What makes a successful writer? Is it reviews, awards, sales, simple longevity. Back in the early two thousands, the Australian Council for the Arts put out a report on how many people in Australia make a living from the proceeds of the books they've written. Do you want to guess
how many it was? I bet you can't. According to their best calculations, excluding people who supplemented their income with teaching or journalism, or public speaking or unrelated day jobs, the number was eight eight people who could make a living as writers in this country, and let's be honest, seven of them were probably Andi Griffiths. In the two decades or so since that picture might have changed a bit, but not much. It's perilously hard to make it as
a writer in this country. And even if you do make it, what of it? All of which brings us to today's guest. A towering success story by any measure, he spent well over half a century publishing daring, exciting work. He's a seven time nominee and two time winner of the Miles Franklin Award. He's acclaimed around the world. He's had fourteen novels published, eleven collections of poems. The Washington Post said he's reminiscent of both James Joyce and Gabrielle Garcia, Marquz,
David Mitchel, Zevan so Salmon Rushdie. But at eighty eight, almost none of Rodney Hall's books remain in print, and there's a reasonable chance that you've not heard of his name. When I sat down to talk with him, I expected he might be a bit disillusioned by the Australian publishing scene, reasonably a little bit frustrated by a kind of collective
littery neglect. But for Rodney Hall, the idea that one's career, let alone one's life would follow some kind of clear narrative with a neat beginning, middle and end, is nothing more than a made up story.
I've always had a suspicion of stories. I think the problem with stories is enchanting things that strip away all the natty realities and presume that our lives in any way are sensible successions of cause and effect. My life's being chaotic. If I try to find a story and it it always rings false.
I'm Michael Williams, and this is read. This a show about the books we love and the suspicious stories behind them. If you can find a copy, I implore you to read Rodney Hall's memoir Papa I Never told you. It's gorgeous, beautifully written, but also quite a life. Rodney Hall arrived in Brisbane from England as a child following World War
Two and was raised by his widowed mother. His childhood was marked by poverty, but for his eighth birthday he received a formative gift, a printing set from his great uncle Mont, who said, what I look for in a boy is ink stains, because writing is the most important thing of all. What a wonderful gift, and one that kicked off an obsession that would shape and define an entire life.
Where to begin? When I was twenty two, I set out to walk in Europe. I left school in Brisbane at the age of sixteen. On my sixteenth birthday, I did my last exam for the junior public in Queensland. My mother couldn't afford for me not to be in work, so I was sixteen when I went out into the workforce, and it was with an incomplete education and no family
money and no connections. Brisbane was a pretty rough and raw proposition, very fruitful in my view in the long term, but tough to live in and I wanted to get out. And I worked at these various low grade jobs. When I saved enough for the ship fare, and it was one hundred and twenty four pounds anyway, I stayed in work till I got another one hundred and twenty four, stuck it in my sock, as it were, metaphorically, and set off on a ship to go to Europe to
land in Genoa. For the next three years, I walked and did work where I could find it, and starved when I couldn't. And it was a life changing experience because I was there to find some sense in the muddle of my life and the fact that I seemed to have no openings to do anything, and the only things I wanted to do were all the arts of
one sort or another. But on that journey, I was in Barcelona and I saw a billboard for a overnight boat to New Yorker, and I thought, Robert Graves lives in New York, and he's a great hero of mind, me now almost forgotten, author of I Claudius and Claudius to God and the Wonderful White Goddess, An amazing book. And it was like the equivalent of tenpence in English money, because we traveled with English money if you sat up
on deck. So I thought that would be fun. So I was twenty two, so I did the overnight, got to Palma Mi Yorko. Found a little library called the English American Library. So I knocked on the door, as it were, and went in and explained to the lady behind the desk, and I wanted to visit Robert Graves and did she know how I go about doing that? And she said, I think he's a member, and she went through her card index owed the privacy business is business,
just shot to pieces. She said, yes, here he is, and she got out of his address and wrote it out for him and gave it to me these innocent days. And to my surprise, it was on the margins of Palmer, there's little city. I expected he lived somewhere grander than that,
and in fact that's what happened. I was somebody. One of the tenants at the address I was given guided me where to go to Deja, to the village, and I walked there and that was twenty five kilometers The following day and I got there around about four in the afternoon, and someone pointed out this beautiful bungalow on the top of the cliff overlooking the It's just magical place.
