[In the following essay, Harrison-Ford discusses differences in the works of Wilding and the Australian writer Frank Moorhouse.]

In the few published commentaries on the contemporary Australian short story, the names of Michael Wilding and Frank Moorhouse have been linked quite often. It is a natural enough connection to make, but it must be added now that both writers have had collections of stories published¹ within weeks of each other, that their differences assume the greater significance. The connections are still there, but they are misleading, often superficial ones. First, and most misleading, is the shared subject-matter of urban, particularly inner-city, life and social, sexually-oriented milieu. Secondly, this subject-matter has until recently frustrated both writers' frequency of publication and both collections have a surprisingly high proportion of previously unpublished material. Of those stories published, many have appeared in girlie magazines rather than literary ones, and sometimes in bowdlerized form. This has led, in turn, to the initiation of Tabloid Story, of which Wilding and Moorhouse are the best known editors. Lastly, and more germane to their literary output, both writers have grouped their stories so that there is a loose-knit interaction, with characters straddling stories and referring to incidents from different ones. This is present in both writers but more pronounced in Moorhouse, who can refer to his two collections, with justification, as “discontinuous narratives.” At times both writers hint at the novel, though it would be unfair to suggest they aspire to the novel or its structure.

But the reader interested in the difference between these two writers need look no further than Wilding's review (in Southerly, No. 2, 1969) of Moorhouse's first collection, Futility and Other Animals. There, after carefully discussing Moorhouse's general areas of interest—“Moorhouse has moved into a whole new area of material, of experience, of sensibility for Australian fiction”—Wilding went on to note Moorhouse's “serious examination of sexual ethics” and concluded:

Behind all these stories lies the ethic of being true to oneself, breaking with delusions and deceits: the occasional three- and four-letter words, the occasionally aberrant activities, all are in the service of this quest for the honest way, are presented to us not to shock, but to ask for a new, truer, fairer way of life. His characters would probably arraign him for it, but the impulse behind the writer is that of the moralist.

Without doubt, that last sentence carries enough of a scald to seriously undermine the claims of the preceding one. It is not so much a literary objection, but a mark of a difference of opinion between the writers as to how to approach their society. In Aspects of the Dying Process Wilding's stories have shifting, more indeterminate points of social reference and words such as “quest” would be quite inappropriate.

In The Americans, Baby, the tone of the moralist is much stronger, though no more conventional. Moorhouse still writes of ethics and lifestyles from a predominantly sexual point of view, and he is obviously anxious to do away with cant and with the social inhibitions barring personal, sexual adjustment. But he is more inclined than previously to do this through playing with types and expectations. His gift for handling dialogue is in the service of mapping in national, social or political types. And even some of his titles tend to give a character's role before his personality or name: “The American, Paul Jonson,” “The American Poet's Visit,” “The Girl from The Family of Man,” “The Girl Who Met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris.” After reading any one of these stories, the reader may find the titles alone of the others easing him into his responses. In the stories the process continues. Moorhouse tends to move, for instance, from dialogue to authorial voice nearly and unobtrusively. In “The Story of Nature,” Hugo, the American academic living with Cindy, the young Australian historian, is a health fanatic who believes, inter alia, that wholesome and organic foods prevent tooth rot, and Cindy answers back:

“My parents' teeth haven't fallen out.”
“They will—if they eat a corrupt diet.”
He said that modern food manufacturing was criminal.

(p. 45)

In the process Hugo's aggressive certainties get enshrined, and it is Moorhouse's narrator who has so placed them.

The method of operation is unobtrusive and extremely serviceable. The stories are usually condensed and yet less than sympathetic characters seem to have condemned themselves out of their own mouths. In fact they are likely to have uttered only a few lines, wrong-footed from the start, that have been carefully arranged as icons, or pointers towards usually self-deceptive faults. Paul Jonson, the American, to re-order the story's title, is quick to give away just enough American expansiveness to both draw in, and repel, the local student radicals he debates in a pub:

He looked at them with an easy grin, “Am I to gather?” he said, reaching for money for another round, “that you fellows don't particularly like America?”

