For Michael Heyward, it was like the publisher’s fantasy of ripping open a package and an undiscovered masterpiece falling out. These things don’t really happen. But there he was in September last year, reading a manuscript written more than 40 years ago. It was Elizabeth Harrower’s In Certain Circles, accepted for publication by Macmillan in 1971, but withdrawn by an author who was never quite happy with it.
Heyward, the publisher for the independent Text Publishing, sent an email to Harrower, now 86. “Dear Elizabeth, this novel might have been a torment to write but it is a profound pleasure to read. It shines with your keen eye, your sleepless intelligence, your extraordinary intuition. And its structure is masterly. What a wonderful writer you are. In Certain Circles is a lost gem, if you will allow me to say that, and we would LOVE to publish it!”
Harrower is experiencing her own “fairytale” moment, as she puts it. She wrote four novels before In Certain Circles that were highly praised at the time; the Sydney Morning Herald called 1966’s The Watch Tower “a dense, profoundly moral novel of our time”. Hers was a frugal but full literary life, enmeshed with close friends including Patrick White, Christina Stead and Sidney and Cynthia Nolan. Her life was writing. It’s “what I can do, it’s all I can do”, she says now.
For reasons she struggles to explain, Harrower stopped writing after In Certain Circles, apart from a handful of short stories. Four decades passed, her books slipped out of print, and even many of her friends had no idea she was a writer. Then Heyward’s company began publishing neglected Australian books in 2012. One was The Watch Tower, a dark, psychological thriller about two sisters terrorised by a suburban, everyday monster in Sydney around the time of the second world war.
Then more books were rescued. The Long Prospect was released in October 2012. Down in the City was republished late last year and The Catherine Wheel is due in September. In Certain Circles has just been released in Australia and the UK for the first time, and will be published in the US in September. In a little over two years, Harrower will have had five books published.
She greets me in her modest apartment with lovely views of Sydney harbour, a tall, white-haired, intensely curious woman. She never expected anyone would discuss her novels until after her death. Now they are alive again, being read and reviewed. At first, she was “sort of frozen” by the attention.
“Suddenly these very good reviews started coming out and I’m still in a coma. I was coming home on the bus from buying something at the patisserie and I suddenly thought of all the people who are now not here who would be incredibly happy. And I listed them, starting with my mother, and [her mother’s cousin] Margaret and Patrick and Cynthia. A whole range of people who would have been terribly happy, so I thought I’d better be happy.”
She never worried about the books. “They were buried treasure. There they were underground, locked up, secure, and I had total confidence that they wouldn’t disappear.” Harrower knows she was different too, “all those years when they were coming out, there were very few women silly enough to cast their life away and take all these risks. It’s not a sensible thing to do.”
Heyward caused a fuss a couple of years ago by raging about the neglect of Australian classics, arguing it was a cultural scandal equivalent to allowing The Grapes of Wrath to slip out of print in the US. Harrower has been Text Classics’ bestseller, and Heyward makes big claims about how important her rediscovery will prove to be.
“I want to argue that Elizabeth Harrower is on a par with Patrick White and Christina Stead, who would be on anybody’s list of postwar literature giants in Australia.
“Her great subjects are class, gender and power. She applies a spotlight to those things in a way I don’t think any other writer really does, with this intense, unsentimental and relentless psychological examination of men and women interacting with each other.”
Heyward would be expected to champion his authors, but there is a broader buzz about Harrower. Michael Dirda in the Washington Post wrote that The Watch Tower “reminded me of Zola in its unflinching depiction of two sisters entangled with a moody, violent man, one of them being gradually crushed into subservience, the other struggling desperately to save her own soul. It is a brilliant achievement.”
The Guardian said of In Certain Circles that while “less malignant” than The Watch Tower, it was “no less psychologically profound”. Irish author Eimear McBride, whose debut novel won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize last year, says she can’t remember a novel moving her more than The Watch Tower. “The writing is just fantastic. I couldn’t believe I had never heard of her before,” she tells the Guardian. “Australians have their F Scott Fitzgerald in Elizabeth Harrower.”
Harrower can’t even remember In Certain Circles. You can read her a sentence and she says, “that’s interesting”, as though it were written by somebody else. She was awarded a grant to write the novel – the first she had received – and wonders whether that tainted it for her in some way. The 1970s fashion for government support of the arts was “such a strange idea to me because (you know) ‘piece of bread in a garret’.”
Heyward has shown her the correspondence between herself and her London publisher Alan Maclean. The book was accepted in 1970, but Harrower took it back to rework it, trimming it by 10%. Maclean wrote again in March 1971, saying they’d publish this version, although he was not hopeful it would do well. Harrower replied a week later, withdrawing the book. “I have felt, all along, that this novel shouldn’t see the light of day … All I regret are what I can only call the ‘true things’ scattered through it here and there, that I am addicted to as a physicist might be addicted to quarks.”
She gave it to the National Library and there it sat. The story traces the relationship over several decades between well-to-do Sydney brother and sister Russell and Zoe and their orphan friends Stephen and Anna. There are familiar Harrower themes: the casual entitlements of wealth; the everyday humiliations of poverty; people who notice things and those who look past; and the suffocation of suburban marriage, particularly for women. Zoe, at first carelessly confident and talented, finds herself in a marriage in which she adjusts again and again, tries to please, and shrinks.
“They were like spies working for hostile governments,” Harrower writes of the couple, “looking for advantages, avoiding blows.”
“That’s quite good!” says Harrower when I read her the sentence. She has never re-read her books and says she’s too tired now to do so, there’s been too much excitement already. She has never married, never had children. It was all about the writing.
She worked in routine jobs at the ABC and Macmillan’s Australian office, and she wrote. At 23, she left for England for seven years, where she wrote her first novel, Down in the City, published in 1957, before returning to Sydney. Writing “was my life’s blood, I was so serious about it. It came first and I cared about it so much that it just had to be good.” Then she stopped. Patrick White would berate her, but there was a time when she couldn’t even be bothered writing letters.
Why she stopped she can’t quite answer. Her mother died suddenly in 1970 and it crushed her in a way that was hard for others to understand. She was distracted, lived “quite a trivial, enjoyable life, still observing, just not doing what I should have done”.
“As a writer you have to be so singly focused, it has to matter more than anything and of course people around you want you to be their playmate.
“To some extent I looked after people. I’m not going to have a tombstone but I think I could write ‘Beware of Pity’, that is one thing that could be said,” referring to the title of a 1939 novel by Austrian Stefan Zweig. “Pity is an emotion that can lead to great ruin.”
Heyward intends entering In Certain Circles for Australia’s major literary award, the Miles Franklin, and the Stella Prize for writing by women. Harrower is not a festival person, nor does she hold great store by awards. She is very sociable, and very private. Her novels may have been rediscovered, but over the past few months she has shredded 300 pages of diaries notes, jottings and letters, including those she sent to her mother from London.
“I always thought one day someone will find that very interesting, and then I thought, ‘Why should they?’ Very, very contrary … the idea of being misinterpreted is very annoying.”
What will be left will be five novels. She made “dramatic and tragic mistakes in her life”, she says, and she knows she should have kept writing.
“I’m thinking of waste,” she says. “Well, no, because I’ve enjoyed it. Also the books make up for everything. I think I regard them as a contribution to something or somebody. This is the strange thing. Here I am telling you how important they are and yet I haven’t thought about them [for years].”
