Speaker 1: How do you begin to talk about Gerald Manine. There's
Speaker 1: a bit of a legend that's emerged around the man.
Speaker 1: One profile in The New Yorker described him as the
Speaker 1: reclusive giant of Australian letters. But that's not quite right.
Speaker 1: He's not a recluse exactly. He's just doing his own thing.
Speaker 1: He lives in a small town in the western district
Speaker 1: of Victoria called Garoque, with a population of about three hundred,
Speaker 1: and by all accounts, Gerald is a sociable, well liked
Speaker 1: member of the community. He's the long standing secretary of
Speaker 1: the local golf club, hardly a hermit. When The New
Speaker 1: York Times published a profile, they called it is the
Speaker 1: next Nobel laureate in literature tending bar in a dusty
Speaker 1: Australian town, to which the answers are maybe yes, but
Speaker 1: also he only tends bar on special occasions. But you
Speaker 1: get the picture. Next Nobel laureate, giant of Australian letters.
Speaker 1: These are the kind of terms in which Gerald Manane
Speaker 1: gets discussed. Another one that gets thrown around is strain
Speaker 1: but brigiant. He doesn't have readers. He has acolytes people
Speaker 1: around the world who read him and then devote their
Speaker 1: lives to writing about him and reading them again and
Speaker 1: trying to persuade other people to read him. He's this
Speaker 1: massive figure in the literary landscape, but also an elusive one,
Speaker 1: not always easy to read and even less easy to describe.
Speaker 1: The first year of the name book I read was
Speaker 1: The Plaines, which is the novel for which is arguably
Speaker 1: best known. I loved it, I've reread it, and yet
Speaker 1: I still struggle to describe what it's actually about. The
Speaker 1: best I can come up with is it's a book
Speaker 1: that's about itself, but that makes it seem like some
Speaker 1: kind of metal wank and completely fails to capture the
Speaker 1: delicacy and the gentle, probing beauty of the book. He's
Speaker 1: written ten novels, collections of short stories, essays, a memoir
Speaker 1: about horse racing called Something for the Pain, and all
Speaker 1: of this represents one of the most formidable, powerful, singular
Speaker 1: body of work in literature. So I decided I need
Speaker 1: to go and visit him, and go and see how
Speaker 1: Gerald Manine talks about Gerald manatue.
Speaker 2: Once upon a time there was a who we called
Speaker 2: Gerald Mannanine.
Speaker 1: Once upon a time there was a show called Read
Speaker 1: This about the books. We love the stories behind them,
Speaker 1: and this week Gerald Manatue. I drove out to meet
Speaker 1: Gerald a couple of months back, four days before his
Speaker 1: eighty fifth birthday. His longtime friend and publisher Iver Indick
Speaker 1: helped me make the arrangement. No emails, just text messages,
Speaker 1: and Gerald is warm and direct, immediately agreeable and swift
Speaker 1: to make arrangements. We're to meet at the golf club.
Speaker 1: On first approach, I completely missed the dirt track up
Speaker 1: to the clubhouse. Google Maps has given up the ghost
Speaker 1: and it's just me and the scrub in a quickly
Speaker 1: disappearing gap in the trees. Before I find myself lost
Speaker 1: on some random back road between the paddocks. I circle back,
Speaker 1: retrace my steps and there it is a squat fibro building,
Speaker 1: nestled in the trees, lazy cockies strolling around an overgrown garden.
Speaker 1: It's not exactly clear where the golf course itself is,
Speaker 1: but Gerald is there, unmistakable, ready to talk.
Speaker 2: Now. I'm just going to take ten minutes to eat
Speaker 2: the sandwich and have a drink of hurry.
Speaker 1: I'm in no tearing hurry whatsoever. The room is quiet.
