Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Each Sunday, we're sharing one
Speaker 1: of our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This.
Speaker 1: The show features interviews with some of the best and
Speaker 1: most beloved writers from Australia and around the world. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from Gerald Manane. Gerald doesn't have
Speaker 1: readers so much as acolytes. Described by The New Yorker
Speaker 1: as the reclusive giant of Australian letters, He's written ten novels,
Speaker 1: several short story and essay collections, and a memoir about
Speaker 1: horse racing, all of which represents one of the most
Speaker 1: formidable and singular bodies of work in literature. Michael Williams
Speaker 1: is the host of Read This and Here's with Me Now. Hi,
Speaker 1: Michael Ruby Jones. Hello, So this feels like quite a
Speaker 1: special episode, not only because Gerald is sort of famously
Speaker 1: a bit of a recluse, but also because you actually
Speaker 1: met him on his home turf of grog. Can you
Speaker 1: tell me a bit about it?
Speaker 2: What was it like? I do have a particular fondness
Speaker 2: for Read This. Episode's where we go and visit writers
Speaker 2: at home. Our first ever episode was with Helen Ghana.
Speaker 2: We went to Tasmania to talk to Richard Flanagan went
Speaker 2: and sought Kate Gremble out. So when it came to
Speaker 2: talking to a writer who The New York Times referred
Speaker 2: to as Australia's most likely next Nobel laureate in literature,
Speaker 2: it felt worth my while making the trip out to him,
Speaker 2: as you say, on his home turf. We didn't quite
Speaker 2: go to his house though. Gerald lives in a town
Speaker 2: called Garoque, out in the western district of Victoria, and
Speaker 2: I met him at the Garoque golf course, where he
Speaker 2: is club secretary and has been for many years. If
Speaker 2: you think there's a disconnect between someone being a recluse
Speaker 2: and being club secretary at their local golf club, you're right.
Speaker 2: The man is relentlessly sociable, but a little bit off
Speaker 2: the grid.
Speaker 1: And so for those who might not know Gerald's work,
Speaker 1: could you talk a bit about his writing and what
Speaker 1: makes him such a singular author.
Speaker 2: Gerald Benane is a very literary author, so his work.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to pretend his work is going to
Speaker 2: be for everyone. Although the people who love him obsess
Speaker 2: about him, They write books about him and hold academic
Speaker 2: conferences and devote their lives to trying to understand what's
Speaker 2: happening with Gerald Manine. He's written ten novels, collections of
Speaker 2: short stories, essays. He wrote this memoir about horse racing
Speaker 2: that was called Something for the Pain. That sounds prolific,
Speaker 2: although he's been added for decades and decades now, and
Speaker 2: he writes these singular someone say, even postmodern books that
Speaker 2: are as much about the imagination and about the process
Speaker 2: of writing as they are about anything else. He's probably
Speaker 2: most famous for a novel called The Plaines, which was
Speaker 2: the first one of his I read, which is this
Speaker 2: terrific novel about Sorry I can't.
Speaker 1: Help coming up in just a moment. We visited Gerald
Speaker 1: Manine at the Groat golf Course.
Speaker 2: I drove out to meet Gerald a couple of months back,
Speaker 2: four days before his eighty fifth birthday. His longtime friend
Speaker 2: and publisher Ivor Indic helped me make the arrangement. No emails,
Speaker 2: just text messages, and Gerald is warm and direct, immediately
Speaker 2: agreeable and swift to make arrangements. We're to meet at
Speaker 2: the golf club. On first approach, I completely missed the
Speaker 2: dirt track up to the clubhouse. Google Maps has given
Speaker 2: up the ghost and it's just me and the scrub
Speaker 2: and a quickly disappearing gap in the trees before I
Speaker 2: find myself lost on some random back road between the paddocks.
Speaker 2: I circle back, retrace my steps and there it is
Speaker 2: a squat fibrobuilding, nestled in the trees, lazy cockies strolling
Speaker 2: around an overgrown garden. It's not exactly clear where the
Speaker 2: golf course it's a elf is, but Gerald is there, unmistakable,
Speaker 2: ready to talk. Now.
Speaker 3: I'm just going to take these ten minutes to eat
Speaker 3: the sandwich and have a drink of cherry. Hurry.
