REMEMBERING ELIZABETH HARROWER – GEOFFREY LEHMANN

After publishing four books that earned the admiration of Patrick White, Shirley Hazzard and Christina Stead, Elizabeth Harrower published no more novels. She faded from the literary landscape, until being rediscovered decades later to international acclaim. Helen Trinca has now written her story in Looking for Elizabeth – The Life of Elizabeth Harrower. On Monday 21 July 2025, at The Sydney Institute, she joined writer and poet Geoffrey Lehmann, who knew Harrower, to reflect on Harrower as a force in writing circles.

REMEMBERING ELIZABETH HARROWER

GEOFFREY LEHMANN

I was a friend, but not part of Elizabeth Harrower’s circle of intimate friends. The cosmopolitan novelist Shirley Hazzard, who occasionally visited the Australia of her birth, was one of Elizabeth’s intimate friends. Hazzard was neat and compact, perhaps glamorous when young. Christina Stead, a truly great novelist, was another of Elizabeth’s intimate friends. When I met Stead at Elizabeth’s in her old age, I thought she was like a collapsing camellia flower.

The fourth of Elizabeth’s intimates I observed was Patrick White. White had a craggy Easter Island head, like Malcolm Fraser. He shared with Fraser a squattocracy heritage, but where Fraser was obtuse and mediocre, and had to get someone else to help him write a book, Patrick White was sharp and appreciative of others, as well as a Nobel Prize winning novelist.

Harrower was tall for a woman born in 1928, slightly awkward, with an open face and vulnerable. Helen Trinca’s biography of Harrower reports these comments Harrower made about her great friend Patrick:

Simultaneously this sometimes (unwisely) perverse and multi-faceted man, urged me to write, berated me for not writing, hated me for not writing, was mean to me because I wasn’t writing, abused me because I wasn’t writing, told me I was an artist, not a social worker (when I indeed unwisely spent time helping distressed friends and acquaintances like an unpaid welfare worker), told me he was depressed when he thought I wasn’t writing, told me he’d thought of four books for me to write . . . If he cared about me, he was right to mind, right to regret my silence, and at some level I felt grateful for it, but his way of displaying concern was alienating, lowered my spirits and hurt me.

That completes the circle of Elizabeth’s intimate friends that I was personally able to observe.

My friendship with Harrower began with a book review. I did not know her at the time, but I was asked by The Bulletin magazine to review her fourth novel The Watch Tower in 1966. My review was headed “Portrait in Black”. It began:

One of the dominant themes in the Australian novel at present is the conflict between sensitive and insensitive people, and the way in which the insensitive will attempt to undermine and destroy people whom they jealously suspect are different and perhaps superior to themselves.

It is a major theme in Patrick White’s work, and it is also important to the novels of Elizabeth Harrower. This theme looms much larger in Australian literature at present than it does in overseas literature.

I suggested that this conflict between the sensitive and insensitive was important in Harrower and White because they came to maturity when anti-intellectualism was still rampant in Australia. I then quoted “an illuminating passage” from Harrower’s “very beautiful” second novel The Long Prospect, published in 1958 where she wrote about Australia:

Then and there, in the cities, great wealth masked a naivete one would hesitate to call childlike. A contradictory striving after perpetual adolescence, sophistication, and an accumulation of wealth were the motives of action . . . To be one of the self-critical minority was to be not so much politically unsound – for there was very little, it seemed, to be political about as thoroughly, disagreeably un-Australian. Two members of the small minority meeting could not easily part without a promise of further meetings, letters, communication. The opportunity was rare.

This feeling that she belonged to a small self-critical minority is a driving force in much of Harrower’s fiction and led to a correspondence of hundreds of letters with Shirley Hazzard. Perhaps because I was 12 years younger than Harrower, and male, I did not have her feeling of intense isolation. But I was moved by her fiction.

My review of The Watch Tower summarised how two daughters, whose father is a doctor, are selfishly taken away by their mother from a good boarding school and set to work when their father dies, and the mother then abandons them to join some congenial relatives in England. The older sister is constrained to marry her boss, Felix, who turns out to be an evil and friendless spiv. Both sisters live with him in a large house Felix has bought in the Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay, and are exploited by him to work in his businesses without being paid.

My review was lengthy, and laudatory about Harrower’s psychological insight and prose style, commenting that “it is this very understatement which gives her writing its power and sincerity”. My review contained one qualification. I thought that some of Felix’s business deals seemed “far-fetched and improbable. The ease with which he buys businesses, builds them up and then sells them at a loss to handsome young men is astounding. If he were as hopeless as all this, it is difficult to see how he is able to build the business up in the first place.” My final paragraph concluded:

The Watch Tower is not as perfect as The Long Prospect, because in it Elizabeth Harrower does sometimes move outside her range, but it is a striking and sustained work of great sympathy. It depicts absolute evil and waste, but it also contains within it the seeds of redemption.

My vaguely worded “seeds of redemption” allowed me to end my review with a rhetorical flourish – something loved by schoolboy debaters, which I had once been.

A couple of years or so later, I met Elizabeth and we became friends. She perhaps remembered my review as well intentioned, although rather lacking in finesse. In any event, we never discussed it. She wrote a fond inscription in my review copy of The Watch Tower.

