Apart from a few stories that are set overseas, most of her writing is about Western Australia and it is full of the appreciation of the landscape and natural life. There are innumerable recurring details and motifs, as there are in all her work: the pear trees, the jarrah forests, the honey trees, the beautiful melodies of the magpies, the complacently cooing doves. One of her continual preoccupations is the remorseless encroachment of city and suburbia upon natural surroundings. Cramped city and spacious countryside are often contrasted in her stories and always to the disadvantage of the former. Boarding houses figure prominently in the stories, symbolic of the rootless urban life of so many of her protagonists.

Even if the characters cannot obtain land, they will go so far as to fantasise about it. In one of the finest stories in Five Acre Virgin, ‘Bill Sprockett’s Land’, Bill gambles away the money his father sent him to buy land. He is then forced into describing the land that belongs to others in letters home to the Black Country of England: ‘After every dreary week in the factory and the boarding house he went out to look at the land and every Sunday he wrote to his father telling him everything that was being done.’ There is a fatalistic quality to the story – we know that eventually Bill’s deception will be exposed – but although the material of Jolley’s stories is most often to do with pathos or is grim and sometimes even horrifying, she is not at heart a gloomy or self-pitying writer.

Characteristically, ‘Bill Sprockett’s Land’ ends on a note of subdued affirmation. Bill’s mother dies and his father arrives from England to take possession at last of the land his son had so lovingly described in letters:

The old man looked at him not understanding what was wrong at first, and then slowly he began to understand. And it was in a moment of deep agony he understood his son for the first time in over f arty years. His disappointment was such that he felt he could not bear it, not for himself, what did an old man like him matter, but for his son. He wished for words to offer the love and pity he felt.

The straightforward tone of this story is relatively unusual in Jolley’s work. More often, pathos is fused inextricably with (if it is not vanquished by) a peculiarly hard-headed and even mordant humour. We see this especially in the opening sequence of six stories about a cleaning woman, Mrs Morgan, and her two children, the feckless Donald and the narrator Mary, all of whom reappear throughout Jolley’s work. In ‘“Surprise! Surprise!” from Matron’, one of many stories set in a nursing home, one of the patients falls over an unwisely placed bucket and lies on the ground moaning. ‘“There dear,” Matron comforts her, “just sit down on this chair and vomit.”‘ Or in ‘The Shepherd on the Roof’, the narrator informs us, ‘A man died in my ward last night … His wife cried so much she had to be given the Valium written up for him.’ Such casual, almost throwaway humour is common in her work.

The Travelling Entertainer

Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1979, $4.50, 181 pp, 0909144214 Jolley’s second collection, The Travelling Entertainer (1979), contains her longer stories from much the same period as the first book – ‘Mr Parker’s Valentine’, for instance, was written in 1962 – and reveals for the first time the extent to which her work is a continuum. She tends to go back again and again, revising and reworking the same material – themes, characters, landscapes, situations, motifs, even names. It is not a question of paucity of imagination or invention – ‘Mr Scobie’s Riddle’ alone contains enough material for half a dozen novels – but of each of her books being a part of one large work, her entire life’s achievement.

The stories contain many elements that appear throughout her work: the preoccupation with land again, the allusions to music (especially Beethoven) and literature (especially Tolstoy), the nursing homes and hospitals, the defeated salesmen, the migrants from Holland and the Black Country including Uncle Bernard again, the first of Jolley’s many treatments of lesbian relationships and of women offering themselves to other women as a form of comfort or consolation or even occasionally a means of achieving power. There is also the lament at the destruction of the natural landscape:

‘It’s progress, Dad,’ they said to the old man. They cleared the bush beyond the toilets and put up a sign saying:

‘Happy Days. Campers Only.’

The men said they were bringing out water and electricity.

‘It’s a new world, Dad,’ they said.

Characteristic of Jolley’s art, little happens in most of these stories. Often they take the form of a meditation over the past, with the narrative cutting back and forth between the past and a static or trivial situation in the present. They are stories mostly about stasis or defeat, the characters are generally passive, and the author unjudging, sympathetically observant.

