Memoirs of Hard-Won Success

Trouble: Evolution of a Radical,

by Kate Jennings;

Black Inc, 2010, 320 pages, $32.95.

Piano Lessons,

by Anna Goldsworthy;

Black Inc, 2009, 224 pages, $27.95.

There’s a scene from The West Wing that comes to mind, as I digest Kate Jennings’s recently released “stand-in for a memoir”, Trouble: Evolution of a Radical. In this scene, President Bartlet and the White House chief-of-staff, Leo McGarry, are meeting with the Russian ambassador to the United States. It has come to the attention of the Americans, via their satellite surveillance, that there has been an explosion in a nuclear weapons silo in Russia. The Russians are denying that this is the case—they say it is just a factory fire and they will put it out, not to worry. Leo and the President urge the Russian ambassador to admit the truth and accept help from the Americans in putting out the fire and containing the nuclear contamination. The Russian ambassador says that Russia neither wants nor needs help from the Americans, and she moves to terminate the meeting.

“Madam Ambassador,” says the President, “I honestly don’t know from where you people get the nerve.”

The ambassador turns to face him coolly and replies, “From a long, hard winter, Mr President.”

I have often wondered from where Kate Jennings gets her nerve. In Trouble, I have found my answer.

It is something of a challenge to categorise Trouble. The cover subtitles it as “selected writings 1970–2010”. Jennings herself describes it as a “stand-in for a memoir”. Perhaps the right word is showcase: a showcase of Jennings’s mastery over her many forms.

In the interests of full disclosure, I ought to say upfront that the chances of me giving this book an at all unfavourable review were always slim. Since a teenager I have rarely left the house without a scrofulous copy of one or another of Kate Jennings’s books about my person. I eagerly anticipated Trouble’s release. And having had a chance to read most of the reviews that precede this one, I undertake that this will be only reference I make to myself herein.

It is interesting in itself to note that while the reviewers who have preceded me were undeniably excited by their reading of Trouble, they do not give much of a sense of the book itself. Trouble seems to have triggered them to go off on their own journeys of recollection and analysis of, well, many things. Jennings does that to you. She uses a conversational voice that sends the reader off in numerous tangents of reflection and response. You feel as if you’ve had a private audience, and been invited into a conversation. And in addition to leading you to water, she’ll make you think.

Sara Dowse in the Sydney Morning Herald was moved to recall her own days as a Canberra femocrat (having “sold out”) and noted that while Jennings and her radical feminist colleagues were running amok in Sydney, Dowse herself was “waging titanic bureaucratic battles for the funds that enabled the poetry, the novels and the plays to be written and films to be filmed”, it is implied, for much less glory. She notes that she and Jennings moved in very different circles in the 1970s and that “if we had met then, I suspect that we would have instantly disliked each other”. That said though, nostalgia won the day, with Dowse moved to remark, “What a wonderfully audacious bunch we were, whatever the front we fought on, and oh what a time it was. Trouble has brought it all back: the demos, the passion, the laughs, the daring.” They were as one, you see.

Gay Bilson (Australian Book Review) takes on Jennings’s assertion that her essay “High Horses” (1993) was “largely ignored” in Australia when it was released. “Well, hell, I read it,” she recalls. And perhaps her most salient observation of Jennings in Trouble: “She has a way with words.” I couldn’t put it better myself. Well, maybe I could.

From Coleambally in the Riverina, to Sydney University and the barricades of the feminist movement in the 1970s. From a terrifying expatriation to New York City in the late 1970s to speech-writing for big banks on Wall Street in the 1990s. From a “lifestyle” of pain, alcohol and submission to romantic juggernauts to the choice of re-education, sobriety and new-found sanguinity. From the finding, to the losing, of an other half. Poetry, short stories, novels, essays, reviews. There was no doubt that Kate Jennings would theoretically write a bloody great memoir. But I never took it for granted that she would. Why? People on a Long March don’t generally have the time or the inclination to look back over the land they have just crossed, let alone to reflect on it. “Don’t look back—you’ll turn into a pillar of shit” is the quotation that Jennings opens with in Trouble, the sentiment of which has been present in various strains through much of her writing. Fortunately for us, she has overridden that credo and forced herself to look back, to “reel in the years”, to consider spurs won now that she “knows of which she writes”.