Speaker 1: He's worrying about the hum of the fridge as I
Speaker 1: set up my recording equipment. He's already laid out all
Speaker 1: his books in various editions on one of the tables,
Speaker 1: and has clearly put a lot of thought into which
Speaker 1: chairs are best for us to sit in. And the
Speaker 1: chat flows immediately for about twenty minutes. As he eats
Speaker 1: and I set up, we talk about family and places
Speaker 1: we both lived. He's funny, and this disarming mix of
Speaker 1: very considered and deliberate on the one hand, and idiosyncratic
Speaker 1: and completely free range on the other. I keep looking
Speaker 1: at the spread of books on the tabletop, the beautiful
Speaker 1: abstract covers and titles like Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs and
Speaker 1: a Million Windows. Tamarisk Row is there. It's fifty years
Speaker 1: since it was first published, and I still remember the
Speaker 1: little boy at the heart of it, Clement Kyleaton, sitting
Speaker 1: on a mat and building an imaginary life, pushing marbles
Speaker 1: around through which he builds an entire reality. I want
Speaker 1: to ask Gerald about that boy, about those marbles and
Speaker 1: stained glass and horse racing, and about perfect sentences. But
Speaker 1: when the microphones are on and we start talking, it's
Speaker 1: his late wife, Katherine who comes to the foreground first.
Speaker 1: It was in two thousand nine, following her death, that
Speaker 1: Gerald moved to Garague, and it's clear that she remains
Speaker 1: a significant ongoing presence, not just in his daily consciousness,
Speaker 1: but in how he regards the world of writing in
Speaker 1: the mind.
Speaker 2: We had an extraordinary relationship as author and wife. Never
Speaker 2: mind all the rest of our marriage, which was a
Speaker 2: turbulent marriage, not always by any means a happy marriage,
Speaker 2: but a successful one. To judge from the ending of it,
Speaker 2: all ended well. She seldom asked me about my books.
Speaker 2: I don't even remember asking her had she read the books.
Speaker 2: I know she did read them, but she had this
Speaker 2: strange well, I don't know really what she had. I
Speaker 2: suspect that she was puzzled and intrigued to read what
Speaker 2: I'd written, because it was not often what I talked about.
Speaker 2: We were very close. We had no hesitation in talking
Speaker 2: about the most difficult matters or what's it with controversial
Speaker 2: things people say, the three difficult things to talk about
Speaker 2: on a deep level, of sex, the afterlife, and money.
Speaker 2: We managed to talk about those with a few differences,
Speaker 2: but we didn't ever. I was very seldom talked about
Speaker 2: my books. Sometimes I would read to her just a
Speaker 2: paragraph and she would make a comment, but not often.
Speaker 2: And then when I stopped writing for publication, I've never
Speaker 2: stopped writing. When I stopped writing for publication after the
Speaker 2: publication of Emerald Blue in nineteen ninety five, and I
Speaker 2: didn't tell her straight away, And when she found out
Speaker 2: that I wasn't writing anything for publication, I was very
Speaker 2: much affected by the disappointment she displayed, and I thought, well,
Speaker 2: my writing must mean more to you than you've ever
Speaker 2: told me, and I've ever suspected. And then after a
Speaker 2: year or two, she began to parlance niggle at me
Speaker 2: and say when are you going to start writing again?
Speaker 2: And when I didn't show any evidence that I was
Speaker 2: writing again, then she went into a different mode and
Speaker 2: started to say, it's a tragic or yes, she might
Speaker 2: have used that word, it's a very tragic thing that
Speaker 2: you haven't got the recognition that you've got for your books,
Speaker 2: and that's all she said. I'd had seven books published
Speaker 2: up till then, and of course the planes have made
Speaker 2: me almost famous for a few years, but it wasn't
Speaker 2: enough for her, and she regretted it. And then she
Speaker 2: lived to see, well, she just lived to see the
Speaker 2: finishing balley patch. And I wouldn't have been so bold
Speaker 2: as to say this outright in earlier years, But in
Speaker 2: my age I can say anything and get away with it.
Speaker 2: I have an unquenchable, absolutely utterly confident belief that we
Speaker 2: live on as parts of this survived. And it's just
Speaker 2: spooky to me to see that she'd only been dead
Speaker 2: a few months and I won the Melbourne Prize, and
Speaker 2: then all the rest has happened in the last few years.
Speaker 2: I don't say any more than that that's maybe just
Speaker 2: a wonderful coincidence. The strange thing is that what I
Speaker 2: I won't say I yearned for it, but what I
Speaker 2: felt with a sense of grievance that I deserved but
Speaker 2: didn't have in all those years I now have. I
Speaker 2: don't really take the trouble to appreciate it. I played
Speaker 2: golf at garage and rasing them, erasing archives and stuff.
Speaker 2: I hear the sounds of distance thunder and the applause
Speaker 2: of distant crowds, and things like the poor guy dying
Speaker 2: at the end of the Duy obscure. There's a festival
Speaker 2: in the street or something. He's dying upstairs and it's
Speaker 2: not quite like that. But yes, I've got it all that.
