He accuses Bungey of mixing her metaphors (‘my favourite is the image of Arthur’s wife, Yvonne, at once putting him through the “wringer”, acting as his “buffer”, and playing “ferryman” to his emotional energies’). But Auden is not mixing his metaphors when he famously laments: ‘He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest’, etc.. Multiple metaphors do not become mixed metaphors, in the pejorative sense, until they are inconsistent or incongruous.

Britain writes: ‘Hyperbole blends effortlessly with bathos (we find Cynthia Nolan at a funeral “resplendent in a pill-box hat”)’. This is neither hyperbole nor bathos, and she was not at a funeral but at a function celebrating Boyd’s first major London exhibition. When he laments that Bun-gey splits infinitives, it is clear that he is quite simply allergic to modern idiomatic prose. When he consistently misspells her given name in his review, we are for-given for doubting his own attention to detail.

Britain complains that every fact is not footnoted (a decision taken by the publishers, not the author), and mentions that ‘[a] fully footnoted PhD thesis is available from the British Library, London’. He doesn’t remark on the fact that there is a lively debate over footnoting every time a book built on such painstaking scholarship is published. It is a view by no means confined to Allen & Unwin that exhaustive footnoting irritates the general reader and unnecessarily pushes the retail price into the stratosphere. Lodging at the British Library a fully footnoted copy of the original manuscript, which may ultimately become available online, is a modern and rational response to this age-old dilemma.

Britain wonders out loud why so many distinguished art historians – from Richard Haese to Patrick McCaughey – have lavished unstinting praise on this magnificent book. He asks whether they were reading the same book as he was. Yes, they were. But with considerably more empathy.

Richard Walsh,
Consultant Publisher, Allen & Unwin

Ian Britain replies:

Richard Walsh, in his gallant defence of his author, is quite right to tick me off for my careless rendering of her given name. But it hardly quells my apprehensions about the state of contemporary literary publishing that he – or those peer reviewers to whom he refers – did not apply such vigilance to the author’s text. If I am lacking in ‘empathy’ by focusing on its gaffes and gaucheries, I feel I am at least paying it the respect of a close reading.

Something in the water

Dear Editor,

I congratulate the two winners of this year’s Calibre Prize, Mark Tredinnick and Rachel Robertson. I am sorry to see, however, that neither essay is long. The Calibre, with an upward length of 10,000 words provides an opportunity to think through and write about large ideas.

I would like to comment on Mark Tredinnick’s essay ‘A Storm and a Teacup’. As it happens, my house lies about ten kilometres south from where Mark lives. In the nineties there were passionate local fights not to see that land subdivided by our local council, as it is a natural flood plain and once upon a time a haven for water birds.

I must say that I was surprised to see Mark’s stretch of Burradoo – one of the most expensive bits of real estate in Australia, and one that is being mercilessly subdivided by our local council into ‘McMansion’ land – described as ‘country’. The last time I would have referred to any part of the Highlands as country would have been about 1978.

Elisabeth Holdsworth, Bundanoon, NSW

Elisabeth Holdsworth won the inaugural Calibre Prize in 2007. Ed.