The Shadow and the Acolyte

THE WHITE ERA

Let’s begin with a spat. Late in 1959, Thea Astley’s first attempt to drop in unannounced on Patrick White was thwarted. His lover and lifelong partner, Manoly Lascaris, turned her away at the door: Patrick was already seated at his desk. He would brook no interruption. Irked yet undeterred, Astley returned to Castle Hill in the new year with all the determination of a jilted lover, beginning an idolatrous friendship with tea and tattle and a self-serving gift in the form of a signed copy of her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958). In a 1963 letter to Thelma Forshaw, she recounts a subsequent gathering with characteristic verve:

In her exquisite biography Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather (2015), Karen Lamb depicts the Queenslander revelling in this literary company, ending meals seated ‘cross-legged on the floor’, a practice it’s hard not to see as her peculiar way of sidling up to Saint Patrick’s feet. Something similar could be said for saucily zipping up windbreakers, though unlike Christina Stead she had cottoned on to the fact that White was gay. Astley’s was a swerving, breakneck wit: even this ostensibly dashed-off letter, with its faux-juvenile misspellings and exuberant capitals, veers from sentence to sentence heedless of the risk of emotional whiplash. It’s easy to imagine Manoly raising a sceptical eyebrow. Then there was the conversation. A. D. Hope once gleefully wrote to Astley to recall lunching in the presence of her ‘ever more splendid irreverent asides – not always so sotto voce that their victims could miss them’. She was doubtless every bit as fun at the dinner table.

Whatever heady mix of sycophancy and arch conviviality transpired there saw White, Astley and Lascaris through some seven years, until Thea and Paddy fell out spectacularly over the phone. Seeking to vent her frustration at Penguin Australia’s decision not to reprint her novel The Well Dressed Explorer (1962) as part of its new paperback series, Astley took an ill-calculated swipe at the poems of the press’ editor Geoffrey Dutton, who unbeknownst to her was White’s erstwhile protégé. Her timing was poor. Dutton had recently published an appreciation of his mentor’s fiction titled simply Patrick White (1961), in which he judged White to be ‘the most serious and gifted novelist Australia has yet produced’. Saint P, famously, could also be a monster. He retaliated to Astley’s sniping by snarling down the line that she was a ‘fucking malicious bitch’. Worse still, he criticised her novel. Astley apologised for feeling the way she did, without recanting a single word of her verdict. White coolly dialled a few days later to declare an end to their friendship. ‘They did not speak for fifteen years’, notes David Marr in Patrick White: A Life (1991), meaning these formidable frenemies spent at least as much of their turbulent relationship on speaking terms as not.

What did it mean, in the late sixties, for an Australian novelist to have fallen out of favour with Patrick White? Reviewing a collection of White’s letters five years after his death, Tim Winton recalls the way he ‘loomed over Australian literature for decades as a distant, grimacing colossus […] Writers around him and after him were forever in his debt, or at least his shadow’. While hindsight can at times occasion hyperbole, the length of White’s shade is difficult to deny. In her review of Marr’s biography, Helen Garner writes that White was ‘unbearable at times, and of merciless cruelty’, yet still prone to ‘generosities grand and small’, such as entering bookshops to ‘ringingly buy a dozen copies of some young struggler’s latest novel’. With elegiac grandeur, Thomas Shapcott’s poem ‘Meditation 5: Rocks: In Memoriam Patrick White’ imagines White’s legacy as quartz within the geode of Australian letters: ‘in the rock agate all layers hone in / to the central crucible of white’.

Earlier accounts tend to be more circumspect, if only marginally so. Poet-professor Vincent Buckley, one of the earliest advocates for the inclusion of Australian literature on university courses, offers a measured view from the shade in his lecture-cum-essay ‘In the Shadow of Patrick White’ (1961). He begins by noting that accounts of a writing scene ‘dominated by a commanding personality or a commanding idea’ have rarely amounted to more than oversimplifications of messier realities. Yet in this case, Buckley observes, ‘such fictions have a real though limited use’; to do away with them altogether would be to underestimate what White meant to a generation of novelists. For those who pursued a career in letters in the post-war decades, no portrait of the period could be considered complete without White’s imperious figure ‘in the foreground of our literary landscape’.

When Buckley’s appraisal first appeared in the July 1961 issue of Meanjin, White’s sprawling suburban satire Riders in the Chariot (1961) was not yet in print – it would not arrive in Australian bookstores until October – and his remarkable late modernist novel The Aunt’s Story (1948) had found lamentably few readers. White’s national reputation at this juncture therefore rested on the merits of his two mid-century masterpieces: the family myth of settler self-establishment The Tree of Man (1955), and the anti-epic of colonial exploration Voss (1957). ‘Voss left his mark on the country,’ claims the mutineer Judd in the latter’s final pages, after the eponymous mad messianic map-maker’s lifeblood has run ‘out upon the dry earth’: ‘he is there in the country, and always will be’. This insistence on an indelible presence typifies White’s mid-century tendency to mythologise his own influence. Little excursus is necessary to see that Voss’ gory apotheosis also allegorises the reputation of its author, who had a habit of complaining (in so many words) that he was bled dry by local critics.

