Secret Life of Books

At the 2003 USA National Book Awards, the horror writer Stephen King gave an impassioned speech criticising the assembled great and good of the literary world for its critical neglect of popular writers like John Grisham, Elmore Leonard, Tom Clancy, Jodi Picoult and, of course, himself. It’s nice to get an award, he said, but what took you so long and why do you still neglect so many of us, simply because we sell a lot of books?

Shortly afterwards, a 72 year old Australian woman took to the stage to receive an award for her fourth and - as would turn out - last novel and found herself arguing with Stephen King. ‘Giving us a list of those who are most read at the moment’, she said, is not an argument and misses the point of what literature is for. In her own case, literature is ‘the expression of something in a supreme way. Once it has been said, it’s both an exorcism and an exhalation. An intensification of life.’

Shirley Hazard’s argument was that there is such a thing as high art, that it is different from popular culture and the rule of the market, that it has a mystical intensity, and that we should’t be ashamed of defending it from the likes of King. This was not a very 21st Century argument, nor even a particularly 20th Century one - at least, not the second half of the 20th Century - but many in the audience applauded her. There are, after all, some things you can say in your seventies that can be career-ending when a decade younger.

Today’s episode is about Shirley Hazzard and her third novel,The Transit of Venus. The story follows two Australian sisters as they navigate life and love in Britain, from the austerity years after WW2 to the 1970s. It was published in 1980 - twenty-three years before her National Book Award winning The Great Fire in 2003. And it says something about Hazzard that she waited that long in-between publishing novels. She was not a Christie for Christmas - or rather, a Hazzard for Halloween - kind of writer. Literature, for her, was a religion not a job.

Shirley Hazzard is something of an outlier in this Classic Australia season. She was not an egalitarian like Miles Franklin and Ruth Park, wanting to knock the stuffing out of the literary Establishment and its cultural subservience to European taste-makers. Hazzard was a shameless snob and elitist. She adored the European classics and the Old World and happily turned her back on Australia. When an interviewer once asked her to describe the Sydney of her youth, she described it as ‘provincialissimo’, which is pseudo-Italian for the most provincial place on Earth.

Hazzard is a bit of a conundrum for Australians. In the USA at least, she’s one of the most respected Australian writers of all time, but she didn’t care much for the country of her birth. Her books are considered Australian classics yet exhibit contempt and willful ignorance of the land of her birth. Her writing is undeniably brilliant, but hard to penetrate and feels simultaneously immediate and old-fashioned. In this episode we’re following the transit of Shirley as she tracks a fiery course across the literary firmament — from humble beginnings in Sydney to a glamorous jet-setting life in-between New York and the Italian island of Capri, we’re making our observations about the Transit of Venus and ultimately asking: how do you solve a problem like Shirley?
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Ruth Park’s debut novel, The Harp in the South, was first serialized in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1947, provoking angry letters from outraged readers. The book was destined to become an Australian classic. The story follows an Irish Catholic immigrant family - the Darcys - living in the inner-city slum of Surry Hills, as they navigate domestic violence, child prostitution, racism, backstreet abortions, abduction, and alcoholism. Some readers objected to Park’s frank depiction of these social ills. Others claimed her story was exaggerated. And there was general outrage that an outsider - a blow-in from New Zealand, no less - should assume the right to air Sydney’s dirty laundry for all to see.

But The Harp in the South is not a judgmental or moralizing novel. Park, who was living in Surry Hills at the time, simply depicted the world around her. There is no traditional plot to the story. We simply join the Darcys for around three years of their lives and grow to love them despite their flaws. Park finds beauty in the everyday and her prose is often most beautiful when describing unbelievable squalor. Her descriptions of rubbish and dirt are second to none.

In this second episode in our Classic Australia season, we take a leap from Miles Franklin’s charming, sometimes naive, turn-of-the-century rural bildungsroman to Ruth Park’s urban, immigration story that became a template for many of the great Australian novels of the last fifty years, including Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap (more on that in a few weeks) and Tim Winton’s Cloud Street.
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In breaking, literary-adjacent news, Hollywood is about to do the final screen tests to choose the next James Bond. They’ve narrowed it down to just four actors, according to today’s Guardian.
But what’s a tough decision for the motion picture studios is a simple decision for SLOB. We’ve cracked the Bond code.
Each of these four rumored finalists has played at least one major role in recent adaptations of literary classics. So, Sophie and Jonty have put their classics know-how to the (screen) test, to ask which of these nineteenth-century literary heroes fits the bill for our post-Daniel Craig 007.
Want a hint? The name’s Darcy. Fitzwilliam Darcy.
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In 1901, six self-governing British colonies in the Southern Hemisphere came together to form a single nation - Australia. In that same year, a 21-year-old woman from rural New South Wales published a book which gave voice to that new nation. The woman is the great Miels Franklin, and the book is My Brilliant Career. The novel’s heroine Sybylla Melvin, immortalized in the 1979 film by Judy Davis, is ebullient, clever, defiant, funny and brave. It’s a gripping story of her farming childhood, her family’s descent into poverty, her romance with a handsome jackaroo called Harry Beacham and - most of all - her determination to forge a career as an independent artist.

The story is essentially Pride and Prejudice in Blundstones, which perhaps accounts for its enduring success. Sybylla herself is a proud atheist, socialist and feminist. This was not an image Australia necessarily wanted to project at the time, with one critic denouncing Sybylla as ‘distinctly unpleasant’. But The Bulletin celebrated it as ‘a book full of sunlight’, and pronounced it ‘the very first Australian novel to be published’. Most of all, young women around Australia found - at last - an author who spoke to their experience and Franklin spent a large part of the following years replying to the many letters of gratitude and appreciation that flooded in.

This episode is the first in a series devoted to Australian classics. Today we’re asking just what it was that makes Sybylla Melvin such a compelling and evergreen heroine.
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Diana Reid is the hottest young screen adaptation-writer of the hour, and she wrote the screenplay for the delightful new Sense and Sensibility film with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles. Today she's joining us on SLOB to talk rom-coms, wild hair, muslins, ribbons, and learning self-restraint.
The story of how we got Diana on our show is almost as meet-cute as the story of how she came to write the screenplay. You'll hear the whole story, and we'll go in deep on how Diana went from being a novelist to screenwriter almost overnight, and how Jane Austen herself taught her how to write the beats of a gripping story about two sisters who seem to be opposites and learn how to be more like one another. This version of Sense and Sensibility is true to the original and also windblown and yearningly impassioned, as any good modern rom-com should be. Hear about how Diana, along with the producer, director and actors made the magic happen as a team, over several months of shooting on location in the UK.
Diana now lives in London, but grew up in Sydney, and indeed seems to have led a shadow life to Sophie. Diana's first novel, Love and Virtue, is set on the campus of Sydney University, and reminded Sophie not a little of her own heady days as an undergraduate. We talk about how novel-writing prepared Diana for screen-writing, and about how she managed to write three such different, accomplished, page-turning novels and a successful screenplay all before her 30th birthday!
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