The pen and the bottom line.(Culture)(writing as absolute freedom)

LORNA SAGE (whose spellbinding autobiography Bad Blood was published in 2000, and who died a year later of emphysema) talked of novelists being engaged in a sort of imaginative civil war in which a writer could come down on both sides. Novelist Murray Bail, when asked about the difference between writing an art biography and a novel (in 1981 he produced a luminous book on the art of Ian Fairweather) waved me difficulty of the former away with his hand. "Facts," he said, "they're just facts."

When it comes to writing history, Simon Schama bemoaned tide lack of "great narratives ... capable of stirring the imagination" which those enduring historians like Gibbon, Voltaire, Macaulay, Trevelyan and Carlyle had delivered. His most telling point however, was this: the truths offered by such histories "will always be closer to those disclosed in great novels or poems than the abstract general laws sought by social scientists". Thomas Keneally recently drew attention to some pitfalls faced by most--if not all writers; the solitude that can become habitual and "the lack of tribal communal friction".

Any way you look at it, writing may be the last guild--or craft--left on this furiously professional planet. Many of its practitioners will place themselves in a silent and lifelong apprenticeship to one or two whose example is, for them, unassailable. But there will always be dissent over who might offer this example, and it is more often the preserve of the young whippersnappers, elevated in this postmodern world to posts of unlikely loftiness, to patronise their elders. For example, McKenzie Wark, former lecturer in media and cultural studies at Macquarie University, had this to say of an essay by Janet Malcolm, whose writings include a meditation on the writing of biography (The Silent Woman) and a luminous examination of Chekhov (Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey): "I find Malcolm's reading somewhat strained frankly, but the thinking spark is at work in it." Yes, reader, wince.

On the other hand, the eminent China scholar Pierre Ryckmans, with a much larger reservoir of experience, punctured some of Andre Malraux's historical and literary pretensions in an essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in 1997. He suggested that Malraux, whose verbal incandescence and theatrical persona had seduced the likes of Charles de Gaulle and Andre Gide, was essentially a dull and pompous writer. He invoked Vladimir Nabokov and Jean-Paul Sartre, who were both in agreement. Sartre once suggested: "Yes, Malraux has got a style--but it is not a good one," and Nabokov called one of ms tomes "a solid mass of cliches".

Sometimes the easiest way for a writer to tug the tails of sacred cows is to arrange for fictional characters to deliver some astringent observations. In his novel Youth, J.M. Coetzee has a young man from South Africa settle into the grim London bed-sit--there to agonise over the possibilities of ever writing good poetry or prose. He ruminates on Shakespeare and cannot see "why verse has always to be rising to a declamatory pitch, why it cannot be content to follow the flexions of the ordinary speaking voice". He is sceptical of Pope, who is "still too much at home among petticoats and periwigs". He likes Chaucer, who keeps a "nice ironic distance from his authorities", and unlike Shakespeare, "does not get into a froth about things and start ranting". This young man doesn't like the "slack versifying" or cloying sentiments of the Romantics or the Victorians. He believes it is Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot who will point the way for him.

Occasionally it can be a temptation to draw attention to the work of an admired writer as a vehicle for denting another's, as the now retired Supreme Court judge Roderick Meagher demonstrated in his brief essay on Helen Garner in the October 2005 issue of Quadrant. Now Meagher knows a thing or two about the law, and Thomas Keneally knows a thing or two about writing. When Keneally once suggested that Patrick White's Voss "was recognised ... as a great literary work" he was re-stating an unassailable fact. Keneally suggested that White had used the then acceptable nineteenth-century metaphor of Australia--"vacancy and peril"--as an image for the emptiness and callowness of the Australian heart, and his comment that White's prose was "demanding and succulent" carries much more authority than Meagher's peremptory endorsement of A.D. Hope's comments "illiterate and pretentious sludge". Roderick Meagher and Patrick White's families were related, so it is a temptation to comb White's novels for spiky burrs of disdain---casually disguised--for members of that large and extended clan.

Silence has served many writers well. "Writers," said Coetzee in a collection of essays called Doubling the Point, "are used to being in control of the text and don't resign it easily." He is famously unavailable for that spontaneous exchange that interviewers attempt to elicit from reluctant subjects in the hope that some revelation-some key to thus-far unrevealed truths--will inadvertently be turned in the conversational lock. Not for Coetzee they ...