Trouble: The Art of Sticking Your Head Above the Parapet

Kate Jennings, Australian poet and writer, made her home in New York four decades ago, from where she has charted her age from a liberal and feminist perspective. Her novel Moral Hazard dramatised the perils of Wall Street years before the global crash of 2008; her recently released Trouble offers her best writing over four decades. Never quite with the mainstream, Jennings has taken the lead in contemporary debates and sometimes paid for it. Kate Jennings returned to The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 3 August 2010 to consider some of the highlights of her career as an outsider.

TROUBLE: THE ART OF STICKING YOUR HEAD ABOVE THE PARAPET

KATE JENNINGS

It is with great pleasure that I return to the Sydney Institute and an even greater pleasure to share the rostrum with Shelley Gare, a good friend, a provocative writer, and a superlative editor who covers the same beat as I do: the infinite ridiculousness of human beings.

I’m in Australia to publicise my book Trouble: The Evolution of a Radical/Selected Writings 1970-2010. The idea for the book came about after I wrote one of Black Inc’s Quarterly Essays on the fall of Wall Street and the rise of Barack Obama, followed by several shorter essays for the Monthly. My editor at Black Inc., Chris Feik, suggested I compile a book of essays, but I’ve always found books of essays a little dutiful. And they can date quickly. Because I’ve covered the waterfront in my career and written in many different forms, I suggested that I attempt to weave together essays, poems, speeches, op-eds, and even short stories and parts of my novels that are true, and in doing so, tell the story of a time. And, in smaller way, my own story.

My first books – an anthology of women’s poetry, Mother I’m Rooted, which came to be seen as groundbreaking, and a book of my own poetry, Come to Me My Melancholy Baby – were published in 1975 by Outback Press. Morry Schwartz and three other guys founded Outback Press, a tiny, freewheeling outfit that was representative of its time in that its books were experimental gambles. These days, Morry is Black Inc. So with Trouble, Morry and I have come a satisfying full circle.

Unbelievably, when I signed up for the project, I didn’t think ahead and realise that I would have to spend time rooting around in my past, one of my least favorite things to do. Eddie Fisher, on being asked in his old age what he thought of putting a gun to Elizabeth Taylor’s head when she left him for Richard Burton, said, “The past is a son of a bitch.” Couldn’t agree more. And some of us have pasts that are more sons of bitches than others. The highest praise I received for the book was from a close New York friend. She said I had been “fair and understanding of my younger self.”  Take it from me, no easy task.

Being confronted by my younger self was made less difficult because, fortunately, I didn’t have to spend long stretches of time with that self. Normally, publishing a book can take what seems like forever. When the book finally reaches the stores, you are not only thoroughly sick and tired of it but also deep into your next project. Because Black Inc. is a small, tightly run publishing house, meetings and consensus-building are kept to a minimum. In fact, Chris Feik and I were able to produce my Quarterly Essay in five tumultuous weeks with a four-day turn-around. Warp speed. And the same happened with Trouble, a feat made possible by the efficient, uncomplaining researchers and typists at Black Inc. and by Chris’s geniality, judicious reasoning, and steadying hand.

Putting the book together, reading work from distant years, made me remember the various editors with whom I’d worked over the years and brought home to me how important they had been in my development as a writer. Editors who brought out the best in me. Editors who made me reach higher, dig deeper. Editors who “got” me, as the vernacular has it. And Shelley Gare is fair and square on that list.

The title Trouble? It came from a poem included in the book about accusations of presumption directed at me from my old mates on the Left and in the literary world and mutterings to the effect that my only talent was for causing trouble.My husband’s mother once chided me when I was whinging about the cost of putting myself on the line. “Where else would you put yourself?” she asked. Ysabel was a beautiful, tough, no-nonsense Cuban woman who worked in the settlement houses in Cincinnati. Voted for Eleanor Roosevelt.

So, what lines have I put myself on? Over the years, I’ve spoken out about the refusal of feminists to look at their own failings. I’ve been critical of women’s studies, which has led to the ghettoisation of women’s issues. I’ve taken issue with identity politics, which has fractured the Left, leaving it with a paucity of ideas and, more often than not, on the defensive, never setting the agenda. Letting Rush Limbaugh set the agenda – bad idea.

I’ve grumbled at length about post-modern theory, which didn’t put a premium on distinguishing good writing from bad and encouraged the belief in three generations of students that objectivity is a fool’s errand. Telling truth from lies: fundamental human endeavour. Give up on that and we’re dead on the vine. I’m hardly the first to object to post-modern theory, but my peers from the 1960s and 1970s embraced it with such self-righteous fervour that to question it put me beyond the pale.

I’ve taken aim at the Australian arts grant system, which was established with the best of intentions – small population so writers, artists, and film-makers needed encouragement – and now is just a trough. Also, over time, people receiving grants have come to feel not only entitled to them, to view them unquestioningly as their due, but also to equate their talent with the money they receive. Pot-shots, too, at writing schools, which produces fiction narrow in scope because writers go to writing school and then teach in them; their experience of the world is necessarily limited. The old saw about writers writing about what they know should be amended to get out in the world and then write about what they know. A sidebar here: Elizabeth Hardwick maintained that writing can’t be taught. You either have that particular talent or you don’t. A love of reading, though, can be taught, she believed.

