Interesting piece by Frank Devine in yesterday’s Australian newspaper, focussing on the writing of Helen Dale.
Dale – formerly Helen Darville/Demidenko – is nowadays a Queensland lawyer and sometime contributor to the blog catallaxy. A couple of her blog pieces were selected for inclusion in Online Opinion’s Best Blog Posts of 2006.
Frank Devine notes that his best holiday reading thus far has been the first 10,000 words of Our House, a novel in progress by Helen Dale (or Darville as he sometimes refers to her). “Darville, it will be remembered, I hope,” writes Devine, “was the focus of probably the ugliest literary controversy ever inflicted on Australia when, under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko, she won the 1995 Miles Franklin award for her first novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper. She was then aged 24.”
Devine refers to detractors of The Hand That Signed the Paper as “literary fringe dwellers’” resentful of the Miles Franklin going to an outsider.
One of Darville’s critics at the time was Richard Flanagan, whose Death of a River Guide, coincidentally, was pipped for the 1995 Miles Franklin Award – as were Kate Grenville’s Dark Places and Jay Verney’s A Mortality Tale – by The Hand That Signed The Paper. Can’t recall if I’ve heard of Flanagan referred to as a literary fringe dweller before; then again, opinion’s subjective. One of Flanagan’s arguments against the book concerned the post-modern notion of the author’s irrelevance. “Take a writer like Italo Calvino. What you need know about him is irrelevant. You can read his books and derive a great pleasure from them without needing to know what he was like personally. But if you take his compatriot Primo Levi, who was a concentration camp survivor and whose works to my mind represent some of the best writings of the last thirty or forty years: who he was, and his history, is critical to his works. Because, if it suddenly came out in the press tomorrow that Primo Levi hadn’t been in Auschwitz, then all his work no longer has any basis. It just wouldn’t stand up because the identification of the man and his history and his writing is complete. In the same way Demidenko tried to identify her writing with who she was in a way that was total and complete. The point about the separation of text and author is that sometimes it doesn’t matter. But sometimes it matters entirely. And it mattered entirely with Demidenko. Because the moral touchstone of the book – even if you disagreed with it profoundly, the history, morality and so on – was that here is the voice of authentic experience. That was the underlying argument as to why it must be treated with some seriousness. But there was no such moral touchstone.”
Dale has since published her own perspective of events surrounding the publication and reception of The Hand That Signed The Paper as “My Life as a Young Australian Novelist” in the May 2006 issue of Quadrant. In it, she points out that in 1995 she hadn’t intended to hold the pseudonym ‘Demidenko’ for very long. “It was designed to last until my main source for the novel died. At the time, he had terminal bone marrow cancer and six months to live. I promised him that he wouldn’t be prosecuted under the War Crimes Act on my account. Shortly after I won the Australian/Vogel Award, his cancer went into remission and faced me with a real quandary. I decided to keep the pseudonym, although came perilously close to letting my publisher in on the secret.”
A good deal of commentary at catallaxy follows the publication of Devine’s piece yesterday.