OPINIONS AND NOTEStures), and Robert Wren's /. P. Clark (mostinteresting as an American's reaction toClark's America, Their America). StephenGray's Douglas Blackburn shows what happensin a good Twayne book: it is a reinvestigation<strong>of</strong> the world <strong>of</strong> a writer who fabricated hisown biographical data (cf. Grove), and asolid survey <strong>of</strong> the romances, operettas, pamphlets,columns, history, reviews, socialistcauses, secret service work, and the satiricSarel Erasmus trilogy, all <strong>of</strong> which shaped andexpressed Blackburn's career. Gray thus rescuesBlackburn from obscurity <strong>of</strong> several kinds,literary and political; more importantly, hewrites extremely well. Crisp and clear, hemakes literature sound interesting. As it sometimesis.Political myths, moreover, <strong>of</strong>ten take onvisual images, acquire populist form, affectboth literature and criticism. "We have a fictionthat we live by," writes Vincent O'Sullivanin The Rose Ballroom and other poems(John Mclndoe, $7.95) ; "it is the river ..."— "At every window, fiction / Love at eachdoor." For the satiric New Zealand playwrightGreg McFee, the image is less flattering; hissociety's infatuation with rugby and the rhetoric<strong>of</strong> hero-worship is summed up in hisantiheroic title: Foreskin's Lament (Price Milburn,$5.50). The play itself — direct, comic,pathetic, male — unfortunately does not travelwell.Laurie Hergenhan's Unnatural Lives (Univ.<strong>of</strong> Queensland, $19.95) probes a parallel Australianimage. He less traces the runningtheme <strong>of</strong> convicts in Australian literature(Tucker to White), however, than he effectivelyprobes the literary implications <strong>of</strong> theidea, the cultural fact. By contrast, JohnDocker's In a Critical Condition (Penguin,$9.95) takes on the power structure, fasteningon critical method. Self-defensive in stance(perhaps too much so), the book constitutes aplea for "whole" criticism, by means <strong>of</strong> anattack on what Docker claims to be criticalhegemonies: a Leavisite and then a similarlyexclusive poststructuralist bias which permeatesthe Australian academy. Canadian criticsmight reflect on its provocative remarks.Directly anthropological, Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Naked Man (Harper, $12.50,a paperback translation <strong>of</strong> the 1971 Frenchversion), comments on North American Indiancultures, again seeking images <strong>of</strong> organization.He classifies myths, rituals, and socialstructures according to what he determinesare the binary distinctions <strong>of</strong> human life atlarge. But one wonders also within contexthow exclusive the observations are, wonders atthe degree to which binary expectations encodethe subsequent analysis before it eventakes place. Douglas Gifford's Warriors Godsand Spirits from Central and South AmericanMythology (Douglas & Mclntyre, $15.95) * sa book <strong>of</strong> yet another kind, a book <strong>of</strong> talesaimed at an adolescent market (John Sibbick'sillustrations range from awkward drawingsto imaginative — animistic ? — designs <strong>of</strong>figures in nature), one which implictly challengesconventional Eurocentrism. One extraordinaryInca tale (Christian, we are advised,but the label is deceptive) shows the embroidery<strong>of</strong> a mixed culture: it tells <strong>of</strong> awoman with a snake sister, who aids her toward <strong>of</strong>f the devil husband who was about tocarry her <strong>of</strong>f. It is a tale with various overtones.But the stated moral is perhaps unexpected:Never marry a stranger.In yet another context, the myths <strong>of</strong> roleand relationship affect the subject and structure<strong>of</strong> fiction itself. The ten 194.0's stories <strong>of</strong>the Maori writer Jacqueline Sturm, collectedas The House <strong>of</strong> the Talking Cat (Brick Row,$6.50), seem rather dated now. But the bestreads somewhat like a Joyce Marshall story.Called "Jerusalem, Jerusalem," it tells <strong>of</strong> ayoung woman's discovery <strong>of</strong> a previous generation'sdifficult choices about sex, love, andsatisfaction. Such choice is a recurrent subject.Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted, for example(Penguin, $7.95), though a muchearlier book, seems oddly more up to datethan Sturm's. An Australian novel submittedto a literary contest in 1879, it was rejected atthe time for its immorality, and was not publisheduntil now. Reading it is an educationin both fashion and social bias. The "immorality"ostensibly was to be found in thepractice referred to in the title — "handfasting"is explained as a "trial marriage" <strong>of</strong> ayear and a day — but in retrospect one getsthe feeling that the novel was deemed evenless acceptable in 1879 because the practice<strong>of</strong> handfasting in the story was the prerogative<strong>of</strong> women to demand. The story tells <strong>of</strong> ayoung Australian who travels abroad and discoversa lost Scots colony somewhere southeast<strong>of</strong> San Francisco. Having lost the Bible andthe habit and art <strong>of</strong> reading and writing, themembers <strong>of</strong> the colony acquire (instead) theskills <strong>of</strong> humanity and egalitarian government.The young man is attracted to the virtues <strong>of</strong>such a life and to a young woman in thecolony. Handfasting follows. But one <strong>of</strong> theparadoxes <strong>of</strong> the book involves its ultimatesurrender: <strong>of</strong> vision, to convention. Spence207
OPINIONS AND NOTESfinally permits the young man to exerciseauthority; the woman resists, but at last shegives in — to marriage.In more recent Australian novels there issomething <strong>of</strong> the same preoccupation. Thecentral character <strong>of</strong> Barbara Hanrahan's KewpieDoll (Ghatto & Windus/Hogarth, £7.95;pa. £3.95) —not an advance on her earlierwork — claims to want "instant now," to beable to cope with plastic civilization. But thenovels show her seeking most to remember hermother — and to find her father — and tolocate in family a freedom from her terribleand somehow stupefying naive isolation. TheaAstley's An Item from the Late News (Univ.<strong>of</strong> Queensland) uses a more sophisticatedstyle to tell <strong>of</strong> the sexual violence and malemyths <strong>of</strong> a small town, <strong>of</strong> an atypical malewhose pacifism and passivity make him thetownsmen's victim, and in whose murder thefemale narrator plays her part. Afterwards shegrieves, and the novel indicates conventionalsocial role-modelling, but as with Hanrahanand Spence, it also closes declaring (if notexactly asserting) some form <strong>of</strong> dependenceon the male. Glen Tomasetti's Man <strong>of</strong> Letters(Penguin, $6.95), by contrast, is an ironic,articulate, satiric portrait <strong>of</strong> a universityphilosopher and writer who fancies he understandswomen. But he puts down the innuendoand anecdote beloved <strong>of</strong> the popularculture only to ask for a new form <strong>of</strong> Galatea.Tomasetti nicely balances his disconcertment(when women are enraged with him) with hisapparent need to have his ego stroked. Realityengenders myth in this world; and vice-versa.Following on her first book {Thoroughly DecentPeople), this one shows Tomasetti to bea writer worth watching for again.W.N.208
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