Much the same impulse toward narrative acts of self-aggrandisement likewise subtends the end of The Tree of Man, when a ‘rather leggy, pale boy’ named Ray, grandson of the novel’s protagonists Stan and Amy Parker, moons his way through the bush, ‘rubbing his forehead against the bark of trees’, and is ‘tortured by impotence, and at the same time the possibility of his unborn poem’. In ‘putting out shoots of green thought’ in the novel’s penultimate sentence, the seedlings of his literary ambition turn The Tree of Man’s end into another beginning – a burgeoning of the kind of imagination that glimpses ‘the crimson mystery of the world’ through his grandmother’s shard of carmine glass, of the kind of mind that might one day become capable of penning something like The Tree of Man itself.

All this is not to imply, as Simon During once did, that because ‘White’s life and writing’ were formally ‘organised to achieve his recognition’, his oeuvre therefore achieves little beyond the expression of ‘an autobiographical aesthetic of perverse genius’. The former does not necessitate the latter (few great writers could be said to have never fictionalised their own genius); there’s much more to White’s corpus than just recognition-seeking. Yet White’s mid-century novels certainly do help us see his post-war influence for what it really was: a necessarily exaggerated but nonetheless illuminating reputational fiction, provoked in part by novels that reflexively figure their own looming cultural status.

Mind you, no rose-tinted account of Australian literature circa mid-century as constituting something like ‘The White Era’ – to riff on Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) – could ever quite justify declaring a scion of the squattocracy’s influence to be this period’s defining literary-historical feature. Not when literary production was also indirectly shaped by decades of the racist immigration restrictions known as the White Australia Policy, which enforced the ethnic homogeneity of the writing scene over which White debatably held sway, and especially not when its gradual dismantling gave way to an official platform of multiculturalism only as recently as 1973, the same year White happened to be awarded the Nobel Prize. To these sociocultural determinants we might also add state-mandated policies of assimilation, which saw increasing numbers of First Nations children forcibly removed from their families and fostered or institutionalised over the 1950s and 1960s. So whether or not one shares the view that by 1973 White had, as the Nobel committee’s citation notoriously claimed, single-handedly ‘introduced a new continent into literature’, the post-war decades were in several other senses ‘The White Era’, at least insofar as legally enshrined white nationalism continued to restrict access to the literary field – though, as Christos Tsiolkas observes, such restrictions were also ‘challenged by the hundreds of thousands of Jewish, Eastern and Southern European migrants’ who were naturalised in this period. In tandem, these conditions amounted to a rarefied state of literary affairs – a small, relatively ethnically homogenous, and predominantly male cultural ecology – in which it was possible for White’s contemporaries to imagine that any single writer might cast a shadow over an entire nation’s literary culture.

A SICKNESS CALLED SEMINAR

These conditions did not persist. By 1979, just six years after he was awarded the Nobel, White himself found reason to suspect that change was afoot. The cause? What else but an acute case of institutional malaise, spreading from campuses frequented by packs of screeching peacocks and baying dingoes – White’s preferred terms for his academic critics. The chief threat to the novel, as he judged it, was no longer the banality of reportage; White had by then made good the ambition he declared in his essay ‘The Prodigal Son’ (1958), to ‘prove that the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’. Now, he had another bugbear in mind. ‘Australia seems to be suffering from a sickness called seminar’, wrote White to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s secretary Mary Lord, in a letter coolly refusing the organisation’s offer of a lifetime membership:

Seminars imperil the serious (male) writer through their (effeminate) amateurism, their welcoming into the classroom all manner of weak-willed wannabees, and their academicism, which risks the desiccation of whatever cerebral fluids White’s solitary bottle might contain. The advice to aspiring authors hardly needs to be paraphrased. ‘True writers’, in this imagining, seek out neither teachers nor peers to review their manuscripts; to ‘emerge under [your] own impetus’ is, firstly and finally, to ‘read, and read’.

