Speaker 1: I'm always interested in the relationship writers have with their
Speaker 1: previous work, particularly once they've built up a significant backlist.
Speaker 1: How do they feel about that novel from twenty years ago?
Speaker 1: Is their comfort in rediscovering an earlier literary voice or
Speaker 1: is there something a little bit mortifying about retreading old ground.
Speaker 1: I've spoken with writers in both camps. Some have expressed surprise,
Speaker 1: even delight, at finding in earlier works turns of phrase
Speaker 1: or clarity of expression that they have no memory of
Speaker 1: being responsible for. Others avoid it like the plague. When
Speaker 1: a book is finished, it's no longer theirs. It belongs
Speaker 1: to the reader at that point, time for them to
Speaker 1: move on. But that seems wild to me. The intensity
Speaker 1: of the way so many writers talk about their characters,
Speaker 1: about the months and years of world building that consumes
Speaker 1: them when they're writing, takes on this life of its own,
Speaker 1: not to mention those writers who draw from life from
Speaker 1: personal stories and ideas or people who matter to them.
Speaker 1: It seems like a big thing to let go of.
Speaker 1: Alex Miller has written seventeen books, fourteen of them novels.
Speaker 1: His first was published thirty seven years ago. He's now
Speaker 1: eighty eight, and there have been various moments in his
Speaker 1: glittering literary career where he might have been inclined to
Speaker 1: dip back into his own writerly past. He's won the
Speaker 1: Miles Franklin Award twice and countless other accolades. Maybe awards
Speaker 1: make you look back and see the book with fresh eyes.
Speaker 1: Just last year, with his wife Stephanie Miller, he unearthed
Speaker 1: old notepads, diaries, and letters for a collection called A
Speaker 1: Kind of Confession. It's deeply personal, but amongst its pleasures,
Speaker 1: perhaps the most acute is the insights it offers to
Speaker 1: his writing process and the conversations and thoughts that inspired
Speaker 1: so many books. But it's his latest novel that perhaps
Speaker 1: represents the deepest engagement yet with his own creative past.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen ninety two, Iilla released the modern Australian
Speaker 1: classic The Ancestor Game. It's arguably his most celebrated book,
Speaker 1: and at the heart of it is a character. Lang
Speaker 1: Sue is an exiled Chinese artist turned dealer and is
Speaker 1: based on Alex's real life friend Alan o'hoy. The pair,
Speaker 1: who met in the mid seventies, shared a deep friendship,
Speaker 1: and much of The Ancestor Game reads like Miller and
Speaker 1: his characters Stephen, August and Gertrude trying to make sense
Speaker 1: of this puzzle of a man. In their work of fiction.
Speaker 1: Lang su survives, but in real life, Alan o'hoy died
Speaker 1: by suicide. His grieving friend was paying tribute on the page,
Speaker 1: immortalizing him in the Australian literary firmament. Now more than
Speaker 1: thirty years later, Alex Miller is returning to that fiction
Speaker 1: and returning to his friend. His new novel, The Deal
Speaker 1: is about how writers engage with the world around them.
Speaker 1: It's about artists, about Australian racism and marriage, and parents
Speaker 1: and their children. But ultimately it's about giving length Sue
Speaker 1: or alanor'hoy, or even Alex Miller himself another go at
Speaker 1: laying out the truth. I'm Michael Williams and this is
Speaker 1: read This show about the books we love and the
Speaker 1: stories behind them. Alex Miller, Are you a rereader of
Speaker 1: your own work?
Speaker 2: No, I've never read one of my books from beginning
Speaker 2: to end. I've read chunks, bits and pieces of them
Speaker 2: and then sort of remember so much of what's going
Speaker 2: to happen, where it's going to go, and even sentences
Speaker 2: that I made up. Yeah, I've never read one to
Speaker 2: the end.
Speaker 1: I ask about rereading your work because it seems to
Speaker 1: me the book that came out with your name on
Speaker 1: the front of it before the deal was a kind
Speaker 1: of confession, and it was a collaboration with your wife, Stephanie.
