Revivals: From Heroic to Systemic

In The Field of Cultural Production, Pierre Bourdieu argued that, in the symbolic network of modernity, “losers win”.1 A novelist like Flaubert, who did not enjoy much commercial success, is far more esteemed than a more commercially successful writer, not just in spite of Flaubert making less money but because he made less money. The ratio between financial and imaginative success was inverse. One can see this in the counterculture as late as the 1960s, when the American bohemian writer Seymour Krim could say, “if you are a proud, searching ‘failure’ in this society, and we can take ironic comfort in the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of us, then it is smart and honourable to know what you attempted …”.2 Honourable failure – conceived as smart, proud, searching – was seen as superior to success in bourgeois terms, which focused on money, status and power. There was an asymmetry: those who were losers in the real world were winners in the symbolic world Krim sketches.

In neoliberalism, the asymmetry between the winners in the real world and the winners in the symbolic world is eliminated. There is no gap: the relationship between the real and symbolic worlds is one of reproduction, mimesis or miniaturisation, not inversion. Neoliberalism claims that the old obstacles to success have been removed, and that people are now assessed, as Thomas Piketty observes, on “the basis of their intrinsic merits” – not on inherited wealth, class, gender or race.3 If there is nothing to stop anyone succeeding, those who do not must be failures – not losers who win, but losers who merely lose. If symbolic capital swirls the other way from real capital in a kind of uncertainty principle, art thus might be able to resist the pressures of capitalism. In any event this is what the late-modern mentality hoped and assumed. Here I discuss the works of Elizabeth Harrower and, at the conclusion of the chapter, Patrick White as emblematic of the last stage of modernity before neoliberalism arrived to replace it.

In the novels of Elizabeth Harrower (born in 1928), for the most part the protagonists lose; they are victimised or constrained by society. But they also in some way win, even if only by increasing our estimation of them. The reader looks down on those who oppress or limit these characters. In most cases gender is involved: female characters are brutalised or led astray by men in whom they have trusted and invested too much. Despite the welfare state and a seeming general tendency towards social equality, the patriarchal forces so evident in Stead still persist.

Harrower may continue the dynamics at play in Stead’s work, but her route back to canonicity has been very different. The revival of Christina Stead has been heroic, closely associated with specific individuals who, through the force of their personal reputations, have pulled her work onto the international stage. This was in the tradition of earlier revivals, particularly T. S. Eliot’s engagement with the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. Although the twentieth-century interest in the baroque was Europe-wide, the revival of these poets largely depended on Eliot’s personal taste and discernment. The revival of Elizabeth Harrower, however, followed a different pattern.

Beginning in the late 1970s, there had been a series of revivals of previously neglected female writers. Although the writers concerned were women, their revival was not an explicitly feminist one. It can be differentiated from the republication of neglected twentieth-century female writers such as Antonia White and Rosamond Lehmann by Britain’s Virago Press (led by the Australian Carmen Callil) in the 1980s, which garnered notice in academic and activist circles but not among general readers.

Unlike the concurrent revival of female writers for explicitly feminist reasons, these women writers were associated more with arch moral sagacity than with feminist activism, and were revived by publishers and belletrist critics. Some were still living, though elderly, when their works were revived: Barbara Pym in the UK, Paula Fox in the USA.4 Some had been dead for many years, such as Dawn Powell, the American comic novelist whose publication by Steerforth Press was paradigmatic of the revival process: a writer known in her own day but only perceived as a secondary talent, revived a generation after her death as a major American writer. Powell had died recently enough (1965) for her works still to be in copyright. In the USA, copyright lasted fifty years after the death of the author (in 1998, thanks to pressure from the Walt Disney Company for the protection of Mickey Mouse, new legislation extended this to seventy years). If a book had gone out of print, the rights might have reverted to the author or to her estate, but the work would still be under copyright. If the original publisher reasserted its rights, or if some other publisher acquired them, no other house could publish the book without permission. Steerforth agreed to have Dawn Powell be published by the Library of America, a clear win–win proposition for both publishers as they served such different markets.

This was the general pattern for the revived novelist, and Harrower’s revival largely followed it. Before 2012 or so, Harrower was remembered only in Australia, but her ensuing Australian and international rediscovery, led by her Melbourne-based publisher, Text, followed the paradigms already established by the cases of Powell and Fox. Moreover, Harrower was revived in an international way, not along the lines of the nationally defined feminism adumbrated in, for example, Susan Sheridan’s Nine Lives, which focused on postwar Australian women writers.5

There was also an invisible distinction between writers from the more distant past, who tended to be championed by critics with cutting-edge theoretical agendas, and those from the near past, whose revival was associated more with general readers and their literary pleasure. Text forthrightly says on its webpage that it believes “that reading should be a marvellous experience, that every book you read should somehow change your life if only by a fraction”.6 This wording serves to distance Text’s books from how-to manuals or trashy potboilers, but also and more pertinently from books seen as ideologically didactic. It also suggests that books exist above the market, even though the phrase is itself in part – if not solely – a marketing device. This commercial imperative distinguishes the revival of authors such as Powell, Fox and Pym from writers from the more distant past, whose work was out of copyright and could be taken up by multiple publishers. When eighteenth-century writers such as Frances Burney or Charlotte Lennox came back into academic vogue as a result of feminist and new historicist criticism, multiple publishers could and did publish their works. With Powell and Harrower, however, specific publishers held the rights and led their revival. Steerforth and Text adopted Powell and Harrower respectively as their signature authors; in doing so, the publishers sought to promote not only the author’s work but also the company’s own profile. Furthermore, although these revivals were not as closely associated with single champions as those led by Eliot and Jarrell had been, there were still individuals involved: Gore Vidal and the literary and music critic Tim Page in the case of Powell; Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace in the case of Fox; Philip Larkin in the case of Pym. The academic revivals had tended to be more collective. (The case of the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, revived on an individual basis by Alice Walker but then widely taken up within academia, may be said to split the difference here.)

Text Publishing’s revival of a series of Australian books, which as of 2015 numbered well over 100, could also be said to diverge from the usual pattern.7 Text’s emergence was part of a revival of independent Australian publishing that included Black Inc., Scribe, Giramondo, Puncher & Wattmann and Sleepers, and helped to counter the conglomerate-heavy scene of the early 2000s described in Chapter 1. Text in particular, led by publisher Michael Heyward, has ramified the current literary market by acquiring books no longer in circulation and energetically promoting them, both at home and internationally. Text also published Geordie Williamson’s The Burning Library: Our Great Novelists Lost and Found (2012), a survey of Australian fiction that features, although not exclusively, many writers who have been revived by Text. Text, however, has not focused solely on writers still in copyright: the Text Classics series includes late eighteenth-century accounts of the earliest white Australian settlement by Watkin Tench and Matthew Flinders, as well as works by Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Joseph Furphy, all long out of copyright and available in editions by other publishers. The series also features books first published in the past few decades, such as Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (first published in 1999) and J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007). The inclusion of these recent books, written by currently active and internationally celebrated authors (Grenville won the Orange Prize; Coetzee the Nobel) has made the Text Classics series both more prestigious and more newsworthy than the smaller set of Australian classics published by Angus & Robertson, now a subsidiary of HarperCollins, which concentrates on older, out-of-copyright works, or the Sydney University Press print-on-demand Australian Classics series, which features new editions of Australian classics with scholarly introductions intended largely for an academic audience.8 As the star of the Text series, Harrower, in contrast, is very much in the tradition of Fox and Pym: a writer still alive when revived, who is seen to belong to the recent rather than distant past and to offer something different from what is currently being produced and reviewed.

