Amy Witting
fiction DEFT REALISM
Peter Craven
Amy Witting
Faces and Voices: Collected Stories
Penguin $26.95pb, 442pp
0 670 89300 5
Amy Witting
WHEN WE COME TO WRITE the history of Australian writing in the twentieth century, the strange case of Amy Witting will be there to haunt us. Here is a writer who not only has great gifts -- the kind of expert and mimetic gifts that would impel instant recognition from someone who admired a fine-lined American naturalist like William Maxwell -- but a realist who has an effortless immediacy and a compelling sense of drama that should have ensured the widest kind of appeal, the sort of appeal that Helen Garner could command in her fiction writing days. And yet this woman who published in the New Yorker and commanded the respect of Kenneth Slessor was scarcely encouraged during the long gray sleep of Australian fiction publishing. It wasn't until the publication of I for Isobel a bare decade or so ago that Witting gained a national profile.
She represents in the fullest (though also the most quiet way) the literature we should have had and her stories with their steadiness and their depth of life, their nonchalance and their sweeping understated power of articulation belong quite plainly to the heroic period of mid-century Australian fiction making of which Patrick White is the towering but not the monopolising exemplary.
White, of course, was a writer who showed what could be done with fiction. Witting (if we can risk a shade of meaning) shows what fiction can do. She is a classical realist taking the form of what might almost be the magazine story, the sort of story thousands of people before the advent of television once read for fun and twists it in such a way that its conventions and its conventionalities (always subtly undermined) gleam like gold.
Her new Collected Stories (shamefully only reviewed in brief by some of the newspaper book pages) brings together a life's work and it will repay a season of concentrated reading. Witting is one of those writers who looks much more ordinary than she is; she can seem if you're unprepared for her like a collision between the craft of Somerset Maugham and the world of yesterday's Women's Weekly but she in fact transfigures everything about her art that is potentially smart and everything about her subject matter that is potentially mundane.
The upshot in this large variegated collection of fiction is consistently refreshing and disconcerting even when it seems (as Witting ensures that it will) intimately familiar. A young schoolteacher imagines that an adolescent boy has implanted a double entendre in his translation and provokes from him a flash of outrage and anger only to find in the end that she has been forgiven but that the different veils of the world she inhabits have been drawn back or rearranged. A lawyer who has lived in tolerant contempt with a wife he does not love finds himself hurled headlong into an abyss of love by the feelings he finds in himself when his wife is pushed into a quest to find her family origins.
Some of these stories are unemphatic novellas full of wells of feeling; others are as light as air, fleeting epiphanies but diamond sharp. In the weighty category there is a story from the bush that might have been the merest occasion for slouch-hat outback kitsch. An itinerant worker gets a girl pregnant, is married by shotgun and won't give her the time of day. In Witting's hands it is full of dry continents of feeling and resentment and pain but remains -- however much it plays with Lawson's tradition, however parched a story its stoicism unfolds -- an invigorated and colourful thing to read, even an 'optimistic' one because of the power of the writer's delineation of a world that is threadbare and semi-articulate but never less than human.
And if you want to taste Witting at her most light try the story about the Christian girl who has to haul a drunk young man through the window of a slowly moving train only to discover when she succeeds that her top has collapsed and her breasts are bare to the world.
Witting has that rarest of realist gifts, the one Chekhov had of revealing character in action with minimum fuss, as if by stealth. Nothing world shattering is especially likely to happen in an Amy Witting story but when a child cries or a woman laughs or a man's voice goes cold, it is as if the nymphs came out of the woods and the horsemen rode by night.
In short she is a consummate dramatist of the everyday and the power of her micro-drama comes from a very Australian refusal to be seduced by the picturesque. The world she evokes is a world that is fading fast, a rather more egalitarian Australia which is at the same time quite capable of expressing itself through the codes of a set of manners for which middle class world would be too small a word. It is a world which could easily seem quaint or simply of its period if such blasts of raw emotion, sometimes generous, sometimes mean, didn't blow through these suited matrons and behatted blokes.
There is, more or less trivially, a kind of double time operative in Witting's fiction so that we sometimes feel that something which has been conceived in the 40s or 50s has somehow been transported to a setting thirty or forty years later with a concomitant smattering of anachronisms. But this hardly matters with a writer who is not only belated (through no fault of her own) but whose survival is a testament to the different sanities and strengths of a bygone time which these stories instantiate through a pure power of expression that comes across not as mere skill but as a moral authority that can evoke the truth of feelings through a complete indifference to anything else.
The first half of this book consists of the somewhat longer stories. One of them, about an old couple meeting the threat of extinction in a flood (a subject Witting treats with absolute assurance and power) filled me with precisely the same pity and terror as when I first read it years ago (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I had forgotten the ending). Witting is, I suppose, the kind of writer who can see the significance of the storm in the teacup because she also has the power to describe a storm when she sees one.
It's probably true that some of the shortest stories in the book will blow out of the reader's consciousness if an effort is not made to hold them. Some of them are mere diversions, but there is a tang of reality even in the tidbits.
Witting's sheer technical virtuosity is everywhere in evidence in the final longish piece 'Letters to Jane Eyre' in which an insinuatingly recognisable voice takes issue with Jane about her life and loves while delineating the sturm und drang of its own with humour that is never bled of poignancy or robbed of bite. This was written for the Susan Geason anthology Regarding Jane Eyre and it shows -- with a dazzle that is never overreaching -- what a writerly fiction writer Witting is for all her deep readableness.
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Return to Australian Book Review /August 2000