Dear Editor,

In his recent letter to ABR attacking Hilary McPhee’s review of his Best Australian Stories 2001, Peter Craven adduces as evidence of his editorial gifts the following statement: ‘Richard Flanagan will testify that I edited his chapter in extreme detail. Indeed, when I came to the finished book, I was amazed to discover that I could “hear” the point that I left off editing, and I was appalled that Richard (or perhaps his editor) did not get the prose into better shape.’

Testify I shall.

In 1999 I was approached by Peter Craven to contribute to Best Australian Stories 1999. My piece – what was to evolve into the opening chapter of my novel Gould’s Book of Fish – was welcomed effusively. Unilluminated though it was by the guiding light of the Great Editor Himself, Peter still felt able to draw favourable comparisons between it and the work of Borges, Sterne and Gogol.

But, he continued: ‘I don’t want to sit here comparing you to the sun and the seven stars.’ He had edited the piece, he wrote, ‘in fairly elaborate detail … Pretty obviously only a tiny fraction of this will be strictly necessary but, in my experience, this kind of scattergun, inevitably “excessive” edit can be helpful.’

My practice, as all my editors will readily acknowledge, is to open myself up completely to the process of editing and to my editor’s ideas. In Peter Craven’s case, this was a largely futile exercise.

What followed in several emails were Peter Craven’s editing notes. I am not saying that all of them were unhelpful, only most of them. A few comments I acted on, but taken in their entirety they were indeed, as he had so direly threatened, a scattergun; a confusion that I found of only limited value in helping me prepare the whole for the standard I felt necessary for publication.

I thanked Peter for his help, but had not the heart to tell him that, in my despair, it was to another I had turned for assistance – the editor Meredith Rose, who had done so much for me in her splendid editing of Death of a River Guide. As Meredith will attest, it was she who edited the piece, and it was using her suggestions rather than Peter Craven’s that I then reworked the piece for Best Australian Stories 1999.

Years passed, Peter aged by volume, and I spent a whole year with Bernadette Foley and Nikki Christer, respectively my editor and publisher at Picador, working and reworking the manuscript of Gould’s Book of Fish. Their passionate contribution helped me make of my manuscript a far better book, and my debt to them is large.

A comparison of my piece published in Best Australian Stories 1999 and its final form, published as the first chapter of Gould’s Book of Fish in 2001, reveals in the latter language much tightened, new elements introduced, others taken out.

In addition to the minutiae of changes wrought sentence by sentence, I will list just a few of the new story elements in the chapter Peter seems not to have noticed: an aunt who dies, a football game, a seahorse giving birth, paying homage at a shrine to Victor Hugo, a night spent in a pokie joint, and a man turning into a sea-dragon.

Given that his own editorial influence was so slight, given the intense attention the work subsequently received from editors regarded as some of Australia’s best, and the substantial rewriting that took place in consequence, that Peter can ‘hear’ the point he left off editing is indeed, as he says, amazing.

Richard Flanagan, Hobart, Tas.

Richard Freadman replies to Tamas Pataki

Dear Editor,

Allow me to respond to the more substantive points in Tamas Pataki’s abusive letter (ABR, March 2002) concerning my essay ‘Heddy and I: Relational Life-writing in Susan Varga’s Heddy and Me’ (ABR, February 2002).

(1) Is Freud’s thought ‘monadic’? As the qualifier ‘more’ makes clear, I do not claim that Freud’s model is wholly ‘monadic’ - that would indeed be absurd - merely that it is more so than those of expressly relational theories. In his Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1988), Stephen A. Mitchell, one of the leading authorities in the field, argues that ‘there is a fundamental distinction between Freud’s drive theory and the major trends within contemporary psychoanalytic thinking (some of which retain the language of “drive”). Freud views mind as fundamentally monadic; something inherent, wired in, pre-structured, is pushing from within.’

(2) My general characterisation of Wollheim as a Freudian is wholly unexceptionable. Even if I were offering a more ‘tribal argot’-like description, I’d still prefer to call him a Freudian whose work is inflected by, and derives important elaborations from, Klein.

