Kate Grenville site - Interviewed by Norman Oder, Publishers Weekly, 1994

Kate Grenville -
" I Thought I'd Be Howled Down"

Interviewed by Norman Oder
for Publishers Weekly
October 31, 1994

This interview is copyright, and is reproduced here with permission. It is about 5 printed pages long. Here is a live link to the Publishers Weekly internet site.

LIKE HER HEROINES, Australian novelist Kate Grenville has learned to confront convention. She hasn't just questioned sex roles in the land of "blokes." She's also resisted the rules of storytelling - at least, the former rules-that long stifled her voice.
In her fifth work of fiction, Albion's Story, published this month by Harcourt Brace (Forecasts, Aug. 29), Grenville pushes another boundary. A companion volume - not a sequel - to her much-praised 1985 book, Lilian's Story, the new novel consists of the confessions of Lil Singer's father, Albion, whose Victorian rectitude shadows an abusive misogyny. Reviews in Australia and the U.K. have been laudatory; PW called it "a tour de force".
While Grenville's male ventriloquism represents a stylistic step, the book also heralds a commercial revival. Her first novel since loan Makes History (1988), this was also Grenville's first book to be auctioned back home. She's finished her first British tour. And with Harvest's simultaneous paperback re-release of Lilian's Story, her reintroduction here seems at hand.

Managing at Home

Grenville meets PW at her Victorian terrace home in Balmain, a gentrified inner suburb just west of central Sydney, an easier trip by ferry than by bus. With its bookstores and cafes, Balmain is an artsy place, home to writers like Peter Carey (formerly) and Frank Moorhouse. Grenville's husband Bruce Petty, a nationally known editorial cartoonist, also works at home, but the toys, art-work and contraptions reflect the presence of Tom, eight, and Alice, four.
With her red-tinged brown hair a bit woolly, and a cordially casual manner, the compact Grenville, 43, seems to be a woman managing multiple duties. Repairing to the small back porch, she speaks in a direct, considered style, a sign of hard-earned self-possession. "I write because I need to explore ideas," she declares. And though her books have "a moral that's fairly obvious," she dislikes didactic fiction: "You have to embed what you want to say in the truth of human experience."
Her human experience began across the Harbor in middle-class North Sydney. A "fairly isolated child" and storyteller in a supportive family, Grenville found that the social straitjacket governing post-pubescent behavior turned her from a sunny tomboy into a bitter teenager.

At the University of Sydney, English literature was taught, she says, in a "very traditional way," paralysing her writerly ambitions. So Grenville, surfing the zeitgeist, entered the emerging Australian film industry in 1972 and rose to an editor's job: "I thought I would never write again, and I wasn't even reading."

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Finding a Calling

After six years, though, Grenville resisted the compromises of collaboration. At 28, she took the traditional Australian sojourn in Europe. Renting a room in Paris, she wrote two "appalling, atrocious novels" in six months, but realized she'd found a calling.
She'd been hanging out at Shakespeare & Co., the expatriate lodestone, meeting American writers and learning, for the first time, of authors like John Hawkes, Robert Coover and Flannery O'Connor. One American, the experimentalist Ron Sukenick, encouraged her to go to a U.S. graduate school, and she wound up at his base, the University of Colorado.
Her teachers, including Sukenick himself, Edward Dorn and Robert Steiner, "made me be much bolder," Grenville asserts. Indeed, the collection Bearded Ladies (published by the University of Queensland Press), largely her M.A. thesis, shows her testing form, voice and narrative, avoiding the closure she had previously thought fiction required. Presaging her novels, some stories show a recurring character, a young woman learning life's lessons.
"I had this idea of the personality as being a bit like a violin string, which has a main note, but if you touch it in the right way, you can get an almost infinite number of notes out," muses Grenville, an amateur pianist. "I find these kind of harmonic characters, who have some overlap or resemblance to me, but are not me."

Return to Sydney

Grenville went home in 1983: "I still hated it, but I realized something different was happening." The country's British stuffiness was being leavened by Asian immigration and recognition of Aboriginals, and feminism and intellectualism had gained a toehold. Also, Grenville knew it would be easier to pursue a writing career in Sydney. She edited copy part-time and, in her free time, began Lilian's Story.
"I wanted to write about a person who writes the novel of her own life," she says, recalling her rising feminism. Her inspiration was Bea Miles, a well-known Sydney eccentric who declaimed Shakespeare on street corners, slept in parks and hailed taxi rides to nowhere.
To Grenville, Bea Miles - or Lilian - represented a "kind of wish fulfilment. She was big, loud, extroverted, rude - all the things I'd never dared to be. it's like the harmonic of myself became the dominant for the period that I was writing."