In the early to mid-1970s I was invited to a small dinner party Elizabeth held in a Hunter’s Hill flat where she was then living. Elizabeth’s generous purpose was to allow some Australian writers to meet Shirley Hazzard, who was then publishing some remarkable short stories in The New Yorker. Hazzard then wrote a piece in The New Yorker about some of the Australian writers she had met at Elizabeth’s flat.

It is interesting to compare Hazzard and Harrower as writers. Harrower’s novels have a ferocious intensity, and slowly build up tension with small, painful details. Hazzard is crisp and detached. Hazzard’s short stories in People in Glass Houses (1967) are as sharp as cut glass and hilarious. Her two early short novels The Evening of the Holiday (1967) and The Bay of Noon (1970) are lyrically affecting. The Bay of Noon is perhaps Hazzard’s masterpiece – as good as E M Forster. But I was disappointed by her widely acknowledged “masterpiece” The Transit of Venus (1980). I found it too artfully composed and staged. Nevertheless, I gave it a long and favourable review. (I don’t remember where.)

I was recently surprised to find that Harrower had doubts similar to mine about The Transit of Venus. Susan Wyndham and Brigitta Olubas published a selection of the voluminous letters between Harrower and Hazzard: Hazzard and Harrower: The letters. Wyndham later wrote:

Common interests and concerns flow through the letters: their need to write, and the obstacles to writing . . . their left-wing political views and their joint despair that learning, decency and the planet itself were all in decline . . . Harrower immediately read The Transit of Venus, twice, and declared to its author that the novel was “a stunning, dense, complex work”, though she told others she only liked Hazzard’s early novels.

Those words “stunning, dense, complex” give us the first clue as to why Elizabeth stopped writing. To immediately read her friend’s novel twice may indicate Harrower was anxious to like it, but finding it hard to.

Patrick White and his partner Manoly Lascaris were guests at some of Elizabeth’s dinner parties. Manoly and I were both keen gardeners. I was sitting next to him one night and we talked about daylilies. He told me how he came to live in Australia. He and White lived together in Cairo in the final years of World War II. When the war ended, White, as a repatriating Australian serviceman, was given an immediate flight back to Australia. Manoly didn’t qualify. However, flights from Britain to Australia touched down in Cairo to refuel. Although always fully booked, sometimes a passenger fell ill or died on the flight. With luck, Manoly could take the vacant seat. For months he waited for a phone call from the airport – his suitcase packed, and ready to jump into a taxi. Eventually the phone call came, and he rejoined Patrick in Australia.

I was aware that Manoly and Patrick lived in Castle Hill before moving to Centennial Park. I mentioned driving through Castle Hill past a cottage that had roses climbing over a veranda, a red rambling rose with a white eye known as “Bloomfield’s Courage”, and a yellow Banks rose. “That was our house,” Manoly said, (referring to the house where White wrote The Tree of Man). “I planted those roses!”

Elizabeth was a great fan of Gough Whitlam. She confessed that she had his photograph pinned to the back of her wardrobe. Not long after the infamous dismissal of the Whitlam government in late 1975, Elizabeth held a dinner party at her Hunter’s Hill flat. It may have been when Manoly and I discussed his Castle Hill roses. The dinner guests began discussing the dismissal – how terrible it had been. I admired the Whitlam government’s legislative reforms, but I was dismayed by its economic record. I ventured the opinion that I had not been sorry to see the Whitlam government go. There was a shocked silence. Patrick White’s face froze. Manoly came to my defence.

Not long afterwards I got divorced and found myself caring for three small children for three and a half days each week. I lost touch with Elizabeth. A few years later she invited me to a white-painted Federation house in Stanley Street Mosman with sweeping views across Sydney Harbour to the ocean. She told me it had been her mother’s house. The invitation was to a gathering for Christina Stead, who was staying with Elizabeth. I’m ashamed to say that I had not read anything of Stead’s at that time, but I talked with her and liked her very much. (Ditto Gough Whitlam, when I got to know him years later.) That was my last contact with Elizabeth.

To prepare for this talk, I reread Harrower’s second novel The Long Prospect (1958). A child, Emily, is living with her “handsome, twice-widowed” grandmother, Lillian, who is coarse, promiscuous and domineering. Emily’s mother and father are young and clueless and have separated. Emily forms crushes on older, sensitive people she encounters. One of these is Thea, a boarder in Lillian’s house, who is having a long distance affair with Max who is unhappily married. Thea goes away, creating a gap in Emily’s life. Lillian has another boarder Rosen, a bore who is also Lillian’s lover and whom she has stolen from his wife and family. One night Lillian leaves Emily alone in the house so she can go drinking with Rosen and friends. Emily, desperate, turns on all the lights in the house and waits for hours at the front gate for the household to return. It’s likely, after reading Helen Trinca’s biography, that this may be based on an incident in Harrower’s own childhood, when she was living in Newcastle with her grandmother (like the fictional Emily).