Speaker 2: I'm in no tearing hurry whatsoever. Drink of the room
Speaker 2: is quiet. He's worrying about the hum of the fridge
Speaker 2: as I set up my recording equipment. He's already laid
Speaker 2: out all his books in various editions on one of
Speaker 2: the tables and has clearly put a lot of thought
Speaker 2: into which chairs are best for us to sit in.
Speaker 2: And the chat flows immediately for about twenty minutes. As
Speaker 2: he eats and I set up, we talk about family
Speaker 2: and places we both lived. He's funny, and this disarming
Speaker 2: mix are very considered and deliberate on the one hand,
Speaker 2: an idiosyncratic and completely free range. On the other I
Speaker 2: keep looking at the spread of books on the tabletop,
Speaker 2: the beautiful abstract covers and titles like Invisible yet Enduring
Speaker 2: Lilacs and a million Windo tamarisk Row is there. It's
Speaker 2: fifty years since it was first published, and I still
Speaker 2: remember the little boy at the heart of it, Clement Killaton,
Speaker 2: sitting on a mat and building an imaginary life, pushing
Speaker 2: marbles around through which he builds an entire reality. I
Speaker 2: want to ask Gerald about that boy, about those marbles
Speaker 2: and stained glass and horse racing, and about perfect sentences.
Speaker 2: But when the microphones are on and we start talking,
Speaker 2: it's his late wife, Catherine who comes to the foreground first.
Speaker 2: It was in two thousand and nine, following her death,
Speaker 2: that Gerald moved to Garogue, and it's clear that she
Speaker 2: remains a significant ongoing presence, not just in his daily consciousness,
Speaker 2: but in how he regards the world of writing. In
Speaker 2: the mind, we.
Speaker 3: Had an extraordinary relationship as author and wife. Never mind
Speaker 3: all the rist of our marriage, which was a turbulent marriage,
Speaker 3: not always by any means a happy marriage, but a
Speaker 3: successful one. To judge from the ending of it, all
Speaker 3: ended well. She seldom asked me about my books. I
Speaker 3: don't even remember asking her had she read the books.
Speaker 3: I know she did read them, but she had this
Speaker 3: strange well, I don't know really what she had. I
Speaker 3: suspect that she was puzzled and intrigued to read what
Speaker 3: I'd written, because it was not often what I talked about.
Speaker 3: We were very close. We had no hesitation in talking
Speaker 3: about the most difficult matters or what's it with controversial
Speaker 3: things that people say, the three those difficult things to
Speaker 3: talk about on a deep level, of sex, the afterlife,
Speaker 3: and money. We managed to talk about those with a
Speaker 3: few differences, but we didn't ever, very seldom talked about
Speaker 3: my books. Sometimes I would read to her just a
Speaker 3: paragraph and she would make a comment, but not often.
Speaker 3: And then when I stopped writing for publication, I've never
Speaker 3: stopped writing. When I stopped writing for publication after the
Speaker 3: publication of Emerald Blue in nineteen ninety five, and I
Speaker 3: didn't tell her straight away, And when she found out
Speaker 3: that I wasn't writing anything for publication, I was very
Speaker 3: much affected by the disappointment she displayed, and I thought, well,
Speaker 3: my writing must mean more to you than you've ever
Speaker 3: told me. And I've ever suspected, and then after a
Speaker 3: year or two she began to well in common pilance,
Speaker 3: niggle at me and say when are you going to
Speaker 3: start writing again? And when I didn't show any evidence
Speaker 3: that I was writing again, then she went into a
Speaker 3: different mode and started to say it's a tragic or yes,
Speaker 3: she might have used that word, it's a very tragic
Speaker 3: thing that you haven't got the recognition that you've got
Speaker 3: for your books. And that's all she said. I'd had
Speaker 3: seven books published up till then, and of course the
Speaker 3: planes have may be almost famous for a few years,
Speaker 3: but it wasn't enough for her, and she regretted it.
Speaker 3: And then she lived to see well, she just lived
Speaker 3: to see the finishing balley patch. And I wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been so bold as to say this outright in earlier years,
Speaker 3: but my age, I can say anything and get away
Speaker 3: with it. I have an unquenchable, absolutely utterly confident belief
Speaker 3: that we live on as parts of the survived death.
