Kate Grenville site - Interviewed by Sue Woolfe, 1992

Kate Grenville : Interviewed by Sue Woolfe, 1992

This interview took place in Sydney, in March 1992, and was published in the book Making Stories, 1993. It is about seven printed pages long. Australian writer Sue Woolfe is co-author with Kate Grenville of Making Stories, and the author of (among other works) the novel Leaning Towards Infinity.

This link takes you to the Making Stories page.

Sue Woolfe: How did the writing of Lilian's Story begin?

Kate Grenville: It began in a sort of soup - lots of completely disconnected things going on in my mind. The first was that I'd just finished Dreamhouse and was sick to death of living in that cynical bloodless world. I wanted to live in the book of a positive, vital, cheery kind of world for a while. Another was that I was just about to come back to Australia after seven years away, and I was starting to think about the place, through the distorting - or maybe clarifying - lens of distance. And one of the images of Sydney that I came across, turning over images in my mind, was Bea Miles, a famous Sydney eccentric of my growing-up days. A bag-lady, but a cheerful soul. What I was reading had nothing to do with Sydney, though: I was reading the letters of Jane Austen and Flaubert.
Well, all those elements were going on, and I was making desultory notes as I was reading the Jane Austen letters, and suddenly a sentence leaped out at me from the page: "In the nights we invent a few hard names for the stars." I wrote it down and found myself writing the fragment about Bea Miles sitting on the beach.
These handwritten fragments, prefaced by dates of Jane Austen's letters are the earliest notes for Lilian's Story. Words in [square brackets] are crossed through in the original draft.

Thurs 15 Sept 1796 p 14
Sun   18 Sept    " p 18
Sat   27 Oct 1798 p 24
Sat   17 Nov 1798 p 28
                     50 invent a few hard names for the stars

In the nights we build fires from the wood [that] frayed by the tides and invent a few hard names for the stars. Hebdomedary, old Francis suggests after a long silence. Or cornucopia. [The wood] When the flames reach in and singe the wood it spits salt and embers that pulse on the sand before [they die] dying. Evelyn and the baby make damp noises to each other and when [that] the tiny [tooth] blunt-gummed mouth begins to smack at the air we hear Evelynl's buttons release a breast [and Blue] Tommo works each night to bury [both feet and both hands in] his limbs under the fine cool sand, [that] with its stores /of/ cigarette butts, as if for the future, [but] and then sits as if /invisible or/ guiltless, examining the water.
These summer nights are our times for telling the stories of our lives, either the ones we had or the ones we wished for. We watch by cold starlight and hot flames as tears slime down Francis' cheeks. [My] The wife he'll say and look for the bottle /beside him/. [Me little girl] he'll say and the cork will make a hollow /mocking/ sound [of contempt mockery]. Those who spend their days [with coins sliding smug the power of] smiling and worrying at each other, and their nights behind walls and windows, would claim that Francis has never had wife or daughter, and never wanted anything but the loving boy he never quite had, but we listen and throw another plank onto the flames, and later one of us might hold him a little as he shudders under the dew. Across the water, as black as the inside of an ear, the windows of those in the old country seem to be sending us code as the branches of their domesticated trees bend [in front] down across the light, and up again. [In] When our memories or inventions fail us we [listen to the sem] watch the yellow semaphore and the baby clutches out feebly as if to put the flickering lights into his mouth. Snug as a bug in a rug, Evelyn says, but it is not [possible to know] clear if she speaks of the baby or those [in th] secure in their houses across the bay. Behind us a few more handfuls of plaster drop from the laths of the ceiling of Rosecroft and another litter of rats is born, squeaking.
In the old country, across other bays and tides, I have known the image of myself, a young girl with glossy bangs, in the dim reflection of a window closing out night. I know the chill on the shoulders after bending too long over the piano, wondering if the draught meant someone had come in. When ants were discovered seething through the sugar in the curled silver dish, Mother had hidden her open mouth behind a hand and looked at me. I had accepted her accusation, of course, and like those others I too was /slowly/ transported to a beach on the lip of another [new] strange land./ The privilege of the first settlers is to impose names of their own invention on the new world./
Along the tide-line where we sit, our faces glowing and our backs pimpled with cold, the litter of everyone else's lives seemed washed up for our inspection, washed obsessively by the harbour's tides.