Speaker 3: It was Stephanie who did it.
Speaker 1: It was her project of unearthing your papers, your letters
Speaker 1: and compiling them in a way that tells a story
Speaker 1: of a writerly life and a body of work. How
Speaker 1: did you feel about that process? How was it to
Speaker 1: be confronted with your words of forty years ago and
Speaker 1: think about what they meant, what they said about you,
Speaker 1: and how you've changed.
Speaker 2: Had I done it, I wouldn't have done it the
Speaker 2: way she did. She and Annett Barlow, my publisher, were
Speaker 2: in it together, and it took a long time for
Speaker 2: them to put it all together. I'm an unbelievable amount
Speaker 2: of material. For years since I can remember, I've kept letters,
Speaker 2: and then of course when email came in, I kept
Speaker 2: what I thought it was significant responses from me, so
Speaker 2: that the letters have a place, and I love writing letters.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have put in the stuff that steph put in.
Speaker 2: She went through to the earliest, went through all my diaries,
Speaker 2: every diary for bloody years, and all the notebooks, piles
Speaker 2: of notebooks. I mean a lot of those notebooks just
Speaker 2: had things like dentists three PM, you know, stuff like
Speaker 2: that in them, about them.
Speaker 1: That's a good name for a future book about.
Speaker 2: The dentists three PM root canal.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, I mean no, I was very busy while she
Speaker 2: was doing it, writing another book. I can't remember what
Speaker 2: the book was. It may have even been this one,
Speaker 2: the deal, but I didn't read it. I'd had no
Speaker 2: input to it. I attempted to have an input to
Speaker 2: it at one point by saying, looking at what had
Speaker 2: been done at a fairly late stage, and I said, well,
Speaker 2: all my essays on art have been left out. There's
Speaker 2: nothing in there to indicate really my lifetime interest in art.
Speaker 2: And Steph said, that's for another collection. We've kept them
Speaker 2: out on purpose. I said, okay, who Yeah, it was
Speaker 2: absolutely Steff's job.
Speaker 3: Smart woman.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's my first editor, and she'll save a book
Speaker 2: from being discarded altogether and see something else in it
Speaker 2: that it needs rearranging, or the perspective's a bit wrong.
Speaker 2: That's what's the trouble is that's why you're talking about
Speaker 2: giving it up and doing something else. And it again
Speaker 2: shines a light for me on the work that's a
Speaker 2: long way from finished.
Speaker 1: It seems directly relevant to me to the deal, because
Speaker 1: the deal is partly an act of reckoning with one
Speaker 1: of your most celebrated works, a book of many years ago,
Speaker 1: and that there is a letter that you send your
Speaker 1: Chinese translator in a kind of confession, where you offer
Speaker 1: a forward for the Chinese edition of The Ancestor.
Speaker 3: Again, I really I can't remember that.
Speaker 1: And it begins. I began to work on the answer
Speaker 1: game in order to try to understand the tragic death
Speaker 1: of a dear friend. The man on whom the hero
Speaker 1: of this book is based, Langzu, was a real person.
Speaker 1: He was my friend. He was an Australian Chinese artist
Speaker 1: who had lived his entire life outside China. He failed
Speaker 1: to achieve recognition as an artist in Australia, and his
Speaker 1: life came to seem to him to be more and
Speaker 1: more pointless as time went on. Eventually, at the age
Speaker 1: of fifty, he shot himself.
Speaker 2: So really been revealed. I've forgotten that was in there,
Speaker 2: all that I'd written.
Speaker 1: There only for the Chinese forward of the book, but
Speaker 1: you laid it out there very clearly, that engine for
Speaker 1: the Ancestor game, but also for this book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and for this book because.
Speaker 2: In the ancest Game he doesn't die.
Speaker 1: So I want to begin with the Ancestor game before
Speaker 1: we get to the Deal.
