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.

A Classical Education?

As the clouds came out again over Melbourne, Peter Rose, Eliot Weinberger, Barry Hill and Ian Morris gathered to discuss the influence of the classics on contemporary writing.

What is a classic, anyway? When I was at school, classical societies and cultures were those of ancient Greece and Rome. Morris, who is Willard Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University, described a redefinition of ‘classic’ that was taking place in scholarly and educational circles: ‘It would be silly to carry on acting like they did in the 19^th century, when there was a real focus on Western culture.’ Where Western civilisation courses used to be ubiquitous, they have now have been replaced by world history courses. Of course, this means that ‘there’s going to be less of a focus on Greek and Roman literature – but that’s not such a bad thing’.

Classics do still play a part in modern literature, poet and historian (among other things) Hill reminded us, as he had been reminded last week at a series of events featuring philosopher Raimond Gaita. Plato features in Gaita’s work, as does Socrates – Gaita clearly has a passion for ‘the examined life’. As the attendees discussed Gaita’s Romulus, My Father and Gaita’s new book, Hill realised they were engaging in the ritual of rendering a new book as a classic – by recalling the classics that helped shape it, and lauding it in terms of the classics we admire. A paradox of the ‘classic’ occurred to him: the classic is there to be used and reused (and abused), but is also sacred, unique.

It’s universal that every culture venerates its ancestors, said a jetlagged Weinberger (‘One is stupid, but when jetlagged, one has an excuse for one’s stupidity.’) ‘It’s hard to think of any culture that doesn’t’; perhaps we’re at a moment where the poets have lost the past and the classics have dropped out, in a nod to postmodernism.

An audience question suggested that history is being poorly covered in schools; did the panellists find this depressing? Morris didn’t, and said he didn’t worry about it because history is being covered abundantly on television and being watched like never before, although the coverage was perhaps not what a historian would choose to watch.

The Cameron government has made huge cuts to university funding, too, Rose said, raising the question of what sort of education should be produced under financial constraints. Morris agreed there was a push towards career-oriented disciplines, such as finance, and that the lack of funds prompted reflection: is there any point to a humanist education? But reflection needn’t be so defeatist, Morris said – perhaps humanists aren’t making an attempt to teach relevant content that interests people.

At session’s end, Weinberger revisited the idea of what defines a classic, pointing again to the expansion of this idea of what is classic: not just Greece and Rome, but also artefacts from Asia, and Aboriginal culture, closer to home. ‘The ancient is always lurking under the parking lot and it has an unpredictable way of resurfacing.’

“I was able to play with the truth”: Creating History

A friend of mine is at this moment in Iceland, digging through library rooms, sneezing from archival dust, and loving every moment of it. She is doing research for a historical novel, based on the life of an Icelandic woman who lived in the 1800s. This intrepid dipping into the history and, indeed, mind, of a person long gone is an experience shared by Peter Rose, Lisa Lang and Michael Meehan

Peter Rose is well known for his memoir The Rose Boys. His latest offering is a novel, Roddy Parr, which tells the literary insider tale of Roddy Parr, amanuensis to lauded author David Anthem. In name, biographical and autobiographical writing are different to fiction. But writing fiction requires the same attention to detail, the same consciousness of a multifaceted and continous being. Rose says of his characters that he has to know ‘how they dress, what they read, who they sleep with … they must become vivid, plausible, almost historical’. They’re not passive creatures: ‘I hear them babbling away in my head’.

A few years ago, Lisa Lang published Chasing the Rainbow, a book on Edward.W. Cole, a significant and prolific figure in publishing in the 1850s. She has now fictionalised Cole’s life in her novel Utopian Man. His history may be described as checkered – he sold lemonade in the gold rush fields, later sold pies, and once travelled to Adelaide in a wooden boat. He then put an advertisement in the newspaper for a wife: ‘She must be a spinster of 35 or 36 years of age,’ he declared. This was before he installed himself as a bookseller in Cole’s Book Arcade, which included a Chinese tea salon at the height of the anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia.

What is it, Lang wondered, that fiction could offer this abundant, larger than life story? ‘It gets us inside the heads of the characters.’ The ‘intensity of the inner life’ is served better by fiction than non-fiction writing, she concluded. The public details of Cole’s life were there for the taking, but what of the more personal details, the childhood memories, the blush of feeling?

Michael Meehan has published four novels, the latest of which is Below the Styx. Martin Frobisher’s name is familiar to connoisseurs of Tudor history. But the newer Frobisher is more like a sleuth than a courtier (though he is interested in the art of lying); he’s searching earnestly for the truth about well-known Australian, Marcus Clarke. Earlier this year, the Meehan family celebrated their 100th year in the country up in the Mallee. Michael’s grandfather had insisted on a total break from the Irish Meehans, many of whom opposed his union with his chosen wife. With all that excitement in one’s background, it’s not surprising that Meehan has written about history, but not to rechart it – instead, ‘Hope, desire, dream and dread’ is the realm of the novelist. Documentary history ‘will take you a certain distance’, as will oral history (though it’s ‘notoriously unreliable’), but you must ‘fuse’ this research with sensation and feeling, because that’s why readers read – not facts.

Cinema Nova and Readings event: Which is better? The book or the movie?

To celebrate the release of the film adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novel DISGRACE, starring John Malkovich, Cinema Nova in partnership with Readings are proud to present the first in an ongoing series of discussions to try and settle the age-old dinner party dispute:
WHICH IS BETTER? THE BOOK OR THE MOVIE?

Sunday June 14, 5.00pm
A screening of DISGRACE will preceed the panel discussion.

$15.50 / $11.00 concession

Melbourne’s best and brightest film, publishing and arts identities will join the panel and try to settle the score.

Elliot Perlman is a barrister and award-winning writer who adapted his own book, THREE DOLLARS, for Robert Connolly’s drama starring David Wenham.

Sue Maslin is the multi-award winning producer of Japanese Story and the executive producer of Irresistible starring Sam Neill, Emily Blunt and Susan Sarandon.

Catherine Deveny is a controversial social commentator for The Age, was named amongst the 100 Most Influential Melbournians and co-wrote the 2005 AFI awards with Russell Crowe.

Tom Ryan has been the film critic for The Sunday Age in Melbourne since 1989. A film lecturer in Australia and the UK, he has also contributed to several international film magazines.

Peter Rose is the editor of Australian Book Review. He was a publisher at Oxford University Press and has authored the highly successful family memoir Rose Boys.

To be moderated by Michael Veitch a performer, broadcaster and writer, Michael started his career in TV comedy on legendary shows such as The D-Generation and Fast Forward. Born into a family of journalists, he has written as a theatre and literary critic for The Age, Australian and Herald-Sun newspapers. Michael is the host of ABC’s vastly popular Sunday Arts program.

MORE PANELISTS TO BE CONFIRMED CLOSER TO THE EVENT!

Tickets available at www.cinemanova.com.au