Interview conducted by Jim Davidson, 5 May 1980.
INTERVIEWER
To jump straight in, it seems to me that the abiding preoccupation in your work is a concern with what might seem on the surface to be impossible relationships, or extraordinarily difficult ones, and the importance of persevering with them. And perhaps the need to recognise that.
HARROWER
Well, I certainly seem to have dealt with very difficult relationships. But I really have no theories like that to fit all occasions.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps I can come at that another way. One of the things I’m struck by is that your work is a kind of cross between that of Martin Boyd and Christina Stead .. .
HARROWER
When I first came back I met Ron Geering, who helped a lot with the republishing of Christina’s books, and he said he thought I would like them very much. And so I read them then, and did of course. I’d already written three novels, and was struck by certain similarities, especially in For Love Alone. I recognised the violence of the feeling and the viewpoint. But the range of Christina Stead’s work is so great, and Martin Boyd’s, too. I wouldn’t think of these comparisons, myself.
INTERVIEWER
It’s not a matter of influences, particularly. The connection with Christina Stead is perhaps on that level of intense psychological interaction between the characters, its flickering needlepoint, its sense of discomfort, often.
HARROWER
There is a concentration and intensity, but I think it’s natural, it’s my only natural way of writing. And if I sometimes launch into something that doesn’t demand it, things don’t work out well. It’s simply the wrong voice.
INTERVIEWER
Even so, I’d have thought that the tone of The Watchtower was slightly more relaxed than, say, The Long Prospect.
HARROWER
Yes. I think they’re all quite different. I don’t think they’re very much alike. Anything that comes now would be different again, and I’m glad about that because I wouldn’t want to repeat myself.
INTERVIEWER
There is an interesting way, though, in which you do repeat yourself a bit.
HARROWER
‘A blackbird always sings the same song.’ I just do have preoccupations, but you can come at them from so many different angles. What you often find is that one person might be enthusiastic about one particular book, and not at all about the others. So that in order to reach people, you just keep drawing on those preoccupations to explore different things. In this way the books are different, it seems to me . . .
INTERVIEWER
Oh, sure. What I was really going to say was that I found Down in the City a very interesting first novel in that it seemed to me that nearly all the pre-occupations are there already. It’s the most dramatic case I can think of, frankly, of a first novel prefiguring all of a writer’s subsequent work.
HARROWER
That is peculiar.
INTERVIEWER
And it brought to mind a remark of Isherwood’s in Christopher and His Kind: the embryos of novels tend to start their growth as interlocked Siamese twins or triplets, which can only be separated by the most delicate surgery’. Because that’s what you then subconsciously proceed to do, in a way, in the next three books.
HARROWER
You may be right. I don’t know . There’s no problem about having enough to say — it’s having too much to say, and sorting it out.
INTERVIEWER
The effect in that first novel is interesting. It makes it somewhat etiolated rather than stronger, because all those things are in there together, fighting each other.
HARROWER
Well, I was teaching myself to write with that book. I had The Long Prospect in my mind but I thought it’s a pity to waste that when I haven’t yet written anything. And Down in the City I wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, really working terrifically hard just to work up some . . . experience.
INTERVIEWER
Had you begun writing when you were in Newcastle?
HARROWER
I left Newcastle at a very early age, when I was about eleven. But I think I submitted my first piece to a children’s paper when I was about seven or eight, and they said keep trying (laughter). And so I kept trying. But when I think that nobody encouraged me to do it, and there was always a lot of turmoil going on around, I’m surprised that I had that much initiative. But, you know, I liked writing little compositions at school, and I wrote letters from an early age because my mother was in Sydney when I was in Newcastle. So that was an incentive.
INTERVIEWER
And how old were you when you decided to sit down and write that first novel? Was it the first lengthy piece of work you attempted?
HARROWER
Before that I had written — apart from the aforesaid letters and diaries (the diaries were pretty massive) — I’d written one short story. And then I started Down in the City. And I was about twenty-seven, or six, something like that.
INTERVIEWER
And how many years did that take to write?
HARROWER
Oh, in those days a novel took a year.
INTERVIEWER You imply it takes longer now?
HARROWER
It depends whether you’re working full-time, or what else you’re doing If you work six days a week and if you write from nine till you’ve done four foolscap pages, or till five o’clock — whichever happens first — and you rewrite the novel a number of times, it takes a year. But if you’re out working, as I was when I was writing The Watchtower, it takes centuries.