So that yeah, this is Graves territory. So I rolled up to the door, knocked on the door, and his second or third wife, whichever it was, came to the door, and I said, I wonder if I could speak to mister Graves, and she said certainly not. And I said, well, could I at least have a glass of water? And she said, well, stay here, and she shut the door, came back a moment later and thrust the glass of water at me, and she said, you better hurry up if you want to catch the bus. I said, oh,
is there a bus? And she then opened the door to see if I had a car, I suppose. She said, how did you get here? I said, I walked? Said you walked from Palmer and I nearly, because humor is never far away, I nearly said, no, I've walked from Genoa.
I walked from Brisbane.
From Brisbane, yes, I said, would be even better anyway, she said, well, at least I'll tell him you're here. Anyway. The upshot was he sat with me for two hours. It was the most fabulous conversation I'd ever had. And in the course of it he asked to see what poems I was writing. I'd written a lot by then, but I had had nothing published and very little encouragement. Anyway, when he got me to read them, because they're in my handwriting, and when he'd heard three or four, he said, oh, well,
well that answers that the poems stand. You don't have to worry about that. He said, By the way, if you ever decided to write novels and you choose a historical setting, remember the two golden rules. Rule number one, write first, rule number two, research afterwards, because if you don't write first, you don't know what you need to know. If you don't research afterwards, nobody will believe you.
That's magnificence, isn't a.
One who what a great thing? And so I always write first?
Can I ask, before you had that validation from a writer who you revered, do you remember what fueled you to keep writing poems, you know, without any kind of audience, without any response, or what was it inside you that made you know that that was just the thing that you were going to keep doing.
I think a sense of a loss or a repudiation of who I was. I wanted to be a great deal taller and a lot better looking and given to simple enthusiasms that I could pitue with that without guilt. All the arts are always I always felt open to them. I mean, I do discover that I have a pretty good memory, and I've got I did a little book of memoirs tracing my adventures from the age of five to nine. Were all the things I could remember on the basis that if I could remember them, however trivial,
they were important. And that's what happened with this, is that what I'm really doing in Vortex is recreating the Brisbane of my most anxious days because I went to a pretty rough, brutal school. It was my mother spent the money she got from selling her furniture in England in order to bring my sister and brother and I here and with her soul surviving relative in Australia, she paid for a year at a private school, and it
was if you were a palm, it was brutal. All of it worked out for the best in a way, because the very fact that it was as awful as it was meant. I was determined to get away, which I did. Which I getting away in Europe shaped me. If you say, could I have made it as a stonemase, I reckon I could. But it was a much easier path to be writing novels.
Rodney's latest book, Vortex, is a wild read. It's experimental, fragmentary, boldly itself. At eighty eight, he's clearly not done with redefining the form in ways that interest him. It's the story of a year nineteen fifty four, but not quite the nineteen fifty four of history. Fifty four was the year Queen Elizabeth first toward the Commonwealth, and the book follows the story of a fatherless boy in postwar Queensland
as he sets out to become a man. In many ways, it's a love letter to the city of Brisbane, but it's not just one story. It's not just about one city. All of that just undersells this expansive, generous novel. It brings together scores of characters and historical events swirling together in a way that gives the book its name Vortex. His publisher calls it the most comprehensive achievement of a long neglected giant of contemporary literature and suspects that it
may be his final work. And as someone who's enjoyed so much of what Rodney Hall has written, it's fascinating to say how all these earlier novels have led to this moment. Many of the chapters, many of the ideas and fragments of this book have been just stating for some time. They've popped up in other works and popped up in journals and things. And I'm curious about when you knew that there was a single story that you wanted to tell.
Well, that's very interesting because I never planned works. I take what comes to me and see how long I can work with it. And it means that there are probably twenty five or thirty novels that have got anything between twenty pages and two hundred pages done before I realize there's nothing in it. And this book has. It's
a curious circumstance. I wrote a book in nineteen seventy one called The Colony Club, which was set in Brisbane, where I had my teenage the only time I've ever written a book which I based characters on real people, and it got to me afterwards, I thought I can't do this. It's just it's not my right to do it. Anyway, fast forward something like thirty years and I get a phone call from an old acquaintance and he said, I've just been downsizing, moving into a flat, and I've come
across an envelope of some papers of yours. And this is subsequent to me having my whole house of all my work go up in flames and I lost absolutely everything, including this failed book. Anyway, he said, I've cleaned out my library and I've found an envelope of some type pages of yours, and I wondered if you would like them back, send me a postal address. So I did, and that came the envelope and there were these four sketches, and there were five characters in four sketches from that
early book. And I looked at them and I thought, at long last, I know what it is that I didn't find when I wrote this. I can work with this. This is the beginning of a new book. In the end, I cut one of the ninety seventy one passages out, but we knew what the date was from the postmark on the envelope, and so there are three passages in Vortex that are substantially, not exactly unchanged, but substantially the way I wrote back in the seventies.
