Impulse, curiosity, envy, mystery: Geordie Williamson on criticism

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian, a position he has held since 2008. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications both here and overseas over the past decade, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, Australian Book Review, Best Australian Essays, and Britain’s Spectator and Prospect magazines. Earlier this year he was awarded the 2011 Pascall Prize for criticism. We spoke to Geordie about the art of criticism.

Earlier this year, you said: ‘If I didn’t write for the newspaper and speak on the radio, I’d be stopping strangers in the street and holding slightly too firmly to their arms while I told them what to read.’ How can a writer go from unbridled enthusiasm to crafting an opinion?

I should probably clarify: ‘unbridled enthusiasm’ is my default orientation towards good books in general, not my default critical response. That wide-eyed rosy-cheeked glow doesn’t survive every reading experience. But when a particular book clicks — when I lose my body and drift for a while in its pages — my first impulse on returning to Earth is to ask, ‘How did he/she do that?’ The awe of first contact with a beautiful or arresting work shades almost immediately into curiosity (and envy, too).

One example. I’ve been reading Melbourne University Press’s reissue of Christina Stead’s novel Letty Fox: Her Luck. It’s an often overwrought and (at almost 700 pages) an overlong fiction. There are glaring flaws in almost every department of the work. And yet Letty’s garrulous, wickedly eccentric voice  — and the oddity of the story she tells — soon overwhelm the usual desire for tidiness and order (Stead makes such needs seem petty). Narrative takes on momentum in spite of itself. It grows grander, wilder, ever more spendthrift in terms of imagery and dialogue, character and idea. Tensions build to such a point that the inner weather of the novel starts to darken and swirl. Storm clouds gather and lightning cracks — and the whole novel catches fire.

The admiration I feel for Letty Fox and Christina Stead more broadly is only enhanced by the mystery of how she manages to turn her weaknesses into strengths. Yet my enthusiasm is tempered by the difficulty of articulating what it is in her work that provokes it. Stead inspires homage but demands explication, and the top-drawer criticism her work has elicited from writers like Randall Jarrell, Angela Carter, Tim Parks and Jonathan Franzen emerges from a sense that her writing cannot simply be gushed over — it must be grappled with. And what is true for Letty Fox is true for any work of lasting worth.

Of course a book’s call for considered critique is only half the story. The shape each response takes is the critic’s responsibility. The would-be reviewer needs to have read widely (for context’s sake) and deeply (for specific response) — the lens needs to zoom and pan — and he or she needs to be able to identify and isolate those aspects of the work that make it swing on the page. Beyond that, there is the only the mystery of style: words placed in the right order. Even the most insightful reading is worthless if its described in terms too recondite, verbose, or just plain dull.

Do you remember the first published review you wrote?

Peter Rose (fine editor, brilliant poet, all-round scholar and gent) rang from the Australian Book Review to ask if I was interested in some work back in 2000. He asked me to review two novels by young Australian authors: Malcolm Knox’s debut, Summerland, and The Art of the Engine Driver, Steven Carroll’s first Glenroy novel. I agonised endlessly over the 800-word piece — overwriting is a besetting sin for those just starting out — but I liked both novels and said so. Ten years on and I have just reviewed each of their latest books. I feel like we’ve grown up together.
Should critics have any particular credentials? What do you think about the idea — suggested by some novelists — that a person who hasn’t written a book shouldn’t be trusted as a critic?

Critics require no credentials, only a relentless auto-didactic urge. Even though I studied Eng. Lit. at uni it was the extra-curricular reading that made a reviewer of me. As for the second question, I’m not sure that novelists are quite as snooty about critics as they once were. The exigencies of the literary marketplace are such that creative writers are often obliged to review these days — it’s not much money, but the turnaround is faster than writing a book — and the line between fiction and non-fiction has become so blurred in recent times that the distinction is probably redundant.

Having said that, many of our best Australian authors are also our best critics. My own touchstones — Virginia Woolf, V.S. Pritchett, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Berger ­— are all practitioner-critics too, so there may be something to the claim.

In your 2011 Pascall Prize acceptance speech, you defined the kind of criticism that interests you as ‘open-handed criticism: the kind that encourages and guides by example, that rummages through the discount bins of the culture on the lookout for overlooked treasures, that attempts to find the good that lies in even unliterary book’. How do you decide what to read and what to review?

I used to trawl secondhand bookshops, scooping up half a dozen cheap paperbacks at a time and taking them home to scan. I made a lot of mistakes at first, but fewer later on as my taste matured. When the web arrived I used it to track down interesting new titles for review — it’s a fantastic if not always reliable resource — but now I find the books come to me via publishers, agents, authors and editors. Publishing is in such a hyperactive state these days that some filter is necessary for sanity’s sake. I do miss those solitary excursions, though. I still try to use the secondhand bookshops as research libraries, though for private pleasure rather than public toil.

In 2008, you started a blog, where you publish some of your reviews and literary miscellanea. How has the internet affected the way you think about criticism and write about literature?

Have you got a week? Short answer, then: the web changes everything and nothing. On one hand it is a revolutionary development — the first time in human history that work, education, social life and Eros have all been combined in the same neat device — whose coming has led to an upheaval in my corner of the culture (the creation, production, dissemination and discussion of literature), as it has in everyone else’s.

But it would be absurd to say that those narratives that have sustained our culture — culture being the accumulated store of stories we tell about ourselves — will be touched by the shift. So far they have managed the migration from oral literature to written, from poetry to prose, from epic to novel. They’ll manage the shift from analog to digital.

My postgraduate research area has been in Romantic-era prose. I’m particularly interested in Romantic pedestrianism: those poets and essayists who walked and walked. But it was the improvement of Britain’s roads and the rise of the mail-coaches (the high speed internet of the day) that allowed these ramblers to become philosophical about what had so far been a practical necessity. They were freed by technology to reflect upon — to make an art of — walking. Just as we are now free to reflect upon and make an art of the codex. I suspect the book will once again become an object a for coterie appreciation: a thing of beauty rather than an industrially produced object. A new chapter, hopefully, for writers and critics both.

Geordie Williamson will appear in The Art of Criticism on Saturday 1 September with Nicholas Hasluck, and asks  Anna Funder, Leslie Cannold, Malcolm Knox and Christopher Kremmer about Switching to Fiction on Sunday 4 September.