Nobody devours a newspaper like Susan Johnson. I arrived at her rented worker’s cottage in East Brisbane to find her sitting in the garden immersed in The Australian Literary Review. She reads it furiously from front to back, folding it into small sections and marking quotes. When she saw me walk towards her across the garden, she almost threw the paper at me. ‘Read that! I’ll make tea. Just read it! It’s wonderful.’

Johnson and I have been friends for more than 35 years, since we did our journalism cadetships together at The Courier-Mail. We have a conversation that old about books and writing that we have conducted mostly by mail and email during the long periods she has lived in Sydney, Melbourne, London, Hong Kong and Paris. She recently returned to Brisbane, after ten years in London, and we’ve been able to continue our conversations in person over tea or wine.

The article that had excited her was a thoughtful piece by Geordie Williamson, in praise of Jessica Anderson. Johnson had marked a paragraph about Nora, the character in Tirra Lirra by the River.

Nora is a portrait of the artist who, unlike her creator, fails to realise her nature: “a born artist” in Anderson’s words, who lives “in a place where artists, although they were known to exist, were supposed to exist elsewhere”.

That place was Brisbane and I immediately recognised an old theme of Johnson’s – her love-hate relationship with our city, that she found physically beautiful and desirable but spiritually cruel and rejecting of people with different values, especially artists.

Johnson’s first novel, Messages from Chaos, was published in 1986. A witty page-turner set in Brisbane, it launched one of the great themes of her writing, the ‘disarray and confusion of my generation when it came to men and sex’. Eroticism and celebration of the body appear in different ways in all of the five novels that followed : A Big Life occupied the body of an acrobat; in Flying Lessons, Johnson sensuously explored life in a north Queensland cult; Hungry Ghosts was an explosive story of love and betrayal set in Hong Kong; The Broken Book wrote the story of Clean Straw for Nothing from the point of view of Cressida Morley, the object of  David Meredith’s desire; her most recent book, Life In Seven Mistakes, is a black family comedy set on the Gold Coast, and here the sensuality of the body is  expressed through the central character, a potter, whose hands and arms and body aim to be as one with the material of her art, that is, clay.

Johnson’s other big themes are families, marriage, motherhood, exile and the place of art in our lives. She is particularly concerned with the role of the artist, and in particular the relationship of the artist to Australia. Her memoir A Better Woman describes Johnson’s shocking birth trauma and many aspects of mothering which are ignored in less searching examinations.

When she emerged, carrying a tray with tea and cups, she let me pour so she could quickly snatch back the paper and read me another quote from the article, also about the character of Nora.

She is a beautiful, breathing emblem of her maker: a young woman whose skin suffered in the heat and who, “on hot, bright nights”, would smear herself with citronella, take a rug out to the lawn, and there “allow her hatred of the ugliness around her, her fear that she might never escape it, be obliterated by the thick brilliance of the stars”.

She put down the paper and looked at me with shining eyes. ‘Isn’t that a fine sentence?’ And I switched on the recorder and we began to talk.

PA: One of the things that strikes me when I read your writing is how important the body is and desire. Why do they play such a big part in your books?

Because I think the body is the starting place for everything. I have a very strong feeling that we live much more instinctual, intuitive lives than we think we do. We like to think we’re rational and we’re ruled by the intellect, but actually our responses are far more visceral and immediate and physical than we realise. For example, when we suddenly like someone for no known reason or else take a dislike to someone else. It may be about smell or touch. I try to write in a very pure, intense, straightforward way, which may of course reflect nothing more than my own personal inclination, but what I try to achieve by this is a kind of truth, a plain, unadorned bodily truth which will strike the reader as actual, lived experience. I think we’re much more creatures of the body than we think we are.

PA: That makes you an erotic and sensual writer but it’s not just about sex. You have a special relationship with food and …

It’s the physical world really. I think we discussed this some time ago in reference to a conversation about counselling and psychotherapy. There’s supposed to be some sort of template to which humans should aspire, and that template’s supposed to be that of a reasonable, thoughtful, restrained person. That’s what we accept as a sort of a reasonable being. But there are people, and I think I’m one of them, that experience greater highs and lows. There are a lot of people like me that don’t conform to the mid-continuum. I know that I experience the world in a very physical way, for example, possibly more than the next person. I seem – you might say – easily intoxicated. I get intense joy from the physical world, from the weather for example …this doesn’t make me a better or worse person that a reasonable, thoughtful, restrained person, even though for the longest time I thought it made me a worse person. Now I just think that the scope of human personalities is infinitely variable. I just happen to be one of those people who like spring blossoms, rain, sun, physical existence…who can experience exultation very easily.