Speaker 3: And it's just spooky to me to see that she'd
Speaker 3: only been dead a few months and I won the
Speaker 3: Melbourne Prize, and then all the rest has happened in
Speaker 3: the last few years. I don't say any more than
Speaker 3: that it's maybe just a wonderful coincidence. The strange thing
Speaker 3: is that what I won't say I yearned for it,
Speaker 3: but what I felt, with a sense of grievance that
Speaker 3: I deserve that didn't have in all those years I
Speaker 3: now have, I don't really take the trouble to appreciate it.
Speaker 3: I played golf at garaagu andsing at them, erasing archives
Speaker 3: and stuff. I hear the sounds of distant thunder and
Speaker 3: the applause of distant crowds and things, and like the
Speaker 3: poor guy dying at the end of the duty obscure
Speaker 3: there's a festival in the street or something. He's dying upstairs,
Speaker 3: and it's not quite like that. But yes, I've got it.
Speaker 3: All that I won't say yearned for, felt that I deserved.
Speaker 3: I could have done without. I could have survived without it,
Speaker 3: but would have been a tough life. And now, if
Speaker 3: I want to just suppose I was feeling a bit
Speaker 3: miserable one night, I just go google Jeralm the name
Speaker 3: her bloke was playing golf as me at a tournament
Speaker 3: at Eden Hope. A bloke come up from somewhere in
Speaker 3: the Western district and he said, oh, you're from Garaque.
Speaker 3: We just finished playing shook heads. He said, you're from
Speaker 3: garagu He said there's somebody, there's some sort of famous
Speaker 3: painter or somebody visit. And I said, I think so.
Speaker 3: And I got out of the phone and I said,
Speaker 3: would this be heare? It should not be playing off
Speaker 3: for the idea and people do. I mean, it's not
Speaker 3: a welcome thing because the storekeeper and the post office
Speaker 3: lady and the people in the town know not to
Speaker 3: direct people to my house, tell them to put a
Speaker 3: note in the post office. And if I want to
Speaker 3: answer them or answer them, it's happened occasionally.
Speaker 2: There's not many writers to whom readers would do a
Speaker 2: pilgrimage like in terms of a marker.
Speaker 3: Of I think. I think that I'm not saying this
Speaker 3: from a sense of mock modesty, but I think that
Speaker 3: the oddness of Garoaque as a name and as a
Speaker 3: locality that's nearly four hundred k from Melbourne. I think
Speaker 3: if I lived at South Geelong that might there might
Speaker 3: be so many pilgrims.
Speaker 2: By my account, and I may have this wrong, so
Speaker 2: please correct me, but by my account, you have four
Speaker 2: times I think declared that a book that you're bringing
Speaker 2: out is going to be your last fault.
Speaker 3: That wasn't any sort of pose. I actually have a
Speaker 3: couple of times in recent in the last year or so,
Speaker 3: I thought I could. I've never thought I could make
Speaker 3: something into a book, but I was coaching writing letters
Speaker 3: of help to a young writer, and I started. I said,
Speaker 3: here is the beginning of what could be a long
Speaker 3: piece of short fiction. And I wrote the beginning, and
Speaker 3: I thought for a couple of days I thought, you know,
Speaker 3: I could go on with that, and then a tiredness
Speaker 3: overcame me. I thought, you know, but I'll tell you
Speaker 3: that because it's it's it's my stating that I won't
Speaker 3: write again, has been always an honest thing. And then
Speaker 3: out of the blue comes a possibility and a few
Speaker 3: words with it, a mental image, a few scenes, and
Speaker 3: and I get started, or I have got started in
Speaker 3: the past the very last book was written. The explanation
Speaker 3: is simple. I was writing these essays for the archive,
Speaker 3: and not writing them with elaborate care, just writing them
Speaker 3: as you write a diary entry. And then I was
Speaker 3: writing about my own books, what they meant to me
Speaker 3: at my advand stage, and I let my publisher know
Speaker 3: of this, and he urged me and succeeded in persuading
Speaker 3: me to write them for publication. So that's one example
Speaker 3: of how a book came about that I never intended
Speaker 3: to write, but the others genuinely came. See. When I
Speaker 3: came to Gark, I didn't think i'd write anymore. I'd
Speaker 3: finished Balley Patch in the History of Books, and I
Speaker 3: had I don't often take notice of dreams, but I
Speaker 3: dreamed about colored Glass. And I noticed a church of
Speaker 3: little Old Wesleyan Church around the corner from the house
Speaker 3: where I'm living at my son's house, and I looked
Speaker 3: at the colored glass, and I realized that colored glass
Speaker 3: was a strange thing. To understand what colored duce the
Speaker 3: true appearance of colored das you didn't stand outside in
Speaker 3: the light, you stood inside in the darkness. I couldn't
Speaker 3: see what these windows represented in the church because I
Speaker 3: was out in the bright sunlight. And to understand I
Speaker 3: had to go into the dark the gloomy church, which
Speaker 3: I eventually did and saw what they were. And just
Speaker 3: that mystery of vision and the appearances fascinate me. So
Speaker 3: the book Border Districts came from there, although as I said,
Speaker 3: i'd announced the people. Now I've given up writing for publication.
