Thomas Keneally's Career and the Literary Machine

By Paul Sharrad

Thomas Keneally is known as a best-selling novelist and public figure in his Australian homeland and has also managed a transnational career. He is, however, something of a conundrum in being regularly disparaged by critics and often failing to meet expectations of sales. ‘Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine’ explains some of the reasons behind such disparities, focusing in part on his deliberate transition from high-style modernist to ‘journeyman’ entertainer while continuing to write across both modes. 

Reactions to this shift have been framed by critical and cultural investments, and by an idea of the literary career common to both high literary and popular taste. This study examines the complex network that is a career, considering personality traits, authorial agency, agents, editors and shifts in publishing from colonial control to multinational corporations. As such, the study moves across and beyond conventional literary biography and literary history, incorporating aspects of book history and celebrity studies.

In doing so, this book relies on Keneally’s extensive archive, much of it previously unexamined. It shows his ambition to earn his living from writing playing out across three markets, his work in other modes (writing for the stage and screen, travel writing, historical narratives) and the breadth and depth of expressions of his social conscience, including political protest, leading professional associations and work for constitutional reform, the Sydney Olympics, and so on. Keneally is seen as playing a long game across several events rather than honing one specialist skill, a strategy that has sustained for more than 50 years his keenness to live off writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785270994

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Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine

Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine

Paul Sharrad

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Paul Sharrad 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-097-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-097-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

To John Palmer, Bill Crowley, Graham Jenkin, Brian Matthews and Jim Wieland, who all taught me the joys and worth of Australian literature. And to the memory of Peter Pierce.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter One Beginnings

Chapter Two The Collins Years

Chapter Three To the Booker

Chapter Four Afterwards

Chapter Five Republican and Beyond

Chapter Six Histories and Refugees

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Projects grant, which made all the archival searches possible, and to the University of Wollongong for assistance with resources. Thanks also to the National Library of Australia for a Harold White Fellowship and Robyn Holmes, Catriona Anderson, Tony Sillavan and all the wonderful staff who helped me trawl through the huge collection of Keneally’s papers. I also wish to record my gratitude to Tom Keneally for encouragement and generous provision of answers to persistent questions. Ingeborg van Teeseling supplied invaluable research assistance, translations, good ideas and unbounded energy; Shayne Kearney assisted with gathering material and Tomasz Fisziak helped with research and Polish translations. Thanks also go to Laura Kroetsch and Anna Hughes of Adelaide Writers’ Week and Jemma Birrell of the Sydney Writers’ Festival for permission to survey readers. Librarians in the manuscript collection of the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales, the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, the Mildura Public Library, and Neroli Blakeman, Librarian, Wollongong City Library, helped me collect information on publishing, theatre work and reader patterns. Thanks to Carole Welch and Nikki Barrow for access to Keneally’s papers at Hodder & Stoughton/Hachette, London, and to Anne Borchardt and Tara C. Craig for access to and assistance with the Georges Borchardt archive at Columbia University. Valuable help was provided by people at the Glasgow University Library archives and the William Collins archives at the company’s Glasgow offices.

I am grateful for helpful advice and encouragement from David Carter, Nic Birns, Gillian Whitlock and Stephany Steggall, and for support from my colleagues in the Centre for Research In Texts Identities and Cultures, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong. This includes the work of Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans, who initiated a seminar on the literary career. Their edited collection Literary Careers in the Modern Era (2015) contains a chapter that anticipates this book, and related work has appeared in Australian Literary Studies and Text Matters. I am more than grateful to Leigh Dale for hawk-eyed reading and instruction on the finer points of football codes; also to Susan Lever for relentless encouragement to reduce an unwieldy bulk to manageable proportions. Finally, as ever, my thanks to all the family, especially Diana, for love, interest and close reading. Thanks also to Tej Sood, Nicole Moore and Katherine Bode for their willingness to publish this study and to Abi Pandey and Kanimozhi Ramamurthy — for efficient editorial support.

NOTE

Because many different editions of Keneally’s novels are in circulation, quoted material is not paginated. Most correspondence was produced on manual typewriters without italic fonts and quotations use the original capitalization of titles.

