Lurie EJ

Tribute: Elizabeth Jolley

Caroline Lurie

Dear Elizabeth,

Well, it seems our long correspondence is over. Actually it ended some years ago, didn’t it? Your last letter to me is dated Christmas Eve 2001. I continued writing to you into the following year, not immediately realising you were unable to reply, even though your later letters spoke of confusion and of unaccountably getting lost in familiar streets.

It’s been a long goodbye. I hope you know that during your last illness there were always people beside you, your son in particular, and some close friends who regarded it as a privilege to be with you, to repay some of the kindness you had shown to them. Even when you weren’t able to talk and laugh with them any longer, they felt sure of lively activity happening inside your head. They sent me a lovely photograph of you having lunch with them one Christmas in the leafy courtyard of your nursing home. You are wearing a straw hat at a jaunty angle, and your face bears an unreadable expression. Wise? Amused? Baffled? Hard to say.

Your inscrutability is one of the things I miss most about you, Elizabeth; you could encompass multiple meanings into the simplest statements. When confronted with an enthusiastic interpretation of one of your characters or stories, you would invariably hesitate briefly and then say, ‘But how clever of you! I would never have thought of that myself.’ It was impossible to tell if you meant exactly what you said or if you considered the interpretation too banal or absurd for words. In any case, you would never crush anyone who had taken the trouble to read your work with sufficient care to formulate ideas about it, though you were secretly irritated by reviewers who insisted on laying out your whole narrative on the slab, thus threatening to spoil discoveries other readers might prefer to make for themselves. ‘But I have had some lovely reviews from people who can read’, you said, in one of your last letters, as if to excuse yourself for having voiced a gentle complaint about the others.

People thought you performed a dotty old lady act, but that was not entirely true. Your anxieties for yourself and others were not feigned; they were just not disguised. You allowed the ambiguities you felt, which we all feel, to surface in your life and in your fiction.

I don’t know if it was widely appreciated how much reading, both classical and contemporary, you managed to crowd into a busy life. You would often incorporate some quotation which had struck you. ‘“Fiction is … the response to a deep and always hidden wound …” – Flaubert’, you wrote on 23 September 2001, and, in the same letter, ‘The little boy (?Proust) being sent to bed and not allowed to have the kiss from his mother – Hayman on Proust, p. 14 Biography, Rememberance of Things Past, page 1’; and then, with your usual sweet irony, ‘End of Literary Studies’. The Flaubert remark was one you must have reflected on often; you mention it several times in your articles.

Our correspondence ranged rather erratically over domestic trivia, our feelings for our children and animals, literary business, books and films we had enjoyed – or loathed – and serious matters of life and death. When discussing refugees and their plight, you suddenly came up with ‘Emerson said, “The clouds are the daily bread for my eyes.” I wish people could feel like Emerson about the clouds and then not regard the sky as a battle ground for an ugly war. There is too much suffering already without providing more.’

Engendering empathy towards suffering was something you tried to do in your work, not merely from principle but because you felt deeply for society’s outsiders. The pathetic hero of Love Song who longs to embrace little children is no more beyond the pale of your sympathies than the simple-minded Adam’s bride of the eponymous story, or the vulgar, manipulative mother of the pregnant Leila in The Sugar Mother.
You once told me that you had learned during the many rewritings of Mr Scobie’s Riddle, which had started out as a long lament, that humour was an essential ingredient if you must write of what is unbearably sad. No doubt that is why some of your novels, particularly the earlier ones, are filled with a wacky, eccentric humour. Was it Ibsen, you wondered, who said ‘Humans cannot bear too much reality’? Was it in The Wild Duck? You knew that what was intolerable must be handled lightly.

Another thing you once told me, while we were driving to an airport in the early 1990s: ‘I would like,’ you said, rather tentatively – because I think you were horrified at the idea of appearing self-important – ‘to write something of significance one day’. I was shocked at the time, for you had already published a dozen novels, including the wonderful trilogy My Father’s Moon, Cabin Fever and The Georges’ Wife, and it seemed to me, and to many, that the significance of your work was established beyond question. You were always genuinely modest about your achievements and seemed shy to reveal what you must have felt to be a grandiose ambition.

We were attuned in our thinking; we sometimes finished each other’s sentences, remember? And our careers were intertwined, otherwise we might never have met. It is said, I can’t recall by whom, that it is important to recognise your teachers when you meet them. I recognised you, dear Elizabeth, and I thank you for all that you were in life and for leaving behind an inspiring body of work for us to remember you by.

Goodbye, my dearest friend.

Caroline