Trouble opens with the bellow that was Jennings’s “front-lawn speech” given at a Sydney University rally against the Vietnam War. The speech itself is like fire-throwing in the dark, and even better is Jennings’s 2010 reflection that prefaces it. Both are historical documents, the former a primary source. Thank God someone thought to keep the paper it was written on. All of the seeds, the hints of the writer that this twenty-one-year-old woman would become are here: its simplicity, its anger converted into units of energy, its unflinching confrontation, its palpable frustration, clarity and searing humour.

Patriarchy was “in your face” in this era. Now it has largely receded from plain view, although its camouflaged tentacles have remained around old strangleholds and taken some new ones. The era in which Kate Jennings went to university saw women still starkly disadvantaged in law, industry and other institutions. There were no refuges for women and children in unsafe domestic situations, there were women haemorrhaging from “backyard” abortions, there were virtually no (palatable) options for unmarried mothers, and—strangely this one made me blink with the most disbelief—woman had to drink in “Ladies Lounges” in the pub, where the beer was more expensive. As a thirty-two-year-old I appreciated this opportunity to reflect on what Jennings’s “front-lawn speech” era of feminism achieved, on how it “adapted to the terrain” in Australia. (I hope that didn’t count as being self-referential.)

“I feel anger” … “I would like to speak” …
In Australia, a raw, pervasive misogyny begat a virulent, unforgiving form of feminism …

These women who broke into a building in Glebe and squatted there, ultimately claiming the space as the first women’s refuge founded on secular, feminist principles—“Elsie”. I’d take my hat off to them if I was wearing one. On Wikipedia I discovered that the women running Elsie started out protecting the women and children in need of refuge by guarding the doorway with a cricket bat. And my reflection on this achievement, this daring, this walking of the walk, is tempered by a sadness at the current dilemma for the refuge movement in Australia—that no amount of cricket bats can protect women and their children from the practice of federal family law. It’s so cyclical, this patriarchy business. I’m guessing that there is a new crop of women growing, who feel anger, who would like to speak.

Cataloguing the many delights of Trouble is no small task and nor is it, I suspect, my job here. But I must, will, take some samples. Jennings’s style as a writer is extremely accessible, and at the same time very clever. (If you are still wondering what a derivative is, and are too embarrassed to ask your friends to explain it to you yet again, read Moral Hazard.) She is often funny, but at the same time very sobering. Her talent as a satirist, as a creator of caricature, is formidable—I laughed big belly laughs at the characters and their antics in the short story “Mistakes, Too Many to Mention” while at the same time appreciating the harshness of life in that pocket of the world, at that point in time. And even more sobering was the essay that follows it, “Moral Trouble”, where Jennings discloses that she was sued by an old boyfriend over that story. It never fails to amaze me, the number of people willing to stand up and say publicly, “See that awful unsavoury character in that novel/play/short story? Well that’s me! And I’m suing!”

Is it training as a poet that has lent her writing its lyricism, its economy, the ability to get straight to the point in a relatively short space, to choose the words that will count? Her poem “Father and Daughter”, a touching tableau of a father’s love—

And when she woke to stew in her shame

Her father was by her bedside

—to name but one. Jennings wades into the “poetry wars”, taking umbrage with the “Generation of 1968”:

I strenuously object to men who didn’t know the significance of 1968 until 1988—okay, I exaggerate, make that 1978—appropriating a year sacred to political radicals to give themselves an insurrectionist aura.

