Biography can be difficult to achieve. There is the balance between too much detail, where one can’t see the wood for the family trees, or not enough, which can be disappointing all round. One also bears in mind possible antipathy: Sigmund Freud, who famously began burning his personal papers at twenty-nine, was dismissive of future chroniclers: ‘As for biographers, I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.’ Consider, then, the work involved in writing a family biography, where the factors of histories, stories, lives, facts, checks, and balances are dauntingly multiplied across generations, within and without direct recollection, and are not always easily resolved.

Such was the task facing Brenda Niall who, by utilising one theme, has succeeded where she might well have come off second-best. Her magnificent survey of the Boyd family starts with a series of questions: Where to begin? How to structure a narrative covering one hundred and fifty years and five generations? Who to include or exclude? Where to stop? Niall, who had a head start with her 1988 biography of the novelist Boyd, Martin, had considered a wider-ranging biography of the others – the painters, potters, architects, musicians, writers, and the other myriad artisans of this astonishingly creative family – but no ideas of how to build their history into anything other than a cluttered, over-detailed book. Then an epiphany: ‘the idea of the family house as a recurring motif in Boyd history.’ This stirred Niall’s memory of a conversation she had in 1976 with the American biographer of Henry James, Leon Edel, who was writing a biography of the Bloomsbury group:

Edel had nine characters moving towards the ‘house’ that was Bloomsbury, and he did not attempt a ‘cradle to grave’ narrative for any one of them. His way of using interlocking chapters rather than strict chronology was a useful example. The Boyd story offered a sequence of family houses, each of which expressed an individual, a way of life, a time and place.

Clive James is a fussy A-grade mechanic of the English language, always on the lookout for grammatical misfires or sloppiness of phrasing that escape detection on publishing production lines. Us/we crashtest dummies of the written word, who drive by computer, with squiggly red and green underlinings on the screen to help us steer, should therefore expect perfection in James’s own work, and pounce with Schadenfreudian glee if disappointed. Having just finished reading his autobiographical trilogy, Always Unreliable (previously published as individual volumes between 1980 and 1991, but here crammed into the one plump tome), I can report that, apart from a couple of typos (though, if you ask me, ‘slipped’ is a more evocative word with three Ps) and one or two lazy descriptions, such as dubbing rugby league legend Reg Gasnier’s sidestep ‘a kind of poetry’, James’s prose barely has a scratch on it.

Looking under the bonnet, we find an Australian suburban childhood, a 1950s model that thousands have owned and swear by to this day. James has kept his memory of it in pristine condition. He might label the trilogy ‘unreliable’, but I don’t believe him for a minute. My late Aunty Dorothy, a goer in her youth, by all accounts, always referred to the fifties as the ‘filthies’, but would never tell me why. James isn’t so coy. Certainly, he provides his readers with cute, wholesome stories about antics in the bushes, backyards and streets – billycart races, snake confrontations, swimming, sunburn and lollies – simple elements that, if left in their crude form, would amount to sentimentality and little more. But that doesn’t happen with James’s memoir because it contains intricate psychological wiring. He is a sad, clever funny-man, an observant loner, a dreamy only child whose father died too soon, someone who suspects in early boyhood that there may be shortcomings in his nature and worries himself into a state of feyness about it. His sexual openness – there was a lot of masturbation out Kogarah way in the fifties, and bisexual crushes, and (Aunty Dorothy cover your angel eyes) participation in an adolescent group sex romp with the blankly willing town bike Laurel – also helps refine mere childish reminiscence and its generic backdrop into a tougher, nononsense, personal production.

Bernard Smith gave us Australian art. Before him, the subject was not part of our cultural discourse. We knew and could place the work of Michelangelo and Monet but not that of Eugene von Guérard, Tom Roberts or Grace Cossington Smith. In 1945 Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788 was the first book to contextualise Euro-Australian art within European art movements. Based on a series of lectures he had given in Sydney in 1942 for the Teachers’ Federation Art Society and the Contemporary Art Society, it was republished in 1979 with little revision, and reprinted as recently as 1993. It remains an engaging Marxist period piece, of particular interest to art historians but still enjoyable for non-specialists.