Losers Who Win

Stead and Harrower may both have been revived for the twenty-first century, but they are two very different writers. Harrower’s novels are short to medium in length, largely domestic in setting and concerned chiefly with relationships. Although they are full of philosophical and social resonance, they lack the realistic heft of much of Stead’s work. And whereas Stead had been revived once before, Harrower’s revival in the 2010s was the first time her work had been considered since its initial publication in the 1960s. Like Stead at the time of her first revival in 1965, Harrower was alive (although no longer writing fiction) at the time of her rediscovery. But whereas Stead’s first revival in the mid-twentieth century was meant to redress the perceived defects of that era, Harrower’s revival in the 2010s reflected a new nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s. Against the backdrop of neoliberalism, the era in which Harrower wrote her fiction was suddenly seen fondly as a bygone period of postwar reconstruction and of moves towards equality and social improvement.

Harrower’s view of late modernity is as dystopian as it is utopian. But her work very obviously pertained to a decisively different era, one that by the 2010s was no longer the near past (which is always likely to be disparaged by those who historicise) and had moved into the middle distance. Paradoxically, the fact that she seemed far removed from the market-dominated energies of the twenty-first century made Harrower marketable. This new late-modern chic was not confined to literature. The positive reaction to a 2014 exhibition of Australia’s quintessential modernist architect, Harry Seidler, at the Museum of Sydney emblematised it.9 Part of this is cyclical and inevitable, more mathematical than hermeneutic, propelled by a constant demand for novelty: eventually, every era gets its turn, much as, in Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, each nation is bound to have its vogue as long as it bides its time. Casanova says, “Every work from a dispossessed national space that aspires to the status of literature exists solely in relation to the consecrating authority of the most autonomous places.”10 Harrower’s reputation was dependent on international acclaim as much as Australian, and her revival was also dependent on the mood of the current time and whether it would condescend to take an interest in the era in which she wrote. The reassessment of late modernity is akin to the reassessment of individual nations or regions by the literary academy, as when it was decided in the 1980s that the literature of Poland had been underrated and deserved more acclaim. The renewed interest in the late-modern period, however, was not random. It was symptomatic of a growing scepticism, in the wake of the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis, about capitalist economic policies.

In 2012, Text brought out paperback editions of Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966) and The Long Prospect (1958). Southerly published a special issue on mid-century women writers with an article on male hysteria in The Watch Tower by Naomi Riddle.11 In the Australian, Stephen Romei commented:

Williamson devotes an illuminating chapter to Harrower in The Burning Library. Seemingly hopelessly irrelevant at the turn of the millennium, Harrower had surged back to prominence.

Text also made Harrower’s titles available as ebooks that could be purchased by readers in the USA and UK, not just Australia. Text sent the first instalments of the Australian Classics series for review to a number of North American newspapers. In June 2013, Michael Dirda, the book critic for the Washington Post, wrote a long and appreciative consideration of Harrower, singling her work out among the series of books sent to him and concentrating on The Watch Tower.13 By August 2013 the first two Harrower novels were in major independent bookstores in New York, receiving as much exposure as Stead, who had been heralded by Franzen three years before, and as much even as Peter Carey, who has lived in New York since 1989. In 2013, Harrower’s Down in the City (1957) was re-released, followed in 2014 by The Catherine Wheel (1960) and In Certain Circles. The latter was written in the late 1960s but had not previously been published. In November 2015, Text published a collection of Harrower’s short stories, A Few Days in the Country.

The Harrower phenomenon was a victory for genuine transnationalism. Text, based in Melbourne, reached readers in the USA without going through an American corporate intermediary. Now, it must be admitted that Harrower had had an international presence since the beginning of her career: she lived and wrote in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and The Watch Tower was published in 1966 by Macmillan in London and St Martin’s Press in New York (only in 1977 was it published “locally” in Australia, by Angus & Robertson). The Angus & Robertson editions, in particular, did have a modest international circulation. But this small-scale transnational success had long been eclipsed and what little attention Harrower received in the 1980s and 1990s was by academics working within Australia. The transnational Harrower of the 2010s was a new phenomenon.

The Harrower wave peaked in October 2014 when James Wood, the renowned chief book critic of the New Yorker, published a lengthy, discerning and appreciative essay on Harrower in that magazine. Wood describes Harrower’s writing as “witty, desolate, truth-seeking and complexly polished”. The title of his essay, “No Time for Lies: Rediscovering Elizabeth Harrower”, embodies all the factors discussed above: the sense of revival and rediscovery and of the active role of publishers and critics in implementing the rediscovery; the perceived moral honesty Harrower shares with Powell, Fox and Pym; and, playing on the other meaning of time, as temporality, that the time of Harrower’s novels, now so conspicuously different from the contemporary, is coming back into view.14

In January 2015, the New Yorker published a short story of Harrower’s, “Alice”. (Harrower told the magazine that she couldn’t remember when she had written the story, but that she had stopped writing fiction in “1971 or 1972”.) Furthermore, Harrower’s work is influencing contemporary writers in a felt, idiomatic way, as seen in Fiona McFarlane’s story “Art Appreciation”, published in the New Yorker in 2013.15 Written by an Australian and first published in America, the story captured a sense of frustration with love and life in 1960s Sydney that was recognisably influenced by Harrower in tone and setting. Harrower is now a world writer. This is a far cry from even 2009, when a responsible survey such as Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman’s After the Celebration called Harrower a middlebrow, socially committed novelist.16 Harrower is more than that. Through a scrupulous focus on prismatic localities of experience, which has a far wider tacit scope than it would first appear, Harrower’s narratives hew to a taut twentieth-century stylistic lyricism. In this mode, she pinpoints the tragic situations of the “medium-sized mortals” she depicts.17

If one had to choose a governing scheme for Harrower’s fiction, it would be constriction. Letty Fox was able to burst out of her confines through sheer force of will. Harrower’s more wan and easily discouraged characters feel more compelled to yield. “The 1950s were the time for the growth of systems”, says the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in Book Three of My Struggle.18 Harrower’s importance is, in the largest sense, political, not necessarily in a partisan or electoral way (in Australia, the 1950s and 1960s saw the electoral lockhold of the conservative Robert Menzies and his like-minded successors), but in portraying the collective possibilities available to people at a given time.

