The Shiralee (1955) by D'ARCY NILAND

Reader's Book Club, c 1957

 

 

 

He had two swags, one of them with legs and a cabbage-tree hat, and that one was the main difference between him and others who had to take to the road, following the sun for their bread and butter. Some have dogs. Some have women. And they have them as mates and companions, or for this reason and that, all of some use. But with Macauley it was this way: he had a child and the only reason he had it was because he was stuck with it.

 

 

 

The Novel:  Macauley is a man with a problem. The Depression is making paid work harder and harder to find and the only way he can earn a living is as a ‘swagman,’ travelling by foot through the harsh Australian bush and taking any kind of job he stumbles upon along the way –– shearing, droving and sometimes helping to do the heavy work on farms.

 

Unlike most ‘swaggies,’ however, Mac doesn’t travel alone.  His young daughter Buster –– his burden or ‘shiralee’ –– travels with him and has to be factored in to every decision he makes about what sort of jobs he accepts and even where he should camp for the night.  Mac wishes he could be free of his daughter, live his own life the way he did before he came home from work one day — he lived in the city then — to find his wife in bed with another man and took the kid away to spite her.  Buster talks too much.  She gets tired too quickly and complains all the time.  Mac thinks of her as an unshiftable weight upon his back, yammering away a mile a minute about her pet caterpillar, demanding to know when they’re going to stop for the night as any young exhausted child might do.  He feels responsible for her because he got her mother, Lily, into ‘trouble,' but has never really loved the kid the way parents are supposed to love their children and doubts he ever will.  He only keeps Buster with him because he thinks that by doing so he’s somehow taking his revenge on the faithless woman who betrayed him.

 

At least this is how he feels until his daughter gets sick.  Her illness, which proves to be serious, changes everything.  Forced to confront his true feelings about her for the first time, Mac gradually comes to realise that while she might be his self-imposed burden, she's also a necessary burden to him, a crucial part of his life he can neither deny nor abandon.  Buster teaches him what it means to be a parent and, more importantly, what it means to be a man and put the life and happiness of someone else before that of himself. 

 

 

Penguin Modern Classics UK, 2002

 

 

The Shiralee was D’Arcy Niland’s first novel, based in part on his experiences as a ‘swaggie’ travelling through northeastern New South Wales with his own father during the 1930s. He knew the bush and the people who lived in it and wrote about both with an unsparing and revealing eye for the truth.  But he also knew how soul-destroying it could be to live in the city and wrote about that experience just as skillfully, highlighting the contrasts between the ‘real’ bush and the romanticized view of it popularized by famous 'bush poets' like AB ‘Banjo’ Patterson and Adam Lindsay Gordon in a way that few Australian novelists before or after him have ever succeeded in doing.  'Going bush' was common in Australia up until the end of World War Two and Niland’s bush is a tough place to live in, its climate cruel and unforgiving, the drunks, eccentrics and heavy-handed bosses who populate its towns and highways all too often cut from the same unyielding cloth.  It's a place that Mac escapes to rather than a place he visits for the love of it or because he thinks it represents some bohemian ideal of 'freedom' that cries out to be explored for its own sake.

 

Niland’s clear spare style (which he claimed was influenced by Chekhov among others) manages to capture the beauty of the bush while never trying to skirt the issue of what a strange and lonely place it could be.  Mac and Buster only have each other to rely on during their outback odyssey.  They have nobody else but each other to turn to if one of them gets sick or things go wrong.  Like all great roadtrip stories from that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), what they discover on their journey turns out to be far more important than the journey itself or the number of miles they eventually cover.

 

 

D'ARCY NILAND, c 1940

 

 

 

The Writer:  D’Arcy Francis Niland was born in the northern New South Wales town of Glen Innes on 20 October 1917.  His parents were Irish immigrants and he was actually christened ‘Darcy’ (he later changed the spelling to ‘D’Arcy’) in honour of the Irish-Australian boxer Les Darcy who died in suspicious circumstances in North America the same year he was born.  The Niland family were extremely poor, forcing Niland’s father to take to the road to look for work in the Depression, where he struggled to earn a living –– as his son's creation Macauley does –– any way he could.  Niland, who left school at fourteen, often accompanied his father on these journeys, gathering the material that would later serve as the subject matter for much of his fiction.

 

At sixteen, Niland became a copyboy for Sydney's Sun newspaper, hoping eventually to rise to a cadetship as a reporter.  This was not to be the case, however, as he was retrenched soon afterwards, his employers telling him before he left the paper that he would ‘never make a journalist.'  This rejection only strengthened his lifelong resolve to become a writer and he set about teaching himself to write short stories, submitting dozens to various newspapers and magazines until one was finally accepted and his career was launched. 

