Thomas Keneally's Career and the Literary Machine

Paul Sharrad

Description

An examination of Thomas Keneally’s work and reception

Booker Prize winner and Living National Treasure, Thomas Keneally still divides critical opinion: he is both a morally challenging stylist and a commercial hack, a wise commentator on society and a garrulous leprechaun. Such judgements are located in the cultural politics of Australia but also linked to ideas about what a literary career should look like. ‘Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine’ charts Keneally’s production and reception across his three major markets, noting clashes between national interests and international reach, continuity of themes and variety of topics, settings and genres, the writer’s interests and the publishers’ push to create a brand, celebrity fame and literary reputation, and the tussle around fiction, history, allegory and the middlebrow. Keneally is seen as playing a long game across several events rather than honing one specialist skill, a strategy that has sustained for more than 50 years his ambition to earn a living from writing.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Beginnings; 2. The Collins Years; 3. To the Booker; 4. Afterwards; 5. Republic and Beyond; 6. Histories and Refugees; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 30 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785270994
• Langue: English

Extrait

Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine
Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine
Paul Sharrad
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2019
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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Copyright © Paul Sharrad 2019
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-097-0 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-097-4 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
To John Palmer, Bill Crowley, Graham Jenkin, Brian Matthews and Jim Wieland, who all taught me the joys and worth of Australian literature. And to the memory of Peter Pierce.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter One Beginnings
Chapter Two The Collins Years
Chapter Three To the Booker
Chapter Four Afterwards
Chapter Five Republican and Beyond
Chapter Six Histories and Refugees
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Projects grant, which made all the archival searches possible, and to the University of Wollongong for assistance with resources. Thanks also to the National Library of Australia for a Harold White Fellowship and Robyn Holmes, Catriona Anderson, Tony Sillavan and all the wonderful staff who helped me trawl through the huge collection of Keneally’s papers. I also wish to record my gratitude to Tom Keneally for encouragement and generous provision of answers to persistent questions. Ingeborg van Teeseling supplied invaluable research assistance, translations, good ideas and unbounded energy; Shayne Kearney assisted with gathering material and Tomasz Fisziak helped with research and Polish translations. Thanks also go to Laura Kroetsch and Anna Hughes of Adelaide Writers’ Week and Jemma Birrell of the Sydney Writers’ Festival for permission to survey readers. Librarians in the manuscript collection of the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales, the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, the Mildura Public Library, and Neroli Blakeman, Librarian, Wollongong City Library, helped me collect information on publishing, theatre work and reader patterns. Thanks to Carole Welch and Nikki Barrow for access to Keneally’s papers at Hodder & Stoughton/Hachette, London, and to Anne Borchardt and Tara C. Craig for access to and assistance with the Georges Borchardt archive at Columbia University. Valuable help was provided by people at the Glasgow University Library archives and the William Collins archives at the company’s Glasgow offices.
I am grateful for helpful advice and encouragement from David Carter, Nic Birns, Gillian Whitlock and Stephany Steggall, and for support from my colleagues in the Centre for Research In Texts Identities and Cultures, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong. This includes the work of Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans, who initiated a seminar on the literary career. Their edited collection Literary Careers in the Modern Era (2015) contains a chapter that anticipates this book, and related work has appeared in Australian Literary Studies and Text Matters . I am more than grateful to Leigh Dale for hawk-eyed reading and instruction on the finer points of football codes; also to Susan Lever for relentless encouragement to reduce an unwieldy bulk to manageable proportions. Finally, as ever, my thanks to all the family, especially Diana, for love, interest and close reading. Thanks also to Tej Sood, Nicole Moore and Katherine Bode for their willingness to publish this study and to Abi Pandey and Kanimozhi Ramamurthy — for efficient editorial support.
NOTE
Because many different editions of Keneally’s novels are in circulation, quoted material is not paginated. Most correspondence was produced on manual typewriters without italic fonts and quotations use the original capitalization of titles.