After a succession of crushes on various adults, Emily encounters Max who has returned to Ballowra (the New South Wales city of Newcastle) where Lillian and Emily live. Max becomes Lillian’s boarder and the new object of Emily’s obsessive crushes. He is respectful of Emily and goes out of his way to educate her, introducing her to literature and ideas. They become a duo, so much so that other adults in Lillian’s circle become jealous and resentful. Lillian has to eject Max. At the moment of his leaving – the climax of the novel – Emily, who has viewed Thea as a potential rival, tells Max where he can find Thea. These events are all too much for Lillian. She gets rid of her nondescript lover Rosen, gets herself a new man and insists that Emily’s young parents start living together and caring for Emily.

To move in with her newly united and rather uninteresting parents, Emily has to leave behind some of the books Max has given her. She can now lead a normal, less exciting life.

Christina Stead regarded The Long Prospect as Harrower’s masterpiece. I agree. Emily’s manipulation of the adults around her, seeking an escape from her abusive grandmother is wonderfully portrayed. In some ways it is reminiscent of What Maisie Knew – one of Henry James’s many masterpieces. Without consciously willing it, Emily brings her parents back together – something that didn’t happen with Harrower’s own divorced parents.

The next novel by Elizabeth I read for this Sydney Institute talk was Down In The City (1957). Harrower apparently regarded this as an apprentice novel for her later fiction. Esther, an idle socialite in her early thirties lives in a stone Rose Bay house with her family She falls for Stan, a working class factory owner who drives up to their house in a Cadillac and marries Stan two weeks after meeting him. They go to live in a flat in Kings Cross, then very downmarket from a Rose Bay viewpoint. Stan’s an unlikeable, occasional alcoholic, and a bit of a crook, but he genuinely loves and admires “Est” as he calls her. Esther feels compassion for Stan and his hardscrabble childhood. It’s a roller coaster of a marriage. Esther is beaten up by him once, and then a neighbour mentions that Stan’s having it off with a former mistress named Vi. Esther, much to the reader’s surprise, turns on the neighbour and defends Stan with remarkable aplomb, and later confronts Vi, with no resolution and accepts her situation.

On the last page Harrower tells the reader: “That she was she, that this was her one life, her past and future, she most tiredly knew.” Esther is waiting for Stan to come home. The last sentence of the book is a triumph of understatement. Harrower tells us: “Going forward to meet him, she said, ‘Hello Stan.’”

I bought Down In The City second-hand many years ago from Chatswood’s White Elephant for 10 cents, but did not get around to reading it until this year. My copy was owned by the Mickle Book Club of 18 Railway Avenue Wahroonga, now a Ray White Real Estate agency. It was lent at 9 pence per week 57 times over just a few years. How the readers of Wahroonga reacted to this confronting and disturbing book with its remarkable ending is anyone’s guess.

I then read Harrower’s third novel The Catherine Wheel – a new copy which I ordered on the internet. This is her only novel set in England, where she lived for a few years. It is written in the first person voice of Clemency, a young Australian female law student, who is just getting by on a small inheritance. Clemency drifts into a friendship with Christian, a strikingly handsome failed actor and brilliant mimic, who wants to become a tour guide in France. He’s sponging off Olive, an older woman, whom he has lured away from her husband and family. Clemency reluctantly starts giving Christian French lessons, and the French lessons become a full-blown affair. To get him out of scrapes, Clemency starts “lending” him money, which he splurges on alcoholic binges. Christian shows uncanny genius in his displays of helplessness and in manipulating emotions. Realising he’s lethal, and nothing will soon remain of her minuscule savings, Clemency finally disengages from him – describing her experience as “a fiery alphabet”. Harrower’s depiction of Christian is a bravura performance.

Harrower’s first three novels deal with complicated and painful emotions, but they have a formal simplicity. Stan wakes Esther from a life of boring conformity. He allows her to have feelings that are shocking and new. She becomes she. Emily is an innocent manipulator of the adults she depends on and unconsciously engineers an escape from her abusive grandmother and creates for herself a normal life with her parents at the end of her childhood. Christian wakes impossible longings in Clemency, but she recognises the danger and wisely retreats back to a life with her educated English friends.

The novelist Joan London told Jason Steger of The Sydney Morning Herald that she read Harrower’s The Watch Tower when she was 18 years old, and it “gripped her like a nightmare”. There is no diminution of emotional intensity with The Watch Tower, but it is formally more complex than Harrower’s three earlier novels. The accounts I have read of her fifth novel In Certain Circles indicate its plot line is yet more complex and episodic than The Watch Tower. Harrower withdrew In Certain Circles from publication after what has been described as a “condescending” reader’s report. But it seems Harrower had independently formed a critical view of her fifth novel, similar to her comment about Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus being “stunning, dense, complex”. I suspect Harrower’s initial criticisms of In Certain Circles (2014) may be right. But I haven’t read it, and I may be mistaken.

Elizabeth’s first three novels uniquely combine an exploration of a set of complex and difficult emotions and relationships with formal simplicity. She may have thought she needed to develop beyond this formal simplicity. But could she, and was it personally worthwhile? Her novels “grip. . .like a nightmare”. They must have been exhausting to write. Perhaps she just wanted to be happy. The second clue.