Part of what's so beautiful about vortex is that the voices of the past and the press and they imagine past, all intersect in ways that render the exercise of picking out an individual bit almost redundant. The point is that they talk to each other.
Thank you, Michael's exactly what I hoped, and i've I was working with an idea in the abstract, as it were, that the spider's web is a better image for how life drops us into a multiplicity of conflicting forces, that we're not subject to a single strategic storyline, dynamic. And as I got these little fragments back in the mail, I thought, as long as I don't attempt to connect them, as long as I don't attempt to tinker with them,
I can absorb them. They've sparked my interest in so I initial working title was the web.
A vortex is more anxiety.
Yes, thank you.
I'm deeply moved by the singular tragedy that was the burning of your house, Given what that meant for your papers, what that meant for a life, gathered and carefully considered and thought about. It just seems to me to be a devastating loss. And I'm thrilled to hear the story of being sent the fragments that helped trigger this book. I'm just as an inflection point in a life. That fire must have been a terrible one to endure.
Well it was, but you know, don't forget, as I have made public in my memoir, Papa never told you just about my earliest memory. I was five. We know exactly what it was in Gloucestershire in England, when the bombers came over Second World War to bomb the port in Bristol and Swansea where the British fleet was anchored. And when the waves of bombers had dropped their bomb,
they'd turn round to return home. And at that stage they were vulnerable to the British Air Force fighters, which had speed but not altitude, so the bombers could fly higher than the fighters, so they dropped all the remaining bombs that they hadn't expended on targets to lose weight
to gain height to escape back to Germany. And one of those bombs hit the house a friend of mine, right across the street from where I lived in a little country town, and getting up in the morning after the air raid the night before, which was beyond terror, and seeing that house gone. I think I've always expected
that the house would be bombed, as it were. I'm more worried about my three daughters and what the world has turned into, in many cases, a very ugly place, and a place where tyrannical individuals wielding colossal amounts of centralized power, and the rich behavior appallingly and anti socially and destructively, and the twenty six or twenty seven wars that we of the West have fought to prevent Eastern countries making up their own minds about what system they
want to live under. I mean, all this is terrifying stuff, and I can let go of it, but I do trouble it does trouble me with the next generation.
After the break, Rodney reveals the eighteenth century philosopher that has shaped his writing career. We'll be right back. I want to come back again to your resistance to the consolations of story, and why the novel felt like the right art form for you, given that.
How it came about. This developed idea is if I'm writing a novel. Who is reading the novel? Why are they reading? What are they reading for? And I came across an essay by C. S. Lewis called an Experiment in criticism, and the experiment of the title was he said, if the experience of a work of fiction that exists in the head of the reader as the reader is silently reading, we call that the book. The book is as it exists for one person, one person only at
a time. The closer to fifty percent of that that is brought by the reader, the greater the book. And it struck me that I had to address the reader as a collaborator, that really I'm not giving them as something complete. They're collaborating in the process of finding something that will do for the moment. And the one philosopher that was speaking to me he was an eighteenth century Italian called gim Battista Vico. I only discovered later that Vico was much loved by James Joyce and a few
other choice readers. But Vico spoke to me, and I most of my books, most of my novels, have taken an idea from this philosopher and used that as the basic structure of the book, and one of his ideas was against the way history was taught in seventeen twenty eight, when he was writing his great book The New Science, that he says, it's truer to our experience of living history if we think of time forms like you do
with a slice of sausage. You get all of the ingredients in the sise, but you're only dealing with the sis as under a microscope and vortex. Is that it says most of the public events that are in the book did happen in nineteen fifty four, but they're all upside down and jumbled about in order to show what they mean, and puts it to the reader read freely.
In fact, when I first completed the project, I said to Jordie Williamson, my wonderful publisher, I want to explore that idea and time form, and I might write a book called one hundred and one chapters to be read in any order. And he very politely said, oh, that's interesting, And I got a message in a subsequent conversation. Do you think that's asking too much? He said, I do.
I think it'll put readers off. So I've taken the year ninety fifty four, as if all the events of ninety fifty four have happened simultaneously, as it were, And that involved devising a structure in which there are always threads that you're picking up from what you've just read. So the idea of threading and becoming is really what I was hoping to use in order to attract the reader to what we were doing together.
It's such an exhilarating level of play when you're reading it. When you play in fiction like this, do you feel a responsibility to the events of nineteen fifty four, the people in nineteen fifty four, or do you feel liberated from that because you're writing fiction that you're outside.
