to Bohemian Balmain, Sydney, Australia.
People are sick to death of the South Pacific.
He quickly flies to Balmain and has a look.
There it is, like a movie! Writers, artists!
The harbour, blue as always, the container wharves
just like it says in the novels, and the lesbians …
My God, the Lesbians! Bohemia Gone Mad!
This is too much for James, and he flies out.
TOP WRITER JETS OUT OF SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA!
But is that how it really happened? I like to think
of James in the Honolulu Hilton, older and sadder,
nursing a drink by the pool, nursing a broken heart,
dreaming of a pert little lesbian in Balmain.
John Tranter
(from Crying in Early Infancy, 1977)
THE LITERARY LIFE
The Tabloid Story Story
Michael Wilding
(adapted, from The Tabloid Story Pocket Book, 1978)
We came up with the idea of producing a packaged short story magazine as a supplement to other host journals as Carmel Kelly, Frank Moorhouse and I were sitting on the balcony of the Balmain Volunteer. We had all become increasingly dissatisfied with the literary quarterlies in Australia, feeling that their editorial selection of fiction was out of phase with the new fiction being written. This was mid 1972. Before setting up Tabloid Story we had all tried to work through existing media. And occasionally there had been mavericks in the overground scene who had done crucial work. In Sydney Jack de Lissa, Ron Smith and later Gareth Powell had been publishing good, exciting new fiction in Squire, Casual and Chance International in the late 60s. These provided outlets for the new writing. Their editors didn’t have that orientation to particular traditions of the short story that the literary magazines seemed stuck to. Of course these magazines were sexist and male chauvinist. The women’s movement attacks on them now are well known. At the time we wrote for them, male chauvinism and sexism were not terms we had heard; the women’s movement was not in existence. I didn’t have any formulated intellectualised objections to the magazines since no critiques of sexism and chauvinism had been developed. I was simply always terribly embarrassed going to newsagents and looking to see if the latest issue had run a story of mine.
To us at that time the girlie magazines provided the only outlets for work that dealt with sexuality, for works that weren’t committed to the old outback tale and other formulae that the established literary quarterlies ran. The girlie magazines were open to new sorts of writing – in part, for sure, because people bought the magazines to look at the tits – pre-pubic hair days, these were; it didn’t matter too much about the stories since few people read them; but the editors and publishers nonetheless did read them, did have an idea of a new writing, did have a belief in a new prose; and those editors had a wider, non-academic, non-establishment taste than the editors of the quarterlies and of the respectable publishing houses. The girlie magazines were the first onslaught on bourgeois sexual repression; the women’s movement critique of sexism could only operate after sexism had at least become explicit in the society. After the taboos had been broken down, then the values embodied in sexuality could be verbalised, expressed – and examined. Before the girlie magazines began, the total expression of sexuality in writing, with a huge list of banned books prohibited entry to Australia, served as a form of social and political control.
By 1972, Squire, Casual and Chance had folded, and Man followed them into extinction in 1974. After years of publication we never knew how many people actually read the stories in the girlie magazines – but with circulations of between 40 000 and 100 000 they offered some chance of getting a writer an audience. The literary quarterlies circulated between 1000 and 3000 – and much of that was dead circulation, straight into institutional library stacks. And the people who did read the quarterlies were already committed to literature. We wanted to reach that new audience that normally wouldn’t pick up the quarterlies with their daunting, expensive, permanent-seeming format.
As far back as 1966 Moorhouse had experimented with City Voices, an inner-city newspaper modelled on the original Village Voice concept. Murdoch has bought New York’s Village Voice now; but in 1965 no one wanted to invest in anything that gave voice to those sorts of things in Australia. City Voices lasted five issues and never reached its break-even circulation of 1500.
When we settled on the tabloid format for Tabloid Story, it was a development of something we had already had experience of. The same line of thinking was obviously going on elsewhere; our first issue was just out when we were mailed a copy of Fiction, a tabloid from New York devoted to new stories; and that was soon followed by the tabloid American Poetry Review. Hide them, said Frank, otherwise everyone will think we copied the idea. Zeitgeist, suggested Brian Kiernan, who joined us early on as our fourth editor, initially in Melbourne. But apart from using tabloid format and publishing ‘new fiction’, Fiction was an orthodox literary magazine.
