ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the 15^th of the current month. E-mailed letters must include a telephone number for verification.

Peter Craven responds to Hilary McPhee

Dear Editor,
As someone whose business it is to dish out criticism of books when required, I am not in the habit of replying to criticism. Recently, a journalist has suggested that I be put out to pasture as the editor of The Best Australian Essays annual I brought into being, and an academic has disputed my right to introduce the Quarterly Essays I commission. These are not, to my mind, happy or wise suggestions, but one can't complain — they come with the territory. I edit the major collections of fiction and non-fiction that appear in this country. I also edit a series of more or less political pamphlets that have received their fair share of attention. On top of that, I have published a great deal of literary criticism in the press over the last however many years, some of it, by necessity, scathing. I am bound to have displeased and wearied all sorts of splendid people over that time.

But the remarks about The Best Australian Stories 2001 in the February 2002 issue of ABR by Hilary McPhee are so confused and misleading that they require some response. McPhee takes issue with the fundamental procedure I use in putting together these collections, which is to ask people whose work I respect what they have to hand without necessarily going through the mediating procedure of finding it in literary magazines, or via work already contracted to publishers. It amazes me that a publisher of McPhee's experience should come out with this sort of muddle-headedness. When I publish such material, I am engaged in precisely the same procedure I engaged in when I published Helen Garner or Julian Barnes or whoever in Scripsi. Of course, the procedure requires no further 'protocol' than editorial judgment, which I may be forgiven for presuming I have. It is precisely this principle that McPhee followed in the course of her long and distinguished career as a publisher. She did not hesitate to publish something by Garner or Tim Winton or Drusilla Modjeska until it had received some koala stamp of approval from Meanjin or whoever.

McPhee says, at one point, that she 'couldn't establish from the limited notes provided which were extracts from works the author regarded as "ready for publication"'. The authors of these pieces regarded them as ready for publication by allowing them to be published. Indeed, some of them went to considerable pains to ensure that their work was in the state where they thought it would be ready. How could they not? And these labours are not always one-sided. McPhee describes my review of Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish as close to a mugging and brings my judgment of the whole book to bear on the folly of publishing extracts because I published Flanagan's first chapter in The Best Australian Stories 1999. Richard Flanagan will testify thatI edited his chapter in extreme detail. Indeed, when I came to the finished book, I was amazed to discover that I could 'hear' the point that I left off editing, and I was appalled that Richard (or perhaps his editor) did not get the prose into better shape.

McPhee does not disclose the fact that she was happy enough to allow me to publish an extract of her own work in progress in the The Best Australian Essays 2000. It astonishes me that McPhee can be contradictory enough to praise the very writers (they are all well known) who have been uncovered by the method she deplores. It seems to me to be wanting in courage that she fails to identify those authors whose works she deprecates. No names, no pack drill.

But we should not be too heavy-handed about this. McPhee's reference to that 'international name' James Joyce is embarrassingly amateurish. James Joyce is an international name the way Pablo Picasso was an overseas painter. It does point to the limitations of an oh so Australian perspective.

Peter Craven, Fitzroy, Vic.

Richard Freadman and psychoanalysis

Dear Editor,
Why, I wondered, as I read Richard Freadman's essay on 'Relational Life-writing in Susan Varga's Heddy and Me' (ABR, February 2002), are there so many inaccurate and inapt references to psychoanalysis and philosophy? There is no space here to list all of them. Is 'the' Freudian model, the one with the Oedipus complex and all, really 'monadic' or non-relational? Should Guntrip, though a worthy analyst, really be up there in the object-relations, pantheon instead of his master Fairbairn? Wollheim is a philosopher, but not a Freudian one; he is, in the tribal argot, a Kleinian. Stern is not an Attachment theorist, though he is a leading researcher of infancy. The skimpiest acquaintance with Bowlby's work would have told Freadman that a mother's milk drying up is precisely the kind of deprivation that Attachment theory does not emphasise. The leading idea in Attachment theory is that orality had been overemphasised in psychoanalytic theory and that primary attachment to mother is independent of orality. Why does Freadman affirm that whether there are true correspondences between reconstructions in therapy and the earlier 'feelings' that are their object 'can never finally be known'? Some can, some can't. And is the illusory conviction of some such match really the condition of 'the possibility of healing'? There are numerous factors involved in 'cure'.

