Dear Editor,

Following my piece in last month’s ABR, the Australian’s feature writer, Luke Slattery, tells me he has no recollection of ever sighting an essay of mine, rejected by the Good Weekend, and subsequently submitted to the Australian by my agent in 1993. That may very well be so. Equally, Peter Craven in the Australian’s ‘Higher Education Supplement’ has pointed out that in my ‘bewildering’ fictionalised introduction I say that at my meeting with the famous novelist she drank a short black coffee. He says: ‘I believe Helen Garner has never drunk a short black’. And that may very well be so. Does Peter Craven then agree that there is a problem with the technique in The First Stone, in which Helen Garner has taken selected quotes, out of context, from several people, including myself, and attributed these quotes to a variety of fictionalised characters? Does he know whether or not I have ever drunk cappuccino?

Cassandra Pybus, Lower Snug, Tas.

Dear Editor,

Cassandra Pybus and Ramona Koval, in the latest issue of ABR, join Graeme Duncan, in the latest issue of Quadrant, in making important contributions to the critical reception of The First Stone which is now emerging. Cassandra Pybus’S questioning is clear and strong in analysing how the book fails as investigative journalism in both its procedures and its ethics. Instead, as Ramona Koval points out, the book pursues a sustained and derogatory portrayal of the young woman, ‘Elizabeth Rosen’.

My concern is that readers have been misled about the ‘truth’ of this book and its status as ‘non-fiction’. The Australian’s ‘Weekend Review’ (6-7 May) called the book ‘Garner’s controversial true account’. Peter Craven, in The Australian (10 May) called it ‘that best­selling account of the Gregory Affair at Ormond College’. Robert Manne (The Age 12 April) writes of Dr Gregory’s dancing with ‘Nicole’ as though there were no difference between factual and fictional names. Luke Slattery (The Australian Magazine 4-5 March) called the book ‘the first full rendering’ of the story.

The First Stone is not an accurate, reliable, or factual account of events surrounding the allegations of sexual harassment at Ormond College. Helen Garner’s book is not informed by an understanding of sexual harassment, its definitions, remedies, processes, or effects. The book is not informed about contemporary feminism or its debates. Instead, we get a great deal of dodging sideways. Dramatisation, invented dialogue, highly selective sequences of events, hypothetical meetings with imaginary characters are all stitched up with fact and verbatim quotation into an apparently seamless web. Gaps and inconsistencies, unanswered questions, contradictions, and improper disclosures are drowned out by Garner’s own shrill protestations. No wonder readers are feeling puzzled, confused, betrayed, and patronised.

But, more importantly, given the moral posturing of the author, this book is mercilessly unheeding of the people whose lives have been fictionalised to produce ‘a decent shape’. When asked by Andrea Stretton how she imagined these people would continue to live after the book, Helen Garner replied, ‘Er, um, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that.’

Jenna Mead, North Carlton, Vic.

Dear Editor

I know it’s not the done thing to reply to a review – but I simply can’t let Liam Davison’s inaccurate comment on my motivation for writing Movie Dreams pass uncorrected, in his otherwise pleasant review. Movie Dreams was not written with any ‘market’ or ‘film rights’ in mind, youth or otherwise. It is true that people in their late teens and twenties seem to relate strongly to the book, but I believe they are quite sophisticated enough to distinguish between some cynical market formula ‘aimed’ at them and a serious attempt to enter the world of a seventeen year old and to convey some of his pain and confusion.

Like all my novels, Movie Dreams was written out of the complex mix of obsession, passion, conviction, and hard slog that most fiction writers are probably familiar with. That mix leaves no room for market considerations, even more so with Movie Dreams, which was a particularly difficult book for me to write. As with all my novels, the question of who will actually buy them is only addressed once they are finished and the publishing process begins. Any other interpretation is a singular misreading of my work and why I write.

Rosie Scott, Glebe, NSW

Dear Editor,

In his review in the May 1995 ABR, Laurie Duggan (poet and postgraduate fine arts student) bewails the level of debate he discovers in my book on the Roar group of artists. He writes, ‘when the levels of debate seldom rise above weekend magazine standards these kinds of justification probably “rool o.k.”’, and sends the argument hurtling downhill himself by devoting a fair portion of his review to my reference to ‘ten people sharing a single electricity plug’. Out of context this appears banal indeed. He dodges the main issue involved here: the controversy over conceptual art versus painted or sculpted work in which the Roar group took a central place. For their stubborn resistance to anything other than the latter forms they received a consistently bad press. I demonstrated how personal the debacle became when they were condemned as not fully committed to their ‘vocation’ because they were thought to be financially well-off. Along with other examples I use the electricity plug to evoke the amusing but debilitating chaos of a household in which art making was more important than basic convenience. But Laurie Duggan seems to rely on that plug even more than the poor Roar artist. He finds an inconsistency in that she had renovator parents who discovered the Roar building. I don’t write that the building was donated but that the artists renovated further themselves, paid for renovation and a standard rate rent.