(3) Stern and Attachment Theory: The relations between psychoanalytic thought and Attachment Theory are much debated. Stern’s name certainly appears in accounts of Attachment Theory, and his work has several points of commonality (notably his account of IWM) with work that is regarded as mainstream Attachment Theory. The divisions between these discursive areas are far from watertight, but it’s probably fair to say that, on the strictest current definitional terms, Stern’s work exhibits most, but not all, of the features associated with fully fledged Attachment Theory.

(4) Bowlby and breastfeeding: the word I used was ‘refers’, not ‘emphasises’. Bowlby does in fact refer, on occasion quite graphically, to the deprivation that can result from the absence of the feeding mother. I was thinking, in particular, of his seminal Child Care and the Growth of Love (1953).

(5) Attachment Theory and breastfeeding: I can see why Pataki thinks that my reference to Attachment Theory (as opposed, say, to some psychoanalytic model) is misleading. Bowlby does indeed regard ‘the attachment behavioral system’ as distinct from, and in some senses primary to, the system associated with breastfeeding. But I believe these matters to be more complex than Pataki allows. The distinction between these two systems derives from a theoretical construct, and such constructs often fail to exhaust the complexities of particular cases, or case-types. As Bowlby shows, in the case of breastfeeding it is in practice extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between the security-imparting effects of orality and those of the ‘attachment behavioral system’. In discussing Varga’s situation, I wanted to capture the sense that when a mother’s milk dries up, when the mother and child are in hiding and in a situation of extreme trauma, the nature of ‘attachment’, in an inclusive sense, is affected.

(6) Therapy and reconstructions of the developmental past: I was guided in my comments here by Stern’s discussion in The Interpersonal World of the Infant (Basic, 1985): ‘Most [developmental] therapists would agree that one works with whatever reconstructive metaphor offers the most force and explanatory power about the patient’s life, even though one can not get at the “original edition” of the metaphor.’

(7) ’Freadman notices that the Holocaust could complicate a mother–daughter relationship something awful.’ In his last sentence, Pataki refers to Heddy and Me as ‘Varga’s evidently interesting book’. I think this means that, when he wrote his letter, he had not read the book that is the subject of my essay. Had he done so, he’d know that a large part of the personal journey Varga narrates concerns coming to understand the ways in which, and the extent to which, her relationship with her mother has been shaped by the Holocaust: ‘Only recently have I started to think of Heddy and myself as part of something bigger.’ Why might this be? Autobiographies by the children of Australian Holocaust survivors often retrace a slow coming to consciousness of the ways in which the Holocaust has shaped their relationships with their parents. For many of these people, the Holocaust was seldom discussed in the family home. Growing up as first-generation Australians, they initially understood their relationships with their parents predominantly through familiar Australian categories. As the facts of the European past emerge, these frames of understanding are heavily modified, even replaced, by frames pertaining to their experience as children of survivors. Varga’s book not only traces this pattern; it records her discovery that, having been a baby during the Holocaust, she is also a child survivor.

(8) English professors should stick to ‘the play upon its natural objects of a sensibility profoundly educated in literature and, maybe, life’. If Pataki looks at some of my published work, he’ll see that I’ve argued that literature departments should indeed continue to teach literature as literature. However, it does not follow from this that such departments should do nothing else; nor does it follow that the category ‘literature’ is entirely straightforward. For example, many academics in English departments worldwide are now writing about what is sometimes called ‘the literature of trauma’. Holocaust literature is one example; stolen generation narratives are another. I think it absolutely appropriate that they do this. Indeed, it’s one of the ways literature departments can stay in touch with ‘life’. But it’s not always easy to decide how it should be done. Heddy and Me has undoubted ‘literary’ merit, but to focus merely on this aspect, and to read it without some attempt to find a vocabulary for its trauma and other psychological dimensions, would be seriously inadequate - indeed insensitive. That’s why I pose the question: ‘How to read such a text?’, and why I introduce extra’-literary’ dimensions into what is also a ‘literary’ reading.

