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NLA News - home June 2004 Volume XIV Number 9
Beating the Odds: The Career of Amy Witting
A gelatin silver photograph of Amy Witting, Brisbane 1995 by Alec Bolton
Alec Bolton (1926–1996)
Portrait of Amy Witting,
Brisbane  1995
gelatin silver photograph; 21.6 x 16.5 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an14602492
Courtesy of Rosemary Dobson Bolton

Elizabeth Nelson listened to Peter Coleman’s sensitive interviews with the Australian writer known as Amy Witting before outlining her adult life and work

At the end of her career, in 2001, novelist Amy Witting was a literary lioness—a feted prizewinner. For most of her life, however, she was unknown outside a small circle of admirers. The first question author and critic Peter Coleman addresses in a series of interviews he conducted with Witting in 1992 for the National Library’s Oral History Program is why it took so long for her career to take off. The oral history suggests that Witting’s tough life circumstances and uncompromising spirit hold the key.

Witting was born Joan Fraser in Sydney in 1918 and grew up in the then working class inner city suburb of Annandale. ‘I came from a pretty battling background,’ she says, ‘and I saw life as a struggle.’ Her talent was apparent at an early age. She received 7/6 for a comic poem she sold to an English magazine when she was 10. At 16 she received slightly more—10/6—from The Sydney Morning Herald for a more melancholy poem that was published under a pseudonym. A local composer was so taken with the poem that he set it to music and sent an invitation to the author to attend the premiere of the work. Witting laughs as she remembers the astonishment of the composer when she turned up at the concert in her school tunic. ‘The gentleman could hardly keep his face straight,’ she recalls, as ‘the poem was obviously written by a very sad 45-year-old’.

Witting, who attended Fort Street High School, was also publishing poetry in the school magazine,The Fortian, at this time. She was intimidated, however, by the quality of some of the other poetry in the publication. Two frequent contributors, fellow Fort Street students James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who were to later to mastermind the Ern Malley hoax, were writing ‘very experimental’ verse influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. ‘I hadn’t heard of T.S. Eliot,’ Witting recalls, ‘and I was pretty shattered when I did.’ (John Kerr, later Governor-General, also attended Fort Street High School. He and Witting became close many years later following his marriage to her friend Nancy Robson, and the last of the tapes provides Witting’s perspective on his dismissal of Gough Whitlam.)

A gelatin silver photograph of A.D. Hope 1983 by Alec Bolton

Alec Bolton (1926–1996)
Portrait of A.D. Hope  1983
gelatin silver photograph;
25.4 x 20.3 cm
In series ‘Portraits of A.D. Hope, 1983’
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an14261033-1

Courtesy of Rosemary Dobson Bolton

 

Witting won a teaching scholarship to Sydney University, where she studied modern languages and moved in a circle which included McAuley, Stewart, and A.D. Hope. In The Education of Young Donald (1967), Donald Horne recalls that she ‘dressed modestly, in the intellectual fashion, and even put on her lipstick modestly, but this modesty in embellishment seemed to bring out the whiteness of her skin and the warmth of her eyes’. Horne was charmed by Witting’s habit of rolling her own cigarettes and paying for her own coffee. He called her ‘Fraser’ as ‘it was progressive to call women by their surnames’.

Those years at Sydney University in the mid-to-late 1930s seem in retrospect to be a golden period devoted to literary excellence. The protagonists have been much written about and Witting herself was known and admired as a wit by this group. While acknowledging that ‘it was a burgeoning time’ for Australian literature, Witting is scathing about the social context in which she was struggling to survive. First, there was the snobbery. ‘It was very class conscious,’ she recalls. ‘More class conscious than you could imagine.’ You were supposed to eat lunch in the refectory. This cost money, of course, so some people had to bring sandwiches in a paper bag. Witting was one of these. ‘It was a real social bar,’ she says. James McAuley, for example, ‘would rather go hungry than eat sandwiches out of a paper bag for his lunch’.

Then there was the sexism. Donald Horne’s enlightened attitude was an exception. ‘Girls were dolls and I wasn’t,’ says Witting. If you were perceived to be an intellectual equal ‘you weren’t a customer, you were a competitor, and a female competitor in those days had a very rough time’. Witting singles out A.D. Hope as being particularly sexist although she acknowledges his brilliance. Of the other lecturers she says, ‘At that university I never heard any lecturer or professor make a remark worth remembering’.

A black & white photograph of Kenneth Slessor. Australian News and Information Bureau photograph
A gelatin silver photograph of Donald Horne, Woollahara 1987 by Alec Bolton

Kenneth Slessor  n.d.
b&w photograph; 22.0 x 16.5 cm
Australian News and Information
Bureau photograph
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-vn3096390

 

Alec Bolton (1926–1996)
Portrait of Donald Horne, Woollahara 1987
gelatin silver photograph;
17.7 x 12.6 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an14467624
Courtesy of Rosemary Dobson Bolton

 

As for Witting’s reputation as a wit—well, ‘I may have made things very amusing for other people but I didn’t make them amusing for myself’. Deeply unhappy, she considered not doing her teachers college year but came to the conclusion that, however ill-equipped she might be to teach, it was the only way she would be able to make a living.