INTERVIEWER
To return to the nexus I raised first . . . There’s a kind of aristocracy of spirit about a lot of your characters, and what interests me about that is that the result is sometimes a little Manichaean: the contest is so marked that often the subsidiary characters, such as Lewis in The Catherine Wheel, have a slight air of unreality about them.
HARROWER
Aristocracy of the spirit. I don’t like the sound of that, and it’s alien to the way I think. To the extent that illusions are thrown off, people become less dangerous to themselves and others. The contest is with the world of illusion . . As for my minor characters — no doubt some are more convincing than others.
INTERVIEWER
I think that’s what’s interesting about The Long Prospect. Every one who appears in that is totally well-developed, and things are extraordinarily evocative of what it must have been like in a household like that in Newcastle in the early Fifties, or whenever. And I think it’s partly because the little girl is growing up there are huge areas which are open and loose, and so you see the adults in it to some degree as she does —. as huge ships passing in the night . . Even relatively minor characters such as Rosen are perfectly characterised, whereas in the other novels they’re not quite as tangible.
HARROWER
The important people became fewer in the other books.
INTERVIEWER
Nevertheless, there’s a very strong sense of high moral code which returns in each of the novels. I could cite a number of quotations, and I don’t mean to throw them at you particularly, except to say that even the little girl, although she is only eleven, is perceived by Max to have ‘desired for herself and for others that they should live to principle when it hurt’.
HARROWER
I think that young people are often very extreme. I think that’s not unnatural or even unusual .
INTERVIEWER
What I think is unusual is the way that you draw it out and insist on it.
HARROWER
Well, that’s what some people are like.
INTERVIEWER
But the other thing I found interesting about it was the importance of recognition. In connection with Thea and Max, you as the narrator say that there could be no holding back once they recognised each other as belonging (to the self-critical minority’ . . .
HARROWER I probably wouldn’t say that now.
INTERVIEWER
No. Because they’re almost Jamesian Europeans: they’ve returned — or perhaps never went away — but are partly located elsewhere. And they seem to draw a real sustenance from each other and from an implicit location of some kind of spiritual aristocracy which is centred in Europe . . . There’s a long apostrophe at the beginning of Down in the City about how people in Australia are hurried, frantic, empty, unsophisticated .. .
HARROWER
They were different times. I’d say other things now. A lot of people did discover each other in 1972. Many people who were very isolated in that uncongenial sort of Australia found themselves at home in their own country for the first time. In that first novel I was drawn to write about Sydney because I’d been absent from it for some years. I used to love it. Then I wrote, incidentally, about an industrial town, but principally about men and women trapped by circumstances, and just, generally, struggling to know their own natures. Society can legislate to open some gates, windows, so that lives aren’t too much handicapped from the start . . . That’s important, but the least part of it.
INTERVIEWER
I think that’s true. And one of the things one is very struck by is that Clare, in The Watchtower, who is one of these people, does make the discovery that the real, significance doesn’t exist in another country.
HARROWER
Exactly.
INTERVIEWER
But that’s where the transition occurs, in the last novel.
HARROWER
I really don’t think that people have to go to great centres in order to find out important things.
INTERVIEWER
No, not at all. And that’s the interesting thing about Clare . .
HARROWER
That she chose not to go away . .
INTERVIEWER
That she chose not to go away, even though she’s somewhat attached to Bernard. With Laura, her sister, one wonders whether her way of surviving is in fact to adapt to Felix, so that she ends up appropriating all the mother’s anglophilia. Whereas Clare has in a sense resolved all that, and in a very interesting way.
Speaking of Clare and Bernard, their relationship suggests a certain parallelism between hers and the more highly coloured relationship between Christian and Clemency insofar as both women are very deeply involved, but also reluctant perhaps to see what that means for them . . .
HARROWER
Yes . .. could be.
INTERVIEWER . . and I find that interesting.
HARROWER
You know The Watchtower would have been a totally different book if she had just made off with Bernard into the sunset. Some very amiable person who reviewed it, and reviewed it well, felt that it was a very austere sort of ending, but it would have been a lot weaker any other way. It would have destroyed the whole book. It had to happen like that.
INTERVIEWER
Yes. There’s a stoicism about the good characters in your novels: a real sense of not only accepting difficulty but of embracing it up to a point, and feeling that one must.
HARROWER
Well, I don’t think they were people who went out searching for difficulties, very major life difficulties were there . . . I felt that I was really embarking on something strenuous each time I was writing any of these books, that I was really wrestling with very large themes. All I can say is that I felt I had to think extremely hard . .
