Picture: Katherine Johnson – Maisenbacher House Moving, https://www.flickr.com/photos/aka_kath/3035341007
Dear readers,
In case you missed the original announcement in April, I just wanted to remind you that this blog has moved. You can now find it at https://nathanhobby.com, still going strong. (Well, if not a flood of posting, there has at least been a decent trickle.) Hope to see you over there – please do subscribe if you haven’t already.
Nathan.
Photo: “Abandoned House” mrfreson, Wikimedia commons.
Starting this separate blog seemed like a good idea at the time. It was January 2014 and I was writing a lot about the art of biography on my original blog, nathanhobby.wordpress.com. It was quite specialised and I thought that (a) it might bore readers who came for other things and (b) if I started a new blog it might help me connect to other biographers and readers of biographies.
As it turns out, I don’t have time to maintain two blogs and most of the readers of this blog would probably enjoy or at least tolerate the things I write on my other blog. So the blogs have merged, and I’ve exported everything on this blog to my new address, https://nathanhobby.com. My two blogs, “The Annotations of Nathan Hobby” and “A Biographer in Perth”, have become one: “Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth: The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things.”
Thank you all for reading and commenting on this blog! I look forward to continuing the conversation with you over at the new address. If you haven’t already, please do follow me there through WordPress or by email or however else you like to do it. It won’t be much different, just a little more frequent, if anything. And for the moment, this blog can stay just as it is, like an abandoned house.
Alas, blogging is one of the things which have fallen by the wayside as I try to keep up a gruelling (for me!) chapter-a-month. So far I’m on track. It’s complicated by the fact that several chapters, including February’s, have divided into two. I’ve given Hugo Throssell VC his own chapter to introduce him and describe how he met Katharine, his future wife, in 1915 after Gallipoli. It means Guido Baracchi, the perpetual student Katharine met at the end of the year, gets his own (shorter) introductory chapter too.
My reading from the biography at the KSP Writers’ Centre was a couple of weeks ago now. There were over thirty people who came, braving the extreme heat and the drive out into the hills. There were many people I knew and many I didn’t; I was grateful to them all for coming. It was so encouraging to see so much interest in the biography. I love engaging in discussion after a reading, and there were some perceptive questions. I need to come up with a concise answer to the question: “Why Katharine?”; there are good reasons, if not necessarily obvious ones. Novelist Jenny Ackland was at KSPWC for a writing retreat ahead of Perth Writers’ Festival and I was chuffed that she wrote about my talk and the centre on her blog.
The great Australian artist Tom Roberts volunteered to serve in a London military hospital during the Great War. He ended up serving as an unofficial batman to Katharine Susannah Prichard’s future husband, Hugo Throssell, who was being treated for war wounds. I picked up Humphrey McQueen’s comprehensive 1996 biography of Roberts and found a lively account of their friendship. Another biography I wish I had the time to read. Each chapter has the name of a literary work from “Such is Life” to “The Good Soldier”. I love this acknowledgement at the back:
Paul Kelly for offering me a column in the Weekend Australian. The $585 I earned each week for two days work during the almost three years was the equivalent of a literary fellowship, without which this book would still not be completed. Rupert Murdoch let us get away with it until the week before the first draft went to the publishers.
One must always look for creative ways to fund the writing of a book.
Another note: McQueen’s great account of Roberts and Throssell is quoted or paraphrased at length in John Hamilton’s biography of Throssell Price of Valour without referencing. Mcqueen’s book does appear in the bibliography, but I don’t think that’s enough. Even “popular” biographies owe it to other writers and to the readers to acknowledge their sources fully.
Katharine ca. 1904, from her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane, p. 42.
Governess – Katharine Susannah Prichard at Yarram, 1904: a reading by Nathan Hobby
KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session
4:00pm – 5:30pm Sunday 19 February 2017
11 Old York Rd, Greenmount WA
$10 general entry / $5 members (proceeds to KSP Writers’ Centre)
Refreshments provided
https://www.facebook.com/events/709078175927574/
Patience is an important virtue in writing a biography—or any book—and realistically it’s going to be a couple of years before my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard appears. In the meantime, I’m excited to have a chance to share a chapter at the KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session.
The writers’ centre is in the hills of Perth, in the house Katharine lived in from 1919 until her death in 1969. Being involved with the centre has put me in touch with a community of writers who care about Katharine and her legacy. It’s also given me the rare opportunity to spend time in my subject’s house. The centre has many writing groups across genres, demographics, and timeslots. If you are a Western Australian writer, I encourage you to join up and be involved in some way – it needs your support more than ever in these days of limited government funding.
