It was David Marr who commented that the key character in Gore Vidal’s first memoir, Palimpsest (1995), was not Jimmie Trimble, the boy whom Vidal loved when they were at school and who died, aged eighteen, at the battle for Iwo Jima; nor Vidal’s blind and adored maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, whom young Gore would lead onto the floor of the Senate; nor his life partner of half a century, Howard Auster; not even the audacious and polymathic Gore himself. The star of the book was in fact Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, who was dying when Vidal began to write Palimpsest.

We know of course (Vidal has told us a thousand times) that he and Jackie were briefly and arcanely related by marriage. Palimpsest opens with a wedding at which Jackie, matron of honour to Vidal’s half-sister, shows the virginal bride how to douche after sex. The brilliant young step-somethings often lunch together; the gossip is delicious; Jackie, whose ‘boyish beauty and life-enhancing malice’ delight Vidal, anticipates and dreads her absent husband’s future. There is even an ‘erotic shock’ in a speedboat when they go waterskiing, though Vidal, always guarded about sex, declares that ‘nothing happened’. Even when Robert Kennedy steps in at a 1961 White House party and accuses Vidal of being too familiar with the First Lady, Jackie continues to haunt the book.

The references in this new memoir are sparse, for they never socialised after the contretemps in 1961. According to Vidal, the rupture with the Kennedys did not faze him (‘I was not designed to play attendant lord’), but a constant in this book is the old yearning and ambiguous need for Jackie’s presence in his life. He baulks at Jackie’s attempts to erase him from her past; insists he was there; adduces proof.

Palimpsest ended in 1964, when Vidal was aged thirty-nine. Point to Point Navigation (a term for navigation without a compass, relying on maps) resumes the story and ends on 1 January 2006 (Vidal, as ever, is precise about dates). It has none of the shapeliness that distinguished Palimpsest, a larger and more ambitious book in every sense. Short by Vidal’s standards and yet divided into fifty-fix chapters, Point to Point Navigation darts about all over the place. But the old stateliness is intact: patrician, ironic, derisive.

Many of the stories are familiar, including Vidal’s old feud with the homophobic New York Times, which refused to review his books after The City and the Pillar (1948). Vidal excuses these repetitions: ‘It has been my experience that writers often forget what they have written since the art of writing is a letting go of a piece of one’s mind, and so there is a kind of mental erasure as it finds its place on a page in order to leap to another consciousness like a mutant viral strain.’ But there may be another explanation. Vidal, with his formidable brain and boundless sense of entitlement, refuses to forget or forgive. Combative to the last, he rails against his adversaries. In this he is like Barry Humphries, both brilliant, fearless, aphoristic, vengeful, not to mention endlessly mother-hating. It is so liberating for a memoirist not to need or wish to be liked. As Pope said, ‘The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth.’

Of his biographer, Fred Kaplan (1999), Vidal is curtly dismissive. Truman Capote, ‘a marvellous liar’, gets another serve (‘Although he felt himself to be the heir to Proust, a reference I once made to Madame Verdurin drew a blank’). Vidal is friendlier towards Dennis Altman and finds things to admire in his Gore Vidal’s America (2006), but he still devotes a chapter to supposed mistakes and misreadings in the book. Not all the main characters in Palimpsest reappear. Jimmie Trimble is hardly mentioned, as if it is painful or futile to recall the beautiful boy. Tennessee Williams, whom Vidal dubbed ‘the Glorious Bird’, remains the most vivid creation in his memoirs, but the old friendship wanes because of the playwright’s drug addiction and his ‘night-blooming paranoia’. Vidal’s impossible mother (Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss Olds) dies in 1978, but that’s about all she does: Vidal hadn’t seen her in twenty years because of her rudeness to Auster. Still, Vidal can’t resist trotting out her great rationale for not seeking a fourth husband: ‘My first husband had three balls. My second, two. My third, one. Even I know not to press my luck.’

Vidal remains a peerless name-dropper. Fellini, for whom he acted in Fellini’s Roma (1972), has a cameo role, weird as any of his characters. We meet Johnny Carson in retirement, ‘better looking than he looked’. Vidal pays court to Eleanor Roosevelt, the veins in her left temple throbbing when she becomes emotional. There is a late glimpse of Nureyev not long before his death, still angry about President Carter’s manner towards him in the White House (‘Very powerful, these Russian curses’). More tedious is the usual tittle-tattle about Garbo in the toilet.

Princess Margaret (already brilliantly depicted in Edward St Aubyn’s novel Some Hope [1994]) is so much more attractive in satirical literature than she was in real life. Her description of Wallis Simpson at the duke’s funeral is classic, as are her confidences about the queen. Clearly, ‘PM’ endeared herself to Vidal by saying of his novel Duluth (1983): ‘I don’t know what there is in me that is so low and base, that I love this book.’

Vidal is the least sentimental of memoirists, but he regrets the loss of two houses: Edgewater, a Greek Revival extravagance on the Hudson River; and La Rondinaia in Ravello, which he sold not long after Howard Auster’s death in 2003. Vidal attributes his obsession with houses to his mother’s cavalier approach to matrimony. He adds to the record about his remarkable grandfather, who sat in the Senate from 1907 to 1937 (one of the shorter terms in the history of that chamber of gerontocrats). Of the United States he is now utterly despairing: ‘Our old original Republic does seem to be well and truly gone.’

Auster’s long illness and treatment are described at some length. There is a tender moment at the end when Auster, who never expected it to last, asks Vidal to embrace him. They kiss on the lips for the first time in half a century. (Like his father, Vidal does not like to be touched.) The success of their partnership he attributes to the absence of sex: ‘… it is easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does.’

