Lohrey

By Julieanne Lamond

Amanda Lohrey is a fearless and idiosyncratic writer whose award-winning career spans four decades. Her work is experimental, political, intimate and compelling. Lohrey provides an illuminating series of readings of key preoccupations across Lohrey’s body of work. From the relationship of the personal to the political, masculinity and free will, human and non-human worlds and how reading shapes us, Lohrey traces a remarkable career across the contemporary literary landscape, and provides readers with an understanding of Lohrey’s bold and singular style.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780522878943

Book preview

Introduction

‘The essays, reviews and novels all ask the same questions: Is this what you want to be? Is this the way you want to live? Is this what you want to believe in?’¹

Amanda Lohrey is a bold and idiosyncratic writer. Her novels chronicle the forces that shape intimate and social experience in the contemporary world, taking seriously the difficult decisions of daily life: what food to eat; how to relate to others; where to live; what structure family should take; how to make a living. She presents these matters in a style that is calm, restrained, lean, and at the same time open to mystery and the unknown. Lohrey’s fiction makes coherent what might seem contradictory: a sharp political interest coupled with strong empathy for personal circumstance; an interest in the material world and also in the metaphysical realm; a sense of curiosity and poetic richness that never gives the impression of getting carried away.

I first encountered Amanda Lohrey’s work as a PhD student, attempting to write a survey of politicians in Australian fiction. This project was misguided and abandoned when I realised that I did not have the stamina to read and write about so many woeful novels (especially those written by politicians themselves). But this ill-conceived project led me to one novel that was not at all boring, but was thrilling, challenging, and deeply political: Amanda Lohrey’s The Morality of Gentlemen (1984). Like Lohrey, whose husband Andrew was for many years a Tasmanian Member of Parliament, I was once a fascinated spectator of politics. Before starting my postgraduate study I had been working as a political staffer and was personally invested in the drama of politics. I wrote bombastic speeches, drafted reports that nobody read, and tried to stay out of the factional negotiations I did not have the ambition to enjoy. The Morality of Gentlemen was the first novel I had ever encountered that captured the entanglement of personal desire, ideological commitment and institutional constraint that I saw in the daily experience of politics.

Lohrey has published seven novels: The Morality of Gentlemen, The Reading Group (1988), Camille’s Bread (1995), The Philosopher’s Doll (2004), Vertigo: A Pastoral (2009), A Short History of Richard Kline (2015) and The Labyrinth (2020) as well as a collection of short stories, Reading Madame Bovary (2010). Her nonfiction writing spans a period of forty-two years and includes two book-length essays: Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens (2002), and Voting for Jesus: The Christian Revival in Australia (2006), some thirty-two reviews and pieces of literary and cultural criticism, and a number of autobiographical pieces.

What strikes me most about Lohrey’s fiction and nonfiction alike is its courage. Underpinned by erudition, this is a body of writing that often flies directly in the face of current literary trends to pre-empt major social or cultural preoccupations. The intellectual fearlessness that underlies Lohrey’s novels is right on the surface of her nonfiction, from her earliest publications onwards. She takes up a common way of doing, saying or thinking about something and baldly asks: why?

Across Lohrey’s writing career particular ideas and formal experiments are put forward, tested, developed, and returned to. Perhaps every writer develops their own poetics: a set of images, concerns, narrative strategies and a worldview that, when known, helps us to make sense of their books. My aim here is to read these images, concerns and strategies across the work, rather than take each novel on its own, in order to provide other readers with a sense of Lohrey’s bold and singular writing.