We often find the deep past more accessible than the near past. It is easier to desire to speak with the long dead than to reach out to those, like Harrower, who are still living or those like Patrick White, who died only within the last few decades. The hybrid nature of the near past, caught between past and present, is vexing. As suggested by Johannes Fabian in his discussion of the denial of coevalness, another problem is the way people use temporality as a mode of dismissal.19 Saying someone is outdated is a more acceptable way of saying you dislike them. This became a particular issue in the early 2000s, when some castigated what they called “seventies feminism”, as if to tag feminism as outdated was the first step in further delegitimising it (in the process hiding sexism behind a form of ageism).20 Because the present has seen itself as neoliberal, or involved in the questioning of what were previously established left-wing or welfare-state assumptions, the dismissal of the near past has been associated with a rejection of the left. The near past has been seen, in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, as a modern or late-modern “great disruption”, a statist aberration that has been cured by a neoliberal “reconstitution”.21

The issue becomes complicated with respect to Australian literature. Through the course of various paradigms – nationalist, postcolonial, internationalist – there has been tremendous pressure to validate the Australian literary project, to see it as emerging from British precedent. Though one understands that this sort of hortatory rhetoric is needed in order to secure arts funding and to galvanise peak bodies, it has led us to emphasise a view that new always means better. This was true as far back as Miles Franklin’s rejection of modernism at a time of cultural nationalism; it is evident in her disappointment in Stead (after Seven Poor Men of Sydney and Stead’s expatriation) and in Henry Handel Richardson, who was an internationalist despite staying closer to home and with whom Franklin was “not temperamentally attuned”.22

This had the baleful consequence of bringing Franklin perilously close to the pro-Nazi Australia First movement, although, as Jill Roe relates, she rejected this movement; Franklin adhered to an “old-fashioned evolutionary nationalism”, while Australia First, in Roe’s account, was “modernistic, antidemocratic, and looking for the main chance”.23 Although the malevolent male narcissists of Harrower’s fiction do not share the rightist politics of Australia First, those adjectives could well apply to them, showing the conjunction of late modernity with power-hungry, ideological narrowness. This linkage between vulgar nationalism and swaggering masculinity played into certain media and pop-cultural stereotypes. The 1994 film Sirens portrays a visit by a British Anglican clergyman to the rural retreat of the artist Norman Lindsay as an allegory of Pommie uptightness versus Australian vitality. Lindsay is ribbed and lampooned. He is subject to prudish censorship. But on his own property he is king. Australia is on its own, and happy about that.

Today, transnationalism is often proposed as a solution that will bring happiness where nationalism failed.24 In Harrower’s work, although the national is no longer the solution, the transnational cannot yet be that. In The Watch Tower, a male officemate of the young Clare Vaizey tells her she is not reading the “real” news when she reads Australian newspapers and offers to lend her his papers from England. When he leaves Sydney to return to Britain, he promises to “send you some of ours when I get back”. Clare, jaded and unexcitable, responds, “Thank you. But don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. It makes no difference.” When the man remarks of Australians, “You get a bad press in London”, Clare ripostes, “Do we? Never mind.” This is not about Australia not needing Britain any more, or standing on its own feet, but about the malaise Clare sensed as too endemic to be solved by a change of venue or a breath of fresh air from the metropolis.

Although Harrower’s novels (except for The Catherine Wheel, which is set in London) are precisely and observantly set in specific Australian locales (Sydney in Down in the City, In Certain Circles and The Watch Tower; Newcastle, where Harrower lived for the first eleven years of her life, in The Long Prospect), her characters are past the point where landscape or national identity can matter. They were born too late to be euphoric about nationalism and either too early or too prescient to be euphoric about globalisation. Harrower’s books give a sense of a society that confines without satisfying. Her world offers no categorical liberation from mid-century industrialism, suburbia or domesticity. This is a world where people will allow themselves to fester in a stasis if it helps them to control others. Harrower’s texts have both the virtues and the liabilities of being in the middle. They are middle-class (although her books range from the shabby industrial boarding houses of The Long Prospect to the cultivated radical-chic of In Certain Circles), and they are in the middle in the sense of being hemmed-in.

There is no neoliberal bimodality between winners and losers here. Even the winners are losers, and the losers are winners if they just endure with some cognition of the horror of their circumstances. This dovetails with the books’ generally suburban settings, and a sense that suburbia provides an index of the shift from modernity to late modernity, as seen in the difference between Stead’s largely urban settings and Harrower’s suburban ones. As Nathanael O’Reilly argues, suburbia was at once a characteristic setting for mid-century Australian fiction but also a target of its sometimes splenetic critique.25 Harrower’s fiction has to be seen as a kind of extension of Patrick White’s Sarsaparilla novels. White was a supporter of her work, and the sense of stasis and paralysis seen in The Solid Mandala resembles that of Harrower’s characters, although no one in her books is as cruel as Waldo Brown or as innocent as his brother, Arthur. Harrower avoids polarities. But her characters have so few options that the reader almost wishes for the emergence of such extremes.

Chocolate Factories and Grandmothers: The Watch Tower and The Long Prospect

In The Watch Tower Laura Vaizey feels fixed, confined, in a Manly so parochial it refers to itself as “the village” (31), although it is just across the harbour from Sydney, a major world metropolis. The very title The Watch Tower evokes a mixture of T. S. Eliot’s line, cribbed from Gérard de Nerval, “La prince d’Aquitaine dans le tour abolie” and Foucault’s iteration of Bentham’s Panopticon, a juxtaposition memorably captured in the title of Philip K. Dick’s alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle. All these images combine privilege with stasis. This is the Australian condition in Harrower’s works, and the white house in which Laura comes to live yokes privilege and paralysis. Harrower’s Australia is one where the future is “a boundary” rather than an opportunity, and in which the future of women who lack a man in their lives is absorption into “strange institutions” (12). In Laura’s case this is the chocolate factory in which she works (a realistic antipodal obverse of Willy Wonka’s in Roald Dahl’s 1964 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), where, more through inertia than anything else, she becomes engaged and then married to its proprietor, Felix Shaw.

Felix turns out to be an opportunistic self-promoter. In Williamson’s phrase, he is a “perfect beast” who, despite not being really well off or successful, concocts an enabling myth of himself as a self-confident, secular, modern man, a myth that proves disabling for his new and swiftly disillusioned wife.26 Far from being a stable man of affairs, Felix is a self-pitying, impecunious madman, whose greatest delusion is that he is not mad. Stella, Laura’s mother, is lost in dreams of being rescued from her Australian mediocrity by a return to wealth, England, or both; Clare, “remorselessly expectant” (93), is the one who is not totally controlled by the social determinism to which her mother and sister too readily succumb and which Shaw personifies (108). Against the background of World War II, the dangers Shaw presents might seem parochial, yet Harrower convincingly shows that his delusions are symptomatic of the age. Fiona Capp, in the epigraph to her 2013 novel Gotland, quotes the British psychoanalytic thinker Adam Phillips as saying, “Because erotic life rearranges the world it is political.”27 Through Eros, Felix malevolently rearranges the lives of his wife and thereby his sister-in-law and so is malevolently political.