Vidal, citing his beloved Montaigne, is fatalistic about death, and waits for diabetes to ‘do its gaudy thing’. While immensely proud of his oeuvre and his pedigree, he is resigned to the eclipse of the famous author and to the wide-spread indifference to newspapers and commentators. ‘Today, where literature was, movies are.’

As for Jackie? There is a last encounter in 1975, soon after Aristotle Onassis’s death. Vidal, celebrating his fiftieth birthday, is staying at the Ritz in London. Jackie, widowed again and wearing a white trench coat, joins Vidal and Auster in the lift: an awkward moment, which Vidal – in a brilliantly symbolic moment – chooses to ignore by turning to the mirror and removing a smudge of ink from his brow. ‘[Jackie] sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, “Bye-bye” and vanished into Piccadilly.’

It all has the fatal authenticity of a dream.

A review is more like a conversation than an overview from an Academy, and conversations often start with a salient point leading on to judgement. I suggest readers of David Malouf’s new collection should turn straight to page twenty-five and encounter a spray of short poems, titled ‘Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian’. This is prefaced by the Silver Age Emperor’s own verse, the legendary address to his soul, which begins with the playfully sonorous words ‘animula vagula blandula’ and, in a most un-Latinate way, adds a half-refrain, ‘pallidula rigida nudula’. If all of us, including Byron, who have attempted to put Hadrian’s words into our own languages were to be brought together, we’d stretch out to Macbeth’s crack of doom. No one has done it, to my knowledge, as brilliantly as Malouf does in his not-over-extended fantasy.

The Shrine of Remembrance is such a familiar object in the landscape of Melbourne that we can easily be unaware of its singularity. This is, as far as I can tell, the largest purely monumental structure in the world commemorating the war of 1914–18, a great memorial to participants in the Great War. The duke of Gloucester inaugurated the Shrine before a crowd of more than three hundred thousand people – almost three times the largest number ever to attend a sporting event at the Melbourne Cricket Ground – on 11 November 1934, Armistice Day, as it used to be called. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the duke placed a wreath from his father, George V, on the Stone of Remembrance in the Sanctuary at the centre of the Shrine, and at that moment, as planned by architect and engineer, a ray of light fell on the black granite of the Stone, lighting up the word ‘Love’ in the carved inscription ‘Greater love hath no man’. In 1934 more people than in 2007 knew those words and the words that followed them in the Bible: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’

When Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française was first published in France in 2004, it created extraordinary interest for at least three reasons. Firstly, there was the story of the survival of the manuscript, preserved in an unopened suitcase for almost sixty years by Némirovsky’s daughters, Elisabeth and Denise, who had assumed that the papers in their possession were personal notes that would be too painful for them to read. Secondly, there was the documentation, provided in Myriam Anissimov’s preface and in a rich appendix, about Némirovsky’s life as an identified foreign Jew under Nazi occupation. Arrested in July 1942, interned in the Pithiviers camp, and deported almost immediately to Auschwitz, she died barely a month after her arrest, even as her husband and friends, ignorant of her fate, tried frenetically to save her. Finally, there was the novel itself, or rather, the two completed sections of what was intended to be a five-part epic narrative: a brilliantly rendered fresco of the French collapse in 1940 and the first years of German occupation, which earned Némirovsky, posthumously, the unparalleled honour of the prestigious Renaudot prize. With the English translation of the novel in 2006, she became an international celebrity. A Némirovsky biography, therefore, could hardly be more timely.

Jonathan Weiss, who teaches French studies at Colby College in Maine, is at pains to stress that his interest in Némirovsky and her work pre-dated the Suite Française phenomenon by a number of years. By 2001 he had completed a book-length study in French of the author, but it was only in the wake of Suite Française that he found a publisher. Expanding his work to take Suite Française into account, he brought out the French version of his study in 2005. The English-language version, an elegant translation by Weiss’s wife, Dace, not only offers insight into Némirovsky’s life and career, it provides a useful basis for approaching the rather stormy international debate that has been stirred up around her.

In the main, Weiss’s book has been well received in France. It has also provoked a certain amount of resentment. Valérie Marin La Meslée, in Le Point (7 July 2005), noted that two French authors, Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, both Némirovsky specialists, were preparing a biography that would certainly be richer than Weiss’s, and less flawed in its approach and methodology. Sour grapes towards an American ‘outsider’? Probably, at least to an extent. Weiss is quite frank about the limited amount of biographical archival material available to him, which has led him to concentrate most of his analysis on Némirovsky as a writer. At the same time, he has been thorough in his scrutiny of the contemporary press and of surviving correspondence. Weiss comes across as a practised and confident literary critic, and his analysis of the recurring motifs and themes in Némirovsky’s work sheds light on her life and mental world.

Born in 1903 into a wealthy and socially privileged Jewish family in tsarist Russia, Irène Némirovsky emigrated to France with her family in 1919, fleeing the revolution. Like many Russians of her class, she was already fluent in French, and she seems to have determined from an early age to leave behind both her Jewish and her Russian identities, electing France as the cultural space within which she would define herself, and French as the language in which she would construct her career as a writer. A dilatory but eventually successful Sorbonne student, she married Michel Epstein, a banker and fellow émigré, in 1926. Her first publications date from that time, but it was in 1929, with the publication of David Golder, that she became famous. The deep ambiguities associated with this work – a cruel but strangely moving portrait of a Jewish speculator – cast a darkening shadow over Némirovsky’s subsequent itinerary. Weiss traces Némirovsky’s prolific career through the 1930s, when she published a new novel almost every year as well as maintaining a steady output of short stories. In addition, she completed a number of works that would be published only after her death. This was a woman for whom writing was life. Neither her marriage nor the birth of her two daughters impinged on her commitment to writing, although she appears to have been a dutiful mother and wife – at least she did not neglect her family in the way she had been neglected by her own mother. She did well out of her profession, her royalty earnings and advances easily outstripping the income of her banker husband. Weiss rightly worries over the alliances that Némirovsky made among writers of the extreme political right, such as Paul Morand and Jacques Chardonne, as well as with the publisher Horace Carbuccia. She seems to have been largely blind to how dangerous the situation was becoming for Jews in France, especially for those who, like the Epsteins, had not taken French citizenship. Just why Némirovsky and her husband did not do so remains a mystery: Weiss hypothesises that it may have been simple neglect, based on the levels of safety that they felt. When, after the Munich Accords in 1938, they finally lodged an application, it met with ominous silence. Whether her subsequent baptism into the Catholic Church was intended as some kind of insurance against possible future persecution remains moot. For Weiss, it corresponded to an affinity with the deeper values she identified in French culture, a way of assuaging her discomfort with her Jewish background, and of belonging more fully to her chosen new homeland.