Speaker 3: And by.
Speaker 1: What motivated you as a writer to tell his story
Speaker 1: and what motivated the decision to let him live?
Speaker 2: Yeah, really good questions that I've asked myself many times,
Speaker 2: and there are many different answers to them, depending at
Speaker 2: what stage of life you're at. For the first two
Speaker 2: or three years after he shot himself, I was very
Speaker 2: upset about it and quite depressed often, and if I
Speaker 2: had a few drinks in the evening, I'd start lamenting
Speaker 2: his death, which made me angry and disappointed and a
Speaker 2: number of confused emotions for quite a long time. And
Speaker 2: Steph finally said, well, why don't you write a book
Speaker 2: about him? And I knew immediately that she was right,
Speaker 2: I should do it. So, yeah, I mean to clear
Speaker 2: your mind in a sense, to get it over, to
Speaker 2: deal with it. And that book. What didn't become the Deal,
Speaker 2: It didn't become the real life. It became a real
Speaker 2: and an imaginary life, and it took me back into
Speaker 2: Chinese history in Australia, and it brought me to the
Speaker 2: realization that if you're Chinese you're never going to be
Speaker 2: an ussy bloke. If you're Irish or English or a
Speaker 2: German migrant, you can be a Nussi bloke, not if
Speaker 2: you're Chinese. It began to sink into me that that
Speaker 2: was the case. And of course I also read in
Speaker 2: great depth the History in Australia, the published history in
Speaker 2: Australia of anti Chinese feeling and racism, which ran deep.
Speaker 3: There was even a I.
Speaker 2: Mean, it hasn't gone away. If you're Chinese, you must
Speaker 2: come across it from time to time. And I was
Speaker 2: talking to Alice Pung the other day and she and
Speaker 2: I are friends. She came for lunch and we were
Speaker 2: talking about it and she just said, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: it's normal for it to be in her life and
Speaker 2: in the lives of her friends who are Asians. And
Speaker 2: one of the reviews, a very good review of the
Speaker 2: deal actually know it was lovely to get it in
Speaker 2: the Australian Book Review, and in that the reviewer, who
Speaker 2: has nothing negative to say, about the book, said, it's
Speaker 2: a stretch for me to believe that this or he
Speaker 2: didn't quite say to believe, but it's a stretch for
Speaker 2: me that this Chinese drunk is valued so highly by
Speaker 2: dealers and auctioneers in the art world in Melbourne. Anybody
Speaker 2: who was involved in the art world in Melbourne in
Speaker 2: the seventies and eighties knew Lang Zu, They knew Alan o'hoy,
Speaker 2: the man on whom he was based. I mean that
Speaker 2: was unconscious racism in the sense that if it had
Speaker 2: been a drunken German dealer or a drunken Ossie dealer,
Speaker 2: now I would have blinked an I it was Chinese dealer.
Speaker 2: He was a secret dealer and a collector, and he
Speaker 2: was relied on by a lot of agents and also
Speaker 2: people in the business of auctioning paintings.
Speaker 1: That anger and grief in the wake of his death, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I understand that as an impulse to write. But I
Speaker 1: love what you're reckoning with the man you look.
Speaker 2: I loved him, and as you know, if somebody who
Speaker 2: loved dies, they're with you forever. They don't go away.
Speaker 2: People like Alan Barry Reid really critically important people to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean a lot of people have gone into my
Speaker 2: books who are now did friends, people I loved and
Speaker 2: cared deeply about the truth of what they had lived,
Speaker 2: the truth of what they claimed those things are I
Speaker 2: mean yeah to me. I mean Ray Gator always says
Speaker 2: I'm a searcher after truth, and I hadn't kind of
Speaker 2: realized that there was anything special until he said that,
Speaker 2: and I thought, oh, I am too, because that's what
Speaker 2: interests me, to get to the truth of the story.
Speaker 2: I mean that the story in a sense. If you're
Speaker 2: a writer, you don't have this beginning of the story.
