Shed a Tear for the Norman Mailers

I was recently forwarded an article on the so-called piety of Australian fiction. Published in the Monthly, the piece is an example of what has been popping up with increased frequency in some corners of the internet, opining on the vapidness of contemporary literature, the blame for which is almost always laid at the feet of a shadowy cabal of what its author Martin McKenzie-Murray calls ‘tyrannical arts administrators who have helped determine our thin and pious literary culture by reflecting, and eventually entrenching, their own mediocrity’.

The article is framed around McKenzie-Murray’s appreciation of Norman Mailer, a writer now best remembered for his jaw-dropping misogyny and propensity for violence. Most infamous was a rage-filled attack on his wife, who he stabbed with a penknife and refused to help as she was bleeding out on their apartment floor. In a less egregious but no less shocking incident, Mailer punched in the face the editor of The New Republic after a scathing review of his novel was published in the periodical.

Citing these events, McKenzie-Murray grieves the absence of anyone quite like Mailer in Australian letters. He assures us it’s the writing he admires, which in the context of the article strikes me as about as credulous as saying you’re a fan of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead because you like architecture. Anyway, it wasn’t the lament about no Australian Mailer that most troubled me about the piece (and this after discovering that Mailer often boasted about never reading women, once saying, ‘I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.’). It was how, by using the shadier elements of Mailer’s biography as a lens through which to read his literary creation, McKenzie-Murray makes the argument that a writer’s personal character has a deterministic quality in the production of their work, and specifically how their writing manages to grapple with great moral questions. This strikes me as a myopic and outdated understanding of creativity and inspiration, and the role of fiction in our society.

The article is framed around McKenzie-Murray’s appreciation of Norman Mailer, a writer now best remembered for his jaw-dropping misogyny.

Another problem with the article is that it is analytically lite—anti-institutionalists could further their case about industry failings with some actual research. As it stands here, it’s just vibes. We don’t know who McKenzie-Murray is referring to when he describes ‘tyrannical arts administrators’, an idea he poached from a ten-year-old article by Luke Carman, who had at least encountered cultural bureaucrats in earnest in his efforts to amplify marginalised voices in Western Sydney. But we can presume it is women since they occupy the majority of these positions in our industry.

‘We have disinfected our public letters,’ complains McKenzie-Murray, himself an author of three books, the most recent of which is published by Black Inc., an imprint of his employer at Schwartz Media. ‘We aren’t dreamers, or readers, or encouragers of art. We’re cleaners. We’re moral hygienists. Our literary culture is a plastic mausoleum—stuffed with pundits, hacks and those more concerned with their moral hygiene than the quality of their sentences or the originality of their thought.’

What moral hygiene does McKenzie-Murray find so dreadful? Once again he doesn’t say. Is it the Biblical kind, the more ‘woke’ flavour or other efforts to be more inclusive to writers who have been historically excluded or discriminated against? These are not rhetorical questions; I do want to know. Left with no such clarity, I fear the scope for how he measures this piety may be narrow and severely lacking in imagination.

To continue the generalisations, he claims that Australian writers are today expected to be ‘Good People’, which in practice means:

forsaking talent, independence, originality and aesthetics for a performative moral cleanliness. What does it mean to be A Good Person? Well, in Australian letters, it means sharing the beliefs, attitudes, tactical timidity and specialised, ultra-numbing vocabulary of a self-righteous class of liberal bourgeoise narcissist.

Putting to one side a staff writer at the Monthly describing others as ‘liberal bourgeoise’ (the irony is indeed heavy), who exactly is demanding this morality status? Is it those pesky arts administrators again? In all my professional life, I’ve never heard anyone articulate the view that our nation’s writers should be Good People—if anything, the cultural establishment has lately punished writers for showing moral fortitude on matters of genocide and anti-censorship. But that’s another issue, and one certainly not the focus of ‘Here’s piety in your eye’.

