There is at least one bravura performance in Melbourne right now, and it warranted a much larger house than we saw last week (February 1), when Southbank Theatre was only half full. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s long poem The Rape of Lucrece was first seen in Australia during the recent Sydney Festival, but it was premièred almost two years ago, at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

On a sharp triangular stage – mostly gloomy, sometimes lit, with tall, distressed pictures hanging on the walls – Camille O’Sullivan recites and sings most of the 1855 lines (the performance lasts eighty minutes). Irishman Feargal Murray, her sympathetic accompanist on piano, helped to adapt the poem for the stage; Elizabeth Freestone is the director.

O’Sullivan – part French, part Irish, a former architect and painter who now devotes much of her career to music – bounds onto the stage in a dark fascist overcoat and introduces the poem (rarely performed, rarely listed as one of Shakespeare’s major works) so urgently and accessibly that it takes a moment before we recognise the verse. Lucrece (1594) and the earlier Venus and Adonis (1593) were conceived as a pair (both are dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton). The Lucrece stanza has an additional rhyme (ababbcc): Venus and Adonis is ababcc.

The scene itself, unlike that of the al fresco Venus and Adonis, is claustrophobic: a tent in ‘the besieged Ardea’ of the opening line. Brilliantly, with her excellent vocal resources, O’Sullivan introduces her three characters: the cavalier Collatine, who boasts of his wife’s beauty and virtue, and rashly leaves her alone; the visiting Tarquin, who listens and resolves to have her; and Lucrece herself, ‘Lucrece the chaste’, a phrase which tells us everything until after the rape, when notions of honour and shame rouse her.

Camille O'Sullivan as Lucrece (photograph by Keith Pattison)

Tarquin’s lengthy approach to the tent is most suspenseful (the lighting is deft), and the rape itself generates colossal tension; rarely is an audience so attentive, so respectful. O’Sullivan – throwing off Tarquin’s brute coat and becoming the supine victim in her slip – conveys Lucrece’s terror and outrage. When she sings the verses, as she often does, O’Sullivan’s vast cabaret experience is evident; the voice is strong but flexible, and highly emotive.

Rape done, Tarquin (‘this faultful lord of Rome’), sickly sated, makes his exit:

He like a thievish dog creeps sadly thence;
She like a wearied lamb lies panting there;
He scowls and hates himself for his offence;
She, desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear;
He faintly flies, sweating with guilty fear;
She stays, exclaiming on the direful night;
He runs and chides his vanished, loathed delight.

Lucrece – left a ‘hopeless castaway’ – summons Collatine, intent on revenge, only to stab herself on his arrival, a cue to two of the most vivid stanzas in the poem:

Stone-still, astonished with this deadly deed,
Stood Collatine and all his lordly crew;
Till Lucrece’s father that beholds her bleed,
Himself on her self-slaughtered body threw;
And from the purple fountain Brutus drew
The murderous knife and as it left the place,
Her blood, in pure revenge, held it in chase;

And bubbling from her breast, it doth divide
In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
Circles her body in on every side,
Who like a late-sacked island vastly stood
Bare and unpeopled, in this fearful flood.
Some of her blood still pure and red remained,
And some looked black and that false Tarquin stained.

O’Sullivan – weary after this virtuoso reading and performance – is clearly moved at the end, as is the audience. No one interested in innovative theatre or Shakespeare’s poetry should miss this unforgettable performance.

The Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Rape of the Lucrece is presented at the Sumner Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, 6–10 February 2013.

 Opera Australia returns to Melbourne for a short season of three operas – one German, two Italian, all notable for their gory finales.

The season opened on 14 November with Moffatt Oxenbould’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which has been entertaining us since 1998. Done well, Puccini’s ‘orientalist’ masterwork is riveting. The orchestration alone is worth the price of the ticket. Done badly, it can be interminable. The première – at La Scala, in 1904 – was a famous fiasco, a rare failure for the wizard of Italian opera.

Happily, this was an outstanding performance, one that got better and better all night, culminating in scenes of great drama and pathos. Conductor Giovanni Reggioli drew sure, subtle sounds from Orchestra Victoria. Oxenbould’s stately but dramatic conception holds up well. The courtly semaphore-like Japanese gestures are ubiquitous at first, but this settles down, allowing us to concentrate on the many dramas of fifteen-year-old Cio-Cio-San, perhaps the composer’s most poignant creation, along with Liù in Turandot. Barry Ryan, our Sharpless, the US Consul who must do Pinkerton’s dirty work, is outstanding. Young local James Egglestone plays the American cad. It is a light, high, accurate voice, and he hits all the notes, possibly waning slightly in the arduous love duet, but returning to the stage in outstanding voice an hour later (or should we say three years later?), when Pinkerton, accompanied by the American wife he always craved, acknowledges his many imperfections in the great trio and in his doleful aria ‘Addio, fiorito asil’.

James Egglestone and Hiromi Omura in Madama Butterfly
(photograph by Jeff Busby)

Sian Pendry, as Butterfly’s constant servant Suzuki, makes much of this noble rôle, and acts affectingly. But this is Hiromi Omura’s night, and this must be one of the finest Butterflys we have seen in years. Quite an actress, she remains in character all night, negotiating with ease the heroine’s marked transformation in outlook and temperament, from clueless virgin to undeceived suicide. The fantasy scene that opens Act Three could easily come unstuck in lesser hands, but here Omura is at her most actorly and compelling. 'Un bel di' could hardly be sung better. It is not a huge voice, but Omura copes with Puccini’s surges. Only the moving farewell to her infant son (a remarkably well-behaved little actor) is sung light-voiced, but it is no less affecting for that. Really, it is an awesome assumption of a truly great and truly difficult rôle.

Hiromi Omura as Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Nothing, it seems, happens in Scotland except cloudage and mariticide. Opera Australia’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor (first presented in Sydney a few weeks ago) is remarkably sombre. A series of huge panels, covered in dark clouds, rise, fall, and tilt, providing a kind of bleak architecture for this latest rendition of Donizetti’s most famous opera.

John Doyle’s direction is sober, static, subdued. The sizeable chorus, deployed by Doyle, behaves like a frosty Presbyterian army. They enter in rows, interweave methodically, handle props as if their moral reputations depend upon it, and largely eschew expression. The wedding celebrations at Ravenswood Castle are quite joyless, despite the rousing music. D’immenso giubilo, indeed! When Lucia, having murdered her unwanted spouse, enlivens the occasion with her sanguinary fancies, the chorus remains rigid, emotionless, barely responding to Donizetti’s flitting freak. Still, the chorus sings forcefully and impressively throughout.

The vast stage is radically bare. This would suit Wagner, but I’m not sure about Donizetti’s busy, peopled opera. When two chairs are (theatrically) introduced in the third scene of Act One, it feels more portentous than the Second Coming. Later there is a long nuptial table on which the hysterical Lucia relives her gory consummation.

Lucia, of course, always dominates this opera, notwithstanding the excellence of Donizetti’s writing for male voices in this his forty-fifth opera (first performed in Naples in 1835). Famous as the long and elaborate mad scene is, Lucia has some superlative music in her earlier scenes, notably ‘Regnava nel silenzio’ and the jubilant cabaletta ‘Quando, rapita in estasi’ in the first scene, and a small, exquisite cavatina during her demoralised scene with Raimondo.