Speaker 2: You don't have the middle of the story. It's only
Speaker 2: when the end of the story appears to you that
Speaker 2: you realize, oh my god, there's a story there.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: When that began, you think, and then you've got the
Speaker 2: compass of the story.
Speaker 1: If you like it.
Speaker 3: If you like it.
Speaker 1: When we return, Alex shares why he had to return
Speaker 1: to the story of his friend and set the truth straight,
Speaker 1: and why he's no longer scared of death, We'll.
Speaker 3: Be right back.
Speaker 1: If seeing the shape of the story isn't clear until
Speaker 1: you get the end of the story, how different is
Speaker 1: telling a story when that end is death by suicide.
Speaker 1: When that end is at the hand of the person
Speaker 1: that you're writing about.
Speaker 2: Well, writing The Deal wasn't the same as writing The
Speaker 2: Ancestry Game. It was a desire to tell the truth.
Speaker 2: Because when I wrote The Ancestry Game, people who'd known
Speaker 2: Allen wrote to me or rang me up and in
Speaker 2: those days left a message saying you brought him back
Speaker 2: and thanking me.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, but he's dead. He shot himself. That was
Speaker 3: the reality.
Speaker 2: And as you just pointed out in that book of
Speaker 2: Steffs that I actually wrote about that to Professor Leo,
Speaker 2: who translates my stuff into Chinese. I think that writing
Speaker 2: this book The Deal, it came simply, in a sense,
Speaker 2: from a desire to the two things. I suppose one
Speaker 2: is that I'm continuing with a kind of autobiography because
Speaker 2: it's all come It all comes from friends and loved ones.
Speaker 2: As I'm concerned. I did try and write about a
Speaker 2: person I disliked intensely once, and through trying to write
Speaker 2: about him, I began to like him and understand his
Speaker 2: motivation and have some sympathy with it. The real life
Speaker 2: bloke I still didn't like, but I find it very
Speaker 2: difficult to write about people I don't.
Speaker 1: Like you'd written written him into someone you understood.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, the reason I wrote the Deal was to bring
Speaker 2: a couple of things into perspective. One was the fact
Speaker 2: of my father as the good man before the war,
Speaker 2: and his gift to me of the simplicity of art
Speaker 2: in that innocence of art as it can be, and
Speaker 2: the corruption of art which happens in the book, with
Speaker 2: the substitution of paintings and recognition of things and all that.
Speaker 2: The end the signature, I mean, neither he nor I
Speaker 2: put the signature on that picture, but it was there,
Speaker 2: and it was sold in London for some enormous.
Speaker 1: And the heart of the deal is your surrogate, if
Speaker 1: you like Andy, And I'm curious at times it's a
Speaker 1: picture of the writer as someone who is extractive of
Speaker 1: the people in their life. And it seems to me
Speaker 1: that if we understand this book partly through the lens
Speaker 1: of autobiography, you seem critical of your chosen profession.
Speaker 2: It's the same in the Ancestor Game. I actually call
Speaker 2: the writer a parasite in the Ancestor game, because he
Speaker 2: is feeding off the material of his engaging main protagonist
Speaker 2: of a book that maybe he will write one day. So, yes,
Speaker 2: he's kind of feeding off a relationship.
Speaker 3: But both of us were.
Speaker 2: We were both using each other, And you do have
Speaker 2: to ask, is there any friendship in which the two
Speaker 2: people don't use each other to some extent? I mean,
Speaker 2: I know they say, oh, he's a user or she's
Speaker 2: a user, and.
Speaker 3: That's a derogatory term.
Speaker 2: But nevertheless, we do use or make use of friends
Speaker 2: in all sorts of ways, and they do of us too.
Speaker 2: We find we have been used and in not unpleasant way.
