Adelaide Writers' Week

Adelaide Writers' Week: essay

. . . mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol.

See nations, slowly wise, and meanly just,

To buried merit raise the tardy bust.

(The Vanity of Human Wishes)

That was in another country, and besides, two centuries ago, but certain things are ever-constant in the world of letters. In this year’s Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week (hereafter ‘the Week’) every one of Dr Johnson’s enemies of the writer’s promise were in evidence in modern dress – even, surprisingly, the Gaol, as Mr Robert Adamson of Sydney, regaling us with his interminable spiritual biography, told how he came to see Shelley plain, as well as his own poetic destiny in a Long Bay solitary confinement cell. Toil and Want also put in a mournful appearance. The cognoscenti have come to expect many delicious, almost Metaphysical conjunctions in the events of the Week; and they were not disappointed when the Writers’ Pavilion was declared open on the Sunday to the rattling roar of Iroquois helicopters above the adjacent Torrens Parade Ground. As a wounded soldier emitting blue smoke was winched into the air the mood of Apocalypse Now without was echoed within by Dr Bob Brissenden, Chairman of the Literature Board. ‘Grotesque and degrading’ it was, according to him, that the Board, now an all but bankrupt Patron, was able last year to award only 49 Fellowships compared with 158 six years ago; and the value of those, even, reduced by half. The war-gamers swooped and soared outside, triumphantly celebrating the new defence allocations, while inside Johnson’s Envy found voice with an ungrammatical squeal of ‘less Helicopters, more Books!’

There have been many occasions in previous years for wondering if Mars had been appointed tutelary deity of the Weeks, in that experiencing them has been somewhat like being in the front line of a war: wastes of ennui punctuated by unpredictable moments of sweaty exhilaration. But, by and large, what followed of this year’s Week belied its promisingly martial opening. No skilled Black rhetoricians appeared, working over the parlour liberals and bringing them trembling to their feet with elaborate apologies for the white race; there were no feminist hissings at the first hint of sexual heresy; even the action poet Pi-O with his cymbals has, finally, given the whole thing away. There was the usual lavish eating and drinking, of course, and many rooms in the new Oberoi hotel were expensively occupied; but most of the sessions proved as dull, respectable and intermittently interesting as their bland titles – Literature and the Child, Literature and Cultural Identity – indicated to even the most well-wishing observer. The banquet which had opened with such a spicy hors d’oeuvre proved to have no overall theme, and its menu was heavy; stodgy even, and the courses too close together for efficient assimilation. Lacking an iron digestion one could only sample the dishes. (Even with an iron digestion was impossible if one had a living to earn: with sublime insouciance the organisers persisted in programming vital sessions right through the middle of five consecutive weekdays.) Often it was the peripheral but illuminating detail that lingered in the memory, setting the overall tone.

Of the Myth, Symbol and Fable session, for instance. This one got off to a belated start after a ‘few introductory remarks’ from Professor of Literature Ian Reid, in whose prolonged discourse terms like “mythoids” and “parabolic fictions” jostled uneasily with allusions to Jesus Christ Superstar. His expropriation of a quarter of the time stirred some muffled protest from the audience. What remained, however, was more than sufficient to prove that no one had thought much about the subject and had not the faintest idea how the various papers were going to slot together.

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s paper, which set up an elaborate distinction between ‘real’ myths such as a creation myth of the Ibo and ‘false’ myths such as those which fuel anti-semitism, was chiefly remarkable for the enthusiasm with which his audience greeted the news that they were the inheritors of a narrow-minded white Western scientism.

Achebe was lively, though, whereas the next speaker, Ms Elizabeth Plessen, spent her time recounting in a plodding Teutonic monotone her elaborate researches for a historical novel. At first her listeners registered bafflement (not unwarranted when inquiry later revealed that the novel isn’t available here even in German and nothing else of hers has been translated) but as, in the stifling marquee she seemed to be nodding off to sleep over her microphone, torpor settled down on the audience like a warm soggy duvet.