Emma Matthews as Lucia – girlish, sanguine, wide-eyed, a victim who smiles too much for her own good – is (understandably) cautious at first, and the high notes feel a little effortful, though always accurate. For the first act it is a winsome performance, not terribly original.

The mad scene is quite different. Here Matthews comes alive – comes alive to die. There is nothing glamorous about opera these days. Twitching and mad-eyed, the bare-footed Lucia shuffles on stage, her plain white nightgown covered in blood (with the usual modish menstrual additions). Here the orchestra plays every bit as well as it did during Butterfly – which augurs well for next year’s Ring Cycle. The addition of a glass harmonica-like electronic keyboard (the harmonica was Donizetti’s original choice, but Benjamin Franklin’s invention) during the mad scene is inspired. It is such a weird, luring, other-wordly sound – perfect for this long, abject, infinitely melodious scene. Matthews – eschewing grandiose effects and shuffling round the stage like a demented murderess in Prime Suspect – takes it slowly and imaginatively. She responds brilliantly to the companionable flute. Rightly, she brings down the house with the cabaletta ‘Spargi d’amaro pianto’.

Emma Matthews in Lucia di Lammermoor (photograph by Jeff Busby)

The men are equally fine. The expressive-faced Giorgio Caoduro (Lucia’s venal brother Enrico) doesn’t waste any time and kicks off the night with a spirited aria. Aldo Di Toro, as Lucia’s hapless lover, Edgardo, is a conventional actor, but he sings his difficult music with great feeling, assurance and brio. If Opera Australia is ever going to give us another I Puritani, they need look no further than Matthews and Di Toro.

For some reason the director has chosen cut the Wolf’s Crag scene – a regrettable choice, since the music in this tempestuous contest between Enrico and Edgardo is lively and the available baritone and tenor would have savoured it. Why shorten an entertaining night at the theatre?

The youthful David Parkin, as Lucia’s chaplain Raimondo, brought impressive sympathy and accuracy to the rôle of Raimondo, Lucia’s often aghast chaplain.

(photograph by Jeff Busby)

In one of the many paradoxes of bel canto opera, Lucia’s mad scene doesn’t close the opera. It is Edgardo, on being told of Lucia’s mad descent, who ends it with two arias, during the second of which he manages to stab himself much more neatly than Lucy of Lammermoor could manage. As the curtain descended – or rather, as the big cloudy panels folded on the latest victim – our boisterous conductor, Guillaume Tourniare, lost control of his baton, which went sailing over the pit – a fitting flourish.

Unfortunately, New York and the Met call and I will miss Cheryl Barker (who sang so beautifully in the Sydney production of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt in July) in Strauss’s coruscating Salome, which opens on 1 December.

Opera Australia is performing in the State Theatre at the Arts Centre Melbourne. Madama Butterfly runs until 14 December 2012 and Lucia di Lammermoor until 15 December 2012. Salome opens on 1 December and runs until 15 December 2012.

 There is, understandably, much umbrage and anxiety in Canberra following Fairfax’s decision to remove its literary editor at the Canberra Times and to rely exclusively on literary reviews and commentaries emanating from Fairfax’s two main broadsheets, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald – broadsheets that will themselves become tabloids next year, presumably with less literary and cultural content. Australian Book Review regrets this decision, and hopes it will be reconsidered. The Canberra Times has long carried some of the most distinctive and extensive books pages in the country. It seems extraordinary that such a wealthy city – a major university city – a national capital even – cannot support its own bespoke literary pages and must, like some outpost, rely on the word from Melbourne or Sydney. Variety of opinion and sensibility in such a deplorably concentrated media environment as ours is surely worth defending. Without it there will be many victims: writers, readers, critics, booksellers, publishers, etc. We support the campaign to overturn this unfortunate and philistine economy.

Below we carry an open letter from many of those involved in this campaign. We will update it regularly as more names are added, and we welcome readers’ comments.

Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review

Dear Editor,

We, the undersigned, wish to draw to national attention the implication of the upcoming Fairfax consolidation of The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times book sections. This has the potential to reduce significantly the content of the three separate sections in terms of both the number of books covered and reviewers. The same review would appear in all three outlets. This will particularly impact on the Canberra Times, currently one of the best book review sections in the country, if, as seems likely, most of the reviews in future will be sourced from ‘Fairfax Central’.

This consolidation will considerably reduce divergent voice and opinion on both fiction, non-fiction, and poetry books in Australia. While Fairfax has indicated that some ‘local content’ will still be included, there is no doubt that many authors and their books will no longer be reviewed. Unlike the United Kingdom and America, where there are numerous publications, Australia is not well served by alternative national literary outlets, Australian Book Review being an honourable exception.

Canberra has the highest book purchasing and reading per head of population in the country, so it seems counter-productive that a search of the Canberra Times book section already only brings up reviews sourced from Sydney and Melbourne. We recognise the challenges confronting the newspaper industry, but we also want to emphasise that the digital era provides opportunities which are currently not being recognised in local content, advertising, and bookshop sales.

We would argue that the reading publics of Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney are sufficiently different that online literary diversity should be promoted by Fairfax, rather than the opposite trend. The lack of public dialogue within the Fairfax papers on this issue to date, despite numerous submissions, is also a matter of regret, especially given the need for public debate is so often espoused by those organs.

 Jaki Arthur, Joel Becker, Carmel Bird, Alison Broinowski, David Brooks, Sally Burdon, Alexa Burnell, John Byron, Tracey Cheetham, John Clanchy, Paul Cliff, Kirstin Corcoran, Sara Dowse, Suzanne Edgar, Christine Farmer, Heath Farnsworth, Jane Finemore, Ian Fraser, Brendan Fredericks, Irma Gold, Alan Gould, James Grieve, Janet Grundy, Robert Grundy, Marion Halligan, Paul Hetherington, Chris von Hinckeldey, Claudia Hyles, Subhash Jaireth, Brian Johns, John Kerin, Cora Kipling, Kathy Kituai, Alisa Krasnostein, Elizabeth Lawson, Lesley Lebkowicz, Caroline Le Couteur, Charlie Massy, Andrew McDonald, Debbie McInnes, Patti Miller, Jennifer Moran, Ann Moyal, Kerrie Nelson, Hoang Nguyen, Susan Nicholls, Jane Novak, Benython Oldfield, Kate O’Reilly, Frank O’Shea, Moya Pacey, Geoff Page, Andy Palmer, Bettina Richter, Andrew Schuller, David Skinner, Melinda Smith, Linda Spinaze, Peter Stanley, Colin Steele, Jen Stokes, Dallas Stow, Faye Sutherland, Peter Tinslay, Bethia Thomas, Leon Trainor, June Verrier, Kaaron Warren, Judith White, Robert Willson, Belinda Weaver, and Cameron Woodhead

Bricks, knowledge, gravity

‘I just read a history of bricks.’

We learn about the ways our teachers have influenced us over many years. As an undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne, I took every class taught by Professor Peter Steele SJ. More than a decade after I first sat in his office, and only days after his death, I recall a statement he made almost as an aside during one lecture. The class was on travel writing. Not the popular genre, where narratives of Tuscan revelations or adventures on the trans-Siberian railway abound, but a more ragtag bundle of texts: The Odyssey, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and, a particular favourite of Steele’s, Gulliver’s Travels. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Jonathan Swift, a fellow priest with an appetite for the world’s many wonders.