Speaker 2: I won't say yearned for, felt that I deserve. I
Speaker 2: could have done without. I could have survived without it,
Speaker 2: but would have been a tough life. And now, if
Speaker 2: I want to just suppose I was feeling a bit
Speaker 2: miserable one night, I just go google Dural the name. Yeah,
Speaker 2: a bloke was playing golf with me to tournament at
Speaker 2: Eden Hope. A bloke come up from somewhere in the
Speaker 2: western district and he said, oh, you're from Baraque. We
Speaker 2: just finished playing shook heads. He said, you're from Garagua.
Speaker 2: Said there's somebody there's some sort of famous painter or
Speaker 2: somebody visited it. And I said, I think so. And
Speaker 2: I got out of the phone and I said, will
Speaker 2: this be heare? He should not be playing golf with you?
Speaker 2: And people do. I mean, it's not a welcome thing
Speaker 2: because of the storekeeper and the post office dady and
Speaker 2: the people in the town know not to direct people
Speaker 2: to my house, tell them to put a note in
Speaker 2: the post office. And if I want to answer them
Speaker 2: or answered them, it's happened occasionally.
Speaker 1: There's not many writers to whom readers would do a pilgrimage,
Speaker 1: like in terms of a marker.
Speaker 2: Of I think, I think, but I'm not saying this
Speaker 2: from a sense of mock modesty, but I think that
Speaker 2: the oddness of Garoaque as a name and as a
Speaker 2: locality that's nearly four hundred k from Melbourne, I think
Speaker 2: if I lived at South Geelong that there might be
Speaker 2: so many pilgrims.
Speaker 1: By my account, and I may have this wrong, so
Speaker 1: please correct me, but by my account, you have four times,
Speaker 1: I think, declared that a book that you're bringing out
Speaker 1: is going to be your last fault.
Speaker 2: That wasn't any sort of pose. I actually have a
Speaker 2: couple of times in recent In the last year or so,
Speaker 2: I thought I could. I've never thought I could make
Speaker 2: something into a book. But I was coaching writing letters
Speaker 2: of help to a young writer and I started, I said,
Speaker 2: here is the beginning of what could be a long
Speaker 2: piece of short fiction. And I wrote the beginning, and
Speaker 2: I thought for a couple of days I thought, you know,
Speaker 2: I could go on with that, and then as overcame me,
Speaker 2: I thought, no, but I'll tell you that because it's
Speaker 2: it's it's my stating that I won't write again. Has
Speaker 2: been always an honest thing, and then out of the
Speaker 2: blue comes a possibility and a few words with it,
Speaker 2: a mental image, a few scenes, and w I get
Speaker 2: started or I have got started in the past, the last,
Speaker 2: the very last book was written. The explanation is simple.
Speaker 2: I was writing these essays for the archive, and not
Speaker 2: writing them with elaborate care, just writing them as you
Speaker 2: write a diary entry. And then I was writing about
Speaker 2: my own books what they meant to me at my
Speaker 2: advanced age. And I let my publisher know of this,
Speaker 2: and he urged me and succeeded in persuading me to
Speaker 2: write them for publication. So that's one example of how
Speaker 2: a book came about that I never intended to write,
Speaker 2: but the others genuinely came. See, when I came to Grog,
Speaker 2: I didn't think i'd write anymore. I'd finished Barley Patch
Speaker 2: in the history of books, and I don't often take
Speaker 2: notice of dreams that I dreamed about colored glass. And
Speaker 2: I noticed a church, a little old Wesleyan church, around
Speaker 2: the corner from the house where I'm living at my
Speaker 2: son's house, and I looked at the colored darce and
Speaker 2: I realized that colored glass was a strange thing to
Speaker 2: understand what colored Dace, the true appearance of colored Dace.
Speaker 2: You didn't stand outside in the light, you stood inside
Speaker 2: in the darkness. I couldn't see what these windows represented
Speaker 2: in the church because I was out in the bright sunlight,
Speaker 2: and to understand I had to go into the dark,
Speaker 2: the gloomy church, which I eventually did and saw what
Speaker 2: they were. And just that mystery of vision and the
Speaker 2: appearances fascinate me. So the book Border Districts came from there,
Speaker 2: although as I said, i'd announced the people. No, I've
Speaker 2: given up writing for publication. The same with the mean Windows.