Kate Grenville: At that stage I knew hardly anything about the real Bea Miles, and I certainly didn't know that I was beginning to write a book about a person rather like her. She and the sentence from Jane Austen connected, that was all I knew, but if I'd been asked then, I probably would have said she was going to be a minor character in the book.
At that time I didn't allow myself to think any further than: here is a character, a setting and a tone that interest me. If I stir the waters around, I may come across other interesting things. And out of that may come the subject of a novel.
The more I wrote about her . . . well, two things started to happen. The first was I realised that the voice she spoke with was the voice I wanted to write in. I knew I was going to enjoy that voice. The other was that, slowly, I realised that she was going to be central.

Did you do any research into her life?

Not until much, much later. I researched her after I'd written many drafts, in fact. I wasn't all that interested in the real Bea Miles, but in what she represented to me. As I wrote more and more, she - at least my idea of her - began to embody ideas I'd been vaguely mulling over for quite a while-about how a woman gets to write her own life, rather than have it written for her. How a woman gets to turn her back on all the things women are supposed to want, and invent another set of priorities. How it feels to be a big loud rude active woman instead of a little meek polite one. Dreamhouse had been a book about passivity and lack of self-knowledge - the exact mirror image of that.
Looking back now, it's almost as if I had written one side of the equation in Dreamhouse and wanted to write the other side. But I was pretty sure that if I found out too much about the real Bea Miles I would be locked in then, to her. My own imagination would be blinkered. So I wrote perhaps three drafts of the book, and then I went in to the State Library and read about her a bit. Lilian's Story overlaps with the life of Bea Miles in a few places, but that's all - it's not really about her at all.

What other kinds of elements did you "stir around"?

My own memories of childhood, particularly schoolyard memories, went into the stew - I suddenly realised how I could use those in a way that made them not just boring old self-regarding autobiography. I could give them to this woman who was starting to take shape in my mind and they could be transformed. Also as I wrote the book - I was back in Australia then - people told me stories about Bea Miles, and with some of those I thought yes, I can use that.
As I started to home in on the idea of Bea Miles a bit more, as I realised that I could use her as my central character, it was natural to start to look at Shakespeare. Bea Miles was famous for quoting Shakespeare outside the Public Library - sonnets were threepence, a scene from a play was sixpence. The Tempest was the play I used most obsessively in the book.
There were other things, too. While I was writing the book I went to the National Gallery and I saw paintings there that just . . . exhilarated me. Blue Poles was one, and that Tiepolo ceiling where you're looking up the bums of all the cherubs, and some of Nolan's Ned Kelly pictures. They were so bold! I kept repeating the word, I remember, in a sort of astonishment. I remember coming back and throwing myself back into the book with renewed energy - it wasn't that there was anything I could use directly from the pictures, it wasn't even really the pictures themselves, but that sense of risk-taking.

As you say, Jane Austen's letters and Flaubert seem a long way from Bea Miles - what was it you found so useful in all those other writings?

It was my way of getting the voice. Mainly it was their tone, the tone I wanted to be able to write in, a kind of expansive, confident, slightly self-mocking voice. I knew I wanted to write in that voice.
I just kept on reading Jane Austen's letters and Flaubert's letters and Shakespeare, and every time I got to a bit I liked the sound of, I'd use it as a starting point for a short piece of writing. For example, I borrowed the line from Shakespeare: "Every third thought shall be my grave" and used it several times as a springboard. It was almost free association, but free association within the magnetic field, if you like, of the image of a big powerful woman whose empire was the streets of Sydney.
I wanted to get away from any sequential or logical process. It was an invitation for the mind to leap around rather than walk. It was just a stab in the dark.

