Classic Conundrum
Newcastle Herald
Saturday September 1, 2001
HENRY is a she, not a he. This pertinent fact is one that English lecturers in universities around the country need to gently correct many new students on each year.
The Henry in question is Henry Handel Richardson, the pseudonym under which Melbourne author Ethel Lindesay Robertson wrote. In fact, Elizabeth Webby, Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University, says: 'Most people would not have heard of Henry Handel Richardson.'
Richardson's three-part story The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is thought by many to be the greatest Australian novel of all. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932.
That so many know so very little about such an important literary figure says much about our collective ambivalence to Australian literature.
Sydney author Gerard Windsor declared in a speech at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival that there were few, if any, Australian literary classics. He cannot nominate a single Australian novel that's a classic in the sense that it is so highly thought of and loved that it has been passed from generation to generation.
'We don't have cultural works that are part of our national psyche in the way that other countries do,' he says, adding that the classic Australian novel is 'a mythological beast of sorts'.
According to Windsor, the term 'classic' has been devalued by being slapped on inferior writing in an effort to sell more books. His only literary nominations are Banjo Paterson's Man From Snowy River, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding and May Gibbs' illustrations.
Windsor says we have many marvellous works but no equivalent of Ulysses, nor Blooms Day; no match for Pride and Prejudice, nor David Copperfield, nor Moby Dick.
THE writer Tom Keneally, who recently had his novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith relaunched as part of a classics series by Harper Collins, says we're more likely to apply the term 'classic' to a horse race or a footy goal than a novel.
For Keneally, a literary classic is a splendid work of imagination that transcends its time and place; it must have resonance for the species, as well as the tribe.
'In demanding that they have Australian resonance above all, we are showing that we still feel there aren't enough books that do that for us,' he says.
'We are still showing, me as much as anyone else, a sense of cultural adolescence.'
Literary theory is undermining the concept of the classic, he says, and the quick turnover of titles by publishers and bookshops is making it increasingly difficult for them to emerge.
'It has never been more of a sliding term - the word classic - than it is now, even though all of us
bastards want to be accused of having written one,' Keneally says.
Webby says Windsor's definition is too restrictive and his contention that James Joyce's Ulysses has entered the popular psyche is a nonsense.
'How many people read Ulysses? How many families does that get passed down in?' she says.
Webby says Joseph Furphy's Such Is Life is probably the greatest Australian novel of all but, although no more difficult to read than Ulysses, students avoid it.
Award-winning author Frank Moorhouse says Australia has, despite being a very young literary culture, unquestionably produced several classics, such as The Man Who Loved Children, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and Henry Lawson's short stories.
Moorhouse says printing histories, school and university curricula and conversational knowledge all provide 'empirical evidence' of this. Twenty-five years after the publication of his great and haunting novel Voss, Nobel prizewinner Patrick White wrote despairingly of Australia's literary ambivalence.
'As it is, I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about,' White wrote in a letter to Joseph Losey.
Literary critic and Australian Quarterly editor Peter Craven believes that if Voss had been made into a film it might today be thought of in the same way as, say, Dr Zhivago.
'I think Australia has produced classics in the sense that it has produced works of the highest order,' Craven says.
He recalls Germaine Greer saying that Handel Richardson had the misfortune to produce a great work of naturalism at precisely the moment when its conventions died.
The poet and academic Kevin Hart says Voss comes closest to a classic according to Windsor's definition, while the little-read Fortunes of Richard Mahony is the greatest. Like Keneally, he sees the ongoing search for the great Australian novel as fundamentally a sign of an immature culture'.
Author Helen Garner says Australia's literary
history isn't old enough for the term classic to have much meaning.
'Just because you love and admire a book it doesn't mean you have to attach the term classic to it,' she says.
'You cross over someone else's idea of a classic and everyone gets upset.'
Christina Stead, another great writer, was driven to alcoholic despondency by fitful interest from publishers, critical caution and scarce readers.
Her harrowing portrait of a disintegrating family, The Man Who Loved Children, is widely considered to be one of the finest Australian novels of all time. It was first published in the United States in 1940 but not published in Australia for another 25 years. A disgrace, Stead said before her death, and not hers.
American poet Randall Jarrell wrote in an introduction to the 1965 edition of her book that if the world rejects, and then forgets, a writer's most profound and imaginative book, it'll affect what can come next.
