Chapter 1: What insights does Helen Trinca provide about Madeleine St John?
This is an ABC podcast Hello and welcome to a podcast extra edition of ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf. I'm Kate Evans with a discussion today about the life and significance of the writer Madeleine St. John. The reason? Well, I hope you heard last week's show about fiction and work.
It was part of our monthly book club series, where we paired Kikuko Sumura's Japanese novel in translation, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, with Madeleine St. John's The Women in Black, which is also known as The Ladies in Black. Now, in that discussion, you heard a few extracts from an interview with St. John's biographer, the journalist Helen Trinker.
Chapter 2: How did Madeleine St John's upbringing influence her writing?
Well, here now is the full interview. Alan Trinker, thank you so much for speaking to us on the bookshelf.
Thank you. It's a pleasure.
Now, what was it about this woman, Madeleine St. John, that caught your interest?
I got very excited when I read her novel, A Pure Clear Light. It had been republished by Text, I think around 2011. And I read a review in The Australian, in fact, and thought, gosh, that's a great little book and ordered it and got it and was very, really loved it. Loved the way she went straight into the story. The dialogue was fantastic. The observation was terrific.
The ideas were really good as well in that book, ideas about God and faith and love and marriage and how to be in the modern world. Anyway, all delivered with a very light touch. So I got quite interested in her and then more interested in her life as well because, of course, she was fairly unknown to Australians for a long, long time and had written only a few little books, four books.
But she came from a fairly famous family in some ways because her father, Ted St. John, had been a very well-known liberal politician, partly because he was such a dissident in some ways and such a maverick, I suppose we used to call him in the 60s. And so, you know, I kind of was interested in that.
I discovered, as people had known for some time, that her mother had suicided when Madeleine was very young and that had really sort of damaged her and affected her life.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in The Women in Black?
So that was the starting point to do the biography and also, of course, to read her other books.
But how would you describe her as a person in the sort of broadest possible sense?
Well, as a person, I mean, obviously I never knew her. She died in 2006. But I spoke, of course, to many, many people who knew her, her contemporaries, which was a wonderful biography to do because she left very few papers, well, no papers, really a few letters. But that was a journey of discovery to find her friends, many of whom, of course, were Australians. and talk to them about her.
So she emerges as a very difficult person indeed. She's very kind, generous, smart, intelligent, savvy, and yet so complex. And so internally, I think, divided within herself so that at times she could behave in a very cruel way. She would pull people into her very closely and then just let them go without many explanations.
She was, I guess in some ways we would call in modern sort of language, fairly damaged psychologically, I suppose, and yet an incredible survivor. You know, she had suffered depression and she suffered, I suppose, a trauma of her mother, suicide, but she emerged from that as a, as a very interesting and ultimately highly successful writer in the sense that her books are very good.
You know, she didn't have a lot of, she didn't have major success when she was alive, but since her death and since the republication of them by text publishing, you know, she has received much more acclaim.
What was her relationship to Australia?
It was very odd. To be honest, she was quite a snob about Australia. She had grown up here and she wasn't, I don't think, necessarily that unhappy about Australia as a nation. But by the time she married and went to, first to America with her then husband and then to the UK, she decided that the new world, the real world, you know, the true world was Europe, France, Australia.
preferably, but London was very much good enough for someone who couldn't really speak French. So she sat herself down in London and stayed there from about 1968 until her death. So her relationship to Australia was, like many expats of that time, a sense that Australia was a cultural dead hole.
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Chapter 4: How did Madeleine St John's personal experiences shape her literary voice?
Yeah, I mean, that is one of the most interesting things she said to friends at the time before she died. launched into novel writing in her 50s and that she didn't want to ā there were too many sad books and she didn't need to add to the sort of sad books. So she was very interested in, you know, in providing us, I guess, with at one level a comic novel.
But, of course, it's deeply serious as well about Australia at a certain time. So I think it's an amazing capacity of her to sort of, in a sense, see some of the ā some of the broader issues about Australia. And she, of course, in the book, if you really look at it, she's very much more sympathetic to the European refos, you know, the inverted commas, new Australians, you know.
They are the ones who come from the old world of Europe with all of the, you know, great food, the sophistication, you know, the sort of knowledge that will take Australia along a different path. And I guess in some ways she was not completely wrong about that. but the sort of Aussie Australians.