With these sentiments, White found an unlikely ally in the form of his occasional nemesis A. D. Hope; the latter famously made an enemy of him by declaring The Tree of Man’s prose to be so much ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’. Whatever their differences, they shared a penchant for grumbling about the state of higher education. In ‘Literature Versus the Universities’ (1965), Hope raised the alarm: ‘[s]omething very odd and probably very unpleasant is happening to literature’, he complained, following his return in 1958 from a fifteen-month sojourn across campuses in the northern hemisphere. There, he witnessed creative writing’s emergence as a tertiary discipline: ‘there was something disturbing about the whole thing – a feeling that universities are beginning to move in, take over, train and control writers – and that it will not be long perhaps before there are no wild writers left anymore’. Whereas White’s rebuke stops short at suspicious churlishness, Hope’s concern ramps up to a catastrophising crescendo:

Never mind that Hope himself had long been a tenured denizen at the ANU, and had dabbled in the teaching of creative writing via a short-lived experiment at Sydney Teachers’ College in the 1940s. What’s good for the goose risks standardising the gander.

It was poets of Hope’s ilk that Judith Wright had in mind when, in a contemporaneous lecture at the University of New England titled ‘The Task of Australian Poetry’ (1965), she observed that verse had until very recently been the purview

Whatever we now make of how poetry’s darlings once chose to apply their makeup, the concerns that White, Hope, and Wright shared could hardly be said to have proven totally baseless. Economic and institutional forces – including a burgeoning local publishing industry, curricular changes that made space for local writings on secondary and tertiary curricula, and remarkable increases in federal support for the arts – would indeed bring about the professionalisation of literary craftsmanship over the course of a few short decades. As Leigh Dale observes in The Enchantment of English (2012), this process was spearheaded by ‘a trio of poet-professors who are closely identified with the academic study of Australian literature’: Hope, who taught the first full course on Australian literature at Canberra University College in 1954, ‘is most persistently identified as the “founder” of the study of Australian literature, although it is almost certainly Buckley who has made the more important intellectual contribution, and [James] McAuley who had the most substantial impact beyond literary studies.’ Poets were thus the first Australian writers to win a place in the tertiary system and, albeit with some reluctance, they took advantage of their new digs to introduce home-grown literature to university classrooms.

Novelists found a place within this ecology due in no small part to the Whitlam Labor Government’s establishment of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. As David Carter notes, this development led to a state of affairs in which, ‘by 1985, over 1000 writers had received grants and over 1000 books had been subsidised (34 per cent poetry, 35 per cent fiction)’. Between 1973 and 1986, Carter continues, the Literature Board provided a total of some $14 million in grants to individual writers, ‘$2 million to magazines, and $3 million to publishing subsidies’, and of these recipients ‘more than 75 per cent […] produced or published work’. It is difficult to overstate the difference to writers’ livelihoods that this federal patronage made. Take it from White himself who, on 13 May 1974 before a capacity crowd of three thousand at the Sydney Opera House, singled out for rare praise the ‘Whitlam Government’s recognition of creative endeavour and its practical encouragement of our artists to a degree no previous Australian Government has dared’. There was also ‘a conscious policy decision’, as Shapcott writes in his memoir Biting the Bullet (1990), ‘to support novelists or potential novelists: writers who had already proved their talent and persistence but had not the crucial freedom of time in which to define and develop their craft’. This included the implementation of a program of over 140 writer-in-residencies, a vast web of affiliations enumerated in Shapcott’s The Literature Board (1988), which were a vital precursor to the more stable posts a number of creative writers now enjoy on campus. With these greener pastures came the domestication of Hope’s cud-chewing herd of wild writers, the gradual matriculation of Wright’s wallflower debutantes.

In 1970s Australia, we can thus see the first signs of ‘The White Era’ beginning to cede the field to an epoch in which literary activity has increasingly taken place in and around cultural institutions, foremost among them the universities. Graeme Kinross-Smith, appointed in 1968 to the first lectureship in creative writing in Australia, was ‘[i]n the early months of 1969 […] employed in establishing a tertiary-level creative writing stream in a General Studies Diploma and later Degree in Vocational Writing of the Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong, under the aegis of the Victoria Institute of Colleges’. At the Canberra College of Advanced Education, a diploma course in Professional Writing was established in 1970 under what a former student remembered as the ‘sympathetic blue eye and relentless red pen’ of lecturer David Swain, who in turn described a selection of his first students as ‘several public servants who, when chivvied out of their grey, anonymous officialese, know how to present information entertainingly’. The New South Wales Institute of Technology, as Paul Dawson writes, offered from 1972 a subject called ‘Writing 1’, which covered both creative and professional production as elements of ‘a rhetorical, transactional and highly practical theory of writing’. At the Western Australian Institute of Technology in 1974, Brian Dibble set up what was likely Australia’s first three-year course in creative writing, a development he self-deprecatingly credits to a cocktail of his own ‘ignorance, arrogance, and two self-cancelling accomplishments related to one great accident’, but likely had more to do with his eight years’ experience teaching the subject in Illinois and Wisconsin.