Whatever its motive, the conversion did her no good. When war broke out, Némirovsky and her family moved from Paris to the Burgundy village of Issy-l’Evêque, still in the occupied zone. Here, they suffered from increasing material hardship, even though Némirovsky still received some income from her publishers, and even though, through the connivance of the editors of the collaborationist periodicals Candide and Gringoire, she managed to continue publishing her work under pseudonyms. When the wearing of the yellow star became obligatory for all Jews in the spring of 1942, Némirovsky and her family complied. It made her an easy target for the French gendarmes carrying out Prime Minister Laval’s order to expel all foreign Jews aged between sixteen and fifty-five. When she was taken, and when she died in deportation just a month later, Némirovsky was just thirty-nine. In October 1942 Michel Epstein, too, was arrested, deported and probably gassed. The two little girls, one of them twelve, the other four and a half, were successfully hidden, and survived.

Weiss shares his sense of frustration about the choices that Némirovsky failed to make. She could have sought exile in the unoccupied zone (or even in the United States). The problem was that she believed she was better connected than she was, and this illusion, and the complacency that attended it, contributed to her arrest, deportation and death. As the trap of anti-Jewish measures inexorably closed around her – forbidding publication, the operation of bank accounts and indeed any form of public activity – Némirovsky became resigned and fatalistic. It is touching that her final completed work was a life of Chekhov, whose masterly end-of-era melancholy so profoundly corresponded to her own. She had lost some of her illusions about the France that had given her the freedom to castigate her origins but did not allow her to escape them.

After Némirovsky’s arrest, a large number of people participated in the efforts to free her, but no one seems to have been aware of the swiftness of the processes that had been set in train. It is poignant to realise that many of the letters seeking information and assistance were written after she was dead. Jonathan Weiss concludes that Némirovsky has her place in the long tradition of French moralist writers, fierce in her condemnation of a society driven by money and material rapaciousness, and desperate for a social order founded on love.

Weiss’s biography would have benefited from an index, but it is an informative work, neatly structured to bring out the dramatic and tragic fate of a woman who, as he puts it, ‘died without ever having resolved the question of where she belonged’. It is a book well worth reading. Whether it is entirely convincing, however, is another question. Although the author’s exploitation of the material available at the Institut Mémoire de l’Edition Contemporaine has been exemplary, he himself admits the paucity of his archival sources, and some of the historical background feels rather thin. For instance, we learn very little about people such as Hélène Morand, to whom Némirovsky turned for help. More importantly, Weiss’s treatment of the issue of whether Némirovsky was an anti-Semitic Jew, while better rounded than many of the discussions that have appeared in the international press, is not sufficiently grounded; and his contention that she was a great writer – or rather, that she deserves to be treated as one because Suite Française, had it been finished, would have been ‘one of the most important works of literature produced in twentieth-century France’ – remains assertion rather than argued analysis.

The question of Némirovsky’s anti-Jewishness has been brought to the fore by the republication of David Golder, the novel that made her reputation in 1929. Many commentators have pointed out that this publication is opportunistic, an effort to cash in on the international success of Suite Française, but it has also triggered debate over whether its subject matter constitutes anti-Semitism on the part of the author. Much of the book’s original success was due to its reception among the anti-Semitic, nationalist right, for whom its appeal was its savage ‘insider’ portrayal of the money-hungry, ruthless milieu of France’s Russian Jewish immigrant population. It is clear enough that Némirovsky had little affection for this world which she knew well, having grown up in it. But she herself stated in 1939 that she would not have written the work had she known about the way that events would evolve after Hitler’s rise to power. Another matter that has been held against her is the letter she wrote to the head of state, Marshal Pétain, seeking special treatment on the grounds that, although Jewish, her work had never favoured the Jews. However, while certainly not noble, this plea is clearly born of personal desperation and not of any racist belief.

It was therefore more by accident than by design that Némirovsky contributed to the increasingly virulent currents of anti-Semitism in interwar France. As Patrick Marnham puts it in his introduction to Sandra Smith’s new translation, ‘Golder is Jewish because Némirovsky was Jewish, but her choice of an unsympathetic Jewish character did not make Némirovsky anti-Semitic any more than Robert Louis Stevension was anti-Scottish because he created the diabolical figure of Ebenezer in Kidnapped’. Her novel was praised for its realism (and not infrequently compared to Balzac), and it was this quality that inspired Julien Duvivier to turn it into his hugely successful film of the same name in 1930. Still, in provoking distressed anger from the Jewish press and rave reviews from the nationalist right, David Golder planted Némirovsky squarely on one of France’s most critical seismic fault-lines, a position from which, despite her best efforts, she would never escape.