Speaker 3: The same with a million windows. Once upon a time,
Speaker 3: I got a lot of my just background knowledge from
Speaker 3: reading good Old Time, not Time, Australia, Time, International, way
Speaker 3: back in the sixties and seventies. And I also used
Speaker 3: to admire when I went to films, which I've stopped
Speaker 3: doing a long time ago, I used to admire some
Speaker 3: of the films or scenes in the films of Ingemar
Speaker 3: Bergman and looking through the I was looking through some
Speaker 3: old time magazines from about the eighties and I noticed it.
Speaker 3: In his last years Bergmann decided to make a film
Speaker 3: I don't know if he ever succeeded, and it was
Speaker 3: to be set in a castle, and in every room
Speaker 3: of the castle was one of the characters from one
Speaker 3: of his other films. And I thought straight away it
Speaker 3: just came to with that I could write a book
Speaker 3: about a house. And I thought of Henry James's words
Speaker 3: that the house of fiction has a million windows. All
Speaker 3: the books that I've admired, or the writers that I've admired,
Speaker 3: are all living in this castle. I'm there among them,
Speaker 3: nameless and anonymous, and we're all writing, and we have
Speaker 3: a few drinks together at night and talk about our
Speaker 3: writing methods and such things. And out of those daydreams
Speaker 3: almost came the book A Million Windows. So once again
Speaker 3: a chance happening, something catches my eye takes me notice,
Speaker 3: and I should speak in the past, And something took
Speaker 3: my eye, and a statement that I'd made to the
Speaker 3: effect that no more books would emerge from me had
Speaker 3: to be negated.
Speaker 2: I mean, as a reader, I'm grateful that something else
Speaker 2: took your fancy afterwards each time. But I'm curious about
Speaker 2: even the physical impulse to say I think I'm done.
Speaker 3: Is it fatigue?
Speaker 2: Is it just a preparedness to apply your brain somewhere else.
Speaker 3: But it would have to be some element of tiredness
Speaker 3: in it. But also see, I think a lot about infinity.
Speaker 3: And I mentioned before about my reluctance to use terms
Speaker 3: like intellect, feeling, memory, imagination. But the mind, now, some
Speaker 3: people say there's a superrego and unconscious. I have never
Speaker 3: found any evidence for that view of the mind. My
Speaker 3: view of the mind is rather like the view that
Speaker 3: I can see around me all day in the Western
Speaker 3: Wimrock mostly level landscape with a line of trees in
Speaker 3: the distance. I think that's what my mind really is.
Speaker 3: I know to some it would seem a childish thing,
Speaker 3: too bad. And the next question is what's behind the
Speaker 3: line of trees. Well, if you go through the trees,
Speaker 3: you're in another sort of bare landscape, and ten kilometers
Speaker 3: further over is another line of trees. And that gets
Speaker 3: me going on the business of infinity is time, infinite
Speaker 3: is space? Infinite is my mind? And is my mind
Speaker 3: just an infinite part of infinitud Now I don't think
Speaker 3: in those words, but I think visually. And the thing
Speaker 3: that might lead me to write the next book or
Speaker 3: in the past when I was writing, might be beyond
Speaker 3: the third or fourth line of trees, which might take
Speaker 3: me some time to reach in my mind or rich
Speaker 3: with my feet.