They laughed. He said to Jonson, “Why should we?” speaking for all of them.

Jonson shrugged, “Let me buy you another beer—as a gesture of international goodwill.”

They let him.

“Let's get one thing straight?” he said. “I'm not blind to my country's ills,” handing them the beers.

(p. 9)

The rhetoric is hollow and yet sincere, and the gesture of “international goodwill,” like the naive disclaimer, comes across as yet another instance of misplaced American foreign aid, of boughten friendship. But if Jonson has got nothing straight, nor have the radicals in accepting the handout. What does emerge from the story, however, is a homosexual relationship between Jonson and one of the radicals, Carl, that moves outside the stilted terms of many of the book's encounters. Both the American blandness and the radical verbal aggression come across as too general and vague as opposed to the development of a difficult, clandestine personal relationship that, guilt-ridden as its beginnings are, is loaded with the potential for fulfilment because it moves clear of stock responses. In the later “Jonson's Letter,” Jonson writes to Carl of “nude bodies” and “bare minds” (p. 181) and, schematic as his concepts are in the letter, they indicate once more an attempt to move past set responses and social inhibitions to a personal relationship.

In contrast, the radicals with whom Carl has associated emerge as the most reprehensible characters in the book, not so much for the nature of their beliefs as for the strength of them. Turvey, in “The Machine Gun,” is something of a hermit, using women rather mechanically (“I get the stray fuck” [p. 86]), who has deluded himself into believing the Chinese are infiltrating Australia—a fantasy convenient to his personal and political inadequacies. He creates minor havoc at a party with a machine-gun. Turvey's friend Kim is even less pleasant and more authoritarian. He tries to force feed Dell a political and sexual education, he falls into bourgeois line by teaching at a country school and marrying an ex-private schoolgirl, he mixes with Young Liberals rather than miss a party and then, drunk, in “The Coca-Cola Kid” he clings to offensive rhetoric. After Becker, the man from Coca-Cola, has tried to hang himself at a party Kim says that he hopes he dies, and his wife responds:

“Things aren't as simple as you sometimes see them,” she said. Then, lighting a cigarette, she laughed derisively “You'd have fainted if they'd carried the body out.”

“Lenin never watched executions,” he said, accelerating on the straight road towards the scattered lights of the town.

(p. 133)

What is offensive here is not so much the heartlessness, which the reader is never asked to feel, as the use of rhetoric to be so totally evasive. Kim misses not just whatever implications there are in Becker's suicide attempt and his own wife's comment; he misses their very fact as he dredges up what sounds suspiciously like a line he had always wanted to use. It is in a similar context, in “The Machine Gun,” that Moorhouse threads fragments of Che Guevara's diaries through Turvey's and Kim's inadequacies and childish games with the Bren gun. (It is also worth noting that the story Moorhouse contributed to the anti-Vietnam anthology, We Took Their Orders and Are Dead, was the politically frustrating and non-committal “Dell Goes Into Politics.” Clearly, Moorhouse is anxious to prevent beliefs setting hard as dogma.)

If these come across as negative virtues in the storytelling, they must also be seen as pointers to some sort of non-aligned, non-authoritarian new order. As noted, the stories are strongly sexually-oriented and set in the inner city suburbs. But they are also not very specific in a physical, geographical sense. The characters don't have far-reaching terms of reference or social backgrounds that impinge on the present. The past is behind them, and very little personal background is considered relevant. When Moorhouse does move into the past, in “Who is Sylvia?,” the result is a journalistic, human interest set-piece that is far from illuminating and that actually slows the revelation of Sylvia, and of Carl. The more dramatic revelations of the neurotic Terri, in “The St Louis Rotary Convention 1923, Recalled” and elsewhere, are outrageous and more to shock Becker in the present than to explain Terri's past. But more often, and more successfully, Moorhouse presents characters whose background seems to have been, in their own terms, idyllic or innocent and therefore not very relevant to present experiences—and the reader is never compelled to believe such self-assessments anyway. Most often, the characters are like Cindy, in “The Story of Nature,” who notes that “She was not of the suburbs any more … She was not dramatically ‘alienated’ but she was bound in her own direction” (p. 46). This sometimes overly explicit story is the earliest collected in The Americans, Baby and was included in Moorhouse's previous book, but in the very recent “The Jack Kerouac Wake: The True Story” in Tabloid Story 2, Moorhouse includes a short soliloquy on the merits and dangers of downtown life, this time as opposed to the academy rather than the suburbs. Clearly, in the absence of any strong sense of actual place, and in the presence of a number of variously bewildered Americans who give the book its title and leitmotiv, the volume is looking for something as vague, and yet as revolutionary, as a new mode of living.