Every third thought is my grave while, with my toes, unconscious in the sand, I dig furrows big enough to bury mice in matchboxes. John had a way with sandcastles I never had, patience to furrow and burrow through the whole edifice so that, lying on my stomach,/looking through,/ I could see a patch of his brown face with a smear of sand on his chin, on the other side. His moats were models, each drawbridge another blow for democracy. The flag on top, a gum-leaf poked into the damp sand, did not waver but turned loosely in its socket against the breeze from the waves. I could see his [crawling] blue play-suit crawling with its yellow bucket between the sea and the castle, filling the moat endlessly as it drained as quickly back to sea. Finally I would clamber so far up the rough cliff side that it seemed I would be able to crush him with one strong leap outwards. Father, though, sauntering out from under the umbrella /to check on his son,/ would be a tougher nut to crack.
Every third thought is of my grave. Frank will go first, I think, however. Some dank June night when we hear the tankers mooing to each other like full udders in the fog, when the crumbling walls of Rosecroft do nothing to keep out the cold, when the fires we build there on the floors have burnt down and there are no more laths handy - on [some] one night or other like that, [he will groan, hiccup a last] Frank will die. Frank was once a wealthy man, he says, and has written a will, he says, leaving his estate in its entirety to me, he says. Two or three glasses more and he may well claim to be the lost scion of the House of Windsor.
Frank will go first, perhaps in my arms, perhaps rolled tightly into his own corner of the room in Rosecroft. Where the ceiling has not unclenched the plaster, there are still swags of flowers and crisp bows up there, dusted with soot from our fires. In the corners, under the rubble and faeces, the boards of the floor still gleam in spots where [some] the maid on hands and knees, kneeling on the thickness of folded sheet, her cobbled soles exposed pathetically to the door, polished until she could make out [a dark] the murky threatening shape she knew to be her [head] face.
(Rosecroft belongs to Bea? Fire burns it & her down?)

Did you do a lot of rewriting?

The difficulty was that I had a paucity of incidents. I had the voice to say it in, and a sense that I would arrive at underlying ideas that would give it some substance, but I was always scratching around for things actually to happen.

So you would've liked a plot?

When I have a plot from the beginning it can be a disadvantage, because it takes some of the element of surprise out of it for me. I seem to prefer to be plotless until quite late on, because that way I discover things I wouldn't otherwise.
When I ran out of steam in Joan Makes History I could fall back on some real event from history, whereas with Lilian I had to fall back on finding something colourful, something just beautiful in its own right, not connected to anything bigger. But you can't always write a book like that. Every book has its own personality, and I seem to have to find a slightly different mechanism for keeping up that excitement in every book.
In fact, plot ideas gave me a lot of false starts. Some of those false starts had nothing wrong with them - they just didn't feel like part of this book. At some point I began to feel as if I was beginning to uncover several other books as well as Lilian's Story. For example, this extract turned out to be the seed for my next novel, Joan Makes History.

It was one thing to draw careful pictures of Sir Joseph Banks Discovering Bottlebrush, or maps of New South Wales with a red arterial maze of Governor Macquarie's Roads. It was something else to have to think of what Mrs Banks and Mrs Macquarie would have been doing, and what everyone might have had for tea. Muffins? London Broil? Damper? Mrs Poole had never been quite sure what damper was but was sure it was not pleasant. Nor did she wish to hold up the whole class for such questions. On the boys' side of the room, John blushed and Stewart made a noise like a fart with a piece of his father's best rubber-band. Miss Poole was sweating lightly under her powder and Ashes of Violets, and decided that [Gwen sh] it was time that Gwen [stammering Gwen would] should read aloud. Page 53, Gwen. Under the picture. Gwen could not be prevailed on to stand and read, nor would she read from a sitting position, and continued to shake the silky mouse-brown fringe that hid her face and make tiny anguished gestures with her fingers on the pages of the book, until the bell rang for recess.
[It was easy to answer] What happened in 1813? It was easy to answer that Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth crossed the Blue Mountains for the first time. But it was more interesting to imagine . . .

So, you didn't start your story at the beginning and work in order?