Speaker 2: Once upon a time, I got a lot of my
Speaker 2: just background knowledge from reading good Old Time, not Time, Australia,
Speaker 2: Time International, way back in the sixties and seventies. And
Speaker 2: I also used to admire when I went to films,
Speaker 2: which I've stopped doing a long time ago, I used
Speaker 2: to admire some of the films or scenes in the
Speaker 2: films of Ingemar Bergman and looking through the I was
Speaker 2: looking through some old Time magazines from about the eighties
Speaker 2: and I noticed it. In his last years Bergmann decided
Speaker 2: to make a film. I don't know if he ever succeeded,
Speaker 2: and it was to be set in a castle, and
Speaker 2: in every room of the castle was one of the
Speaker 2: characters from one of his other films. And I thought
Speaker 2: straight away it just came to with that I could
Speaker 2: write a book about a house. And I thought of
Speaker 2: Henry James's words that the house of fiction has a
Speaker 2: million windows. All the books that I've admired, or the
Speaker 2: writers that I've admired, are all living in this cast,
Speaker 2: and I'm there among them, nameless and anonymous, and we're
Speaker 2: all writing, and we have a few drinks together at
Speaker 2: night and talk about our writing methods and such things.
Speaker 2: And out of those daydreams almost came the book a
Speaker 2: Million Windows. So once again a chance happening, something catches
Speaker 2: my eye tax me notice, and I should speak in
Speaker 2: the past. And something took my eye, and a statement
Speaker 2: that I've made to the effect that no more books
Speaker 2: would emerge from me had to be negated.
Speaker 1: I mean, as a reader, I'm grateful that something else
Speaker 1: took your fancy afterwards each time. But I'm curious about
Speaker 1: even the physical impulse to say I think I'm done.
Speaker 2: Is it fatigue?
Speaker 1: Is it just a preparedness to apply your brain somewhere else?
Speaker 2: It would have to be some element of tiredness in it.
Speaker 2: But also see I think a lot of infinity. And
Speaker 2: I mentioned before about my reluctance to use terms like intellect, feeling, memory, imagination.
Speaker 2: But the mind. Now, some people say there's a superrego
Speaker 2: and unconscious. I have never found any evidence for that
Speaker 2: view of the mind. My view of the mind is
Speaker 2: rather like the view that I can see around me
Speaker 2: all day in the western Wimrock, mostly level landscape with
Speaker 2: a line of trees in the distance. I think that's
Speaker 2: what my mind really is. I know, you know, to
Speaker 2: something it would seem a childish thing, too bad. And
Speaker 2: the next question is what's behind the line of trees. Well,
Speaker 2: if you go through the trees, you're in another sort
Speaker 2: of bare landscape, and ten kilometers further over is another
Speaker 2: line of trees, And that gets me going on the
Speaker 2: business of infinity is time? Infinite is space? Infinite? Is
Speaker 2: my mind? Is my mind just an infinite part of infinitu?
Speaker 2: Now I don't think in those words, but I think visually.
Speaker 2: And the thing that might lead me to write the
Speaker 2: next book or in the past when I was writing,
Speaker 2: might be beyond the third or fourth line of trees.
Speaker 2: Which might take me some time to reach in my
Speaker 2: mind or reach with my feet.
Speaker 1: But when he does finally reach that third, maybe even
Speaker 1: fourth line of trees, where does that spark of an
Speaker 1: idea come from? How does he discern whether something is
Speaker 1: worthy of his time? An answer to this came to
Speaker 1: Gerald when he was preparing a paper The Breathing Author,
Speaker 1: to read at a conference held at the University of
Speaker 1: Newcastle back in two thousand and one.
Speaker 2: I kept several times using this expression, the image that
Speaker 2: winks at me, And it had only come to me
Speaker 2: a few days before, sitting in the hotel room with
Speaker 2: my wife preparing this speech, I thought, why do how
Speaker 2: do not so much? Well? How do certain things tell
Speaker 2: me that I should write about them? Where are certain
Speaker 2: other things, seemingly more important? Things? They make no appeal
Speaker 2: to me? And the only way I could think of
Speaker 2: it was they have a way of winking. And it's
Speaker 2: not literally a human wink. It's a kind of the
Speaker 2: sort of way that the roof of a house in
Speaker 2: the very far distance will will wink at you when
Speaker 2: the sun catches it as you're driving on a distant road.