Amanda Lohrey was born in Hobart on 13 April 1947 and grew up on its working-class waterfront. She tells Charlotte Wood:

I was raised by men for the first five or six years of my life. My mother worked and the men in my family were shift workers. So often during the day I was looked after by my father—which meant he just carted me around wherever he wanted to go. The pub, the bookmaker’s club, the wharf—there was no concession. He’d take me over one of the big boats that would come into the harbour in Hobart, or have a few drinks with his mates while I sat out on the hotel steps with my raspberry lemonade, and the drunks would come out and give me a shilling. It was quite a good life, really! And it meant I grew up feeling comfortable around men.²

This was a childhood in which clashing narratives about the world and how it worked were part of daily life. The 1950s was a period of intense ideological and religious conflict in Australia, with a failed referendum to ban communism in 1951 and massive division between Left and Right in the Australian Labor Party (ALP), leading to a split with Catholic anti-communist members breaking off into the Democratic Labour Party (DLP). It was a period of McCarthyist sentiment in Australia that Lohrey witnessed at first hand. These disputes, which would later be fictionalised in her first novel, The Morality of Gentlemen, were very close to home, and a young Amanda Lohrey heard both sides of the story. Several members of her family had been union officials, including in the Waterside Workers’ Federation. She notes that ‘a couple of them had also been, at various times, members of the Communist Party’. They were, women and men, ‘strongly of the Left.’³ She recalls being regaled by her grandmother, aged five, with stories about King O’Malley, and about how Ben Chifley ‘was a labour rat because he put the troops in the mines when the miners went on strike.’⁴ However, at her Catholic school she was privy to the anti-union, anti-communist rhetoric of the DLP. She writes, ‘I copped it from both sides. You’d get a set of stories at home and a set of stories at school and they didn’t quite match up. You start shuffling the variables around and in the end you come up with your own story.’⁵ Lohrey understands her writing practice as grounded in political narratives, and in the idea of the truth as always being contested, and always contingent on your point of view.

Lohrey has told me, apologetically, that she is not very good at recalling her own history. She reports a reunion with school friends who were shocked at how little she remembered of their time together. In an email she explains, ‘what’s happening now is always more interesting.’ This interest drives her fiction’s focus on contemporary Australian life, but it also poses challenges for a writer tasked with providing readers with an overview of her biography. For this reason I was delighted when I came across an autobiographical piece called ‘Work in Progress or a Writer’s Lament’ that she published in a 1986 collection on Catholic childhoods. Her contribution focuses on sexuality with a determination to be clear and straightforward in the face of the elisions and fearful paraphrasings that sex was met with in her own education. It begins with usual forthrightness to discuss her earliest memories of masturbation. In the face of being constantly called to account for any perceived impurity or sin, Lohrey recounts a feeling not of shame ‘but of a privileged naughtiness, something which was a desirable secret from the adult world and which belonged to a whole repertoire of special pleasures’ containing ‘a feeling of excitement, of discovery and, above all, of independence.’⁶ Characteristically, she uses this topic of masturbation not to think about her own experience but, rather, for what it reveals about the reasons for Catholics and other repressive institutions to so insistently police it: ‘power and autonomy are the last things that such people can afford to let a child have.’⁷

Lohrey’s account of Catholic school is vivid in detailing the absurdities of such acts of policing: the icy-faced Mother Imelda, unable to name the deed but nonetheless attempting to entice 9-year-old Amanda to admit to it. Amanda responded by returning her stare, unblinking. But this account also considers the longer term impacts of this constant surveillance and being called to account: a distrust of authority, of friends, and a ‘defensive distrust of other women’:

Apart from my mother it is always men who give me support and encouragement, who tell me I am clever and give me books to read. My grandfather gives me A Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), my uncle, Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The women tell me that I am untidy, that my hair is a mess, that my body is suspect and my attitude unladylike.⁸

These experiences suggest why Lohrey writes in such searching detail about masculine subjectivity. They also explain her umbrage at suggestions that she writes about masculine worlds she could not possibly understand.

Lohrey was constantly warned about ‘reading [her]self out of the church’ when caught reading Freud, Stekel and Marx, although the latter was a bit confounding: ‘what was this word bourgeois that seemed to crop up in every second sentence but couldn’t be found in my dictionary?’⁹ At fourteen, Lohrey escaped Catholic school and enrolled at the local grammar school, ‘a transition unheard of at that time and one subject to excommunication.’ The relief was immense: ‘I felt as if I’d been let out of the madhouse. There was no battleground of seething sub-texts’, good work was rewarded and Lohrey was taken seriously ‘as a prospective scholar and critic.’