Speaker 1: If the deal is partly about telling the truth of
Speaker 1: that relationship and of that time and that story, is
Speaker 1: it a stretch then to say that you feel that
Speaker 1: you weren't telling the truth in the ancest Again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not a stretch. I suppose it's just the
Speaker 2: truth to say that I wasn't. I mean, the ancestor
Speaker 2: game is a lot of it is history making the point.
Speaker 2: I suppose that the Chinese arrived twelve years after Melbourne
Speaker 2: was declared a settlement, and that they came before the gold, whereas,
Speaker 2: of course the story is normally that they came for
Speaker 2: the gold and then went home again, which is simply
Speaker 2: not true. Maybe true of some people. It's certainly true
Speaker 2: of English people who came out with money, significant amounts
Speaker 2: of money, and exploited land and sheep and cattle for
Speaker 2: a few years.
Speaker 3: And then went back again to England.
Speaker 2: Lots of lots of them, and that was but that's
Speaker 2: not said about them.
Speaker 1: Part of what works so beautifully in The Deal and
Speaker 1: makes the way it recast the story so moving is
Speaker 1: the perspective of time and age. You know that Andy's
Speaker 1: voice and his story comes from from the other end
Speaker 1: of a lifetimes, so much so that the book actually
Speaker 1: ends in the first person with Andy's voice and in
Speaker 1: old age kind of looking back at this stuff. How
Speaker 1: important is that perspective of distance. I mean, I imagine
Speaker 1: the Alex Miller who wrote The Answer Game not only
Speaker 1: didn't write The Deal then, but couldn't have that. It's
Speaker 1: something that you can only come to several decades on
Speaker 1: in your writing career.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I've simplified things in as much as
Speaker 2: I'm able to in the last few books. I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm not capable of writing a great, big book anymore.
Speaker 2: I'm too old to take on a subject that requires
Speaker 2: a lot of research and he's going to finish up
Speaker 2: being a sort of six hundred page book. So it's
Speaker 2: kind of in my interests anyway, to be much tighter
Speaker 2: and more disciplined about the way I deliver a story.
Speaker 2: So yeah, a kind of not a kind of confession.
Speaker 2: What was it called A Brief Affair and The Deal
Speaker 2: I were both relatively short books compared to ancestor Game,
Speaker 2: which is not huge, but still it's big in terms
Speaker 2: of its subject and its grasp of things and its
Speaker 2: historical reference and all that.
Speaker 3: But The.
Speaker 2: Deal runs from when I was a kid to now
Speaker 2: I'm what eighty seven, I'll be eighty eight next month, December.
Speaker 1: It's distressing to me, Alex, you're in better nick than
Speaker 1: I am.
Speaker 3: And then you know, well, I work at it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I work at a two that's not having any
Speaker 1: and me of the same success you're having.
Speaker 3: It's just luck.
Speaker 2: But yeah, So the perspective that I now have on it,
Speaker 2: I think needs to be stated in this book because
Speaker 2: the guts of the book, The Deal is a story
Speaker 2: that happened a long time ago. It's also the story
Speaker 2: of Stephanie and I meeting and having our first child
Speaker 2: and what that did to me and for a lot
Speaker 2: of people, that's the most important part of the book.
Speaker 2: But none of the reviewers so far has mentioned Australian
Speaker 2: racism as having any part to play in it. Except
Speaker 2: Chinese people. It's the most important part of the book
Speaker 2: for them.
Speaker 1: I'm so curious about whether the writer in their eighties
Speaker 1: is more comfortable letting their friend die on the page
Speaker 1: than the writer in their forties. You know, whether that
Speaker 1: or their fifties. You know, whether whether that distance allowed
Speaker 1: you to be truer this time around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's probably an insight, of valuable insight.
Speaker 2: But you're not afraid of death when you're old. I mean,
Speaker 2: why be afraid of death when you're in your eighties?
Speaker 2: For Christ's sake, you should be dead and it will
Speaker 2: be soon. I used to call it, and I probably
Speaker 2: still do. People don't like it, of course. Is the
Speaker 2: death zone. Someone turns eighty and they let me know
Speaker 2: or have a party, and I say, you're in the
Speaker 2: death zone now, and they say, oh, fuck felks for
Speaker 2: christ aint cheer up, mate.