Speaker 2: And so these images that wink at me. But if
Speaker 2: I wink at somebody or I don't. But in the
Speaker 2: old agement people wink at each other. It was often
Speaker 2: it was to signify that a bit of shared knowledge.
Speaker 2: You and I know better than that, don't we wink wink, nudge, nudge,
Speaker 2: wink wink. So when these things wink at me, they're saying, Gerald,
Speaker 2: I know something that you ought to know, or we
Speaker 2: really share something that we ought to talk over and
Speaker 2: elaborate on. And it's that feeling that this utterly ordinary
Speaker 2: looking image has something to tell. Well, what it has
Speaker 2: to tell is that I've come to understand this after
Speaker 2: years of experiencing it. It's connected with another image, which
Speaker 2: I didn't know it was connected with beforehand. And then
Speaker 2: when you get to that image and write about it,
Speaker 2: when I get to write about it, I find that
Speaker 2: three other images are appearing in the further background, and
Speaker 2: they're all connected to Hey, presto, I've got a book
Speaker 2: of fiction.
Speaker 1: When we return, Gerald reveals the obsession that's filled them
Speaker 1: for nearly eighty years. We'll be right back. Many of
Speaker 1: the profiles of Gerald Manine focus on the idea of
Speaker 1: his eccentricity, and to be fair, his list of videosyncrasies
Speaker 1: is long and varied. During a two one speech that
Speaker 1: has become somewhat infamous amongst his devoted groupes, he made
Speaker 1: an attempt to itemize some of them. I have never
Speaker 1: worn sunglasses. I've never learned to swim. I've never voluntarily
Speaker 1: immersed myself in any sea or stream. I've never touched
Speaker 1: any button or switch or working part of any computer
Speaker 1: or fax machine or mobile telephone. I've never learned to
Speaker 1: operate any sort of camera. In nineteen seventy nine, I
Speaker 1: taught myself to type using the index finger of my
Speaker 1: right hand alone. Since then, I've composed all my fiction
Speaker 1: and other writing using the finger just mentioned, and one
Speaker 1: or another of my three manual typewriters. It's a fabulous
Speaker 1: list and well worth reading. That essay. Gerrealmanane is it's
Speaker 1: fair to say singular. So one comes much of a
Speaker 1: surprise that the accountentamrisk Row of a little boy playing
Speaker 1: imagined horse races with marbles on a mat provides an
Speaker 1: insight into a key passion of Gerald's, a lifelong obsession
Speaker 1: and an underpinning philosophy for his life. Talk to me
Speaker 1: about imagined race horses, well, we moved to Bendigo in
Speaker 1: January nineteen forty four, and the third house we lived in.
Speaker 2: We lived in two places for a few months each.
Speaker 2: Then we settled into this little shabby weatherwood place. It's
Speaker 2: still there if anyone's listening, Number five Niel Street. It
Speaker 2: was number two hundred and forty four when we lived
Speaker 2: in it, but it's number five there, just off Maciva Highway.
Speaker 2: Then I heard horse races broadcast from Melbourne while my
Speaker 2: father listened, and then I'd go out in the backyard
Speaker 2: and I'd repeat some of the names of the horses.
Speaker 2: And I didn't do this as a parrot might do it.
Speaker 2: I've see now that I did it because I was
Speaker 2: almost destined to do it, and it fulfilled a deep
Speaker 2: need in me to have at the far end of
Speaker 2: my vision, and Melbourne was about as far away as
Speaker 2: I could imagine. There was an endless horse, not an
Speaker 2: endless horse race, an endless series of horse races taking place.
