The Burning Library : Our Great Novelists Lost and Found by Geordie Williamson

The Burning Library : Our Great Novelists Lost and Found Reviews

• 
  Sammy

  Perceptive, erudite, and thoughtful - what else would one expect from one of our greatest literary critics? There is a murkiness in this text, which I'll come to below, but I urgently recommend this to all lovers of Australian lit.
  
  Williamson argues that Australia has forgotten or neglected some of its greatest novelists, to our peril. He makes this case by examining fourteen 20th century novelists (really fifteen, since
  M. Barnard Eldershaw was of course two people), and locating them within the framework of Australian cultural history. His choices are impeccable, and his skill at critical dissection superlative. Even if you have no interest in the polemical side of the book, this is a sensitively written, brief introduction to these novelists. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was most engaged with the sections on the two writers I had not yet read; the chapter on
  Dal Stivens is worth the price of admission alone.) To be clear, Williamson is interested in the "greats". He is not some half-arsed nationalist trying to dig Marcus Clarke out of the rubble of history. He has no interest in minor novelists or those whose cultural importance is to perpetuate some kind of mythical colonial tradition. He is focused on the top of the tree. I might not entirely buy all of his claims -
  Thomas Keneally and
  Christina Stead, for example, seem fairly well-integrated into the canon - but his argument is dogged and immaculate. He is equally adept at profiling the author as he is their works. Every chapter is distinguished in its power.
  
  I begin with such effusive praise because I'm going to use this as a chance to disagree with quite a few of Williamson's arguments, but this should be taken only as good-natured debate. The Burning Library is a phenomenal piece of writing about writing. Now, on with the show:
  
  So, why are these literary gems neglected? Williamson sees two culprits: a widespread uneasiness amongst Australians toward Australia, and some misplaced gunshots fired in the war over the past. In regard to the former, Williamson is a firm believer that spirit-of-place underpins many, if not all, of the great writers. Whether Stivens or
  Xavier Herbert seeking to show Australia as it was (with vastly different motivations) or
  Patrick White and
  Sumner Locke Elliott reacting against Australian culture, their works cannot exist in a vacuum. Williamson notes the disastrous effects of neoliberalism upon senses of culture and community, and argues that this in turn contributed to our lack of connection with our own cultural past. An unwillingness to understand
  David Ireland in his context or an inability to place
  Jessica Anderson within hers made all the difference. In regard to his second point, Williamson examines the discovery of pluralism in the last fifty years. While acknowledging that the rise of women's voices, voices of colour, queer texts, and multicultural views can only be a good thing, Williamson's claim is that the desire for these voices led academics and their progeny to unreasonably throw out the baby with the bathwater, as it were. That
  Randolph Stow,
  Amy Witting and
  Elizabeth Harrower became accidental victims of an assumption that anyone of their era must share the views of their era. That in a competitive environment in which not every literary voice can survive, the keepers of the pantheon chose to admit the great works of the present but not those of the past. Here, he narrows his argument to claim that university English courses - by focusing on "comparative literature" and Cultural Studies - create a hierarchy in which older works are dismissed without interrogation and in which pure literature (the kind in which the author has intentionally prepared a text that will reward close reading) is often considered inferior to "texts" (i.e. a work which is studied more for its historical context and phenotypes, whether a romance novel or a young adult drama).
  
  The challenge for me is that, while I don't disagree such a transition has taken place, I don't see it as the great evil at the heart of our cultural amnesia. At the start of his introduction, Williamson - like all great rhetoricians - sets out the arguments his opponents will use. Unfortunately for him, I find some of them very compelling. There is a natural attrition among authors, sometimes even the greats. More to the point, not only was our literary culture very young a century ago (one might even say it was still embryonic) but the change wrought in that time is staggering. If I may make a bold claim, I wager that a British person in 2020 has as much (or more) in common with Jane Austen, and an American as much (or more) in common with Walt Whitman, than Australians in 2020 have with our ancestors of 1900. Alongside this book I have been re-reading Henry Lawson's
  Joe Wilson and His Mates and Manning Clark's
  A History of Australia: Volume V: The People Make Laws 1888-1915. My people go back to the 18th century on this continent, and I grew up in the same place as Lawson, but even I find myself having to reach back into something beyond historical memory to connect that world with mine. There are four kinds of reader: the popular reader (not worth discussing here), the avid reader (one who likes a challenge but doesn't consider themselves an intellectual or historical reader), the ideological reader (one who only reads, for example, radical novels or only novels written before the War, and as such can be equally dismissed) and the intellectual one. On what grounds do we charge those members of the first two clubs with the unusual assignment of reading
  Capricornia or
  The Man Who Loved Children?
  
