The taste for television interviews is relatively easy to understand; when you put an intelligent, articulate, knowing, passionate character like Michael Parkinson in front of a camera with somebody who’s famous for being in some way extraordinary, the dynamism and potential drama of the resulting exchange can be great to watch and listen to. It’s television without a safety net. Sure, it’s been edited – all the dead bits and all the dirty bits have been pared away like a ragged fingernail – but what’s left is a kind of flowering of conversation, a script that grows out of itself as you watch it, its directions and conclusions genuinely unknown by the participants.

Published interviews don’t create this kind of excitement, obviously. But what they do share with television (and radio) interviews is a mediating function between the audience and the subject; interviews create for members of their audiences a kind of intimacy with the person which adds a whole new dimension to our sense of that person’s work. And if the subject is an artist, that can be an enlightening experience. Usually we know the art but not the artist; and the art is presented to us whole and entire, perfect according to its lights, finished, hermetically sealed. But for anyone interested in the creative process, discovering the bits and pieces of attitude and experience that go towards the work is fascinating. To watch or read an interview with an artist is to watch the artist-in-process, so to speak; to discover the dynamics of artistic production.

And this is especially true if the artist is a writer, because when writers talk they are in their own element, their own medium – words. A talking writer is a swimming fish. One of the most interesting things about published interviews is the way they contain (if well conducted and well edited) the most appealing elements of both the spoken and the written word; it’s rare to get the best of both words in one hit. Usually one must settle either for the unpredictable and occasionally static electricity generated by the live wires of conversation, or else for the immaculate satin gloss of the carefully written and re-written text. In a good interview with a writer, whose very business it is to be articulate and imaginative, you get both. So these two collections of interviews with Australian writers make good reading simply because of the kinds of books they are.

Preparing and conducting an interview, however, is a surprisingly difficult thing to do; and Baker and Ellison are working in the double shadow of Jim Davidson and, beyond him, the Paris Review. As Harold Bloom has pointed out, although he didn’t put it quite this way, the trouble with an honourable tradition is that it’s made up of hard acts to follow. Jim Davidson’s interviews with writers over a number of years for Meanjin, collected as Sideways From the Page, is pretty much the definitive collection of complex, coherent, high-quality conversations with (mostly) Australian writers. And Davidson’s interviews were inspired by the Paris Review series which practically elevated literary interviews to the status of a literary genre. Neither Baker’s interviews nor Ellison’s have the depth and breadth of Davidson’s, although it must be said of Davidson that he sometimes only achieved this by asking questions that were rather longer than the answers – a disconcerting technique, and one which both Baker and Ellison avoid.

Jennifer Ellison has set herself the task of interviewing a group of specifically Australian, specifically female writers; she says in her Introduction:

In the 1980s women writers enjoy a prominent place in Australian literature … But under what conditions do these authors write, and why has the number of women writers increased so dramatically? To what degree does the feminist movement account for this rise? This book was motivated by a curiosity about the answers to these and other questions.

Perhaps it’s because she has set herself such a specific task that Ellison’s questions sometimes seem a little formulaic and mechanical, and you can often see the writers rather resisting the terms in which she couches them. And in a book containing interviews with d’Alpuget, Anderson, Astley, Bedford, Dowse, Farmer, Garner, Grenville, Jolley, Lord, Masters, and Savage, one surprising gap is the absence of an interview with Barbara Hanrahan. I’m deliberately avoiding the word ‘omission’, which assumes that the idea of interviewing Hanrahan did occur to Ellison, and that, for whatever reason, she decided against it; this may well not be the case. And maybe making the point at all is as fruitless as listing writers who ‘should’ have been included in anthologies. Some would say, however, that to publish a collection of interviews with female writers is by implication if not by definition a feminist enterprise; Ellison certainly makes it clear both in her introduction and in the content and wording of her questions that her own motivation is largely and consciously feminist. So it seems odd that Hanrahan, certainly no polemicist but all the same a writer whose work is quietly but unmistakably feminist in many of its values and assumptions, should have no voice in Rooms of Their Own. I for one would have liked very much to have read her responses to some of the questions Ellison asks the writers she includes.