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Vectoring In

The book's brief, kaleidoscopic scenes - most only a page or two - arise less from Grenville's film work than her no-outline method. Following Flannery O'Connor's discipline, she resolved to complete five pages a day, writing longhand into exercise books that provided privacy for her risk-taking. When she had 100 pages of non-linear fragments, she found herself "actually vectoring in on a story." At 300 pages, she tried to meld the scenes into conventional chapters, but saw it wouldn't work.
For Lilian's voice, Grenville found inspiration in phrases from the letters of Flaubert and Austen, and in Shakespeare's plays. As in much of her work, she kept dialogue, or speculative dialogue, within the paragraph, using italics: "I was very impatient with traditions that put speech apart."
Grenville thought the spur to her heroine's boisterous street life must have been severe. The crux of the tale: apparent abuse by Albion. "At puberty, women have to put away all the things that were best about them. And boys, too, I now realize," adds Grenville. "The sexual abuse is a literalization of that idea."
Since Lilian's Story didn't "look like a proper novel", Grenville had few hopes. But she submitted it for the Australian/Vogel Literary Award for writers under 35, and won publication with Allen & Unwin. Now taught throughout Australia, with a film version in the pipeline, it is, to one Australian critic, "regarded by many as the great Australian book of the 1980s."
New York agent Elise Goodman, building an Australian business, made contact with Allen & Unwin at Frankfurt in 1984. She sold Lilian's Story to Pat Mulcahy at Viking but thought the book's last third needed work. Grenville, thankful for the advice, sat down and poured out 30 pages. The revised version is now the standard.
After Lilian, Grenville resurrected the novel Dreamhouse, tightening and recasting the tale of a doomed couple's Italian retreat. Since part of the book appeared as a story in Bearded Ladies, Grenville returned to UQP, which has launched several literary authors.

Putting Women Back In

In 1988, as Australia prepared for its bicentennial, Grenville got a government grant for an anniversary work, and openly bit the hand that fed her. Joan Makes History alternates tales of Joan Redman (born Radulescu), an immigrant from Transylvania, with chapters in which an everywoman named Joan enters 11 episodes of Australian history. Grenville, then a new mother, says that she "wanted to put the women back in," reacting to the triumphalist celebration of national history.
If the book, Grenville regrets, is her "most conscious," its genesis is organic. Joan appears as a minor character in Lilian; at one point, Lil even observes, "Joan was someone it was easy to write many histories for." With such Faulknerian permission, Grenville had produced sketches about Joan, putting them aside as a "starter culture." Joan also was published by UQP. By then, Goodman was working with Carolyn Lurie, who represented Grenville at Australian Literary Management; Goodman sold it to the small new house British American Publishing.
Since then, motherhood has limited Grenville's creative time. Still, she teaches writing to adults at the University of Sydney, and her educator's side has spawned two books. In 1990 she produced The Writing Book (Allen & Unwin), a workbook that urges fledgling writers to ignore dogmatic advice. Also, with her friend, novelist Sue Woolfe, she edited Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written, published last year by Allen & Unwin. In interviews, authors like Thomas Keneally, Elizabeth Jolley and the editors themselves compare early and final manuscript drafts.

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Unfinished Business

For a decade, though, Albion's Story was brewing. "To be in the head of this atrocious abuser," Grenville recounts, was difficult, but she could never fully put aside the "unfinished business. in Lilian's Story, I had shown what might happen when a father abuses a daughter, but I needed to know why. My own personal stability gave me the strength to be able to do it.
"I thought I'd be howled down," she says of her 18-draft experiment in the male voice, but it has provoked little censure. "My answer is: this is maybe not what men are, it's what women think men must be to behave the way they do."
Though she drew on the magisterial yet slightly self-mocking letters of Charles Darwin to inspire Albion's voice, Grenville also found a shocking streak of misogyny "actually in me. We're all taught to despise women. Women's magazines are full of reasons to feel bad about yourself."
In Lilian, the rape scene is fuzzy, a child's blurry memory. But not here. "Albion would see it very clearly," Grenville declares. "He knows what he's done, but he doesn't realize the implications." Despite the book's topic, she maintains this "savage parody" is "actually good for a laugh of that horrified kind."
This time, Grenville got some crucial help at home. Pan Macmillan publisher Hilary McPhee told her where she'd lost the "stereoscopic vision" of Albion transcending his point of view. The book was auctioned by Lurie's successor Lyn Tranter.
In both Australia and the U.K., the novel has Grenville's title, Dark Places. However, the American title allows Harcourt to market Albion and its precursor as a set, with similar covers. Though Grenville believes the books need not be read together, Diane Sterling, Harcourt and Harvest senior editor, thinks Albion goes over easier if readers see the artistry in the diptych.
Both books were bought by Harcourt editor-in-chief Cork Smith, who told Goodman he wanted to revive Grenville's work as he had William Kennedy's at Viking. When Harcourt cut its adult trade division in January, firing Smith, Goodman was concerned, but she sensed her author would not be forgotten. Learning that the Australian Literature Board would bring Grenville and other writers to read at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center this month, Goodman persuaded Harcourt to move up publication.
Grenville says her next book, still in early stages, draws on metaphors inspired by bridges - the dynamic opposition between men and women - but she's sure Lilian will play a cameo role. Grenville's made her peace with Australia - "at its most interesting point ever" - and now values the "depth of reference" her painful college education provides. And, with dark voices banished for now, she bids PW goodbye and steps out through quiet streets to pick up her kids.

Copyright © Norman Oder and Publishers Weekly, 1994

The illustration from the cover of Publishers Weekly is a painting of the actress Dorothy Dandridge, reproduced from the cover of Donald Bogle's biography published by Amistad Books in 1994