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Sumner Locke Elliott (1917–1991)

Autore di Careful, He Might Hear You

19+ opere 365 membri 10 recensioni

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Opere di Sumner Locke Elliott

Careful, He Might Hear You (1963) 125 copie
Fairyland: A Novel (1990) 73 copie
Waiting for Childhood (1987) 37 copie
Water Under the Bridge (1977) 32 copie
Edens Lost (1969) 26 copie
Going (1975) 22 copie
The Man Who Got Away (1972) 14 copie
Signs of Life (1981) 7 copie
Some doves and pythons (1966) 7 copie
About Tilly Beamis (1984) 6 copie
Rusty Bugles (PLAYS) (1980) 5 copie
Radio Days (1993) 3 copie
Buy Me Blue Ribbons. (1952) 2 copie

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A subtle, appealing, assured debut novel, Careful, He Might Hear You is still regarded as an Australian classic six decades after publication. The story centres around a boy whose peaceful life with his aunt and uncle (the only parents he has ever known) is interrupted by the arrival of another aunt from London, who enters a legal battle to take custody of him.

It is not often that a writer's debut novel remains their most famous (and best, for that matter), but there are two common reasons why this might be so, and Elliott evinces both of them. First, it is autobiographical, based on the author's recollections of being raised by aunts in Sydney in the 1920s. Second, it is the work of an experienced writer. By the time he published his first novel, Elliott had spent 25 years writing first radio serials in Australia and then live television dramas in New York City. He was already skilled at the art of sketching multiple points-of-view, of softening seemingly villainous characters and toughening apparent heroes, and composing dialogue which reveals both the inner and outer lives of the people speaking.

Elliott had some interest in modernism, which comes across strongly in some of his later novels, but if we're honest he was perhaps not a serious, by which I mean linguistically difficult writer. This is subtly drawn but still ultimately melodrama. As such, it remains an easy read decades after publication but shows signs of age in the dialogue and character interactions. What it gains, perhaps, in retrospect is a historian's view of an Australia long gone but still casting shadows over us all.
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therebelprince | 3 altre recensioni | Oct 24, 2023 |
Sumner Locke Elliott remains famous for his first novel, Careful, He Might Hear You, a largely autobiographical tale of his childhood raised among aunts with vastly different views of his future. Elliott wrote that novel in his late 40s, having started a career in the Australian theatre and radio industry in the late 1930s as a beautiful young man with a quick wit and an ability to craft long-form stories with a popular slant. After the War, he moved to the USA where he spent twenty years as a highly respected name in the "golden age" of television drama. It was only when that era faded, in the mid-1960s, that Elliott seriously turned his attention to writing novels, largely because he was settled in New York City and did not want to make the trek out to that notoriously vapid West Coast.

Perhaps herein lie the clues to the fatal flaw of his second novel, 1966's Some Doves and Pythons. The novel focuses on Tabitha Wane, a talent agent who - when we open in medias res - is organising a house party that will prove crucial to retaining and obtaining key clients, while also stabilising her many personal relationships, which are equally as manipulated and driven by Tabitha's ego as her private ones.

Elliott's talent as a writer is evident from the first page. He writes polyphonically, with a chorus of voices interrupting each other, reflecting in flashbacks, with some sections in free indirect discourse, other sections lengthy conversation pieces. The expanding and contracting timescale is (somewhat) modernist and the structure, with Tabitha's rise and fall and rise, is expertly thought out.

Some Doves and Pythons doesn't fail, exactly, but it is ultimately unremarkable for two key reasons, both of which I believe relate to Elliott's lengthy experience in television and radio dramas. First of all, the subject matter is simply inconsequential. A scheming talent producer who realises, over the course of a country house weekend, that the people in her life must be valued as friends more than as means to an end, well that's just dandy. It would've made a great Sunday night drama in the era of live television, when audiences expected to see everything from Ibsen to Coward appear on their screens regularly. As the subject for a full-length novel the reader grows weary of the sheer emptiness.

Second, and more importantly, is the dialogue. Now, don't get me wrong, the dialogue is vibrant enough, if not quite sparkling. But it struck me, midway through the novel, that I was reading a play. Truly. During his decades as a popular scriptwriter, Elliott had also written a play which appeared (very briefly) on Broadway in the 1950s. I wouldn't be surprised if this novel began as an idea for a stage piece. Elliott is stage-managing a production, and nowhere is that more in evidence than the endless use of italicising of individual words in a sentence or often of individual syllables! Yes, he is prone to informing the reader of exactly how a line should be spoken, because he doesn't trust his dialogue to do its work without an actor speaking the words. (A problem Elliott must have worked through, as his later novels like Fairyland attest.) Anyone who is familiar with writing will see the script-based nature of the dialogue in sections such as this:

"Marvelous," Tabitha said to Barney. "Both Flora and Harry are marvelous people. Good people. Of the earth, earthy." She was moving a green glass to replace the pewter on the mantel. "But they don't understand charm."

