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Author! author!: Tales of Australian literary life
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, the noted poet, critic and teacher, has produced a highly amusing collection of anecdotes of the business, intrigue and drama of the authorial life.
294 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1998
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January 3, 2020
Very weak.
Many of these are easily accessible from obvious sources but, more importantly, most of them are boring and of no interest.
The editor, Australian poet and former English Department academic, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, writes in his introduction that, "Everybody loves anecdotes. They constantly form a staple of our conversation. They are, if you like, a junction where person meets story, character becomes narrative. At best, an anecdote captures a character, in the old sense of that word, as a person's defining quality."
Let's just say that this collection, then, very rarely reaches the "best".
I found three anecdotes I enjoyed.
(1) There was an interesting one about F.R. and Queenie Leavis, and their prodigious son Ralph.
(2) I liked the poet and critic, A.D. Hope's comments on retirement:
“Now that I have retired at last and feel thirty years of academic drudgery lift from me, it is surprising how quickly what I thought ingrained habits of mind dissolve and leave me in a pleasantly indeterminate attitude to things and books and writing. It is the way a cicada must feel, wet and weak after climbing out of its carapace and 14 years below ground. I think of it as the end of a sort of long constipation – getting the professional shit out of my system.”
I was interested to find the editor writing (smugly?) “Then, as now, universities were not the place for bohemians. The job of a university, in this case the University of Sydney, is to interpret the works of dead bohemians while remaining a conservative as possible.” I mischievously wondered where he positioned himself on the bohemian-conservative continuum.
(3) Easily the best anecdote is one which is too vulgar to quote here but relates to some quick-thinking punning by another Australian poet, Max Harris, on a possible misquoting of the popular Australian doggerel, "I love a sunburnt country."
Many of these are easily accessible from obvious sources but, more importantly, most of them are boring and of no interest.
The editor, Australian poet and former English Department academic, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, writes in his introduction that, "Everybody loves anecdotes. They constantly form a staple of our conversation. They are, if you like, a junction where person meets story, character becomes narrative. At best, an anecdote captures a character, in the old sense of that word, as a person's defining quality."
Let's just say that this collection, then, very rarely reaches the "best".
I found three anecdotes I enjoyed.
(1) There was an interesting one about F.R. and Queenie Leavis, and their prodigious son Ralph.
(2) I liked the poet and critic, A.D. Hope's comments on retirement:
“Now that I have retired at last and feel thirty years of academic drudgery lift from me, it is surprising how quickly what I thought ingrained habits of mind dissolve and leave me in a pleasantly indeterminate attitude to things and books and writing. It is the way a cicada must feel, wet and weak after climbing out of its carapace and 14 years below ground. I think of it as the end of a sort of long constipation – getting the professional shit out of my system.”
I was interested to find the editor writing (smugly?) “Then, as now, universities were not the place for bohemians. The job of a university, in this case the University of Sydney, is to interpret the works of dead bohemians while remaining a conservative as possible.” I mischievously wondered where he positioned himself on the bohemian-conservative continuum.
(3) Easily the best anecdote is one which is too vulgar to quote here but relates to some quick-thinking punning by another Australian poet, Max Harris, on a possible misquoting of the popular Australian doggerel, "I love a sunburnt country."
Displaying 1 of 1 review