In this context the Americans give Moorhouse some handy terms of reference and much fine material for his fiction. Abstracting themes is especially damaging to Moorhouse's lack of dogma and to the direct impact of the stories which have such a dazzling surface, are often very funny, and that come across so well and so easily in readings. But it is selling the stories, and the “discontinuous narrative,” short to pay inadequate respect to the brio alone. In his treatment of Americans Moorhouse gives his stories a degree of flexibility and play that keeps wide of polemics and tracts. The stories involving Paul Jonson, Hugo, Kenneth Rexroth (“The American Poet's Visit”), and Becker (the six Coca-Cola stories) demonstrate, with varying degrees of success, how the roles, types and set-pieces are kept clear of dull stereotypes and work as shifting patterns of responses and stimuli for the individuals who are at the book's core. Of the Americans themselves only poor, confused Becker—never sure whether he is proud of his country and his product or simply propped up by them; ultimately claimed by alien Australia, losing his job, becoming a bar pianist—gets anything like sympathetic treatment. The others simply keep the stories mobile, the characters reflective and comparative and usually aware of the increased importance of American life as a model for our own. There are gentle reminders of the differences between the countries—Jonson who “graduated AB” (p. 9), the girl from The Family of Man who goes “marketing” (p. 37)—that pinpoint local identity rather than the spread of the American net of influence. This is apparent even in the form of the stories. Moorhouse's fictions are the most “American” ones published in Australia, blending literary homage with self-consciousness and rejection and, in the encounter of the writer-narrator of “The American Poet's Visit” with Kenneth Rexroth, embarrassment slips into drunken aggression and drunken retreat. There is something almost audacious about this since even the American abroad has tended to remain American literary property, in Twain, in James and ever since. By using Americans as reference-points for his own stories, Moorhouse almost commits trespass.

But if the Americans and some other stock characters work to isolate and pinpoint more particular, individual attitudes, there is still one obsession that pervades the book and speaks for a totally unresolved struggle. That is Moorhouse's presentation of the battle of the sexes. In the stories the women are seen repeatedly as dangerous and as terrifying as they are (usually) necessary. Moorhouse views, three-parts ironically, a world of male roles and female aspirations. Very often, male characters act according to expectations or retreat into the safety of them—Anderson in his boxer's robe (p. 142), the revolutionaries with their one gun—and in “The American Poet's Visit” the narrator in his confusion consoles himself with positive analogies of masculine activities: “We sit nonplussed and then I fall backwards into silence like a skindiver” (p. 58); “At times I fall back on myself like a boxer against the ropes” (p. 59). Women, on the other hand, tend to assert themselves in a way that suggests aspirations to some idea of masculine virility or activities that are considered men's domain: Dell goes home to a country town and takes up political slogans against her better judgement and her previously apolitical convictions, but out of confusion and frustration; Rexroth's young secretary is shown “clubbing us with an exclamation” (p. 60). Such women are shown as out of one social role, but only edging into another. When competition fails, derision takes its place and the women do their best to deflate their men. In “The Girl Who Knew Simone de Beauvoir in Paris,” the three principal male characters are accused by the women of being faggots—very American slang—and are besieged in Anderson's study:

“How long can we hold out?” Cooper said to Stockwell, who was white.