Palomino

Outback Press, 1980, o.p. pb, 260 pp, 0868882615 Jolley’s third book and first novel, Palomino, was written partly in the late 1950s, partly in 1962, and then re-written over 1970, 1973, and 1974 before finally appearing in 1980. The dates may be important because it is the least typical of Elizabeth Jolley’s works, the only one in which the writing is not instantly recognisable as hers, and it is also the book that critics of her work are most divided over. Helen Garner, for instance, in a delicately appreciative article on Jolley (Meanjin, 2/1983) says that it is the only one of her books ‘which is devoid of her weird humour, and this is one of the reasons for its failure’.

She is right about the lack of humour, though I am not sure that the novel is a failure. The tone is, if anything, lyrical, rhapsodic – even reverential at times. Its subject is a brave one, even in 1980, certainly in 1960, a love affair between a sixty-year-old deregistered doctor and another woman barely half her age. Intense sexual and emotional feeling between women has rarely been dealt with in Australian fiction (though there are exceptions, such as Beverley Farmer’s Alone and Elizabeth Reilly’s All That False Instruction), and Jolley seems so determined not to trivialise the subject that at times she is in danger of going to the other extreme. The two women, especially the older one, Laura Ward, behave with such relentless nobility towards one another that at times they seem rather dull. The subject matter of the novel is potentially sensational; there is not merely the lesbian relationship but an incestuous affair in Andrea’s present and a murder, as well as a love affair, with Andrea’s mother thirty years before in Laura’s past. Jolley, though, is wholly intent on emphasising the affirmative and healing qualities in the relationship. At the end Laura, with her age and experience, understands that she must let the girl go if the best things they feel for each other are not to be destroyed. Despite a sense of strain at times, a self-conscious quality in the writing, I found it an oddly moving and honest book, with some wonderful descriptions of landscape.

The Newspaper of Claremont Street

Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1981, $20 hb, $8 pb, 120 pp, 0909144486 hb, 0909144494 pb. The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981) is vintage Jolley, not the most profound book she has written, but a delightfully amusing and sometimes moving one. The eponymous heroine of this novella is a cleaning woman known as Newspaper, or Weekly, because she gathers gossip from her rich clients and passes it on to the rest of her community. She is closely related to Mabel Morgan (her own name is Margarite Morris), the cleaning woman who appears in the first six stories in Five Acre Virgin and reappears later in ‘Wednesdays and Fridays’ in the recent collection Woman in a Lampshade.

As usual, little actually happens in this easy-paced tale. Weekly saves her hard-earned pennies, living almost like a pauper, until miraculously, hardly able to believe her own audacity, she discovers she has collected enough of them to buy the magic five acre property. There is a cat named Crazy, who gives birth to seven kittens; Weekly blackmails as many of her clients as she can into taking one and patiently drowns the others. She has a brother Victor who is as delinquent as Morgan’s brother Donald and whom in her naivety she betrays into the hands of gangsters. She becomes involved with the eccentric, self-centred refugee Nastasya Torben after her husband dies and her land and her solitude have to be shared. Like so much of Elizabeth Jolley’s work, the novel is largely taken up with a retrospective view of the main character as she goes mechanically about her arduous tasks. Despite the presence of Nastasya, Weekly does finally achieve her ambition of acquiring five acres before she dies and the book ambiguously ends with her dancing before the pear tree she has just planted on her new land, and with the disappearance of Nastasya.

Mr Scobie’s Riddle

Penguin, 1983, $5.95 pb, 226 pp, 014006656XMr Scobie’s Riddle is unquestionably Jolley’s finest achievement to date and one of the best Australian novels to have appeared in the last few years. Set in the appalling nursing home of St Christopher and St Jude, the novel is less concerned with pursuing a narrative than with examining the nature of the institution, its staff and its patients through a documentary-like series of snapshots from different points of view.