But for a couple of episodes, David Golder would be a slight work, more an extended short story than a fully fledged novel. The three main characters – Golder himself, his wife Gloria, and his daughter Joyce – are stereotypes living stereotypical lives. Golder is a businessman in his late sixties who has pulled himself up out of poverty and made a fortune, mainly in oil speculation. Gloria seemingly exists entirely to leech Golder’s money from him in order to drape herself in expensive clothing and jewellery, and to maintain an opulent lifestyle in Paris and Biarritz. Their daughter Joyce follows in her mother’s footsteps: at eighteen years old, she is a vacuous socialite, motivated only by an insatiable desire for champagne, fun and amorous adventures with the fortune-seeking types who hang around such families. The work opens dramatically, when a cold-hearted decision by Golder drives an old friend and associate to suicide:

‘No,’ said Golder, tilting his desklamp so that the light shone directly into the face of Simon Marcus who was sitting opposite him on the other side of the table. For a moment Golder observed the wrinkles and lines that furrowed Marcus’s swarthy face whenever he moved his lips or closed his eyes, like the ripples on dark water when the wind blows across it.

Némirovsky keeps the story ticking over with crisp descriptions and rapid, almost cinematographic, changes of scene.

What gives it substance is that Golder, despite lucid awareness of his daughter’s frivolity and her lack of any real affection for him, loves her more than his own life. Indeed, he finally sacrifices himself to provide her with the money that she craves and will certainly waste. This graver tone in the novel hinges on two parallel travelling sequences, one a railway journey from Paris to Biarritz early in the work, and the other a boat journey out of Russia, towards the end of the novel, when Golder has returned there to make one last major deal. In these sequences, Golder suffers the heart attacks that will eventually kill him. The experience is described from the inside as the protagonist suffers both the physical pain and the psychological anguish springing from his fear of death. The writing in these sections is riveting, achieving a simultaneous and disturbing effect of oppression and compassion. Its intensity, set as it is in the context of a journey whose destination may not be reached, strongly suggests that beyond the satirical realism of her plot, Némirovsky was giving potent voice to her own existential uncertainties.

The issue of Némirovsky’s writerly status cannot be resolved. In France at least, she has never really been forgotten as fully as many commentators claimed at the time of the discovery of Suite Française: most of her more significant works have either remained in print or been republished. At the same time, she is not as great a novelist as Jonathan Weiss would like her to be considered. We need to remember that her contemporaries were the likes of André Malraux, Georges Bernanos, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Louis Ferdinand Céline. If David Golder undoubtedly pointed to talent and some depth, nothing that followed quite reached the same strength until Suite Française. The richness of its portrayal of France’s collapse in 1940 suggests that the author might have broken through into new ground, but it appeared too late to offer anything in the way of fresh understanding of those tragic events. Since World War II, scores of fictional narratives, both novels and films, have deployed the same essential elements that Némirovsky uses in her account. Her evocation of the great exodus of civilians from Paris is well rendered, for example, but no more so than in René Clément’s 1951 classic Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games). Furthermore, there is no guarantee that, had she lived, Némirovsky would have actually completed her planned epic. After all, Sartre abandoned Les Chemins de la Liberté and Malraux, similarly, left Les Noyers de l’Altenburg incomplete, both writers being convinced that the war had destroyed the continuities they had been attempting to weave through their fiction. The best novelistic account of the French experience of World War II is in Céline’s last works, which are unremittingly apocalyptic.

In short, for those familiar with postwar French literature and cinema, Suite Française is not so much a revelation as a reminder. A salutary one, to be sure, because its message is one that needs to be constantly renewed: it shows how easy it is for a civilisation – even a great civilisation – to collapse into disarray and to betray its own most closely held values and principles. In the end, it is less as a writer than as an historical phenomenon that Irène Némirovsky will hold an important place in the French national memory.

The world we live in provides us with a great deal of information that is not really intended to inform. We must be informed, for example, that a phone call is being recorded for training purposes. Thus language becomes an accessory to the black arts of spin, propaganda, manipulation and arse-covering. Words are twisted and violated, making it difficult to recover the meanings, the distinctions, that we need. What was clear becomes murky, while murkiness is hidden behind a veneer of false clarity. Protean language becomes complicit in the world’s nefarious purposes. Take the hijacking of the word ‘rendition’, which has come to mean ‘moving someone from a place where they can’t be tortured to a place where they can’: a diabolical mix of expediency and propriety, of global mobility and legalism. If you can’t do it in the United States, export it to Egypt or Poland.¹ The term ‘rendition’ has been co-opted from a specific legal sense, meaning ‘to hand over’, to a vaguely plausible-sounding, altogether more dubious destination. This upsets me because my primary association with the word ‘rendition’ is, of course, with translation, and particularly the venerable magazine Renditions, published from the Chinese University of Hong Kong for more than thirty years, and such a wonderful source of Chinese literature in English translation, classical to contemporary.

I recently went back to New England. It is a long drive from Melbourne, but as I passed through Coonabarabran and Tamworth and began the ascent up the Moonbi Ranges, my gaze responded to the strange and familiar landscape. I periodically wound down the car window to smell the air – crisp but still warm for autumn. I grew up in a few different New England towns – Inverell, Glen Innes, Armidale – so I am familiar with the territory covered in the fascinating essays in High Lean Country. The high elevation of the Tableland makes the winters cold, summers mild. The dramatic landscape is dotted with granite mounds and monoliths. It is edged to the east by the escarpment and the gorge country of Judith Wright’s poems.

High Lean Country is an unusual regional history. Its contributors include historians, literary scholars, archaeologists, geographers, geomorphologists, botanists, educators, dramatists and visual artists. It is accessible and expresses a preference for the place, while maintaining the rigorous scholarly standards of an academic publication. Many of the contributors, though based at the University of New England, are not originally from the region, and it is the tension between these elements that gives High Lean Country a strong poetic sensibility, steering it clear of parochialism.