PA: What’s your favourite kind of weather?

I think my favourite kind of weather is … I do love the seasons in Europe. I mean everyone loves spring.  And I can see why people go mad; you know that bipolar, intense ‘up’ kind of madness, from spring. I can see that when you come out of a long northern European winter it’s kind of shocking, the first approach of spring, when you see the buds … So there’s that and I also like the middle of cold winters. Did you ever see those photos I took of the park?

PA: Yeah, with the frost

Mmmmm. I love that too.

PA: And I can remember you loving the beach

Yes, I love the beach. I love swimming naked in the ocean and lying in the sand. I do love the physical world and food and wine. It doesn’t have to be sex, though they can be erotic. Breastfeeding a new baby is erotic.

PA: Is there a connection between that physical joy you’re talking about and your response to religion?

I think that’s right. When I lived in England I started to go to an Anglican church. Not necessarily because I believed Jesus Christ died for my sins. I don’t class myself as a technical Christian because I don’t believe in the three in one concept or Jesus dying and being resurrected and I definitely don’t believe in resurrection of the dead. But I do feel a sense of the numinous, of there being a richness of imaginative experience that is beyond words. Which is why I would argue about Richard Dawkins’ view of atheism, because it completely discounts that human yearning for otherness and for that sense of beyond that some humans have a capacity for and a need for. In every human culture there has been some system for trying to deal with the mystery that’s at the heart of life. I respond to beauty that way. The beauty of the physical world is what I see as my church in some ways. I feel religion as an intense bodily experience when art, music, nature can move me.

PA: Your essay On Beauty could be your anthem.

It was unfortunate that in the only serious review of that essay, it was reviewed alongside Roger Scruton’s exhaustive academic text about beauty. My book was a very slight artist’s impression of beauty, a practicing artist’s inside view, as it were, as opposed to the outside intellectual view. So what I wanted to get down was some of those experiences. When we talk about God, and I don’t know if He or She exists, but if there’s anything that approaches the sense of the numinousness or otherness in the world, it’s in those moments of beauty.

PA: Is that what you want to do with your work? To create a moment of that kind of beauty?

Oh absolutely. That would make me very happy to reach one of those moments of beauty in my writing. But I know you could send yourself mad, like Flaubert and Proust, they sent themselves mad in trying to find that. And I’m not equating myself with them in any way, God forbid, but any artist worth his or her salt hopes to create some sort of connection in a reader, something in a reader, whether it’s emotion or a sense of a shared experience or recognition about the human experience

PA: That’s not the same as beauty though is it?

No, I’m saying that’s what I want but not every writer wants that.

PA: You want a connection with the reader, I think you said that once. Tell me what you mean by that.

I’ve just been reading this interview in the Paris Review with Michael Houellbecq and I’ve only read one of his books, Atomised, but this interview has made me want to read more of his work. He says that he wants two things with his writing: to make someone weep and to make them say, ‘I stayed up all night reading that book’. I think that’s an old-fashioned view, really unfashionable.

PA: Really?

I think so. You’re not supposed to want anything as crude as story. It’s seen as second-rate, vaguely embarrassing or clumsy and passé in some way. But I love story. Just that old what happened next. It doesn’t have to be any crude beginning/middle/end but it certainly has to have something that’s pulling you forward. And the other thing is, I also like to enter into the experience of another person’s human consciousness and I want to recognise something. I want someone to tell me what it’s like for them to be involved in the mystery of existence. So those two things I do want. That’s what I mean by connection. And if I can do that in someone else, I would be really thrilled. That does mean a lot to me.

I mean what are you writing for? I’m not writing for glory. I’m not writing for money. I’m not writing for all those things that people think they’re writing for. Because if you are writing for those things you’re certainly going to run out of puff before long. You’ve got to have other reasons for going on for so long and one of them for me would be that sense of … you know, I’m not writing for the good of my health.

One thing’s really interesting. The first person who reviewed my first book, [Messages from Chaos], Tracey someone in The Courier-Mail, reviewed it in a similar way to the way that Helen Garner was reviewed –  you know, ‘ She ripped the pages from her diary and published them’ kind of thing. This particular reviewer said in a patronising way that it would be interesting to see what I could possibly write next, the implication being, What had I left to write about? You know, what can you possibly write about if you’ve written all your experiences up to then? In fact, I realised afterwards that’s sort of a back-handed compliment, because everyone thinks every single one of my novels is exact truth and that it’s autobiography. Every single book.