In essence, the novel is appealingly written at times but can't overcome these qualms. Where Elliott succeeds more is in the moments of individual character analysis, which had made his first novel so appealing and would earn him justified acclaim for some of his later works. The sequence where Tabitha finally asks her longtime confidante Barney about his sexuality (in a very roundabout way) feels poignant and sensitive. And the most well-drawn character is Tabitha's housebound mother, who tolerates the house parties while being unable to see her daughter as anything other than the troubled but determined child she had once been. Edith:
"disdained the trappings of the past, however. She was, by nature, unsentimental. She would not pick and pry through old boxes of mementoes, faded pictures of the dead. She avoided the obituary columns, preferring not to know that another of her friends was dead, relying on the distillation of her mind to summon them at will to her, and so the slow-motion figures revolved around her, untouched by age, bright-eyed and brown-haired, immortal. The past and present merged."

As far as I can tell, the novel has not been reprinted in several decades. When I went to my local library to request their archived copy, the librarian wasn't even sure if it still existed, as they had lost some books in a flood several years ago. The copy had survived but, even then, I had to create the Goodreads entry! Perhaps I will be the only person who reads this novel in the 21st century, and I don't think it will be a great loss if that is so. But still, for the sake of the thoughtful and sensitive Mr Elliott, I'm glad someone did.
… (altro)
 
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therebelprince | Oct 24, 2023 |
Sumner Locke Elliott's third novel continues the career of a writer who was, in his time, vastly underrated, but who has aged poorly in some ways.

To the positive: Elliott's delicate shading of character is stronger here than in his previous two novels. Orphaned Angus journeys to the Blue Mountains to stay with the St James family, ruled over by cold fish Eve, the matriarch who has lost her youthful passion in favour of a cool detachment. Her daughter Stevie has inherited Eve's passion, but it is wasted on the beautiful young man she falls for, who is - unbeknownst to Stevie - gay. Elliott's first book, Careful He Might Hear You, had been a fictionalised version of his own childhood; here, Edens Lost feels like a sequel, telling the tale of young adults in love.

The interesting difference here is that, while the queer Marcus is clearly a stand-in for the author, Elliott is also to be found in the other St James daughter, Bea. Bea has hidden her desires for physical and emotional connection by retreating to her creative pursuits. She is writing for radio dramas, and gradually developing a career out of this. But her rational, intellectual point-of-view is challenged when she meets an American serviceman.

Edens Lost is an engaging read, and feels more purposeful than the forgettable second novel in the Elliott canon, Some Doves and Pythons. Still, fifty years after publication, it feels woefully archaic. I read a review that described the book as "strictly matinee entertainment", and I think that's the problem here. Elliott was an immensely talented and creative writer; he had made his name for years in radio serials and live television dramas, so he knew how to spin several plates before bringing them down together, and he knew how to conjure up engaging dialogue and plots. But - despite some fetching attempts at modernism - he is not a particularly literary writer. Most enervating of all is Elliott's habit of directing the reader to how dialogue is spoken. Words and sometimes individual syllables are italicised; the radio dramatist doesn't trust his own dialogue without an actor to interpret it! As a result, Edens Lost feels like a high-class airport novel. Of the three sections, the second - Bea's - is by far the most successful, clearly connecting to the writer's own sense of self.

This is the kind of novel to pass the time on a train journey or perhaps, better yet, on a rained-in weekend at a hotel with a partner you are secretly planning to abandon for a more attractive new lover. If you're not in that situation, though, don't worry about it.
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therebelprince | Oct 24, 2023 |
Just over a week ago, Writers NSW and the State Library of NSW hosted another in their Honouring Australian Writers series, with a tribute to the author Sumner Locke Elliott (1917-1991). Hearing about this event prompted me to retrieve his sixth novel Water Under the Bridge from the TBR where it had languished for far too long, and subsequently listening to rel="nofollow" target="_top">the podcast* enhanced my reading of the novel. So I must acknowledge the speakers at the event: Sharon Clarke who wrote a 1996 biography of Sumner Locke Elliott; and the other speakers Kim Knuckey, an actor with a keen interest in Elliott's plays; the film producer Margaret Fink who produced the film based on Elliott's Eden's Lost in 1988; and Walter Mason who did some of the readings.

