2. Jack and George: who owns a life?
2. Jack and George: who owns a life?
A discussion of George Johnston’s My Brother Jack in the light of two interviews with Jack and Pat Johnston on 29/7/1980 and 20/8/1980. (The tapes of these interviews are held by the National Library of Australia, Canberra, and an abbreviated version of the interviews was published in Helix, numbers 11 & 12, combined issue, 1982.)
Jack and George: who owns a life?
My Brother Jack is one of the most popular of Australian novels, regarded from its first publication as encapsulating important truths. I was a teacher when it came out, and my students read it willingly. It was about their world, and they liked to discuss its events and characters. They were students from the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and when George Johnston describes Davy and Helen dining with the Turleys in Toorak, with Davy forced to see himself as inferior to his hosts because he lacked their certainties of taste and confidence, my students grasped intuitively why he felt as he did. It pleased them that Jack, the working class Aussie, was the object of praise, but they followed the rises, falls and rises of Davy with an even closer interest because their own paths, they sensed, would have similarities to his. Brother Davy was a man on the way up, and so, they hoped, were they.
This was all very interesting for a teacher, but after a time I began to have doubts. I’d known plenty of Jacks myself, I’d written about some of them in my first book, and it struck me that my Jacks were, in the way I’d presented them, nothing like George’s brother. I wondered what the ‘real’ Jack had been like; I assumed that he’d read the novel: what had he thought of himself?
Years passed, and I became aware that Jack Johnston had given talks about the novel named for him to students in the Catholic system. I got his address, I wrote to him, then I rang, and he agreed to meet me and let me ask some questions. [read more]
Introduction:
In 1981 Patrick White published an autobiographical book called Flaws in the Glass; the Melbourne Age commissioned two reviews, one of them from Hal Porter, who said, among many things unflattering to ‘Mr White’:
Writers of my sort can be said not so much to read as to examine another writer’s work rather as one car freak examines the vehicle and driving of another car freak. One says, “Splendid vehicle! Superb driving!” Or, “Nice vehicle! Ghastly driving!” Or, “Can’t stand that kind of cumbersomely pretentious vehicle! And what bewildering and erratic driving!”
Hal confesses that the third attitude is his to the novels and plays of ‘Mr White’. I will say no more at this point about Mr White or Mr Porter, but I quote this comparison of writer and car freak because in the essays that follow I am the freak who comments on others of his kind. I know I can’t see my essays as others will see them but I imagine some readers accusing me of many things, and others, well trained, perhaps, in one or another school of literary or social criticism, who will think my observations no more than shallow or ignorant. To such people I can only say that these essays offer whatever it is that a fellow-writer can offer, and don’t pretend to offer anything else.