At scale, this development should be understood, per D. G. Myers’ The Elephants Teach (1996), as a local permutation of American creative writing programs’ roots in the Deweyan reformist movement collectively known as ‘progressive education’. Its ambition, in the words of progressive educator William Hughes Mearns, lay not ‘in making poets or even in making writers’ but in setting up ‘such an environment as might extend further the possibilities in creative writing pupils of high-school age’. Mearns’ conviction that ‘the best literary education comes with the amplest self-realization of the individual’ enunciated a modus operandi that for many practitioners of the discipline remains axiomatic to this day.

But what’s most novel about creative writing’s entry into the tertiary system, as Mark McGurl memorably quips in The Program Era (2009), is that its arrival marks the beginning of a period ‘in which institutions, not individuals, have come to the fore as the sine qua non of […] literary production’. In the spirit of McGurlian typology, it seems worthwhile to attempt a provisional roadmap of Australia’s institutionalised literary scene: we might begin with the observation that our preference for PhDs over MFAs brings with it nebulously defined expectations that are best summarised as a set of incentives to produce creative works that are demonstrably the products of research. This tendency is most apparent in the work of ‘revisionist historicists’, writers who have in diverse ways understood their writing to constitute a response in fiction to the limits of historical scholarship and archival holdings. One point of origin for this genealogy would be Astley’s A Kindness Cup (1974), with the caveat that revisionist historicism really comes into its own with the emergence of doctoral degrees in creative writing: I have in mind Kate Grenville’s thesis-cum-novel The Secret River (2005), as well as Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010), Rohan Wilson’s To Name Those Lost (2014), and Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023), to name but one especially clear line of interrelated projects.

Even as their subjects vary considerably, each of these authors shares some basic conception of fiction as an act of rewriting with those we might dub the ‘allofictive specialists’, for whom fiction emerges, allusively or explicitly, from their reimagining of other writers’ works, in a way that repurposes the expertise they’ve acquired as instructors or students in humanities departments as narrative material. If the thesis shadows the novel in the work of revisionist historicists, then the lecture does so for allofictive specialists: the two repurposed lectures that serve as chapters in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003) make this connection unmistakable, but the logic of the lecture also lies behind the explicatory digressions that structure various other novels, including Gerald Murnane’s A History of Books (2010), Brian Castro’s Street to Street (2012), and Gail Jones’ A Guide to Berlin (2015).

Finally, the proliferation of writing degrees across some forty Australian universities finds a correlate in the emergence of what we might dub, after Ivor Indyk, ‘provincial empiricists’, by which I mean writers who, despite their vast stylistic differences, share a commitment to the writing of fiction that voices its author’s lived experience within a region they understand to be outside mainstream literary culture, even – especially! – when doing so necessitates resistance to conventions of plot or structure. While in McGurl’s typology the high cultural pluralist novel conjoins ‘the high literary values of postmodernism with a fascination with the experience of cultural difference and the authenticity of the ethnic voice’, the provincial empiricist novel expands this fascination, transvaluing the authentic expression of place as a quasi-ethnic literary identity. The institutional form behind this conception of voice is the regional writing workshop or, more capaciously, the local classroom writ large. Thus we might understand this formation to encompass novels as dissimilar as Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977), which frankly narrates transgressive Melburnian sexual mores using much the same terms that saw her fired from Fitzroy High School, Tim Winton’s An Open Swimmer (1982), an Honours project turned dropout fantasy in which a young man’s departure from the tertiary system permits re-immersion in the holy mystery of the West Australian coastline, and Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (2018), a doctoral novel that burlesques ethnic tropes of the kind its author frequently railed against at the writing workshops he orchestrated in Western Sydney.

That a single work of fiction might exhibit the characteristics of two or even all three components of this typology goes without saying. As only the rudest sketch of the forms and themes many Australian writers have preferred in the half-century since the discipline’s establishment, this list is intended to describe, not proscribe. But it also helps draw out a shift in the structure of the field that writing’s institutionalisation has catalysed. As we have seen, creative writing in Australia first gained a foothold in the tertiary system over the course of a decade in which, from 1974 onward, a university education could be acquired free of charge: it emerged in part through a series of initiatives intended to improve working conditions for Australian writers, as one element in a larger effort to modernise an underdeveloped literary field. But the discipline was also defined by contemporaneous demographic shifts among the tertiary student body, which in turn have precipitated the literary field’s gradual diversification, especially with respect to class and gender. As Stuart Macintyre, André Brett, and Gwilym Croucher note in No End of A Lesson (2017), Australia’s tertiary cohort has long been ‘far more representative of the population at large than in Europe or North America, particularly of families of modest means and educational attainment’. Julia Horne and Jeffrey Sherrington have observed that 49 of the first 123 students (almost 40%) admitted to study at the University of Sydney had fathers who held lower-middle class jobs, or were employed in working-class trades. From record lows in the post-war decades, when as few as a fifth of students enrolled in Australian universities were women, to parity by the late 1980s, to a majority of some three fifths in the decades since, the gender diversification of the literary field owes much to the sizeable fraction of the new majority who elected to pursue degrees in creative writing, literary studies, and the humanities more generally. As Katherine Bode has shown in Reading by the Numbers (2012), the percentage of Australian fiction penned by women roughly doubled (from 21% to 40%) between the early 1970s to the late 1980s: by the early 1990s women had ‘surpassed men as the predominant authors of Australian novels’. Such a profound shift also owes much to the tertiary system’s production of cohorts of educated women readers over the same period, even as this growth was paralleled by what Bode describes as ‘a devaluing of both novel writing as a profession and of the novel as a literary form’.