Sumner Locke Elliott is known to most of us as the winner of the 1963 Miles Franklin Award with his first and very poignant autobiographical novel Careful, He Might Hear You which I read years ago when it was made into a film in 1983. Much more recently I reviewed Fairyland (1990), which was the last of his novels and an autobiographical novel which reveals a rather grim Sydney in the days before homosexuality was decriminalised. Apart from Edens Lost (1969) and Water Under the Bridge (1977) which were both set in Australia, all the others were set in the US, where he lived from 1948. These included: Some Doves and Pythons (1966); The Man Who Got Away (1972); Going (1975); Signs of Life (1981); About Tilly Beamis (1985); and Waiting for Childhood (1987). In 1977 he won the Patrick White Award.

But apart from these novels which were internationally successful (including in translation), Elliott was also a successful playwright and scriptwriter, most notably for Rusty Bugles (1948) which was, according to one of the speakers on the podcast, the first play to feature the Australian vernacular, an homage more commonly applied to Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) by Ray Lawlor. This may well have been because Rusty Bugles was promptly banned because of its bad language, which is apparently quite tame by contemporary standards. I'll leave that to others to judge.

What I learned from the podcast, and subsequently by poking around in my Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1985 edition), was that one way or another, all Elliott's novels were autobiographical, featuring orphaned boys brought up by lone surrogate mothers. Elliott's own mother died young, leaving him to the tender mercies of the aunts who waged a custody battle for him as fictionalised in Careful, He Might Hear You. In Water Under the Bridge, the mother is careless of him, dumping him on a theatrical friend while she goes to nurse the husband by whom she so besotted that she barely notices the child's existence. Both of them promptly die of the flu epidemic, leaving him in the dismayed hands of the friend.

The portrayal of Shasta, the ageing chorus-girl, is both brutal and sympathetic. She gives up her big break on the stage to take care of him all through the bleak years of the depression, but her resentment about this entrapment and the lost opportunities for fame and for love bleed through into hysterical rants which are legendary in the boarding house. When Neil comes home after the celebrations for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, he is warned to be wary:

"The front hall light had been left on for him which would mean sixpence would be added to the rent. The house had a peculiar smell of old carpet, frying and stale beer. The vestibule was a slight cut above the neighbours', with threadbare carpeting rather than lino. There was a lithograph of 'Hope' crouched blindfold in despair over the globe of the world, and a framed mirror that had tarnished into golden measles. On the fumed-oak dropleaf table was a bowl of dusty wax grapes that looked like tumours and a china Tyrolean couple probably won at Luna park years ago. Mrs Chauncey reluctantly took telephone messages and one or two of these were propped up against the grapes. One read 'Neil'.

In the uncertain light he read 'Cave. V.B.M.' Chauncey liked a bit of Latin. Cave was Latin for Beware. [...] V.B.M. meant Very Bad Mood. Good old Chauncey, what a pal. Neil unlaced his shoes and took them off and went up the stairs using the extreme side which was less inclined to squeak." (p.57-8.)


Mrs Chauncey's warning does him no good at all. Shasta is awake, and she lures him into what starts as a genial conversation that then morphs into a tirade about his selfishness, about how she doesn't care about anything he does, but she's sick of being treated like a doormat, and so on. And on and on. Shasta has become an awful old harridan, tormenting Neil at every opportunity, and not evoking much of the reader's sympathy — not until a last opportunity for happiness arises. Elliott has set his novel in an era of real suffering — the Depression, and then the war, but he gives proper weight to Shasta's tragedy: the collapse of her long-held hopes and her fear of a lonely old age...

"She lay awake and thought about being rescued from the descending spiral of shabby rooming houses, each one worse. Of the diminishing of old pals, the eventual state home for the aged, recognised the fact that in all her born days of entertaining men in and out of bed, she'd never before had a legitimate proposal of marriage.

Most of all she thought about the horror of ending her life in any kind of hospital or institution. She could never forget going to visit broken-down old Queenie Dawn in one of those places, the stench of disinfectant, the rows of beds with the old women lying in their own wet or shuffling up and down the ward in their institutional grey cotton bathrobes, the cold disinterested attendants. And Queenie saying, 'You're the only one who's ever come to see me, Shast.' Even at that she couldn't ever go back." (p.285)


But it's not easy for Neil to escape.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/09/05/water-under-the-bridge-by-sumner-locke-ellio...… (altro)
 
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anzlitlovers | Sep 4, 2019 |

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19
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Utenti
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ISBN
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