I took to Edith Wharton in the late 1970s but don’t remember why. I have never forgotten the name of the heroine of the first of her books that I read: Undine Spragg, all soft promise dashed by that biting surname. This was The Custom of the Country (1913), and I read on: Ethan Frome (1912), Summer (1917), and The Children (1928), for instance. Someone offered me R.W.B. Lewis’s Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975), and a friend created space on his bookshelf by unloading The Collected Short Stories (edited and introduced by Lewis, who calls himself an ‘addict’). Much later, when the film of The Age of Innocence was released in 1993, I primly chose to read the novel rather than see a version of it. Then I left Edith Wharton, née Jones, born to wealth in 1862 in New York, on the shelf.

All of the above is to declare that I came to Hermione Lee’s literary biography of Wharton as a general reader, neither as a Wharton aficionado nor with academic interest in this writer who published forty-eight books in forty years. Lewis’s Life had surprised me: I admit to being hardly friendly towards biography. It was engaging and compelling enough to invite a lively interest in Wharton whose Old New York circumscribed much of her social attitudes (V.S. Pritchett called her ‘the accountant-historian of a rich society’). Old New York had a penchant for, and the money to sail to, France and Italy and Old European Culture. Often, Old New York established itself in Europe. Wharton did, and Lee insists that her biography is ‘the story of an American citizen in France’.

At about the time that he was preparing the final drafts of The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot was preoccupied by a separate, but no less overwhelming question: when to sell his shares in the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. In October 1922, the month the poem was published in the periodical he edited, the Criterion, Eliot wrote to his brother, Henry: ‘For myself, the important point is that Hydraulic should rise and give me an opportunity to sell when Sterling is low: it looks as if Sterling might fall a few points before very long. Do you think that Hydraulic will continue to pay dividends for the next year or so?’

I am not overly
Gregarious. I wait and I watch. I keep a decent
Silence. But there are some skills where I have power.
At times I have spun a silk web strong as wire.

These are the final lines of a poem entitled ‘Endings 111’ in Tom Shapcott’s recently published collection of poetry, The City of Empty Rooms. The poem is included in the final two sections of the book devoted to memories of a Queensland childhood, more particularly recollections of growing up in the inland town of Ipswich. As David Malouf suggests in the blurb, ‘this is a late book that sometimes sharply, sometimes forgivingly looks back, but always with the freshness of things felt and seen anew in a living present’.

The lines I have quoted mesh with my own recollections of the poet: a modest man, a great listener and storyteller, quite able to manage long silences in conversation and his own diffidence. I first corresponded with Shapcott when he was editing the collection of poetry, Australian Poetry Now, published in 1970 by the admirable Sun Books. As an editor, Shapcott was diligent in searching out new voices and providing publication opportunities for young poets without a national reputation.

In the late twentieth century, museums throughout the world faced a number of challenges. Confronted with a plethora of flashy new technologies, they struggled to overcome a perception of irrelevance and fustiness. Bureaucrats demanded that museums pay their way, entertain the masses, and meet the growing expectations for instant gratification and information without effort.

Over the past four years, we Australians have had considerable experience of the conflicted, and sometimes agonising, politics of war. In this study, Michael A. McDonnell, a historian at the University of Sydney, examines the unanticipated social and political contestations aroused by the demands of another war. In the late eighteenth century, Virginia endured a six-year struggle against the imperial rule of Britain. A settled class of wealthy gentlemen planters who had previously assumed the right to leadership came to find that role questioned in a wholly new politics of war. Middle- and lower-class Virginians began to ask them: how will you distribute the burden of the war equitably across society? Should the wealthy planters be exempt because of their property holdings? Who is to fight and die in this war? Who is to control recruitment? McDonnell’s is not a story of Virginia’s rebels going forth in unison to realise on the battlefield and in their assemblies the famous words of the Virginia patriot, Patrick Henry, in 1776: ‘give me liberty or give me death.’ Instead, readers are made to consider Yorktown, Virginia. When General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his army there in 1781, effectively ending the war, he did so to 5000 men of George Washington’s Continental army and 7800 French forces. About 3000 Virginia militiamen gave themselves to the engagement. This, writes McDonnell wryly, ‘of a militia estimated to number almost 50,000’.

The Rape of The Lock helped secure Alexander Pope’s reputation as a commanding poet of the early eighteenth century. This mock-epic poem, based on a real incident, satirises the trivialities of high society by comparing it with the epic world of the gods. One of Pope’s acquaintances, Lord Petre, cut off a ringlet of hair from his paramour Arabella, thereby causing a breach of civilities between the two families. Pope was asked to write a poem to make jest of the situation and to reconcile the disgruntled parties. Its success was due to the disparity between content and form, between his mischievous coupling of petty vanity and the lofty grandeur of traditional epic subjects. The rape of Helen of Troy thus becomes the theft of a curl of hair; instead of gods and goddesses there are ‘sylphs’ or guardian spirits, and great battles are converted to gambling bouts and flirtatious sparrings.

Sophie Gee’s first novel, set in 1711, takes the reader behind the heavy velvet curtains of Pope’s melodrama to reveal the leading players: Arabella Fermor, who ‘at the age of twenty-two combined beauty and cleverness in almost equal parts’; her suitor, Lord Petre; and a host of attendant ladies and gentleman, including Pope himself who, more often than not, is cast in a spectator role and is usually seen peering from the wings. The Scandal of the Season follows the seduction and dalliance of belle of the ball Arabella and her handsome lord amid the gossipy, bitchy world of clacking fans and hair ‘like confectionery’.

‘Westering’ is a resonant archaism which makes a wittily ironic title for Peter Kirkpatrick’s new volume. This is work which has a decidedly début du siècle flavour in its hard-edged urban perspective on ‘out west’. The dialectic of city/bush, with its history from Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to Les Murray, is voiced in several registers through these finely crafted and sharply literate poems.