Oh no, I feel totally responsible to it. And it's the guiding principle behind the idea of decentralizing everything and tearing it with freight edges loose from each other, so that we've got fragments, because I think that's all we live anyway. We tend to bind the fragments together and cobble them together as best we can, but they are fragments, and the holder you get, they pass more swiftly and
more tantaloe, more terrifyingly than they ever did. But again, you know, our armament against all that is is our collaborations with each other. You know, I am a socialist. I think we are a collective, and we do things as a collective, and we're going to see the best and deepest part of ourselves when we operate as a collective. I want to see that in the way we are. I mean, I'm writing nominally in nineteen fifty four, but I'm also of course writing in twenty twenty four.
I want to ask you mentioned your excellent publisher, Jordie Williamson, and in the advance reading copy of the book, he has a lovely letter introducing the book to readers. But in that he refers to you as a long neglected giant of contemporary literature. And I have to say that that phrase did correspond with my own impression. You know, you have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin seven times, and one or twice you were chair of the Literature
Board of the Australian Council. You are one of the most consequential novelists, and yet you are sometimes I think underestimated or overlooked. Your books aren't all in print at the moment, for example.
Now almost nothing in print.
That seems like a very sad state of affairs and an indictment of Australian publishing to me. And I'm curious about whether that's something that wounds you or disappoints.
You or no. No, no, no, the public if in this hypothetical sense, the public knows what it wants. I haven't at any stage in my working life've been what the public wants. People don't want it. They want personal confessions, personal stories. I'm not interested in it. I'm interested in them as an imagination. I'm interested in the reader coming along for I hope is an exhilarating ride. No, I mean I winced at the idea have a sort of comic vision of me as some kind of lumbering giant fifi fo from.
You said you wanted to be taller.
Yeah, I did say that. Anyway, it's I've always accepted that I didn't fit. I wanted to fit around her. At the time that I did the three year walk in Europe, I thought I'd never come back to Australia. And then the first time the opportunity arose when my camera was the only valuable thing I had, was stolen, and I claimed the insurance. The insurance just paid me to come back, and I came like a shot. And I've never regretted it, but I haven't felt that I
have earned a place in a way. So I don't mind. I would only mind if the books weren't published, and then I would mind very greatly.
In the event that a young writer walks the twenty five kilometers out of my yorka and finds a cabin on a hill and knocks on the door, and the door opens, and Rodney Hall answers the door, and you know, Rodney Hall in his late eighties, lets in that young writer and sits down and listens to their palms and talks to them for a couple of hours. What bit of advice do you give that young writer?
Read what speaks to you. I mean, some of the best and and or ugly things in ourselves are things we deny and thy pass and we tend to as it will make a virtue of reading to the end of every book we pick up when what we really are gettest signal we're really getting is put it down. You know that wonderful piece of advice. Franz Kafka gives us that every new novel should be an axe for
smashing the ice around our hearts. I think, goodness me if I've ever provided any readers with an axe to crack the ice around their heart, and I've done my job.
Rodney Hall, You've done your job. Thank you, Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you. Michael.
Rodney Hall's latest book, Vortex, is out now. Look for all his other books in your local library or second hand bookshop. And before we go, I wanted to let you know what I mean reading this week. I love the British author Kate Atkinson. Her novel Life After Life a few years ago was an absolute sensation. But I am a particular fan of her unusual crime series starring private investigator Jackson Brodie. That most of them set in or around Yorkshire, and the series started with case histories.
A couple of weeks ago, the sixth mystery landed and it's called Death at the Sign of the Rook and it's a whole lot of fun. A country house of vicar A Horpes, all the elements of a classic murder mystery, delivered as only Kate Atkinson can do it. You can find it and all the other books we mentioned at your favorite independent bookshop. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends rate and
review next week. I read This I sit down with Irish writer Kielin Hughes to discuss her latest book, The Alternatives and Kill, and shares the near death experience she had during its creation.
Well, it definitely passed the is this the book you should be writing if we were you to be hit by a boss? You know test, which is genuinely the thing I always ask myself when I'm writing a book, Is this the book that were you to be hit by? I usually say a boss, insert a truck, that you would need to be writing, that you'd be glad to
have been writing. And it turns out that you simultaneously glad, but also in the moment of being hit and just before being hit, are absolutely tortured by it because it's like, finally I am writing the book that I must write, and I am not going to get to finish this. That was my thought.
Read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames. The show is mixed by Travis Evans and has original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week,