essays
Morag Fraser
Peter Craven (ed)
The BestAustralian Essays 1999
Bookman Press $24.95pb, 468pp, 1 86395 361 2
START WITH HAZEL ROWLEY in Monroeville, Alabama. This is not where I expect to find the sometime Australian academic and biographer of Christina Stead -- cruising alongside the cotton fields.
Rowley is looking for Harper Lee. I'd thought Harper Lee was dead. The author of To Kill a Mockingbird, the once-in-a-lifetime novel which marked my generation -- and the one to whom we taught it -- like an initiation scar, was always as shadowy as her character, Boo Radley. Lee disappeared so completely into her deep-etched Southern locale, the Maycomb of Atticus Finch, Tom Robinson and the courtroom trial of American race politics, that I assumed there was nothing more to learn about her. And in one sense that is true. But peel back the layers of fiction to the mysterious centre of another's experience and you're jolted by the depth of your own preconceptions.
Enter the essay -- this one is a model -- to administer the salutary shocks. I learned things from Hazel Rowley's essay that confound expectation the way a frilled-neck lizard or exemplary kindness can. Miss Nelle Harper Lee, literature's totem '60s liberal, gives her religion as Methodist and her politics as Republican. She was a close friend of Truman Streckfus Persons, and when the writer we know as Truman Capote went to Kansas to research the murders that became the 'factional' subject matter of In Cold Blood, Harper Lee, classic fiction writer, went with him. And -- most poignant discovery of all -- Lee's own mother, Frances Finch Lee, whom only the kind would call eccentric, found her coded way into To Kill a Mockingbird not as Scout's mother (dead when Scout was two) but in the name of its hero, Atticus Finch.
Rowley's essay is resonant, shapely, illuminating: about prejudice, about cultural habits, curiosity and context of fame, and, not least, about the essayist herself. Very Montaigne. I did wonder, incidentally, what satisfaction academe could have taken from allowing this one to get away.
Not all of the pieces in Peter Craven's The Best Australian Essays 1999 are as evenly satisfying as Hazel Rowley's 'Mockingbird Country' or as Amy Witting's sensational essay about loyalty and John Kerr, which, fittingly, opens the collection. Craven's editing is eclectic, inclusive and occasionally perverse -- it was hardly kind, for example, to follow Meaghan Morris' high, self-deprecating praise of Adrian Martin as film critic with Martin's own serious, pondered defence of Kubrick's Eye's Wide Shut. Read the two on different days.
Craven defends his inclusiveness by raising the 'problematic' nature of the end-of-century essay, indeed of non-fiction generally. There are slippages of form, he suggests, more indicative of cultural unease than fin de siècle experimentation. Journalism has lost caste and sidles towards literature. History spills out of the academy. Fiction, critique, memoir, analysis, political opinion, commentary and polemic interweave. Non-fiction in its currently vigorous efflorescence is 'just the essay writ large'. Certainly Craven's selection demonstrates extraordinary variety. Whether it corrals 'the essay writ large', is controversial. I'd be less inclusive, not because these pieces of non-fiction are undistinguished -- some of them are indispensable reading -- but because the essay's hallmark for me is its interrogative quality, the way it allows the reader to be a fellow traveller. Some of these pieces, like Peter Coleman's critique of Cassandra Pybus' The Devil and James McAuley, nail the lid down. With devastating flair. But you are left with no air to breathe.
But enough taxonomy. I belong to the grateful school of reader and after many hours with this volume my response stayed mostly between elation and wonder at such plenitude.
Lindsay Murdoch's unforgettable suite of reportage from Dili, September 1999, sits alongside classic explorations of classic themes -- Marion Halligan on the uses of grief, Oliver MacDonagh on childhood, rugby and fathers, Peter Temple in the memory hoard of his books, and Robert Dessaix and Richard Flanagan unlocking languages and Jorge Luis Borges.
Essays typically take personal risks. Gillian Mears' heart-breaking excursion into Australian environmental politics gives you some idea of how far we have still to go, and at what cost. Michael McGirr uncovers other costs, other vulnerabilities, in the hard-lived life of Cardinal John Henry Newman and in all committed, or obsessive, lives.
The historians, each in a completely different timbre, are particularly diverting. Greg Dening opens his marvellous 'Writing, Rewriting the Beach: An Essay' with a novelist's panache:
'Calcutta 1811. The rich travelled on the shoulders of the poor in Calcutta in 1811. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, in his palanquin, bobbed along above the heads of the coolies and beggars in Tank Square.'
Inga Clendinnen, with her customary precision and moral clarity tackles the perplexing case of Bruno Dössekker (or 'Binjamin Wilkomirski') and his tragic fabrication of childhood Holocaust memories. Ken Inglis unpacks another ritual of recovery in his account of the long journey Australia undertook before it finally buried the body of the unknown soldier in the Australian War Memorial in November 1993.
The journalists Craven selects write a complementary, contemporary history. Tony Wright's profile of Tim Fisher is an unsentimental, sympathetic account of a man who confounded the stereotypes -- and much of the cynicism -- of Australian politics. David Marr's unflinching portrait of NSW Premier Bob Carr bristles with the kind of judgment ('Words never fail Carr. Taste does.') that you'd hope his subject would appreciate, being a man who reads, and who will have pondered the proposition that humankind can bear too much reality. But you suspect not.