Australian Painting 1788–1960 appeared in 1962, a splendid blossoming from those 1942 lectures. Smith was no longer a schoolteacher and occasional surrealist painter. He had spent ten years at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, interrupted by a research fellowship in London and followed by another at the Australian National University, which resulted in his timeless European Vision and the South Pacific (1960). Since 1955 he had been a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. He knew exactly what Australia needed.

These two novels can be read as intelligent manipulations of the crime genre, exploring the inarticulacies as well as the betrayals, real or imagined that can precipitate acts of violence. Chloe Hooper’s impressive début, A Child’s Book of True Crime, explores, in her words, ‘the twilight space between childhood and adulthood’. The means for interrogating this porous and ambiguous zone include a primary school teacher complicit in her own infantilisation, school children with steadier insights and clarity than their teacher, a faux children’s story narrating the details of a gruesome murder, and adults participating in games of emotional brinkmanship that their children would probably play as variants of ‘chicken’. Regret, by contrast, is more concerned with the isolation that occurs once the growing up ostensibly has occurred. While Chloe Hooper is at the beginning of a career with the potential to produce exceptional work, the experienced Ian Kennedy Smith is the more accomplished storyteller with Regret.

In living there is always
the terror
of being stung

In living there is always
the terror
of being stung

of something
coming for you
on the unavoidable wave.

So, little Ashenputtel & her groom
sit up in their palace,
                              growing fat
and ruling badly. Not exactly
role models for a new generation.
I mean, sure –
                        she had it rough
(her father made us realise early
how useful it would be to keep her
down)
           – but that’s no reason
to push her weight around now.
She hasn’t, it seems, thought it out
very carefully.

It may seem somewhat odd that I, a racketeer and gangster, was suspected of making Cuba a safe place for the National Bank. But having made such an impression with my reports, prophecies and ancillary publications that the Federal Government, aided by a sycophantic mass, had declared me likely to generate flippers, I can see why I might have been a plausible suspect – the crime, after all, was committed by sea. The accusation, when it came, nonetheless caught me by surprise; I wasn’t quite certain at first how I should respond.

So, little Ashenputtel & her groom
sit up in their palace,
                                 growing fat
and ruling badly. Not exactly
role models for a new generation.
I mean, sure –
                        she had it rough
(her father made us realise early
how useful it would be to keep her
down)

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Emailed letters must include a telephone number for verification.

Responses to Peter Craven

Dear Editor,

I expected a spray from Peter Craven in response to my review of The Best Australian Stories 2001, but such a display of self-importance from an editor and critic is alarming (‘Letters’, ABR, March 2002). I had imagined he would be willing to reflect on the poor reviews he received for the latest volumes of Best Essays and Best Stories and to consider the possibility that plumping up the books with samples of writing not yet ready for publication is not working. 

Perhaps, it belatedly occurs to me, Craven does not get it. Editors have a responsibility to authors – especially those whose work is still in a fluid state. These books are claiming to be the year’s best Australian writing, and my ‘oh so Australian perspective’ tells me they are something else.

Hilary McPhee, Fitzroy, Vic.

Occasionally, we bring you thematic issues. The April issue is a good example, the first half being devoted to art and art history. This seemed timely, because of the abundance of major publishing in this area and the energy and controversy generated by current debates about the genre.

Janine Burke’s study of Albert Tucker, Australian Gothic, has been the subject of much discussion since its publication was postponed last year. Jaynie Anderson, writing for ABR for the first time, reviews Australian Gothic and T.G. Rosenthal’s Sidney Nolan. Elsewhere, Michael Shmith admires Brenda Niall’s Edelian biography of the Boyd family. Books such as these raise all sorts of questions about the responsibilities and vicissitudes of biographers when they write about artists. Long before Janine Burke tackled Tucker, writers were aware of the dangers and delicacy of the business. Indeed, the pitfalls are so stark they almost make poets look like easy biographical subjects. Numerous issues come into play: ethical, artistic, legal, ideological and familial ones.