Speaker 2: But when he does finally reach that third, maybe even
Speaker 2: fourth line of trees, where does that spark of an
Speaker 2: idea come from? How does he discern whether something is
Speaker 2: worthy of his time? An answer to this came to
Speaker 2: Gerald when he was preparing a paper The Breathing Author,
Speaker 2: to read at a conference held at the University of
Speaker 2: Newcastle back in two thousand and one.
Speaker 3: I kept several times using this expression, the image that
Speaker 3: winks at me, and it had only come to me
Speaker 3: a few days before, sitting in the hotel room with
Speaker 3: my wife preparing this speech, I thought, why do how
Speaker 3: do not so much? Well? How do certain things tell
Speaker 3: me that I should write about them? Where are certain
Speaker 3: other things seemingly more important? Things? They make no appeal
Speaker 3: to me? And the only way I could think of
Speaker 3: it was they have a way of winking. And it's
Speaker 3: not literally a human wink. It's a kind of the
Speaker 3: sort of way that the roof of a house us
Speaker 3: in the very far distance will wink at you when
Speaker 3: the sun catches it as you're driving on a distant road.
Speaker 3: And so these images that wink at me. And if
Speaker 3: I wink at somebody or I don't. But in the
Speaker 3: old agement people wink at each other, it was often
Speaker 3: it was to signify that a bit of shared knowledge
Speaker 3: You and I know better than that, don't we wink? Wink, nudge, nudge,
Speaker 3: wink wink. So when these things wink at me, they're saying, gerald,
Speaker 3: I know something that you ought to know, or we
Speaker 3: really share something that we ought to talk over and
Speaker 3: elaborate on. And it's that feeling that this utterly ordinary
Speaker 3: looking image has something to tell. Well, what it has
Speaker 3: to tell is that I've come to understand this after
Speaker 3: years of experiencing it. It's connected with another image, which
Speaker 3: I didn't know it was connected with beforehand. And then
Speaker 3: when you get to that image and write about it,
Speaker 3: or when I get to write about it, I find
Speaker 3: that three other images are appearing in the further background,
Speaker 3: and they're all connected to Hey, presto, I've got a
Speaker 3: book of fiction.
Speaker 2: When we return, Gerald reveals the obsession that's fulled him
Speaker 2: for nearly eighty years. We'll be right back. Many of
Speaker 2: the profiles of Gerald Manane focus on the idea of
Speaker 2: his eccentricity, and to be fair, his list of videosyncrasies
Speaker 2: is long and varied. During a two thousand and one
Speaker 2: speech that has become somewhat infamous amongst his devoted groupes,
Speaker 2: he made an attempt to itemize some of them. I
Speaker 2: have never worn sunglasses. I've never learned to swim. I've
Speaker 2: never voluntarily immersed myself in any sea or stream. I've
Speaker 2: never touched any button or switch or working part of
Speaker 2: any computer or fax machine or mobile telephone. I've never
Speaker 2: learned to operate any sort of camera. Nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 2: I taught myself to type using the index finger of
Speaker 2: my right hand alone. Since then, I've composed all my
Speaker 2: fiction and other writing using the finger just mentioned, and
Speaker 2: one or another of my three manual typewriters. It's a
Speaker 2: fabulous list and well worth reading that essay, Geraldmnane is
Speaker 2: it's fair to say singular. So one come as much
Speaker 2: of a surprise that the account in tamersk Grow of
Speaker 2: a little boy playing imagined horse races with marbles on
Speaker 2: a mat provides an insight into a key passion of Gerald's,
Speaker 2: a lifelong obsession and an underpinning philosophy for his life.
Speaker 2: Talk to me about imagined race horses.
