True Stories Read Free

the doctors of the Penrith story in this book, you have to keep moving—on, on, on.
    When I first started publishing regular feature articles, a newspaper man came up to me at a party and said genially, ‘I like your journalism, Helen—but you should write more. You should write faster. ’ A publisher’s editor standing nearby overheard this. I saw his mouth drop open. The journalist moved on and the editor said to me in a voice faint with horror, ‘That was awful. It was like hearing the devil talking.’
    But in the early eighties the Age had a wonderful editor, an Englishman called Michael Davie. He had a black-and-white photo of Samuel Beckett pinned to his office wall. I respected his judgement, loved his dry, elegant sparkle, and was always just a little bit scared of him. When I did my first feature for him, he sent me a bottle of champagne. He offered me a retainer. He was funny and sophisticated and he thought writing mattered. He didn’t stay long in Australia, but he was the first editor I worked for who lent dignity to the job of writing features for a daily newspaper.
    After he went back to London, I made an appointment with his successor, for I was labouring under the delusion that, since I was in a very minor way on his payroll, I ought out of courtesy to present myself in person. The new editor lost no time in letting me know that he was not in the business of ‘massaging writers’ egos’. Crrrrunch. Things were back to normal. Thus ended my formal relationship with the Age.
    It is very squashing to come to feature journalism from a publishing house, where one’s work is treated with respect. These days, with newspapers and magazines, I am crabby enough to demand and get proofs, but back then I was still at the mercy of the sub-editors and their brutally applied house style. I have never to my knowledge actually seen a sub, but their harsh pencils (or whatever they use) have punctured many a balloon of my modest rhetoric. I once wrote a piece for the Age in which I rhapsodised about looking out the window of an interviewee’s kitchen in an outer suburb and seeing ‘miles and miles of golden grass’. This appeared on Saturday morning as ‘kilometres and kilometres of golden grass’.
    Further into the eighties I worked for the National Times and the Times on Sunday , which were based in Sydney. Sunday became the worst day of the week. Their typesetters were slap-happy and their subs not merely deflating—they delighted to slash and burn. Between them they could mangle the meaning out of the simplest sentence. ‘Operatic’ became ‘operative’. ‘Hedonistic’ turned into ‘pessimistic’, ‘rhetorical’ into ‘theoretical’. A friend of mine who also wrote for them phoned me one Sunday morning. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done to my story?’ he said in a choking voice. ‘I’ve just smashed the toaster with a hammer.’
    Journalism is a tonic for narcissists like me. It gets you out of the house—literally, but also in the sense that it blasts you out of your immediate personal situation and into direct contact with strangers. The more of it I try to write, the deeper grows my respect for the great interviewers. I used to think a lot of Joan Didion, but when I reread Slouching towards Bethlehem , lately, I found it rigid with mannerisms, with style. I’m thinking rather of writers like Janet Malcolm ( The Silent Woman , most recently), the Englishman Tony Parker ( Life after Life , interviews with twelve murderers), Norman Mailer of The Executioner’s Song —and the French documentary maker Claude Lanzmann ( Shoah, Tsahal ) .
    Lanzmann has a humility before his material which is exemplary and rare. He never shirt-fronts, or tries to get people on the back foot—but he is persistent, gently stubborn. He is the king of the apparently dumb question, the