My image of Bea Miles was of course of her as an old woman, because all the famous stories are about Bea Miles as an old woman, and the few times I had seen her she was an old woman. But pretty early on it began to be apparent to me that the project of the book was to work out how she got there. So I began to work . . . well, I didn't work backwards, I leapt backwards then, to her childhood. I was fairly confident about writing her schooldays because I knew that I could use so much of my own. The mature Lilian I was fairly confident about too; I was confident that I could make that work because of the tone I'd got from Austen and Shakespeare. But the real mystery of the book was what happened in the middle. Something happened at some point that caused her life to take this particular turn. So in the writing I did a pincer movement from the two parts that I was confident about, the beginning and the end, and gradually began to tentatively feel my way into that middle part.
Everything I'd written previously, I'd written much more consciously than this book, and I'd thought very early about things like the motivation of my characters, and where the plot would go, and I'd had chapter-plans and all the rest of it.
When I did this first writing for Lilian's Story, I'd just finished two years of studying in the University of Colorado writing program, and finally - now that it was over - I had come round to the idea that maybe you could write books in a much more open-ended way. Each day when I sat down to write, I'd have no idea, till I got going, whether I was going to write a scene from the end of the book or the beginning, or something that didn't seem to belong anywhere. That's why there wasn't so much a shift as a sort of pogo-sticking from one bit to the next, depending what happened to fall under my hand.

How did you structure all these fragments?

Once I decided to tell the story chronologically, the fragments fitted together fairly easily.
The biggest struggle I had was to recognise that I had to go with the material in the way it had come to me. What I had was a pile of fragments, and my first thought was: Okay, this is good raw material for a book; now I have to make it into a flowing narrative. So I smoothed it all out. Instead of having each one being a jumpy little scene of its own, I made them flow together, and I even wrote little transitions to force them to flow when they didn't. Something terrible happened to it when I did that - it just all went dead. Finally I had to accept that those fragments were not preliminary notes, they were the structure of the book itself.

That process of moving things around would seem to be a process of great logistical difficulty. Did you have lots of bits of paper that you reshuffled?

I probably should have, but I was writing in exercise books at this time. I'd write it by hand in the exercise books in whatever order it came. When I had around 60 to 70 pages, I started to see that some fragments belonged together. I numbered each fragment, and wrote instructions: now go to page 17, number 4, that kind of thing. Then I typed it out, according to those instructions. Then after writing some more fragments I'd see I had to rearrange it again, and I'd cut up the typescript and hang bits together with sticky tape. I'd end up with a sort of fringe effect of little strips precariously taped together.

You've spoken of enjoying that voice that you discovered. Were there doubts, as well as the pleasures?

Pleasure reigned supreme whenever the writing was just a private thing that I was doing for myself. The doubts started as soon as I began to think of the world out there actually reading what I was writing. For the longest time, I didn't think Lilian was a book that would ever be published - it was just something I was doing for my own pleasure, and one of these days I would start a real book. It felt very self-indulgent.
I used to read the weekend book pages - reviews - and that fed the doubts. It's the job of the reviewer to analyse and judge, but those ways of thinking may not be at all useful for a person actually engaged in writing. If you ask yourself what your book's about you get all twisted up - at least that's my experience - and if you ask whether or not it works you'll always find fault with it. Getting into the critic or reviewer state of mind makes me timid as a writer. I start to play it safe and the writing gets strangled with sheer caution.

How do you get around that?

I find going back to handwriting is good, because handwriting is very personal, very private. You can feel with handwriting that no one else is going to read it. On the typewriter or the computer it suddenly has that public look about it.
I also find writing in fragments is good, because while it's in fragments, I can tell myself: Well, this is obviously not a book, this is just some raw material. And of course I've stopped reading the book pages.

What keeps you writing in the face of all these doubts?

I think I write as a way of contemplating something I don't understand - there's a curiosity, an itch, that keeps you going, no matter how strong your doubts are. It's not that you think what you produce is going to be good, but because you need to know something. And you can only know it by writing it. The method seems quite random, but the end result is very focussed . . .

That sense of: If it hadn't been this event, it would have been another event, suggests that the book would have become Lilian's Story whatever chances had happened.

I so much wanted to explore the notion of a self-defining woman - it was such a powerful preoccupation in my mind - that almost any material would have arrived at the same destination.
But there was an element of magic about writing the book. There were times when I felt in direct relation to that voice, and that the book was - as they say - "writing itself" through me. Lilian's voice felt very natural to me, although it's not a voice I ever use in my own life. In taking on that persona - that voice, actually - I discovered an astonishing freedom. Perhaps that's the compulsion of writing: the freedom to be, not somebody else, but another of your selves.

A page of typescript from a draft of Lilian's Story