It’s chapter five I’ll be reading, “Governess,” the story of 1904 in Katharine’s life. I chose it because it’s a dramatic and largely unknown year of her life, as well as being quite self-contained as a narrative. Twenty-years-old and living away from home for the first time, Katharine set the tongues wagging in Yarram, a small country town in Gippsland. She beguiled several men, including a drug-addicted German doctor on the run from his wife. Starring in a play, she earned a new nickname. She gathered notes and impressions that she would turn into her first award-winning novel, The Pioneers, a decade later.
What better place to hear the story of this important year in Katharine’s life than at the house she lived in for fifty years? Tickets at the door.
Like many readers who are also writers and/or PhD candidates, my reading is driven by several imperatives. There’s things directly useful to the research, but they often don’t get read cover-to-cover. (“One of the joys,” writes Yvonne on Stumbling Through the Past, “after I finished my history degree was reading a book from cover to cover.”) There’s interesting books with some connection to my research, which make me feel I’m being slightly productive to read in my spare time. (And given I’m trying to master the art of biography, any accomplished biography could fit this category.) There’s books by friends and colleagues which I want to read after knowing them in person and seeing some of their creative or scholarly journey – and to encourage them! And then there’s books for fun. There’s actually a lot of overlap between the second, third, and fourth categories.
I was still in the midst of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1997) when I summed up last year’s reading in biography. Lists are rather arbitrary; I had it at number three, but after finishing it in January and reflecting on it all year, I think it’s probably the best biography I’ve ever read.
I didn’t review Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, edited by Michael Bostridge, but it was the most enjoyable book I read this year. The volume was released to celebrate the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography but that project is not a focus of the book. The thirty-three short tales reveal funny / sad / poignant / fascinating anecdotes about writing biography as well as reflections on the art and nature of the genre. Almost all the great British biographers are included, including two of my heroes, Claire Tomalin and Hermione Lee. Two contributions impressed me so much I looked up their biographies and both made it near the top of my favourites list for the year: Kate Summerscale and Frances Watson.
Somehow I didn’t review either of the two of Kate Summerscale’s books I read, even though I loved them. Both The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace are gripping narratives which combine biography, true crime, and cultural history into absorbing pictures of the Victorian era. In Mr Whicher, Summerscale tells the story of the original, quintessential detective and the most famous case of the age – the murder at Road Hill House. In Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace extraordinary extracts from an upper-class woman’s diary in the 1850s are preserved in trial records and form the core of a sad and vivid story of the hopes, angst and misery of a woman trapped in an unloving marriage. The breadth of both books is incredible; Summerscale gives the wider context of shifts in society and worldview. She shows a whole age better than a comprehensive history. And she does this with the narrative skill of good fiction. I still need to read That Wicked Boy, the book she actually published this year. She will be at the Perth Writers’ Festival in early 2017!
I reviewed three significant literary biographies from UWA Publishing this year. Sylvia Martin’s Ink in Her Veins is the pick of them for me, a great biography uncovering the life of Aileen Palmer, who lived an obscure life paradoxically near the centre of Australian literature. (Bill of The Australian Legend picked it as his book of the year.) Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow is a landmark volume, comprehensive and significant for literary scholarship. Georgina Arnott’s The Unknown Judith Wright is a well-argued revision of Wright’s early life. Another important Australian literary biography I reviewed is Philip Butterss’s An Unsentimental Bloke.
I read less fiction than ever this year (it used to be the main thing I read!), but one book stood out – Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (USA, 2010). I wrote on my general blog: “the novel gives a sense of the poignancy of all the remembered (and forgotten) people and events in any one’s life. It’s a novel which expands our appreciation of life, going beyond initial viewpoint characters and their present to reveal the past and future and inner lives of other characters.”
We all have our notions of Queen Victoria, even as the Victorian age recedes further into the past. It’s an obscure song from Leonard Cohen which I’ve long associated with her:
Queen Victoria,
My father and all his tobacco loved you,
I love you too in all your forms,
The slim and lovely virgin floating among German beer,
The mean governess of the huge pink maps,
The solitary mourner of a prince.
Cohen was right: there are many Victorias, public and private, old and young. Few have lived a more documented or contested life, making her a formidable biographical subject. It didn’t stop ABC journalist Julia Baird taking on the challenge and after eight years of work, her Victoria: The Queen was published in November.