Bankers. I became acquainted with them after a stint on Wall Street in the nineties. Lots of thoughts on that profession, the main one being that banking needs to be rethought because of computers. The volume and speed of trading that computers enable means that risk can’t even begin to be controlled. As well, computers amplify gossip, and, as we all know, markets are as emotional as a two-year-old.

All of the opinions I’ve just outlined are argued with more nuance, I hope, in Trouble. Thecost of having these opinions? In large part, sidelined and ignored. Especially by the crusty old sisterhood. It used to bother me.  Not any more. Was I sidelined and ignored deliberately? Perhaps not. I used to have the sensation whenever I returned to Australia that the words coming out of my mouth couldn’t actually be heard.

There’s a psychological phenomenon called cultural blindness. Sometimes called cognitive blindness. Psychologists did an experiment and dropped a gorilla amongst a group of people – I’m simplifying here – and they couldn’t see the gorilla because they didn’t expect one to be there, in the middle of the street. And then there is the probably apocryphal story of the Pacific islanders who couldn’t see a ship with big white sails that had anchored in their harbor because such a vessel didn’t exist in their world. Similarly, the issues I was bringing up weren’t part of intellectual debate in Australia and, thus, couldn’t be heard. Cognitive deafness. Not a value judgment: every culture has different preoccupations. And I don’t live here and haven’t done so for more than three decades. Benefit of the doubt.

As well, with age, one gains a little bit of self-knowledge, or so one hopes. I’m an outlier, a contrarian, by preference and personality. Over to the side, the edge. I prefer to observe than be observed. One thing that has always puzzled me about many Australian expat writers: They want your approval. They want you to like them. I find this bizarre because they come “home” and can be mightily condescending and then get upset when Aussies object. As it happens, I don’t feel like them: I don’t care what you think of me. I avoid reading bad reviews – that comes with age. When it comes to reviews, what one wants, whether the book is praised or panned, is an intelligent review. And I’ve long ago come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to be heaped with prizes and grants and featured on the front covers of the weekend magazines.

Not caring. My husband’s Alzheimer’s changed me. For seven years I watched a man with a capacious brain, a person of great curiosity and inventiveness, lose it all, piece by agonizing piece, until he was a diapered, unknowing lump of flesh. The experience cauterised me, boiled me clean of need. This happens sometimes when life comes at you hard, as I’m sure more than a few of you know. As long as I have a roof over my head, friends with whom I can laugh or cry, a mystery to read or a movie to watch, a novel or an essay on the go – I’m happy. I could add bankers being bad actors to that list: They are the gift that keeps on giving for writers such as me. My life in New York suits me. It’s private, anonymous, no-one judges me. I’ve had enough of ideologies – of -isms – to last several lifetimes. Enough of closed minds, intellectual dishonesty, and false modesty, ditto.

I write in Trouble that I’m even more radical now than when I was in 1970. Now I know of what I speak. Stick out my neck? Sure. Why not? A bit incorrigible that way. And not a whole lot of choice, really, in the matter. While I put together my notes for this event, I was listening to the Australian C&W singer Kasey Chambers: …I’ve got something to say/and I thought it might be worth a mention/If you are not pissed off at the world/Then you’re just not paying attention. Kasey – a woman after my own heart.

I was asked by James Valentine on his ABC radio talk program whether it is possible to make a stand, be a radical, these days, what with all the jabbering blogs. Everyone’s got an opinion. Is it possible to stick your head above the parapet? Is there a parapet? Later in the week, James moderated a discussion with my brother, Dare Jennings, and myself. During the event, I banged on about the grant system and its deleterious effects, as is my wont. (My brother’s version of this is that instead of going to business school or the like, everyone should be put on clipper ships and be made to sail the China Seas. So to speak.)  On the way home, I could hear Dare and James cackling in the front seat. What was the joke?: “Kate, you keep saying things that are illegal in Australia.”

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was easy to say and do “illegal” things. Wear a dress, for example, when your feminist sisters were wearing overalls. I was interviewed a week or so ago by a young woman journalist in Melbourne. First thing out of her mouth as she eyed my sixty-two-year-old face and neck: “So glad you are not using Botox.” Ahem. Second observation was about my clothes. A jacket from Calvin Klein Collection and boots from Barney’s that day, if I remember correctly. Not what she thought a radical would wear. It’s the ideas and not the clothes, I had to point out, that are radical. The most radical man in America in recent memory is Paul Volcker, one of President Obama’s economic advisors and former Fed chief, because he put the words “purity” and “banking reform” in the same sentence.

When I reached the end of Trouble, I realised that I had one overarching theme: the need to keep an open mind, an open heart. Of course, I could be fooling myself, but I’d like to think I’ve tried to the best of my ability to do both. I have a friend who is of Vlach heritage, a people who live up in the vastnesses of the Macedonian mountains, among other places, and they have a strong oral tradition. He told me of one of their sayings:

I knew a tale, I told a tale. How well I don’t know, but I have not deceived you.