Cirrus@Austlit

'Whenever people gather together, they tell each other stories. As anecdote, gossip or reminiscence, stories arise naturally in human communication. And that is what is so appealing about the short story: its naturalness, its being a part of timeless human experience. There is no need to be defensive about writing or reading a story. Stories are basic to our existence and are beyond justification. Our understanding of the world of public and private events is expressed in the stories of history and case history. Our futures are projected in war-game scenario stories no less bizarre than our own fantasies and reveries. The media bombard us with news stories and storylines and the compressed narratives of advertising.' (Introduction)

'‘My mind doesn’t work in those regions,’ Wallace Robson, my tutor at university, is reported to have said when asked about aesthetics. My own response was much the same when I was asked to contribute to a symposium on ‘Realism’. ‘Realism’ has never been something I have understood as an aesthetic or stylistic issue. It is more a moral issue. It represents a shorthand term for telling the truth in writing, which for me is what writing is about. Understanding, not mystification; discovery, not obfuscation. In part this has its aesthetic implications, a matter of seeing the object as it really is, describing characters as they really are. As they really are? Yes. For me the most interesting novels and stories are those that are based on real people rather than on fictional constructs. They are the ones I return to. When you read the work of Jack Kerouac or Christopher Isherwood or Katherine Mansfield or Anthony Powell or Christina Stead or Evelyn Waugh you are encountering characters drawn from the life, from observed experience. Of course some writers adapt the life models more than others. The strength of Christina Stead’s writing was the closeness of her observation: her characters were closely based on originals, and the wisdom and value of her work comes from the wisdom of her observations about people. Other writers will combine aspects of more than one person into a fictional figure. I have done this myself. The advantage is that you can always say that this character is a composite, not a libellous portrait. The disadvantage is that you can end up with someone like a police identikit portrait, someone who is a combination of known features yet unlike any known living being.' (Introduction)

'Establishing the New South Wales Writers’ Centre in a former mental hospital building predictably caused much comment. The popular feeling is that writers are likely to be somewhat mad anyway, and certainly could well be locked behind the walls of an asylum for the good of the community. As long as writers continue to make the community anxious, as long as they continue to ask the forbidden questions and to raise the difficult issues, they will always provoke this response.' (Introduction)

'One of the basic ways to develop as a writer is to read the work of writers you admire. Just as painters traditionally learned to paint by studying the classics, and copying them, so writers learn to write. You start by imitating writers you admire. Then you go on to other writers, and imitate them. There is nothing wrong in this. What is wrong is when would-be writers refuse to read other writers.' 

(Introduction)

'How do you write? The best way I know is simply, do it. Just sit down and do it. There is no other available advice. And if you don’t know what you want to write, you sit down and write about how you don’t know what to write. After a page of that, ideas start to flow.'  

(Introduction)

'In terms of the literary marketplace, my own practice has always been to write the story first, and then to look for a suitable place for publication afterwards. I have never written fiction with a particular magazine or publisher in mind. I have always believed that the writing has its own demands, that the work has to take its own direction and shape and not be deformed by commercial pressures. There are pressures enough without inviting more. Inevitably when we write we are influenced by the context of the society, inevitably there are dangers of shaping the work to conform to the acceptable, inevitably there are the dangers of self-censorship. Once you write for the market you have surrendered unconditionally to those pressures.' (Introduction)

'I was once addressing a conference of visiting Korean writers at the Opera House, and, talking of Henry Lawson, I mentioned that there was a statue of him nearby. The delegates expressed a wish to see it. So at the end of the session we set off into the Domain. And I couldn’t find it. For twenty minutes I led an increasingly hot and exhausted procession of close to a hundred Korean novelists and poets amongst the varieties of native flora. But of the statue of the great native writer there was not a sign. We never did find it. The episode became quite well known in Seoul.' (Introduction)

'I had never thought that much about how poems looked until I read Rosemary Huisman’s The Written Poem. The appearance of the poem was something I pretty well took for granted. Maybe that was the heritage of my English puritan background, a distrust of keeping up appearances – the sort of thing that provoked Luke Slattery, when he was editing the now defunct Australian Literary Review, to ask me if I ever ironed my shirts. I explained that I was following the New York crumpled look, redolent of the New York poets of the 1970s; or the Beat look, of the Beat poets of the 1950s and 60s, in their beaten-up and down-beaten aspect more than in the beatitude associations.' (Introduction)

'I have never been convinced about the advice you often find in ‘How to Write’ guides that you should show your work to a friend. The assumption is that the comments you get back will be useful. It depends on who the friend is, in part. If you have written something absolutely, evidently brilliant and you show it to another writer, the response may be less than enthusiastic. If you have written something really original and ground-breaking, then it may prove too new and different to produce any useful response.' (Introduction)

'I am not a good correspondent. Whenever I do write a letter it inevitably begins with ‘Apologies for not having written earlier’. Emails are no different. Tom Keneally told me how early in his career he was much puzzled at Frank Hardy’s complaint that the hardest thing about being a writer was the correspondence. Later in his career Tom realized what Hardy meant. Writing is one thing; but all the literary-related-activities, as Frank Moorhouse used to term them, take far more time than the original writing. The endless correspondence with publishers, editors and agents, let alone with other writers, students writing dissertations on your work, and so on, becomes a massive business. Evelyn Waugh had a printed card he would send out saying something like ‘Mr Evelyn Waugh is travelling abroad and has left no forwarding address.’ He made an exception for rich Americans who might buy multiple copies of his books.'  (Introduction)

'I was once invited to contribute a chapter to The History of the Book in Australia project to be published in three volumes by University of Queensland Press. After flattering comments about ‘your acknowledged book trade expertise and experience’ came the crunch. I quote: ‘Because of the special nature and scope of this ambitious undertaking, no payment is available for editors or contributors. However contributors will receive an exclusive pre-publication purchase offer for all three volumes.’ That, I felt, concisely summed up the history of the book in Australia. No payment is available.' 