INTERVIEWER
That’s very obvious. I mean you’ve really struck a raw nerve in nearly every case. The novels are about surviving, or enduring.
HARROWER
They’re about surviving and they’re . . what else are they about? I always wait to see what somebody’s written (laughter) and then I say, yes, that is what they’re about. But, see, I have to write the book because I can’t say what they’re about in a sentence . . In The Watchtower I said salvation, didn’t I? I think I feel now that when people go to the end of an experience then that’s a good thing, because they don’t have to keep repeating that experience. On the other hand, people can be involved in things that are so extraordinarily destructive that it’s madness to keep on. But every case is different, isn’t it?
INTERVIEWER
It’s as though you feel that wherever possible perseverance is preferable to textbook psychological analysis.
HARROWER
I don’t think I see these as alternatives. Perseverance can waste such a lot of somebody’s life in a lost cause. But then people can grow old without having found out very much if they don’t follow their experiences to a natural conclusion. And I feel that people often look for easy ways out that are useless evasions.
INTERVIEWER
How much of your stoicism, or the stoicism of your characters to be thoroughly accurate, is linked with a sense of a world, or a civilisation in peril? One thinks of one or two references in The Catherine Wheel, and of the atomic bombs going off in the background of The Watchtower…
HARROWER
Well, when I was living and writing in London I did a short walk from Trafalgar Square to the Albert Memorial with one of the first Aldermaston marches, and then rushed home to finish off The Catherine Wheel. I thought even if the world’s coming to an end I must finish this book, which is really strange and yet it seemed terribly important that I had to get all of these things down. In London we were very much more conscious of Cold War danger than people were here, I think. You felt then that you were a sitting target. At one meeting I heard Bertrand Russell and Linus Pauling say that we could all be flattened next week, and in those days there was always some crisis going on, so that it seemed quite possible. They were very tense days, and you would hear great flights of planes at night very low, and really, you never knew . . . you felt that anything could happen. And of course it could now . . . It would be terrible to expire with everybody else, and know that that was the total end.
INTERVIEWER
Are you a Christian?
HARROWER
No . .
INTERVIEWER
There are a couple of references in the books to India.
HARROWER
Oh, yes, something about Gandhi in one of them . .
INTERVIEWER
Something about Gandhi and then the Hindu king who finds all of his subjects desert him.
HARROWER
Oh, that’s right, yes. Well, all of these things are interesting. I’m interested in Buddhism, but I’m not any of these things in particular.
INTERVIEWER
I’ve raised these particular matters, which I mightn’t with another writer, because they strike me as being germane to your distinctive tone of voice.
HARROWER
When I’m really involved in something I often have the feeling that I’m sort of looking at the page but somehow thinking sideways. When people ask you about writing who perhaps are interested but haven’t done any — especially fiction — I think they have the impression that it’s more mechanical and straightforward than it is when it’s actually happening. You don’t have as much control as appears while the thing is actually being done. And so you tend not to think about that aspect of it, because it’s difficult to express and probably best not talked about.
INTERVIEWER
To take an entirely different tack, one could imagine that some people could read your novels now and say that a couple of them, particularly in connection with Esther in Down in the City, and most certainly Laura in The Watchtower, are documents of women’s oppression.
HARROWER
I suppose they are at one level, but that’s incidental to what I’m really writing about. Even so, I like to think it would be less easy for women like these two to be as dependent as that again. I think it’s sad what happened to women like this — capable, sensitive and clever women who just really lived and died very quickly, and with a sense of failure. There have been dramatic changes for the better in a relatively short space of time. But — as is inevitably the case with reforms — unfortunately too late for many.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that the stoicism that I refer to is perhaps partly a corollary of that condition — a fairly resilient way of facing up to that kind of predicament? .. . That more women would be stoic than men . . . Stoical rather than hysterical?
HARROWER
I must say I’ve known more stoical than hysterical women and men (laughter). Many more . . . Once or twice I’ve been asked along to an Adult Education class by Madge Dawson at the W.E.A., when they’ve been reading Australian women writers. I’ve been pleased and interested to see how much they’ve cared about some of these characters, and how much they’ve identified with them. When a book is over, the writer doesn’t care passionately about the people any more. So it’s interesting to be reminded that there are always new readers for whom your novels are very vivid, and very much still living.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of the books, the last of them, The Watchtower, appeared in 1966. Have you written any full-length manuscript since then?
