AustLit

'The Watch Tower (1966) is typically read as a psychological novel, an exemplary study in abuse and entrapment that returns to and intensifies the central subject of Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction. Like everyone else who reads it, I am riveted by the forensic brilliance with which Harrower details Felix Shaw’s systematic destruction of the lives of the women in his household. Yet this focus on individuals and psychology risks blinding us to other things that are going on in the novel, one of which is a preoccupation with, well, things. So I’d like to look a little closer at objects in The Watch Tower'

'It seemed especially fitting to re-read the work of Elizabeth Harrower in Sydney in November, the season of the jacaranda, when Sydney is perhaps most perfectly and most ludicrously itself. Because Harrower is one of the great novelists of Sydney, and it’s impossible – I find it impossible – to think of her work without also thinking of the suburbs of the lower North Shore, of Kings Cross, and again and again of Sydney Harbour.' (Introduction)

'When I first read The Long Prospect (1958) some thirty years ago, what impressed me was the expressivity of Harrower’s writing, its power in capturing the drama and surge of emotion. It strikes you immediately, in the first pages of the novel, which have the formidable and oppressive grandmother Lilian intruding into the flat of her one-time boarder, the young scientist Thea, with “her eyes on swivels” – and not just her eyes working overtime, but her eyebrows too, “one ironic eyebrow cocked and ready to greet Thea”, and “one drooping disdainfully”. 1 As so often in Harrower, the drama of emotion is played out in the face – the characters constantly scan each other’s faces, they twist incredulously or curve maliciously, they beam with admiration or are bleached with dismay. Their mouths are similarly expressive – close-lipped with resolution, quivering with anger, clamped shut with rage. They exhibit several different kinds of laughter, smiles, grins and giggles – most of them fairly chilling. And then of course the eyes – cold, downcast, brightly sullen, wild with accusation or fixed with tension, “frank and yet guarded” (125). Within moments of her intrusion into the younger woman’s flat, Lilian’s face and indeed the nervous, endlessly mobile dispositions of her body in the confined space, have registered a whole parade of emotions: disdain, resentment, disapproval, wonder, disappointment, incredulity, anger, excitement, annoyance, jealousy, awe and derision.' (Introduction)

'The recent publication by Text of two new works by Elizabeth Harrower, along with their reissuing of all her earlier novels, some out of print for over fifty years, provides an ideal opportunity to study the development of various themes and preoccupations in her fiction. I have chosen here to focus on her fictional representations of Australia and Australians, and in particular how the city of Sydney, where she has spent most of her life, figures in her work. The previous difficulty of accessing Harrower’s novels has, no doubt, been one of the reasons why they have received little detailed critical study. Most essays published to date have discussed The Watch Tower (1966), using a variety of perspectives but rarely mentioning its Sydney setting. In 1990, when editor of Southerly, I published an essay on Down in the City (1957) by Rosie Yeo, based on her Honours thesis which I had supervised, to draw attention to this then largely forgotten novel. While the differences in class and attitude of those who live in various parts of Sydney are especially important in this novel, the city appears in all of Harrower’s works, even those not primarily set there.' (Introduction)

'Elizabeth Harrower’s fictions are often severe and enigmatic, and, although riveting in their surface action and exquisite in their style, do not immediately disclose their meaning. Yet it could well be said that if Harrower has a subject it is gender. All her novels are about gender relations and hierarchies. Indeed, the only way to ignore this is if we persist in seeing gender as a minor and provincial sphere, not heeding to the way that, as Raewyn Connell puts it, gender institutions affect all social institutions. This is even more salient as we realise how, in Connell’s words, gender differences can appear in one sense so “stark and rigid” and in another so “fluid, complex, and uncertain”.' (Introduction)

'Elizabeth Harrower’s third novel, The Catherine Wheel (1960) – the only one set outside Australia – begins with an example of what Jon Hegglund terms modernist “metageography”: that is, a use of maps and the conventions of cartographic representation in such a way as to defamiliarise the social production of space, and of national and personal identity. 1 Clemency James, a young Australian woman, has come to London in the late 1950s to study for the bar, and as she returns to her bedsitting room from a shopping trip to Notting Hill Gate, she takes her bearings from a weather report that locates London in relation to the landmass of hemispheric Europe:

“The wind from Siberia as announced by the BBC came down Bayswater Road from the direction of Marble Arch somewhere in a straight line beyond which, half a world away, Siberia was taken to be”. 2 Zooming in to a local scale, Clem locates her “centre of the universe” (3) in a boarding house just off Bayswater Road: Across the road the enigmatic façades of a row of semi-public buildings ended where the railings of Kensington Gardens began. Just opposite this corner of the gardens Miss Evans had her service-house, and it was here I had a room with a diagonal view of bare black avenues and paths and empty seats and grass. (4)' (Introduction)

'The opening sentence of the first short story Elizabeth Harrower ever completed 3 plunges the reader into a dramatic meteorological event:

And then, as if the lightning that ripped the sky apart wasn’t enough, the lights round the edge of the swimming pool, and even the three big ones sunk into it on cement piles, went out. At once the solid blackness rang with shrieks and laughter; only Janet was struck dumb to find that she had been obliterated. It was like nothing so much as that astronomical darkness into which she had been plunged last year when they took out her tonsils. (Introduction)

In Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966), Clare Vaizey visits a doctor in Sydney’s Macquarie Street to see about an allergic rash on her neck. She assures the doctor that the rash appears nowhere else on her body and yet – ominously – he requires her to take off all her clothes. She obeys. The doctor’s motives are opaque, his expression impassive, his manner clinical. His tenth-floor surgery sits high in a cliff-like row of buildings, its windows staring down on the harbour and the “barbered greenness” of the Botanical Gardens.2 The doctor’s office resembles, it seems, a “watch tower”. It is uncertain whether the surgery is a malignant space of punishing surveillance or benign, illuminating perspective. The view the surgery commands recalls the watch tower that is Clare’s own suburban bedroom in the Neutral Bay house where she lives with her sister Laura, and with Laura’s husband, Felix Shaw, the novel’s Bluebeard. With its view of the world outside, of glittering blue harbour and suburban streets, Clare’s bedroom is, on the one hand, a space of retreat from the more threatening communal areas of the Shaw house. On the other hand, the bedroom is uneasy, occupied territory; it is cheerless, blank and exposed, clinical and impersonal like a doctor’s surgery. In both locations Clare must submit to the intrusive gaze of a dominant male figure. Naked but for her high heels, Clare gazes upon the dazzling landscape of garden and harbour while the doctor circles her body. She practises detachment, shielding her private self as her pearly white flesh is exposed. She maintains composure under inspection. But at the moment of parting, an intense, wordless exchange takes place, the import of which is not directly stated: the doctor looks at Clare deeply and she returns his gaze. In that moment, “an invisible rocket sped between them, rocked the room, shocking and enlightening her to the very tips of her high-heeled shoes” (Introduction)

'My point of departure for this discussion of The Catherine Wheel is the connection (observed, in passing, by D.R. Burns)  between Elizabeth Harrower’s 1960 novel and Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest, published nearly half a century earlier (1908). The points of similarity between the two novels are instructive: both trace the inexorable decline of moderate talent and ambition in the face of searing obsession; both treat the question of performance, musical or theatrical, which trumps the force of words and language; both displace their narratives away from Australia to northern cities, reflecting in a further shift their authors’ own departures from Australia; and both focus narrative attention on the impossible, liminal promise of youth and talent, on student life, life without parents or family, pursuing a mode of living where adult maturity is barely imaginable. But while both are heavily invested in melodramatic incident, the dramas of The Catherine Wheel are largely internal, unvoiced, or they take place off-stage, or in the novel’s unimaginable future. And Harrower’s characters are remarkable not for their external acts so much as for their interactions; it is in their relationships rather than their individual personalities that we find the crackle and hum, the pyrotechnics promised by the novel’s title. There is also a dramatic scaling back of narrative scope in Harrower’s mid-century setting compared to Richardson’s: we move from Wagner’s Leipzig to Clemency James’ London bedsit, and much of The Catherine Wheel’s action takes place over the telephone, a mediation working as a further and technologically specific kind of displacement. And while Maurice Guest resolves tempestuously with the suicide of its protagonist, Clem’s narrative (as always with Harrower) concludes bleakly, with the opaque, inconclusive conviction that it is “too late”.' (Introduction)

'One of the indelible moving images of the postwar era is Marlon Brando’s screen-andT-shirt-ripping realisation of Stanley Kowalski in the screen version of Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1951. It is worth dwelling for a moment on that date, because there is something extraordinary and almost uncanny about it. This is a film whose visual style (noir-ish chiaroscuro and heavy set design) associates it with the late 1940s, but whose acting style lifts it into the 1950s thanks to Karl Malden and Kim Hunter, both engaged in a new naturalism cribbed from Stella Adler. But then, on top of that palimpsest, another layer is added: for somehow, Brando’s performance belongs neither to the 1940s nor the 1950s, but is projected ahead into the future, and – in its hulking, electric, infantile combustibility – manages to incarnate something essential and true about the 1960s to come. And this is an anomaly that cannot be said to inhere in Tennessee Williams’ play text either, since it only emerged, fully fledged on the New York stage, through Brando’s muscular interpretation of the role, which shocked Williams and turned audiences into unwitting supporters of a character that he had intended mainly as an unsympathetic brute.' (Introduction)

Over the course of 1961, the New Yorker published Hannah Arendt’s reports on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Her articles would give rise to a controversy in which Arendt would lose friends, as well as the support of many in the Jewish community. They also gave rise to one of the most significant philosophical concepts to emerge in the aftermath of the Holocaust: the idea of the banality of evil. Arendt painted a picture of Eichmann as a bureaucrat and a follower, who committed atrocities not out of ideology or hatred, but rather through a pronounced inability to think for himself. She writes,

[I]t would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster, even though if he had been Israel’s case against him would have collapsed or, at the very least, lost all interest. Surely, one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondents from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.' (Introduction)

'In her poetic catalogues of being and experience, Emily Dickinson records the chasm between the visibility of the world, including the poetic image, and the invisibility of inner transformation. In one such poem she writes: “We can find no scar / But internal difference – / Where the Meanings, Are –”.  Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction investigates this “internal difference” in both its invisibile [sic] and its hypervisible effects, and understood in the related senses of transformation, individuation and self-division. In these representations, Harrower deploys a very particular version of the modernist epiphany or moment of being. In her novels and short stories this epiphany characteristically interweaves and disentangles the subjects and objects of the narratives. One recurring revelation exposes the ways some human subjects wire themselves and others through the objects of postwar consumer culture to expose how (mostly) women can become relegated to object status in and through these dynamics. In another mode, Harrrower’s narratives record moments of instant, electrical connection between strangers, who are otherwise isolated. Across the spectrum of these interactions, as this essay will investigate, the revelations experienced by Harrower’s characters are always intersubjective – even if the ultimate revelation is solitary and about the condition of being solitary in the world. This essay will identify at least some of the key properties of Harrower’s epiphanies and consider how they relate to narrative mode and genre by moving between her short fiction and the novels. Ranging across these different genres, in view of their respective relationships to realism and their capacities to represent temporality and causality, underscores the operations of her particular postwar, postmodern epiphany and its centrality to her understanding of being in the world.' (Introduction)