Thea Astley driving the Writers Train on its 1990 tour of Queensland. Source: QWC.
Watching the news the other night the ABC raised the thorny question of when elderly people can ‘come out from underneath the doona’? The good journalists interviewed a number of people concerned with giving their grandkids ‘a cuddle’; getting back to line dancing; playing cards with a woman who licked her fingers before dealing the pack; and finally blowing spit spraying trumpet in an age appropriate brass band.
These are the god-awful activities the ABC allocates to Helen Garner’s, Donald Trump’s and Mick Jagger’s generation, now in their seventies, none retired, all economically productive. The ABC’s stereotyping is surprising really given that its Chair, Ita Buttrose, is 78 years old. Then again, Buttrose was editor of Cleo in the 1970s and has form taking groups (women) and taming political dissent (feminism) for marketing purposes. Aged care provision is a very lucrative industry, and stereotypes of course are much easier to cater for/commodify.
In a recent essay for The Griffith Review poet Sarah Holland-Batt argues that our revulsion at ageing enables the aged care industry. It’s a howl of despair. While we are still waiting for the final report from the Royal Commission into Aged Care, the interim report has already revealed the shocking scale of sexual and psychological abuse, together with cost saving cruelties, flourishing in deregulated ‘Care’ homes. Nothing will change. It is our fault. We ‘other’ and dehumanise the elderly. We simply don’t connect.
Novelists have tried to forge that connection, if only we would read them. Thea Astley’s neglected novel Coda takes us into the mind of a woman slipping into dementia, showing us that even losing our marbles can be an exhilarating, defiant ride. American critics were more complimentary than Australian, one comparing Astley to Beckett, or rather an odd composite of Beckett and Muriel Spark. Full of scathing attacks on all forms of elder segregation, including the Oldie University of the Third Age (whose patron, incidentally, is Ita Buttrose), Coda is a very angry and very funny novel.
Astley was a relatively young 66 when she wrote Coda. Published originally by Heineman Australia in 1993, she intended it to be her last novel, until she was given a ‘Keating’ Creative Fellowship and went on to produce Multiple Effects of Rain Shadow and Drylands — the latter earning her a fourth Miles Franklin, which she shared with Kim Scott for Benang.
Astley saw the Miles Franklin as a mixed blessing, telling Candice Baker in 1986 that the prize favoured novels that were ‘a bit artily written, which would account for the poor sales’ (Yacker, Picador, 1986, p. 38). True up to a point. Astley forgot about the non-arty best seller Tim Winton, who is the only other writer to win the Miles Franklin four times.
Astley’s difficult poetic prose alienated Australian readers. As did her satire, which we think fine as a form so long as its target is, preferably, steeped in sickly sentimentality like Kath and Kim and doesn’t hold a mirror up to the middle classes. Astley’s less comforting satire cuts across class. In Coda she mocks all of us for telling ourselves mum or dad is better off in a Home.
Confined by her family to her minute aged care room, Kathleen is one of the great characters in our literature:
“‘Well quite a view isn’t it?’
Even as they stared through glass across the four-feet wide balcony at the green lawns, they saw a man topple sideways from his wheelchair.
‘I think’, Kathleen stated clearly but unemphatically, ‘it’s fucking awful.’” (p.169).
Palpable rage disrupts the line between fact and fiction. Kathleen’s all too common story is interwoven with monstrous Australian newspaper reports on ‘granny dumping’, a craze that first swept across America and Australia in the early 1990s. The reports of confused, elderly parents left sitting on park benches, sometimes waiting days for adult children who will never return, are harrowing. Hell also to care for parents without support; their meltdowns understandable if it were not for the calculated detail documented across reports: the aged parents were stripped of any means of identification. The bond between child and parent was deliberately cut.
Coda’s target is also the academic critics, the men who, as Susan Sheridan shows in her study Nine Lives, were dismissive, condescending or disrespectful. In Coda, Astley leads those critics to a satirical dead end:
“Could it have been that barely recalled firming of the spirit three years ago that now found her Lear-like between the homes of a son and daughter, who had dutifully and reluctantly offered haven and then made living in that haven impossible?” (pp. 121-122).
The academic critics were all over the Lear reference. The ‘spirited, eccentric heroine of Ms. Astley's 13th novel, a kind of female Lear, contemplates her past and articulates her wrath at age and abandonment.’ (New York Times, 16 Oct 1994). At home, Andrew Reimer jumped with the same certainty on the ‘echoes’ with Lear. (The Age, 5 February 1994). Sure, it’s tricky to catch Astley’s ironic skewering of Kathleen’s grandiosity, but the joke was sadly lost on the men.
Kathleen doesn’t bother testing her children’s love like Lear. As a mother she already knows the bond is thin and weak. Nor does she give them a kingdom while suffering from the delusion she could maintain power. She is an aged housewife who never had any power or influence. Her undoing, moreover, lies in that now forgotten ‘firming of spirit’, the small stand taken when she refused to babysit her granddaughter, a rebellion no doubt as shocking to the ABC as it is to the thankless daughter.
Escaping from the nursing home, Kathleen’s mental unravelling doesn’t take place on Lear’s dramatic stormy moors but absurdly in the mall:
“‘It’s time to go feral. Tribes of feral grandmothers holed up in the hills, just imagine it, refusing to take on those time-honoured mindings and moppings up after the little ones” … “Always grandmothers,’ she was shouting now. ‘They never put the hard word to mind on grand pops. Old men. Because there’re afraid they’ll shove their fingers up the kid’s bum or worse. Isn’t that so?’ she demanded leaning forward to the grinning but alarmed face across the cups.” (pp. 184-185).
Kathleen’s coda, meaning the final repeated musical sequence which brings the movement to an end, takes place on a ferry going to Magnetic Island. Her desire to return to the island has been a central refrain. Now she is travelling backwards into memories of the island, the setting long ago for her honeymoon; trying to recall a poem, ‘Magnetic’, written in fact by the young Thea Astley in the 1940s. (Cheryl Taylor, ‘Thea Astley’s Poetry: A Prequel to Her Fiction’, Fryer lecture, University of Queensland, 14 March 2011, Brisbane unpublished).
That confounding of author and character is the novel’s final postmodern joke:
“‘Oh yes’ she said aloud, oh yes oh yes oh yes. There was more if it would come …
There was more poetry if she could simply catch hold of it. Upon my brow, she struggled to remember. Winds, patterned – was it patterned? With palmetto finds the calms beyond great longing. Ah there! The calms! She was scrabbling and rooting about for words in that old handbag of her years. Young I magnify –that is it, magnify - the island moving in across the prow!
Young!
‘God!’ she said aloud to the world at large, to anyone who would listen. ‘What a marvelous day!’”
- J.G.