This work contains copious footnotes to archival collections. Most refer to previously unexamined correspondence and to newspaper clippings that lack some source detail. ML refers to the Mitchell Library archives at the State Library of New South Wales. The bulk of Keneally’s papers is held in over three hundred boxes in the Manuscripts collection of the National Library of Australia. Unless otherwise indicated, NLA 3/1 refers to the collection MS Acc 05.198 Box 3, with the ‘1’ being a bag or file number. NLA box numbers are accurate to the time of carrying out research. Future researchers should be aware that there has been a subsequent reorganization of materials in the 05.198 series. Where indicated, some items were only located on the Factiva database of newspapers, which does not provide the original page numbers.
ABBREVIATIONS A&R Angus & Robertson ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission/Corporation ABR Australian Book Review ALS Australian Literary Studies ASA Australian Society of Authors ASAL Association for the Study of Australian Literature CLF Commonwealth Literary Fund H&R Harper & Row HBJ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ML Mitchell Library NLA National Library of Australia NYT(BR) New York Times (Book Review) S&S Simon & Schuster SMH Sydney Morning Herald TLS Times Literary Supplement
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about Thomas Keneally, frequently referred to as Australia’s best-known writer, and officially as a Living National Treasure. More specifically, it is about his work: about the conditions under which his books have been produced, about how they have been received, about the author’s sense of himself and the public’s perception of him and his writing. In that regard, this is not a book about Thomas Keneally the person but is a study of his literary career.
I wanted to write about Keneally partly because I recall being both excited and irritated by his rhetorical style when reading Bring Larks and Heroes . I was then an undergraduate studying Australian literature at a time when academics and overseas readers would still regularly ask whether such a thing existed. My interest has been sustained by a discrepancy between Keneally’s constant visibility in the media and the fact that most readers know only two or three of his thirty-plus titles. 1 Among literary scholars there seems now to be a studied disregard of his work when once it was feted. Although the press will always give Keneally’s newest book a background piece and a review, surveys of the most popular novelist or book run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the national network of libraries have not included him in their rankings. Critic Geordie Williamson hailed the 2012 reissue of Bring Larks and Heroes in a series of Australian Classics, but placed its author among ‘our great novelists’ who have been ‘underestimated or discredited’. 2
Foreign and younger Australian readers will have difficulty appreciating the sensation that Keneally’s breakthrough novel, Bring Larks and Heroes , caused in 1967. The treatment of ordinary suffering convicts as moral philosophers rather than brutes or romantic rebels, along with the presentation of a drab colonial outpost in poetic language, was unusual, imbuing simplistic tales of national origins with complexity, drama and metaphysical depth. To the extent that Keneally followed through in 1972 with The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith , another fiction of national history, and a decade later with the international success of Schindler’s Ark as novelized Holocaust history, his story is one of career success. In turning to overseas settings and rejecting the heightened style of his early work, Keneally provoked criticism from former admirers, some of whom saw a career failure. Nonetheless, publishers have kept signing contracts for over 50 years and Keneally has won or been shortlisted for almost all the literary prizes an Australian writer could hope for.
This book attempts to explain the persistent clash between recognition and reservation, and to track the continuity of the career through all its ups and downs. It finds answers in the network of negotiations among author, genres, publishers, economies and audiences. In doing so, it follows on from career studies largely developed in relation to early-modern British and American modernist writing: books such as Gary Lee Stonum’s Faulkner’s Career: A Internal Literary History (1979), Jerome Christensen’s Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (1987), Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas’s collection European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2002) and Edgar A. Dryden’s Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (2004). 3 In Australia, this area of research is relatively new, with only David Carter’s book A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Politics of a Literary Career (1997) preceding the more recent transnational collection, Literary Careers in the Modern Era (2015), edited from Australia by Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans. 4 The highlighting of local work is significant in that some of the forces shaping Thomas Keneally’s