Windsor says marvellous books such as The Man Who Loved Children and Voss have yet to attain the vitality of a true classic and, sadly, they may never do so. In strong disagreement, Moorhouse says: 'The thing I would say about the classics are they're books not that everyone should have read but books that, in a lifetime of reading, ultimately they'll have read.'
Jane Palfreyman, head of publishing at Random House, says the harsh reality is that books are lucky to last longer than three months on the shelves of major book shops.
'Hold on to your classics while you've got them. They may not be with us much longer,' she says.
Windsor says Australia lacks a sufficiently critical
literary culture because the opinion makers are so
self -interested.
'Literary culture is more and more getting dominated by the whole publicity machine and I think newspapers are colluding in that to some extent,' he says.
Ivor Indyk, editor of the literary magazine Heat, agrees with Windsor that we're forgetting the most profound and imaginative works of many of our finest writers.
'We don't love our books enough. We don't pass them down from generation to generation and it is not the fault of the books but the fault of publishers and the reading public,' he says.
Ken Gelder, the head of Melbourne University's English Department, says almost no-one reads The Man Who Loved Children and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.
'They are imaginary classics that one would like to have if only one could persuade a reading public to read them. The same with Patrick White. We can be sad about that but that is a fact.'
Gelder says what turns a book into a classic is being retold, reinterpreted and listened to generation after generation - and we don't have the wherewithal to do so.
'That's not about Australia being too young or naive, it's about Australia investing in its media infrastructure,' he says.
Gelder says Lawson's work is kept alive by 'a sort of Australiana folklore machine' but its relevance to contemporary, multicultural society is doubtful. He says the great contemporary Australian novel is David Ireland's The Unknown Industrial Prisoner but, being set on an oil rig, it 'doesn't fit into any agenda'.
He says modern Australian literature is 'very conservative' and overshadowed by 'quite shocking novelists like David Malouf'. Indyk, in stark contrast, says Malouf is one of our finest writers.
The writer Carmel Bird says we all live in our own little worlds and in her's everyone knows and loves the works of Christina Stead and Patrick White.
'They're going to last as long as Australia lasts and they are going to be read and reread and they're going to be part of the fabric of our
culture,' Bird says.
HENRY is a she, not a he. This pertinent fact is one that English lecturers in universities around the country need to gently correct many new students on each year.
The Henry in question is Henry Handel Richardson, the pseudonym under which Melbourne author Ethel Lindesay Robertson wrote. In fact, Elizabeth Webby, Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University, says: 'Most people would not have heard of Henry Handel Richardson.'
Richardson's three-part story The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is thought by many to be the greatest Australian novel of all. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932.
That so many know so very little about such an important literary figure says much about our collective ambivalence to Australian literature.
Sydney author Gerard Windsor declared in a speech at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival that there were few, if any, Australian literary classics. He cannot nominate a single Australian novel that's a classic in the sense that it is so highly thought of and loved that it has been passed from generation to generation.
'We don't have cultural works that are part of our national psyche in the way that other countries do,' he says, adding that the classic Australian novel is 'a mythological beast of sorts'.
According to Windsor, the term 'classic' has been devalued by being slapped on inferior writing in an effort to sell more books. His only literary nominations are Banjo Paterson's Man From Snowy River, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding and May Gibbs' illustrations.
Windsor says we have many marvellous works but no equivalent of Ulysses, nor Blooms Day; no match for Pride and Prejudice, nor David Copperfield, nor Moby Dick.
THE writer Tom Keneally, who recently had his novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith relaunched as part of a classics series by Harper Collins, says we're more likely to apply the term 'classic' to a horse race or a footy goal than a novel.
For Keneally, a literary classic is a splendid work of imagination that transcends its time and place; it must have resonance for the species, as well as the tribe.
'In demanding that they have Australian resonance above all, we are showing that we still feel there aren't enough books that do that for us,' he says.
'We are still showing, me as much as anyone else, a sense of cultural adolescence.'
Literary theory is undermining the concept of the classic, he says, and the quick turnover of titles by publishers and bookshops is making it increasingly difficult for them to emerge.
'It has never been more of a sliding term - the word classic - than it is now, even though all of us
bastards want to be accused of having written one,' Keneally says.
Webby says Windsor's definition is too restrictive and his contention that James Joyce's Ulysses has entered the popular psyche is a nonsense.