This work contains copious footnotes to archival collections. Most refer to previously unexamined correspondence and to newspaper clippings that lack some source detail. ML refers to the Mitchell Library archives at the State Library of New South Wales. The bulk of Keneally’s papers is held in over three hundred boxes in the Manuscripts collection of the National Library of Australia. Unless otherwise indicated, NLA 3/1 refers to the collection MS Acc 05.198 Box 3, with the ‘1’ being a bag or file number. NLA box numbers are accurate to the time of carrying out research. Future researchers should be aware that there has been a subsequent reorganization of materials in the 05.198 series. Where indicated, some items were only located on the Factiva database of newspapers, which does not provide the original page numbers.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about Thomas Keneally, frequently referred to as Australia’s best-known writer, and officially as a Living National Treasure. More specifically, it is about his work: about the conditions under which his books have been produced, about how they have been received, about the author’s sense of himself and the public’s perception of him and his writing. In that regard, this is not a book about Thomas Keneally the person but is a study of his literary career.

I wanted to write about Keneally partly because I recall being both excited and irritated by his rhetorical style when reading Bring Larks and Heroes. I was then an undergraduate studying Australian literature at a time when academics and overseas readers would still regularly ask whether such a thing existed. My interest has been sustained by a discrepancy between Keneally’s constant visibility in the media and the fact that most readers know only two or three of his thirty-plus titles.¹ Among literary scholars there seems now to be a studied disregard of his work when once it was feted. Although the press will always give Keneally’s newest book a background piece and a review, surveys of the most popular novelist or book run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the national network of libraries have not included him in their rankings. Critic Geordie Williamson hailed the 2012 reissue of Bring Larks and Heroes in a series of Australian Classics, but placed its author among ‘our great novelists’ who have been ‘underestimated or discredited’.²

Foreign and younger Australian readers will have difficulty appreciating the sensation that Keneally’s breakthrough novel, Bring Larks and Heroes, caused in 1967. The treatment of ordinary suffering convicts as moral philosophers rather than brutes or romantic rebels, along with the presentation of a drab colonial outpost in poetic language, was unusual, imbuing simplistic tales of national origins with complexity, drama and metaphysical depth. To the extent that Keneally followed through in 1972 with The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, another fiction of national history, and a decade later with the international success of Schindler’s Ark as novelized Holocaust history, his story is one of career success. In turning to overseas settings and rejecting the heightened style of his early work, Keneally provoked criticism from former admirers, some of whom saw a career failure. Nonetheless, publishers have kept signing contracts for over 50 years and Keneally has won or been shortlisted for almost all the literary prizes an Australian writer could hope for.

This book attempts to explain the persistent clash between recognition and reservation, and to track the continuity of the career through all its ups and downs. It finds answers in the network of negotiations among author, genres, publishers, economies and audiences. In doing so, it follows on from career studies largely developed in relation to early-modern British and American modernist writing: books such as Gary Lee Stonum’s Faulkner’s Career: A Internal Literary History (1979), Jerome Christensen’s Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (1987), Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas’s collection European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2002) and Edgar A. Dryden’s Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (2004).³ In Australia, this area of research is relatively new, with only David Carter’s book A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Politics of a Literary Career (1997) preceding the more recent transnational collection, Literary Careers in the Modern Era (2015), edited from Australia by Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans.⁴ The highlighting of local work is significant in that some of the forces shaping Thomas Keneally’s career lie in the history of building an Australian national literary culture, even as they also rest more generally on entrenched ideas of what a literary career should look like. It shows that the uncertain positioning of Keneally’s work rests on there being two Keneallys: the solemn literary wrestler with technique and moral dilemmas, consistent in his themes, and the more relaxed celebrity craftsman of realist-romance tales writing ‘too rashly’ on too many diverse topics.⁵

