EARLY IN 1992, the year I turned fifty, my fifth book, Cosmo Cosmolino, came out. The fact that there had been a gap of eight years since my previous novel, The Children’s Bach, was much remarked upon by journalists, although in the intervening time I had published a collection of stories, written two screenplays and had them produced, and continued to earn a living by various forms of journalism. One critic said that to let such a gap occur ‘in one’s career’ was ‘dangerous’. This way of thinking about work—a treadmill, never relaxing, always looking back over your shoulder, hearing footsteps—seems to me at worst exhausting and corrupting, and at best simply beside the point.
The word ‘career’ is one I can never imagine applying to what I do. ‘Career’ is a word that can only be applied from without. It’s a word with connotations of speed and certainty, of a smooth forcefulness, like the trajectory of a comet seen from a great distance. How can one speak without irony of one’s own career?
It’s unimaginable, to me, to use the word ‘career’ to refer to this daily slog; the absolute inability, while you’re working, to judge whether or not what you’re doing has any value at all—thus, the blind faith and grim stubbornness required in order to keep going; the episodes of elation, the occasional sense of hitting your stride, or of being in tune with the force that creates—the feeling that now you’ve got it, now you can’t put a foot wrong—then the guilt you feel, when your work’s going well, that you are allowed to spend your days having this much fun and ultimately being paid for it, while others have jobs in offices or schools, and bosses, and laid-down work hours they have to stick to—then the arrival next morning at your desk, the dropping away of the floor from under your feet as you see the thinness of what yesterday seemed so rich and right; the picking up of the pen, the dogged keeping going—the sickly envy of people with jobs, because they have got bosses to tell them what to do next, and work hours that finish at a certain regular time so they can go home, and holidays, and secretaries, and superannuation—and they’re allowed to ask for help; the pathetic pleas for encouragement you make, invariably to the wrong person—a child, a husband, a parent—someone who can’t possibly know the right thing to say, or who is in the grip of some barely conscious hostility towards you that they can’t help expressing at the most destructive possible moment; the hatred of your own name, because of its connection with this slogging labour and with the expectations which you have caused the outside world to have of you, and that you’re afraid you’ll never live up to; the despair of feeling trapped inside your own style.
This last may be a particularly middle-aged despair; or perhaps it’s one that strikes just before a new surge occurs in your work. The Caribbean writer Clarice Lispector said, ‘Even one’s own style is an obstacle that must be overcome’; and the Cubist painter Georges Braque, ‘One’s style is one’s inability to do otherwise.’ I once wrote to Manning Clark, grumbling that I was ‘sick of my style’. He wrote back a postcard saying bluntly, ‘Your style will not change until you do.’
I like to think that if there was a big gap in my so-called career, it was for the simple reason that I had nothing to say.
The idea of career also ignores something that my working life has taught me: you write a novel, and you think, good, right, now I know how to write a novel. WRONG. You found out how to write that novel; but what you nutted out for that one is not going to help you to write the next. Each new bout of work demands a new approach. You have to teach yourself everything afresh, every single time, and then when you’ve learnt that, you have to teach yourself a whole lot more.
This too may be specially true of middle age. Because at middle age, life gets serious. At middle age you have to learn the language with which to speak of death. This is the time when a kind of sombre colouring can enter your thinking and feeling, and thus your work. It can also be a difficult transition—and perhaps it’s just as difficult for your audience.
Once an artist has become reasonably well known in her society, specially if it’s a rather small one, like ours, there’s a danger that she will be pinned down. People dislike change. If they’ve settled into your already established content and style, they like you to stick with it. They want the comfortable feeling of opening your new book and settling down to an afternoon of what they’ve come to expect of you.
There’s a problem, too, specially in Australia, or if you belong to my generation and kind of education and social experience, anyway—a problem of embarrassment. People are embarrassed, for example, about religion, they’re embarrassed about God, they’re embarrassed by biblical imagery and angels and ideas of redemption and salvation. The people I’m thinking of want materialism and realism, and if that’s not what you’ve written this time, they’ll bloody well distort your book till that’s what they get out of it—anything rather than read what you’re actually trying to say.
I used to suffer a lot from what critics said. But after Cosmo Cosmolino I was able to see the reviews as a cavalcade of attitudes. I enjoyed them as a spectacle. They fascinated me and made me laugh. This is how I knew that suddenly I was a grown-up. I did not shed a single tear.
The grand thing about being fifty is how tough you can be. You don’t have to care what people think. You can let things rip, in your work, that good manners and being lady-like would once have inhibited. At fifty you can stop wanting to be nice.
And, anyway, who was ever silly enough to imagine that you could be an artist and a nice person? How can a woman be an artist and nice in the way women are supposed to be? Who can be the oil in the social machine when she’s got the fiercely over-developed observing eye that the artist has to have? The two don’t match. They can’t. The nice thing is not to notice. But artists must notice. They have to stare coolly, and see, and remember, and collect. That’s their job, their task in the universe.
I don’t see how you can be an artist without causing pain. I don’t mean hurting people on purpose, for revenge, or idly, or to settle accounts. But what you see, if you’re really looking, is often what people wish you wouldn’t see.
A good friend of mine recently reread, after twenty-five years, Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. I asked her, ‘How does it last?’ She looked uncomfortable, then blurted out, ‘I hated it. It’s cold, it’s horrible, it’s cruel—I couldn’t bear it.’ We were both shocked. To two educated readers of our generation this was heresy. Soon after this, my friend went to visit a wonderful old woman we know who is a tremendous, voracious reader. In her eighties, she’s the widow of two painters and has known many writers. This is a woman who, when I once admired her trenchant turn of phrase, laughed and said, ‘The men in my life, when women spoke, had an attention span so short that if I wanted to be heard I was obliged to haiku everything.’
My friend phoned me after her visit to this woman. ‘I told her,’ she said, ‘about hating Madame Bovary. I thought she’d be scornful of me—but she laughed and said, “Good. When a woman realises that she hates Madame Bovary, darling girl, that’s when she knows she’s come of age.” ’
Perhaps we ‘come of age’ rather late in Australia, or in my generation—but I never expected to find, in my fifties, this marvellous freedom. Women may be late starters, as artists, but perhaps a strength that develops late lasts longer. Where once you rushed at things like a bull at a gate, now you know how to be patient. Things still hurt, but you are stronger. At fifty, you are developing a steady nerve. You can discriminate. You can stop worrying about exteriors, and start to look inward for meaning. At fifty, the age when you thought you would be on the scrapheap, you find you are just entering your prime.
1992