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Brian Matthews has stayed at Manning Clark House several times to research and write. A convivial guest and fine writer, his talk about writing follows:
'From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books . . . I was [a] somewhat lonely [child] and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons and [in this way] I created a sort of private world . . .'
Although I didn't make it clear at the start, they are not my words (and I sort of hoped you'd intuitively know that and we could achieve the bonding that comes from mutuality): the words are George Orwell's, in his essay, 'Why I Write'. I quote him because I want to say something about those sentiments and to return to that same essay later. Needless to say, although I momentarily pretended to be the author of those words, several of the remarks he makes do not apply to me. I was not a lonely child and I did not develop disagreeable mannerisms. On the contrary, I was particularly lovable and nice. More seriously, I would never have owned to those opening sentences: From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. I knew no such thing. And I would not have regarded being prevented from writing as outraging my true nature. I might have thought roughly along those lines at times or even often as a youth and a young man, but I would never have admitted to them. The reasons why I would not have admitted such sentiments take us, or take me, anyway, into the question of writing and its rewards. Why write? While there are obviously certain rewards – some of them monetary for example – which are easily distinguishable and which it would be hypocritical not to admit interest in, there are ways in which rewards and motivation cohabit in a complex mix and I want to say something about that, using a personal example.
At the age of five on to eight or nine, I don't know that I was thinking anything very much, but I was keenly aware of the highly interesting maelstrom of life that was going on around me in its inexplicable way. I recalled some of that life in my book called A Fine and Private Place. I want to give you a glimpse of what I saw and heard in order to explain some things about how I came to seek and to view the rewards of writing:
From the moment I hit the streets – an aspiration constantly interrupted, monitored, truncated and occasionally forbidden by my mother, my grandmother and the army of aunts that constituted my wartime family – I was conscious of the marvellous array of distractions that St Kilda daily offered to its diverse denizens. It was a strange, confused little enclave, the rough bit of it that we inhabited, anyway. Working class mostly, yet without the fierce homogeneity of Collingwood or Fitzroy; grim and dark enough as the smoke from the council depot in Blanche Street mingled with exhaust fumes from the green buses to intensify the winter overcast, yet with Luna Park's mad laugh and the glitter of the bay and the broad curve of the beaches to adjust the balance; bristling with petty crims and with a tradition of more dangerous, gun-wielding gangsters, yet endearing in its polyglot confusion of dinkum Aussies, orthodox or backsliding Jews, a vanguard of Europeans and a motley, coming-and-going population of drunks, down-and-outs, prostitutes, odd job men and scroungers.
We lived at 54 Havelock Street whose tiny 'backyards' jostled with the houses in neighbouring Fawkner Street. Our street struggled for respectability, but Fawkner Street knew exactly where it stood in relation to respectability: it stood nowhere. The most famous resident of Fawkner Street was 'Pretty Dulcie' Markham, a gangster's moll who married one Leonard 'Redda' Lewis in her Fawkner Street house. This was a doubly significant date for 'Redda'. Not only was it the day of his delight, it was also the last of the seven days the local police had given him to get out of St Kilda. The best man was Lesley 'The Butcher' Goodwin who, as he assured the police, was 'in charge of the eighteen and there'd be no blues'. Despite this cast-iron consolation, the occasion was attended by numbers of uniformed and plain-clothes state functionaries who, sensitive to the holiness of the proceedings, remained shadowy in their cars while thoughtfully blocking off both ends of the road.
About a month earlier, Pretty Dulcie's Fawkner Street residence had been the scene of a very different ceremony during which ex-boxer, Gavan Walsh, was shot dead, his brother, Desmond, was injured and Pretty Dulcie herself copped a bullet in the hip. The matrimonial legacy of this was that the bride was able to set off her outfit with a white cast on one leg. She and 'Redda' were married in the very room where Gavan Walsh got his, which prompted a Truth reporter to ask, with the refined punctilio for which that paper was known, if she had any qualms about mixing marriage and violent death.
'Not a fuckin' one,' said the bride.
Pretty Dulcie was not one for the niceties either of language or behaviour. My Aunt Tilly, walking out behind Dulcie from the ladies' toilet of the Middle Park Hotel one afternoon and having no idea at the time who she was dealing with, noticed that Dulcie's dress was accidentally hooked up at the back. Helpfully, my aunt flicked the offending bit down for her, whereupon, before a word of explanation could be offered, Pretty Dulcie turned and intimated her gratitude by saying, 'You lay a finger on me again and I'll have the boys break your fuckin' arms.' To which she added a number of other recommendations very difficult to carry out, even if Tilly had had the slightest idea what they meant.