The reading list for Steele’s class was already an odd selection, but his casual statement in class that he had been reading about bricks revealed a world of reading that lay before me. A lover of fiction and poetry, I had devoted almost all my reading to these genres, dipping liberally into the literary essay along the way. But here was a radically different suggestion: a history of bricks; essentially a history of the buildings we construct that are meant to last. I thought of the different character of homes made of red brick, and those made of yellow brick. I pondered again the Yellow Brick Road of Oz. Later, when reading of Timbuktu’s mud architecture, and when visiting adobe pueblo sites in the American Southwest, I thought again of this history of bricks. How like the Peter Steele I came to know over a number of years to understand the world from the perspective of the materials with which we build it. In various library catalogues, I have looked up the subject of bricks, and a number of books have come up. I have often wondered which volume he read, and am sorry I never asked him. I am grateful, however, that he introduced me to the work of, among many others, Mandeville. The weird account of this knight’s travels eastward into an increasingly wild and unrecognisable medieval world is one I have returned to often, both in imagination and on the page.

Another text Steele revealed to me was the poem ‘Matthew XXV: 30’ by Jorge Luis Borges. He often brought a poem to class, projecting it on a transparency, and talked us through the reasons why the poem impressed him. Borges’ poem ends with the following lines:

… In vain have oceans been squandered on you,
in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.

These final four lines, he said, never failed to humble him, to haunt him – and they have come to have the same place in my own life. I read those lines and reflect that every poem I have written fails, somewhere – is still not the poem; will probably never be that poem. Yet when I read last year’s Best Australian Poems, I was struck by Steele’s poem ‘The Knowledge’. In its gentle gathering of worldly phenomena and its almost serenely contemplative mood, I felt that this poem distilled so much of what I loved about him as a poet. I read it and thought: ‘He has written the poem’ – that is, the poem that, for me, most simply represented his poetic voice and concerns. Ever questioning that knowledge which was his life’s quest, the poem ends ‘No end of wisdom: but what does a frog / in a well know of the waiting ocean?’ The ocean had not been squandered. I wrote him a letter to tell him how much I admired the poem.

I remember, too, the day he told me of his diagnosis, now several years ago. It was before I moved to the United States to study at Georgetown, a move I may not have made if I had not been Steele’s student. I already knew he was sick, and wanted to see how he was feeling. When I arrived at Newman College he was waiting outside the gates. In a nearby café he told me frankly and clinically of how his illness had been discovered.

As ever, he was interested in talk of other things. I told him that Susan Stewart’s book Columbarium, which I had just read, contained four words that were new to me. Looking them up, I was pleased that Stewart had – of course – used them correctly, and thus taught me, better than the dictionary, how they should be used. This seemed to amuse him. We spoke of Elizabeth Bishop, and I said casually, ‘Bless her heart.’ He paused, and then with both amusement and gravity, then finally his priestly gentleness, agreed, ‘Yes. Bless her heart.’ I told him that I had recently taken up trapeze lessons. He told me, ‘I often think of you as gravity defying.’

Remembering that last statement, and a number of other things he told me over the years, I feel that, perhaps, I have not defied gravity enough; nonetheless, I like to think that Peter would be pleased to see how my interests have broadened and broadened over time, and that each time I deviate from the literature area of a bookstore or library to another set of shelves – science, history, theology, philosophy – it is not a little because of him. I am certain I am just one of the many students to whom Peter Steele delivered a much richer vision of the world.

Kate Middleton’s first collection Fire Season was published by Giramondo in 2009, and won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry. She holds an MA in literature from Georgetown University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. From 2011–12 she is the inaugural Sydney City Poet.

Below we reproduce Peter Steele’s late poem ‘Maze’, which appeared in our June 2012 issue:

Maze

Birds are amazing, newspapers, stoves, friends.
James Richardson

But wait, there’s more – as when the hummingbird
flies backwards for the hell of it, or
the odd flamingo’s pinkened up by snacking
on blue-green algae. Aeschylus, potted
by a dropped tortoise, was one unlucky Greek –
from the same stable as Melvin Purvis,
who pioneered belching on national radio.

Were you an ant you’d start the day by stretching,
and, at a pinch, have a big yawn;
were you a cricket you’d listen through the slits
of your eager forelegs: were you, alas,
a white shark, you’d never take sick but always
be hungry: and if a caterpillar,
you’d boast to the end a couple of thousand muscles.

The ermine in white is the weasel in brown, and the chow
the only dog with a black tongue:
mice were sacred to Apollo: a camel-hair
may be a squirrel’s tail: the mosquito’s
wings are thrashing a thousand times a second.
If you look for the only crying creature –
or laughing come to that – consult a mirror

and find, your mind bested by wonder, your eyes
lit up again at the starry torch,
rue and its makings, something of jubilee,
the shot-silk of the hours. Better,
as the man said, to keep on dreaming small,
than see given to dissipation
the friends, the stoves, the newspapers, the birds.

Peter Steele

Patrick McCaughey and Peter Steele at the Fricke Museum

As we broaden our team of contributors and extend our non-Victorian content, we are currently focusing on Queensland, with good results and some excellent new contacts. We expect this quota to increase markedly in coming months. In mid-July I will be spending a few days in Brisbane, spreading the word about the magazine and recruiting new contributors. I’ll be taking part in a few events at the University of Queensland and the Queensland Writers Centre.

On Thursday, 19 July I will take part in an event at the Queensland Writers Centre – ‘an intimate evening of wine, cheese and chats’. I very much look forward to meeting Brisbane’s pool of talented and emerging writers. My aim will be to give them practical information about how they can engage with ABR and the best way to do so.

Date Thursday 19July

Time 6:00–7:30 pm

Where Queensland Writers Centre, Level 2, State Library of Queensland, Stanley Place, Cultural Centre, South Brisbane 4101

RSVP This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

As ever, I welcome approaches from seasoned reviewers or from those who want to chance their arm in a critical sense. All you have to do is send me an email outlining your experience and interests (authors, genres, etc.) and sending me one or two examples of your work. My email address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

From time to time I chat to Sky Kirkham on the excellent 4ZzZ Book Club, our subject being literary news and recent developments and offerings at ABR. Here is a podcast of our latest conversation (courtesy of 4ZzZ Book Club). Click the Play button to stream the podcast, or click the link ('peter_rose_interview.mp3') to download it.

Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review

‘An important book’ is one of those facile terms that usually have an off-putting effect – like ‘the defining election of our time’. But some publications do have a galvanising effect, and one of them is Dial M for Murdoch, written by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman, and published (with laudable speed) by Allen Lane. For this reader – this anxious addict of the print media – it’s one of the most troubling books of the year; essential reading for anyone interested in the media or in our democratic processes. It’s a perfect companion to the Guardian’s brilliant, valiant coverage of this lamentable affair.

Tom Watson, of course, is by now very familiar to us. The Labour MP – no friend of News International (‘the tub of lard’ they dubbed him sweetly) – traces the origins of the scandal, right back to 2005, when an innocuous news story about a prince’s knee injury led to something rather bigger and darker. Watson, with a few courageous, relentless colleagues – lawyers, parliamentarians, journalists, actors, some of them sick of being traduced in Murdoch’s papers and indignant at being stalked or having their phones hacked – pursued the story for years, often at some professional risk and without much support, until the revelations in July 2011 about News of the World’s conduct after the murder of Milly Dowler accelerated the process of exposing the institutionalised criminality, mendacity, corporate megalomania, and sheer immorality.