As for the contributions by Robert Bly, his earlier readings had been notable for his translations from classical Indian poetry, readings accompanied by strange jerkings of the limbs suggestive of ataxia but in fact supposed to imitate the movements of Hindu dance. In his talk he psychoanalysed a couple of folk stories with a rather sharkish bonhomie which provoked the less devout of his listeners. ‘Now, what can Jack do with his beanstalk?' he demanded at one point. ‘He can climb it, yes. Or chop it down, yes. Now, what else?’ ‘Smoke it?’ came a cry from the rear, giving the one light touch to the afternoon.

Much more memorable and worthy of study were the faces of the panelists as each speaker went through his or her routine. The Chairman himself very creditably managed to preserve a look of alert interest for more than two hours. His guests did not bother to do so. At the more histrionic moments, it is true, their expressions were wonderful, ranging across the entire gamut from astonishment, through incredulity to contempt; but usually they maintained and impassive and diplomatic patience. The antics of one’s fellows are all part of the literary traveller’s lot, they seemed to be thinking; just a boredom to be endured, like the long plane flight.

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Despite its frequent absurdities and embarrassments, Writers’ Week is an important cultural resource which, though it will never be popular even to the extent that the rest of the Festival is popular, can be excellent value for its modest budget. And, if one discounts the catastrophes of the 1976 Week (‘a high water mark in sheer awfulness’ Les Murray later wrote of it), its reputation continues to be high. True, criticism has not been onerous. Retrospective criticism has been practically nil: apropos of this, Humphrey McQueen (himself a notable beneficiary of the Literature Board), whose sprightly comments on the media put a spark into the opening session, bewailed the lack of any tradition of extended critical journalism in this country of the kind represented in Britain by Muggeridge, Connolly and Trevor-Roper. The local media have been content to print sketchy biographical details and at most an unpenetrating interview or two – the contract here with the often rough justice they mete out on other aspects of the Festival is striking.

Even so trenchant a critic as Mr Peter Ward, who has certainly not been sparing of the Festival as a whole (“Its day in done. It has no meaning, no relevance any more”) has been content to approve the Week insofar as it is a purely indigenous occasion. But there is more to the Week than that. Its real glamour rests in the fact that like Festival itself it gives an opportunity to look here upon this picture, and on this; to place our literary accomplishments against those of overseas, to see how they measure up.

That, by and large, is what people are most curious to see, and certainly that is the point of the sessions they have to pay to see. In this sense, much of the value of the Week resides in the effectiveness with which the visiting writers are selected and, once they are here, what use is made of them. And it is here that those interested in making international comparisons are being badly served. Though there are honourable exceptions, we are required to judge the true proportions of writing overseas gazing into a fairground distorting mirror.

To view the matter more generally for a moment, it has to be borne in mind that what we are face with is the final extension of a venerable institution. The literary lecture-cum-reading tour, which began with the peregrinations of Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope between Britain and the States late last century, has now spread to cover the entire world. And as this free global circulation of writers has increased, a sort of Gresham's Law has come into operation with the bad writers swamping the good. For the mediocre, in the nature of things far more numerous, are far more mobile as well. Of the talented writers, committed to the exigencies of their art, a far higher proportion will grudge flying round the world to deliver a few hours' worth of generalities on Literature and the Infinite or whatever numbing topic has been dreamt up for them. But the hodmen of literature, to whom such gatherings are meat and drink (psychologically, if not literally speaking) will have no such qualms. Used to scribbling their material in hotel rooms and on the armrests of plane seats, they are bound to be represented at functions like the Week and its endless counterparts elsewhere far more ubiquitously than even their relative numbers would imply. For every D.J. Enright we manage to lure to these shores, there will be a dozen Joan Aitkens (or 'Joan Aitken Enterprises Ltd.' as the flyleaves of her books proclaim her) whose Mills-and-Boonish historical romances spilled across two cases of a display in the Book Tent. The tendencies we are talking about cannot of course be reversed by any effort of the Writers' Week Committee. Even to compensate for their effect would mean competing financially with the affluent American lecture circuit industry. But certain ameliorations are possible. At the most basic level, it would help if the various writers who were actually or potentially available were put on a "shopping list" and their performance on their home ground vetted before any invitation was issued. At the moment a good proportion are taken on the dubious commendation of the various Arts Councils which sponsor the visit — on the trust, that is to say, of bureaucracies whose very existence depends on making sure, come what may, that talent is found and advertised. Such quality control might be expensive (though taken as a matter of course in planning the rest of the Festival) but it would at least winnow out those who are completely inarticulate in a public forum; it would also eliminate the more simple-minded kind of fraud who has put together a road show which has been found to slip easily down the throats of sophomore audiences. As for the selection procedure itself, it would no doubt be profitable if this attracted more public debate; but for various reasons, some of them good, the Committee will no doubt continue to play the benevolent autocrat, giving us what it thinks we deserve or need, and doing its best to stifle any speculation about who is coming or not. Its attitude is not perhaps very defensible but it is comprehensible enough: visiting writers cannot, apparently, be tied to a contract to appear, and after having its collective nose bloodied so badly in 1976 — when Baldwin, Williams, Vonnegut and Moravia fell in a heap by the wayside to loud public lamentation — it is not surprising that the Committee intends keeping the cards close to its chest in the future. But this is far from being an excuse for neglecting to think again about what visiting writers can offer the public, and how they should be presented to it. We need to confront more directly the difficulty that if we invite a musician, an actor, a painter, we can put him to work without too much sense of artificiality. But the writer may lack the power to render his art in public; his claim on the attention may be evident nowhere except in the Book Tent next door, and to force him as a substitute to talk about his research methods is positively to invite tedium. So is to present him with a seminar topic: it is a strange delusion that a writer should be automatically more worth hearing on, say, cultural identity than a flautist or sculptor. A certain uneasy recognition of this has led to the proposal that writers should not appear publicly at all, but only in informal workshop sessions for aspirant writers. This is surely the council of despair. What is needed is more exposure to visitors, not less, but exposure of a particular kind. We want to hear more of their work; work read by themselves and actor-interpreters and in as many other ways as can be devised, plus the chance to discuss it with the authors.