The reader takes a savage delight in how little works out for Felix. We are appalled by his decline into penury, failure and the “male hysteria” diagnosed by the critic Naomi Riddle. But we are also vindictively pleased by his failure, not because we do not feel sorry for Laura or, collaterally, Clare, but because Harrower convincingly reveals how often people get it wrong. The world makes idols of anyone who seems moderately successful, but a few turns of fortune’s wheel sees them topple. As Nicholas Mansfield points out, this is a world in which nobody really has any individual power.28 Harrower and the reader collusively chuckle over the folly of it all even as we gnash our teeth about how much waste results from wrong decisions and misalliances. Clare uses a young Dutchman named Bernard to detach herself from Felix and her emotionally bludgeoned sister, but Bernard has to destabilise Felix’s authority first; Felix is still adamant in his self-belief despite his inexorably diminishing circle of influence. Clare escapes from her oppressors, but the air is one of respite rather than liberation:

The journey out of the late-modern suburbs brings healing, but the hardness, the constraint, still looms in the background.

Both Clare and Emily in The Long Prospect are heroines who, though very young, have ceased to have definitive or determinate hope for the world. This is both because they have been traumatised and because they have seen what self-delusion – a lack of self-knowledge – has done to the older people who oppress them. Lilian is Emily’s grandmother, but Emily never calls her by that name and there is little affection between them. Lilian looks after Emily because Emily’s mother, Paula, is unwilling to, but she does so only just enough to ensure that she will not be deprived of the girl, like a bad leader doing just enough administration to avoid being booted out. Lilian’s unsavoury liaison with her boarder, Rosen, outrages Emily, who finds an ally in Max, the kindly, introspective quondam lover of Lilian’s former best friend Thea. The setting may be conventionally domestic, but the particular congeries of relationships are very unusual. The Long Prospect is narrated through the third-person perspective of Emily’s consciousness, in a way in tune with the period’s formal dogma, influenced by Henry James, of the well-made novel – one sees particularly the influence of Frankie in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding.

This is another trait Wood remarks upon: Harrower’s emulation of Henry James, particularly in her use of third-person limited point of view. This Jamesian predilection was shared by novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen and Glenway Wescott, who were a generation older, but Harrower’s last contemporarily published book, The Watch Tower, appeared after Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) had exploded this Jamesian paradigm. Yet the wounded lyricism of Harrower’s writing combines with its astonishing philosophical depth to ask such insoluble questions as: if people are to be judged by equal standards yet are born with different levels of moral character, how is one to square the circle? This moral horizon goes well beyond the frame of taut, austere, technically accomplished realism. To speak of Harrower as a domestic, politically committed or social-realist writer is to perceive the surface but miss the depths. She is politically committed because the domestic relations she depicts – between husband and wife, between guardian and child – are so oppressive, authoritarian and unjust as to become political. Her social commitment lies in her recognition that the denial of human freedom and potential in these situations is but an instance of how, as Shakespeare put it in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, “the earth is thronged by man’s oppression”. As Geordie Williamson remarks, Harrower’s vision contains “intimations of Auschwitz” and of “nuclear annihilation”, allusions that only need to be dropped lightly, so close in tenor is the domestic tyranny and abuse depicted here to those external political nightmares.29

In The Long Prospect, even the minor characters are vividly etched. They include Billie, the middle-aged housewife who appeals to Max to go off with her and, when he rejects her, falsely accuses him of indecent relations with little Emily, setting off the sad chain of events that leads to what can only be called the young girl’s emotional incarceration. Emily is in an unorthodox situation for a child of any era. Her precocity, combined with Lilian’s belief that she too is still in the game of love, precipitates a rivalry between them more intense than most mother–daughter, let alone grandmother–granddaughter, relationships. In comparison, Emily’s relationship with her actual parents seems remote, as though they are only deputies for Lilian, who by book’s end has in effect restored their broken marriage solely in order to control Emily. Marriage and worldly authority are shams, as is property. Well-intentioned people like Max go just a bit too far and inspire emotions in Emily that are inappropriate; intellect and books are valued but are far out of reach of most people condemned to a life of drudgery and manipulation. Authority within the family is used to control rather than to nurture. Both Felix Shaw and Lilian are authoritarian personalities who are also strangely weak and dependent; despite their absolute self-assurance they lack resourcefulness, inventiveness and self-confidence. Felix may represent, as Michelle de Kretser puts it, “grab-all materialism”, yet he is a risible failure in building, just as his pseudo-machismo covers, as de Kretser asserts, “repressed homoeroticism”.30 They are bad eggs in intrinsic terms, but they are also representative of a way of life that does not foster positive outcomes for most people. The institutions of mid-century life – the industrial factory, the welfare state, the black-and-white television serials evoked en passant in The Long Prospect, expressions of the lower-middle-class culture that was assumed to be the norm – all stifled creativity but made people understand how difficult it was to disestablish authority.

The neoliberal era has given us the illusion that we can disestablish authority simply by cutting taxes for wealthy people and for business, when all that does is consolidate and intensify authority. Harrower’s realistic understanding of the malign tendencies of the welfare state suggests that neoliberalism will not cure them. This does not mean we can look to Harrower’s fiction for leftist nostalgia or for simple caricatures. Some characters are better than others, and some outcomes are preferable, but, as Brigid Rooney observes, “in Harrower, every choice is marred”.31 The only political hope in Harrower is to realise there is no way out, at least in the short term. Gelder and Salzman read Harrower as a strictly naturalistic and social novelist, while Williamson is so determined to concentrate on Harrower’s aesthetic aspects that he scants the novel’s social horizons, although he is aware of them. From whatever perspective, however, Harrower’s social thought is one of profound and lacerating pessimism.

The Long Prospect does offer some possibilities for dissent and growth, but it treats them ironically or distances them from the foreseeable canvas. Emily champions the Spartans as losers of history, a stance that is similar to Sylvia/Dora’s defence of the Carthaginians in Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, and in context it makes us think more darkly of Max’s motives as Dawes, an adult, ends up having overtly romantic feelings for the young girl. While Clarke’s nineteenth-century story has a tragic but emotionally cathartic ending, Harrower’s twentieth-century novel is more equivocal but also more ambiguous. Like any great book, The Long Prospect is full of wisdom above and beyond the situations of its characters, such as Max’s admonitions on what one can and cannot expect to get from a university education. But Harrower will not allow Max to be an unambiguously good figure, a figure the reader probably yearns for as much as Emily does. Instead, Max is like a hybrid of two Patrick White characters, Himmelfarb in Riders in the Chariot – an émigré intellectual factory worker, a man whose wisdom is wasted among the complacent and limited – and Waldo Brown in The Solid Mandala, whose artistic pretensions are mingled with a self-destructive perversion.

Harrower’s female characters are stymied in their choices, and even their potential saviours are flawed. In the twenty-first century, realistically depicted female characters would have many more choices due to the expansion of women’s rights and roles (and because there is simply more choice generally). Like Stead’s portraits of Sam Pollit and Jonathan Crow, Harrower’s evocation of authoritarian males reminds us that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with their libertarian emphasis on individual volition, did serve to break down not only the patriarchy but also certain restrictively macho renditions of masculinity. This is not to credit neoliberalism with promulgating feminism or with bringing down the patriarchy. As Nancy Fraser has pointed out, feminism can be co-opted by neoliberalism and turned into something very different from its original collective and altruistic spirit. Fraser, a long-time feminist theorist and activist, has accused feminism of being no less than “capitalism’s handmaiden”.32 But if the defect of neoliberalism is an excessive polarisation between winners and losers and the equation of human achievement with worldly success, then late modernity, with its preoccupation with system and circularity, was prone to a wielding of male authority and control. We see this in Felix, although Harrower extends this authoritarian principle to female characters such as Lilian in The Long Prospect.