Victoria is a superb biography, the kind I aspire toward, compulsively readable and intelligent. The combination of journalist and historian – Baird has a PhD in the discipline – is an ideal one for a biographer. She writes vividly, precisely, and wisely as she narrates the development of Victoria through life stages and how she became the different Victorias, some mythical, some misunderstandings, some true but in need of nuance. One of the surprises for me, for example, was to discover that Victoria began life as a Whig, opposed to the Tories; it was fascinating to see her political transformation as the politics of Britain changed over the century and she finished her life as the more expected ardent Tory, close to Disraeli and hating Gladstone. The “mean governess” is only part of the story, and a fun-loving, opinionated, passionate woman emerges in the biography. Some cautious biographers avoid interpretation let alone judgement; others are far too confident and dogmatic in their judgements. Baird is a courageous and wise interpreter of her subjects. “Victoria’s passionate fits came and went, but Albert’s anger was white, cold, and enduring. He was willing to inflict pain on his wife.” She captures the complexity of Victoria’s character, her goodness and her faults in an evenhanded way.
The biography is structurally accomplished in its combination of the chronological and thematic. Each chapter takes us forward a little in the span of Victoria’s long life, but has its own mini-narrative ranging over the span of a particular incident, theme, or relationship. It’s one of the difficult and essential things to get right in biographies; biographies which are too strictly chronological tend to fall apart as narratives, constantly broken up with the next development in the myriad of “subplots” that are developing in any subject’s life at any time.
Most chapters begin with a scene, a fraught process in biography as there is rarely enough sensory detail to build up a scene purely out of historically verifiable material. Thus in chapter 11, Victoria’s wedding, Victoria is lying in bed before the wedding. “She closed her eyes and thought of the preparations humming across the city.” The preparations she imagines are all historically sourced, although in this case the device feels a little clumsy to me. However, it’s probably more a question of what the reader finds permissible in biography than anything else. Some other scenes work perfectly and it’s part of the biography’s appeal that Baird has used the approach.
I am in admiration of Baird’s grasp of nineteenth century British (and wider) history. To read the biography is to be given an accessible primer in the period, as Victoria was involved in everything from the social upheaval resulting from industrialisation to the Crimean War to the emergence of a unified Germany. Baird shows great skill in narrating complex historical events in a way which is gripping but not simple.
The amount of research involved in any biography is immense, but this book must have involved more than most. The volume of primary and secondary material is huge. Despite redactions, burnings, and the losses of time, many of Victoria’s letters and diaries remain, and that is only the first layer of material. The biographer has to be on top of it all and then have the instincts for what is important and how their reconfigurations and reinterpretations will add something new. One of Baird’s great discoveries – found in a doctor’s diary – is an account of Victoria and her confidante, John Brown, peeking under each other’s clothes. The temptation is to trumpet the revelation, but Baird avoids this completely, narrating her breakthrough material in a straightforward way and letting it speak for itself. I admire that, and would have allowed her considerable more trumpeting.
I really enjoy Julia Baird’s hosting of ABC TV’s the Drum, where she brings out the best from her guests and steers the conversation well. (I’ve often wondered at her politics, given she comes from Liberal Party royalty but doesn’t seem conservative in outlook; turns out her Twitter profile tells all, at least for those better-read than I was: she is a “Mugwump.”) It was interesting to hear her on Philip Adams’ Late Night Live in the guest chair, speaking passionately and articulately about her subject, showing a different side of her character. She spoke then of the challenge of accessing the royal archives and how it was only the intervention of the former governor-general which secured her access. But her obstacles were even greater than that: she wrote movingly last year about living in the shadow of death after a cancer diagnosis, only to come through. I hope she continues to write for the New York Times and host the Drum, but most of all I hope she continues as a biographer.
It’s Katharine Susannah’s birthday today. She’d be 133 years-old, were she alive. To me, she’s currently 27, as I’m in January 1911 with her. (She has aged ten biographical years since her last birthday.) I’m in this silent period of her life. I know of various things which happened to her, but there’s no primary personal material from the time itself. Her state of mind in October 1910 will remain a mystery to me. She left Melbourne for a “brief holiday” in Sydney, but ended up sailing to the USA, staying a few months, and then onto London, not returning home for five years. I have some theories, but I have to be rather tentative about it all. In celebration of her birthday, here’s a photo from 1915, low resolution, poor quality, but one which I only recently unearthed and which gives a different angle on the young Katharine Susannah Prichard. She’s carrying lavender; she had been cultivating an association with lavender for some years since playing the role of Sweet Lavender in a play in Yarram in 1904. The photo comes from “an appreciation by one of her friends,” Sumner Locke, in Everylady’s Journal, April 1915. Sumner Locke was the vibrant young novelist who died in childbirth a couple of years later. It’s one of December’s tasks to uncover and tell of their friendship as two aspiring writers in pre-war London.
In 2005 I met Lily Chan in a writing group in Perth and she shared some early chapters from her work-in-progress, Toyo. Like many books, it involved a long journey for Lily, but I was thrilled when it was published by Black Inc in late-2012 and won the 2013 Dobbie Literary Award. Four years late, I’m finally reviewing it. Continue reading
A Biographer in Perth 