Watson and Hickman’s book is quite chilling. Peter Wilby, reviewing it in the Guardian Weekly (18 May 2012), began:

Even if you are familiar with the News of the World phone-hacking saga, you will be gobsmacked by this account. It is a tale of stupidity, incompetence, fear, intimidation, lying, downright wickedness and corruption in high places.

Robert Manne, covering the story in the June issue of The Monthly, mused about the likely coverage of the book in Australia, where Murdoch controls seventy per cent of our newspapers. Well, the book is in reliable hands at ABR. Anne Chisholm – journalist and biographer – will review Dial M for Murdoch for us. Anne is very accustomed to writing about dubious and domineering media moguls. With her late husband Michael Davie (a former editor of The Age), she wrote a biography of Lord Beaverbrook (1992).

Look out for Anne Chisholm’s review in the July–August issue and earlier in ABR Online Edition, where major articles of this kind now appear in the weeks leading up to publication.

Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review

While the Brits prepare to traipse up and down The Mall brandishing their Union Jacks and Coronation Chicken to fête our remote head of state’s Diamond Jubilee, what better way to mark a rather more momentous local milestone – the centenary of Patrick White’s birthday (28 May 2012) – than by reading the man again, and reading one’s favourite book by him, after more years than one cares to recall.

A few weeks back I headed to Clunes Booktown with thousands of other readers and bibliophiles. Away from the dozens and dozens of antiquarian book displays and the brass band in the quaint rotunda and the ferocious Punch and Judy and the hay-bale maze in the main street, Tess Brady and her colleagues presented an interesting program of interviews, panels, and workshops. I chaired one of these sessions, a tribute to Patrick White, and was joined by three friends and colleagues: Peter Goldsworthy, Michael Heyward, and Nicholas Jose. We began by discussing our first encounters with White. Peter Goldsworthy, borrowing The Tree of Man from the Glenelg library, thought White was from South Africa. For Michael Heyward, it was The Aunt’s Story. ‘It changed the shape of your mind.’

That’s exactly how I felt when I read White for the first time. This was earlier, in 1973, when I was seventeen. I bought a copy of The Aunt’s Story for about a dollar and read Part One in a single gulp. I don’t think I’d ever been so stirred by anything in my life, especially that last, inexpressibly tragic paragraph:

Theodora looked down through the distances that separate, even in love. If I could put out my hand, she said, but I cannot. And already the moment, the moments, the disappearing afternoon, had increased the distance that separates. There is no lifeline to other lives. I shall go, said Theodora. I have already gone. The simplicity of what ultimately happens hollowed her out. She was part of a surprising world in which hands, for reasons no longer obvious, had put tables and chairs.

I recall having to put the novel aside for a couple of weeks before I could read the other two parts. I couldn’t bear much more of that knowledge.

To be sure, Theodora’s domestic metaphysics or epistemology are guaranteed to speak to a moody adolescent, but the beauty of the prose and its rare simplicity (‘the moment, the moments, the disappearing afternoon’; and this of Theodora: ‘She was as negative as air’) move me still as I read a rather more expensive copy of the second edition (1958), which I bought recently from Kay Craddock: ‘corners of boards slightly bruised, edges slightly rubbed ... From the library of Australian journalist and critic, Neil Jillett with his bookplate, designed by Spooner ...’

Never, for me, was White’s prose more expressive, more original, more observant. I had forgotten how much energy he derives from his verbs, often of the simplest. ‘And the cows wound into the yard at evening to be milked. And Gertie Stepper punched the dough.’

From left to right: Peter Rose, Nicholas Jose, Michael Heyward, and Peter Goldsworthy

It’s prose that deserves to be read aloud, slowly and savourly. In Clunes, during our panel, Nick Jose wished we could step back and just read from The Tree of Man. There’s a thought for the next Booktown. ABR might do something similar ourselves when we move to The Boyd next month.

It was salutary to be reminded in Clunes that only 464 copies of The Tree of Man have sold this century. Let us hope that Peter Goldsworthy, who came up with this dismal statistic, was responsible for a few more sales when he extolled, and briefly read from, White’s 1955 novel, for many people his greatest achievement.

Well, now we all have many reasons to reflect on and explore this uniquely gifted Australian novelist. There has been much coverage of his life and oeuvre in the press. The ABC has produced a short, interesting documentary on the man, replete with fascinating photographs and footage. At ABR we’ve been pleased to publish Peter Conrad’s review of the posthumous (and incomplete) The Hanging Garden (April issue) and David Marr’s article about White’s intermittently abortive career in the theatre (May issue). Now comes the welcome news that Text Publishing will reissue White’s first (and long suppressed) novel, Happy Valley. Copies are scarce, and very expensive. I’ve never read it, and can’t wait to do so. Text will publish it in September, with an introduction by Peter Craven (who is said to be writing a full-length book on White for Penguin).

Barbara Mobbs – White’s long-time agent and friend – speaking at the opening of the National Library’s The Life of Patrick White exhibition (which is on display there until 8 July), wondered if her famous client would emerge from the twenty-year quiescence that often follows the death of a writer, however celebrated. It’s hard to imagine – deplorable to imagine – that such a voice, such a prodigious talent, will cease to be relished by readers of all ages and types for decades to come.

Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review

While the magazine (due tomorrow) is being printed, the May issue is now available to Australian Book Review Online Edition subscribers. After spending the past few days uploading this month’s ABR (with highlights including David Marr on Patrick White in Adelaide, and a review of Susan Swingler’s sensational family memoir on the Jolleys), I will be grateful to swap the pixels for ink and get back to some good old head-down reading. But I encourage all ABR readers to explore the Online Edition. Print subscribers can add-on a year’s subscription for just $20. An online-only subscription costs $40.

Much consideration has gone into the best way to publish Australian Book Review online. The format of ABR Online Edition means that it can be read on anything connected to the Internet, whether it be a computer, tablet, smartphone, your fridge, augmented reality glasses, whatever. This way, access to the magazine is not limited by the need for certain software or an app that is only available on one operating system. Schools, public libraries, and universities can sign up, giving thousands of users simultaneous access.

ABR Online Edition has all of the content of the print magazine, including images, Advances, Letters to the Editor, and Open Page. It is searchable, enabled with comments, and links the reader to articles on similar subjects and those by the same author. One chief advantage of subscribing is gaining access to ABR’s online backlist, which extends to November 2010. Adding to this backlist is one of our priorities, and along with this blog, the magazine is set to publish more content online than ever. Readers who are yet to subscribe can see an example of an article (Brian McFarlane’s review of The Deep Blue Sea). The whole May issue is now online.

Milly Main
Australian Book Review Ian Potter Foundation Editorial Intern

To Canberra on 12 April for the opening of a new travelling exhibition, The Life of Patrick White.

First, though, a quick dash that morning to Sydney for a meeting with Bernadette Brennan and Hilary McPhee. The three of us have been judging this year’s National Biography Award. We met in the small but spectacular Shakespeare Room at the Mitchell Library. First we shortlisted six of the dozen hitherto longlisted titles – biographies, autobiographies, memoirs. Then, after an unElizabethan lunch of shaslicks and chicken wraps, we chose our winner, who will be named and fêted and enriched by $25,000 at a ceremony on Monday, 14 May.