Any writer worth bringing here at all is worth a really generous portion of time in which to be heard. The prevailing ridiculous practice of crowding into one reading-session as many as four participants plus a chairman must be changed, even at the cost (if it is a cost) of inviting fewer writers. And let us expand our notion of writer. What about the historians and the biographers? The scientific popularisers, the polemicists, the social philosophers? Doesn't their very raison d’etre rest in their powers of word -manipulation? Is not writing their trade just as much as it is of the emotional solipsists and self-vivisectors who at present crowd out the Week? And let us do something about the physical setting. The old calico tent (“colour of cow's diarrhoea" Murray called it) has gone, and its replacement works well enough in the day; but the evening's mis en scene is far less satisfactory. The coldly yawning hall, the intimidating rostrum, the formal introduction of each speaker who rises in turn to read, standing, into a microphone as though on the hustings: surely these could be replaced by one of the larger university common rooms, where softer furnishings conduce to a warmer atmosphere.

Finally, let us abandon the policy of determined contemporaneity, particularly as this finds expression in the assumption that the inter-Week period has inevitably produced a crop of local writing worth harvesting in a two-hour seminar. New books which are worth noticing deserve better than this, and as for the rest, let us take our chance on having later on to raise Johnson's tardy bust to their buried merit. Centenaries and anniversaries make convenient excuses, but are by no means critical in giving the proceedings an historical dimension.

As proof of what is possible, this year's extremely successful celebration of Henry Lawson asserted the very great value of taking a long purview. Though unpretentiously organised, this shone amidst the inflated claims and affectations like a good deed in a naughty world. Lawson's was, after all, a modest enough talent; but as the first passages were read the effect was really quite electrifying: one knew indisputably that here was a creative intelligence at work, and with a noiseless shock, as when one's eyes suddenly adjust to the cues of perspective, much of what had come before fell into its proper Lilliputian scale. Mr Robin Ramsay's face, now deadpan as a comedian's, now mobile and droll; his voice, with a hundred subtle modulations of its laconic drawl, were alike perfect in the role he has made so peculiarly his own. The material was selected with typical verve and intelligence by Dr Brian Matthews and the narrative links, read by Don Dunstan, neatly stitched it all together. Here, surely, is a lesson for handling visiting writers in the future. Must it prove the Vanity of Human Wishes to expect that it will be heeded?

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Les Murray, "Clapped in Macedonia: Two Festivals," Quadrant, XXI (April 1977), 16-21.

Peter Ward, "The Party's Almost Over but the Melody Lingers On," Weekend Australian, 15-16 March 1980, 11.