(Introduction)

'I was listening to the jazz on the radio one morning, when some tracks from Bernie McGann’s album Bundeena were played. And the presenter remarked how Bernie McGann used to live at Bundeena in the 1960s and practised the saxophone out in the bush there. And I suddenly remembered, yes, I had written a story about Bundeena in the 1960s. Frank Moorhouse was living there, and I had arranged to go and visit him. Except that when I arrived it turned out he had stayed in town. His girlfriend was there, and I remember her telling me about swimming and sunbathing on the beach and hearing this amazing jazz saxophone playing in the bush. It was an image that struck me, and I incorporated it in a story I wrote about the occasion, ‘Joe’s Absence’. It was an image that stayed with me, and I was amazed to have its reality confirmed. Much of the story I wrote is fictionalized. But it was good to have the veracity of this one detail confirmed, decades after the event.' (Introduction)

'‘What’s in a name?’ as the Bard of Avon put it. As well he might, given the various contemporary spellings used for his own – Shaxpere, Shaxspere, Shagsper, Shakspere, Shackespeare, Shakespeare. I never had trouble with the spelling of my name. The problem was that someone else was already using it.' (Introduction)

'I was reflecting on how the world of advertising shamelessly plunders the world of the creative. It is hard not to reflect on it, bombarded as we are by billboards and posters and television commercials. The particular example was a campaign for a Hyundai Elantra. ‘A streetcar named desire.’ No mention of the late playwright Tennessee Williams, the title of whose play it was. No benefit for poor Tennessee Williams, long dead. I wondered, did his estate benefit?' (Introduction)

'I was listening to Amiri Baraka on radio one morning. Vicki Viidikas introduced me to Baraka’s work years ago. At that time he was known as LeRoi Jones and his Tales in a Grove Press Black Cat paperback were an amazing breakthrough of fictional possibility. The movie Dutchman was a brilliant tour de force. Originally associated with the Beats, he later took up an Afro-American position and changed his name. Later still, after seeing the limitations of nationalist and race politics, he moved on to become one of the very few truly progressive, radical writers in the USA.' 

(Introduction)

'Every new book I begin seems to present a different sort of problem. In theory, having written one, the next should be easy. Just follow what you did before. But in practice it does not always work out like that. For a start, doing what you did before can all too readily be a recipe for boredom. The times I’ve roughed out the outline of a book and thought, ah, that section will be simple, that’s what I did with this story or that novel, I know how to do that, it hasn’t proved simple at all. I would find I couldn’t do it again a second time. The novelty, the creative energy, the creation through discovery wasn’t there.' (Introduction)

'One of the perennially fascinating questions that novels always raise is that of the origin of the characters. Are they totally fictional, or are they based on real people? Helen Garner remarked to me that she had never seen the point in making up characters. I feel much the same way. One of the functions of literature is that of assisting the understanding of life; and you are likely to understand more if the characters you read about are based on actuality.' (Introduction)

'When I arrived at the University of California at Santa Barbara to teach creative writing, I had no idea of how to go about it. I had my own experience of writing novels and stories. But how was that to be translated into teaching practice? I tentatively asked some of the staff there how they did it. ‘Oh, we were hoping you would be able to tell us,’ said Edgar Bowers. He was a poet whose most recent collection was called Living Together. That was the title of my first novel. I think we viewed each other with some suspicion about this coincidence. But he did offer me one piece of advice. ‘I tell them they can write anything they like, as long as it’s not science fiction or about death.’ After that I was plunged into it.' (Introduction)

'The author of thirty books with international sales in excess of sixty million copies, Morris West was undoubtedly the most successful Australian novelist. Yet his work has received little serious, critical notice. In part this was due to academic prejudice against popular fiction. He also suffered from being labelled a Catholic novelist, as Judah Waten and Frank Hardy suffered from being labelled left-wing novelists. The chattering classes never warmed to him. The glitterati rejected him because he was a Roman Catholic and believed in God. The Catholics were unenthusiastic because of his self-appointed role as vocal critic of the church. The academics ignored him because in the years of his success fiction deemed to be commercial was not discussed in lit. crit. And since most of his fiction was set in Italy, the U.S.A. and Asia, rather than Australia, he tended to get ignored in the development of Australian Literature studies. His leaving his first marriage and leaving Australia provoked resentment in the media. In writing political thrillers about public issues, in maintaining an independent and uncompromising critical stance, he inevitably offended many powerful interest groups. His refusal to accept the offer of a formal political role from the Labor Party caused deep offence, as he recorded in his memoir, A View from the Ridge. Yet the critical industry has been able to accommodate other commercially successful writers, and other Catholic writers. West, however, was a consistently questioning, challenging, oppositional voice.   Conformist Catholics saw him as troublesome and critical, the left categorized him as Catholic and failed to read him. This was a mistake.' (Introduction)