Some Doves and Pythons

by Sumner Locke Elliott

Tabitha Wane is an agent, a woman of great charm and social ability, who in another age might have ruled a salon. Instead, Tabitha makes a flamboyant if hazardous career of encouraging, manipulating, and merchandising talented writers and theater people.
The story takes place during a country weekend party where Tabitha is entertaining several clients and friends: creative people of widely varied talents and predators of rare and exotic plumage. Outwardly it is concerned with the maneuverings of their careers. But, on another level, it searches the quandary of a professional woman who, in trying to maintain her emotional balance among today's upside-down values, faces the crisis of self-discovery.
The curious inversion of values in the artistic world - of real worth and dollar value, of love and commerce, and the men and women whose lives are shaped by these distortions - afford generous scope for Sumner Locke Elliott's accomplished satire.
-- from the first edition jacket

250 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Elliott was born in Sydney in 1917 to the writer Helena Sumner Locke and the journalist Henry Logan Elliott. His mother died of eclampsia one day after his birth. Elliott was raised by his aunts, who had a fierce custody battle over him, fictionalized in Elliott's autobiographical novel, Careful, He Might Hear You. Elliott was educated at Cranbrook School in Bellevue Hill, Sydney.

Elliott began acting and writing for radio during his teens, and showed signs of a promising career during his twenties before he was called for administrative military service in World War II. In 1948, Elliott relocated to the United States where he became a highly regarded television scriptwriter. As a fiercely intelligent and bold person, he made a name for himself, until the era of live television drama ended in the early 1960s.

Elliott remained in the United States for the remainder of his life, commencing a literary career in 1963 with his autobiographical novel "Careful He Might Hear You", which won the Miles Franklin Award and was subsequently made into a film. He published ten novels in total, several of which dealt with issues from his own childhood and experiences in Australia before the War. Although he increasingly developed a following among Australian readers, Elliott remained uncomfortable with his country of birth, in no small part due to his homosexuality, which had marked him out for difference during his youth. He spent his final years in New York City, dying of cancer in 1991.

For the final six years of his life, Elliott lived with the American writer Whitfield Cook. The two men had been close for several years, although the exact nature of their relationship has been disputed. Cook was a widower from a heterosexual marriage, however his most notable works included the homoerotic Alfred Hitchcock film "Strangers on a Train". Cook cared for Elliott until his death.

Reviews

[Sammy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sumner Locke Elliott remains famous for his first novel, Careful, He Might Hear You, a largely autobiographical tale of his childhood raised among aunts with vastly different views of his future. Elliott wrote that novel in his late 40s, having started a career in the Australian theatre and radio industry in the late 1930s as a beautiful young man with a quick wit and an ability to craft long-form stories with a popular slant. After the War, he moved to the USA where he spent twenty years as a highly respected name in the "golden age" of television drama. It was only when that era faded, in the mid-1960s, that Elliott seriously turned his attention to writing novels, largely because he was settled in New York City and did not want to make the trek out to that notoriously vapid West Coast.

Perhaps herein lie the clues to the fatal flaw of his second novel, 1966's Some Doves and Pythons. The novel focuses on Tabitha Wane, a talent agent who - when we open in medias res - is organising a house party that will prove crucial to retaining and obtaining key clients, while also stabilising her many personal relationships, which are equally as manipulated and driven by Tabitha's ego as her private ones.

Elliott's talent as a writer is evident from the first page. He writes polyphonically, with a chorus of voices interrupting each other, reflecting in flashbacks, with some sections in free indirect discourse, other sections lengthy conversation pieces. The expanding and contracting timescale is (somewhat) modernist and the structure, with Tabitha's rise and fall and rise, is expertly thought out.

Some Doves and Pythons doesn't fail, exactly, but it is ultimately unremarkable for two key reasons, both of which I believe relate to Elliott's lengthy experience in television and radio dramas. First of all, the subject matter is simply inconsequential. A scheming talent producer who realises, over the course of a country house weekend, that the people in her life must be valued as friends more than as means to an end, well that's just dandy. It would've made a great Sunday night drama in the era of live television, when audiences expected to see everything from Ibsen to Coward appear on their screens regularly. As the subject for a full-length novel the reader grows weary of the sheer emptiness.

Second, and more importantly, is the dialogue. Now, don't get me wrong, the dialogue is vibrant enough, if not quite sparkling. But it struck me, midway through the novel, that I was reading a play. Truly. During his decades as a popular scriptwriter, Elliott had also written a play which appeared (very briefly) on Broadway in the 1950s. I wouldn't be surprised if this novel began as an idea for a stage piece. Elliott is stage-managing a production, and nowhere is that more in evidence than the endless use of italicising of individual words in a sentence or often of individual syllables! Yes, he is prone to informing the reader of exactly how a line should be spoken, because he doesn't trust his dialogue to do its work without an actor speaking the words. (A problem Elliott must have worked through, as his later novels like Fairyland attest.) Anyone who is familiar with writing will see the script-based nature of the dialogue in sections such as this:

"Marvelous," Tabitha said to Barney. "Both Flora and Harry are marvelous people. Good people. Of the earth, earthy." She was moving a green glass to replace the pewter on the mantel. "But they don't understand charm."

In essence, the novel is appealingly written at times but can't overcome these qualms. Where Elliott succeeds more is in the moments of individual character analysis, which had made his first novel so appealing and would earn him justified acclaim for some of his later works. The sequence where Tabitha finally asks her longtime confidante Barney about his sexuality (in a very roundabout way) feels poignant and sensitive. And the most well-drawn character is Tabitha's housebound mother, who tolerates the house parties while being unable to see her daughter as anything other than the troubled but determined child she had once been. Edith:
"disdained the trappings of the past, however. She was, by nature, unsentimental. She would not pick and pry through old boxes of mementoes, faded pictures of the dead. She avoided the obituary columns, preferring not to know that another of her friends was dead, relying on the distillation of her mind to summon them at will to her, and so the slow-motion figures revolved around her, untouched by age, bright-eyed and brown-haired, immortal. The past and present merged."

As far as I can tell, the novel has not been reprinted in several decades. When I went to my local library to request their archived copy, the librarian wasn't even sure if it still existed, as they had lost some books in a flood several years ago. The copy had survived but, even then, I had to create the Goodreads entry! Perhaps I will be the only person who reads this novel in the 21st century, and I don't think it will be a great loss if that is so. But still, for the sake of the thoughtful and sensitive Mr Elliott, I'm glad someone did.