Then, rather glad to be able to read something other than biography for the first time in two months, I flew to Canberra rereading Persuasion for the first time in years.

The National Library’s congenial downstairs theatre soon filled, and James Spigelman (Chair of the National Library) – with a pleasing lack of ceremony (rare in the national capital; in any capital, for that matter) – introduced our two speakers.

Barbara Mobbs – Patrick White’s long-time literary agent, and now his literary executor – rightly came first. But for her the National Library and the State Library of New South Wales (partners in this venture) would struggle to mount a major exhibition, because of the paucity of manuscripts and memorabilia. Mobbs’s remarkable and laudable decision to ignore White’s express wish that all of his surviving notebooks and manuscripts (including the unfinished The Hanging Garden, which Peter Conrad reviews in our April issue) should be destroyed led ultimately – almost two decades after his death in 1990 – to their being transferred the most appropriate cultural repository in the country – the National Library of Australia.

When Mr Spigelman referred to this agential refusal – to coin a term – there was lengthy applause. Mobbs, always direct and impressively dry, began her short, witty, stylish speech in Piafian style – ‘I have no regrets.’ In passing James Spigelman had described Patrick White as curmudgeonly, but Mobbs was having none of this. She spoke of White’s kindness, good humour, and immense loyalty to friends – and to the several charities he quietly supported. She said that she enjoys writing cheques to the four principal beneficiaries of White’s estate, including the Smith Family and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Her account of White’s ignorance of technology made me feel like less of a luddite. Once, having heard of the miracle of faxing, he asked Mobbs to send a letter to London. He was bamboozled next time they met when she returned the letter. But he’d asked her to fax it! She reminisced about their shopping expeditions, when she was often mistaken for his daughter.

Mobbs recalled White’s famous penchant for the telephone. When he asked her to become his literary executor, she said it wouldn’t be very different from her previous role – except that she wouldn’t be on the phone to him for six hours a week.

Then came Judy Davis – whose role as Dorothy in Fred Schepisi’s The Eye of the Storm rightly won her another AFI award, or an AACTA, as they are now called. Extemporising freely, with funny sawing gestures, she reminded us of her inspired Judy Garland in the miniseries that won her an Emmy. Davis first read White as an eighteen-year-old, in Perth. This was in 1973, soon after he had won the Nobel Prize. The book was Riders in the Chariot – a transformative experience for her. (Here I recalled my own introduction to White that same year – The Aunt’s Story in my case: so astonishing and transcendent in Part One that I had to put it aside and compose myself for a while before resuming it.) Davis was awed by the book – ‘Suddenly I didn’t feel alone.’

Afterwards, there was time only for a quick look at the exhibition, which remains in Canberra until June before moving on to the State Library of New South Wales on 13 August. It is a large, detailed, funny, poignant exhibition. I was impressed by the letters, the manuscripts, the photographs, the dust jackets – less so by the several pictures White donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The desk is there (a replica of the one Francis Bacon made for him in London); above it Ian Fairweather’s Gethsemane, which he donated to in 1974 (AGNSW, not uncontroversially, sold it two years ago to help fund its acquisition of Fairweather’s The Last Supper). Among the memorabilia are his typewriter and beret and spectacles – and a certain medal, in its own case.

Later the National Library hosted a dinner at Water’s Edge. I drew a good table, with Wendy Whiteley and actors Kate Fitzpatrick and Angela Punch McGregor – and we had an immoderately good time. Kate and the Whiteleys look to be having a similarly good one with Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris in the 1980 photograph by William Yang that hangs in this highly recommended exhibition.

Peter Rose
Editor, Australian Book Review

Although private patronage and the arts have been linked for centuries, cultural philanthropy has not typically been associated with literature in the same way that it is with art galleries, libraries, museums, and performing arts companies. But this is changing. Since we launched our Patrons Program in 2007, we’ve been delighted by the diversity, enthusiasm, and loyalty of our generous supporters. At the end of 2007 we had eleven founding Patrons. We now have well over one hundred, and the list of Patrons occupies two pages in each issue of the magazine. We are regularly contacted by new and renewing Patrons and donors who believe in actively supporting Australian literary culture.

By donating to the magazine, our supporters are not only championing Australian Book Review, but also the cause of Australian literature. Every contribution, large or small, has a genuine impact. Those who donate to ABR are helping us to encourage new writers with poetry, essay, and short story competitions; to develop our Fellowships program; to publish more fine new writing in the magazine; to protect and promote Australia’s literary heritage; and to initiate public awareness and debate about literature and ideas throughout Australia. Patrons make a tangible contribution to this vibrant agency of literary ideals.

Without the generosity of our Patrons and donors, many of the popular and diverse programs run by ABR would simply not be possible. Thanks to their donations, we have been able to expand the magazine’s programs and to support Australian writing through Patrons’ Fellowships, lucrative prizes such as the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and the development of ABR Online Edition. Last year – our fiftieth birthday year – was an auspicious one for ABR. Now we look forward to introducing major new programs and features, including a range of eBooks and other online initiatives.

We always enjoy meeting our Patrons, and throughout the year we host of range of events, with noted speakers such as Alex Miller and Patrick McCaughey.

ABR welcomes all suggestions and enquiries about our philanthropy program. If you would like to become an ABR Patron, or if you would like to discuss ABR’s philanthropy program, call us on (03) 9429 6700 or contact me via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Amy Baillieu
Philanthropy Manager, Australian Book Review

Hot off the press – possibly the longest of recorded literary longlists, for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, which is worth $50,000 – not quite prime ministerial, but still premiership material, and well worth winning, apart from the kudos attached to Australia’s pre-eminent literary competition.

Of the sixty-one novels entered in the Award, the judges have longlisted thirteen. We list them below, and indicate who reviewed them for Australian Book Review, and when. Obviously ABR can’t review every novel published in this country. If we did, we would have no room for other genres. But it’s pleasing that we reviewed ten of the thirteen. You can peruse these reviews on ABR Online Edition (just $6 for thirty days’ access).

The judges this year are Anna Low, Richard Neville (Mitchell Librarian), Julianne Schultz, Murray Waldren, and Gillian Whitlock. Happily, this year’s list is inclusive and varied – and also rather starry (it features several past shortlisted and winning authors):

We’ll find out in June who has won this year’s ‘Miles’:

• Tony Birch Blood (UQP) – reviewed by Chris Flynn in the December 2011–January 2012 issue
• Steven Carroll The Spirit of Progress (Fourth Estate) reviewed by Patrick Allington in the September 2011 issue
• Mark Dapin Spirit House (Pan Macmillan Australia)
• Virginia Duigan The Precipice (Vintage)
• Anna Funder All That I Am (Hamish Hamilton) – reviewed by Jo Case in the October 2011 issue
• Kate Grenville Sarah Thornhill (Text Publishing) – reviewed by Sophie Cunningham in the October 2011 issue
• Gail Jones Five Bells (Vintage) – reviewed by Felicity Plunkett in the February 2011 issue
• Gillian Mears Foal’s Bread (Allen & Unwin) – reviewed by Gillian Dooley in the November 2011 issue
• Alex Miller Autumn Laing (Allen & Unwin) – reviewed by Morag Fraser in the October 2011 issue
• Frank Moorhouse Cold Light (Vintage) – reviewed by Kerryn Goldsworthy in the November 2011 issue
• Favel Parrett Past the Shallows (Hachette Australia)
• Elliot Perlman The Street Sweeper (Vintage) – reviewed by Don Anderson in the October 2011 issue
• Charlotte Wood Animal People (Allen & Unwin) – reviewed by Miriam Zolin in the December 2011–January 2012 issue

http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/news

Peter Rose

Editor, Australian Book Review

In his Seymour Biography Lecture ‘Pushing against the Dark: Writing about the Hidden Self’, repeated at Adelaide Writers’ Week and soon to be published in ABR’s April issue, Robert Dessaix (struggling to appreciate the new genre) likens the intimacy of blog-writing to that of striptease.