Speaker 2: Now we both, my interviewer and I smile at each
Speaker 2: other then, and it is a child childlike and the
Speaker 2: sort of thing that you'd smile at. But eighty years later,
Speaker 2: I still insist that one of my deepest needs is
Speaker 2: to be confident that in the background of my mind
Speaker 2: there is a horse race going on, and I could
Speaker 2: elaborate a lot on that. What were the names of
Speaker 2: the jockeys, What was the name of the race course,
Speaker 2: what were the names of the horses, what colors were
Speaker 2: the jockeys wearing, what were the odds? How was the
Speaker 2: race going to end? And this series of questions can
Speaker 2: occur to me at any time of the day. I'll
Speaker 2: be driving somewhere, or walking on the golf course, doing
Speaker 2: any number of things, and suddenly one of these invisible
Speaker 2: horse races will take place. Now, when I stopped writing
Speaker 2: for publication in the middle nineties, I had already devised
Speaker 2: the beginnings of a collection of pages and notebooks and
Speaker 2: files which would finally And it wasn't the first time
Speaker 2: in my life I tried this. I tried it at
Speaker 2: the ages of fifteen and sixteen. I tried to draw
Speaker 2: the race courses and name the horses that were performing
Speaker 2: invisibly at the outskirts of my mind. And I first
Speaker 2: concealed it from people. The first person I told was
Speaker 2: my wife. I said, I've got this archive starting up
Speaker 2: with just fictitious horses that doesn't it. No one knows
Speaker 2: where they are well of a pulf like Australia, at
Speaker 2: half like New Zealand. She said, where did you find
Speaker 2: the time? She didn't say you stupid man, or how
Speaker 2: silly or how childish? She said where did you find
Speaker 2: the time?
Speaker 1: She said?
Speaker 2: You brought up three kids, you worked at two jobs,
Speaker 2: you wrote all, one job being the writing job. Where
Speaker 2: did you find the time? And I don't know where
Speaker 2: I found the time. The archives grown. It's potentially infinite,
Speaker 2: as most such things are, and it gives me enormous
Speaker 2: satisfaction to know that I've documented some of these far,
Speaker 2: far reaching, of distant entities. So it's something that developed
Speaker 2: in me from an early age, and I thought it
Speaker 2: was something I ought to keep quiet about. But I
Speaker 2: never thought it was anything symptomatic of some fault in
Speaker 2: me or failing. It's the most difficult thing to explain,
Speaker 2: and the thing, that one thing that's kept me balanced
Speaker 2: and secure about this when I reflect on this. An
Speaker 2: American poet who went a bit funny in his old age,
Speaker 2: and his name was Robert Blyth. When I was a
Speaker 2: teacher of writing, I was always looking for little maxims
Speaker 2: and little pieces of guidance that I could pass on
Speaker 2: to my students because I didn't want to be telling
Speaker 2: my views. And I've searched through the Paris interviews and
Speaker 2: books and things, and Robert Lawyer found once made this
Speaker 2: to me amazing statement. A writer should always and he
Speaker 2: used the PRONEU and his A writer should always trust
Speaker 2: his obsessions. And thank Goodness for me, I trusted my obsessions,
Speaker 2: my horse racing obsessions, my landscape sessions, my daydreams about
Speaker 2: the Western District and the plains and so on, and
Speaker 2: the books are one result of my trust.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you say that because one of the things
Speaker 1: that I have long admired and enjoyed. And the way
Speaker 1: you talk about writing and the life of the mind
Speaker 1: is that you use the word obsessions a lot. Obsessions
Speaker 1: and passions you talk about quite comfortably. And I think
Speaker 1: so much of Australian, particularly Australian masculine culture, is this
Speaker 1: kind of laconic.
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't want to show my hand.
Speaker 1: I can't go too big, or I can't be obsessive
Speaker 1: or passionate or and I like that you don't have
Speaker 1: any inhibition about.
Speaker 2: That your obsess on, your passionate. We mentioned the wife
Speaker 2: a few times. I used to think when she described
Speaker 2: her childhood to me, it was a child who had
Speaker 2: just lost in books. She read all the Mary Grant
Speaker 2: Bruce books, or she read all of Henry Lawson's collected works.
Speaker 2: And at first I used to feel regretful because I
Speaker 2: had no opportunity to read any of those books and
Speaker 2: never have. But now I realized I was perhaps lucky
Speaker 2: not to because it might have persuaded me that the
Speaker 2: only way to be a writer was to be a
Speaker 2: Henry Lawson or a Mary Grant Bruce, whereas I was
Speaker 2: just locked away with hardly any books to read until
Speaker 2: I joined libraries. Only with glass marbles and the games
Speaker 2: in the backyard with my brothers, making mud roads and
Speaker 2: building imagining farmhouses, putting little people in the little tweak
Speaker 2: people in the farmhouses. That was my substitution for reading.
Speaker 2: And I think I'm lucky. It's a pity that I
Speaker 2: didn't get that background in one way, but I don't
Speaker 2: think it's hardly in anyway. I think I was lucky
Speaker 2: in the end.
