8. Keeping it in the family: one way to interpret the past
8. Keeping it in the family; one way to interpret the past
A look at All That Swagger (1936) by way of seeing how Miles Franklin reconciled her need to be at one with her nation’s past, and with her family too, while expressing something of what she felt was the spirit of her time.
Keeping it in the family; one way to interpret the past:
All That Swagger is a family saga, but what sort of family? What sort of saga? Every family is a mixture of families, since outsiders marry in, and produce children who are half insiders, carrying on the established line, and half outsiders, with the potential to pull the patriarchal family they were born into back onto the rails of the family their mother came from. I, for instance, am an Eagle, but my mother was a Duncan, and the Duncans recite their story with as much pride as the Eagles, and if we stop to consider, the Duncans are as much a mixture of admixtures as the Eagles … A family line, a family ‘character’ are constructs, usually created by the men or women whose imaginations are strongest. Humans need definition. We cannot think without a few precepts unchallenged in our minds to fall back on when we’re most in doubt. Personal identity, and that includes ‘family’, is something that must be sustained. The idea of family, and the idea of our particular family, are necessary to us. The family members surrounding a young child are a collection of strengths and weaknesses that can be likened, I think, to rocks – some to be built on, some to be avoided.
So what is a family saga? [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.