Speaker 3: Well. We moved to Bendigo in January nineteen forty four,
Speaker 3: and the third house we lived in. We lived in
Speaker 3: two places for a few months each. Then we settled
Speaker 3: into this little shabby weatherwood place. It's still there. If
Speaker 3: anyone's listing number five, Niel Streep, it was number two
Speaker 3: hundred and forty four when we lived in it, but
Speaker 3: it's number five there, just off but Carver Hio. Then
Speaker 3: I heard horse races broadcast from Melbourne while my father listened,
Speaker 3: and then I'd go out in the backyard and I'd
Speaker 3: repeat some of the names of the horses. And I
Speaker 3: didn't do this as a parrot might do it. I've
Speaker 3: see now that I did it because I was almost
Speaker 3: destined to do it, and it fulfilled a deep need
Speaker 3: in me to have at the far end of my vision,
Speaker 3: and Melbourne was about as far away as I could imagine,
Speaker 3: there was an endless horse not an endless horse race,
Speaker 3: an endless series of horse races taking place. Now we both,
Speaker 3: my interviewer and I smile at each other then, and
Speaker 3: it is a child childlike and the sort of thing
Speaker 3: that you'd smile at. But eighty years later, I still
Speaker 3: insist that one of my deepest needs is to be
Speaker 3: confident that in the background of my mind there was
Speaker 3: a horse race going on, and I could elaborate a
Speaker 3: lot on that. What were the names of the jockeys,
Speaker 3: what was the name of the race course, what were
Speaker 3: the names of the horses, what colors were the jockeys wearing,
Speaker 3: what were the odds? How was the race going to end?
Speaker 3: And this series of questions can occur to me at
Speaker 3: any time of the day, I'll be driving somewhere, or
Speaker 3: walking on the golf course, doing any number of things,
Speaker 3: and suddenly one of these invisible horse races will take place. Now,
Speaker 3: when I stopped writing for publication in the mid nineties,
Speaker 3: I had already devised the beginnings of a collection of
Speaker 3: pages and notebooks and files which would finally And it
Speaker 3: wasn't the first time in my life I tried this.
Speaker 3: I tried it at the ages of fifteen and sixteen.
Speaker 3: I tried to draw the race courses and name the
Speaker 3: horses that were performing invisibly at the outskirts of my mind.
Speaker 3: I first concealed it from people. The first person I
Speaker 3: told was my wife. I said, I've got this archive
Speaker 3: starting up with just fictitious horses. That doesn't it No
Speaker 3: one knows where they are well, sort of half like
Speaker 3: Australia and half like New Zealand. She said, where did
Speaker 3: you find the time? She didn't say you stupid men,
Speaker 3: or how silly or how childish? She said where did
Speaker 3: you find the time? She said, you brought up three kids,
Speaker 3: you worked at two jobs, you wrote all, one job
Speaker 3: being the writing job. Where did you find the time?
Speaker 3: And I don't know where I found the time, but
Speaker 3: the archive is grown, it's potentially infinite, as most such
Speaker 3: things are, and it gives me enormous satisfaction to know
Speaker 3: that I've documented some of these said far, far reaching
Speaker 3: or distant entities. So it's something that developed in me
Speaker 3: from an early age, and I thought it was something
Speaker 3: I ought to keep quiet about. But I never thought
Speaker 3: it was anything symptomatic of some fault in me or failing.
Speaker 3: It's the most difficult thing to explain, and the thing,
Speaker 3: that one thing that's kept me balanced and secure about
Speaker 3: this when I reflect on this. An American poet who
Speaker 3: went a bit funny in his old age, and his
Speaker 3: name was Robert Blyer. When I was a teacher of writing,
Speaker 3: I was always looking for little maxims and little pieces
Speaker 3: of guidance that I could pass over my students because
Speaker 3: I didn't want to be telling my views all the time.
Speaker 3: And I searched through the Paris interviews and books and things,
Speaker 3: and Robert Bleier, I found once made this to me
Speaker 3: amazing statement A writer should always and he used the
Speaker 3: pronoun his, a writer should always trust his obsessions. And
Speaker 3: thank goodness for me, I trusted my obsessions, my horse
Speaker 3: racing obsessions, my landscape sessions, my daydreams about the Western
Speaker 3: District and the plains and so on. Books are one
Speaker 3: result of my trust.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you say that, because one of the things
Speaker 2: that I have long admired and enjoyed. And the way
Speaker 2: you talk about writing and the life of the mind
Speaker 2: is that you use the word obsessions a lot. Obsessions
Speaker 2: and passions you talk about quite comfortably. And I think
Speaker 2: so much of Australian, particularly Australian masculine culture, is this
Speaker 2: kind of laconic. Oh, I don't want to show my hand.