With the novel I’m writing now, I’m playing around with that. I’ve called the main character ‘Susan’ and I’m quite deliberately toying with that notion. Because that’s what I aim to do with my writing: I want to make everything so lifelike, so vivid, so truthful that you can’t believe it’s not true.

PA: Like one of the Dutch paintings? Like a Vermeer?

Yeah! That’s what I try and get. That verisimilitude to existence. I really want that level of recognition, that level of connection in the reader. And I was thinking as I wrote this – this is so different to the background of the girl I wrote about in Messages from Chaos or the girl I wrote about in Flying Lessons or Hungry Ghosts ...  Although I say it’s not autobiographical, my work often has its basis in lived life, in emotional truth. But what people get confused about is the difference between emotional truth and literal truth.  So when you’ve got emotional truth it’s quite easy to make that leap into making something seem absolutely true in all respects.
When I came to create the character of Anna Lawrence in Messages from Chaos, I had to cut off whole swathes of my personality. I’m a very different character to Anna but she certainly has aspects of my character and that’s what confused people.

PA: You’re in Australia now. You’re living here with your boys, Caspar and Elliot, and Les is not here.

Les and I have separated and we are in the process of divorcing.

PA: That’s not what this interview’s about but what I do want to ask you is about the link between marriage and writing.

I remember having a big debate with the biographer Victoria Glendinning about this. I was interviewing her for the SMH. She had four sons, or maybe five. She’s older than me. She’s a different generation, she’s 20 years older. We got into conversation because I said I had two sons and I wondered how she was able to write with four. She said ‘Oh really easily. They crawled over me and I worked. I think it’s changed immeasurably for women these days. It’s easy to have children and to write.’ And I just don’t believe that. I think it is still the big question for women. Throughout history all the great women writers have been childless. I think it’s enormously difficult still for women to have children and to have a relationship. Even the most well-intentioned of men find it difficult to be partnered with someone who is so obsessive about their work, which all writers are. It’s the definition of being a writer. And I think it’s a big ask for men to accommodate that. Even men who think they’re not going to be jealous about it.

PA: Now that you and Les are separated, what’s happened with your writing?

Interesting. Is this an accident, a co-incidence or is it a function of being freed from having to worry about when I can write? Because my husband, my ex-husband, has gone back to England and is not supporting the children, I am the sole supporter of the children. Which means that I’ve had to go back to a 9 to 5 job for the first time in ten years. I thought, well that’s it; I’ll never be able to write again. But what’s happened is I’ve just found this new burning desire to get back to it again and this is a novel I’ve been writing for a long time and is actually overdue to the publishers and now I’m finding it an absolute joy to write. I’m getting up at 5.00am in the morning to do two hours writing till 7.00am and any spare time I have on the weekends I just write. I’m speeding through it. I reckon if I had a good long go at it I could finish it in three months.

PA: But even at this two hours a day rate it’s still alive?

Yes. And I would never have thought I’d be able to do that. My normal working practice, and has been for a long time, is to write full-time. I’ve been fortunate to be able to earn just enough to contribute to the marriage. I’ve had some very good advances for some of my books and that kept me going for a while. But even if you get $80,000 advances, a book takes me two to three years to write from inception to editing. And I’ve always taken periods off between my novels as well. I can never do that thing like Trollope. You know he writes The End and then turns over the page and starts Chapter One, at the beginning of the next book. I can’t do that. I always need to creatively recuperate and revive and restock my imagination.

PA: How do you do that?

I don’t do it by reading much other fiction because, when I’m depleted and I read something wonderful, I just think, ‘Oh I’ve got so far to go.’ And it depresses me and I want to slit my wrists. So I don’t read a lot of other fiction in those times except my absolute talismans. I always read The Great Gatsby, which I think is the perfectly constructed novel. I don’t think there’s a flaw in that whole novel. I sometimes read The Lover.

PA: Duras?

Mmmm. Jane Eyre sometimes. But Wuthering Heights even more. I know you prefer Jane Eyre but Emily is so intense and passionate and completely take no prisoners that I think, even though I love Charlotte’s letters, I relate to the passion of Emily more.
I just lost your question. You were talking about how I restock. What I do is I read an awful lot of writers’ letters, autobiographies, memoirs, biographies. I’m very, very fond of authors’ biographies of which there are a huge number of very good ones. For example the one about Muriel Spark that I read just recently. Or the life of Colette.