Speaker 1: You might want to work on the messages you're writing cards,
Speaker 1: if that's what you're.
Speaker 2: Doing, But that's when we die. We die in our eighties.
Speaker 2: Ninety percent of us die in our eighties. A few
Speaker 2: slip through to their nineties. Not too many are still
Speaker 2: being productive in any sort of serious way into their nineties.
Speaker 2: So that's another challenge yet to be faced. I mean,
Speaker 2: when you're forty five, you're scared of death. When you're
Speaker 2: fifty year scared of death, you think, oh fuck, I've
Speaker 2: got bloody cancer.
Speaker 3: Now never think that.
Speaker 2: At my age, I've never give it a thought. I
Speaker 2: just look at Steph and I think, I hope you're
Speaker 2: okay when I'm gone, you know.
Speaker 1: Before I let you go, I just want to ask,
Speaker 1: just cut and ride for the record, if there's something
Speaker 1: that you want readers of the Deal to understand, to
Speaker 1: take away and remember about your friend Allen, what would
Speaker 1: it be?
Speaker 2: No, people read their own book, and my books hopefully
Speaker 2: are open to readers to read their own book, so
Speaker 2: that a young person in Bowrel will pick the book
Speaker 2: up and read it, and they'll read their own book.
Speaker 2: They won't notice the racism, or they will notice it,
Speaker 2: or they won't notice the innocence of art and the
Speaker 2: corruption of art as a possible dichotomy a subject, if
Speaker 2: you like. They might notice the falling in love on
Speaker 2: the bus. Yeah, maybe that will be the main story
Speaker 2: for them.
Speaker 1: Well, the way a man talks to his daughter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that having children was the greatest e end of
Speaker 2: my life, and I think probably of many parents' lives.
Speaker 2: The event of having a child changed everything.
Speaker 3: It humanized me.
Speaker 1: Well, I concur with your other readers who think The
Speaker 1: Deal might be the finest thing you've done. It's a
Speaker 1: masterpiece and thrill to discover that you're still delivering masterpieces.
Speaker 1: And I'm excited for the next one.
Speaker 3: Thanks for a chat mate, It's.
Speaker 1: An absolute pleasure. Great as Everdencey YouTube Mike Alex Miller's
Speaker 1: latest book is The Deal. It's available at all good bookstores.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've
Speaker 1: been reading this week, And like I'm sure many of you,
Speaker 1: I read Picnic at Hanging Rock when I was quite
Speaker 1: young and it kind of haunted me ever since. But
Speaker 1: I realized I didn't know a great deal about his author,
Speaker 1: Joan Lindsay. Brenda Nile is arguably one of the best
Speaker 1: literary biographers in Australia today, and she's just completed a
Speaker 1: new biography of Joan Lindsay with the subtitle The Hidden
Speaker 1: Life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Speaker 1: Lindsay was deeply embedded in the world of the visual arts.
Speaker 1: She was wife of National Gallery of Victoria director Daryl Lindsay,
Speaker 1: and a lot of her life she'd sacrificed her own
Speaker 1: talent because of that context that she was in. But
Speaker 1: on the page she came to life and demonstrated this gothic,
Speaker 1: incredible vision, and Nile does a great job bringing that
Speaker 1: to life. Brenda Niles Joe Lindsay is available in all
Speaker 1: good bookstores. Now that's it for this week's show. If
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and reviewers.
Speaker 1: It helps a lot. Next week, I'm read this. I'm
Speaker 1: sitting down with Sean Wilson to discuss his heartbreaking new
Speaker 1: book about dementia. You must remember this. Read this as
Speaker 1: a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the generous support
Speaker 1: of the AAR Group. The show is produced and edited
Speaker 1: by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original
Speaker 1: compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening. See you next week.