All this (and more) is pretty dismaying, but it is not the occasional bodgie scholarship that set me wondering. Why,
I wondered naïvely, is a professor of English dabbling in this stuff at all? The answer glimmers, I think, when Freadman notices that the Holocaust could complicate a mother-daughter relationship something awful: 'but what critical perspective could accommodate such complexity? A feminist-psychoanalytic reading will address some of the more familiar … mother_daughter issues. But the Holocaust dimension seems to require forms of discussion that go beyond "normal" developmental processes.'

So, it's about an extra-disciplinary theory, a 'critical perspective', reflecting light on 'the text'. Freadman could have done worse than going to the analysts and infancy researchers; he could have gone to the Continental metaphysicians and really hashed his thought, like so many of his professional colleagues. I do not doubt that psychoanalytic and related developmental theory and philosophical work on self-identity and other things can illuminate some aspects of biography, and even of fiction. This has sometimes been done quite well. But why should an English professor not give us something quite different, on less alien turf, but equally, if not more, valuable: the play upon its natural objects of a sensibility profoundly educated in literature and, maybe, life? That way, Varga's evidently interesting book may have been vivified, critically speaking, instead of being buried in a pall of misconstrued theory.

We illustrated Professor Freadman's La Trobe University Essay with the front cover of the Penguin edition of Susan Varga's book. Bruce Sims has pointed out that the current edition of Heddy and Me is published by Bruce Sims Books ($19.95pb, 0 95778003 6). It contains a picture section and a postscript not published in the Penguin edition. Ed.

Summerland forever

Dear Editor,
I have been heartened by the new look of ABR, but was struck by déjà vu on going deeper into it. I see that Malcolm Knox's Summerland was reviewed in the November 2001 issue, even though I reviewed it for the July 2000 issue. Or did I? Am I caught in some parallel universe thing? More worrying, this second Summerland has a different ISBN. Maybe we have all been living double lives, reading and reviewing the same novels over and over, with only the ISBNs varying. The uncanny thing is that that's what Summerland suggests is happening (something both reviewers reflect on). My concern now is how many reincarnations Summerland might have, how many ABR reviews of it there might eventually be, and whether I might find myself reviewing something like it again.

Kevin Brophy, Brunswick, Vic.

Responsibility for the Deakin Lectures

Dear Editor,
Having just read the `Advances' column in the February issue of ABR, I feel that I should write to say that I don't think that it's right to give Jonathan Mills the credit for `running' the Deakin Lectures. I concede that I don't know what part, if any, he might have played in persuading Mr Kennett to fund those lectures and I acknowledge that, in the early days, he contacted a few potential speakers. Virtually all of the work, though, was done by Stephen Crittenden following his secondment from the ABC after Mills realised that he simply could not combine the responsibilities of the Festival and those of the lecture programme. Crittenden's involvement also ensured that these lectures were properly recorded and broadcast (and, indeed, promoted) on ABC Radio. He has received little or no public credit for this achievement — one of the few worthwhile aspects of the Federation Year, in fact.

Jonathan Mills, who directed the special autumn Federation Festival in 2001, is Artistic Director of the Alfred Deakin Lectures Board. Stephen Crittenden is the Artistic Associate. Mills wrote the Preface in the newly published The Alfred Deakin Lectures: Ideas for the Future of a Civil Society (which Jim Davidson discusses elsewhere in this issue). Professor Gustav Nossal, in his Foreword, describes the series as `a tribute to the imagination, energy and flair of Jonathan Mills'. Plainly, Mills had a hand in it. Ed.