As the young ’uns reading her work would put it, Jennings insists on “keeping it real”. The term “poetry wars” has always tickled me. It conjures up images of poets concealing hand grenades underneath their berets or tweed jackets and making pipe bombs in their garrets. But as Jennings collected the title, “the execrable Kate Jennings”, therein, I can only conclude that the poetry wars are actually no laughing matter.

Jennings’s most recent novel, Moral Hazard (2002), was celebrated as a brilliant foreshadowing of the GFC, written with an authority gained from putting in hard yards as a speechwriter on Wall Street. She described the machinations of the banking world as “internecine” and indeed the casualties, when they happened, were heavy on all sides. She compares the subterfuge of business language to cuttlefish squirting ink. Jennings wished she had been “educated into a profession” (Save Me, Joe Louis, 1988) rather than “shooting herself in the foot” by studying English literature. She needn’t have worried. In Moral Hazard she has shown us a frightening working world that affects everyone and given us knowledge and insight otherwise inaccessible to those outside that world. It also delivers a confronting, visceral and beautiful exploration of anticipatory grief, loss, dogged love and slow painful death, over which I’m sure many shed hot tears.

Kate Jennings is surely one of our best and most unafraid writers. Yes, I am claiming her for Australia because we need her. Trouble: Evolution of a Radical is a book to treasure.

Anna Goldsworthy’s memoir Piano Lessons now takes us away from Griffith High School in the Riverina to Pembroke School in Kensington Park, Adelaide. It is an account of Goldsworthy’s journey through adolescence to the destination of success as a concert pianist. Her two co-stars in the narrative are her father, Peter Goldsworthy, the well-known Australian writer, and her piano teacher, Eleonora Sivan, a pianist and Russian émigré with a gift for teaching that will touch even the most emotionally tone-deaf reader. I finished the book wishing I had had my own Mrs Sivan to guide me through adolescence, give me the tools for negotiating the Great Beyond and comprehend me so wholly.

The opening sentence of the book—“It was my grandfather who found her”—tells the reader that this book is about Mrs Sivan, and that the “finding of her” is what gives rise to the story. The book ends with Anna stepping out onto a stage as an adult, after sitting quietly in the Green Room, and considering the wisdom she has gained. In the in-between, Anna Goldsworthy tackles what many would consider the difficult task of writing about her own life and the people in it. I would guess that, unlike many writers before her and doubtlessly after, she pisses very few, if any, people off with her memoir. She writes about her life with a complete absence of rancour.

Anna can sense the “bigness” of Mrs Sivan from their first meeting, indeed she seems to inspire all those who come into contact with her. Perhaps cunningly, Mrs Sivan throws down the gauntlet to Anna quite early on, telling Goldsworthy pere and fille, “Anna will never be concert pianist.” Thereafter Anna is dogged in her pursuit of this goal, practising, listening, learning. And loving too—loving her art even though the mastery of it is so difficult. One of Goldsworthy’s principal achievements in this book is her capturing of Mrs Sivan’s language. We hear the beauty of a speaker for whom English is not the first language, yet who uses it even more effectively than most native speakers: “Beethoven is very man composer.” And this priceless gem:

“For me, compliment is not praise. Not excellent,” she said with a dainty smile, “or that is very nice.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “How I hate that word! Not! Compliment is to sit and work.”
She swivelled back to the keyboard, and we sat and worked.

Mrs Sivan’s teaching also captures the imagination of Anna’s father Peter, who accompanies his daughter to every lesson and listens from the corner. Eventually he writes his best-known novel, Maestro, with a brilliant, but rather more troubled, piano teacher as a central character. Anna is initially horrified, as are many people, to find that her father has “stolen” from real life without asking. They really should wear bells around their necks to warn people of their approach, these writers.

Piano Lessons is a portrait of a most unconventional adolescence. Anna is blessed with intelligence, a supportive and loving family, and material security, and her struggles are mainly within herself and a small collection of “nay-sayers”. Before she has left high school Anna has decided that she wants a career as a musician, the toughness in this choice being that her academic marks are so good she could easily study law or medicine, both of which are easier and better rewarded in many ways than a career as a pianist.