The career trajectory becomes a trace of values that play through and across author, editors and readers. It oscillates between the poles of an obsolete but tenacious dualism – so-called serious literature and commercial novels – crossed with the author’s balancing act between history and fiction. Keneally has been feted as an important national novelist taught in courses on Australian literature and more recently appears as a mid-list author with titles in major supermarkets and none on university reading lists. Related to this is an increasing difficulty over time in separating the novelist from the social activist.⁶ The man who became the jolly leprechaun of Australian literature has also been the head of the Australian Republican Movement who corresponded with prime ministers and presidents. Keneally’s political profile has often damaged his literary reputation, even though he was elected to the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The swings in Keneally’s career have occurred in relation to Australia’s quest to build an economically viable group of professional writers as well as a literature that would both feature distinctive national traits and cater to critics long imbued with English cultural values who favoured putatively pure and universal works of art. Pierre Bourdieu (in Distinction, The Field of Cultural Production and The Rules of Art) has shown how cultural products of any kind are produced by social machineries of class, of nation, of education systems and of economies that also construct the rules by which those products are categorized and evaluated.⁷ Keneally’s writing, in this context, has been valued – positively and negatively – on the one hand, according to its innovative framing of endemic human struggles and creative use of metaphors and, on the other, because it has voiced minority Irish, Aboriginal and migrant experiences within a mainstream Anglocentric society that itself was striving to break free of a British colonial past. Both evaluative positions were circumscribed for some time by an effort to create subjects worthy of study in the post-war growth of Australian higher education.⁸ As cultural power shifted from amateurs to professionals, and as academics began questioning assumptions behind their structuring of English literature, so different types of writer and genres of writing rose and fell in scholarly and public estimation. As film and television took a more central place in cultural discussion, writers became ‘identities’ or faded from public view.⁹ Accordingly, this career study moves into an expanded disciplinary space of historical work that includes a wider reception of novels than scholarly opinion alone and considers celebrity studies, drawing on foundational work by Graham Turner and David Marshall.¹⁰ Given that a career also depends upon small decisions and sometimes accidents in the processes of being published and getting into circulation, the career study also takes in book history informed by cultural studies. The work of Gérard Genette is useful in pointing to epi- and para-textual details that literary scholars may not attend to but which are part of the production system shaping meanings for readers. Publisher’s colophons, cover designs, margin sizes, endorsements from other writers – all these establish a sense of value that frames the reading experience. Equally, as book histories such as John A. Sutherland’s Victorian Novelists and Publishers show, the ‘triple-decker’ hardback publication or the pocket-sized paperback will tell readers something about what to expect and how to value a work, depending on the norms of publishing at the time.¹¹ Readers make texts just as publishers make authors. Keneally was fortunate in being ‘discovered’ by the highly visible poet, bookseller and columnist Max Harris and then ‘made’ as a significant novelist by winning first a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship and then the Miles Franklin national award for fiction. In taking on board these considerations, the career study both uses and tries to look beyond the opposing values Bourdieu identified: literary autonomy appreciated by a select few and popular commercial success. Sutherland points out that writers could move between these categories in the nineteenth century (Chapman & Hall took techniques from ‘slum publishers’ and refined them for a new middle-class market; Routledge, now a prestigious academic publisher, built its business buying up copyrights to print cheap ‘railway’ fiction). Others like Claire Squires and John B. Thompson have examined the increasing blurring of such a high–low opposition under global capitalism and publishing by multinational corporations.¹² Keneally’s work sits across the two poles of literary value within a social history that has also battled between the facts of popular literary consumption and the ideal of a high-status national literary culture. Charting his career to some degree follows the turn in Australian literary studies towards Franco Moretti’s distant or empirical reading strategies exemplified by Katherine Bode’s 2012 study Reading by Numbers.¹³

If book history takes us beyond the scope of standard literary history, it does not entirely enable the study of a literary career. Insofar as it concentrates on the book, it requires supplementation with analysis of other factors such as economic history (other than that of publishing itself). Robyn Sheahan-Bright and Craig Munro report that in 2006 in Australia, the average annual salary of a writer from writing was around $12,000. Miners and associate professors at the time netted around $100,000.¹⁴ Writers, therefore, had to rely on other income. By 2006, they might have been associate professors themselves, but before creative writing classes entered higher education around the 1990s, this possibility was remote. In such circumstances, what form could a literary career take? Would it be doomed to parochial amateurism, limited to those with private income, or dependent upon governments deciding that cultural capital was worth investing in through grants to the arts? Within Australian literary studies, book history tends to focus on how policies and economics affect publishers and booksellers.¹⁵ This study also investigates how the individual product producer builds a career as part of, and sometimes in conflict with, the larger machineries of literary production, and how that process interacts with reception of works by groups of readers with distinct but overlapping interests. It aligns itself with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as an interactive network of both subjective and objective vectors. The career surrounds text and context but also inheres in both; as a text itself (a narrative of one particular nexus of production and reception) the career concords with Pierre Macherey’s dictum: ‘The movement of the text is systematic, but its system is not simple and complete’ – it is constituted in relationships.¹⁶