Three eighty-five year old men – Mr Scobie, Mr Hughes, and Mr Privett – are given into the hands of the rapacious Matron Price through the agency of a three-ambulance collision at the hazardous intersection just outside the nursing home. All three men wish to return to their own homes to die peacefully but are prevented, virtually by force, from doing so. Each of them dies eventually during the course of the novel. Very little else happens, and in fact the novel uses repetition skilfully to point to the monotony of the hospital’s daily mechanical routine, and its effect on the unfortunate inmates, who are treated as being far less than human: ‘Mrs Rawlings took the patients, one by one, as they were tossed from the bathroom and stuffed them into their clothes. She led them out, one by one, and stacked them in pieces of plastic, in cane chairs, along the verandah.’

The novel is, of course, concerned with the terrible way in which the home – and by implication perhaps Australian society in general – treats old people, but Jolley is far from heated about the issue. It is a very funny novel, for one thing. Throughout, there is a hilarious sequence of exchanges in note form between the illiterate Night Sister M. Shady (unregistered) and Matron Price, in which one masterly non sequitur follows another in quick succession. The one-liners mentioned earlier are much in evidence. ‘Ambulances don’t grow on trees, you know,’ Matron Price mentally reproves the drivers involved in the three ambulance collision. Sister Shade’s report notes: ‘All pats. play cards. Lt Col. Price lose very bad but enjoy himself and Mrs Morgan.’ Struggling to persuade the sanctimonious Mr Scobie to hand over his money to the hospital, Matron Price tells him impatiently, ‘Oh never mind about Jesus right now ... He’s been dead for years, dear.’ The Matron herself directs one of the staff: ‘Robyn! push Miss Nunne’s teeth back. No child, not like that, the other way round. There. That’s better.’ Miss Hailey goes into a lengthy panegyric on the beauty of the song of the magpie. The sociologist interviewing her notes in her diary, ‘Is into magpies.’

Reviewers have referred to the mode of the novel as black comedy, but though the comment is understandable, I think it is misplaced. The triumph of the novel is that it avoids the extremes of seeing the aged people as either merely the victims of society’s cruelty and indifference on the one hand, or as purely comic and eccentric figures, devoid of depth or identity, on the other. It is not polemical, and surprisingly even the monstrous Price is given one scene where we share her worries and doubts, and realise that life is a struggle for her as well as for the victims. However, the humour also lacks the self-indulgence and the relish in suffering and absurdity that characterises so much of the black humour school of writing in the United States. Despite its grotesque quality, one is inclined to suspect that it is based on actual observation.

Woman in a Lampshade

Penguin, 1983, $5.95 pb, 229 pp, 0140066551Woman in a Lampshade, the second book of Jolley’s to be published by Penguin this year, shows her writing at her most assured, though there is little in it to surprise readers of the earlier work. The Newspaper of Claremont Street makes a welcome reappearance, this time dancing before the pear tree by herself as she had done at the end of the earlier novella. Her obsession with land is related much more explicitly to the deprivations of her childhood: ‘Back home in the Black Country where it was all coal mines and brick kilns and iron foundries her family had never had a house or a garden.’ The opposition of city and country is much more pronounced, and Weekly’s feeling towards the soil is one of virtual reverence. The other cleaning lady, Mrs Morgan, also makes a reappearance in a brief story which consists solely of a number of letters she writes to her lodger who, it eventually becomes clear, is also her son. And Uncle Bernard also appears in a less than successful piece of fantasy that has him entering heaven (where he is welcomed by Matron Martha), rejecting it, and departing with Mary: ‘From what I have seen here I have no wish to remain. In that other place a man has the chance to discover what he is himself. In this system which I see here, there can be no such discovery.’

Writing itself becomes more of a concern in the later work of Jolley and there is one curious story in this collection called ‘The Libation’ that seems to relate directly to the experience described in Palomino. A woman holidaying in Vienna discovers some sheets of paper in her room, which seem to be part of a long letter of reply written in response to an especially cruel and obtuse letter of rejection of the correspondent’s novel. As she reads them she realises that the novel is a faithful account of a love affair she herself had with the writer many years ago. The details of the affair recall almost exactly those described in Palomino and the extracts quoted from the novel are virtually identical to passages in that novel. One cannot help wondering if the story was prompted by an actual rejection of the fatuous kind discussed here.