 

 

D'ARCY NILAND and RUTH PARK, c 1942

 

 

Kept out of World War Two due to a pre-existing cardiac condition, Niland married the New Zealand-born writer Ruth Park in 1942.  (Her most famous novels The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange were based in part on the families they met as a young couple while living in what was then the poverty stricken working class Sydney suburb of Surry Hills.)  They would go on to have five children together, two of whom, Kilmeny and Deborah, would grow up to become renowned children’s book illustrators.  Niland was a prolific short-story writer and eventually published four collections of his stories as well as five novels, the most famous (and commercially successful) of which was The Shiralee. The book, which has never been out of print, was made into a 1957 film starring Peter Finch and adapted again for television –– with Bryan Brown playing the role of Macauley and Rebecca Smart playing the role of Buster –– thirty years later.  Niland also wrote radio and television plays and song lyrics that were collected and published as Travelling Songs of Old Australia in 1966.

 

D’Arcy Niland died of heart failure on 29 March 1967.  A selection of his best stories, chosen and edited by his wife, was published as The Penguin Best Stories of D’Arcy Niland in 1987 to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death.  Park and their son-in-law Rafe Champion also completed the Les Darcy biography her husband had worked on for most of his life, which was published under the title Home Before Dark in 1995.  Ruth Park herself died in Sydney on 14 December 2010 at the age of ninety-three.

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of Australian novelist and biographer D'ARCY NILAND:

 

 

 

http://www.darcy-niland.com.au/

 

 

 

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Last updated 17 September 2021

 

That Uncertain Feeling (1955) by KINGSLEY AMIS

Panther Books UK, 1975

 

 

She got up and put her arms around my neck.  Wriggling a little, she leaned against me and tried kissing me, as a motorist on a cold morning might abandon the starter button and get going with the handle.  I fired on the first swing and very soon we were swaying about, as if a gaucho had got us round the ankles with his lasso or bolas.  Then, as I now realised had been probable all along, we went and lay down on the sofa.  She put her tongue in my ear, which was noisy and disconcerting and new to me, but which I thought I could learn, given time, to accommodate within my standard practice.  Her clothes started getting seriously disarranged.  After a little while I said: 'Wouldn't this be more fun in the bedroom?'

                                  
 

 

The Novel:  Welsh library assistant John Lewis is interested in seducing (or at least in 'allowing' himself to be seduced by) Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams, the sophisticated, sexually aggressive wife of a local city councillor who has it in her power to recommend him for a promotion.  The fact that Lewis is married to a woman named Jean and is raising their two young children with her and doesn’t really like Elizabeth very much as a person hardly enters into the equation.  As Elizabeth is a woman and seems quite keen on the idea of having an affair with somebody, Lewis is more than willing to make himself available to be that 'somebody' even at the risk of hurting his wife and sacrificing what little remains of his already compromised self-respect.  

 

Although his first attempt to sleep with his new lover ends ridiculously –– they're interrupted by the unexpected return of Elizabeth's husband, which forces Lewis to hide in a closet and later escape her house disguised in a dress –– they finally do succeed in having sex on a beach following their attendance at a drunken party and a tenuously romantic moonlight swim.  While the physical experience of sleeping with Elizabeth is everything that Lewis had hoped it would be, it ultimately leaves him feeling dissatisfied, cheapened and wracked with unexpected guilt over having betrayed Jean and, in another sense, himself.  By sleeping with this slightly crazed councillor's wife, he gains confirmation of what he had uncomfortably suspected about himself all along –– that the idea of making love to her was always going to be more appealing than the sordid reality of the experience itself could ever hope to be.

 

Amis makes great comic mileage out of this situation, but as always in his work the laughter is underscored by deeper questions of conscience, morality and what constitutes decent, socially-acceptable behaviour among supposedly adult human beings and what, in most cases, does not.  Lewis manages to escape from Elizabeth and her collection of arty, semi-fashionable friends, patching things up with his wife (she learns of the affair and gives him a thorough pasting for it), eventually taking a new job in a new town as the manager of a colliery after rejecting the promotion his lover’s cuckolded husband has unexpectedly offered him.  At a party he meets another would-be seductress named Lisa Watkins, freshly arrived from Oxford with her new husband, but this time he’s wise enough to resist her advances, at least for the time being.  

 

Making an excuse, he leaves the party with Jean and takes her to a nearby pub so they can drink with the local miners who are coming off their shifts, the implication being that he's finally learned to be satisfied with small pleasures and a less selfish, more prosaic life as a husband and father.  Beer, in fact, symbolizes Lewis’s character throughout the book, with him consistently preferring it to the more exotic libations consumed by the cocktail-swilling Elizabeth and her empty-headed friends. 