I grew up among people who were full of such stories, who lived in and through such events with casual stoicism. Anecdote, florid rumour and hyperbolic speculation that became communal fiction laced their conversations. I scarcely realised, as I grew up, that these stories were worth telling and I was soon easily distracted from them, if not moved to embarrassment by them, as a result of education. In my last school year and at university, ambushed by a delicious range of attacks on my lushly romantic temperament, I became a bad poet. Infatuated into a state of total inarticulacy by lines like T.S.Eliot's 'The lonely cabhorse steams and stamps/And then the lighting of the lamps' and Keats's 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale/Far-sunken from the healthy breath of morn' and 'The sound of many a heavily galloping hoof'(author forgotten); and then, as a university French student, overwhelmed with Gallic fervour, and penning lines like, 'Poete, poete, ou se trouve le secret de ton ame? Ou se trouve ton inspiration divin' – comment on the rhymes – 'Ever since Autumn . . .) But I digress: anyway, I wrote myself up to a point, where, a bit like Orwell, I abandoned the attempt. I abandoned it because I had no idea where I was going with it and every idea that it wasn't any good; because without knowing it I had closed myself off from the stories I ought to have been telling; and because I became a university teacher of literature, an honourable and important calling, and I began to write books and essays of criticism or literary history. Unlike Orwell, I did continue to write, but I wrote within clearly delineated boundaries, working off explicit texts or other cues.
All the time I did this, I felt a pressure, a kind of yearning, to become what Peter Goldsworthy used to call 'a primary producer' – not a commentator on, but an originator of, literary work: short stories, satire, innovative non-fiction were what I had in mind. And they stayed resolutely in mind. The fact that I went on and on year after year not writing them I used to blame on the pressures and nature of academic work and discourse. But I came to understand that that was not the answer. And while it didn't help that I regarded much of my personal experience as somehow sub-literary, unsuitable, there was, beyond that denial of my roots, some more important obstruction, some primal interference. This obstruction was a species of diffidence that looked from the outside to be a pleasing modesty, an unassuming character, but was, seen and felt from the inside, crippling, silencing. Diffidence is not – or is not necessarily – lack of self-esteem and I don't think it was in my case. It was a conviction that had an almost moral dimension to it. Diffidence seemed proper, an advantage, because humility was proper, modesty was proper. These were part of knowing your proper place in life. Diffidence is a kind of puritanism that afflicts the intellect and not the soul. I might have grown up among spruikers and yarn-spinners and a bigger proportion than usual of the ragtag of humanity, but they were also people who regarded 'story' as indulgence, mere embroidery: life was much too tough and unpredictable to allow story-telling to be anything other than froth, rare icing on scarcely graspable cake. You will still hear vestiges of this attitude in otherwise well educated and sophisticated people who proclaim with pride that they never read fiction. As if to insist to me the rationality of this position, my brief flirtation with poetry at university came quickly to seem the very essence of dilettantism.
So, though I had become accustomed to and quite skilled in academic discourse, I could not credibly imagine myself having something to say outside its safe and structuring boundaries and I couldn't imagine how I should justify spending time on 'story' even supposing I managed to write some. Thus diffidence edges very close to the idea of 'knowing your place' and thence to being imprisoned by the knowledge. To follow my imagination seemed a terrifying and outlandish proposition, an action which was the preserve of 'writers' – yet it remained immensely exciting, like a long contemplated yet so far unyielded to temptation. In this way reward and motive coalesced in an ever-changing, seductive, probably ungraspable shape.
Whenever I wrote a review, I would never style myself 'an Adelaide writer' (and not because I lived in Melbourne) – because, as I saw it, despite my academic work, I just hadn't written, though the pressure to do so was constant.
Three people combined unknowingly to break me out of this prison: first, the New Zealand writer and a close friend of my wife and me, Vincent O'Sullivan, who, tired of my telling him yet another idea for a short story, said, 'Why don't you write these bloody stories instead of talking about them.' Second, at just about that very same time, Christopher Pearson rang up to say that he'd bought the hitherto stunningly unsuccessful Adelaide Review and needed stories, items, essays – anything, enabling me to embark, with huge trepidation not only on fiction but also on a kind of satiric sports essay which I had been preoccupied barrenly with for years. And third, Hilary McPhee and Di Gribble took the enormous risk of deciding to publish what was then regarded as a wildly outlandish biographical experiment, my biography of Louisa Lawson – a perfectly legitimate piece of literary historical scholarship (I insist) which, under the influence of these developments in my writing life, broke out of its cage and metamorphosed into something very other. McPhee Gribble followed this by publishing a collection of those 'bloody short stories'.
Orwell points out that sheer egotism, the hope of financial reward, a pleasure in the sound of words and their exquisite arrangement, a desire to set records straight, 'to push the world in a certain direction' are all involved in the complexity of motivation and reward that explain why a writer writes. And he's right – they are, to varying degrees depending on the writer. But it is equally true for me that the great reward of writing was the frontal attack it always promised on my own creative and imaginative diffidence. The idea of writing sat there like a castle on a hill until for various reasons I was game enough, or was nagged enough, to walk up and hammer on the doors.
No matter how daunting the blank page – and it still is (though, conversely, making the first black mark on it is enormously exciting); no matter how desperate the press of deadlines or the sudden atrophying this morning of what seemed like good ideas yesterday; or the necessity to speak at festivals or dinners; or submitting to being reviewed; or the almost physical affliction that prevents you getting started, that sends you off on a thousand decoy missions, like cleaning the lint out of the clothes dryer [which I recommend] or rearranging the cutlery from one drawer into two . . . Despite all these clear and present disqualifiers, I get a huge kick out of writing and doing so in the conviction that it's fair enough for me to try, because for so long I assumed it was, in the nature of things, not for me.
But that of course is nowhere near the whole story. To end where I began, with Orwell, full of gloom and contrariness yet, as always, uncomfortably provocative:
'. . . writers are vain, selfish and lazy and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention'.