 | | not just experienceand whether you agree with the view offered, or like the pattern, is neither here nor there. Views are possible, patterns discernibleit is exciting and exhilarating and enriching to know it. You need not agree with the person on the platform, but you discover that neither do you have to agree with friends and neighbours: that's the point. You can have your own view on everythingand this, particularly in a place such as Canberra, is liberty indeed. And it is why, I think, increasingly, any seminar on Women and Writing, or Women Writers, or the New Female Culture, or whatever, is instantly booked upby men as well as by womenand readings by writers, and in particular women writersare so popular. At last, it seems, there is some connection between Life and Art, the parts do add up to more than the whole: we always thought it! We discoverlowe are not alone in the oddity or our beliefs. Our neighbour, whom we never thought would laugh when we laughed, actually does.
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| | It puts, of course, quite a burden on the writer, who is expected to direct all this mental theatre, to be seen as an Agony Aunt as well as the translator of the Infinite, and the handmaiden to the Muse, and may not have realized, on first putting pen to paper, where it would all end. But we have our royalties to give us some worldly recompense: our foreign sales, our TV rights, and so on. Like the real Royalty, it does not become us to complain.
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| | Jane Austen and her contemporaries, of course, did none of this. They saved their public and their private energies for writing. They were not sent in to bat by their publishers in the interest of increased sales, nor did they feel obliged to present themselves upon public platforms as living vindication of their right to make up stories which others are expected to read. Imagine Jane Austen talking at the Assembly Hall, Alton, on "Why I wrote
Emma
." But times, you see, have changed, and writers have had to change with them. When the modern reader takes up a "good" novel, he does more than just turn the pages, read and enjoy. He gratifies his teachers and the tax payer, who these days subsidizes culture to such a large extent, in every country in the world; he gives reason and meaningnot to mention salaryto all those who work in Arts Administration and libraries and Literature Foundations, and Adult Education and the publishing, printing and book distribution tradesnothing is simple, you see, nothing: nothing is pure and by virtue of the pressure put upon the reader to read, the burden of the writer is that much the greater. If your writing has any pretensions to literary merit, you must appear, you cannot shelter behind the cloak of anonymity: you have to be answerable, although you would rather stay home knitting, or dipping a horrified toe into the dangerous coral seas of the uncultured North. It won't do: you have to come down to Canberra: you want to come down to Canberra. Somehow, it is registered as duty. You're lucky, moreover, if they pay your fare.
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But I myself am reader as well as writer: I write, I sometimes think, the book I want to read that no one else has written. It is part of the fellowship of the reader, that what you want to read, and therefore write, a lot of others want to read too. Because you, in your reading, keep pace with them. I think many writers of contemporary fiction feel, as I do, that we are all engaged in the same act, this producing of alternative realities, examples
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