The correlation between rising levels of tertiary education and increasing access to the means of literary production can also be seen in the phenomenon that Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker has dubbed ‘a golden age’ of First Nations literature. In his memoir A Bastard Like Me (1975), Arrente activist Charles Perkins recalls how he ‘survived’ his time at the University of Sydney, becoming the first Aboriginal man to complete a tertiary degree in 1966. While First Nations students to this day remain proportionately underrepresented as a fraction of the domestic student body, the intervening period has nonetheless seen a remarkable increase in both enrolments and course completions, both of which roughly doubled (from 11,800 to 24,000 and from 1,800 to 3,500, respectively) between 2011 and 2021. AustLit’s records indicate that in the same decade – neatly bookended by Kim Scott’s receipt of his second Miles Franklin Award for That Deadman Dance and the publication of Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear, which won the 2022 Stella Prize – the number of new First Nations-authored novels and poetry collections annually published increased from 23 to 39, a far cry indeed from 1966, when the only such work that saw print was Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s The Dawn is at Hand. Almost all the writers mentioned in Whittaker’s essay – including, of course, Whittaker herself – have taken tertiary degrees, and a sizeable fraction have taught or studied creative writing.

But to speak not of authors but of statistics is to offer an impersonal view. Many of the discipline’s most notable early teachers were women best known for blurring the boundaries between fiction and life-writing, who took up university posts at a time when the professoriate was predominantly male: there was Elizabeth Jolley at the West Australian Institute of Technology and Drusilla Modjeska at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, then a decade or so later Brenda Walker, at the University of Western Australia, and Kate Grenville, who taught casually across several institutions over the 1990s. But before them, there was Astley.

A MENIAL APOSTLESHIP

After falling out with White, Astley elected to trade discipleship for disciplinarity. A no-nonsense letter to Macquarie University’s registrar from her editor Beatrice Davis, in which the latter wrote that Astley ‘would bring to her task as tutor a breadth of knowledge and an enthusiasm that would be of the greatest value to the students in her charge’, saw her hired to preach what she had long practiced. Astley could thus count herself among the first Australian novelists contracted to lead the kind of seminars that we have heard bemoaned. Macquarie, as Paul Dawson notes, was ‘the first Australian university to run classes in Creative Writing’: a course titled ‘Literary Craftsmanship’ was established there in 1970 by the poet Alexander Craig, who in 1960 had become the first Australian to graduate from the Master of Fine Arts program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was advised by none other than the workshop’s famous second director and peerless promoter, Paul Engle. ‘[S]ince 1941’, writes David O. Dowling in A Delicate Aggression (2019), Iowa has been ‘the world’s most powerful and prestigious creative writing program’, an early and enduring testament to the potential rewards of institutionalised creativity. Its long honour roll of faculty and alumni include such well-known names as Flannery O’Connor, Jane Smiley, Marilynne Robinson, Carmen Maria Machado, Junot Diaz, Eleanor Catton, and Nam Le. But it was generally less famous graduates, as discipline historian Eric Bennett observes, who went on to found ‘[m]ore than half of the second-wave programs’ that were established in the US, totalling some fifty new workshops by 1970. That year, Macquarie became Australia’s first – and to the best of my knowledge, sole – exemplar of this unusually direct line of disciplinary development.

An unsent letter, addressed by Astley to Macquarie’s Head of the School of English and Linguistics, Professor Anthony Gibbs, allows us to take the temperature of her new institutional climate. This missive, penned a decade into the job, airs its fair share of departmental dirty laundry. After declining Gibbs’ offer of seven additional lectures, she promptly hangs the school out to dry. ‘[I]t is now abundantly clear to me,’ she seethes, ‘the oldest senior tutor in the Commonwealth if not in living memory, that the school has neither the wish to make me a lecturer nor the slightest intention of doing so’. Their egregious oversight was in spite of Astley’s extensive teaching duties, which encompassed a ‘full tutorial load in the first half, a lecturing and tutorial load in the second half and now as well, a special interest course for half a year and a creative writing course for a whole year’, a portfolio of responsibilities she claims exceeded those of her ‘hierarchic seniors’. Nor do these colleagues, whose ‘critical theories’ she dismisses as ‘another branch of fiction whose inane currents I have never ridden’, escape Astley’s invective. The constraints teaching imposed on her time no doubt contributed to the longest dry spell in an otherwise prolific career: the five-year drought between her first historical novel A Kindness Cup (1974) and her foray into the interlinked short story form Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979).