Richard Freadman, Camberwell, Vic.

Rustic virtues

Dear Editor,

Having read Geoffrey Blainey’s Boyer Lectures, and being a person raised in the ‘country’, I would like to take issue with what may have been a throwaway line in Jim Davidson’s essay ‘Land of the Long Black Cloud’ (ABR, March 2002).

I am not sure what Davidson means by ‘country’ people’s ‘refusal to sanction the closure that might come with the republic’, but, to my mind, he seems to be implying that it was rejected outside the big cities because of some backward-looking nostalgia regarding Britain and the Crown. If he were to reread the section in Blainey’s lectures that deals with the republic referendum, he would find that Blainey notices the conundrum that, although it voted against the referendum, ‘this part of Australia [i.e. ‘country’], interestingly, tends to be more proud of the nation and its independence’.

Blainey goes on to state that Australia was also a frontrunner in demanding representation for all members of its society, and points out that ‘country’ Australia has over the years been much more radical than would be appreciated by reading today’s newspapers and opinionmakers.

Could it be that the republic was voted down in regional Australia because the model on offer was seen as undemocratic, unrepresentative and élitist? Perhaps the people voting against it were not looking back but typically standing their ground for their right to choose their representatives. Certainly, the bit of the ‘country’ I come from seemed to have that in mind when voting.

Be wary of stereotyping people in the ‘bush’ - it may come back to bite you. I recommend Blainey’s lectures to everyone. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, they make you think, which can’t help but be good.

Roger Clark, Moonee Ponds, Vic.

Science fiction’s ancient roots

Dear Editor,

I haven’t had to respond to a reviewer before, but Bruce Gillespie is special for me. Reviewing The Halstead Treasury of Ancient Science Fiction (ABR, March 2002), which I compiled, he practically denies its right to exist. A medieval inquisitor might sooner have embraced Hindu scriptures.

In the Treasury, I set out to challenge the view that science fiction occurs only in modern literature. Our problem is that for Mr Gillespie that isn’t a view, it’s an article of faith, which suffices him to denounce my infidel book.

Policing an artificial boundary, he appears unaware of the essence that distinguishes science fiction from other literature. ‘If,’ he says, ‘Richardson had been able to find a story in which an ancient philosopher speculated on the future history of Athens or Rome, he might have been able to justify the title of his book.’ But such stories are prophecy, not science fiction. By extrapolating expansively from the actual development of technology and science, science fiction presents concepts and phenomena not found in the here and now. That is the thread connecting the stories in my book, as I explain in the commentaries. For ‘future history’, Gillespie should go to Plato’s Republic, or the Old Testament.

Admittedly, critics and editors such as Gardner L. Dozois bracket with science fiction some stories in which prophecy, wonders and magic seem to exclude science and technology, but, surely, only because their authors write within a modern literary tradition of science fiction. Denial of science fiction’s modern literary tradition is one of many declarations that mar Gillespie’s credibility. Some reflect unfinished reading. Lucian’s character, he tells us, ‘returns home via India’ (True Story actually ends with Lucian stranded on the Antipodean continent). Others disparage my work. I have, for instance, introduced ‘ludicrous modernisms’ in translation. It is fitting that he cites no example, since whatever he has in mind rests on textual authority.

Although his vehemence surprises me, I expected to disturb some old-school devotees. Ill-informed conventional analysis has readers accepting that, in ancient times, technology and science were unable to transform life and thought. This leads some to insist that these societies never opened literary opportunities the way they do for modern science fiction. They take Brian Aldiss’s history as authority for denial.

Others in the field are more realistic. ‘Between Aldiss and Richardson … our concept of science has become more enlightened, and our view of “the ancient world” has expanded,’ writes Van Ikin (SMH, 16 February 2002). But not everyone is quickly enlightened about the past.

Matthew Richardson, Rushcutter’s Bay, NSW