A Catholic education can shape you in contradictory ways: it can generate a passionate engagement with a sense of spirituality that is everywhere directed and circumscribed; a strong sense of what you, as a woman, are not supposed to be, and a concomitant desire to be exactly that thing. ‘Seriousness in girls was unladylike … Anything personal, speculative, theoretical or political was the mental equivalent of a run in the stocking, a ragged hemline or chewed fingernails.’¹⁰ I went to Catholic school a generation later than Lohrey and share a sense of being shaped in opposition to the demands of that system of belief, but also being influenced by its demands in ways I do not always welcome. When I enter a church now I feel both alienated and compelled. I feel a nostalgic rush of the passionate intensity I felt in the religion of my early teenage years and a crossways whack of anger at the church for what it has enabled. At the end of ‘A Work in Progress’ Lohrey recalls being in Venice in 1983, and on a whim deciding to enter an eighteenth-century church and light a candle to the Virgin. She enters and ‘instantly recoils’ at the images on its walls, feeling ‘physical revulsion. Nothing is there. There is nothing in the church for me and nothing in me to connect with it. It was a fantasy, a desire to recover a lost innocence, a childlike faith in irrational possibility.’ Nonetheless, ‘The spiritual impulse remains. Desire. The need to embrace the world.’¹¹ This impulse remains an enduring interest in her fiction.

Lohrey joined the Labor Party as a sixteen year old, becoming state vice-president of Labor Youth.¹² After completing a degree in political science at the University of Tasmania in 1968, she was granted a traveling scholarship to attend Darwin College, Cambridge, where she studied social theory and undertook two years of a PhD before going to London to write an unpublished novel.¹³ In 1988 she tells Dawn Titmus:

I always wanted to write but I thought writers should do something useful like, you know, reform society and then come home and write at night. It’s a young person’s view of writing because they don’t know how demanding and tiring it’s going to be. Then I went off to do a PhD at Cambridge. I couldn’t stand doing academic research, it was so restricting—I kept wanting to elaborate and improvise and make it up. I just got very sick of it and started to write instead where I had more freedom, didn’t have to stick with the facts.¹⁴

Returning to Australia, Lohrey worked for the Department of Education and in the early 1980s married Andrew Lohrey, who was then a young politician in the Tasmanian ALP. Andrew Lohrey was State Member for Wilmot (in North-West Tasmania) from 1972 to 1986. As Jenna Mead notes, Andrew’s career ‘and Lohrey’s own familiarity with ALP politics gave her privileged access to state politics at a crucial time in the history of both the ALP and the emergence of environmental politics in Australia, which produced the Australian Greens Party.’¹⁵ All this is to say that Lohrey’s fiction is underpinned by a breadth of reading about, involvement in, and observation of politics, especially in the Australian context, from the 1960s through the 1980s.

The political conflict Lohrey witnessed at close quarters on the Hobart waterfront of the 1950s is the starting point for her first novel, The Morality of Gentlemen, which recreates a key political flashpoint of the period, the Hursey case, from a variety of perspectives. This is not a traditional historical novel in part because it is framed by a contemporary narrator, a historian who sets out to find a ‘reliable witness’ of the events of the period. The narrative includes fictional interviews and narrative fragments focalised through a wide range of characters with various positions on the dispute. We meet zealous Catholics and die-hard unionists, lawyers, bystanders, and women sidelined in these events. The result is both a broad and deep view of the ideological and personal conflicts involved. The reader is privy to an intimate sense of the personal desires and motivations of these characters, yet distanced from them by a continual, self-conscious disruption of the narrative.

The Morality of Gentlemen was ‘hard to get published.’ Lohrey was told by major publishers that ‘there was no market for a political novel’ and/or that ‘it was much too contentious and someone might sue them.’¹⁶ It was eventually taken on by David Cleaver at the Australian Publishing Collective, a small left-wing publisher, and subsidised by the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Against all expectations it made ‘a modest profit’, and the novel was reprinted twice: by Picador in 1990 and by Montpelier Press in association with Ian Syson’s Vulgar Press in 2002.

Lohrey’s second novel, The Reading Group (1988), concerns the lives and relationships of a loose community of characters, united by their desultory participation in the reading group of the title. In a development of