Dessaix is right, of course, to observe that much blog-writing is artless and does not achieve, or warrant, the longevity that some diaries and memoirs achieve. However, just as elsewhere in his lecture Dessaix cites Virginia Woolf’s judgement of Lytton Strachey’s biography of Elizabeth I as a failure because he ‘treated biography as an art’, I would argue that artfulness should not be expected of blogs. The implications of the ease of publishing online, and of the galactic numbers of people doing so, go far beyond whether this kind of writing is ‘good’ in the old sense. The Internet has irrevocably changed what ‘writing’ is.

Thirty-five years ago, Susan Sontag wrote: ‘Photography has become almost as widely practised an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practised by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power.’ Substitute ‘blogging’ for ‘photography’ and we get closer to an understanding of the function and meaning of a lot of online writing. Blogs, social media, and all the rest have given birth to a mise-en-scène kind of writing appreciable by readers in a permanent state of distraction. These new forms are antithetical to the traditional modes that depend on sustained concentration and that Dessaix prefers. But this is online writing’s strength – its ability to integrate with readers’ present, and to act, in the words of Glenn Gould, as ‘an uninvited guest at the banquet of the arts’.

Dessaix: ‘[I]t was as recently as 1963 that Marguerite Yourcenar said: “In our time the novel devours all forms; one is almost forced to use it as a medium of expression.” Not anymore, one isn’t.’ The pressure on everyone today, not just artists, is to be present online, to stay connected, never to drop from view. From the Editor’s Desk is in part a response to this pressure, but, to paraphrase Dessaix again, on the writing of his first book, A Mother’s Disgrace (1994), we realise that you are not waiting with baited breath for our revelations. We won’t be pushing back the dark on anything in this little corner of the online universe, not least on ABR staff’s hidden selves. Instead, we intend From the Editor’s Desk to provide a casual opportunity for you to stay in touch with the magazine in between issues. We’ll leave the truly artful writing, with aesthetic longevity, to Robert Dessaix in the April issue.

Mark Gomes
Deputy Editor
Australian Book Review

To Her Majesty’s for the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Pinter’s sixth play, it opened in April 1960 and ran forever (444 performances), his first commercial success, though by no means his first critical one (Harold Hobson had famously extolled the short-lived Birthday Party two years earlier.)

The gently raked stage, littered with junk and detritus (old suitcases, a lawn mower, a gas stove, a cheap plaster Buddha) is reminiscent of Steptoe and Son. From the skylight hangs a bucket for the artfully timed drips. Back we are in impoverished and clapped-out postwar East London. Pinter was living, or subsisting, in a similar boarding house while he wrote The Caretaker. And how quintessentially English the play feels, with its study of meanness, social alienation, and the sharp limits of hospitality. Next door live the ‘Indians’, taking over, spreading ‘blackness’ in the bathroom, on the banister. And who is most outraged by the immigrants but Davies, of course – the visitor, the mendicant, the petty thief, the ‘stinky’ outcast who comes to stay.

Ever nomadic in the theatre, I moved closer to the stage for the last two acts (much the better half). From the second row Jonathan Pryce’s vocal and physical artistry were palpable, especially in the searing final scenes as the incongruous trio battles it out for ownership of the leaky hovel – battles it out, too, for something more than that, for a kind of metaphysical stake. When Davies, threatened with ejection, listens to his fate, Pryce, standing there quivering, not saying a word, acts with every muscle, every nerve ending. Pryce, Welsh accent and all, has been performing the role of Davies – the tramp who comes to stay – in London, and it shows; his is a commanding performance.

Alan Cox – as Aston – the older brother, who rescues Davies, is blandly memorable – forever fiddling with the cord on the old toaster that will never be fixed, that will never warm (like the sole electric fire in the room, which is never switched on). In the great monologue that ends Act Two (the straightest, saddest thing in the play), Aston recalls being committed as a teenager because of his ‘hallucinations’ (‘I used to get the feeling I could see things … very clearly … everything … was so clear’), and describes the forced electric shock treatment that follows. This long, crucial scene is perfectly timed, perfectly judged – almost unbearable to watch. The lighting dims slowly, obscuring Davies on the opposite bed, but he remains faintly visible in the gloom, slowly lowering his head and sobbing noiselessly in recognition of Aston’s tale, possibly recalling his own experience of institutionalised terror and cruelty. Then – a little jarringly, without the usual break – the lights go up and these two pathetic men resume whatever is left of their depleted lives.

Alex Hassell plays Mick – the younger brother, the successful one, the vainglorious owner of ‘the van’. It’s a sinister performance, and so it should be. This is a play about menace, terror, pure and simple. Mick’s furtive second entrance, when he creeps up on Davies, is amazingly effective, producing the kind of frisson one normally only experiences at the opera. Hassell – young, wide-eyed, strongly built, good-looking in a kind of minatory way, the only healthy-looking one on stage – reminds us not of a young Alan Bates (who played Mick in New York and went on to film The Caretaker with his co-stars, Donald Pleasance and Robert Shaw), but of Bates’s great wrestling rival Women in Love – Oliver Reed. Hassell projects the same dangerousness, the same mercurial potential, swaggering round the stage, hands thrust into the pockets of his leather jacket. Even when he offers Davies a cheese sandwich from his pocket, he might be brandishing a pistol. And there is a brilliant riff when Mick dreams of renovating the slum, and imagines what he will do to every surface, every nook: ‘… I’d have teal-blue, copper and parchment linoleum squares. I’d have those colours re-echoed in the walls. I’d offset the kitchen units with charcoal-grey worktops …’ At which point I found myself strangely missing ABR’s old office in Richmond.

The language throughout is crisp, elliptical, masterly. Questions are taunts, feints, barks – rarely invitations. Kenneth Tynan – slower than Hobson to recognise Pinter’s genius – came round with The Caretaker: ‘Mr Pinter is a superb manipulator of language, which he sees not as a bridge that brings people together but as a barrier that keeps them apart.’

It is a long play (two and a half hours, with one interval), and a hugely demanding one for the three actors, but they perform it impeccably. Admirers of seriously good acting will not want to miss the Adelaide season of Pinter’s hilarious and deeply unconsoling masterpiece.

Peter Rose
Editor
Australian Book Review

To Adelaide for the last day of Writers’ Week, now an annual affair (ambitiously, some think) under the guidance of Laura Kroetsch (Director). Ms Kroetsch, an American, joins Adelaide from Wellington, where she ran the literary festival for many years. The removal of long-time director Rose Wight created some heat in certain quarters, but I didn’t share the forebodings about what Ms Kroetsch might do to Writers’ Week, now more than fifty years old, and still based in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden. Change was clearly overdue.