And then there were the students themselves: in an interview with Jennifer Ellison, Asley remembers a class in 1970 with a young chauvinist who outright refused to read Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917-29) upon learning that its author was a woman. Her retort? She would ensure a question on Richardson was a compulsory part of the examination. ‘And he didn’t read it,’ she recalls, ‘and he didn’t answer the compulsory question, so he failed.’ Astley had his ilk in mind when, in her article ‘The Higher Illiteracy’ (1975), she lamented the enrolment of ‘an increasingly passive generation, goggle-eyed-glued to the mediocrities of tenth-rate television programs’, of students who are ‘incompetent, who stagger through a degree course on a chain of Cs and who emerge still incompetent’, and for whom ‘Grammar is now the dirtiest seven-letter word in the language’. These unliterary undergraduates, who Astley notes in her aforementioned letter had swelled the ranks of her Australian literature course by ‘two hundred and fifty percent’, drove her to a conclusion slick with sarcasm: ‘I am more than gainfully employed’. One cannot help but wonder what choice words she might have had for the state of higher ed today.

There was an art to Astley’s brand of anti-institutional ire, which found an outlet in her fiction: Macquarie, as Lamb writes, was the setting in which Astley learned to ‘harness anger creatively’. ‘Abrasively’ would be just as apt, given her penchant for referring to the university as a ‘menopause manor’, a brutally self-deprecating slight against the burgeoning presence of mature-age female students and faculty members. Astley could be a ruthless satirist, a reality belied in photographs by her benign smile, trademark dark sunnies, and laureate’s wreath of ciggy smoke. Her off-colour jokes aside, no attentive reader of her fiction could possibly miss her unsent letter’s return to the vocal stylings of Paul Vesper, the acidulous narrator of her forgotten masterpiece and favourite child The Acolyte. Its relative obscurity – it has been out of print since 1980, despite winning Astley the third of her four Miles Franklin Awards (never mind that her editor was one of the judges) – is rather ironic, given Vesper’s narrative predicament is that of the unrequited lover, underappreciated labourer, world’s-your-oyster young man turned social critic manqué. This was the first entry into Astley’s formidable corpus, Lamb remarks, in which ‘the narrator’s verbal mannerisms resembled their creator’s’. To which we might add that surely, too, do his circumstances. Vesper’s chief subject? His ‘menial apostleship’ as an amanuensis and general factotum to the tyrannical blind pianist Jack Holberg. Over the course of twelve years, Vesper endures a succession of indignities that he decries in triplicate as ‘the copious banalities of the day to day to day’. Here his author speaks through him: Holberg and Astley’s spouse, Jack Gregson, share a first name. We might say that the problem with Vesper’s tedious day to day to day, then, is his de facto marriage to his employer. His problem is he lives his work.

THE VIVISECTED

How Vesper comes to be Holberg’s servitor is a tale that takes the form of an anti-Künstlerroman. ‘None of your big author pretence, mind you,’ he quips, in a nod to the end of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), ‘that this is the couch serial rendered coherent to my alienist. None of that fake hogwash at all’. Nor is this a sketch of the artist’s precocious youth: its primary subject is not the great autodidact, but the ‘fringe-dwellers in the suburbs of the great man’s genius’. In addition to Vesper, two characters – Hilda and Ilse, sisters whom Holberg respectively marries and impregnates (while the former is engaged to Vesper and the latter married to Neville Slocombe, no less) – bear the brunt of the tortured pianist’s erratic oscillation between charisma and callousness. Holberg drives Ilse to abject despair, Hilda to feigned blindness: this spurs a misguided effort on the latter’s part to feel her way toward an understanding of his cruelty. All the while Vesper, abused and appalled though he is, simply cannot wean himself from ‘the dubious by-flow oil of Holberg’s genius’. His is an obsession that resists explication, a relation of awe and envy, of loathing and sublimated love, a ‘bondage […] which has all the transparency of cellophane but is a thousand times tougher’. As he puts it in one of his most telling self-diagnoses, he is simply the kind of individual ineluctably drawn to serve in ‘anybody’s shadow’, desiring only that it be a ‘shadow of substance’.