Macherey’s theorizing of texts prepares the ground for career studies by envisioning texts and literary production as a network of forces in which nothing is fixed, but nothing is free-floating either: mechanisms of production both impinge on and are altered by the literary work; the work ‘builds up its own horizon’ entangled with the labour that has produced it. Bourdieu’s ideas productively extend this model to analysing the production of cultural value, the field that is labelled literary and the habitus of the agents involved in that field. His ideas fit with the sporting origins of the career in that he describes habitus as ‘a feel for the game’ and the players as occupying positions on the field linked with investments, expectations and aspirations.¹⁷

Bourdieu’s ideas, however, were also based upon nineteenth-century French fiction and European early modernism in a stratified society where cultural value was governed by formal structures like the Académie Française. Writing and reading in a more fluid colonized and decolonizing society such as Australia certainly inherit European literary values, but unlike Bourdieu’s literary figures, most Australian writers never actively despised the public and the literary/artistic field was never as autonomous from wider sociocultural dynamics as the theorist seems to claim for France. More recent and differently located work such as Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (1999) pushes beyond the binaries that have come to be identified with Bourdieu to emphasize ‘a plurality of scales of value’ in a cultural field that has ‘multiple simultaneous centres’ made increasingly indistinct under contemporary globalized capitalism.¹⁸ As a study of an Australian literary career, this book rests on European theory but also looks to show that a literary career may function in different ways when it develops outside of Paris, Bloomsbury or New York. In doing so, it departs from other career studies so far concentrated on the Renaissance and on British and American writing. The American dream of self-help has always been interested in media fame and monetary reward, but in the relatively small market of a country in which egalitarianism is an entrenched ethos, Australian sales will always be moderate, and attaining best-seller status may be regarded as merely good luck or as showing off.

Australian literary operations have been shaped by population, cultural affiliation to Britain, and distance – both internal and international. Sales of two to three thousand copies are ‘a solid achievement for lower-profile works’ and anything over five thousand is a good seller. For real money and cultural standing, the writer still needs Henry Lawson’s advice: get published and noticed overseas or shoot yourself.¹⁹ For many years, however, overseas publication carried the danger of being exploited by an industry centred on London. The 1947 Traditional Markets Agreement divided the Anglophone world between Britain and the United States. Any Australian work aspiring to more than local production and circulation had to go through a British publisher, which controlled the extension of rights to other markets and sold back to its ‘colonial’ sources at a reduced royalty rate. Although publishers made good money out of the Australian book market, writers attempting to express local manners and settings could not automatically expect to be taken seriously by those used to BBC English and daffodils. The story of an Australian writer is not completely alien to, but still to some significant degree distinct from, the careers of writers inhabiting centres of global power.

Books are more than commercial items; they are also tokens of cultural identity and national pride. An Australian work selling well in England could at the same time be denigrated in British scholarly circles as colonial and in Australian political circles as selling out to imperial power. Inversely, a poor Australian performer in London bookshops might be accorded high cultural value by its home readership. Such a postcolonial duality is complicated in more recent times by literary globalization: Australia’s writers can acquire national cultural standing by winning one prize funded by a British colonial sugar company or another founded by a Swedish explosives manufacturer. Keneally’s literary career has been shaped by such dynamics while also having to some extent risen beyond them. He has early on and throughout his writing life bridged national and international markets thanks to astute handling of rights and agents, to his Booker Prize win, to indefatigable travel and to years teaching in the United States. Success at home and abroad has not always been a harmonious achievement, however. Keneally was fortunate in having nationally significant novels attract overseas interest, but he considers that his books ‘lost traction’ in Australia as his reputation rose abroad.²⁰ Nonetheless, Schindler’s Ark, Keneally’s key international success, confirmed his place as a leading Australian writer. This work sets out the complex story of how Thomas Keneally becomes an international literary figure as well as ‘Our Tom’, the much-loved and oft-derided public intellectual in his homeland.