But apart from the powerful ‘Adam’s Wife’ and ‘Two Men Running,’ the gem of this collection is a brief, extremely funny story called ‘Hilda’s Wedding,’ that is a minor masterpiece in the manner of Mr Scobie’s Riddle. The first-person narrator, unnamed but a night nurse in a hospital, decides that the unattractive, constantly pregnant maid Hilda should finally be given a husband, so the night staff collaborate and improvise to arrange her wedding to the Casualty Porter. The grotesque and hilariously irrelevant details are listed successively in Jolley’s most impassive prose: ‘I made her a veil with three packets of sterile surgical gauze.’ Lacking a prayer book for the ceremony, they read from an 1851 Cricketer’s Manual one of the staff happens to have in his pocket. The ceremony reaches its climax: ‘Feegan hurried on. “Dust to dust and ashes to ashes,” he gabbled. “I declare you man and wife.”‘‘

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance

UQP, 1983, $7.95 pb, 157 pp, 070221792 Jolley’s most recent book is another novella which, though recognisably her own work, also breaks some new ground in its original and imaginative conception. In Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, the author cuts back and forth between two separate but interrelated stories. Miss Peabody, a type of the faintly neurotic spinster who figures fairly prominently in Jolley’s fiction, lives a dull and uneventful life with her mother in England. However, she has struck up a correspondence with an Australian romantic novelist, Diana Hopewell, whom she admires and who for some reason responds to her uninformed letters with full and copious accounts of the novel she is currently writing. It is these accounts that make up the bulk of the novel, though Jolley also cuts regularly to Miss Peabody, steadily coming apart as more of her energies and imagination go into the life she fantasises about on the basis of the novelist’s letters, rather than into her dowdy existence in London.

Diana Hopewell’s novel concerns three women in late middle age, who travel regularly to Europe together. Miss Thorne (‘Prickles’) is a superb creation, a more benign but not essentially dissimilar version of Matron Price, who runs a boarding school for girls rather than a nursing home for the aged. She is benevolent in her treatment of the girls’ fathers:

‘The gels,’ she says graciously, ‘are having their bra burning ceremony this evening. Would you like to stay. We have a guest room. There’s the bonfire down there in the corner of the meadow ... It’s not a compulsory event,’

Miss Thorne lets the curtain drop,

‘It’s simply for those gels who wish it, and we only burn old ones you understand,’ Miss Thorne explains, leading the way to the door.

‘Matron checks them, ticks them orf as being suitable, and for every one burned, a fresh one is put on the bill. It works beautifully. They have a system to help out those with all brand new underwear, you understand, a gel with two old ones …’

The humour of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is pervasive but mellower than in Mr Scobie’s Riddle, lacking in the hard-edged quality of Jolley’s satire in that novel. Some of the characters and themes are more or less familiar variations on earlier ones. In particular, the book is preoccupied with several lesbian relationships, all of which have a quality more of solace than the intensity studied in Palomino. As Diana Hopewell writes of another of her books, ‘The story itself is very simple, a bit sordid in places, it’s about two utterly abject women, both post-menopausal, who have a brief and unexciting love affair.’ At the end of the novel, the two stories, real and imagined, England and Australia, converge in an unexpected way to make a comment on a theme that increasingly concerns Jolley in her later work: the relationship between life and art.

Elizabeth Jolley has introduced a comic note into Australian writing that is both new and individual. The Penguin editions of her books mention that she has worked as a nurse, a door-to-door salesperson (failed), in real estate (failed) and as a flying domestic, and all these activities seem to have worked their way into her fiction. As perhaps befits someone whose writing career really only began when she was almost into her forties, and whose first volume was not published until she was fifty-three, her fiction identifies its sympathies very much with older people. As Helen Garner shrewdly remarked, she doesn’t always ‘get’ the idiom and manner of her younger characters accurately, though there are many exceptions. But her writing in toto contains an astonishingly rich gallery of comic creations.