Speaker 2: I can't go too big, or I can't be obsessive
Speaker 2: or passionate or and I like that you don't have
Speaker 2: any inhibition about that, your obsess on, your passionate.
Speaker 3: We mentioned the wife a few times. I used to
Speaker 3: think when she described the childhood to me, it was
Speaker 3: a childhood just lost in books. She read all the
Speaker 3: Mary Grant Bruce books, or she read all of Henry
Speaker 3: Lawson's collected works. And at first I used to feel
Speaker 3: regretful because I had no opportunity to read any of
Speaker 3: those books and never have. But now I realize I
Speaker 3: was perhaps lucky not to because it might have persuaded
Speaker 3: me that the only way to be a writer was
Speaker 3: to be Henry Lawson or a Mary Grandbrews, whereas I
Speaker 3: was just locked away with hardly any books to read
Speaker 3: until I joined libraries, only my glass marbles and the
Speaker 3: games in the backyard with my brothers, making mud roads
Speaker 3: and building, imagining farmhouses, putting little people in the little
Speaker 3: tweag people in the farmhouses. That was my substitution for reading.
Speaker 3: And I think I'm lucky. It's a pity that I
Speaker 3: didn't get that background in one way, but I don't
Speaker 3: think it's hardly in anyway. I think I was lucky
Speaker 3: in the end. It happened as it did.
Speaker 2: Right through your writing. What role does your awareness of
Speaker 2: a reader have when you write? Do they exist for
Speaker 2: you or not until afterwards.
Speaker 3: I've sat a fair bit about this in Well. I
Speaker 3: gave the title Last Letter to a Reader and the
Speaker 3: phrase our reader should not be taken to need any reader.
Speaker 3: It really should be taken to read one particular reader.
Speaker 3: And I've only perfected or refined this idea in recent years.
Speaker 3: The ideal reader. And it's a she, because I'm a male.
Speaker 3: She's almost invisible, a presence, her presence is very real,
Speaker 3: but her appearances is very hard to discern. And my
Speaker 3: ideal reader I've only discovered in recent years is a
Speaker 3: supreme importance to me, and I get a sense of
Speaker 3: justification for having thought about her all these years. Every
Speaker 3: now and then, when somebody in Duluth, Minnesota, or Cape Town,
Speaker 3: South Africa and will write to me, it needn't be
Speaker 3: a woman, and I'll just say, look, I've been reading
Speaker 3: your books for fifteen years, and if I lost all
Speaker 3: my other books and I kept hold of yours, that
Speaker 3: would be all I'd want to keep. And this only
Speaker 3: happens once every year or so. And I'm not making
Speaker 3: this up for sentimental reasons or striking a pose. It
Speaker 3: is an enormous reward for all the effort that I
Speaker 3: put into. And there were years when I wondered whether
Speaker 3: these people existed, and they turned out to be They didn't.
Speaker 3: They only existed in potentiality in those days. Then I
Speaker 3: wrote the books. Then they read the books, and they
Speaker 3: proved to have existed. After all.
Speaker 2: How do you feel about your previous books? Do you
Speaker 2: return to them? And do you return to them with
Speaker 2: pride with regret? Do they are they snapshot of a
Speaker 2: moment in time or are they still the fundamental part
Speaker 2: of you?
Speaker 3: This is an interesting question. I had to go to
Speaker 3: Ballarat in twenty seventeen for long course of radiation once
Speaker 3: a day, every weekday, and I had to live in
Speaker 3: a facility provided by the hospital, a very pleasant block
Speaker 3: of flats, and I had wonder myself and I was
Speaker 3: to spend a lot of time there, and I said,
Speaker 3: what am I going to do? I was going to
Speaker 3: reread normal books and I couldn't bring myself to do it.
Speaker 3: And I thought, oh, well, that's because I was worried
Speaker 3: about the treatment and the cancer and stuff. But I
Speaker 3: tried again in the COVID years to read them. I
Speaker 3: can read them in parts. I have reread Tamaris Grow.
Speaker 3: And then I got into a second book, I thought, no,
Speaker 3: I can't do this. It's it wasn't revolting or hurtful.