Some of her questions are a bit breathless, prefaced by a sort of inaudible ‘Ooh-ah’, when she asks about Being a Writer; like a few of her subjects, she seems to buy fairly unquestioningly the mystification of ‘The Writer’ or ‘The Artist’. Most of her subjects, however, resist this to a greater or lesser degree. Blanche d’Alpuget says: ‘People kept asking me what I did. And I’d say, I used to be a journalist, and I’ve written a biography of Sir Richard Kirby, and I’ve written a novel. Then one day I started to say, I’m a writer. It was shorter.’

Helen Garner says, ‘To me the difference between the artist and the non-artist is that the artist is the one who does it.’ Jean Bedford says ‘I think it’s been very destructive, this whole idea that artists are special people.’ And Gabrielle Lord, when asked ‘You don’t feel more conscious with the novel that you’re creating a work of art?’, recoils with the deathless response, ‘Oh shit, no. I ain’t creating no works of art. I’m only telling stories.’

Candida Baker’s interviews in Yacker are more relaxed and conversational, freer; they have the tension and dynamism I talked about earlier, and they read like real conversations. It’s perhaps unfair to make this comparison, really, since this and other particular differences between the two books may well be just as attributable to the authors’ respective editors as to the authors themselves. But Ellison’s book really does give the impression that she started out with a list of written-out questions and worked her way through them systematically, whereas Baker is altogether more responsive and contributory. Perhaps it’s that, unlike Ellison, she hasn’t set herself a specific investigative task and therefore feels freer both to cover more conversational ground, and to let her exchanges with the writers follow their own noses a little more.

Four of Baker’s subjects – d’Alpuget, Astley, Garner, and Jolley – are also interviewed by Ellison, and it’s very interesting comparative reading; they are mostly quite different. The others are Stead, Carey, Hasluck, Foster, Hewett, Malouf, Shapcott, and Williamson. They’re good interviews. Baker elicits from each writer, somehow, a very strong sense of his or her own personality, and this is enhanced by the photographs (Peter Carey looking manic, Nicholas Hasluck and Blanche d’Alpuget looking like movie stars, and Christina Stead in a truly astonishing hat, among others; the Ellison book has some great photographs, too) and by the reproductions of manuscript pages from the authors’ work, mostly heavily annotated and emended, and surprisingly revealing of personality.

Something that is particularly noticeable in both books is the writers’ extreme dissatisfaction with the state of reviewing in Australia. It’s hard to tell how much of this is simply part of the ongoing war that writers have with critics everywhere, and how much is specifically disenchantment with the state and quality of reviewing in Australia in the 80s. Certainly, there is a lot of debate around at the moment on the subject. The writers who are most interesting on this topic are those who don’t simply say, ‘The reviewers are bad reviewers’, but who also explain how and why. David Foster says in Yacker that Australian reviewers consistently fail to recognise his work as satire: ‘It appears quite beyond the average academic reviewer to treat a work in the genre to which it obviously belongs, instead they hit you over the head because you aren’t something you never purported to be in the first place.’

Helen Garner agrees (also in Yacker) that this is a major and unforgivable failing of Australian reviewers generally:

Take Dorothy Johnston’s Tunnel Vision, which I really liked. Now at least one male reviewer said, ‘When I looked at this book, I saw that it was set in a massage parlour, and I thought here’s a chance for some really raunchy stuff, but it isn’t like that, so it isn’t good’. They say ‘this book is about X when it should be about Y’, and so they slag it. I think a writer should at the very least be granted her material, and her subject matter.

This is damning stuff, of a kind to make one look hard but queasily at one’s own practice and the difficulties thereof. One problem, for example, with reviewing collections of interviews is that the sorts of people deemed worth interviewing in the first place usually have, almost by definition, pretty emphatically drawn personalities. And since interviewing of this kind is so much about eliciting self-portraits, it’s quite a challenge for the reviewer not to end up reviewing the interviewees instead of the interviews.