Whether or not one detects here a shadow of Astley’s personal fallout with White, only a reader who knows nothing of the latter’s biography could fail to perceive some echo of his famous cantankerousness – White writes candidly in his memoir Flaws in the Glass (1981) of his own ‘bitter nature’ – in Holberg, of that prickliness which should have cost him ‘a lot of friends’ but instead brings out ‘the masochist flagellant in all of them’. Holberg’s ‘social monstrousness’ describes a sin White often identified within himself: he would later suggest The Monster of All Time as an alternative title for his biography, and Garner borrows the term in her aforementioned review, declaring that to ‘bear with, to bear a man like Patrick White one needs a steady belief in the idea – so out of favour in the universities – of the artist as holy monster’. But is Holberg in a more literal sense White? ‘Definitely not’, Astley answered, in response to Ray Willbanks’ suggestion that her prodigious pianist might be drawn from ‘the great Australian novelist who was once your friend’: ‘no, no, no. Not a bit’. In lieu of White, she directed Willbanks to another source: Ken Russell’s film-length Omnibus episode ‘Song of Summer’ (1968), a documentary depicting the final six years of the composer Frederick Delius based on Delius as I Knew Him (1936), the memoir of his amanuensis Eric Fenby. Case closed. Except that Astley couldn’t quite move on without adding a minor caveat to her emphatic denial: ‘I do admit that I read just about this time or the year before The Vivisector, Patrick’s book about the great artist. I thought out of sheer amusement, this is my reply – the vivisected’.

That The Acolyte, her rejoinder to egotism relayed in the voice of one who suffers for the great artist’s sake, might constitute a response to White’s paean to the afflictions of genius, is an idea so amusing it might just be true. It’s just the kind of thing a novelist might do out of spite, were you to accuse them of being a malicious bitch over the phone. A reply not to the insult, but to the art. Incidental as the line of literary influence may appear here, it’s hard to imagine that Astley would oppose the notion that The Vivisector and The Acolyte are in some kind of dialogue, especially given the incipiently sociological method of reading she elaborates in her contemporaneous unpublished lecture ‘The Author as Critic of Society’. ‘It is extremely hard to decide’, she claims, whether writers give voice through their fiction to ‘spontaneous assertions about the conditions of [their] milieu’. This is because ‘most writers put down what affects them without consciously attempting moral judgments’: the conditions of their moment are thus not so much asserted as ‘revealed willy nilly, often distorted, sometimes underplayed in the final fictive version of the present as the writer sees it’. A novel, on this account, is a great shaggy beast, ‘part truth, part criticism, part product […] part producer’. It’s what leads her, in the same essay, to reject the ‘excremental vision of The Vivisector’ on the grounds that it reflects rather than resists the ‘societal cravings’ she sees it as distilling. Astley makes of this interpretative approach a compositional conceit by bestowing its impulse upon Vesper, who pursues at The Acolyte’s conclusion a stylised ‘gesture […] something that gave expression to my strait’. His strait, or his author’s milieu?

A similar reflexive impulse governs The Vivisector. As Marr puts it, White’s novel is also a ‘writer’s profound exercise in self-justification’: despite the volume of attention to the real lives behind Hurtle Duffield – Francis Bacon, Roy de Maistre, and Sidney Nolan, one of the novel’s dedicatees, remain perennial favourites – its protagonist is clearly a collated identity, less any one identifiable person than a means to get at an underlying artistic condition, ‘a synthesis of many lives beginning with White’s own’. Hurtle Duffield’s expressionist paintings frequently function as ekphrastic portraits of the artist, binding character to creator in coterminous acts of stylised self-expression. At once offspring and progenitor, infernal and miraculous, post-partum and expectant, Duffield’s paradoxical sketch of a child reiterates just such an elision in the form of an umbilical sprawl:

The vivisected, those centrally yoked postpartum bodies that Duffield no longer loves, are here ostensibly inessential, providing no nourishment to the infantile artist. Their abject presence permeates Duffield’s art; these abused muses are essential to his piece, or at very least to the shock of its composition, and are present in many of his other paintings. By binding disparate lives to the navel of a subject that nevertheless asserts its independence from them (tellingly, it is the ‘broken cord’ that ‘charges’ with life), the sketch presents a portrait of the artist birthed by many yet drawing sustenance from none.

The Acolyte has less patience for the tortured artist’s musings about those he has abandoned in his wake. Vesper labels Holberg a ‘rotten solipsist’, one absorbed by the sexist fantasy that ‘every stray stuff amniotically nourishes his latest brain-child’. It’s an accusation that turns Holberg’s own words, and one of Astley’s finer one-liners, against him: ‘You funny man! You seem to think the cerebellum is located in the scrotum’. Holberg seems at times more than a shade of Duffield. In what is likely an allusion to Duffield’s callous practice of portraiture, Hilda’s features are ‘smudged in across her face’ after a particularly brutal remark by her husband, ‘as though Holberg were gradually painting her out’. He later turns the metaphor of vivisection upon himself in a misogynistic tirade, in which he claims ‘nothing satisfies [Hilda’s] sex but the inside turned out, the glistening bowels of me and the small white pip of a soul’; in his caricature, Hilda and Ilse are the vivisectors, seeking to ‘carve [their] names’ on Holberg’s ‘pip, even, no matter how tiny’.