The poem which gives the book its title introduces a suite of works that explore the city-dweller’s frustrated attempts to comprehend a landscape and a culture from which he is, it seems, definitively excluded. ‘Westering’ carries associations with Milton’s recollected world of idyllic pastoral (where Hesperus ‘Toward Heaven’s descent had sloped his westering wheel’) and with the language of folk song (‘Westering haim with a song in the air / Light in the eye and it’s goodbye to care …’). These are brought cleverly into play through the nine poems of the sequence, where the notion of any meaningful sense of ‘home’ is denied to the observer, who can only look without entering into the meaning of what he sees. His city-bred gaze, paradoxically, is razor-sharp, and images linger in the mind, drawing the reader back into the poems:

A striking work by Adrian Feint and Hera Roberts appears on the cover of Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967. It shows an aeroplane, a locomotive and an ocean liner travelling in opposite directions through a vivid landscape of radiating lines and concentric circles. On the circular forms, which are reminiscent of abstract paintings by the French artist Robert Delaunay, we read the legend ‘Paris, Rome, New York, Cairo’; on the diagonal lines, ‘Hobart, Melbourne, Brisbane’. This 1928 work is typically modernist for its celebration of the exciting possibilities of modern technology, and in its use of bold colour areas and geometric shapes. It is also a declaration of a perceived, or wished-for, globalisation of culture, which Feint and Roberts, by adopting styles from international modernism, have realised in the work’s very design.

Anyone browsing in bookstores in the past five years has undoubtedly come across one of the dozens of life narratives that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11. The attack on the World Trade Centre and the consequent ‘war on terror’ produced a new market for the publishing industry – and it has deluged us with offerings. Prominent among them are the sensational, eroticised best-sellers by Muslim women recounting their persecution under the Taliban; journalistic accounts of war by ‘embedded’ Western news correspondents from Afghanistan and Iraq; edited oral histories offering testimony by refugees to the trauma of war in the Middle East; and memoirs of exile by Iranian women living in the United States.

The first official postage stamps of a British colony were produced on the small island of Mauritius. In 1847, seven years after Rowland Hill’s ‘Penny Black’, the Mauritian postmaster issued 500 orange-red one penny stamps and 500 blue twopence stamps. In size, shape and design, they are utterly conventional. Depicting Queen Victoria in profile, they lack the charm of the 1850 ‘Sydney Views’ stamps of New South Wales or the peculiarity of the 1854 ‘Inverted Swan’ of Western Australia. They are, however, inscribed ‘Post Office’, whereas all later stamps are inscribed ‘Post Paid’. They are instantly recognisable and ever since the 1860s, when philately first became respectable, they have been sought and prized by kings, schoolboys and other collectors.

Aphelion can be called a family epic in that it is long and has many characters. The title of the novel refers to the sun; a character explains that ‘there is a point in astronomy when a planet is at its furthest point from the sun, the slowest point in its orbit. It’s called aphelion. I guess it’s the darkest point.’ In this, her second novel, Emily Ballou uses overlapping and intersecting voices. Six characters – five of them female – contribute to the novel’s complex chorus of memory and reflection over time.

The focus is upon time and how it shapes the relationships of individuals across the generations, those between the women of one family, in particular. Set in the highlands of the Snowy River, Aphelion is about the effects of the Hydro-Electric Scheme on the local people, the profound geographic and psychological impact of the construction of the Eucumbene Dam. The specific location for most of the novel is Adaminaby, both the old town and the new one established in 1957, after the flooding of the original settlement. The creation of Lake Eucumbene is the reason for the town’s obliteration, but the lake is also the novel’s symbol of all that haunts the characters. It conceals the old realities of place and yet taunts the memory, as the drought of the last ten years uncovers vestiges of the old town and the spectre of drowned trees.

In her fourteenth novel, in a career that began in 1980 with Fortress, Gabrielle Lord returns to the series of books that feature the troubled and trouble-attracting private investigator, Gemma Lincoln. Shattered, the fourth in the series, is the most densely and effectively plotted of them. Gathered here are key people from earlier novels: Gemma’s lover, the undercover policeman Steve Brannigan; her best friend, Sergeant Angie McDonald; a former street kid called the Ratbag; Gemma’s sometime colleague Mike Moody. Still shadowing Gemma’s life are the memories of the murder of her mother and, much later, her successful but nearly fatal efforts to clear her father of that crime. She has been left with an indelible sense of how perilous is the stability of family life. This is now the more pointed because Gemma is pregnant and unsure whether she will keep the child. Shattered begins with a double murder in sylvan Killara. Police Superintendent Bryson Finn (leader of the Skylark corruption task force) and his sister-in-law Bettina have been shot. Finn’s young son Donovan is critically wounded. Gemma is involved because Finn’s estranged widow, Natalie – police officer turned lawyer – hires her to discover what happened. This leads, inevitably, to the revelation of much seamy sexual business involving the dead man and his numerous conquests among young women on the force. While this case occupies her (and does so more intensely when one of her friends, the forensic detective Jaki Hunter, is fitted up as the killer), Gemma has other cases in hand. One concerns the missing contestant from the reality television show ‘Search for the Princess Bride’ (the prize: marriage to a louche European princeling). Others take us back to the emotional heart of all of Lord’s fiction.

It may be the global unease of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that is causing Australian writers and thinkers to focus more and more on ‘place’: on the fractures and fissures between the homogenising impulse of the nationalist project, on the one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of constructing Australia as a sociological monolith. The current issues of these two journals explore the profound differences between one ‘place’ and another: between Australia and Elsewhere, mainland and island, the mansions of the haves and the degraded housing estates of the have-nots; between state and state, city and city, city and bush, inner-city homelessness and outer-suburban sprawl. And if you expand the concept of ‘place’ into its metaphorical dimensions, there’s almost nothing you can’t discuss, from the buzz-phrase ‘the space of memory’ through the class-bound notion of ‘knowing one’s place’ to L.P. Hartley’s classic ‘The past is another country; they do things differently there’.