 

Although it was published more than fifty years ago, That Uncertain Feeling asks what are still relevant questions for many people attempting to maintain relationships in the digital age.  Should you have sex with someone simply because they have indicated an interest in having sex with you, even if the thought of doing so repels you in every way except sexually?  And if you do opt to sleep with them, should you then turn round and expect the person you may be otherwise involved with to accept and forgive your infidelity simply because you were too weak and lazy to control yourself?  There’s a suggestion at the end of the book that things won't turn out quite as rosily as it seems for the Lewises, that John's morally admirable decision to switch from philanderer to loving husband may not stick in the end because it's motivated more by the need to rid himself of guilt than it is by feelings of genuine affection for his wife and children.  Boys will be boys, Amis ruefully implies, and they can never really be trusted not to become slaves to their sexual impulses. 

 

HILLY BARDWELL and KINGSLEY AMIS, c 1949

 

 

 

The Writer:  Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 to lower middle-class parents who could never quite come to terms with the fact that they were not as genteel as they pretended to be.  He was drafted into the British Army in 1942 — interrupting the scholarship he had won to read English at Oxford University — to serve in the Signal Corps in northern France.  He published several poems while at Oxford and also began his friendship with fellow poet Philip Larkin, a friendship that was to endure for the rest of their lives and go on to become one of the most celebrated in all of modern British literature.

 

Amis married Hilary (known to everyone as ‘Hilly’) Bardwell in 1948 and moved to Swansea with her after receiving his degree, where he worked as a university lecturer for the next few years while writing his first unpublished novel.  His first published novel was the groundbreaking Lucky Jim, which appeared in 1954 and was immediately hailed as a tour de force by the critics, becoming a bestseller among the young, who had apparently been waiting for a novel which poked fun at universities and other previously off-limits symbols of Establishment (with a capital 'E') authority.  The book subsequently became, along with John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, one of the cornerstones of what was known as the ‘Angry Young Man’ movement –– a label Amis disliked and rejected whenever critics attempted to apply it to his work. 

 

 

KINGSLEY AMIS, c 1960

 

 

Despite producing three children together – Philip, the future prize-winning novelist Martin, and Sally –– Amis and the long-suffering Hilly (he was by this time an alcoholic and a serial philanderer who still got upset after learning that she had been having a passionate affair of her own) divorced in 1965 so he could marry fellow novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who would leave him in 1980 and go on to divorce him three years later, citing ‘unreasonable differences’ as the reason for their split.  Amis proved to be a prolific, funny and increasingly curmudgeonly writer throughout his career, publishing almost one novel per year until his death in 1995, including The Old Devils which won the 1986 Booker Prize for fiction and was later adapted successfully for television.

 

In addition to his novels and Collected Short Stories, Amis also published a memoir, several volumes of poetry, non-fiction on subjects ranging from science fiction to his eventually disastrous love of alcohol, an enjoyable James Bond novel (titled Colonel Sun and published under the pseudonym 'Robert Markham’) as well as editing two poetry anthologies including the highly regarded The New Oxford Book of Light English Verse.  He was the most famous man of letters of his generation and was knighted for his contribution to British literature in 1990.  A major biography by Zachary Leader, who also edited his Collected Letters, appeared in 2006. 

 

 

 

Use the links below to read a damning 2010 interview with HILLY KILMARNOCK (née BARDWELL) in which she speaks candidly about her marriage to KINGSLEY AMIS and an article from Modern Drunkard magazine about the writer's lifelong love of alcohol and what it ultimately cost him:

 

 

 

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-409089/My-life-unfaithful-old-devil-Kingsley-Amis.html

 

 

 

https://drunkard.com/0805_kingsley/

 

 

 

 

 

Vale Film Productions, 1962

 

 

 

 

That Uncertain Feeling was adapted for the cinema in 1962 under the title Only Two Can Play.  The film was written by BRYAN FORBES, directed by SIDNEY GILLIAT and starred PETER SELLERS as John Lewis, VIRIGINIA MASKELL as Jean and MAI ZETTERLING as Liz.  Despite being a critical and commercial success, its star PETER SELLERS never had a positive word to say about his co-star VIRIGINIA MASKELL, the process of making the film or the finished product.

 

 

 

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Last updated 17 September 2021

 

The Write Advice 006: JAMES JONES

Writing short stories has a totally different feel from writing novels… There isn’t that long haul ahead of you staring you in the face: this year, next year, the year after.  By the same token the anguish of creative decision is much sharper writing stories.  The particular point at which you must decide on the structure to point the ending you have finally discovered, comes much quicker… Writing stories is like having a series of high-fever ailments in which the crisis comes soon and either passes or it doesn’t.  Writing a novel is like having TB or some such long term chronic ailment with a low grade fever that it takes a long time to cure.  Take your choice.  It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Introduction to The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (1968)
   

 

Use the link below to visit the website of THE JAMES JONES LITERARY SOCIETY:

 

http://www.jamesjonesliterarysociety.org/

 

 

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