But to belabour these references would be to miss their target, which we might crudely summarise as the difference between White and Astley’s working conditions. White drafted The Vivisector in longhand at 20 Martin Road, Centennial Park, in uninterrupted seven-hour swathes between 5am and 12pm; Astley punched The Acolyte directly into a typewriter, in brief bursts between 8.30am and 10.30am, before her morning classes at Macquarie. Her route to class each morning took her through corridors that, in an interview with Jennifer Ellison, she describes as ‘ringing with the sounds of symbols’. Fed up with ‘the extrapolation of symbols from novels’, she resolved to write ‘an anti-symbolic novel’: her cure for the tinnitus her colleagues’ noise induced was to drown them out, to ‘send them up’. Only in these terms can we possibly account for The Acolyte’s end, in which Vesper takes aim at Holberg’s home and Astley her workplace. Their weapon of choice is a

In a word, a phallus. In Vesper’s lavish description, this furtive catapult’s ‘steel member’ is ‘raised significantly, the ammunition for his thrust the smoothest, most ruby-veined of river-stones’, lifted from their ‘seminal fluid’. His fantasy of taking ‘languorous pot-shots’ at his place of servitude, of ‘destroying it piece by casual piece’, comes true by the novel’s end. Revenge, for Astley, meant hearing the ‘dick’ in ‘parodic’, and so one of her catapulted cojones cannot help but find the piano, leaving ‘a terrible wound in the rosewood forehead’ and knocking ‘flat six of its teeth whose ivory chippings lay about on the carpet’. If it’s an ending that feels like a burlesque of a burlesque, with all the subtlety of a flung rock to the kisser, so symbolically overdetermined as to be almost uninterpretable, then she’s finally got her point across. ‘Explanations aren’t for acolytes’, not to give or receive. Having written her way onto campus, she’s written us critics out of a job. But it’s hard to mind when it’s done with so much aplomb.

THE ANXIETY OF ADJACENCY

We’re left to try and see exactly what Astley had written herself into. If The Acolyte is a novel that spurns the figure of the critic, it does so in part because its narrator worries he has been reduced to one: that he is to Holberg as the critic is to the novel, the ‘natural tick parasite’ to the loose, baggy monster it calls a host. Like A. V. Marraccini, who in her book-length essay We the Parasites (2023) finds in the figure of the fig-wasp, tapeworm, and fish-louse an unflattering yet apt metaphor for the critic’s relation to their chosen art object, Vesper’s claim to parasitism is equal parts self-deprecation and self-definition. At Macquarie Astley found herself in a version of his predicament: much as she might have relished the opportunity to lecture on Bruce Dawe, Barbara Baynton, and White himself – the subjects of her short book Three Australian Writers (1979) – doing so necessitated temporarily setting aside her own creative ambitions. We might come to see The Acolyte, then, as a novel about the frustrations of mere adjacency to great art, of teaching it in lieu of making it, a dilemma that at this early stage could well have seemed like the problem for a writer employed within a literature department.

Half a century on, institutionalised writers face more material issues. Marking. Administration. Apathy, on the part of research valuation metrics, toward creative work. Then there’s the sense that the anxiety of adjacency may simply no longer pertain: many creative writing graduates seem to have moved decisively toward various kinds of genre fiction, a trend toward concern for the marketability of their writing that betrays the pressure of several decades of efforts to make vocational education the business of the tertiary system. Many ambitious young writers – Vijay Khurana, Madeleine Watts, Raeden Richardson – have opted to pursue more avowedly literary programs abroad, at the likes of Columbia, Iowa, and the University of East Anglia.

If there’s anything to extrapolate from the history of creative writing in Australia as I’ve sketched it, it’s that the state of the tertiary system now matters if we care about the kind of literature that is to be written in this country. Its curriculum matters: the exemplary authors we elect to present to aspiring writers matter. Class sizes matter; the nature and structure of qualifications matter. Time to read and write, which is to say the conscionable distribution of research and teaching, matters. That parliamentary inquiries and national cultural plans have had so little to say about the relation of quality literary production to the health of higher education has been to our collective disadvantage. For those of us who are more or less reconciled to our adjacency – teachers, professors, editors, critics – this history ought to make it clearer than ever that the long-term value of our work lies in its steady cultivation of the aesthetic sensibilities of future generations of writers. They’re the shadow and we the acolytes.