  And herein lies the key contradiction of the book, which does tend to frustrate. Perhaps it need not be called a contradiction so much as two strands of song, each vying for the melody, each competing for the reader's attention, but rendering it impossible to fully hear either number. In the introduction, Williamson exults the "ordinary reader". You, he says, have the power to engage with these books even if the cultural establishment has forgotten them. And yet he is routinely giving us the flaws of his choices. Eldershaw's
  A House Is Built is, he tells us, stylistically out of date. Herbert's
  Poor Fellow My Country is the longest Australian novel ever written, filled with longueurs and textual inaccuracies. Stead is difficult. White is difficult.
  Gerald Murnane is difficult. Ireland is exceptionally difficult. Anderson writes the same novel several times. And of Harrower's four novels, he essentially dismisses two of them while acknowledging that a third doesn't always succeed!
  
  A cynic might argue that the occasional apostrophe to the "dear reader" is a marketing pitch, a cunning realisation that a screed about works universities are not teaching was hardly going to be a selling point. A more sympathetic viewer might judge Williamson to be a literary idealist, one who believes that no special skill is required to read what we elitists term "literary fiction" and that it is a great shame many people feel that a work written this year has some intangible superiority to those from the past. If he is hoping to appeal to some sense of historical responsibility in the ordinary reader, though, he will succeed on the strength of his argument, rather than the strength of the novels he describes.
  
  Which leads us to the other team visible on the field: the intellectuals. This is perhaps the clearer strand of Williamson's argument, since he outlines why each of these writers is historically important, textually important, culturally important. In this, as a self-confessed intellectual who already adores most of the novelists Williamson profiles, I am the ideal audience, and his argument is powerfully felt. Yet even here, I must air my doubts about the strawman enemy of "Cultural Studies". Have the motivations for studying English Literature changed? My studies indicate they have not; that for everyone who took a such course in 1950, only a certain number were bound for writing and criticism themselves; the rest wanted to understand texts, or just as likely history through texts. Nothing has changed there. Where I am sympathetic to Williamson is that those of us who wish to study great literature may find ourselves stymied by capitalism's conquest over academia. If a course on women's magazines and crime fiction will bring in the bucks, and a course on staid white men will not, there are few universities in 2020 that can get by on their morals alone. This is a concern to me, as it should be to all of those who care about independent thought and the betterment of the human race through education.
  
  Yet morals - or at least ethics - are why I can't fully side with Williamson. I agree with him that the majority of great writers from our history are white, and an unreasonable proportion are male. I also agree with him that this is regrettable, and the result of historical barbarity. I even acknowledge that some of the great political shift has been in response to previous extreme oppression. For decades, the study of literature at universities essentially ended at the Romantic poets. When my parents' generation rose up against this historical cruelty, they - like most oppressed groups - went too far in the other direction. The compass needs to swing back, finding us a true north. Still, in spite of this, I don't think we can teach a "history of Australian literature" course which is monochrome until the final few weeks of the semester. Especially not when such voices will be previously heard in refracted or badly damaged form. That is to say, as much as I believe in extolling and studying our history of literature, and argue fervently that one does not have to be xenophobic or misogynist or conservative to enjoy them, indeed revel in them, even universities must have some ethical responsibilities.
  
