Living With David Williamson – Kristin Williamson

Issue 2 | 12 May 2009

Kristin Williamson has been an actor, journalist, and teacher and is also the author of eight books. She addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 12 May 2009, to discuss her latest book, David Williamson: Behind the Scenes, a biography of her husband, one of Australia’s best-known playwrights. She outlined her approach to writing the biography, the research it required and explained the personal and intellectual challenges she encountered along the way.

LIVING WITH DAVID WILLIAMSON

KRISTIN WILLIAMSON

Virginia Woolf once declared that biography was “an impossibility. Biography pretends that a life can be told, when experience teaches us that it cannot.”

Other respected writers, like Inga Clendinnen, also doubt that a life can be told from the outside. Clendinnen was my lecturer at university on Aztec and Mayan cultures and an excellent one she was too. Two years ago, after winning many prizes for her own memoir, Tiger’s Eye, she gave the National Biography Award lecture, in Sydney and Melbourne. She astonished the audience of would-be biographers by choosing to speak on the impossibility of biography. But Inga is very persuasive. She quoted the French novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who said (in translation): “Everything that’s important goes on in the darkness. We never know anyone’s real inside story.”

Woolf lampooned the whole genre too – although she completed a biography of her friend Roger Fry, which she described as “a grind” just weeks before she died.

Clendinnen points out that, “once dead and deprived of the power to answer back, the biographical subject can be reduced to a puppet made to dance to any tune the puppet-master fancies”. She believes that biographies are dangerous. They cause rage, tears and lawsuits. They can involve “strategic betrayals” and “the looting of secret drawers”.

So why do so many of us want to write autobiographies and biographies? Woolf says it’s “because we have a need for stories, a need to make sense of lives”. By reading or writing about experiences different from our own, our lives are expanded.

After writing this book about David, I agree with Woolf that I had “a need to make sense of” his life and, to a lesser extent, my own. And I agree with Clendinnen that “once dead and deprived of the power to answer back, the biographical subject can be reduced to a puppet”. I wanted David to be able to answer back.  And he did.

I do not agree that biography and journalism are criminal activities that necessarily involve the looting of secret drawers. They may involve the gentle opening of a few secret drawers but, as far as I was concerned, only with the consent of the subject.

But enough of the experts, Woolf and Clendinnen. I hadn’t read either of their strong opinions on biography when I agreed to write this book. If I had I might never have started.

My writing came about by accident when several publishers began pressing David to write his autobiography. He told them he wasn’t interested: “I don’t feel my life has been hugely interesting.” They said that if he didn’t write it soon some unauthorised biographer would do it anyway. Fearing the looming possibility of a puppet master, he told one particularly persistent publisher that he knew a writer who’d kept journals and records of his career for decades. “Ask Kristin.” The publisher was enthusiastic.

I was busy working on a new novel and didn’t want to stop. But I was intrigued. It was a challenge. It wouldn’t be a hagiography, I warned them. “Of course not,” said the publisher. “I don’t see why not,” said David. I said I’d think about it.

David is sometimes described as the storyteller to his tribe and his career had chronicled the political and social texture of 40 years of Australian life. I’d been a journalist reporting on the arts, social issues and politics for some of that time and I felt I knew his plays well. And it was true that I’d been the family archivist, collecting photos, videos, interviews and reviews of David’s work for most of his career, as well as erratically keeping a diary of what went on in the family.

But could I be objective about David’s life? Or did I even want to try? I decided that if I couldn’t always be objective I could at least be honest. If I agreed to write this book it would be about his personal life as well as his professional life – about his marriages, parents, children, friends and critics and about the tensions involved in balancing family and career. It would be about the hectic, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes depressing highs and lows of working in the arts in a country that chronically undervalued them. And of course it would be about politics. What did I think that I could do better than any other biographer? I hoped I could explore and clarify what it is that David does and wants to do in his plays and why this is often at odds with what critics think he is doing – or should be doing.

Anyone who has followed David’s career in the press will be aware that although his audiences are large and loyal he has often been at odds with his critics. Some might say he is a little paranoid about critics. And he certainly can be. So are most artists. Writers like David who are particularly sensitive to social undercurrents and power plays and who write about them so well are very sensitive to criticism.

I also wanted to show how his plays reflected what was going on in society over four decades and often how this affected his personal life, sometimes to the detriment of our relationship. I wanted to be candid about that. So many biographies I have read paint a picture of their subject as admirable but entirely without faults. These biographies, I think, are bland and sometimes unbelievable.