The Victims of Late Modernity: Down in the City and The Catherine Wheel

Although Harrower’s women can be tyrants like Lilian, or insensitive absentees like Stella Vaizey in The Watch Tower, most of them are victims. In Harrower’s first novel, Down in the City, Esther Prescott is a seemingly willing victim: on the shelf at thirty-three, she jumps at the chance to wed Stan Peterson, whose uncouth life-force is inversely appealing. Stan represents two principles characteristic of late modernity. First, he appeals to Esther as a man who “had to make his own chances” without culture or cultivation. This may just be masculine sex appeal, making Stan a mundane version of the early Marlon Brando or James Dean. (Harrower mentions “American crooners”, and Stan notably drives an American car.) But Stan is also, in Bourdieu’s sense, a loser who wins. He is socially disadvantaged but, in an era anxious to smooth things out socially, this disadvantage becomes an advantage: his roughness is valued as virile, energetic, charismatic and subversive. Stan is totally unlike the modernist aesthetes who conventionally benefit from Bourdieu’s inverted economy, but he partakes in the modernist reversal of accustomed winners and losers. He participates in the air of “fostered disreputability” that Harrower sees in the neighbourhood of Kings Cross, and his appeal is the product of an analogous sort of inverse valuation. In an era so concerned with, in Max Weber’s phrase, “the routinisation of charisma” – a tendency Edward Mendelson sees as a concern in the early works of Thomas Pynchon – the charisma of men like Stan, and like Christian in The Catherine Wheel, is a rare commodity.33 These men’s charisma manifests itself so repugnantly because their society, seeking to inhibit all extremes and originalities in the interest of systemic egalitarianism, represses it so much.

Stan is unimaginative, authoritarian in his view not only of himself but of the world (not unlike his namesake, Stanley Kowalski, in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire): “How came man on earth? Stan neither knew nor wondered. If he had been asked, he might have said that things were as they had always been.”34 This sense of stasis, of circularity, is heightened by Stan’s belief that “politicians born of other politicians – a great racket but a closed one” (77), govern the world. For all the potential dynamism of what Delia Falconer calls his “aggression”,35 Stan is not a threat to the system, nor does he wish to be. His aggression is narrowly channelled against his wife, Esther, so that it becomes a form of control. For all his energy, Stan is just as governmental a figure as a welfare-state bureaucrat, although in Stan’s eyes such a person would be laughably effete. Stan, insofar as he has any politics at all, is hardly on the left. But he channels any potential disruptive energy – energy that is indeed felt by Esther during their two-week courtship as disruptive in a sexual way – into governance. This makes his way of life amenable to a socialist or social-democratic mentality. In late modernity, this mentality was predominant, whichever party happened to rule in whichever country.

Another element that might elsewhere be liberating – the city itself – is confining in Harrower’s novel. Wood remarks that Harrower’s titles have a slightly ironic feeling, as “parodic fabrications” in the manner of Nabokov or Anthony Powell, novelists famous for inventing titles of fictional books within their oeuvres that are more or less meant as satiric indications of second-rate works.36 While I agree with Wood as to the constricted and possibly self-parodic aura emanating from the titles, I do not attribute this to Harrower’s talent not extending from the representative into the titular; rather, her books evoke a deliberate constriction, one that is both enabling and limiting, laden with a felt inadequacy but drawing its touch, its palpability, from that felt inadequacy. If, as John Welchman has argued, titles of paintings are “invisible colours”, so might titles of books be invisible characters, exemplifying a deliberate sense of constraint just as Felix and Laura, and Lilian and Max, do.37 The very title of Down in the City suggests that being in the city is not a liberation, but an act of abasement or subordination. The titles Down in the City and The Watch Tower are neatly paired: a watch tower is precisely the vantage point from which one can see people being “down in the city” and potentially keep watch over them. Appropriately, Felix in his chocolate factory is a more articulate version of Stan in the earlier novel. The city does not represent possibility in this book, but boundedness:

Elsewhere, several male characters are described as working in “cool, straight buildings” (131). The city is rectilinear, spatial; it does not yield any sort of growth or progress. It is enclave as much as metropolis, representing immurement as much as potential. It is more a Borgesian labyrinth than the sort of postmodern conduit of possibility – realisable either as dark anarchy or dynamic plurality – described by Suketu Mehta in his book on twenty-first-century Mumbai, Maximum City.38 Esther marries Stan in an effort to escape this. But although she sees their union as “dangerous and dark”, Stan is no Prometheus, able to rend the bounds of urban limitation, but merely “a distorted giant”. He is to some degree parasitic on constraint. Accusing Stan of dishonesty in business, Esther’s brother, a prominent lawyer, says, “new regulations of all kinds appear to inspire your ingenuity, so that you are at the same time able to overcome them, and increase profit” (177). Stan illegally evades government regulations, but he could not do so if they did not exist; even while he is violating them, he is in another way being governed by them. He is hardly a pure entrepreneur who operates outside government control or who would benefit from deregulation. He is the sort of businessman who complements the welfare state and even depends on it, even if his business is not strictly legal. As such, even while he cheats others, Stan is also ensnared, and, much as Esther dreams of escape from his abusiveness, so does Stan wish for a different situation, at one point yearning for the unbound, if frigid, spaces of the South Pole. Although Stan is “proud of his ability to make money”, he is also “not self-sufficient”. He is not who he wants to be. He punishes Esther for this, grinding her down until her autonomy and integrity are imperilled. In marrying an outsider, Esther was seeking to be special, but Stan only hems her in even more.

The conformism of the late-modern welfare state is one of the reasons neoliberalism, with its rhetoric of choice, was able to make such inroads. It is best to see this above the fray of party-political affiliations, elections and ideology. This catchall quality of neoliberalism can be seen in the case of the British novelist Zadie Smith. With the publication of White Teeth in 2000, Smith emerged as a novelist who represented a hip, multicultural Britain. Set, in an ambitious and rambunctious way, among lower-middle-class migrant communities, Smith’s novel was presented as the obverse of the traditional British novel. Multicultural, anti-racist, but also postmodern, Smith’s was a radical voice, a voice at once imaginative and from the cultural left. In a commencement address to the New School in New York in May 2014, however, Smith offered a different analysis of her own generation. In its rejection of the collective and its privileging of individuality, she said, her generation had participated in the free-market rhetoric of neoliberalism even if, in overt political terms, it opposed it: “For the most part we were uninterested in what we considered to be unglamorous pursuits. We valued individuality above all things.” Smith spoke of initially spurning ancestors and relatives who worked with their hands, only to end up valuing, in chastened midlife, their expression and continuance of time-honoured tradition: “It feels good to give your unique and prestigious selves a slip every now and then and confess your membership in this unwieldy collective called the human race.”39

But Smith’s earlier avowal of a libertarian self declaratively reveals that neoliberalism can include even the hip, the radically diverse and the superficially left wing. It was not just about white men in suits. It was an entire mentality that, like the characters in Elizabeth Harrower’s novels, feared the constraining, cyclical mesh of late modernity. The difference is that Harrower sees relief from these conditions as possible only on an individual basis, as depicted in the trajectory of Clare Vaizey in The Watch Tower. Smith’s generation hoped, paradoxically, for a collective overthrow of late modernity that would unleash individualism. It is this collective overthrow of the collective that I am calling neoliberalism, although it can be called other things – Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity”, for instance, or Ulrich Beck’s “risk society”.40 To highlight Zadie Smith’s partial co-option by neoliberalism is not to castigate multiculturalism for complicity with late capitalism, as Walter Benn Michaels does, or to hanker for the return of an all-pervasive working-class solidarity. The paradigm of late modernity, which as Harrower’s work reveals had many problems, is burst, and we cannot go back to the way things were fifty years ago. But Smith does cogently offer proof that what I am calling neoliberalism was all-pervasive and was not just a function of a particular party platform or administrative practice.