The weather was perfect, ideal for an outdoor literary jamboree. I liked the new configuration. Those cramped, airless, claustrophic white tents have been replaced by huge stylish blue shades, offering cover for most of the audience (though any unseasonable early-March rain will test this arrangement in future years). The sight-lines are much better, and there is now cross-ventilation. When there’s a westerly there are minor noise problems, but today was fine. The plastic seats, all linked by cords, seem uncomfortably close, but I heard of ingenious methods to achieve a little distance. ‘Would you like my scissors?’ ladies were overheard asking their neighbours.

Word has it that publishers stayed away en masse. There wasn’t a single party, a blow for the hedonists. But I suspect this is reparable.

While I waited for the midday session, I checked out the Imprints bookshop (further away from the stages this year, like the catering tent) and chatted to Peter Goldsworthy (Chair of the Advisory Committee). He told me about a rather mixed because acoustically challenged session on Tuesday night at the Adelaide Town Hall. Peter chaired a heavyweight line-up: Alan Hollinghurst, Dionne Brand, Caryl Phillips, and Les Murray. This year, pairs of signers appeared on stage during many of the sessions. On Tuesday night, someone moved one of the PA speakers to assist the signers. As a result half the audience couldn’t hear properly.

Crowds were substantial, and writers such as Barbara Santich and Fiona McGregor drew large, attentive audiences. I wondered what was delaying George Megalogenis at midday until I realised I’d forgotten to adjust my watch (I must be rusty). Megalogenis, one of the stars of ABC TV’s Insiders program, drew a capacity crowd. I was impressed by his crisp summaries of complex historical and political ideas. He was droll about the methodology in his new book, The Australian Moment, in which he invites the former prime ministers (Graham Freudenberg represents Gough Whitlam) to reflect on their successors’ greatest achievements, notwithstanding their political affiliations.

I lunched al fresco with Claudia Hyles at Cath Kerry’s reliably excellent Gallery Café. Claudia was in Jaipur recently during the recent festival. She writes about the Salman Rushdie brouhaha cum fiasco in our March issue (‘A Big Tamasha’).

Then I joined Robert Dessaix in the Green Room and we signed the necessary forms. Robert joked that they would get much more money for Jo Nesbo’s signature than they would for ours. Mr Nesbo, of whom I’d never heard, comes from Norway. His crime novels sell in the hundreds of thousands, Robert informed me. The festival program describes him as ‘among the very finest writers on the planet and certainly one of the most popular’.

Robert is always entertaining, even in a green room. He was amusing about one stellar guest from overseas who, in the lead-up to his own session, instructed his chairperson to go on stage ahead of him and generally ‘warm up the audience’ so that he could make an appropriately triumphant entrance – only to be informed that we don’t do things like that in Australia – well, not in Adelaide anyway. Things apparently became quite tense, but they went onstage together.

Laura Kroetsch joined us, pleased with the way her first festival had gone, and possibly glad it was almost over. Robert’s was the last session, but everyone had stayed for this repeat of the Seymour Biography Lecture, which he first delivered in Canberra in October 2011, soon after the heart attacks that nearly killed him in Sydney. A large crowd fanned around the raised platform. It was like a rock concert.

We met our two young female signers and wished them luck with the many foreign names sprinkled throughout Robert’s lecture. Robert wondered how they would cope with Gogol. When he mentioned Bobchinsky and Dobschinky (characters in Gogol’s The Government Inspector, who help to introduce some of the themes in Robert’s Lecture), the signers asked it they could shorten to ‘Bob’ and ‘Dob’.

Introducing Robert briefly, I spoke about ABR’s involvement with the Seymour Biography Lecture and told the crowd that they could read this one in our April 2012 issue.

The Lecture was even better this time – tighter, funnier. The audience loved it, and there was an impressive silence in the closing minutes, when Robert comes full circle and speaks of wanting to ‘push against the dark’ in his writings – ‘not just the dark that certain hidden selves were crouched in, but a more powerful dark, the dark that, as we grow older, we all feel stealing over us, blotting out inch by inch what we have loved and who we have been’. Slowly, quietly, clearly moved, he described the act of writing as ‘an act of resistance against the mortal condition – not mortality, but the mortal condition’.

The audience was stirred too, with many on their feet. I’ve only seen two standing ovations at literary gatherings, and both were for Robert. The first was twenty years ago, after a speech of his at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

After a long ovation, Laura Kroetsch briefly closed the festival and received flowers from a colleague. Robert went off to sign books, I chatted with UWA Publishing director Terri-ann White and former literary agent Frank Bryson, now based here (which I didn’t know) and doing a PhD at Adelaide University. Terri-ann and I took Robert to the old Hyatt (not its name now) and we sat in the bar where Roddy meets publisher Julia Collis early in my novel Roddy Parr, which opens in Adelaide. Julia, flirting with the handsome barman, tells him how to make a Whisky Sour. ‘Not too much eggwhite, handsome. We’re not making a pav.’ When I said much the same to our young barman, he proudly told me they don’t use eggwhite in Whisky Sours. Someone in management must have read the novel.

Robert, buoyed by the response, was in excellent form.  He told us about Raoul’s extraordinary performance during the festival. He hadn’t realised that Raoul is Chaplin’s grandson. Raoul’s artistry reduced him to tears. At the end he stood and applauded like everyone else – something he never does, almost on principle, he told us. I recalled a concert in Amsterdam in 1992 – an amazing Shostakovich Fifth from the visiting St Petersburg Philharmonic, under Mariss Jansons – when Robert was the only person – the only person – in the entire Concertgebuow who was not on his feet.

Robert’s theatre-going is impressively catholic. In Melbourne recently he saw Mary Poppins. Next to him was a blind man with his guide dog. Robert said to the man that his was the first dog he’d even seen in a theatre. ‘Oh, he loves musicals,’ said the blind man.

Peter Rose
Editor
Australian Book Review

One of the things we try to do at ABR is to note each month a sample, however small, of some of the best publishing from overseas – especially works that are unlikely to be reviewed extensively, or at all, in this country (beyond the learned journals, if they bother with them). Many significant titles that pop up in TLS, Harper’s, LRB and NYRB go unreviewed in Australia – largely because stock is limited, and review copies hard to come by.

Fortunately, our friends at Inbooks in Sydney were prompt in sending us a copy of an outstanding 2011 publication from Yale University Press, many of whose quality publications we review in ABR. The book is Alfred Kazin’s Journals, selected and edited by Richard M. Cook, who happens to be Kazin’s biographer (2007). I was delighted when Sydney critic Don Anderson – a long-time contributor – agreed to review both books. We’re setting it now, for the April issue.

Kazin, who lived from 1915 to 1998, is hardly a household name, but he was (almost) in America in the 1950s and 1960s – one of the most influential critics and ‘public intellectuals’. Perhaps the Journals, in particular, will revive his posthumous fortunes and steer readers towards other books by Kazin, notably his memoir A Walker in the City (1951), which Don Anderson rightly commends in his article.

The Journals are funny, and often epigrammatic. Try this zinger about that other sage-diarist, Edmund Wilson: ‘EW thinks he is writing history whenever he sits down to his diary.’ Kazin is consistently illuminating about the American moderns (Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, etc.), and deeply acute about American literary ‘exceptionalism’. See a long series of apophthegms from 15 September 1952, culminating in ‘America – an earthly paradise projected out of the heart of man, and not within it, and so doomed always to magnetize, to be compared, and to disappoint.’