  Why do I go on about this? Because I think the integrity of Williamson's argument is somewhat undermined by his fixation on this issue and, more importantly, his unwillingness to include other points-of-view may encourage readers to accept his claims without fact-checking. (I pause here to note that eight years may have made all the difference. It feels to me as if many of these authors are easier to find in print in 2020 than Williamson makes it sound from the far distant days of 2012.)
  
  I am more inclined to share the other points Williamson makes, stronger ones in my mind even if he is less fiercely angry about them. First, that we are no longer good at reading works without a fixed moral. The ability to come to our own conclusion from a variety of points-of-view, or better yet to interpret an author's thesis without a wise old man appearing in the final pages to provide a summation, is a skill pivotal to the study of great literature. If humans have ever been widely talented at this skill, they seem less so now. If the reaction in some quarters against the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (which featured a racist character who wasn't directly punished for his transgressions, despite the scriptwriter and director clearly disapproving of him) or the television miniseries Mrs America (which showed the hideous actions of 1970s US anti-feminists from their own vantage point, the better to hammer home their absurd and contradictory natures) is any evidence, my generation has rejected irony and subtlety. We will only accept morality plays and confessional fiction; nothing more. In the cases of Stead, Ireland, and others, the general inability to read them as they should be read has contributed to a tragic downfall.
  
  Then there is Williamson's appealing view of the long shadow of inequality. A culture which unreasonably valued a certain kind of Anglo masculinity created in all of us a viewpoint which prioritised certain ways of storytelling, and a viewpoint which lingers to this day. Much as "male antihero with a gun" still receives undue airtime on our television screens at the expense of, well, everyone else, the bloated cocky tones of Pynchon, Mailer and Foster Wallace are still given intellectual priority in the literary world over miniaturists like Harrower or the keen-eyed studies of
  Olga Masters.
  
  And finally, Williamson argues passionately (without ever saying it directly) that our literature - or more accurately, our great literature - has always been a fight against oppression, inequality, and the numbing effect of mass thought. From Henry Lawson and Miles Franklin through Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Kenneth Mackenzie, Ruth Park, Criena Rohan, right on down the line through almost all of his choices. A righteous anger (calibrated in different directions by different authors) at the oppression of Australians who happen to be impoverished, female, Jewish, Indigenous, queer, Catholic, refugees, disabled, geographically distant, mentally ill, from the wrong family, intellectual, imprisoned, children, independent of thought, trapped in family cycles, uncomfortable with nationalism... any marker of dispossession we can imagine. The history of Australian literature is unlike any other Western heritage; it is defined by its defiance. Our current generation of celebrated novelists - Claire G. Coleman, Trent Dalton, Melissa Lucashenko, Favel Parrett, Kim Scott, Evie Wyld, Tara June Winch, Chris Flynn, and Emily Maguire - wouldn't be here without this heritage.
  
  What conclusion do I draw? For all his railing against an ungrateful establishment, blinded by politesse, I'm not sure Williamson really sees this as the crux of the problem. With the exception of Keneally and White (the latter of whom was never beloved by the masses), none of the writers profiled herein had the career they deserved. Witting and Masters were forced by society to start late; Barnard and Eldershaw were prematurely brought to a literary end by social norms; Herbert was dismissed even at the height of considerable (self-induced) fame; Elliott and Stow were rejected by the bland mass of the mainstream for the sin of being different or of preaching difference; Murnane was written off as too difficult; Stivens was dismissed as too easy; Anderson was granted a day in the sun only after years of toil; Ireland was too controversial; Harrower not controversial enough; Stead simply languished in readers' minds in spite of being the most compelling of them all. Dare I suggest that the problem isn't today's literary establishment but the indifference of the Australian people? Until we are willing to look inland, we will simply be nowhere.
• 
  Sonia