I realise it is a stretch, but imagine The Da Vinci Code with brains. No, that’s not fair: it obviously takes brains of a kind to top best-seller lists for several years. So try thinking of how a serious intellect, as distinct from a facility for page-turning compulsiveness, might have gone to work on it. Such effort won’t tell you all you need to know about Matt Rubinstein’s new novel, but A Little Rain on Thursday is inter alia about old manuscripts, church history, subterranean chambers, Templars and libraries – and it is compulsive reading.

The duty to truth

Dear Editor,

Brian Matthews makes an eloquent defence of Manning Clark’s Kristallnacht fantasy, but I was surprised to find myself being drafted as a witness simply because I once said that autobiography is ‘a lying art’ (May 2007). Actually, I can’t remember ever having used quite those words, but, as Brian Matthews well argues, memory plays tricks. I might have said it. If I did, however, I hope I would have added that an historian should be the last kind of writer to avail himself of the autobiographer’s supposed exemption from the duty to truth. My own interpretation of Manning Clark’s eagerness to get his personal story closely involved in such an outstanding instance of mass suffering was that the mass suffering didn’t mean much to him. This would square well with his slowness to notice that the death toll in the Soviet Union had put paid to the régime’s humanitarian credentials.

The cover of Judith Godden’s biography of Lucy Osburn, the founder of modern nursing in Australia, is dominated by a ghostly white statuette of Florence Nightingale. Lucy herself appears in a bottom corner, photographed with a book in hand, an insignificant figure dressed in black silk, with a white cap over a severe hairstyle. At times, it seems as if Nightingale is going to overshadow the book, too. But despite her largely unsuccessful attempts to carry out the wishes of the ‘lady with the lamp’ in New South Wales, Osburn did succeed in creating conditions whereby scientific practices could be introduced into nursing in Australia, though she failed to convince the medical establishment that women could be trusted with medical knowledge or were capable of managing hospitals.

Making Noises is the second self-published novel from Melbourne author Euan Mitchell, and follows in the footsteps of his best-selling début, Feral Tracks (1998). Like Feral Tracks, Mitchell’s new book is partially inspired by his own life experiences, in particular his time spent playing in pub bands and working at Ausmusic.

On one level a satirical novel about politics and power in the Australian music industry in the 1990s, Making Noises is also an exploration of one man’s struggle to come to terms with his failed dreams. Its protagonist, Marty, is a rock musician on the wrong side of thirty whose greatest success to date has been a live appearance on a children’s television programme. Seeking a fresh start, Marty moves to Sydney, finding employment (a little too easily) at the Oz Rock Foundation. He also begins teaching music skills to young men in custody, in the process meeting up with a talented Aboriginal teenager named Billy Durall. Marty’s complex relationship with Billy and his growing attraction towards Ingrid, a fellow Oz Rock employee, form the two main threads of the developing narrative.

Jane Austen’s latest biographer, Jon Spence, observes that by deciding to support herself by writing rather than live on a husband’s income, Austen was spared the likelihood of annual pregnancies, exhaustion, infection and early death, fates that confronted many married women of her day. Another means of avoidance was travel abroad. That was not the only motive, of course, of the many European women who, from the early eighteenth century, attracted admiration, censure and curiosity by combining writing and travel. Nor did it always work.

Roland Barthes called language our second skin: ‘I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.’ Which should make the latest Meanjin, ‘On love, sex and desire’, a veritable Kama Sutra of literary massage. Yet it opens, perversely enough, with a denunciation of the erotic. John Armstrong’s honest, elegant and sharply self-critical essay recounts an early sexual experience during a brief trip to Paris. Giving his father the slip one morning, the teenager snuck off and spent his money on a prostitute. Afterwards he wandered the streets, full of loathing: ‘I was wicked, stupid, naïve, vile, corrupt, irresponsible, thick, wasteful, out of control, nasty, brutish.’

Sunday newspapers are full of oddities, but the Sunday Age of 20 May 2007 contained a most curious story about Meanjin, whose future has been the subject of much rumour and conjecture in recent months. Nestled against yet another outsize story about Harry Potter was an article by Carmel Egan about the future of Meanjin, ‘the tiny but influential literary magazine’ which has been published since 1940. Ms Egan reported that the Meanjin board has recommended to the University of Melbourne that Melbourne University Publishing (like Meanjin, a wholly owned subsidiary of the university) should ‘take over administration and distribution “in the best interests” of the magazine’, and that a decision on Meanjin’s future will be made by the university’s board of management – ‘within the next two months’.

Professor Kate Darian-Smith, Chair of the Meanjin board, was quoted as saying, ‘The board has made a recommendation with the best interests of the journal in mind. The decision was made to ensure the growth of the circulation and strength of the journal.’

Two features of Ms Egan’s article are curious, to say the least. First, the glib headline, ‘New Parent for Ailing University Magazine’. Meanjin, throughout its long history, has been rather more than just a ‘university magazine’; instead, a central player in our national cultural life, and a preferred publisher for generations of essayists, poets, fiction writers and others. As for ‘ailing’ – tell that to its loyal readership and to the numerous critics and commentators who have praised the magazine in recent years. These include Geordie Williamson, who says positive things about the current issue of Meanjin in his review on page fifty-one. Ian Britain’s six-year editorship of Meanjin is widely regarded as being one of the most inspired tenures in the magazine’s history.