PA: How does that help you recuperate?

Instead of deflating me, that somehow inspires me. The more you read about the characters and nature of writers, and this is not to romanticise them, you realise you are among your fellows.

PA: So you feel less lonely?

Yes, that’s what it is. You see this is one of my fears about coming back to Brisbane, this is why I related so strongly to that piece in the last ALR, where Jessica Anderson talks about Brisbane as a place where artists, ‘although they were known to exist, were supposed to exist elsewhere’. I mean this is a place that doesn’t really value artists. I mean there are exceptions now. There’s the Brisbane Writers Festival and there are book stores but outside the inner city you’re not likely to find respect and understanding for what writers do and the importance they have in society.

PA: It’s interesting because it’s a big reading country, Australia

Yes, but if you analyse what they read, they read gardening books, cooking books, fishing books, not literary fiction. But yes, you’re right, compared per capita to England, Brisbane people read more.

PA: But I suppose if you’re in a big centre for culture like London or Paris …

It’s a sheer thing of numbers. There’s just more people that are going to be interested in the things you’re interested in. Plus there’s the layering of history and a collective cultural respect in places like Berlin or Paris or New York, not necessarily London I’d have to say, there’s quite a great anti-intellectual streak in English life, but certainly in Paris, where I’ve spent a lot of time, there’s a huge cultural tradition of respecting what the arts do and it goes through all classes. That’s what’s really exciting. It’s not a class thing. At one stage, when I first moved to Paris in the late 80s, the highest rating Sunday night television show was Apostroph, which is a book show. It rated everything out of the water. I just don’t think you’re going to see that in Australia.

PA: Not if it was up against sport.

No.

PA: France has got a special place in your heart.

Mmmm. Absolutely.

PA: What is that?

Well I’ll explain a bit about it. The period before the publication of my second novel, Flying Lessons, which was published by Faber and Faber and also by Acte Sud in France, was a very significant period for me. Between the first and second book. The first one, people can think it’s a bit of a fluke. And some people don’t write anything beyond a first book. I got a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council to go to the Cite International des Arts studio in Paris, which was bequeathed to it by the wonderful Nancy Keesing, and that was like confirmation from an external source that what I was doing might be worthwhile. It coincided with my growth and development as a writer and really my evolution of growing into being a writer. The people that I met then, and I still know some of them, like Simone, they were all willing to acknowledge that what I was doing had a value beyond myself. I mean, the French believe that making art matters. That was the real gift of it.

PA: We need what you do?

Yes. Which you don’t get at all here, I don’t think. Not in the same way. I mean the French regard it as being just as much of a contributor to capital growth and cultural capital as a worker at France Telecom or something like that. It’s not seen as non-work, which I think it still is here. There’s still always a deep suspicion of artists in Australia that in some way they’re skiving. Don’t you reckon?

PA: I find it in myself. That we have to fit it in around more important things.

Do you? But you know how hard it is. How much it takes out of you. I mean I never feel as exhausted as when I’ve done four hours work of writing. That feels more exhausting to me than eight hours of sitting at my desk doing other work, which I can just do. I don’t feel the work I do in an office is being wrenched from me. It doesn’t have to be squeezed out emotionally, intellectually, physically in some ways. Writing feels to me physically demanding. All the parts of you have to be working at once in order to get anything decent down on the page. So I do believe that it’s harder work than people think. Though, of course I’m aware that there are much more shitty jobs. Working down a coal mine might be harder or lugging boxes in Woolworths or something. I’m not glorifying it. All I’m saying is that I want it to be accepted as work.

That’s enough isn’t it?

PA: Nearly. Just a bit about place. You’ve talked about France but you’ve lived in a lot of different places. Tell me the difference it makes to be in one place or another when you’re writing.

I think you’ve got, broadly, two kinds of writers. One that absolutely have to be in their place, of which the kind would be Tim Winton, Eudora Welty. We all know writers who we can’t imagine living anywhere but where they’re from. The other kind of writers need to match in some way that sense of internal displacement in an external manifestation. They’ve got to somehow feel unsettled. They need to be away to be awake. We used to regularly visit Australia from England and, on the plane home once, my son Elliot said he really liked Australia. I asked him why and he said, ‘I just feel more awake there.’ Which I thought was a really wonderful way of describing what some writers feel when they’re out of their own place. They notice things more. And we all know it allows some writers to look more closely and in a more fully awake way back at their home. Joyce would be one. He wrote about Ireland when he was living in Italy and Paris and Hemingway, when he was living in Paris, was writing about Michigan. So I think I’m in that category.
And the other thing for me is because I’ve been doing it for so long and I’ve been committed to it for so long and it is my life’s work that, when I’ve done that eight hour day, that hard slog, and I’ve been in my head the whole time, I love to be revived and refreshed by going out somewhere that thrills me. Stepping out the door and finding something I didn’t know before. For me, London was like that. The physical beauty and also the physical ugliness of London. It’s a huge monster of a city. I very much enjoyed certain parts of London, like the London library, the British Museum, some streets around Bloomsbury and Richmond and Highgate and Wandsworth. I love that sense of layering of history.