“The women have really got us holed up,” Cooper said grimly, looking through the curtain into the garden, “is there a back way out?”

“Yes, there is a back passage,” Stockwell said with desperate hope.

(p. 142)

The tone here is joking, but the collection looks sympathetically at homosexuality and the only relationship in the book that is left with more potential than detritus is the homosexual one of Paul and Carl.

This is not to suggest simply that Moorhouse is a chauvinist. It would be more accurate to say that his accounts of sexual relationships point up the dreadful confusions of roles that can stem from breaking with a fairly strict, role-oriented society and searching for personal terms of reference. To move clear of conventions is difficult and whatever relative freedom is achieved can be a terrible one indeed. Whether the widespread distrust of women by men in the stories, or women's frequent assumptions of “male” aggressions of a sometimes stereotyped nature came first, it is difficult to say. In fact, Moorhouse seems frankly confused. The terms of the struggle have a chicken-egg relationship that Moorhouse leaves open and records with enough deflections of expectations and indecision to suggest a confessed inability to draw any line between retreats and offensives, sex roles and their parodies. Women's liberationists and others may find much to attack in the book, but the lashings of irony that run through the man-woman battles, the feelings of paranoia that may or may not be justified, seem to develop, in the stories' terms, the quality of adequate response.

The twenty stories in The Americans, Baby cover these areas in a way that develops interdependence. Some of the shorter pieces—“Who is Sylvia?,” “Paul Jonson's Letter”—are disappointing, and the controversial “Letters to Twiggy” don't cap the volume very well, since that story suggests a trick-ending early enough to be predictable, and strongly enough to undermine the more creditable intention of presenting a compassionate portrait of a sad university lecturer who develops an obsession with Twiggy. But individually and together, the stories are assured, very funny and a penetrating examination of the lives of a predominantly urban people. The stories are important in Moorhouse's development, and in the development of Australian fiction. Moorhouse has opened up a wide range of fictional possibilities and presented an excellent set of possible responses.

Michael Wilding moves in the same milieu, but very differently. Moorhouse tends to write with a quick, bold confidence, blocking in characters with certainty and assurance. The stories' strengths come from the ease with which the vignettes are handled on the dissection table, and those readers who want to look at the stories as studies can separate them out easily, though Moorhouse's handling of tone and ambiguous attitudes would eventually undermine so rigid an approach. But themes can be isolated, and have been by Moorhouse himself: obsessions, for instance, appear in strong, concentrated doses in stories such as “A Person of Accomplishment,” “The Machine Gun” and the uncollected “The Dirty Girl” and “The Supersonic Coward.” Even the “Five Incidents Concerning the Flesh and the Blood,” the most reflective pieces in the book, have their vaguely meandering sense of being at the book's conscience strictly marshalled by being gathered as the one story. But in Aspects of the Dying Process Wilding takes a very different approach. In the case of private fears, for instance, they are manifested quite casually and almost unobtrusively, as in the recurrent fear of heights shared by a couple of characters (pp. 9, 31). Further, there is a sense of vagueness about such fears and a sense that one man's paranoia may be another man's comfort. This comes across in “Somewhere New” where the narrator's fear of heights and Gavin Mulgrave's dislike of old buildings (“Think how many people have died here” [p. 12]) are at variance. In the same story the two principal characters develop a greater interdependence than the narrator consciously acknowledges: their overlapping interests, their use of each other, their clashing attitudes that are not compensatory but that are definitely related. The narrator, as in other stories, is bemused but does not, as in the lying- or inadequate-narrator tradition, give the reader much in the way of unintentional information.