The tabloid format was only one part of the concept we had. Packaging the magazine as an already edited and designed supplement was the most revolutionary idea. In the 50s Frank Hardy and other realist writers had joined together to syndicate their stories round the trade union newspapers. But the mode we evolved was that we would produce not single stories for syndication, but an entire packaged magazine, already edited, typeset, designed and camera-ready. The host magazine taking Tabloid Story would give us a run-on of 2000 copies of the supplement for us to distribute to subscribers, contributors, bookshops and as complimentaries and exchanges with other magazines internationally. This way we got access to the host paper’s circulation – without having to build up sales ourselves, without having to sell advertising, deal with bookshops and newsagency distribution, or arrange printing. To be free of those problems that nearly always destroy literary magazines, we were happy to give the edited and designed package for free to the host. We had little alternative. When we began Tabloid Story most editors did not believe readers wanted stories and we had to persuade them to run an issue as an experiment. One of the associated purposes of Tabloid Story – which often seemed to be as much a strategy as a magazine – was to encourage magazines that hadn’t run stories before to run them now – as Nation Review and National Times indeed soon began to, and have continued to do, as a direct result of Tabloid Story.
Tabloid Story was part of a strategy to promote the short story and to get better conditions for short-story writers. We thought of the magazine as a writers’ action product – born of necessity and continued by people who saw themselves primarily as writers, not editors. And so we introduced into our editorial practice certain improvements on the treatment we had received from other magazines. Frank noted down a record of ‘the little things’ we did in our relations with contributors:
(a) We didn’t require them to type.
(b) We didn’t make them pay for a reply – the literary magazines were the only business in the world which required that their clients pay for the courtesy of a reply – usually a form-reply (although we appreciated the same as cost saving).
(c) We made personal comments on the stories (which were not always appreciated).
(d) We supplied multiple copies to contributors.
(e) We paid on acceptance – not publication.
We broke that haughtiness and contempt and discourtesy still found in literary magazines by recognising contributors as the source of life for a little magazine.
We couldn’t have launched the magazine without a subsidy. With no money changing hands between Tabloid Story and the host journal, with no significant bookshop income (since Tabloid Story was appearing as a supplement to papers already on sale or given away free) we were utterly dependent on a grant. In mid 1972 the Commonwealth Literary Fund was floating the idea of subsidising a new literary magazine: the idea of starting a magazine explicitly for ‘young writers’ was raised, but we weren’t inter
ested in that feeler. We wanted to see a magazine for new writing but the age of the writer was immaterial. We also wanted a magazine that would pay its contributors. The literary quarterlies up to this point had been paying writers between $10 and $40 for a contribution; their subsidies benefited not the writer (who was supposed to be grateful for getting into print) but the printer. Tabloid Story was in the forefront of the freelance rates war. It was the first literary magazine to pay the Australian Society of Authors recommended minimum rate, and from the beginning we made public our payment rate – again the first time a literary magazine had done this. This was in part a calculated attempt to campaign to raise payments and to force by example other magazines to declare their rates of payment. Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland and Clem Christesen of Meanjin of course complained bitterly of the pressure to declare rates of payment; but once Tabloid Story had publicised the issue there was no going back; the Literature Board made it official policy that magazines receiving subsidies should declare publicly in each issue how much they paid contributors.
We received a trial subsidy of $2000 and produced our first issues. Matt Peacock took No. 1 for National U, the Australian Union of Students paper distributed free on every Australian university campus; it appeared on 20 October 1972.
Each of these sixteen-page issues printed around 50 000– 60 000 copies – incredible for a literary magazine.
Then came the general election, Labor in office, and the suspension of the Commonwealth Literary Fund’s activities and the great hiatus before the Literature Board of the Council of the Arts (the name was later changed to the Australia Council) got into operation. We were receiving a flood of manuscripts, but we had spent our $2000. Establishing the nature of the magazine, we had used for the first two issues stories from the editors and from writers whose work we knew, the new fiction that we knew was around. Frank had been editing what turned out to be the last number of Angus & Robertson’s short story anthology Coast to Coast, and this gave him a pretty good idea of one segment of the traditional short-story field as well as of the new writing. We had come across other material in the course of the anti-war readings that had been going on for a while – there were a number of stories in the anthology that came out of that movement, We Took Their Orders And Are Dead (Ure Smith, 1971). And there had been the Balmain Readings of Prose and Poetry. This was what we drew on. We used two unsolicited stories in No. 2 – but the big flood of unsolicited material didn’t begin to arrive until after No. 2 had to be on the Nation Review presses to fit in with their schedules and Christmas–New Year reading.