HARROWER
I did write another novel, and it was accepted by Macmillan’s in London — they had an option — but I withdrew it very shortly after the letter from the agent accepting it. I really didn’t like it very much. I still don’t regret that.
INTERVIEWER
Have you re-read it in recent years?
HARROWER
Oh, .lot for a long time. I think it would have pieces, sentences and, you know, passages here and there that it would be a pity to throw away, but on the whole it seemed wrought, manipulated, not organic.
INTERVIEWER
And what was that about?
HARROWER
Oh, people! . . . I just didn’t approve of it somehow. It was a lot of work. But you have to look on things like that as leading you on to the next thing, however. I think there’s no point in regretting anything at all. I thought: if you’d done something else, you might have been run over by a bus. But here you are — alive, which is a strong position to be in (laughter).
INTERVIEWER
What about short stories: were you writing those all through, or have you tended to write those more —?
HARROWER
I have written a few and feel friendly towards some. But I enjoy novels more, both to read and to write. I need the space.
INTERVIEWER
After that withdrawal of the last manuscript, have you felt like girding your loins to write another?
HARROWER
Oh, yes, there’s a lot of writing in there on the desk and I think that it will be something different again. We must just wait and see how it all works out. Things got very complicated for a while . . If I had had a different temperament I’d have written different books, and maybe more books. But then it would have been another person.
INTERVIEWER
It wouldn’t have been the combination of hot coals and soft hearts (laughter) that I discern in your books.
HARROWER
Oh, yes. A terrible combination I think (laughter).
INTERVIEWER
What about influences from other writers?
HARROWER
Like everyone else, from the days of reading Alice in Wonderland I must have been influenced by battalions of writers. So it’s hardly possible to name names.
INTERVIEWER
There’s no-one that you were so impressed with and so admired that you were to some degree aware that you were advancing some of their concerns a little further, or relocating them here in Australia . . .?
HARROWER
No. I’m constantly admiring other writers, and constantly feeling relieved to see certain things in print, but I’ve never imagined I was advancing anyone else’s concerns or relocating them. Concerns find the writer, I think, not the other way round. Geography doesn’t have much to do with it. I think that on the one hand here are you with your pen, or your typewriter, and there are all the world’s great novels. And you can see what you’ve written and you can see what they’ve written, and that’s it. Recently someone sent me a clipping from an interview that Shirley Hazzard gave to the New York Times: they asked her about writing, and she said it’s nervous work to write. You have to be in a state that other people pay large sums of money to get rid of. One reason why you can’t teach creative writing.
INTERVIEWER
How much sustenance have you drawn from the other arts, and in what ways do you feel that they’ve enlivened your imagination? Things like music or painting.
HARROWER
I think friends, the written word and the natural world give me most sustenance and enlivenment. Otherwise, theatre, films and singing have meant most to me. From an early age I was taken to the theatre a lot, and loved it, and I was an ardent movie-goer. I also listened to singing on every possible occasion. In London for years I lived on an incredibly tight budget to be able to write, so I took advantage of all that was free — all the galleries and museums. I hadn’t really looked at paintings till then, but made up for that a bit. I saw quantities of plays, no matter what else was forgone. I used to hope for tickets to concerts and operas, and occasionally they did turn up. Now it’s the same sort of mixture, roughly.
INTERVIEWER
How do you think your difficulties, as a writer, compare with those of others who’ve chosen the craft?
HARROWER
That’s really quite hard to say. My friends who are writers are all very different from each other. I had a turbulent childhood and youth. Children of my age were acquiring useful skills while I was wasting time and energy surviving sadness and confusion. Of course, what constitutes turbulence and how you react to it has everything to do with your own disposition. And turbulence can provide ‘the shock that wakes the spirit’s sleep’, which is a very beneficial thing for a writer, when it’s unsought. In the long run, in spite of having lived with insecurity and outside the regular scheme of things, I have to regard myself as lucky. In spite of politics and the worst human nature can do, I’m optimistic. That’s genetic.
INTERVIEWER
Can one presume that some of the circumstances in, say, The Long Prospect are similar to the childhood that you had to wrestle with?
HARROWER
Well, you could assume that, although I’d have to say that I think the emotional truth is there in all of the books, but none of the facts. It’s like putting real electricity into a dream palace. None of the books are actual accounts by any means. They’re less extreme than reality, because reality is so unbelievable. Besides which, people can only take so much. You don’t want to frighten them, do you? . . Or do you? (laughter).
Interview conducted by Jim Davidson, 5 May 1980.