Kazin, a few weeks later, is withering about his own literary pretensions:

What a monster it is, then, this being not a writer, a thought-bearer, but a WRITER, quoted on the jackets of the latest books, much sought-after by summer workshops, an object of mystery, a perpetual mode of unbelief to the vulgar – “and do you write under your own name?” as if most of us wrote for any purpose other than publicising your own name! (6 October 1952).

But how many copies of Alfred Kazin’s Journals will end up on Australian bookshelves? A hundred? Fifty? In your dreams, probably. Which would be a shame, for they strike me as being among the best journals of the second half of the twentieth century – sharp, luminous, candid, questioning – a necessary book (that rare category).

Late last year, after hearing Robert Dessaix’s remarkable Seymour Biography Lecture at the National Library, I was struck by this beautiful, apropos passage from Kazin’s journal of 16 February 1964:

There is a self, a Me, whom I race against. A Me whose identity is given only by Others – childhood influences, contemporary fashions, the setting of the family, of the job, etc. This Me still gives itself marks, still counts progress by going from test to test ... And meanwhile I, the rational and contemplative and self-fortifying I, sees things that don’t appear in the test. This I wants a breakthrough; this authentic self wants to be free of the self that can only race, succeed or fail. Isn’t this really why I want to write this book, to let the ‘real’ self come through at last? The thinking, free self whose best insights are so often an astonishment?

Tomorrow I’m off to Adelaide Writers’ Week to introduce Robert Dessaix, who will repeat his Seymour Lecture, which is entitled ‘Pushing against the Dark; Writing about the Hidden Self’, and which we will publish in our April issue (I’ve been editing it today – all 7000 words of it – always a pleasure with Dessaix). Now Adelaide will have a chance to enjoy (and be moved by) this funny, pointed, and surprisingly candid account of one man’s oscillations between memoir and fiction, and his deeper, far from comfortable reasons for writing in the first place.

Roll up in astonishment, to paraphrase Kenneth Tynan on Marlene Dietrich’s New York début.

Each year we honour the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010) through our poetry competition – and in the process generate much new poetry. This year we received almost 800 poems in the highly alliterative Peter Porter Poetry Prize. This is almost twice the number we received last year – a measure of the growing popularity of the Porter Prize and, one suspects, of the recent and most welcome return of poetry to the spotlight, through major anthologies, websites, residencies, and specific professorships.

Not all of the entries were specifically written for the Porter Prize, but most of them were. ABR is proud of its role in fostering so much new poetry, and committed to its broader coverage of Australian poetry through cogent reviews, occasional essays, and the inclusion of several new poems each month. Apropos which, we welcome submissions from poets, whether new or established.

Our judges this year are Judith Beveridge and David McCooey, both of whom have long reviewed for and contributed poems to the magazine. David and Judith have shortlisted five poems, all of which appear in our March issue. The shortlisted poets are Anne Elvey, Michael Farrell, Toby Finch, Gareth Robinson, Gareth Robinson, and Annamaria Weldon.

Toby Fitch’s long and wonderfully dry typographical poem ‘Oscillations’ posed some challenges when we designed the March issue. I hope you like the way we’ve presented it.

We look forward to naming the winner in the April issue. He or she will receive $4000. And rest assured, the Porter Prize will be on again later this year.

Peter Rose
Editor
Australian Book Review

From time to time I’m asked what I look for in our reviewers – apart from wit, fleetness, and excellent grammar, that is. Well might a prospective reviewer ask, because the craft of reviewing is not one that is often discussed, or taught, or analysed. You’re on your own: a one-person, low-income cottage industry, a hostage to your telephone and computer, as I have written elsewhere.

To introduce this new feature on our website – which will include regular posts from all of the ABR editors (we happy few) – we thought it might be helpful to revise our earlier list of things we look for in new reviewers.

ABR is serious about introducing bright new critics to our readers. Our commitment to publishing about 250 writers each year in our ten issues is unwavering. We think of our relations with our contributors as creative partnerships.

We hope the informal desideratum below will encourage newcomers to think about writing for ABR or for the host of quality periodicals we have in this country.

Advice for new reviewers

• familiarise yourself with the magazine/newspaper and its tenor and house style
• be sure that you really want to write for a particular magazine; that it suits your own style and aesthetics (there are plenty of other ones around)
• most editors welcome polite requests to review particular books; but don’t expect immediate replies and don’t be downcast if they say no
• when you are starting out, don’t expect to be offered the new Garner or Carey, or the latest biography of Tolstoy; bide your time
• when an editor offers you a book (usually by email), reply to her promptly
• don’t feel obliged to accept every book that’s offered to you: be sure that the book is right for you, and that the commission is practicable
• magazines such as ABR usually give reviewers at least three weeks with a book, but sometimes they need reviews of certain works (e.g. major and/or embargoed books) within a week or less; newspapers tend to work with shorter time frames
• be realistic before agreeing to review something by next Tuesday; does it suit you? Is it feasible?
• editors appreciate candour; it won’t harm your chances if you decline a book now and then (though don’t knock back six books in a row)
• if you feel uneasy about reviewing a particular author, for whatever reason (love, hate, indifference, total unfamiliarity, etc.), ask for something else
• decline books by authors with large oeuvres with which you are totally unacquainted
• if you do accept a book by an author you haven’t read, acquaint yourself with other works by that author
• reviews of major authors that fail to cite any of their earlier works are often inadequate and unpersuasive
• don’t hesitate to enlist literary references, allusions, and aphorisms to enliven your argument
• read the book closely, and read it more than once; it shows if you haven’t
• heed the brief and the agreed length and deadline
• give prompt notice of any likely delay
• bring individuality and stylishness to the review
• lateness and infelicitous prose are guaranteed to shorten your career as a reviewer
• editors relish wit and irony – though not the comedy festival kind
• avoid the perpendicular pronoun; a review is not autobiography
• demonstrate literary competence, good grammar, and confidence with the subject matter
• if you really like – or dislike – a book, say so, and say why; don’t be coy or overly circumspect
• show due but not limitless respect for established authors
• syntax is a wonderful resource, infinitely supple; employ it artfully
• we don’t all have to write the same way
• watch those adverbs, superlatives, and exclamation marks
• if a sentence is making you seasick with its undulations, shorten it
• before submitting your review, read it aloud to yourself or someone whose judgement you trust; it’s amazing what you will pick up
• if you submit timely, literate, well-proofed manuscripts, you’ll be amazed by how much work comes your way
• remember, most magazines and newspapers have limited editorial resources and editors don’t have time for two-hour edits
• demonstrate a sense of an ‘organic’ review, i.e. one emerging from careful appraisal, rather than from preconceptions or publicity material
• write reviews that are small works of art, not just consumer tools
• with major books, ones that have been reviewed extensively in the newspapers, submit reviews that add to our understanding of the book – not just repetitious codas to or echoes of earlier reviews
• with fiction, don’t rely on plot descriptions and never give away the dénouement
• everyone needs to be edited, even editors; respect their craft, their experience
• that said, if you disagree with changes or corrections, say so
• no hissy fits!

Peter Rose
Editor
Australian Book Review