“There are things that come to me more easily than piano,” she remarks to her father, who retorts, “Oh, so you want an easy life then, do you?”

So too counsels Mrs Sivan, telling Anna that a life inhabiting music is intensely personally rewarding, that people are “chosen” for it, but that the world generally does not accord recognition or material reward to the “chosen”. Although there are many choices open to Anna, she does choose to continue with her music, performing and eventually teaching.

Anna’s relationship with her father is obviously very close and his support and encouragement of her musical training are important in the narrative. In one scene Anna’s father designs a flier for one of her recitals, on it citing her recent achievement of winning a piano competition. Anna expresses her embarrassment at this—“it sounds like showing off”—but her father encourages her to see the value in promoting one’s own achievements. It seems that as we get older we perhaps unconsciously take on the values of our parents, as in her memoir Anna lists the honours she won at school—the National Chemistry Quiz, the IBM State Mathematics Quiz, the South Australian Young Writers Award, the ESSO National Science Competition, the Westpac Mathematics Competition, and eventually in the Leaving examinations, a phone call from the Board of Education—“Looks like I received perfect scores in all subjects.”

My reaction to this meticulous recounting of honours won forced me to reflect on whether I myself wield a sharp and shiny pairs of secateurs, ready to snip the heads off the high-achieving poppies in the grand tradition. Or whether I just find it somewhat indelicate, and would prefer the protagonist to convey to me in other ways, if it is relevant to the book, that they did very well indeed at high school. In recent years I had a similar reaction to Lisa Pryor’s book The Pinstriped Prison. Lisa Pryor recalled her Tertiary Entrance Rank (then the rank out of 100 given to students completing the New South Wales Higher School Certificate) as 100 and had the world at her feet, but like Anna, she turned it all down for the path less travelled. One wonders—well, I wonder—why it is so important to make this point.

As a high achiever, Anna does battle with her own demons at various stages in the book, for example she tries to bargain with the universe in the form of magical thinking, she hears derogatory comments about her playing in the form of auditory hallucinations during a recital, she fears that her success or otherwise will trigger external events—for example, she fears on more than one occasion the calamitous possibility of her parents divorcing.

The portrait of the Goldsworthy family is lovely—including all the grandparents—with Anna’s father cast at times as comic relief (when Anna and her friends are searching for a name and an identity for their newly formed trio, Peter suggests that they wear stilettos and call themselves Trio Stiletto. “It’s got sex appeal,” he says). When the family move to a larger house, Anna’s father takes her to buy a new Yamaha grand piano, a tremendous expression of parental support for her musical career. It came as a shock to this reader to read the sentence not far from the end of the memoir that begins, “After the divorce”. Presumably the divorce of Mr and Mrs Goldsworthy took place after Anna’s adolescence, but there is no exploration of what it means to the writer, for whom the fear of her parents divorcing was a major theme in her magical thinking. Just “After the divorce”. I suppose it’s not part of the story. And Piano Lessons manages to avoid unpleasantness of any kind.

Anna Goldsworthy has tackled for her debut book a form that most writers reserve for later in their writing life—the memoir. The “I” in her memoir is a consistent and strong one, often funny, and has given us a window into perhaps the most beautiful artistic medium, music. Anna’s adolescent dedication to her craft is impressive—not to mention a great way of avoiding household chores—and I hope that adolescents are reading it. Her writing style is clear and accessible, imaginative and poetic at times. She explores the intersection of art with life skilfully, and ultimately we share her coming-of-age:

But a life in music no longer seems to be about “making it”. Instead it is about living alongside these composers, getting to know them better year by year, about feeling out their private selves, like those of the other people in my life.

And finally, Piano Lessons is a great tribute to her teacher.

Laura Buzo’s first novel, Good Oil, was published by Allen & Unwin in August.