book, and throw another character into jail. My editor proved right; it was better at a shorter length, and the characters weren’t missed. The title I had given it was The Thorn Birds, universally despised at H & R. But while the title wrangle was still going on, the book was auctioned for U.S. paperback rights while still in manuscript, and fetched a then world-record sum of $1.9 million. Of which I got half. Then my agent and the tax man got half of my half, to indulge the curious. There are many myths about bestsellers.

  I hadn’t expected it, nor did anyone tell me what kind of golden egg I had laid. The goose is always a goose. I’d far rather be that than a vulture!

  It had taken two years to get Tim into print; it took four months to get TTB (my shorthand for the book) into print. And it sold hugely, in so many languages I’ve long lost count. Of course the critics panned it unmercifully, just as if I had never written a book they’d praised; to earn big bikkies automatically means a book has to be trash. Which is a pity, not for the book or its author, but for the critics, who reveal themselves as utterly two-faced. I wish they understood that they can’t matter; the only vindication for a book of any kind is the test of time. If it lasts then it can’t be all bad. It was published on Friday, May 13th, 1977.

  Then came the crunch. An Indecent Obsession said loud and clear that I wasn’t about to write Son of Thorn Birds. I had spent my university years working as a skivvy in hospitals, around the period between 1954 and 1960. Hospitals then were staffed by professional nurses who had never married, and they fascinated me. Though at the time I was too young to know that I too would become a spinster, I had such a horror of marriage (read “Jim” and “Laurie”) that I must have sensed my fate. A great deal of my hard labor was done in a veterans’ hospital; ward after ward of men, some resident for years. I used to watch some of those nurses in their relationships with their men-only patients, and out of it came An Indecent Obsession: the indecent obsession is duty, and personal happiness is all too often sacrificed on its altar.

  Harper & Row hated the book. My editor left me over it, and I was never to have a happy relationship with my publisher for the two books I still owed them under contract. I refused to write Son of TTB. Poor AIO, it died. All because by mischance I had written not a bestseller, but the bestseller. Why such intelligent and widely experienced people could not, could not, could not get it through their heads that TTB was accidental and I was incapable of writing another in the same vein, escapes me. Irving “Swifty” Lazar summed their attitude up when he glared at me with those two pale pebbles lurking at the bottom of a lenticular sea, and said, “Fifteen million dollars! You stoopid bitch!” I daresay I was. But the fact remains that I was the only one came out of TTB still the same kind of person I was before it. My feet were still on the ground and my long-term writing plan was unchanged.

  Harper & Row continued to hope for Son of TTB. I think the chief executives (all of whom I knew quite well as a result of TTB) felt that once I’d gotten this peculiar aberration out of my system by writing An Indecent Obsession, I’d see the commercial light and settle down into an obedient writer of bestsellers. Then I gave them A Creed for the Third Millennium, which I abbreviate as Creed. The shit hit the fan in all directions. If AIO had been a radical departure from TTB, then Creed was a radical departure from Tim, TTB and AIO! Where the hell was I going with my writing career?

  It goes almost without saying that I love Creed, which was a huge pleasure to write. Of course, in stoutly maintaining that I love the act of writing, that I wallow in it sensuously, keenly, voluptuously, deliciously, I am mortally offending those literati who on principle state that to write good books is agony, the hardest work possible. I dismiss the agony: if a career is that punishing, why do it at all? The hard work, yes, but doesn’t hard work go into every satisfying career? Why is one not allowed to enjoy hard work? I love hard work, especially cerebral hard work. It galvanizes me, I fizz with life because of it! So when I say that I love to write and relish every aspect of the process, I speak the simple truth. A writer’s tools are words, a writer’s blueprints grammar, syntax and usage, a writer’s prepared ground are form and structure. Surely if the writer is as well versed with his/her equipment as a neurosurgeon is in that arena, then the writing process should provoke the enjoyment any professional feels when working in what is, after all, the chosen field.

  Creed came out of a deeply rooted conviction I hold — a series of observations — and an intriguing question. My personal convictio
n: that our planet is grossly over-populated, and every family on its face must adhere to the one-child family for at least six generations. The observations: that with the enormous increase in the price of heating oil, the colder parts of the U.S.A. are dying, downtowns boarded up, factories vanishing, while in warmer regions population keeps on swelling. And the question: if a Christlike man were to emerge at the beginning of the third millennium, how would he manage to get his message of salvation to the people? Because of the question, I couched the book in allegorical form.

  Well, poor Creed died too, and I was out of my contract.

  I think contracts are outmoded. That they exist at all seems to be a businessman’s solution as to how to tame and tie down that captious, inexplicable beast, the creative artist. I would like to see a publishing world without the contract for future books; a contract for the one in the publisher’s hot little hand makes some sense at least, for both sides. But I have been wangled into some pretty strapping contracts in my time, and deplore them. I am now seventy-four years of age, and there is still no Son of TTB. Can you imagine the one I’d write today? The heroine crippled by arthritis, the hero watching his aortic aneurysm, da de da de da. That’s why publishers leave me alone at last to do whatever is my thing.

  The Ladies of Missalonghi was, in a sense, commissioned. My dear friend Anthony Cheetham had acquired the British publishing house of Hutchinson, which had a centennial birthday coming up. Anthony wanted to celebrate it by a series of novellas from his top writers, each writer’s book to fall into a specific category. Mine was the ghost story. I had been chewing a version of the Cinderella myth for many years, and saw how to combine the two. Ladies was the result. Classic Cinderella, with a ghost as the deus ex machina rather than a fairy godmother.