Despite his visibility as a literary figure, it has been a while since major scholarly attention was paid to Keneally. After a flurry of journal articles in the 1970s and 1980s, there was an introductory study by Peter Quartermaine in 1991 and a fuller assessment by Peter Pierce in 1995. Since then, Keneally has produced another dozen novels and several non-fiction books followed by a multivolume panorama of the characters that made Australian history. Stephany Steggall produced a biography in 2015 which revealed the edgy side of the author’s psyche in the early phases of his career and showed how Keneally’s work reflects social changes from 1950s white Australia, split between Catholics and Protestants, to a post-1970s multicultural country reassessing its links with Europe and starting to confront its history of oppressing Aboriginal peoples.

The study of a literary career sits across and between literary biography and literary history. The first reads an author’s life through the work and seeks to understand the works in the light of real-life events and the psychological make-up of their author; the second looks at the body of work and its reputation among shapers of cultural value. The career story has to include biography, and assessment of the works’ historical significance, but it is also a mapping of the interactions between author and work, author and society, work and reader, and the movements of cultural values that affect all these.²¹ Literary careers are measured and shaped by social machineries such as literary prizes, school curricula, shifts in the publishing industry and film rights. They tell the story of how a person who writes takes on the persona of a writer and forms a particular sense of the kind of writer he or she is.

In Keneally’s case, one finds an interesting hybrid of the serious literary figure-cum-public intellectual and the knockabout sports enthusiast (tickets to cricket, rugby league and Olympic Games events are scattered liberally through his archives). Etymology allows us to link the two personae, given that the word ‘career’ derives from the Latin for a horse race. One thinks of the writer putting together a strategy that sequences a set of tactics – a number of laps, a sequence of race meetings – into one coherent pattern. At the same time, it should be remembered that in this trope, the writer is sometimes the jockey and sometimes the horse, and that all stages of the career entail constant jostling for position as well as a tussle between controlling an overall strategy and being subject to tactical urges to career off from the standard track. Lest this should be thought too fanciful a string of metaphors, remember that publishers and literary agents still talk of their authors as a stable, as though they are the trainers and owners of a mob that will steadily be sorted into thoroughbreds and hacks.

Edward Said puts it this way:

In the gradual development of a writer’s career there occurs a time when he becomes aware of certain idiomatic patterns in the work […] he can quote himself, refer to himself, be himself in ways that become habitual to him because of the work he has already done. What starts to concern him now is the conflict between fidelity to his manner, to his already matured idiom, and the desire to discover new formulations for himself.²²

This model of the career as self-assessment is complicated by texts being given meaning by readers, and authors being made by editors, agents and marketing agencies. James English, in his study of cultural value as constructed and circulated by a machinery of prizes, observes that literary study has concentrated either on close reading of texts or broad theory and cultural critique, noting that

what’s left out is the whole middle zone of cultural space, a space crowded not just with artists and consumers, but with bureaucrats, functionaries, patrons, and administrators of culture, vigorously producing and deploying [sets of] instruments.

He looks for ethnographies of the artist and reflexive sociologies of culture, crossing into what Patrick Cheney calls ‘career criticism’.²³

Keneally’s career has also been shaped by historical movements. American political interest in the Pacific led to Hartley Grattan surveying Australian society for the Carnegie Foundation and developing a large collection of Australian writing at the University of Texas. World War II forged links between the United States and Australia, and a few Americans, like A. Grove Day and Herbert Jaffa, took their interest in an exotic locale back to the post-war education boom. Australian literature was taught in the United States from 1941, when only one Australian university had offered such a subject.²⁴ This all occurred while Keneally was still a child, but it established the conditions for his eventual entry into the North American literary marketplace. Keneally has promoted Australian literature in the United States, and America gave him the Oscar Schindler story that still marks the acme of his career.

As Said indicates, career studies do make room for authorial agency, and in so doing seem to be at odds with textual theory after Barthes, who posited the ‘death of the author’, wherein the meaning of a text shifts from whatever the writer wanted to say to what readers create from their reading.²⁵ The two energies can be thought of as a dialectic that shapes a career. Allowing an author tactical agency need not reinstall a romantic notion of the individual genius artist – an idea that has haunted assessments of Keneally. Systems surround, penetrate, produce and modify individual creative choices and their outcomes. Said sees the career as a ‘feedback loop’.²⁶ That is, if you write a thriller, you have prevented a romance or a satire from appearing. If your thriller is a success, you are likely to have another go at the same genre, and further success will begin to confirm your readers’ sense of you and your own sense of yourself as a thriller writer. However, public taste and scholarly opinion may incline you to want to be a literary rather than a popular writer. So you may choose, despite the success of your thriller, to write your next book as a highly stylized modernist tale. This feedback system will further depend on business models prevailing in publishing and on cultural politics underlying media and scholarly evaluations. The career becomes, in cybernetic terms, small ‘if–then’ routines fitting into larger programs within a bigger software package, each layer shaped by and shaping the other.