No, it seems individualistic morality is what is under review here. The griminess of our private lives and the transgressions found within. Again, it is difficult to distinguish what exactly this piety represents in the article when its definition is so dependent on whomever is grasping it. Either way, I’m not convinced the industry as a whole cares much about what writers get up to in their free time so long as it isn’t criminal or constitute serious workplace misconduct (though there is still work to be done on the latter). Like everyday readers themselves, they are far more likely concerned with how said writers cast the questions of what it means to be human in all its complexity into the depths of their work. You know, the essence and quality of literary ideation itself.

What ‘Here’s piety in your eye’ appears to be really protesting is a certain decentring of machismo in our fiction, and charges this altered focalisation with the aforementioned cleansing. This is where the piece further buckles without critical scaffolding. Because if McKenzie-Murray had read only a handful of new Australian novels, he’d know that a dark, gritty, uncomfortable encounter with humanity and its foibles is often present. It is true that some of these works do not privilege the male perspective, and some of these books are not even written by men, but whether that automatically renders them mediocre is an argument unlikely to survive even the weakest analysis (of course, there may well be other formal, structural or linguistic aspects of an individual work that leaves a bona fide critic unimpressed). As for the question of piety, I’m similarly sceptical. Many of these works narrate trauma inflicted by narcissistic and dangerously unreconstructed men. The mucky side of people, to be sure. Seriously unclean.

When McKenzie-Murray declares his admiration for a particular cadre of online bloggers we start to get closer to this nub of the piece—that the adjustment to what has been a significant realignment of mainstream literary tastes in recent years has been bruising for some writers. (He also recently published this piece on Substack.) I won’t list the posts out there that share McKenzie-Murray’s grim diagnosis of OzLit, but perhaps by now it will be unsurprising to learn that some of these bloggers (and it must be said they are mostly young white men) relentlessly describe women in publishing as ‘stupid’, as well as ‘kindergarten teachers of the soul’ and ‘glorified HR ladies, mumming at being well-read, erudite citizens’. Women who work in the literary sector who are also mothers are conspicuously reviled, a throughline in the conversation that would make Mailer, an avowed Freudian, especially proud.

The adjustment to what has been a significant realignment of mainstream literary tastes in recent years has been bruising for some writers.

You can see where all this is going. Unfortunately, such a lazy conspiratorial bent towards Australian publishing camouflages what I and many of my colleagues believe is an important debate we should be having about barriers to entry and supporting local writing. Because if you can look past the crude misogyny (which many will choose not to, and that’s your prerogative), you will recognise how these bloggers are trying to articulate a deep yearning for recognition of their ideas, their intellect and their potential contribution to the discourse. They want to be taken seriously. They don’t feel represented by mainstream publishing, often due to where they are from (outside Sydney or Melbourne, which are still the epicentres of literary production) and due to their gender, as well as believing that social or educational background precludes them from genuine engagement with the so-called literary establishment.

I am sympathetic to this position (if not the vitriolic and sexist online responses to it), and at KYD we have been working on different ways to tackle these anxieties, and others, in our publishing. This, too, is a work-in-progress, and one I look forward to continuing with genuine commitment.

What ‘Here’s piety in your eye’ spotlights is another undeniable truth: that we are living through a crisis of readership, and the mood is turning a little tetchy. Studies reveal that fewer people are reading in a sustained way than ever before, regardless of gender. Literary magazines, newspapers, novels, short stories. All of it. This decline is a structural problem that requires a structural solution. Our literature is unappreciated and unread by most people in this country—and yes, here I think those with real, meaningful and lasting influence in the cultural sector must act with urgency and long-term strategy to turn this runaway train around.

A lot rests on Writing Australia. Publishers, too, should be braver; our recent interview with powerhouse Hilary McPhee made me nostalgic for a time of real possibility in Australian publishing that I have never actually experienced. And if there are writers banging on the door to engage with our literature in all its forms, then publications like KYD and dare I say the Monthly should do more to reach them and provide opportunities wherever possible. And we will continue trying our best to do so.

Because until we address these problems seriously, stripping away conspiracy and misogyny masquerading as critical analysis, we will not take consequential steps towards correcting this existential problem facing writers across all genres. And this runs the risk of there one day being little to no audience left for Australian writing, pious or otherwise.