As Smith described it, neoliberalism, in shattering the constraining systemic structures of late modernity, created a situation in which to be valued you had to be special, to be special you had to be a winner, and to be a winner you needed other people to lose. There was none of the late-modern sense of “losers who win”. In 1957, when Harrower published Down in the City, the type embodied by James Dean, Marlon Brando or even Stanley Kowalski may not have had money or social respectability. But he had cultural capital. He was cool. Under neoliberalism, you could be a writer or a businessman, a musician or an entrepreneur. You could be whatever you chose. But you had to be better at it than other people, and the only way to be the best was, as Smith observed, to “value individuality above all things”.

It is appropriate that England comes into the picture here, as Harrower devotes one of her books, The Catherine Wheel, to a depiction of London society in the generation before Zadie Smith’s. The late 1950s was a time of systematic Australian migration to Earls Court, as depicted in novels such as Barbara Hanrahan’s The Albatross Muff (1977). Harrower’s novel, however, is set in the slightly more posh London district of Bayswater. Here, young Clemency James looks to London as “the centre of the universe” and celebrates “the brilliance of the winter season”.41 But Clemency has very low self-worth, as shown by her externalisation of value into London in a sort of non-metropolitan self-abasement. This leads her to fall into the trap set by the contumacious Christian. Christian is young, married and, relative to Clemency, lower-class: a handyman, an “employee”, whereas she is a “tenant” (19). Although Clemency discerns that Christian’s “premeditation” and “boldness” are bogus (20), she eventually succumbs to his charisma and begins an affair with him, even though she knows it will be destructive.

A superficial reader of Harrower might ask, with Robert Graves, “Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls” taken up with “impossible men”?42 The answer has to do with the allure of any charisma in a paralysed late-modern age: in a society that has tried to bind everything into system and mediocrity, a charismatic figure can more easily gull a certain number of people. Setting aside the issue of sex – which, although it is undoubtedly the vehicle of Harrower’s moral concern, is not necessarily its subject – the more apt question becomes, “Why do self-aware, democratically inclined liberal individuals take up with people who are authoritarian, controlling and malign?” Again the answer comes back to Clemency’s own sense of inadequacy. The dynamic recalls Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction, while / the worst are full of passionate intensity”. Clemency has the moral capacity of the liberal individual – she is after all a law student – but not the self-belief. Christian has the self-belief, but his charisma is easily punctured. The illusion of his charisma is produced by the contradictions of late modernity, which empower people to believe they are important, but then drop the floor out from under them at the first hint of stress or pressure.

Clemency fears the malice of people who exist “several feet off the ground” (184). Perhaps, however, she is so firmly on the ground as to be too humble, humble to the point of humiliation. In this state, she must contend not only with Christian but also with a group of self-elevating people, people who make her wish for a “normal intelligent neurotic with whom it was possible to speak a common language” (185). The phrase “normal intelligent neurotic” exhibits a late-modern presumption not of universal happiness but of a society composed of individuals who maturely admit their flaws and live constructively in spite of them. The word “neurosis”, used five times in the novel, signifies a flaw serious enough to be disabling individually, but not socially catastrophic. Some people may even turn their neuroses in a positive direction. But Christian, and others such as his friend Rollo, are unable to give up their illusions of self-superiority. They embody the charismatic energy that the systems of late modernity have tried to suppress. The difference between Christina Stead’s modernity and Elizabeth Harrower’s late modernity may lie in the way Sam Pollit, to beguile and suppress Henny, has to be at once autocrat and clown. In Harrower’s fiction, amoral but charismatic people merely have to seem to blend in for the moment; it is people who, like Clemency, sincerely try to be normal (in the terms of the time) who are most vulnerable to their menace. Clemency settles too much for mediocrity. She then feels her own mediocrity attacked by the appeal of those she had hoped would cure it, but who in fact exacerbate it.

Beyond Late Modernity? In Certain Circles and The Hanging Garden

The title of In Certain Circles would seem to indicate the late-modern stasis that is Harrower’s hallmark, and indeed the last lines of the novel – Zoe Howard Quayle’s affirmation that she can move on, “having pierced that stasis” as Claire Vaizey did in The Watch Tower – confirm late-modern stasis as the default mood of the book. Yet the phrase “in certain circles” also relates to cultural capital, to reputation, gossip, connections, all things that are redolent of neoliberalism and its preoccupation with mobility. Neoliberalism offers a solution to the problems in Harrower’s fiction: males are no longer charismatic underachievers, but super-proficient nerds; women can achieve on their own and need not find their identity through men. But neoliberalism also brings with it perdition and obloquy for those who cannot win on these terms. Harrower’s characters – holding on to a perilous middle – would, in a neoliberal world, fall by the wayside. Where late modernity manifests a critique of existing constraints, neoliberalism is more prone to celebrate its sense of untrammelled freedom; it glorifies those who are what Wood calls, with reference to Zoe and Anna of In Certain Circles, “free agents” who go out to “meet the oncoming present” of the era succeeding their own.43 One era, the era of the setting of Harrower’s fiction, fosters critique through stasis. The other, the era of Harrower’s rediscovery, employs dynamism only to forestall radical critique. There is a possible parallel here with climate change: the 1950s was often seen as an era of global cooling, while in succeeding decades temperatures began to rise again.44 Similarly, Harrower’s caesura of standstill and stasis was pierced by an age of unleashed free agency.

Harrower’s characters are necessarily driven by factors in their own present, not a future that their choices may anticipate. Wood notes that Harrower’s books are partially driven by “anti-bourgeois animus”.45 This seems particularly true of the heroines, with their willingness to put themselves into the clutches of unsuitable, dishonourable men. The men they take up with are not just the objective correlative for these women’s masochism. They are desirable because they are brutal and because they are anti-bourgeois. In the three paradigmatic Harrower works with male antagonists – The Watch Tower, Down in the City and The Catherine Wheel – the tyrannical men are at once abusive and insurgent. This becomes subtler in The Long Prospect and In Certain Circles.