Speaker 1: It happened as it did right through your writing. What
Speaker 1: role does your awareness of a reader have when you write?
Speaker 1: Do they exist for you or not until afterwards. I've
Speaker 1: said a fair bit about this in Well. I gave
Speaker 1: the title last Letter to a Reader and the phrase
Speaker 1: a reader should not be taken to need any reader.
Speaker 2: It really should be taken to read one particular reader.
Speaker 2: And I've only perfected or refined this idea in recent years.
Speaker 2: The ideal reader. And it's a she. Because I'm a male,
Speaker 2: she's almost invisible a presence. Her presence is very real,
Speaker 2: but her appearances it's very hard to discern. And my
Speaker 2: ideal reader, I've only discovered in recent years, is a
Speaker 2: supreme importance to me, and I get a sense of
Speaker 2: justification for having thought about her all these years. Every
Speaker 2: now and then, when somebody in Duluth, Minnesota, or Cape Town,
Speaker 2: South Africa and will write to me, it needn't be
Speaker 2: a woman, and I'd say, look, I've been reading your
Speaker 2: books for fifteen years, and if I lost all my
Speaker 2: other books and I kept hold of yours, that would
Speaker 2: be all I'd want to keep. And this only happens
Speaker 2: once every year or so. And I'm not making this
Speaker 2: up for sentimental reasons or striking a pose. It is
Speaker 2: an enormous reward for all the effort that I put into.
Speaker 2: And there were years when I wondered whether these people
Speaker 2: existed and they turned out to be They didn't. They
Speaker 2: only existed in potentiality in those days. Then I wrote
Speaker 2: the books. Then they read the books, and they proved
Speaker 2: you have existed after all.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about your previous books? Do you
Speaker 1: return to them and do you return to them with
Speaker 1: pride with regret? Do they snapshot of moment in time?
Speaker 1: Or are they still fundamental part of you?
Speaker 2: This is an interesting question. I had to go to
Speaker 2: Ballarat in twenty seventeen for a long course of radiation
Speaker 2: once a day, every weekday, and I had to live
Speaker 2: in a facility provided by the hospital, a very pleasant
Speaker 2: block of flats, and I had wonder myself and I
Speaker 2: was to spend a lot of time there, and I
Speaker 2: thought what am I going to do? So I was
Speaker 2: going to reread all the books and I couldn't bring
Speaker 2: myself to do it. And I thought, oh, well, that's
Speaker 2: because I was worried about the treatment and the cancer
Speaker 2: of stuff. But I tried again in the COVID years
Speaker 2: to read them. I can read them in parts. I
Speaker 2: have reread Tamaris Grow and then I got into a
Speaker 2: second book, I thought, no, I can't do this. It's
Speaker 2: it wasn't revolting or hurtful. It actually made me feel tired,
Speaker 2: tired of just remembering the huge amount of work that
Speaker 2: went into them, because that's something that they look finished
Speaker 2: and polished, and most of them only looked that way
Speaker 2: because they went through an enormous amount of rewriting and
Speaker 2: re polishing. The later books, I got smarter and I
Speaker 2: could write sometimes in one or two drafts. There's another
Speaker 2: feeling I've had. It's it's a multiple thing that the
Speaker 2: other feeling I've had was that I could have done
Speaker 2: it better or differently. There are sentences. Now, I'm not
Speaker 2: ashamed to write long, complicated sentences, but I do feel
Speaker 2: that I've made some very hard demands on the tamors grow.
Speaker 2: There are some passages that I almost I can almost
Speaker 2: feel my hand that are reaching for a pen or
Speaker 2: get the typewritter over and rewrite them, just break them
Speaker 2: up a little. They're all grammatical sentences, they all make sense,
Speaker 2: but they almost need to be sort of set out
Speaker 2: on cards and flashcards and put it around the table
Speaker 2: to put them back where they naturally belong. There's a
Speaker 2: few books, and I can't think of an example of this,
Speaker 2: but I've had the feeling where I felt that I
Speaker 2: could have said more, revealed more, perhaps about gone more
Speaker 2: deeply into something I hesitated because in my earlier years
Speaker 2: I thought, no, no one writes like that. But of
Speaker 2: course when you think that thought, you really should write that,
Speaker 2: because that's what you were meant to write, not the
Speaker 2: way other people wrote. So there's a few various directions.