We knew there was good prose around that wasn’t surfacing in the quarterlies or the overground publishing houses; we knew once we got Tabloid Story going it would attract a lot more new prose we didn’t even know about, people we had never read, heard of or encountered; this is what happened. We shaped the first two issues from the available materials, and shaped them to show the sort of new writing we wanted to encourage – no more formula bush tales, no more restrictions to the beginning-middle-and-end story, no more preconceptions about a well-rounded tale. The manuscripts that began to come in after the first two issues got around further radicalised the magazine, opened it up even more from the initial – as we thought, open – conceptions we began with.
Our emphasis was open, not restrictive. It was the domination of the formula bush tales, the straight narrative that we objected to; we didn’t publish them because they were well catered for. We wanted to provide space for the varieties of stories that weren’t being catered for.
Tabloid Story was committed to the variety of the new prose. There were the fabulists, notably; they tend also to be writers whose emphasis is on the finished fable, on the rendered artefact. Clarke experimented in these areas in the 1860s and 70s. Contemporary models, however, tended to be non-Australian for the new writers: Borges, Cortazar, Casares, Calvino, Barthelme. In Australia Dal Stivens, Peter Carey, Rudi Krausmann helped establish that fable line in Tabloid Story.
Then there is the literature of process – fiction interested in, self-conscious of, its own evolution, aware of its generative process: the analogues here would be Kerouac and the beat tradition of spontaneous writing; and the Black Mountain version of that from Olson – as in Fielding Dawson’s prose. We had Kerouac in a story about the Kerouac wake, one of those early readings that has spontaneously generated its own myth; we had a couple of stories from Fielding Dawson; and Kris Kemensley and John Jenkins amongst others in this area.
Then there was the confessional, revelatory mode, less defined by its manner than by its materials – sexuality, drugs, inner-city bohemian lifestyles, despairs and ecstasies. Frank Moorhouse, Vicki Viidikas and Sandy Slater seem to belong in part here. Amy Witting’s ‘A Piece of this Puzzle is Missing’ was written as a response to this note in Tabloid Story – but its critical perspective was missed by the writers of 200 letters to Education when the story appeared in a Tabloid Story there; they, the Minister for Education, and Murdoch’s Daily Mirror ran horror stories about the moral tone. Kerouac, Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller are international analogues.
And we also had a residual relationship with the socialist realist story; our attitudes might vary towards it, but all of us – Frank, Carmel, Brian and myself – had some fascination with it as an intractable dead-end, as a possibility for development, as political, as activist. John Emery and Gary Taylor both wrote stories that were in that tradition – Emery’s ‘Caravan Park’ was later filmed by Phil Noyce.
Though the new writers may not have consciously been concerned with expressing Australianism, though some would conceive of themselves as ‘writers’, as supra-nationals, the context in which they worked was Australian. Even at their most imitatively American, they demonstrated their Australianness in revealing the new domination of all areas of Australian cultural and economic life by the USA. Especially the counter-culture. I think now that the belief that writers were writers, a supranational camaraderie, is probably the ideology of political control – of imperialism, of the establishment, of the multinational corporation world that we live in. British, USA and USSR imperialism obviously cultivates the belief. ‘Internationalism’ means having the product of the economically dominant imperialist aggressor thrust onto the market of the second or third world consumer; literature is as much a product as any other manufactured commodity, and it bears an ideological message as part of its identity.
But advocating in reprisal the specifically Australian is something that is of ambiguous signification. Mere nationalism merely mystifies. Unless the nationalistic proclamations have a radical economic analysis behind them, then they are simple window-dressing, false advertising, puppeteering. The problem for Australian writers today is that the ‘Australian’ proclamations have seemed to be the preserve of the conservative – conservative both politically and aesthetically. Until now the celebration of rural Australia has seemed to be the preserve of the nationalist conservative – not of the radical or alternative consciousness.