Rather, the stories are reflective, with their uncertainties the narrators' also. For Wilding, English born and educated, Moorhouse's breaking into new grounds in Australian fiction may be of small or academic interest. Running through Wilding's fiction is a sense of exile that is carefully explored and evaluated. There is a debt, in manner, to James though Wilding's sometimes discursive narratives and even his story verging on the essay, “Odour of Eucalyptus,” have dimensions wholly different from those of his partial master. But there are the deliberate mannerisms of painstakingly exploratory analysis as Wilding explores and occasionally pins down his subjects in a flurry of tentative prose, participial sentences, garlands of adjectives, and shifting sets of unresolved possibilities. In terms of exile this has Wilding talking in terms of past assurances, a sense of “over there” rather than a direct and literal acceptance of the present, though this latter seems what he is hunting after. For such reasons the Jamesian tag and the implications of imprecision are not meant critically, for they do not describe shortcomings. The sense of exile and unease comes across clearly in “As Boys to Wanton Flies” in which the central character, a small boy recently arrived in Australia from Europe, develops a phobia about insects and a brutal attempt at a cure is made. He is thrown into a bed teeming with insects, slugs and the like. At the same time the prose bristles with sexually loaded words, another Jamesian characteristic, and connects the story with the unease and changes that are connected with puberty. By perhaps too neat a contrast, “The Altar of the Family,” the slightest story in the collection, has an Australian child dehumanized by preoccupation with imported, ununderstood notions of “family,” “honour” and other such terms.

There is a tone of self-consciousness here and elsewhere. And very often that tone relates to a similar one in the Australian characters who are very aware of their urban, university-oriented lifestyle. In “The Sybarites,” a story that toys with a moral stance while capturing the central character's essential unease in any relaxed, sybaritic situation, the characters seize the opportunity to indulge themselves but also to parody themselves self-consciously:

The shark watching plane droned out at sea.

“When it starts to circle, you get worries,” Pat said.

“We live terribly dangerously,” said Helen, her head lying on the sand …

(p. 24)

In an unsuccessful conversation a girl, Pat, recognizes and names a ship, but shuts up when asked how:

She shrugged. She didn't answer. And he seemed to have stopped any chance of conversation by that, as if suggesting how incurably provincial it was to know the names, how colonially dependent on Europe. Which he had not considered, till her silence.

(p. 26)

Signs are taken for wonders, and experiences such as these are near to the unease that pervades the collection. Comments are usually guarded and there are no pivotal incidents. Particular readings of incidents seem beyond the narrative's scope or intention: “They watched Helen tip the dregs of her glass over the void, carelessly, casually, ceremonially, ritually, desperately, they could not tell, they could not hear” (p. 31); “They sat there, by the flat's entrance, and he knew he should ask her in; but he couldn't; he was too drunk or not drunk enough …” (p. 33).

Other stories subsume these terms and alternatives into less vague events. There are still preoccupations with nationality and with contrasts, there are still phobias and quirks, and still the sexually suggestive, tumefacient, edgy prose but a greater flow of particulars. In “Somewhere New,” “Joe's Absence,” “The Watertight VW” and “Aspects of the Dying Process” the stories cut their teeth on confrontations and day-to-day problems ranging from the humdrum to the traumatic. There is a developed sense of an urban sub-group, loose-knit and trying to live by its non-rules of freedom, but this sense can only be hemmed in. Emotions get blurred in drink, or manipulated by frustration and equivocation, frequently unable to cope with the contradictory pointers that the half-baked lifestyle throws out in all directions. In “Did Henry Miller Walk in Our Tropical Garden” there is a mixture of indecisiveness and bland assurance that Wilding's chosen style can bring into focus. And the same story carries the narrator's sense of frustration as the society he chooses to frequent doesn't give him the peace in which to write. Of related interest is the sexual indecisiveness of “Joe's Absence,” in which the short-story writer opts out of involvement with the other writer's, Joe's, girl. And that story, in turn, sits nicely against the claustrophobia of “The Watertight VW” in which too many people are thrown into a confined space, and the tension burns. Just as there are no pivotal events, there are few set terms of reference, and this openness is central to the collection. Where Moorhouse's images bring types of experience to mind and set up connections, Wilding's images sometimes diffuse response, as in his description of Sydney weather (p. 1) or of Miss Thorn, in “Odour of Eucalptus,”

discovering Sydney, and she looked at the surfies with white zinc coated on their noses, or their backs peeling, the skin coming away, cancerous, multicolor [sic] patches speckled like the underbelly of some fish …

(p. 67)

Here the connections and comparisons are made on a strictly for what-they're-worth basis, are a conglomerate of observations assuming their own form.

