A novelist of honour.(Morris West: Literary Maverick)(Book Review)

Morris West." Literary Maverick, by Maryanne Confoy; John Wiley, 2005, $29.95.

THE AUTHOR of thirty books with sales in excess of 60 million copies, Morris West was undoubtedly the most successful Australian novelist. And yet the chattering classes never warmed to him. The glitterati rejected him because he was a Roman Catholic and believed in God. The Catholics were unenthusiastic because of his self-appointed role as vocal critic of the church. The academics ignored him because, in the years of his success, fiction deemed to be commercial was not discussed in lit crit. His leaving his first marriage and leaving Australia provoked resentment in the media. In writing political thrillers about public issues, in maintaining an independent and uncompromising critical stance, he inevitably offended many powerful interest groups. His refusal to accept the offer of a formal political role from the Labor Party caused deep offence, as he recorded in his memoir, A View from the Ridge.

Maryanne Confoy's study of West is more a preliminary sketch than a full biography. She mentions that he was:

 
   the confidant of some significant people in the 
   varied worlds of business, the media and politics, 
   and also among the Church hierarchy, who passed 
   information on to him ... he had access to certain 
   sources of police, diplomatic and economic 
   information not normally available to other people. 

But these people are not named and their perceptions of West are not sought out. The whole area of West's relationships with other writers is similarly absent, which is regrettable in a literary biography. Jon Cleary gets a few mentions, Thomas Keneally a couple, and that is about it. Yet he was a generous and companionable man. I remember a lunch at Palm Beach in which West and Keneally vied with each other in telling appalling pope jokes. But little of that bon vivant and unbuttoned aspect is conveyed.

His relationships with his first American agent, Paul Reynolds, and publisher, Lawrence Hughes of William Morrow, are given fuller treatment. Dr Confoy recurrently criticises West for refusing to give in to his publisher's suggestions for changes to the novels. Another commentator might well see West's position here as a mark of his/integrity as a writer. She charges him with being "conflictual in his expectations of publishers". She doesn't mention that one paperback house had been reprinting his novels without paying due royalties.

Confoy presents him as difficult. But as Bette Davis remarked to Debra Winger, "If you're not difficult in this business, you're nothing," something no less true of publishing than of the movie industry. As for the movies, West had a fund of hilarious and insightful anecdotes about Anthony Quinn and Oskar Werner during the making of The Shoes of the Fisherman. But none of that is given here. His movie involvements receive only slight mention.