The traditional model of a literary career has been one of a steady progression along a single path, arriving at a stable goal. Gary Lee Stonum sees the authority attaching to a successful career as deriving from the sense of individual texts sitting within a larger project whose coherence is the result of each work being a critique of the former within the writer’s growing awareness of the historicity of the corpus.²⁷ In fiction there has been an expectation that the successful writer will move from short story to novel, and from autobiographical material to something more imaginative. Keneally did begin his career by publishing stories; he based early novels on aspects of his childhood and young adulthood, then moved to a completely imagined tale rooted in historical research. However, he next moved into social satire, jumped to a psychological drama, then swung into a fantastic fable. Reviewers began to see the career as erratic rather than consolidating.

Such a view was fostered by the author himself. Keneally has said, ‘I don’t like going back to my books.’ He depicts his progression as unplanned leaps from one subject and expressive mode to another: ‘It’s temperamental. There isn’t a genre left I haven’t tried.’²⁸ But unless writers do cast the occasional backward glance and listen to feedback, they will have no idea of what works for readers and will quickly fail to get new material into print. Like most writers, Keneally has a picture of his career. He admits, ‘I cringe every time I think of my first two novels. They misdirected every talent I have.’ He has also said that he keeps writing to attain a higher level of perfection – surely an admission of having a sense of career as a series of self-corrections building towards some ideal achievement.²⁹

Keneally has worked and wrestled with two measures of literary success: huge sales and critical plaudits. To some extent all creative writers buy into both notions. In Australia, studies show that the average income from creative writing still varies between $5,000 and $20,000 annually, so the pleasure of attracting critical praise offsets the pain of not selling well.³⁰ Some lucky writers break into larger overseas markets, in which case large royalty payments allow them to thumb their noses at critics. In Creative Labour, Hesmondhalgh and Baker (echoing Bourdieu) suggest that the creative career is a kind of casino in which different games and different bets, plus differing interests among players and the house, all mesh to produce an overall series of wins and losses. The meshing is, however, not free of conflict: literary fame continues to rest on vestiges of romantic and modernist ideals – artistic genius, the organically complete work of art – and preserves a suspicion that commercial success indicates a lack of originality and distinctive style.

Thomas Keneally, after the initial moderate success of The Place at Whitton in 1964, set out to live from his writing. If critics tell a tale of his fall mid-1970s from high literary achievement into commercial writing, they miss the fact that the career has always been about the money: cultural cachet has been a bonus, albeit one much sought after. Financial insecurity has driven Keneally’s resentment towards literary academics, his breaks with agents and publishers, his letters to the press and government championing his profession and his push to build careers in Britain and the United States. Financial security has allowed him to travel (increasing the range of his novels), to hand back a Commonwealth literary grant, to give to charity and to take up projects of doubtful monetary promise.

In this way, the Keneally career is interesting because it messes with Bourdieu’s opposition of literary and commercial values. From the outset, the writer wanted to earn his living from writing but to do so with work that could be recognized as important in the creation of Australia’s literary culture and as significant for its unusual themes and style. He rarely opposed the market in the name of art; he mainly haggled with it so he could get his art out there and get a decent price for it. But he has also regularly insisted that he hones his craft and produces works intended to circulate within literary networks. High literary culture may no longer be (if it ever was) autonomously opposed to commercial culture, yet the distinction, exacerbated by the politics of establishing an Australian literary culture, has played a role in shaping readership and critical appreciation of Keneally’s hybrid or increasingly middlebrow fiction.³¹ In the first decades of the twentieth century, G. K. Chesterton and Norman Mailer battled in different ways and with differing success to connect with the public but avoid being consigned to the literary bargain basement by modernist taste.³² Despite Australia seeing itself as a modern society at the same time as the ‘brow wars’ were being fought overseas, the dominance of literary modernism was held at bay as unsuited to an ideal of levelling egalitarian society. It had a belated, possibly exacerbated, impact when a professional class of literature teachers took charge of creating a national literary culture and adopted its values in the 1960s (whether of experimental high modernism or the more conservative version promulgated by F. R. Leavis).³³ Keneally began writing during this time, and the shape of his career depends very much on this geographical and historical positioning, changing as his work gains an international readership later on.