New writing often deals with sex. Not always, not compulsively, not inevitably – but often; and this was getting us into problems with the straight papers that were potential host magazines. We had no intention of censoring or of rejecting material because of its sexual component – if you do that you don’t have any new writing. But the first issue had been in trouble in Queensland when the Brisbane Vice Squad received complaints about ‘The Oracular Stories’ and seized all copies from the University of Queensland campus. Apparently the whole absurd business involved some student political dispute, and the case anyway was dismissed. With the second issue the distributors of Nation Review in Queensland and Western Australia demanded that one of the stories should be removed from all copies distributed in those states – so ‘The Nembutal Story’ was replaced by a blank page and a half in those editions.
The other problem was what constituted a short story. The host editors who said, ‘Yes, give us a supplement,’ expected the
traditional short story the literary quarterlies were already catering for. The new writing – with its different idioms, its abandonment of the beginning-middle-end linear narrative, its search for new forms and its use of new experiences – they found shapeless, inept, unintelligible, pointless. We didn’t see any point in producing Tabloid Story to run old-style stories. We had created it to cater for the new writing. Moorhouse withdrew from the running of the magazine, except to negotiate the Bulletin issue at another time of crisis. But before he went, we finally produced two eight-page issues at the end of 1973. No. 5 was in Newswit, the New South Wales Institute of Technology paper; we were again unhappy about restricting an issue to a paper that appeared on only one campus, but at least this was a readership outside of the university paper scene. And then we phoned Richard Neville on the Living Daylights who seemed interested in doing an issue, sent him down the rejected Show-business paste-up and it appeared in the Living Daylights the next Tuesday, as Tabloid Story No. 4.
Having got this far it seemed absurd to let the magazine die. So we wrote to the Literature Board with a new proposal – telling them how things were getting bad all over, how the newsprint shortage meant sixteen-page issues with lots of white space were no longer feasible, how we were losing editors through the nightmare of trying to organise host publications as well as read the manuscripts, and how the only way we could survive was to pay a managing editor. Carmel Kelly, Carl Harrison-Ford and Damien White had all tried being production editors without much success.
Pat Woolley became managing editor in February 1974 and Colin Talbot, one of the founders of Outback Press and the Australian’s rock columnist, became Melbourne editor. Things began to look up. For six months we had been negotiating with Qantas and finally they came good and ran Tabloid Story No. 6 as a four-page insert in Q. V. for May, their give-away magazine that reached 150 000 passengers. Geoff Wyatt phoned to say that his story had been silently censored by Q. V. No. 7 appeared as a four-page insert in the Melbourne Times, an inner-city throwaway; at the last minute they wanted to drop it because of a couple of fucks, but a compromise was reached and the fucks were reduced to f on the plates. After 150 000 international readers for No. 6, we were again worried about a limited readership for No. 7 and tried for a similar Sydney inner-city paper: the Glebe was interested in running it until they saw the stories, and so that fell through. No. 7 finally appeared in a second edition in Honi Soit. Tabloid Story No. 8 was arranged with the Living Daylights, and at last we were catching up with the backlog of accepted stories, some of which we’d had for eighteen months. The Living Daylights missed an issue for Easter which we were supposedly in; when we phoned them to check whether we were appearing in the next issue, they said they’d just been told they had closed down. Richard Walsh absorbed the Living Daylights into Nation Review but refused to take the Tabloid Story we had designed for it. Education, having rejected us before, took the paste-up No. 8, and Michael Hourihan, Education’s editor, was immediately blasted by the Teachers’ Federation Council for publishing it without consulting them. There was an outcry about obscenity – in particular about Amy Witting’s story, which ironically had been a reaction to the sexual note of some of the earlier stories. The next two issues of Education ran selections from the 200 letters from teachers complaining about the shocking filth etc. of the stories. Eric Willis took the opportunity in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly to denounce Hourihan, the Teachers’ Federation, us and the federal government. According to the Sydney Morning Herald Willis accused the federal government of generally subsidising ‘anti-establishment and arty-crafty’ material aimed at debasing the Australian way of life.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 16