Second, Advances was surprised by Professor Darian-Smith’s suggestion that ‘the continued employment of editor Ian Britain … would not be affected by the MUP takeover’. We understand that Dr Britain’s contract ends at the end of July and that he has neither been reappointed nor informed if and when his position will be advertised. Whether he will choose to apply remains to be seen.

That Meanjin’s future is uncertain at this juncture is a matter of considerable surprise and concern.

Cornucopia on the Murray

The Mildura Writers’ festival is always enjoyable, but this year’s programme looks almost ridiculously full. Any festival in the world would be happy to present J.M. Coetzee and Les Murray, two of our most internationally successful writers. Coetzee will deliver La Trobe University’s Dean’s Lecture on Sunday, July 22. Other guests will include Patrice Newell, Carrie Tiffany, Barry Hill and Peter Goldsworthy. Judith Bishop, winner of the second ABR Poetry Prize, will be there too. In all, a superbly varied line-up at this small but famously convivial and stimulating literary festival. The dates are July 19–22. For information of bookings contact: (03) 5021 5100 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Clendinnen’s humanistic influence

Inga Clendinnen, another guest at the Mildura’ Writers’ Festival, has been named ‘Australian Humanist of the Year 2007’ at a function of the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. The award was given ‘in recognition of the humanistic influence of her lectures and writings’. Clendinnen’s latest book, Agamemnon’s Kiss, was shortlisted for the Kibble Award ($20,000) at the Nita B. Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers. The latter award, worth $20,000, was presented in May to Deborah Robertson for her novel, Careless, which has also been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Lee Marvin in Adelaide

Poetry readings can be tenuous undertakings these days, but Ken Bolton seems to have got the format right in his series of Lee Marvin readings in the splendidly named Gallery de la Catessen in Anster Street, Adelaide. On each Tuesday in alternate months, four or five writers – seated in the window of an old shop like intelligent mannequins – read poetry or prose. June highlights include: Aidan Coleman and Peter Goldsworthy (June 5); Cath Keneally and Petra White (June 12); Jeri Kroll and Simon Robb (June 19); and Mike Ladd and Ken Bolton himself (June 26). Readings commence at 8 p.m. and cost $5. Space is always tight, so arrive early.

There is colour immediately in Paul Morgan’s Turner’s Paintbox, a juxtaposition of a love story and the history of the famous painter. The novel is a sensory read which falls into the improbable when Morgan begins to write of love.

The naturalist has been something of a recurring figure in recent Australian historical fiction: there is Ingrid in Jessica White’s A Curious Intimacy (2007), Lindsay Simpson’s Lady Jane in The Curer of Souls (2007), and now the real-life William Caldwell, from Nicolas Drayson’s Love and the Platypus. The novel opens in 1883 with the young British naturalist arriving in Queensland. In search of the elusive platypus egg, he crosses overland to the Burnett River, where he sets up camp and begins his investigation.

Genna de Bont’s first novel draws on her experience in working with children and adults with disabilities. Her gaze is drawn to moments of human frailty, which she renders with empathy and precision. The prevailing tone of The Pepper Gate is autumnal, placing us in a profoundly reflective world, one in which the weight of the past is more pressing than the demands of the present.

It is hard to shake the impression that Tony McMahon’s The Single Gentleman’s Dining Club is a book intended for those who don’t usually read. From the back-cover blurb, which compares it to Sex and the City, to the large font and short chapters, this is a book that feels a lot like television. Similarly, like most men depicted by the media, McMahon’s club members struggle with adulthood. Well into their thirties, they are still looking for casual sex, reeling off Star Wars references and trying to ignore their own mortality.

In the acknowledgments to this collection of short stories, Stephanie Green tells us that these stories came to her over sixteen years. Several stories draw on her life as a teacher, academic and freelance writer. There are university yarns and staffroom intrigue, along with busy pieces from family history. Overall, these are stories of women in states of change: a wife, returning to the childhood farm, considers leaving her husband; a faded jazz singer reflects on the highs and lows of her career; an artist returns to her roots in the country.

Before you settle into this ‘random history of the twenty-first century’, grab an atlas: Andrew Mueller is one well-travelled hack. A fatalist philatelist, he has spent most of his career collecting the types of stamps that adorn passports, not envelopes. In I Wouldn’t Start from Here, Mueller reports on and from some of the most exotic sites of international strife imaginable: Jerusalem, Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul. There are also trips to places of lesser renown, aspirational statelets and breakaway provinces in countries as far-flung as Georgia (Abkhazia). All of which, as his publishers congratulate him in their press release, is ‘[n]ot bad for a guy who originally hails from Wagga Wagga’.

Universal dictionaries are no longer possible or desirable. If we would conquer the realm of knowledge we must be content to divide it.’ Thus wrote The Times on 5 January 1885 in its first article on the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), whose initial supplement – the first of an eventual sixty-three published over the next fifteen years – was then about to appear.

Perhaps The Times’s correspondent knew that in 1881, when the Victorian publisher George Smith first conceived of a biographical dictionary and approached his friend Leslie Stephen, the eminent man of letters, to edit it, he had envisaged just such a universal dictionary including biographies of all the worthies, from all the nations and civilisations. Smith was a worthy himself: the publisher of many of the greatest Victorian writers including the Brontës, Thackeray, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brownings, Trollope and Ruskin. He explained in 1894 that ‘[h]is first idea was to produce a dictionary of universal biography with many editors and contributions, English and foreign. From that wild attempt he was saved by the knowledge and sound judgment of Leslie Stephen.’ Contemporaries approved Stephen’s determination to produce a work on eminent and noteworthy Britons only: according to the critic Richard Copley Christie in his review of the first volumes of the DNB in 1887, ‘The day for the general biographical dictionary is passed. For such an undertaking on the scale of the work before us five hundred volumes would not suffice’.¹