| Larry Schwartz |
| A KINDLY real estate agent once took pity on a young couple, realising they were ignorant of the flaws in a ramshackle house they seemed intent on buying. “They were so much in love with each other,” says author Elizabeth Jolley, then a recent migrant from England in a brand-new dress and raincoat to impress on the first (and, as it would happen, last) day on the job. The house was damp, faced the wrong way and had awful, pokey rooms. It was “such rubbish”, she says. “They seemed enchanted with it because they were enchanted with each other.” But any chance of a sale disappeared after a quiet word from a would-be property salesman who would instead become one of Australia’s best fiction writers. “Real estate salesman _ failed”, says a biographical note compiled by her publisher, detailing activities after her arrival in Western Australia in 1959. Above it is the similarly blunt observation: “Door-to-door salesman _ failed”. Other jobs included nursing and a spell as a “flying domestic”, cleaning other people’s houses. “I was quite a success at that.” Though she had written for many years, Elizabeth Jolley was late in achieving publication, let alone acclaim. Now in her late 60s, she has won literary prizes, including `The Age’ Book of the Year Award for `Mr Scobie’s Riddle’ in 1983; and the 1987 Miles Franklin Award for `The Well’. However, for years she felt at times she might have as little success in becoming a published author as in property and door-to-door sales. “I felt really as though I might be a mad, failed writer,” she says. “That failing might send me mad, if I wasn’t already mad. It made me feel very dejected. But, of course, I do have an optimism and a wish to write. And, as it happened, when I did start getting accepted, I had a lot of material.” Bespectacled, in electric blue coat with a red-tartan scarf about her neck, the author is speaking over the plunk of a professional piano at a plush city hotel. She has come to Melbourne from her home in Western Australia to promote a new book, `Central Mischief’, a collection of articles, speeches and essays. Among the insights is a description in a 1986 newspaper article, `Four Trams on a Postcard’, of travel from her home to this city: “To come to Melbourne from Perth is to visit not a new country but to revisit something from before. It is a nostalgic and not unpleasant reminder of a place left behind.” That place, says the author, born in the west of England’s industrial Midlands, is her native Birmingham. “Of course, people in Melbourne might not like that … I suppose it would be the trams partly and the buildings …” She laughs when I ask of the exhaustive itinerary and the need to promote again a book that brings her to Melbourne. “It’s all in a good cause. Me.” Jolley, who has not just written novels and short-stories, but much radio drama, has flown from Sydney in the early hours for two days here. On the day we meet, she is to speak at an `Age’ literary luncheon and do six media interviews. “Put it this way, I can’t keep it up,” she says. “It’s a strain. But, at the same time, publishing is a business. I’d be a fool not to do it. There’s nothing like a dead book sinking …” She says Penguin Books, which initially rejected the title for her 1983 novel, `Mr Scobie’s Riddle’, was similarly unimpressed with her latest choice of title. However, Penguin finally agreed to use the phrase she had taken from a September 1990 piece she wrote of a description by the German writer Johann von Goethe, in his 1809 novel `Elective Affinities’, of a disease strongly resembling anorexia nervosa. “In a way, it fits with the idea of a fiction writer who might explore central mischief in a person …” She is impressed by the work done by her Melbourne-based literary agent, Caroline Lurie, in compiling and indexing the collection. Lurie also represents Western Australian writers Tim Winton and Fay Zwicky. She says Jolley was enduring the frustration, when she approached her to act as agent in 1980, of still awaiting publication of her first novel, `Palomino’, even though it had been accepted by a small publisher in 1976. With Australian publishing concentrated in Melbourne and Sydney, experiences of this kind could be “fairly gruesome” to a Perth writer, she explains. Jolley, incidentally, rejects the notion that Western Australian writers are necessarily disadvantaged by distance. “You could be equally disadvantaged if you were 30 miles from any city,” she says. “You see, you could still be on the edge. And I think the best fiction is regional fiction. The writer writing from within his region, his landscape where he walks and talks and works.” Lurie, who sifted through five bulky folders of photostats (two of book reviews, the rest mainly commissioned talks and articles) before settling on pieces to appear in the 189-page book, says she was first unwilling when approached 18 months ago to compile the book. Lurie says she had replied that though touched by the offer, she was too busy. Later it occurred to her that this response was “graceless” and she agreed to take on the job. Arranged chronologically (not in terms of the time of writing but as they correspond to phases in the author’s life), the pieces cover a variety of topics. Memories of childhood in the Midlands, a Quaker boarding school, work as a trainee nurse during World War II, migration with three young children (“… I trailed along like an obedient squaw,” she writes. “The desire for space was irresistible …”). Predictably, she tells us about writing (“(it) provides the individual with a greater knowledge of language and of self and society … (that) may help in some way to dissipate the monstrous cosiness of suburban apathy”). She says the pieces in `Central Mischief’ are “as close to fact and autobiography as I can get”. Not that it tells more than she would have us know. “I think my fiction might be more revealing, really,” she says. “I use real experience in the fiction, but then go off into imagination. Here … I’m only revealing what I’m prepared to reveal. “In writing a fiction, I think the writer might inadvertently reveal more. And yet, I don’t know why people want to know about the writer, really …” She concedes that some books, notably `My Father’s Moon’ and `Cabin Fever’ are close to autobiography. Asked about the relationship between fact and fiction, she says: “You take a little moment of truth and awareness, and then you let go, on to the imagination to create. “Once I get my moment of truth, I don’t really have any difficulty with the imagination. I couldn’t really write about a real person …” This despite the fact that she had featured her father in some works. Jolley regards herself as a Western Australian, rather than Australian, writer. “It’s regional, you see … I think it’s where you are and where you’re writing from and where you’re living. “Sometimes I’ve been described as an English writer and it’s given me rather a shock. But of course I am English. Half-Viennese actually.” Elizabeth Jolley’s stature is such, says the blurb on the flyleaf of the new book, that her “remarkable mixture of comedy, satire and pathos” has been compared to work by the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and Barbara Pym. “Her fiction shines and shines, like a good deed in a naughty world,” writer Angela Carter once wrote in `The New York Times Book Review’. Jolley appears to be quietly modest about her achievement, untainted by acclaim and says literary fame has not interfered with family life. She believes she can be “quietly pleased that the books took on and people seem to like them”. Success, she says, has not changed her life at all. “Except, of course that I’ve got more money than I used to.” With `Central Mischief’ culminating in a list titled, `What I Know Now’ (“I used to believe in nature’s holy plan, but now I keep geese … There was a time when I did not know about garlic … It seems incredible to me that I ever managed without plastic wrap’ …), it is interesting to hear her measure success. “I was just thinking that I ought to get a new hall carpet and I haven’t done it,” Jolley says. “At one time I couldn’t have afforded to have a new hall carpet.” The Sunday Age, 17-May-1992 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 