I remember how excited David was when he was hired in Hollywood to write a film about the life of Martin Luther King. This was to be an adaptation of the excellent biography of King called Pillar of Fire written by Taylor Branch. Branch’s book showed King as an admirable man but it also detailed his infidelities. David’s screenplay, which included these, was rejected by studio executives on the grounds that an icon like Martin Luther King must appear to be without fault.

Finally, in my biography of David, I wanted to focus attention on his entire body of work that includes 11 films, 5 complete television series and 42 produced plays. (That number of plays is more than Shakespeare wrote, although Shakespeare died at 52 and David is 67, so compared with the great bard David has been slack!)

David was very enthusiastic about my decision to write his biography because he thought I wouldn’t have to bother him. It’s true, he does hate to talk about himself. “You know the answers to all those questions interviewers ask me. You’ve heard them a hundred times,” he said. “Just write what you know.” I said I might have a few different questions to ask. He looked slightly dubious.

And so began two years of questioning. I tried not to be ruthlessly forensic because I know how he hates to be probed, especially when I asked about things he’d done more than 30 years ago that he’d rather forget and reminded him of his failures as well as his triumphs. I wanted to show his vulnerability and paranoia as well as his wit, charm and delightful larrikinism. Although he was sometimes disconcerted he never shied away from answering truthfully, which was brave, I think. Although David is not secretive about his opinions or feelings and we’ve always talked openly together, I learned quite a lot I didn’t know about him during those two years. We recalled things we’d shared differently too. I’ve tried to preserve some of that difference of opinion in the text.

I conducted long interviews with David’s aunts, uncles, cousins and his brother Peter and I was fortunate enough to have strong memories of both his parents before they died and to have kept some of their letters. I traced old school-friends from his years as a teenager, even finding a girl who’d been in love with him for years but had been too shy to tell him. He was touched to hear this story because he’d spent most of his adolescence feeling too tall and unattractive. “I would have jumped on her if I’d known,” he told me.

I talked to friends from Melbourne University who remembered his first skits for the Engineers Revue and also interviewed some enemies, including the critics. I interviewed each one of our five children about what it was like growing up with an often distracted playwright as a parent. I went to the Archives in the National Library to unearth all those outraged letters and emails fired off in fits of rage to his critics, directors, producers and agents, many of which showed him in a rather poor light.

To his credit, David didn’t censor anything I wrote. At the end of each chapter I’d let him read it, not for approval but to see if there were any factual errors. Sometimes it was painful for us both. We had to relive the tumultuous years of the 1970s and 1980s during which, at least in our circle, marriage was totally redefined. At other times he’d laugh out loud. Sometimes he was indignant at what one of his critics had said or surprised at some secret I’d uncovered. Occasionally I’d hear him telling friends about one of these and when I asked him not to reveal it at least until the book was published he’d say crossly, “Why not? It’s my story.”

This is David’s story, of course. But, as my publisher and editor Ben Ball told me when I was struggling to hit the right balance between wife and biographer, “It’s your story too. Put yourself in it.” And so I did. I’ve kept my own work in the background but it features to some degree, as it would in the story of any married couple.  For this, I apologise to the reader who is expecting pure biography.

I am grateful to David for allowing me to probe so deeply. He’s been long suffering and courageously honest. I have tried to reveal what it was that made him a writer and from where he has drawn his inspiration. It’s a portrait of his background and experiences, his insights and intellectual curiosity. It’s the story of his writing and the audiences who have responded to his work over four decades because it reflects what is going on in their lives too.

Recently I’ve been on tour, promoting this book by doing radio and television interviews and giving talks and readings at bookshops and in libraries. It’s interesting to see what audiences are curious about. After some extracts from the book were published in a national newspaper with rather embarrassing headlines like “The Life and Loves of David Williamson” and “After the Affairs” – there was a predictable interest in that angle. I would have preferred not to have had to answer questions about that. It was such a small part of the book. But it was still a part of it so I had little choice. But mostly the people I spoke to were interested in the wider issues explored in the book and seemed very positive about it.

Occasionally David would agree to be interviewed alongside me and he would good-naturedly admit straight away that he had been naive to expect that a wife with a background in investigative journalism would write a biography full of nothing but praise. But hopefully, as we bantered in public about broken marriages, Maoists, the “establishment” theatre versus the left-leaning fringe, the curse of the critics, the playwright’s paranoia, the delicate balance required when there are two careers and a family of teenagers, the horror and excitement of working with a superstar like Madonna and the joy of seeing a new play delight an audience, people would realise that whatever mess we had created in our lives together there was still a strong bond between us.

As one interviewer said at the end of an hour with us: “This book is not only about a playwright’s career but it tells a love story with a few hiccups.”  I have tried to make this is an honest tale about the work, the times, the man and his family.