In February, Advocate member Alex Wells sat down with Australian writer John Hughes and recorded the following interview. Part I is published here: stay tuned for Part II. You can find John Hughes’s work published in the Advocate’s latest issue, Origin.
Alex Wells: The two stories you’ve given us for the Origin issue come from your newest book, The Garden of Sorrows, a collection of reverse animal fables that will be published by University of Western Australia Publishing later this year. How did the idea for this project come about?
John Hughes: The idea had been with me for quite some time. Largely, I think, it came about during the period when I was working on a couple of my earlier books, from experiences working in foreign countries where I wasn’t terribly familiar with the languages. I found that what I began to notice in places where lots of people gather are the things we don’t usually notice when we understand the language, that is, the whole range of nonverbal communication that goes on between people. And it struck me that when I was doing this, what I was looking at was a series of different kinds of animal behavior, really. (I don’t mean to put myself outside that: my own was a kind of animal behavior as well, being more predatory, or at least observing the others.) And so it made me start thinking for some reason about how close to animals we really still are—because basically we are animals, aren’t we? So that got me thinking about fables and the way that animals have been used to tell stories, simple stories with a kind of moral, and then I began thinking about the metamorphosis and the classical tradition of transformation.
What I’m giving you here is a cluster of things, and eventually they all sort of came together in terms of thinking: well, given our Antipodean context here, it might actually be quite interesting to turn the metamorphosis around in a way and so to start with animals—but animals which have already distinctly human qualities. To start with animals, but Australian animals, which aren’t romanticized at all—they’re not cute and cuddly and they’re mean and nasty animals in many instances—and to present these animals in dramatic situations and to look at the transformation, but this time with animals turning into human beings.
AJBW: What work is Australia specifically in The Garden of Sorrows—and in particular native fauna, which is indigenous here in a way that Australians descended from immigrants are not? In what way is it an Australian work, if at all?
JJH: Well, again I suppose there are a couple things there. The first one is that this is my place, the place where I was born and where I have grown up, so the landscape and those particular animals are things I’ve either experienced directly or have been part of the mythology or the stories of this place.
But I think, secondly, it just seemed to me that Australia was such an appropriate place. In The Garden of Sorrows I’m thinking about Eden, in some ways, a sort of paradise—and the garden that seems to be at the start of certain mythologies and storytelling traditions—and again, because Australia is such a dry, desert-like place, it struck me that this is a different way of thinking about a garden. A garden, but much more barren, or primeval, or perhaps even a perverse sort of paradise. Or an inverted sort of paradise—so, in this paradise, sorrow reigns supreme rather than the innocence that’s there in the Christian tradition.
So I think it comes of the nature of this place, and because that seemed to present me with certain possibilities where I could examine European myths and theologies but in a topsy-turvy setting—that appealed to me very much. Using Australian animals, many of which are known now outside of Australia but usually known because they’re cute or strange or whatever else, I could play around with both local knowledge and international knowledge and also play around with the kinds of assumptions that exist about these creatures. And use those assumptions to my own ends.
AJBW: The theme for this issue is Origin, and among the submissions we’re publishing there is predictably much talk of travel and of homeland—and your interest in the garden fits in well, here—but we’ve also found a recurring interrogation of ideas about authorship and originality among the pieces. How would you say your story engages with these two issues, or with the theme more broadly?
JJH: Well, yes, Origin as you say is the garden, so there’s a sense of the beginnings of human life, and trying to look at—in stripped-back or simplified form—some of the key problems and dilemmas that have long plagued us in terms of human social interactions, morality, those kinds of things.
One of the other ways of thinking about Origin in terms of these stories is that because, as I said, I’m using a number of stories from particularly Greek myth, which certainly are there behind much of Western literature—so for me, I’m going back to a lot of these stories and putting them in a landscape and a place where it might at first seem there isn’t a very strong connection at all. And perhaps we might then say, if we’re thinking about what makes a story original or the origins of a story more generally, I think there is a certain number of stories that are available that we can tell. And everything else is a variation: what we’re continuing to do is to write variations on these.
So for me, one of the things that was very stimulating to my imagination and to the way the stories developed was the sense of planting something foreign on this soil and seeing what would come of it. And I suppose if there’s anything original in them it’s in that bringing together of two things that probably haven’t been brought together in this way before. It’s that sense, I suppose, of making new these ideas and stories that pre-exist us, so that the reader is aware and there’s this echo: they sort of carry the trace of their origins but hopefully they are also making something which is unfamiliar as well.
AJBW: Your title set me thinking at first about Borges and his Garden of Forked Paths, and this talk of stories already being written reminds me of the imaginary inaccessible tomes in that collection. Let’s talk about influence, something I know is important to your earlier work and which has come up here again. As a quote-unquote historical college magazine, the Advocate has a long tradition of writers—and especially poets—who feel very strongly the weight of tradition upon them. Harold Bloom talks about the “anxiety of influence,” with a special attention to the way young poets work to forge their own clear imaginative space. You wrote poetry as an undergraduate, and I wonder if the anxiety or forced creativity with respect to inheritance has been a concern of yours even since you were young. And also whether the mixture of fiction and non-fiction you are writing now allows different modes of response to the anxiety of influence than, say, poetry would have.
