Kate Jennings - Trouble: Evolution of a Radical, Selected Writings 1970-2010

Dont look back. Youll turn into a pillar of shit. Ellen Burstyn in AliceDoesnt Live Here Anymore. Im fond of quoting that line and gave it to the narrator in my novel Moral Hazard. For me, reelin in the years, as Steely Dan put it, is my least favourite pastime. A small part of the reason is the usual one: not all my past bears close examination. Sometimes, inadvertently, a memory surfaces coming across that Steely Dan song again reeled in a few not-so-choice years from the 1970s and Im swamped by extreme sadness or acute embarrassment. But never, I hasten to add, regret, which Ive always held to be a useless, piddling emotion unless youve caused real harm. I dont run what if scenarios in my head.

The main reason, though, is an ingrown reflex, part of a pragmatic character formed from growing up on a farm. Im not interested in yesterdays crop, only tomorrows. This maybe also accounts for an ability to deal with dashed hopes, part and parcel of rural life, delivered by nature, bankers and politicians. Ive had my share of drubbings. But afterward I shake myself loose like a terrier whos had a disturbing encounter and proceed to the next fire hydrant. A sturdy streak of Ill show em.

Ted Solotaroff, editor of the New American Review for many years, once addressed this trait he called it endurability when pondering why so many gifted writers vanish: It doesnt appear to be a matter of talent itself some of the most natural writers, the ones who seem to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared. As far as I can tell the decisive factor is the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment. Solotaroff imagined a young writer responding, I already know about rejection and uncertainty. I know what to expect. He answered, You know about them as much as a new immigrant to Alaska knows about cold and ice and isolation. Whenever a young writer knocks at my door, I quote Solotaroff and ask if they are ready for the long haul. My only other piece of advice: when you think youre finished a piece of work, youve only just begun.

Up until recently, I always acted as if my life were about to begin tutto possibile periods of entanglement in the black kelp of depression notwithstanding. Hitting sixty dented that feeling. Im incorrigibly curious, but Im also not sociable, so being a working writer that is, I live on what I earn from writing, not on government grants or prize money or a professors salary has pushed me into the world, all for the better. To cobble together a livelihood, Ive tried my hand at the kinds of writing at which my literary peers have sniffed; no matter.

For the longest time, I also thought that my life was unremarkable, pedestrian. Others had exciting lives, not me. Hitting sixty made me realise that Id either been involved in or around some signal events in the last forty years. Not such a pedestrian life after all. A few of my peers have written memoirs; Im not immune to wanting to set a few things down for the record. If I dont, given my three decades away from Australia, I will be expunged, as in a Stalinist-era photograph. Ive watched my husbands generation twirling and turning to be more advantageously placed for posterity and it isnt a pretty dance. My own generation has already embarked on the same hoodoo hokey-pokey. You put the left leg in, you put the left leg out, and you shove the person next to you into oblivion.

Because Ive never kept a diary, I had to go to the internet to ascertain facts and dates. In the process, I overdosed on the fights and imbroglios in the Australian literary and feminist worlds. I used to think that my old mates lived as if in a tenement building, cabbage smells in the hallways, yelling at each other across corridors, banging on thin walls. After this internet immersion, Ive changed my mind: they live as if in maximum-security prison, and spend their days making shivs from toothbrushes and anything else thats handy.

It was said of George Orwell, who irritated the heck out of his comrades on the Left for his refusal to toe the party line, that he was skilful at rubbing the fur of his own cat backward. Shrewd observation. (Orwell, along with Sam Beckett and Randall Jarrell, are my exemplars: Orwell and Jarrell for their straight-talking and their championing of clarity in language and lucidity in thought; Beckett for his paradoxical lifeaffirming nihilism.) Out of principle and sometimes, I admit, cussedness, I seem always to be rubbing the fur of my own cat backward: so many orthodoxies, so many windmills.

I balked at writing a memoir. My last book, Stanley and Sophie, was a memoir of sorts. What started out as a dog book inspired by Thomas Manns Bashan and I turned into something more complex because of the Bush years and changes in my life. And taxing to write because, like many before me, I find it easier to write novels than to inhabit Janet Malcolms famous House of Actuality, where the f loors are left unsanded, the gutters full, the furniture unvarnished. No fibbing in nonfiction. This book, then, is a stand-in for a memoir. Ive assembled pieces essays, speeches and poems, along with short stories and passages from my novels that actually happened so that a reader might have a narrative of sorts.

Evolution of a radical, although some might say devolution. We drift rightwards as we age, or so received wisdom has it. Ive changed my mind from time to time, which is as it should be. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. True but also flippant; its more complicated. Recently, mucking around on YouTube in search of Johnny OKeefe clips, I came across an excruciating piece of Aussie kitsch: Little Pattie delivering a eulogy at Billy Thorpes funeral. Her hair-do hasnt changed since the sixties, blonde hair flipped at the ends and long bangs still framing her face. Hold onto the ideas of your youth regardless of circumstances, and you risk the intellectual equivalent of Little Patties hair-do.

Holding onto the principles thats another proposition altogether. Some well-known sixties activists ditched the ideas and the principles and have swung so far to the right, theyve fallen off the map and become political Gollums. I remain firmly, actively feminist and left-wing in my ideals. If anything, after my stint on Wall Street in the nineties, I am more radical than before. Now I know of which I speak.