A key argument in this book is that the poles of literary value and the genres associated with so-called high and low cultures are not the primary factors in determining the picture we get of Keneally’s career. Certainly it matters whether professional literary scholars or reviewers in the popular press are painting the career portrait, but both interest groups rely on the same fundamental assumption about what a career should look like. Whether one is considering James Joyce or Clive Cussler, the understanding is that the writer will produce an apprenticeship work, followed by some sorting out of style and plotting, leading to a polished example of the genre best suited to the writer’s talents and thematic concerns. Just as in athletics or horse racing, small prizes (or accolades) are expected to move the winner to a more prestigious regional circuit, to national level and on to international renown. The model across all genres and literary ladders is one of seriality: a string of repeated successes, increasingly in the one specialist event, but with different flashes of particular brilliance each time that keep the audience interested in the next event.

It is this kind of career expectation that underpins a lingering expectation (bolstered by media representations) that the footballer will not change codes, that the novelist will be either an entertainer or a sage, a Bryce Courtenay or a Patrick White. This is now as much due to the commercialization of publishing as it is to hierarchies of class and culture. Distinctions serve to manufacture clear brands so readers can feel secure in the capital they accrue with their purchase (of a book, or an author’s signature or an author’s talk at a festival). The career writer has to maintain the brand (whether that be of the literary genius or popular craftsperson) so audiences can increase the value of their investment as they buy more stocks (constructing their identities as intellectuals or fans): fuzzy categories render the stock value unstable. One of the reasons for the oscillations in Keneally’s career is that, though he professes to be a humble commercial ‘journeyman’, his work and reputation never fully relinquish elements of his serious literary self.

Despite the appearance of inconsistency, one can tell a career story across Keneally’s extensive output. For example, he begins his literary career in 1964 with a murder mystery. This genre continues through his writing life, resurfacing in A Victim of the Aurora (1977), A River Town (1995) and An Angel in Australia (2002), each work injecting complexities of social tensions and moral challenges. His interest in Australia’s origins and soul remains central, even when his settings vary. He remains attracted to allegory. Australia’s ties to the outside world, especially through war, inform The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980), A Family Madness (1985) and Daughters of Mars (2012) – to name but three books. Keneally’s interest in history infuses all his writing and emerges most clearly in the non-fiction that he turns to in the latter half of his career. It is perhaps this consistency as much as shortlistings of three quite different-looking novels that provided a foundation for his Holocaust story to win the Booker Prize.

A map of forms and themes can be seen as a ‘horizontal’ strand in the story of a literary career. It includes Keneally’s sacramental view of life that runs through all his fiction, waxing and waning as it intersects with less serious plot-driven stories or with secular roguish heroes. His fascination with strong women characters, clearly present in the later novels, can be tracked back to early work. But cutting across the horizontal lines are the ‘vertical’ circumstances not just of the author’s personal life (as with the now famous accidental encounter with Poldek Pfefferberg, who gave him the Schindler story) but also of fluctuations in public taste, reviews, sales, changes of editors, shifts in communications technology and so on. The model of the literary career might be simplified into four intersecting circles. There is the personal, containing elements such as ancestry, parents, schooling, reading, marriage and health. This crosses into a national circle in which politics and structures for managing culture operate, and both circles intersect with societal elements – feminism, multiculturalism and globalization, for example. All three cut into a market circle encompassing publishers, agents, reviewers and prizes. Each circle has elements particular to itself, but all share some with others.

I have set out material in chronological sequence, interspersed with overviews of different aspects of the career. There is a reasonably clear periodizing around Keneally’s work: the decade up to The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), followed by the decade leading to the Booker Prize win for Schindler’s Ark (1982). Then there is a decade of international and contemporary Australian stories up to Woman of the Inner Sea (1992) and Jacko (1993), followed by a return to early Australian history and wartime Sydney comprising A River Town (1995), Bettany’s Book (2000) and An Angel in Australia (2002). Daughters of Mars (2012) marks a reprise of earlier interest in World War I and sits close to marking 50 years of Keneally’s career as a novelist. His half-century was originally planned to be coterminous with the completion of this book and remains the basic framework, though publication has taken longer and Keneally has continued to be indefatigable in turning out at least one book a year, primarily novels. Keneally wrote in many other forms as well and the breadth of his career plays a significant part in his reception. Each decade should be seen as a set of lines of potential; they clash and fade, or meet at moments of achievement, creating possibilities and limitations for the next phase.