JJH: I don’t know whether this is partially to do with growing up in Australia—and perhaps some sense of feeling outside the mainstream, or at least the mainstream of both the American literary tradition and the European one—but I think there’s a freedom that comes from the sense of anonymity. A part of you thinks no one really cares what you write anyway; there’s such a small audience here that in some ways it doesn’t really matter—and I’m not saying all Australian writers feel like that but I’m thinking about myself in this instance.
So that’s one level, but I think also because of my Ukrainian background, I’ve always felt a very strong connection from the early days to Russian or Central European literature. And there, too, I feel like an outsider, because I haven’t grown up in those places, I’m not writing in those languages, and I’m still writing from over here—that has given me a strong sense of freedom, because I feel like I can sort of claim these people as part of my heritage while at the same time being outside that heritage. So in a way, I haven’t really felt a weight of anxiety in terms of the people I might claim as being my influences: it’s more that I feel I can develop a very individual relationship to them. So I found that to be quite liberating, and I can have a lot of fun with it.
In terms of what you were saying about this working in a sort of borderland between fiction and non-fiction, it’s something I enjoy playing on, certainly in Someone Else and in my other works as well. If we think about borderlands geographically, as well, they’re the most interesting places in a lot of ways—obviously they can also be quite dangerous places, and they can be places where there’s a lot of desperation, a lot of tragedy and pathos as well—but at the same time these are places that have marked the boundaries between cultures, between different kinds of geography and history and whatever it might be. So I think the borderland between genres is particularly resonant as well.
And I feel that maybe this is the other thing to do with me being both over here, so growing up in this place and feeling already isolated and slightly homeless, but also feeling an attachment to a culture which is twelve thousand miles away, although I think of it as mine. I can have a sense of irreverence, or if not irreverence then a feeling that I can pick the bits I like and play around with them while ignoring the others, and I don’t feel as if I’m committing some kind of sacrilege. So I guess that feeling of not quite being at home in either place hasn’t meant that I feel like I haven’t got a heritage or a tradition—because in a lot of ways, literature is borderless, we can grow up in this place and we can read Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Melville and we can still make things of these writers—it’s more that my attachment to it much more oblique or harder to specify than I imagine it is for young American writers who are growing up in America, or young English writers who are growing up in England, or young French writers who are growing up in France.
AJBW: Still, though, you are born into an Australian tradition of sorts, aren’t you? Which is still a tradition, although it likes to efface itself and is often self-deprecating. The sculptor Robert Klippel is the only Australian who makes it into your cast of characters in Someone Else. Do you see yourself as part of an Australian literary tradition, in any sense, and do you feel the shadow of older Australian writers hanging over your work?
JJH: I don’t, no. And that’s not to say that I don’t read Australian authors and like Australian authors, because I do, but I don’t really see myself and my work within whatever those traditions might be. Maybe this is something that might appear later in the development of a literary history of this place as well—that the sorts of things I’m doing may well appear to be part of something going on—but I don’t feel consciously to be part of any tradition or to be in any real dialog with that tradition.
One thing I was conscious of in writing the stories in The Garden of Sorrows was that I didn’t want them to seen in any way as being pastiches of Aboriginal dreamtime stories or those sorts of stories. There’s a danger I think for an Australian writer when you start telling stories about animals, and using the landscape, they might be seen in some way as totemic or as borrowing some kind of indigenous storytelling more. And I wasn’t trying to do that at all—not because I don’t that that’s an interesting and powerful literary mode, because I do, but because it’s completely alien to me and I certainly wouldn’t want to be assuming that right or that voice. It’s not the reason for doing it, but like I was saying to you before, although the stories are concerned with Australian animals, the stories themselves have their origins in Europe and elsewhere rather than here.
AJBW: The Advocate, as you know, is a college magazine, and we are proud to have published what one Pegasus once called “the juvenilia of the great.” Some recent expeditions into our archives have seen us dig up the early poetry of Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Adrienne Rich and more. We also are proud to have published—and to continue to publish—the juvenilia of the mediocre. What do you think when you look back at your own early work?
JJH: I try as hard as I can not to: I almost studiously avoid it. But at the book launch for The Remnants last year, the person who launched the book, Mark Mordue, was the editor of the student magazine at Newcastle University when I was studying there, and Mark published what I think were my first publications. They were very long poems under the influence of the mad Cantos of Ezra Pound—I’d been reading quite a lot of Pound in an American Lit. course, and I think it appealed to the worst sides of my sensibility and of my writing as well. So Mark, after that launch, reminded me of this, and he rather mischievously had some copies of these things that he forced me and others who went out to dinner afterwards to look at. And it’s funny because I’d almost forgotten that I’d done those things, so on one level it was really quite strange because it was like reading the work of someone else, someone I felt very little connection to whatsoever—and it didn’t bring back for me that person, I couldn’t get back into the mind of that person, I couldn’t really remember, almost, having written those things.
Also, I think, I am particularly obsessive about my work, and if you look at my books, things that appear in one sort of pop up in the next one as well. And this whole business I was talking about before, of taking something and putting it in a different context, and I think with taking something from one book and putting it somewhere else, strange things happen there as well. So for my own psychological health I just have to leave things behind and forget about them, because otherwise I think if I were to return to them I’d be obsessed by them in the end—so especially once something’s been published, I try not to return to it again.