And I love being near Europe. So, coming back to Australia: it’s been a huge shock because I’ve gone back to full-time work and my life has changed. But I’m lucky I can find joy in very small things and I do find the physical beauty of Australia wonderful to be part of. The vastness of the landscape and the sky, and I love Queensland houses and the richness of the vegetation. Because I’m working and writing and I’ve got two children and my dearest friends are here, I haven’t felt the need for anything else at the moment. So much is going on in my life. I’m involved in a divorce and all that palaver and I don’t have much time. I’ve been really enjoying being back. It’s changed in lots of ways but it’s also the same in lots of ways. So I enjoy that combination.

In an email conversation, following the interview, Johnson wrote more about her relationship with Australia and about her writing practice:

Now, re the exile theme – one of the big themes running throughout my work is the relationship of the artist to Australia. Does the artist even fit in? How? My books have often explored the complex relationships between this country and artists.

And I have a complex relationship with Australia too, a push-pull affair – I  like to be away, anywhere, so that I am forced to remember, and to rely on memory to recreate the world. Being away makes me work harder to remember. Plus, as I said, I am an exile by nature, an extreme introvert masquerading as an extravert, and so being in actual physical exile is a metaphorical reflection of some inner exile – if that is not too grand.

I enjoy being a stranger, and the glories of mapping the new place in which I find myself. I enjoy having that stimulation of unknowingness when I step outside the door, of never truly being at home. There is always a certain tension to life living elsewhere, which I find stimulating.

I have a complex relationship with Australia, leaving aside even the artist question. I am Euro-centric, it is where my reading self, and my writing self, grew, and so it was naturally the place I turned my face. Edith Wharton, the Brontes, DH Lawrence, Colette – and then of course the Americans – Saul Bellow and others. Life for me always seemed elsewhere.

I still have a complicated relationship with Australia, although I see now that the old truism about getting on a plane to escape and still meeting yourself when you get off is of course true. I see now the beauty of Australia in a way that perhaps I didn't see before, and I appreciate that it can never be the same as Europe or America, but then neither can Europe or America be the same as Australia.

Oh, and you asked for more detail about my actual physical writing practice. Starting out, I always write longhand, in my notebooks and then on foolscap – my papers, letters and ms have been collected by the State Library of New South Wales. I wrote my first novel completely in longhand, then typed it up on a typewriter in the afternoons, and revised at night. Ditto Flying Lessons.  Big Life was the first novel I wrote on computer/laptop – but always starting out by hand first.

After I had children my work practice changed – I no longer had the luxury of revising at night. I wrote everything on computer, scraps of paper, in notebooks etc. I always print out as I go, and revise on printed pages.

Now, I don't even have a printer. At the moment I am relying on sending the pages to myself via email, and on the kindness of my good friend Sandra Hogan, who has printed some early pages out. I hope to finish within months, and hope to publish by the end of this year but it will depend on A and U's publishing schedule.

More Author Interviews

Gary Crew interviewed by n a bourke (Issue 09:03)

Patrick Holland interviewed by n a bourke (Issue 10:03)

Belinda Jeffrey interviewed by Inga Simpson (10:02)

Susan Johnson interviewed by Sandra Hogan (Issue 11:01)

Krissy Kneen interviewed by n a bourke (Issue 09:05)

Steven Lang interviewed by n a bourke (issue 09:04)

Pippa Masson interviewed by Janene Carey (10:02)

Lisa Unger interviewed by Inga Simpson (10:01)

Charlotte Wood interviewed by Sandra Hogan (11:02)

About the Interviewer

Sandra Hogan has worked as a shop assistant, supermarket shelf stacker, public servant and journalist and she now supports her writing habit by teaching  business people to write reports and letters. She is fascinated, among other things, by the science/religion wars. She is working on a book of linked short stories about lost things.

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