In The Long Prospect, the antagonist is the grandmother Lilian, and Max expresses this anti-bourgeois masculinity in a more sensitive and vulnerable way, albeit in the form of a younger and more sensitive Humbert Humbert. Stephen Quayle of In Certain Circles is similarly a more sympathetic male outsider than Felix of The Watch Tower, although both are anti-bourgeois. Wood’s remarks on “anti-bourgeois animus” place Harrower with such writers as Richard Yates, whose anti-suburban excavations Wood mentions, and with more radical contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath and Jack Kerouac. In a different way these anti-bourgeois qualities also participate in a long Australian tradition of anti-puritanical bohemianism, as seen particularly in the work of M. Barnard Eldershaw, the public profile of cultural figures like Dulcie Deamer and the Andersonian tradition of the Sydney Push.46 This anti-bourgeois attitude is also reminiscent of Patrick White’s Sarsaparilla novels, with their sense of spiritual aspiration amid ruinous deadlock and paralysis.

Whereas Stead can benefit by a strategic Australian reading, Harrower sets her books in Australia but is more interested in the quandaries of late modernity than in Australia in particular. The world of Harrower’s fiction is not only in the Menzies era, before the generation of ’68 and Gough Whitlam, but in an age before neoliberalism; in this longer view, it was not rock and roll but leveraged buyouts that were the true successors and antithesis of Harrower’s world of late-modern authoritarianism. What Wood calls the “anti-bourgeois animus” shared by Harrower’s victims and victimisers would yield to bourgeois bohemians.

If, in the neoliberal era, women are liberated by being free to show leadership and initiative, men are also liberated by being free to be less brutal and more articulate, free to work with their minds, not just their bodies. But the price of this freedom, as Nancy Fraser asserted, is an all-pervasive economism and the disappearance of the zone where working-class and middle-class milieus once came into contact, a zone depicted in Harrower’s fiction, albeit uneasily and unheroically. Wood and Williamson both register the social aspects of Harrower’s work, while seeing her in broader moral and aesthetic terms than Gelder and Salzman, who tend to pigeonhole her as merely naturalistic. In Certain Circles, to which Wood devotes the most space, is not Harrower’s best book, but it is the best-suited to this mode of analysis, as it finds itself poised between stasis and dynamism, paralysis and nobility.

More than any other of Harrower’s books, In Certain Circles is preoccupied with class. The two pairs of siblings, Russell and Zoe Howard, and Stephen and Anna Quayle, are contrasted by class. The Howards are established, wealthy, of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan mien, whereas the Quayles are misfits from the lesser suburbs who are the objects of the Howards’ patronage and compassion. Russell Howard is known for his altruism, a quality that is half genuine concern for other people, half moral vanity. This reflects the ambiguities of the welfare state itself, the combination of succour and authority that is the collective version of the more individualised phenomena Foucault labelled “pastorship”.47 Russell invests in a printing factory in order to issue the broadsides and pamphlets that further his social causes. For Stephen Quayle, his business partner and brother-in-law, however, the printing business is just a business – but one that, like Felix’s chocolate factory in The Watch Tower, he will use in order to conceal his personal flaws. The factory itself – half in the industrial era, half in the information age – is itself indicative of how In Certain Circles anticipates the neoliberal era. Zoe’s “sheltered life” is reminiscent of the Bentwoods in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, the epitome of a revived book by a living writer and of the paradigm that Text’s success with Harrower has emulated.

Zoe, as a daughter of a purportedly liberal man of science, resembles Louie in The Man Who Loved Children, although Charles Howard is the real deal as far as science is concerned and his wife Nicole, unlike Henny Pollit, is his peer and collaborator. Throughout the book, biology and medicine are representative of careers that allow women to evade the confinements of marriage. When Russell and Lily’s daughters decide to go to England and be ballet dancers rather than doctors, Lily experiences it as an almost Lear-like betrayal; she feels that all the sacrifices she has made for them were not worth it. Lily should have listened to her mother-in-law, Russell and Zoe’s mother, Nicole, who warns Zoe against investing her life in individuals, invoking her own work as a biologist as an example of a greater systemic preoccupation.

But as the paradigm shifts from the systemic to the individual, from late modernity to neoliberalism, perhaps the granddaughters, like Stead’s Letty Fox, are simply doing what they can to flourish in the emergent order. Both Zoe and Anna undertake artistic careers; Anna’s photography, strengthened by her experience of loss and an invigorating trip to the Canadian Rockies, becomes particularly important. In Certain Circles, of all of Harrower’s novels, values art and the artistic process the most highly.

Although In Certain Circles shares major themes with Harrower’s previously published works, it also differs from them in ways that might explain why Harrower chose not to publish it sooner, and that suggest a shift away from the givens of late modernity. Anna may not be able to attain happiness in marriage, but she takes herself seriously as an artist. Charles and Nicole Howard may be mocked as bien-pensant leftists, somewhat like the Folliots in Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney, but Harrower – who has made clear that her political sympathies are on the left – also admires their genuine desire to make the world better. Their social activism, although laced with hypocrisy and self-congratulation, is not sourly castigated. Russell, their son, is genuinely compassionate, as is shown when he walks away from a science project because a young woman involved has been bullied into suicide by her team members.

The presence of suicide in the novel, both this young woman’s and the apparent suicide of Anna towards the end of the book, portends a far more urgent sense of crisis than the qualified escape or dour stasis with which Harrower’s previous novels concluded. Harrower was so dissatisfied with In Certain Circles that she refused to publish it at the time of its completion circa 1970 and gave up writing fiction for many years. Although she has not given a reason for this, one might speculate that she felt that the suicide scare was an excessively melodramatic gesture, one that violated the taut, humdrum precision of her earlier fictions. Anna’s putative suicide, although it turns out not actually to have happened, is disturbing and gives the book an unsettling tone.

The title In Certain Circles might connote constrained circularity. But to move “in certain circles” is not to be confined, but to be known, to have a reputation among certain groups, groups that are in one or another way selective. The novel’s circles centre upon the bonds between the siblings Anna and Stephen and Zoe and Russell. Stephen retains his sense of being an outsider despite marrying the more upper-class Zoe; being known in certain circles does not allow him to transcend class differences entirely. But the barrier between his world and Zoe’s is more permeable than that between Stanley and the Prescott family in Down in the City, and looks forward to Zadie Smith’s era, when artistic prestige can provide as much social mobility as financial success. In Certain Circles explores a terrain different enough from Harrower’s previous novels to constitute a semi-crisis in her mode of fictional representation, a sense that the paradigm whose contradictions she had so mordantly rendered was changing.

In late modernity, bourgeois and anti-bourgeois – in broad terms, corporate drudge and hippie rebel – cancelled each other out, or held each other in a standstill. In every instance in Harrower’s work of a bourgeois woman marrying a subaltern, striving man, the woman expects to be liberated by the marriage but is not. The men, and the masculinity of the era, are to blame. Within a deadlocked system, anti-systemic forces can neither rupture the system nor be squelched by it. Adam Davidson has said that late modernity offered “moderate rewards and limited risks”.48 Under neoliberalism, the “bourgeois bohemian”, to use David Brooks’ phrase, emerged and sought to break the deadlock.49 Bohemians and rebels are no longer losers who win, but winners in slightly different clothing. The success of a corporate executive such as Bill Gates and of a writer such as Zadie Smith are different only in degree. Yet there was a quantum difference between the success of a Samuel Beckett, a Jorge Luis Borges or an Allen Ginsberg and the success of a mid-twentieth-century corporate executive such as Charles Wilson, who famously said in the 1950s that what was good for General Motors was good for America. In late modernity, the only way a writer might be seen to rival a corporate magnate in importance was as a loser who won. In neoliberalism, losers who win are non-starters. There are only outright winners and losers, although the scale of the winners’ success may vary drastically.