Irrespective of individual agents and audience desires, a career can be subject to social changes. The star test cricketer and an adoring crowd will both be faced with having to adjust to quite different standards once commercial interests and television push cricket into shorter games and ‘big bash’ tactics. Across all stages, Keneally’s career has been subject to changes in literary critical values. Concentration on high culture has conceded space to serious consideration of popular genres and the literary middlebrow.³⁴ Single and comparative studies in national cultures have moved into transnational paradigms. Keneally’s work spans high and low literary modes and has always transcended national space while remaining grounded in it, and his reputation rises or falls according to who is reading him where and when.³⁵ David Carter’s 2013 book history work on Keneally’s American career would not have been possible 20 years ago. It repositions a national icon as a transnational writer and draws attention to how Keneally’s international success has propelled him into media visibility such that he now has to be discussed not just as an author but also as a celebrity. So far, celebrity studies have concentrated on film stars, pop singers, Dickens and a few American novelists, so this work considers how an Australian becomes a writer, how he survives as one, but also how he accommodates the celebrity that success brings.³⁶

Keneally’s career is worth attention because it reflects and, indeed, has influenced the cultural history of his homeland – its change from colonial habits of mind and Anglocentric monoculture to the self-conscious construction of a national cultural identity and to a multicultural society. Apart from his writing, Keneally’s leading roles in the National Book Council, the Australian Society of Authors and the Literature Board of the Australian Council have made it possible for younger Australians to think they might make a living from literature. His work over time has also helped generate changes in Australians’ sense of their place in the world. Although overtaken by cultural shifts, it has also been an important clearer of spaces in the nation’s writing for Aboriginal and multicultural voices. If his critical reception has varied across time and place, these achievements and Keneally’s survival over half a century as a known writer in three markets represent a career success in itself.

Notes

1 This is the main finding of my surveys of 150 readers at literary festivals in Adelaide, March 2012, and Sydney, June 2014.

2 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘ABC’s My Favourite Book! The Nation’s 100 Favourite Books’, http://abc.net.au/myfavouritebook , accessed 2012; Dymocks bookseller, survey, Dymocks.com.au/Booklovers/101club.aspx, accessed 2012; Geordie Williamson, ‘Keneally’s Triumph’, Weekend Australian 5–6 May 2012, Review 18–19.

3 Gary Lee Stonum, Faulkner’s Career: A Internal Literary History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas, eds, European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Edgar A. Dryden, Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

4 David Carter, A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Politics of a Literary Career (Toowoomba/Canberra: ASAL, 1997); Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans, eds, Literary Careers in the Modern Era (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

5 Paul Mann, ‘ Playboy Interview: Thomas Keneally’, Australian Playboy (April 1985): 33–39 (36); Laurie Hergenhan, ‘Interview with Thomas Keneally’, ALS 12, no. 4 (1986): 453–57 (455).

6 See discussion of this duality in Antonio Simoes da Silva, ‘Displaced Selves in Contemporary Fiction, or The Art of Literary Activism’, ALS 28, no. 4 (2013): 65–78; and Brigid Rooney, Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2009), though surprisingly neither mentions Keneally.

7 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste [1979], trans. Richard Nice (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature , ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field [1992], trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

8 Advocates for teaching Australian literature contended with Oxbridge-trained professors who declared the field was too new, too small, too derivative, too mediocre and too popular. See Leigh Dale, The Enchantment of English (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012), respectively, 224, 240, 114, 235, 214. For another description of literary culture wars in Australia, see John Docker, In a Critical Condition (Ringwood: Penguin Australia, 1984).

9 See general discussion of this shift in authorial visibility in Graeme Turner, ‘Australian Literature and the Public Sphere’, in Australian Literature and the Public Sphere , ed. Alison Bartlett, Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee (Sydney: ASAL, 1998), 1–12; and Wenche Ommundsen, ‘Sex, Soap and Sainthood: Beginning to Theorise Literary Celebrity’, JASAL 3 (2004): 45–56.

10 Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004); P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis and London: University