Witting grew to love teaching but was ill-suited for her first post and was bullied by the headmistress. She could see that the headmistress had suffered but despised the way in which she took out her unhappiness on others. Looking at the life which lay ahead of her Witting realised that she, too, would probably suffer. ‘I thought that I was going to be a spinster and I was going to have a job I hated and I was simply not going to give in,’ she says. She resolved that however bad things became, she would never lose perspective, would always be ‘witting’. She invented the pseudonym Amy Witting at that time with an eye to future publication, although it was some years before she had occasion to use it.

In 1948 Witting was posted to a school in Kempsey, where she met and married fellow teacher Les Levick. In 1953 she took her class to have chest x-rays to screen for tuberculosis. X-rays were a relatively new procedure and, to reassure the children, Witting said she would have one herself. Recalled by the doctor, she feared bad news about one of her pupils, only to discover that it was she who had TB.

A colour photograph of Professor James McAuley 1971. Australian News and Information Bureau photograph
Professor James McAuley  1971
col. transparency; 7.0 x 7.0 cm
Australian News and Information Bureau photograph
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-vn3096383

While being treated in a sanatorium, Witting confided to a fellow patient that she was always starting novels but that she never finished them. The friend suggested she try short stories. Witting did so, and sent one to Southerly. The editor, Kenneth Slessor, sent Witting a message via her friend Thea Astley. ‘Tell her,’ he said, ‘that I would publish any word she ever wrote.’ Witting never forgot those words. After years in which ‘I despaired quite often’, her confidence began to grow. More short stories followed.

In the early 1970s Witting read two stories by Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding in Tabloid Story, a magazine which was published as a supplement to various journals. Witting thought the pieces sexist, and wrote a parody from a feminist perspective, adopting the idiom of the two then cutting-edge male authors. ‘I didn’t know what it was going to cost me,’ she says.

By chance, Witting’s story was published in an issue of Tabloid Story which was inserted into the Teachers’ Federation journal. On 15 August 1974, Witting was listening to the car radio with her son Greg when she heard the Minister for Education, Eric Willis, say that her story, which he tabled in Parliament, was akin to ‘scribbling on lavatory walls’. Willis had, of course, no idea that ‘Amy Witting’ was Joan Levick who as Mistress of Modern Languages at North Sydney Girls’ High School was an employee of his own department, nor that admirers of her work included his Liberal Party colleague, Peter Coleman. Amid threats of obscenity charges, Witting took leave from teaching and wrote her first novel, The Visit. Published in 1977, the book was praised by critics but failed to connect with a wider readership.

A gelatin silver photograph of Helen Garner 1999 by Greg Weight

Greg Weight (b.1946)
Helen Garner  1999
gelatin silver photograph;
22.8 x 18 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an21225265

 

For many years Witting harboured the idea for a novel about a child rejected by its mother. She finally wrote it as I for Isobel but had tremendous difficulty getting it published. Many editors and publishers’ readers could not accept the challenge to the institution of motherhood implied by such a powerful depiction of maternal abuse. Witting’s own editor, Beatrice Davis, told her, ‘No mother has ever behaved like that’. (‘You wouldn’t know how many mothers have behaved like that,’ says Witting. ‘You are never alone.’) After years of frustration, she put the novel away in a drawer and tried to forget about writing fiction. A former pupil persuaded Witting to let her take the manuscript to London, where she showed it to a literary agent whose support finally led to its publication in 1989. Witting, by that stage, was 71.

The public immediately ‘got’ the novel as publishers had not. Witting received letters from women who had been abused as children, from authors such as Janette Turner Hospital and Helen Garner who felt Witting had helped them find their voice as women writers, and from men for whom the novel triggered release from years of suppressed emotion. Still in print, the novel is, as Witting hoped, ‘a stayer’. ‘It is better to spend 30 years on something that is going to stay 30 years, isn’t it?’ she said. Despite failing eyesight, Witting continued to write novels and short stories until her death in 2001.

Amy Witting once told a journalist she would rather ‘dive stark naked into a barrel of rattlesnakes’ than write her autobiography. Perhaps only the extremely patient Peter Coleman (‘Now Joan, we must get back to you’ is a much used phrase) could have drawn her oral history testimony from her. Although Witting clearly did not enjoy the oral history process—the famous wit is seldom in evidence, although the steely intelligence always is—scholars will draw on this resource for years to come as they seek to understand this complex writer and the circles in which she moved.

ELIZABETH NELSON is a freelance writer based in Canberra

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