'How many people read Ulysses? How many families does that get passed down in?' she says.
Webby says Joseph Furphy's Such Is Life is probably the greatest Australian novel of all but, although no more difficult to read than Ulysses, students avoid it.
Award-winning author Frank Moorhouse says Australia has, despite being a very young literary culture, unquestionably produced several classics, such as The Man Who Loved Children, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and Henry Lawson's short stories.
Moorhouse says printing histories, school and university curricula and conversational knowledge all provide 'empirical evidence' of this. Twenty-five years after the publication of his great and haunting novel Voss, Nobel prizewinner Patrick White wrote despairingly of Australia's literary ambivalence.
'As it is, I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about,' White wrote in a letter to Joseph Losey.
Literary critic and Australian Quarterly editor Peter Craven believes that if Voss had been made into a film it might today be thought of in the same way as, say, Dr Zhivago.
'I think Australia has produced classics in the sense that it has produced works of the highest order,' Craven says.
He recalls Germaine Greer saying that Handel Richardson had the misfortune to produce a great work of naturalism at precisely the moment when its conventions died.
The poet and academic Kevin Hart says Voss comes closest to a classic according to Windsor's definition, while the little-read Fortunes of Richard Mahony is the greatest. Like Keneally, he sees the ongoing search for the great Australian novel as fundamentally a sign of an immature culture'.
Author Helen Garner says Australia's literary
history isn't old enough for the term classic to have much meaning.
'Just because you love and admire a book it doesn't mean you have to attach the term classic to it,' she says.
'You cross over someone else's idea of a classic and everyone gets upset.'
Christina Stead, another great writer, was driven to alcoholic despondency by fitful interest from publishers, critical caution and scarce readers.
Her harrowing portrait of a disintegrating family, The Man Who Loved Children, is widely considered to be one of the finest Australian novels of all time. It was first published in the United States in 1940 but not published in Australia for another 25 years. A disgrace, Stead said before her death, and not hers.
American poet Randall Jarrell wrote in an introduction to the 1965 edition of her book that if the world rejects, and then forgets, a writer's most profound and imaginative book, it'll affect what can come next.
Windsor says marvellous books such as The Man Who Loved Children and Voss have yet to attain the vitality of a true classic and, sadly, they may never do so. In strong disagreement, Moorhouse says: 'The thing I would say about the classics are they're books not that everyone should have read but books that, in a lifetime of reading, ultimately they'll have read.'
Jane Palfreyman, head of publishing at Random House, says the harsh reality is that books are lucky to last longer than three months on the shelves of major book shops.
'Hold on to your classics while you've got them. They may not be with us much longer,' she says.
Windsor says Australia lacks a sufficiently critical
literary culture because the opinion makers are so
self -interested.
'Literary culture is more and more getting dominated by the whole publicity machine and I think newspapers are colluding in that to some extent,' he says.
Ivor Indyk, editor of the literary magazine Heat, agrees with Windsor that we're forgetting the most profound and imaginative works of many of our finest writers.
'We don't love our books enough. We don't pass them down from generation to generation and it is not the fault of the books but the fault of publishers and the reading public,' he says.
Ken Gelder, the head of Melbourne University's English Department, says almost no-one reads The Man Who Loved Children and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.
'They are imaginary classics that one would like to have if only one could persuade a reading public to read them. The same with Patrick White. We can be sad about that but that is a fact.'
Gelder says what turns a book into a classic is being retold, reinterpreted and listened to generation after generation - and we don't have the wherewithal to do so.
'That's not about Australia being too young or naive, it's about Australia investing in its media infrastructure,' he says.
Gelder says Lawson's work is kept alive by 'a sort of Australiana folklore machine' but its relevance to contemporary, multicultural society is doubtful. He says the great contemporary Australian novel is David Ireland's The Unknown Industrial Prisoner but, being set on an oil rig, it 'doesn't fit into any agenda'.
He says modern Australian literature is 'very conservative' and overshadowed by 'quite shocking novelists like David Malouf'. Indyk, in stark contrast, says Malouf is one of our finest writers.
The writer Carmel Bird says we all live in our own little worlds and in her's everyone knows and loves the works of Christina Stead and Patrick White.
'They're going to last as long as Australia lasts and they are going to be read and reread and they're going to be part of the fabric of our
culture,' Bird says.
© 2001 Newcastle Herald