Speaker 2: There are some, of course, there are moments that you
Speaker 2: sort of, you know, you revel in where you think,
Speaker 2: you know, did I really write that? Like it's too almost,
Speaker 2: too profound and too marvelous for me who have written.
Speaker 2: There's a sentence on early in a Million Windows. It's
Speaker 2: mentioned in the essay on a Million Windows. I remember
Speaker 2: the day I wrote it at the desk, all in
Speaker 2: one draft, and after I'd written it, I wrote in
Speaker 2: pencil beside it, this may be the best sentence I've
Speaker 2: ever written, And over in Adelaide a few years later,
Speaker 2: when the book was published, a man called Shannon Burns
Speaker 2: pencil beside the same sentence, this may be the best
Speaker 2: sentence I've ever read. This's an extraordinary occurrence, and he
Speaker 2: told me about it, and I said, I think I
Speaker 2: know the sentence you mean, And I took him to
Speaker 2: the he was in my room. I took him to
Speaker 2: the sentence. So you get these moments as well. Look,
Speaker 2: I'm one of the lucky weeps. You know. If there's
Speaker 2: any guiding light through this mad jungle of publication and
Speaker 2: writing and thwarted ambition, it's that you don't imitate to
Speaker 2: think that, of all the things I could have written
Speaker 2: about in the late sixties, the Vietnam wore, the rising
Speaker 2: of the feminist Jermaine Greer and stuff, what did I
Speaker 2: start at? A boy in a shabby little weatherboard house
Speaker 2: pushing glass marbles around a map. I think that's a
Speaker 2: good ending for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where do you go there, don't kell I am
Speaker 1: going to drive to Dunkel.
Speaker 2: I don't even suggested your machinery. You were electronic of
Speaker 2: cript roly.
Speaker 1: I think it'll give me a steer. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for making the time for me today.
Speaker 2: If we don't meet again with one of those circle
Speaker 2: of people who has current feelings towards each other and
Speaker 2: wish each other.
Speaker 1: Well, quite right, So I feel the same plan saves Gerald.
Speaker 1: You can find all of Gerald Manaine's books at your
Speaker 1: favorite independent bookstore. We'll also put a couple of links
Speaker 1: to essays about him and his work up on the
Speaker 1: read This website. The Menaine Industrial Complex is helpful in
Speaker 1: making sense of his work and his mind, and if
Speaker 1: you're just starting out, I recommend The Planes as a
Speaker 1: taste of his fiction and Something for the Pain for
Speaker 1: a bit of memoir good luck. Before we go, just
Speaker 1: to mention that this episode marks the one year anniversary
Speaker 1: for Read This. Back in July of last year, we
Speaker 1: shared with you a visit to Helen Garner's house, and
Speaker 1: now a whole year later, it's a trip to the
Speaker 1: Garoque golf course. What a treat. It's been an utter
Speaker 1: privilege to share these conversations with you week in, week out.
Speaker 1: A huge thank you to you are listeners and the
Speaker 1: support we've had from publishers, booksellers and readers alike. And
Speaker 1: a special thanks to the now more than fifty writers
Speaker 1: who have given their time, their generosity and the stories
Speaker 1: behind the books we love. Couldn't be prouder of what
Speaker 1: we've made. Go and troll through the archive for any
Speaker 1: episodes you might have missed and buy the writer's books
Speaker 1: at your local independent bookshop and rate review us, share
Speaker 1: links to your favorite episodes, even start a book club
Speaker 1: about what you've read. Next week on the show, I'm
Speaker 1: joined by writer Dylan Hartcastle to discuss their new novel,
Speaker 1: A Language of Limbs, which was inspired by their late
Speaker 1: great uncle Douglas, who had one of the most moving
Speaker 1: and affirming responses to Dylan coming out.
Speaker 3: My darling, it is an honor and a privilege to
Speaker 3: love and to witness you. And then he broke into
Speaker 3: song and he sang, the entirety of you are so
Speaker 3: beautiful to me? Is that the name of the actual song.
Speaker 1: Honestly, it's immediately recognizable from that refrain.
Speaker 3: Yeah ninety five at the time sings to start to finish,
Speaker 3: and then he says at the end and anyway I've
Speaker 3: always known.
Speaker 1: Read. This is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with
Speaker 1: mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: See you next week.