She's not cruel to them, but she is at times a little less... They're a little less perfect than the Europeans. And so that reflects, I think, her own background, her own childhood. Her mother was French, a French-Romanian background. She began to idealise and idolise her mother, I think, particularly, I guess, after her death. And so that world of, you know, a European...
sensibility sort of really came to be seen by Madeleine, I think, as the sort of sensibility that we should be after.
But I think one of the great things about the book is that she tackles some of these big, big questions around, you know, really immigration and, you know, what Australia should be in the next, you know, in the second part of the 20th century in a way that's quite light and with a very light touch. None of her and in any of her books ever delivered with any heavy-handedness.
You know, you feel, you stumble through them in some ways. You know, she articulates them through the characters and through the dialogue and through the little stories. And, you know, that's a real pleasure, I think, to realise that you can read the books on so many different levels, really, because they're deceptively... simple and light.
Yes, because you've got that sparkle on the harbour next to some quite telling comments about things like the woman who's never known how much her husband's earned and never will know it.
Yeah, that's right. And look, she wasn't a, you know, I think she would have hated the idea of ever being seen as a feminist. And yet the book is very much a story about women, their place or their lack of place. lack of space almost in the society.
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Chapter 5: What was Madeleine St John's relationship with Australia?
But, yes, I think, you know, they're delivered in a way that is really quite, you know, it can look like a small book, can't it? It can feel at times like it's a little... A little book, not a huge book, but yet it's tackled some big issues.
Yes, with transformation after transformation as well. Now, Helen, there are a few lines from The Women in Black in particular that interest me. One is that the cultivated ones have gone away, have left Australia, comments Magda. Tell us about that line, the clever ones have gone away.
Yeah, well, she was part of that group at Sydney University, you know, Clive James and Germaine Greer had turned up towards the end of the time that Madeline was at Sydney Uni, you know, Bruce Beresford and many others. And her generation would have seen themselves as the cultivated ones at university. She was very interested in, you know, she had literature.
She was very interested in, you know, in high literature, I guess, you know, and also, you know, the French films, you know, that were coming into Australia, et cetera. And she saw that group, her cohort, as the cultivated ones who had to get out and go somewhere else because, you Sydney was just not their place, you know, they were never going to expand there.
So I think that's about that and about that generation, I guess.
Another important line spoken both to and about Lisa slash Leslie, a clever girl is the most wonderful thing in all creation. So what did it mean to St. John looking back on clever girls in the 1950s?
Yeah, interesting. I mean, I think that's interesting because she was a clever girl. And of course, her life story is that she never really made it in that, you know, that cleverness didn't really turn out to be her salvation. So she, for many years from her, until she was really 15, she had started having success with the books.
she had been a very much had a very had no career basically she was working in little antique shops and she was doing little bits of um filing work for lawyers you know and she never sort of made it she couldn't get there so she she knew herself i think as um and recognized she was clever and i think had been really um held back by her own personality by events i guess she you know she no doubt blame she certainly blamed her father it's a very very clever line and um
But it's also, it almost, I think, reflects the fact that she had not enjoyed for a long time the fruits of her own cleverness, you know. So I think that's, I guess that's what she's saying there.
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Chapter 6: How does Madeleine St John's work reflect societal changes in Australia?
You know, the St. John's had a place in Sydney society, not a hugely rich one, but at some levels quite privileged. I mean, I think Madeleine had quite a sense of where she sat in the world, you know, a sense of herself in the world. So it is interesting that she has as her heroine in the story someone who was held back by class.
And I guess that's just maybe that's really just her capacity for imagination as a novelist. It's not completely autobiographical. There are a lot of autobiographical elements to it. The Women in Black, but it's not really an autobiographical novel as such. You see her popping up. And maybe in some ways I often wonder whether she would have liked to have been Lisa.
You know, she would have liked that happy, relatively happy family. The mother, you know, the secure mother who made the clothes and, you know, was sort of, you know, just totally unconditional love for the daughter. You know, the sort of stuff that she didn't really experience herself.
So I think she had a bit of an idealised version of life, of other people's lives, you know, what other families could be.
Well, and even as you say, she didn't have a conventional relationship to work. But this book, The Women in Black, is so much about work and the world of work and the little sort of microcosms within it. Both women working together in the department stores, but also what they knew and didn't know about their work. husbands and partners work. So what was she responding to, do you think?
What was she interested in about work?
What I find amazing about that, and I couldn't agree with you more, is her capacity to observe other people's lives, to sit outside and sort of look at other people's lives and really nail it. is amazing, really, because as you say, she didn't do the Christmas rush. She didn't really know anything about working lives, either as a young person or as an older person.
