World Books Review: An Australian Masterpiece

Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley’s celebrated Vera Wright trilogy, available here in its entirety for the first time, memorably explores the infinite intricacies of the human heart.

Vera Wright Trilogy by Elizabeth Jolley. Persea Books, 568 pages, $19.95.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Elizabeth Jolley is known and acclaimed as an Australian writer although she was born in England in 1923 and emigrated to Australia in 1959. Internationally famous for over 20 volumes of stories, novels and non-fiction, she actually started to publish late – in her 50s – and was still writing almost until her death in 2007, at 83. From all the information about her in publicity sheets and on the Internet, she seems to have been a wonderful person – approachable, wise, compassionate.

Now Karen and Michael Braziller of Persea Books (Disclaimer: they published my second novel) have embarked on a project to make her better known to American readers with what is considered her most ambitious work, The Vera Wright Trilogy. In one volume is My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever, which were published here in 1989 and 1990, and The Georges’ Wife, which came out in Australia in 1993 and is being published in this country for the first time.

In the online Australian Literature Diary is an entry by Jolley’s friend, Adi Wimmer whose loving remembrance was posted in March 2007. Towards the end Wimmer writes:

She had an incredibly hard life in the decade 1939-1949, how hard only a few people know, and they are very protective. The full story has never been told.

My sense is that the closest we have to the full story is this trilogy, that Vera Wright is partially autobiographical, although she becomes a physician instead of a writer, and that this terribly sad, often funny, and entirely memorable journey parallels Jolley’s own journey, starting when she was a young nurse, not yet out of her teens, during the Second World War and in the post-war years when she tried to find a place for herself in the continuing chaos that followed that enormous upheaval.

The operative word is chaos. In the first two volumes Jolley seems bent on conveying her experiences in a way that parallels the confusion that ruled her life, how she was utterly perplexed by the workings of a hospital for wounded soldiers and also congenitally crippled children. In describing the tumult, the intensity of wartime pressures and the way things worked not only there but in a place where she had employment afterwards, Jolley makes you feel as she did – at times utterly disoriented, incapable of obeying anything but the most primitive instincts, totally at sea about the practicalities required to provide for herself.

Yet at other times she seems absolutely in control, as when she describes the people she encounters in language so vivid that you can hear them making fun of her inability to fit in, or see them dancing in the bathroom in a paroxysm of lesbian desire. She seems afraid of nothing – all kinds of sex, cruelty, hypocrisy, tenderness, slap-stick and stupidity.

When writing about that time Jolley has said, “Literature is a study and exploration of human beings, and in a way, nursing is the same, and so it was really the right thing for me to do.” She also tips us off as to her unique method of telling a story, which critics have called fractured and sometimes feels like circling around an airport searching for a place to land, with, at times, so many repetitions that I found myself wishing she had lived long enough to edit out some of them.

In truth, sometimes they feel like hectoring, as if she has confused the reader (who is always far more intelligent than most writers acknowledge) with her mother who needed to be told everything ten times. But most of the time the strongest memories feel right, and near the beginning of Cabin Fever she seems to be laying out her method:

Memories are not always in sequence, not in chronological sequence. Sometimes an incident is revived in the memory. Sometimes incidents and places and people occupying hours, days, weeks, and years are experienced in less than a quarter of a second in this miraculous possession, the memory. The revival is not in any particular order and one recalled picture attaching itself to another, is not recognizably connected to that other in spite of it being brought to the surface in the wake of the first recollection.

Central to the three volumes are Vera’s relationship with her parents, their insistence on helping refugees from her mother’s native Germany during the war, her mother’s conventional way of the looking at the world which was such a direct contrast to her father’s complete acceptance of his daughter and her rather eccentric way of living. It is almost as if he recognizes that the “trouble” she gets herself into is a direct result of her futile search for a father-figure which has its genesis in their profound love for each other.

A Portrait of Elizabeth Jolley, Meg Padgham, 1977.

Like her father, the reader is expected to accept Vera in all her facets. Jolley spares us nothing – her adolescent crush on an older nurse who introduces her to the joy of classical music, especially Beethoven, her surrender to a man who is so elusive, so potentially evil that you almost shudder when reading about him and his deluded, Zelda Fitzgerald-like wife, her attachment to other people who clearly live on the fringes, her growing awareness of the connection between money and power, and her ultimate plight of becoming an unwed mother of not only one, but two daughters.

Although we are often charmed by this determined young woman who wants to know everything — almost like an archaeologist uncovering Pompeii – there were times when I found myself utterly exasperated at her inability to connect the dots in her own life and learn to protect herself a little. But the see-saw of emotions – the exhilaration when Vera becomes more self-aware, and the pity and fear when she seems to sabotage herself yet again are evidence of Jolley’s mastery and her importance as a witness when women had far fewer choices than they have now.

Slowly a more sensible, older Vera prevails, and the writing reflects her ability to make sense of the life she had carved out for herself — the narrative is easier to follow, and the tone is less hectic as she confines herself to the Georges – the well-off sister and her younger brother – who have taken her into their household, woven what sometimes seems like a spell around her, but who, in their strange way have given her the strength and courage to go on.

And when they get to Australia and she seems to be narrating the book from the vantage point of many years later, you feel her yearning for something different but also a newfound assurance of what she could only fitfully grasp before. At the end of Cabin Fever Vera says:

The strange thing about living, I often nearly speak of this during a consultation, is the repetition. It is as though the individual enters the same experience again and again. The same kinds of people make the same demands, and the giver, blessed with giving, gives yet again in what turns out to be the wrong direction.

There are few of us who cannot relate to such poignant honesty.

Although this trilogy is full of mystery and the reader has to work to plumb its depths, there are many, many pleasures – a string of characters worthy of Dickens, Jolley’s joy in nature, in the sense of place, her love of poetry and music. These three volumes are not for the faint-hearted, nor for those who like a linear story and an easy read, but something to re-read, again and again. Some of us will put it next to Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, or McEwan’s Atonement for its subject matter; others next to Virginia Woolf and Henry James and Karen Blixen and Hemingway for its directness of tone and original insights. But you will want it near – for it is a wonderful addition to our best English literature in its exploration of the infinite intricacies of the human heart.

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Roberta Silman is the author of Blood Relations, a story collection, three novels Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again, and a children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child. She has recently completed a new novel, Secrets and Shadows. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net