  This was originally posted at my blog
  http://ifnotread.wordpress.com/
  
  To Mr Williamson,
  
  I'm confused.
  You state your case on the very first page - even before your story begins...
  "This book is inspired by anger and hope. The anger comes from watching as Australian literature is dismantled by the people charged with preserving the best of our writing for future generations. And the hope? It grows out of a sense that neither academics nor publishers will rescue our collective literary achievement - it falls to ordinary readers to do what they cannot."
  Eloquently said but wanting. I am the 'ordinary reader' you talk of and so what exactly do you want me (the collective me, the ordinary readers) to do? In my hands in a well-research, beautifully written book. I bought it, read it, admired it and now I'm talking about it. That's the extent of my capabilities from where I stand (and read from).
  This book talks of 15 Australian authors that for one reason or another have somehow over time slipped through the Australian literary landscape. We have 'forgotten' some, turned away from others (many are ex-pats and you know Aussies don't get excited about ex-pats) and some are barely a vague memory.
  You talk extensively in the Introduction of your book about university courses and the part they have played in all this as you point out "it is thanks to Cultural Studies that you may now study Jackie Collins' The Stud at Melbourne University but nothing by Randolph Stow." Next, you'll be saying something about 50 Shades of Grey, right? Well, I never....
  This book talks of books that have been out of print for a long time. You talk of their authors and state your case why they should be re-introduced to us - 'us', I'm assuming, is the Australian reading population. The thing is, they also read The Stud.
  You suggest that some these authors have been misunderstood but what if it is something far simpler than that? What if the book is too damn long (at 1,463 pages, Poor Fellow My Country, Xavier Herbert)? Or readers not crazed about reading unfinished books (The Hanging Garden, Patrick White)? Or maybe it's downright challenging beyond a reader's capability (David Ireland)?
  On singing the praises of Patrick White, you opened my eyes to the politics of the national canon; those literary fictions that are worthy of the list. It seems that White, who worked hard to keep the Australian canon intact, had fallen on his own sword. Universities and schools have played their part in dismantling the canon in the hope of "greater inclusiveness and democracy."
  You would be forgiven for thinking that I disagree with you. On the contrary, you have convinced me that we should reinstate these great Australian authors as part of our literary history and to bring their works back into print.
  Your description of author Dal Stivens arouses in me an insane interest in his works:
  "His narratives have as much to do with the stylistic and psychological expansions of modernism as with a desire to pass on the tales of the tribe. His stories may have bush settings and narrate the lives of country denizens, in keeping with the long tradition set down by writers such as Henry Lawson. But in these depictions Stivens is at once an earthy compatriot and a weird extraterritorial, steeped in Hemingway and Joyce."
  All the Australian authors you write of are complex and brilliant in their own way. You write of Christina Stead:
  "But it is just at the moment when we have decided her prose is on autopilot that a sudden pitch and yaw in the narrative reveals a crucial insight, or rewards us with a passage so striking it leaves a smell of burnt ozone in the air."
  Ah, it is this kind of critical writing that makes me smile. You have written about many books that are out of my reach because they are out of print. That is why I'm confused. What can I, the ordinary reader, possibly do about it?
  
  Yours sincerely,
  Sonia.
  
  P.S. I have not read The Stud or 50 Shades of Grey (just for the record here)
  
• 
  4ZZZ Book Club

  Since 2008 Geordie Williamson has been the Chief Literary Critic for The Australian, although his essays and reviews have been appearing in major papers and journals for much longer. In 2011, he was awarded the Pascall Prize for criticism, the only major prize for critical writing and review in Australia, further cementing his reputation. Now he has published a book of his own, The Burning Library, a collection of essays that celebrates some of Australian literature’s best writers and mourns the way that their works have been lost to us over time, making the case for their reinclusion into the Australian canon. It’s a fascinating book that exposes the stories, ideas and times behind a lot of half-familiar names.
  
  Originally broadcast on 13/12/2012,
  Geordie joined Sky to talk about his own journey to Australian literature and to share some of the fascinating stories that surround these writers.
• 
  Susan Steggall

  
  A book to digest and enjoy slowly while reflecting on the depth and breadth of Australian fiction. Some of the authors are still with us, many are not, so the book gives insights into the social fabric of Australia over the decades of the twentieth century. Although written in a rich and imaginative style – to be appreciated for itself – the book will also make an excellent starting-point research into the authors featured.