Speaker 3: It actually made me feel tired, tired of just remembering
Speaker 3: the huge amount of work that went into them, because
Speaker 3: that's something that they looked finished and polished, And most
Speaker 3: of them only looked that way because they went through
Speaker 3: an enormous amount of rewriting and re polishing. But later
Speaker 3: books I got smarter, and I could write sometimes in
Speaker 3: one or two drafts. There's another feeling I've had. It's
Speaker 3: it's a multiple thing that the other feeling I've had
Speaker 3: was that I could have done it better or differently.
Speaker 3: There are sentences. Now I'm not a sha aim to
Speaker 3: write long complicated sentences, but I do feel that I've
Speaker 3: made some very hard demands on the tamras grow. There
Speaker 3: are some passages that I almost I can almost feel
Speaker 3: my hand that are reaching for a pen or get
Speaker 3: the typewriter over and rewrite them, just break them up
Speaker 3: a little. They're all grammatical sentences, they all make sense,
Speaker 3: but they almost need to be sort of set out
Speaker 3: on cards and flashcards, and we put it around the
Speaker 3: table to put them back where they naturally belong. There's
Speaker 3: a few books, and I can't think of an example
Speaker 3: of this, but I've had the feeling where I felt
Speaker 3: that I could have said more, revealed more, perhaps about
Speaker 3: gone more deeply into something I hesitated because in my
Speaker 3: earlier years I thought, no, no one writes like that.
Speaker 3: But of course when you think that thought, you really
Speaker 3: should write that, because that's what you were meant to write,
Speaker 3: not the way other people write. So there's a few
Speaker 3: various directions. There are some, of course, there are moments
Speaker 3: that you sort of you know, you revel him where
Speaker 3: you think, you know, did I really write that? Like
Speaker 3: it's too almost too profound and to too marvelous for
Speaker 3: me who have written. There's a sentence on early in
Speaker 3: a Million Windows. It's mentioned in the essay on a
Speaker 3: Million Windows. I remember the day I wrote it at
Speaker 3: the desk, all in one draft, and after I'd written it,
Speaker 3: I wrote in pencil beside it, this may be the
Speaker 3: best sentence I've ever written. And over in Adelaide a
Speaker 3: few years later, when the book was published, a man
Speaker 3: called Shannon burns pencil beside the same sentence, this may
Speaker 3: be the best sentence I've ever read. There's an extraordinary occurrence.
Speaker 3: And he told me about it, and I said, I
Speaker 3: think I know the sentence you mean. And I took
Speaker 3: him to the he was in my room. I took
Speaker 3: him to the sentence. So you get these moments as well. Look,
Speaker 3: I'm one of the lucky ones. You know. If there's
Speaker 3: any guiding light through this mad jungle of publication and
Speaker 3: writing and thwarted ambition, it's that you don't imitate to
Speaker 3: think that of all the things I could have written
Speaker 3: about in the late sixties, the Vietnam War, the rising
Speaker 3: of the feminist Jermaine Greer and stuff, what did I
Speaker 3: start at? A boy in a shabby little weatherboard house
Speaker 3: pushing glass marbles around the map. I think that's a
Speaker 3: good ending for it. Yeah, where do you go?
Speaker 2: Ahead? Don't kell, I am going to drive to Dunkel.
Speaker 3: I've even suggested your machinery. You're electronic crip, do you?
Speaker 2: I think it'll It'll give me a steer. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for making the time from me today.
Speaker 3: If we don't meet again, we're one of those circle
Speaker 3: of people who has kind feelings towards each other and
Speaker 3: wish each other well.
Speaker 2: Quite right, so I feel the same plan. Saints Gerald.
Speaker 3: You.
Speaker 2: You can find all of Gerald Manane's books at your
Speaker 2: favorite in the Benham Bookstore. We'll also put a couple
Speaker 2: of links to essays about him and his work up
Speaker 2: on the Read This website. The Menaine Industrial Complex is
Speaker 2: helpful in making sense of his work and his mind,
Speaker 2: and if you're just starting out, I recommend The Planes
Speaker 2: as a taste of his fiction and Something for the
Speaker 2: Pain for a bit of memoir good Luck.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our
Speaker 1: favorite interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations
Speaker 1: with Malcolm Knox and Louise Milligan. And if you don't
Speaker 1: want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to
Speaker 1: Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to podcasts.