All such instances speak for what emerges as Wilding's most pervasive concern: the capturing of sensations as they occur, and of fidelity to the moment. With the exception of the two set in childhood, which are professionally but rather mechanically “sensitive,” the stories tend to accrue their significance. At the same time, the shifting heart of the tales leads to a curious though complementary sense of invalidation of the moment by recording it. Not only do the stories develop a curious particularity, they also carry a sense of unreality and isolation, even one of vacuum. The narrative voice steers clear of certainties and there is often a lack of certainty around the areas of focus. In “Joe's Absence” the narrator watched Margot wander off to make a phone call and go for a swim:

Instead of returning directly; she walked diagonally across from the road to the water and swam, as if he had not been there at all. And when she swam underwater nothing remained to show she ever had been there except her towel and book beside him. He wondered idly what the book was, but did not bother to reach for it …

(p. 44)

There are three clear instances of the present reality itself being doubted and it is in such a context that Joe's absence is so pervasive and inhibiting a force. Similarly, in “The Altar of the Family,” the boy David shoots a possum at pointblank range but by morning the corpse has vanished, completely without trace. In “Somewhere New” Gavin Mulgrave is invited to dinner but simply never turns up: “It was as if the invitation and occasion had never existed” (p. 8). In the same story Mulgrave, living at King's Cross never relates to it as a physical place:

… none of this seemed to impinge on Gavin, high on the tenth floor. Ferry parties were one of the few things that ever reached him. In the evenings ferries hired for celebrations or R & R men from Vietnam ran the entire length of the harbour, booming out amplified rock. This penetrated his flat.

“I thought a poltergeist had turned on my transistor the first time it happened,” he said, happily.

(p. 16)

Again, in the same story, Wilding gives a list of alternate early starts to the day for Gavin, accentuating no one possibility above others (pp. 13–14). In other stories, two characters looking out to sea note that they don't know what's at the other side (pp. 22, 85).

In such ways, Aspects of the Dying Process makes a virtue out of being tentative, and enacts many of the dilemmas and uncertainties of the society in which the stories are set. Though constantly aware of sex and occasionally preoccupied with it, the stories contain very little successful wooing or seduction and a number of characters reject direct sexual offers or opt out of initiatives (pp. 33, 47–8, 73, 83, 84, 93–4, 104, 109–10, 113–14). Similarly, the stories are related to the general implications of the book's title in their possibly negative and certainly ironic modes, concentrating on elusive attitudes and emotions that are seen as tacked on to the “dying process.” The aspects are not fixed in frozen section but left free-standing, interacting as they will. The narrative force in the title-story lies in two characters' fascination for each other coupled with their always being on the wrong wavelength, and it speaks for the tone of the volume as a whole. The effect is not one of social and personal failure, as this may suggest, but of an inability to set new modes of behaviour and reaction, and of learning to cope with this. The theme of exile that is Wilding's and his narrators' gives a perspective not unlike Moorhouse's use of Americans—giving fluid terms of reference, allowing individuals to work out their own positions without fixing them in time or place. But where Moorhouse is direct, setting up difficult and often ambiguous stories with a deceptively confident approach and sometimes opinionated narrative stance, Wilding chooses to appear less certain and yet gives an assured sense of the social and personal motivations of his characters. This brings the reader back to Wilding's review of the previous Moorhouse collection: the impulse behind Wilding is totally different, shiftier in one sense, much more particular in another.

Notes

1. Frank Moorhouse, The Americans, Baby (Angus and Robertson, 1972.)

   Michael Wilding, Aspects of the Dying Process (University of Queensland Press, 1972.)