But perhaps it’s permissible at least to draw attention to some of their lovable moments, since nobody minds that. In Rooms of Their Own, for instance, there’s Blanche d’Alpuget observing of the characters in her novels: ‘I have for them the affection one has for old lovers, you know’; there’s Beverley Farmer, spiritedly – even a tad crossly – rejecting Ellison’s suggestions that she is modest and self-sacrificing; and there’s Gabrielle Lord on female creativity, in a particularly lively and charming interview where the seriousness of many of her comments is half-hidden behind a translucent screen of loony wit, as here:

It’s not as if I think the creating of literature or art is any more important or less important than the creating of anything. It’s just that cakes don’t get put in libraries. But so much wonderful stuff gets relegated to the craft level. I think mostly because you can’t refrigerate it, or something. You can’t keep it like you can a painting or a book. The ephemeral sort of stuff, that mostly women do … that just gets kicked down every day.

On the subject of Australian writing and nationalism generally, Jean Bedford and Gabrielle Lord both say highly interesting things which hang around in the mind for a long time afterwards. Jean Bedford, asked about the function of literature in creating cultural identity, says, ‘I believe in provincialism, but I don’t believe in nationalism.’ Gabrielle Lord sees nationalistic art in a stern light and says so with inimitable flair:

I’d like to write a musical called Come On, Ned, Come On, in which Ned Kelly rides Phar Lap across Anzac Beach and beats the Americans. Now I reckon that’d be an absolute winner, with Ned wearing a nice tennis outfit or something. You know, I’m just revolted by that sort of superficial stuff that people just seem to flock to, and that constant self-congratulation that doesn’t examine anything, doesn’t strip anything away, just always trots out the old stuff: the British were bastards, they misused the nice, naive, lovely Australian sportsperson boys, and isn’t it all terrible, and wank, wank, wank. And nothing’s ever looked at …

Perhaps the two writers who demonstrate most consistently in their responses a high and complex quality of mind are Sara Dowse in Rooms of Their Own and David Malouf in Yacker. Dowse’s American-Australian perspective combined with her originality and clarity of thought make her interview gripping reading, as is the beautiful verbal shapeliness and lucidity of David Malouf’s responses – like this answer to a question about moving from place to place:

That notion of ‘where you’re going’ is again part of our way of reading things. Both fiction and history tell us that there’s always a chronology, a line, and people keep wanting to know which line it is you’re on. But while that might be our shape for reality, it’s not necessarily so.

This isn’t to say, however, that one demands of interviews that they be exclusively serious and abstract intellectual exchanges. One reviewer has held forth rather foggily about the ‘trivia’ in these interviews (in both books); she seemed uneasily caught between approval of trivia’s undeniable charm (why else are the Trivial Pursuit people millionaires?) and an unstated but apparent sense that a good interview is an unrelievedly serious interview, in which the subject expounds solemnly on nought but big important things like Art and Life. And no doubt this reviewer would classify as ‘trivia’ the following exchange between Candida Baker and Elizabeth Jolley:

JOLLEY: … Now we onlv have the geese and the Rhode Island Reds for breeding and for the eggs …
INTERVIEWER: Do you like geese? I’ve always found them a bit aggressive.
JOLLEY: I think they are beautiful birds. They are very intelligent and I get upset when they go off and I can’t find them.
INTERVIEWER: They are aggressive though, aren’t they?
JOLLEY: Yes they are. They’ve never been aggressive to me but I always fix them with my eye. I never do anything with them behind me, especially when their women are sitting on nests.  

Now I don’t know about you, but that charming exchange tells me more about Jolley as an artist – about her humour, her aesthetics, the nature of her irony, the quality of her feeling for fellow-creatures feathered and otherwise, and her impossibly rare vision, at once fey and earthed, of the world – than if she had expounded on her theories of art for half an hour. And it reminded me of something Virginia Woolf once said, when holding forth under cover of a character in The Waves, about the representation of life in art and about her own practice as a writer: ‘Let a man get up and say, “Behold, this is the truth,” and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.’

That, perhaps more than anything else, is what makes these books a source not just of information and ideas, but also of pure readerly pleasure. Almost none of the interviewees has forgotten the cat.