I think she's an incredibly good observer. And the fact that she can understand relationships, for example, between women and relationship between men and women, that in some ways you wonder whether she'd actually had that experience is, I think, quite remarkable. She was a great I like to think of her on the bus in London, you know, in her impecunious days, and she would travel by bus.
And I think either a friend of hers told me, or that might be one of her letters, where she was a great listener to other people's conversations. She had tremendous capacity for language. And I think that she might also have been quite a good mimic.
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Chapter 7: What makes Madeleine St John's writing style unique?
Her sister, Colette, Sinjin, who I interviewed for the book as well, was renowned as a great mimic, apparently. So I think language, she had a great ear and she picked up on the very nuanced signals, you know, in the stuff she observed to sort of really build stories. So, yeah, she was very, very clever, I think, about that.
And maybe it came partly from the fact that she did sit outside, you know, and looked at the world of work and looked at other people's lives.
And listened. I mean, there's a whole chapter in The Women in Black that is just the party scene, that is just dialogue from Magda's perspective.
And it absolutely fizzes. Yeah, she's fantastic on dialogue. I mean, at the opening of A Pure Clear Light,
is um there's a lot of dialogue at the beginning of that book and i think it's really captivating she um yeah she was just terrific on uh on language occasionally in the women in black she gets it wrong i was reading a little bit no it's it's a different book sorry it's not women in black i think it's a pure clear light she has a she has a party um in london and
And there's an Australian painter there or something, and he keeps saying things like bonza and beaut. And it doesn't work at all well. And she's writing in the 90s, and she gets it wrong, you know. But, you know, she rarely does that. That rarely happens.
And I think she certainly, the English books, the London novels, are, I think, fantastic on sort of language and getting the, you know, elements of class and family and, You know, young, you know, middle class Londoners, professional Londoners. She gets them very, very accurately, I think.
So as you say, she began publishing in her 50s. I think there's only four published novels. What do you admire about her as a writer? Why does she matter?
Look, I think she matters because I think the dialogue matters. I think she's good at that and the observation matters. But I think probably the thing that we ought to focus on a little bit more is the way that she was really interested in some really big questions around how to be. Someone once said of her that she was interested in the theological issues.
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Chapter 8: Which of Madeleine St John's books are recommended for new readers?
religion in Madeleine's life towards the, you know, by the time, in her 50s, by that stage of her life. She was a sort of a cultural Anglican, I guess, all her life. But she did go regularly to church in those later years. And she was interested in the temporal nature of the world, in the transience of the world, in what really made sense. You know, she said to her friends, I guess, love is a,
only real, you know, really permanent thing, perhaps love and perhaps art are the permanent elements of life. So she's interested in, you know, some big issues, I think, you know, the biggest issues of all, really, about life with a cup of love and what it means. And I think that she has, that aspect of her work comes out very gently.
But if you, particularly when you start to look for it, it's really all there. So I guess I think she matters in that way. I'm not, I wouldn't, you wouldn't suggest that she's, I guess, you know, one of the, you know, she's not necessarily one of the major Australian writers of, you know, of all time. But, you know, she has got, you know, she had some things to say and she said them.
And she's also extremely entertaining. I mean, the books are easy to read and good reads. And you can go back and read and reread them and they give you a lot of pleasure, I think.
I've only read The Women in Black. So what do you recommend? Which of her books do you particularly admire?
Well, the two that I really admire, I love A Pure Clear Light, and that's the second published book of hers. And that actually tells the story of an affair. And so the husband in that relationship is looking for, you know, meaning, I guess, in an affair. And the wife, meanwhile, is looking for meaning by trying to go back to the church. So look, extraordinary story, really.
I mean, you never really get very many modern writers who sort of value religion, you know, rather than dismiss it. And so she's, that really struck me. That's quite unusual. That's a terrific little book. And then the one that, of course, was nominated for the book but didn't win in 1997, is The Essence of the Thing, which is again about another affair.
So she's interested in, you know, infidelity and betrayal and, you know, and disappointments. That's a lovely little book again about an affair. But again, it's about a woman getting over a broken relationship and terrifically done. Her final book, the final published book, is A Stairway to Paradise, similar story. a story about a couple of men, both of whom are in love with the same woman.
And it's great. It's perhaps a little bit more uneven than the other two. And, of course, there was a fifth sort of manuscript, which I've seen. It was Bruce Beresford, as a literary executor, had a look at it and decided whether or not they could publish it after her death, but it's a bit too fragmented.
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