Patrick White and the Waning of Late Modernity

In In Certain Circles, Harrower anatomised one era with unmatched precision while sensing the onset of its successor. Patrick White’s posthumously published The Hanging Garden (2012) presents the even more tantalising spectre of an unfinished novel of the then-present by a late-modern master who sensed the coming of a new age. The Hanging Garden describes the childhood meeting in Sydney of Gilbert Horsfall, a boy fleeing from the Blitz in Britain, and Eirene Sklavos, a cultivated Greek-Australian expatriate who has been displaced from her home in Greece by the German invasion. It was to have been White’s next novel after The Twyborn Affair (1979). The Twyborn Affair was White’s belated coming-out, as it were, as gay and postmodernist, and there is a clear relationship between the two novels. In The Hanging Garden, the sibling-like relationship of Eirene and Gilbert recalls the mingling of genders depicted in Eddie/Eudoxia/Eadith Twyborn. Eirene’s Greek name, meaning “peace”, echoes the Shakespearean synthesis of conflicting energies that occurs at the end of The Twyborn Affair.

The Hanging Garden also takes up the migrant theme seen in The Twyborn Affair and in many of the short stories in The Burnt Ones (1964), White’s first collection of short fiction. In stories such as “The Evening at Sissy Kamara’s” and “Being Kind to Titina”, White sets narratives entirely within milieus of Greeks and Greco-Australian migrants, a world to which he had access through his relationship with Manoly Lascaris. In “Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover”, White’s demi-villain is a refugee from the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution.50 In these stories, White represented experiences that writers of actual migrant background were later to explore more organically. The Hanging Garden continues White’s exploration of these themes, and one cannot but appreciate how central it could potentially be to White’s ouevre, even in the incomplete form we now have.

In comparison to these stories and to The Twyborn Affair, The Hanging Garden is more traditional and even sentimental in tone. If one were to venture why White never published the book in his lifetime, one might speculate that it was not just that he thought the book was not good enough, nor that, as David Marr’s afterword indicates, he preferred in his last decade to focus on politics and theatre. Perhaps White realised that he was writing at a cusp of cultural change, and that the time was no longer ripe for his novelistic vision. Or, perhaps he sensed that The Hanging Garden would have provided his oeuvre with a lyrical late synthesis that might have been too pat for his liking. With its juvenile protagonists and its sense of psychological ease (in comparison to White’s earlier, more stormy works), The Hanging Garden resembles Ingmar Bergman’s final feature film as director, Fanny and Alexander (1983) (given the composition dates, the similarities must represent a coincidence rather than an influence). In both cases, authors known for pessimistic and introspective works produced a final, far more optimistic narrative of childhood.

Eirene, the young Greek-Australian protagonist, discovers that back in Australia, she is not seen as an educated aristocrat but as a refugee. The question of who is Australian and who is not is scrambled in a manner that alludes to White’s relationship with Lascaris, perhaps reflecting a desire to splice and suture the differences between the two partners. Furthermore, The Hanging Garden is set during a period (the 1940s) when White was not in Australia, and during which he first met Lascaris. In his blissful portrayal of a prepubescent heterosexual relationship in pastoral Australia, White transplants his relationship with Lascaris from its actual genesis in wartime Egypt. The Hanging Garden is the first of White’s novels after The Tree of Man to be dominated by a heterosexual couple (no, neither Voss and Laura in Voss nor Waldo and Dulcie in The Solid Mandala counts). After the coming-out of The Twyborn Affair and its confirmation in his memoir Flaws in the Glass (1981), White returned to a luxuriant if poised modernist-realist style to portray a heterosexuality uninhibited by compulsoriness. Indeed, had The Hanging Garden been published when it was written – that is, after The Twyborn Affair and Flaws in the Glass, and before Memoirs of Many in One (1986) – its lyricism would have anchored those other books, providing a steady counterpoint to their experimentation.

Why then did White not publish? The answer is perhaps to be found in a note he jotted down on the manuscript, to the effect that Gilbert would be “14 in 1945, 50 in 1981”.51 The Hanging Garden was to have been the first part of a triptych. Portending that the next section would focus on Gilbert and Eirene meeting again in adulthood, White’s codicil committed him to writing a realistic fiction set in the 1980s. Now, White himself was sixty-nine in 1981. For him, the 1980s would be an autumnal period, preoccupied with memoirs, theatre and political activism. Gilbert and Eirene, however, would be in their fifties in the 1980s, still at the peak of their lives; they would likely be intimately engaged with the decade’s culture and politics. The projected time-frame would demand a realistic rendition of the 1980s, something White might have felt unable to attempt.52 The children’s landlady and custodian, Mrs Bulpit, is a classic late-modern figure, reminiscent of Mrs Reardon in David Rowbotham’s poem “Australian Scene 1938”: bumptious, unlikeable but basically decent and reliable, an embodiment of the late-modern welfare state. If White had taken the novel into his present, he would have had to create characters evocable in a similar comic-realist vein, and it is likely that he shrank from this long prospect, not for lack of artistic potency but for totally comprehensible reasons of aesthetic measure.

In addition, by 1981, a new political paradigm was emerging. White may have been focused on what he saw as the perfidy of Malcolm Fraser, but he could not help but have noticed the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, or the more subtle shift from late modernity to neoliberalism. Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975, the successive re-elections of the Fraser government, and the beginning of the Hawke era in 1983 created a rapid sense of political change that may have made White feel he could no longer act as an up-to-date chronicler of contemporary Australia. As with Harrower’s In Certain Circles, perhaps the non-publication of The Hanging Garden reflected an awareness that society was on the verge of a paradigm shift, and an unwillingness to take the artistic risk of representing a time beyond the author’s own.

Why was The Hanging Garden finally published in 2012? It was the centenary of White’s birth, but it was more than that: as signalled by the revival of Harrower, there was a renewed interest in late modernity (especially in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis) that gave White more currency. The Hanging Garden did not receive universal acclaim. Geordie Williamson, whose treatment of the book in The Burning Library was one of the first full-length responses to it, and David Marr, who wrote the afterword to the published edition, seemed to have their doubts. Andrew Riemer found the book inconsistent and suggested that White’s reputation might have been better off had it not been published.53 But the general international reaction was enthusiastic enough to show that a writer once thought out-of-date was now back in style.54

For all the loyalty and security Gilbert Horsfall and Eirene Sklavos discover in the book, however, late modernity was too enmeshed in ideologies of control for its resurrection to be desirable. The revivals of White and Harrower were a symptom of neoliberalism. But they were not a signal that late modernity could be recouped. There was no road home.