Laurie Duggan does not read carefully enough. I do not write that after a few months of exhibiting James Mollison invited these artists to decorate the National Gallery restaurant This occurred four years later. I have more such examples but space precludes.

Duggan queries my description of Roar work as Expressionist because it is not gloomy. Doesn’t he know that Expressionism can be upbeat too? He goes on to argue that I do not ‘contest’ the term Expressionism as applicable to all the artists, failing to notice my chapter ‘NonRawRoar’ dedicated to just this point, as well as that entitled ‘NewRoar’, which provides detailed analysis on the modified original raw Roar.

Duggan seems unaware of the role of direct expression in art: the Surrealists’ automatic writing for example which influenced the group via the Cobra painters, dismissing my explanation as ‘primitivist mumbo jumbo’. Again, he seems not to have read my discussion of the Roar interpretation. For Roar this approach involved little or no pre-planning and a desire to allow identifiable images to emerge during the painting process.

The author is not well-placed to respond to the reviewer’s observation that her writing is ‘slipshod’ and may merely protest. His reasoning as to the cause of its alleged defects is another matter. Such flaws, he postulates, are a result of ‘onscreen revision’. Should I buy a fountain pen? Yes, what about the level of debate?

Traudi Allen, Warrandyte, Vic.

Dear Editor, 

Though I applaud Gary Crew’s attempt at redressing the balance against Australian writers for youth’ I deplore his lack of knowledge concerning current British and American writing in this genre. To describe the work of Lesley Howarth or Jan Mark, Berlie Doherty, Gillian Cross, Anne Fine, Philip Ridley or Robert Swindells as ‘wallowing in the marshes of whimsical nineteenth century childhood ...’ is patently ignorant. And think of writers such as Paula Fox, Virginia Hamilton, Susan Cooper, Laurence Yep and Sid Fleischman before you believe that American writers have ‘sold out to the commercial pressures of turgid teenage angst pulp’.

Wendy Boase, Walker Books, London

Dear Editor,

The only off-putting thing I read in the ABR April issue was John Tranter’s review of Peter Porter’s Millennial Fables. John Tranter has written some fine poems in his day, but this particular critical performance will not enhance his reputation.

He addresses the subject of Porter’s references in his work to various eminent literary, artistic and intellectual figures and concludes, ‘What do they have in common? Why, they’re all dead white men: surprise!’ Well, it’s true that Auden and Marvell (and Richard Strauss and Freud) are male and dead, but the trouble with comments like this is that they give the unfortunate impression that the speaker knows nothing else about them.

And something similar is a bit alarmingly -suggested by the list of supposedly ‘recondite’ words which Peter Porter, a poet mind you, is charged with using. Tranter leads with his chin by listing examples which include a number of words likely to be in most literate people’s vocabularies.

I don’t think there’s any point in denying (and he would not himself) that Porter can have his obscure references as well as his exoticisms of diction, but these are scarcely faults in a poet whose duty is to the language and to the ‘self’ which he shapes through it. Modem poetry in most of its manifestations since the start of this century would be impossible if it had to take too much stock of the potential reader’s limitations of vocabulary and culture-limitations which we’re all likely to have one way or another.

What is so saddening about Tranter’s piece is that his own devotion to Ashbery should have taught him that poetry can be great without the reader knowing what’s going on. That is, after all, one of the central tenets of even T.S. Eliot’ s criticism of it and it is plainly relevant to whatever form of modernism or postmodernism Tranter might be con­strued as practising.

It helps, of course, if a critic has his wits about him. In his discussion of a particular Porter poem that takes off from one by Marvell, Tranter actually castigates Porter for not acknowledging that Ashbery also has a poem with the same point of origin. This comes close to being the silliest critical remark l have ever read and John Tranter (‘Sir John’ as some of his contemporaries call him) would do well to reconsider it. Imagine there being a literary law that whenever· someone used a literary reference (let’s say to Virgil or Catullus), he/she had to take on board every other previous use of it.

Tranter’s overt grouch is that Porter is not as interested in Ashbery as he is: ‘The fact that Porter’s note pointedly ignores (Ashbery’s piece) implies that, like many a British poet with his back turned on the glittering lights of New York, he simply doesn’t wish to know about such things.’ I suspect that suave and expert critical intelligence that Ashbery some­times lets slip would wince at ‘the glittering lights of New York’. Tranter’s real objection-and it is a categorically ignorant one-is that the contents of Porter’s mind are not identical with his own. Besides, I recall Peter Porter writing perceptively and appreciatively about Ashbery some years ago, a fact that John Tranter should have been aware of.

No one who read a page of Porter’s literary criticism and a page of John Tranter’s would conclude that the expatriate had gaps in his literary education.

Peter Craven, Fitzroy, Vic.