Memuat
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Gerard Charles Wilson
From my website 'Still in the Fifties':
Admitting that you’re ‘still in the fifties’ to a certain class of people is like saying you’ve been in jail to the average person, with the difference that...lihat lebih banyakFrom my website 'Still in the Fifties':
Admitting that you’re ‘still in the fifties’ to a certain class of people is like saying you’ve been in jail to the average person, with the difference that the disqualification from the first group would be full and irredeemable. Luckily it does not worry me in the least to suffer such an ancient form of exile.
To boast that one is still in the fifties is of course not to entertain some grandiose idea of transporting our Western society in some sort of Star Trek mechanism back through time. There is no beaming us back in that sense – to state the obvious. But there is the ethos of the 1950s – an outlook that still exists, even if only as an ideal for some people who think it lost forever. It is that framework of manners, law, custom, convention, morals, politics and the intellectually undefinable that my mind is rooted in and is far more than an unrealisable abstract ideal. As manners and custom can be rejected, they can always be accepted again, regardless of the time.
All my writing is explicitly or implicitly governed by that framework. All my writing is about that great rupture in Western society that occurred around 1970.
It seems that readers like to know something about the author of the books they like. Some, I believe, want to know something about the author whose books and attitudes they hate. As my books probably fall into both groups, I am providing a brief biography that will give some clue as to why I did not modernise, as most of my peers did.
I was born in 1946 to devout Catholic parents, and named after the patron saint of pregnant mothers, St Gerard Majella. It never occurred to me to ask my mother if there was any story behind that – a difficult pregnancy? It’s too late now.
Except for one arriving on the First Fleet in 1788, all my ancestors came to that land mass now called Australia in the early 1800s, none later than great-great-grandparents. Most were from different parts of England. There were three Irish great-great-grandparents and two Scots, the Burgesses, husband and wife with their two children from Aberdeen. They were free settlers, literate people with elevated ideas of how one should behave. They exercised a great influence on my mother’s family line, and consequently on our family. Among my original Australian ancestors from the British Isles I have found eight convicts, all of whom made good, one with suitable irony becoming a judge’s tipstaff, or law clerk. Convict labour and perseverance often in harsh circumstances formed the backbone of early Australian society. Knowledge of my ancestral background, particularly of the convict element, has exercised a big influence on my self-perception.
My childhood in Lane Cove, an inner suburb of Sydney, was idyllic. My father, the most principled man I have known, was hard working, having only the family welfare in view. My mother similarly gave her all to the care and organization of the family which included six children. In the 1960s my parents took on the care of a state ward which brought the final count to seven children. We were far from wealthy, but it seems looking back that we had all that a family in the fifties could have expected. I was never conscious of being deprived. How could I? My childhood now appears as one long sunny summer of endless innocent activities with my brothers and sisters and the neighbourhood kids, particularly with my life-long best mate, Pete, who lived two doors up the street. The reminiscences of those times are the subject of part three of my family history: Me and Pete – Recalling a Fifties Childhood 1946-1953, due for publication in 2016.
My school education from start to the end was in Catholic schools of religious orders. I owe a great debt to those religious nuns, brothers and priests who provided me with an excellent education. The vast majority of those religious were conscientious and devoted people of outstanding character. I can remember in all those years only one occasion when the conduct of a religious brother was reprehensible, an account of which I will give in my childhood memoir.
Despite a fun-filled trouble-free family life and the example of a caring mother and father, and despite my good education, I arrived at Sydney University in 1964 with a teaching scholarship and, alas, a regrettable immaturity. To demonstrate the pitiful orientation of my mind, I assiduously went about making a complete mess of my studies, and just about every other responsibility an eighteen-year-old by nature had. But it was not left-wing politics that had me in its thrall, causing me to erupt obnoxiously – as one may be inclined to think, considering the times. Just ordinary teenage immaturity.
As green and callow as I was, though, I was not beyond being deeply impressed by the double standards, hypocrisy and ideological bigotry of the sixties radicals – and I saw them close-up. It was the first clear indication that I was sadly out of step with my contemporaries, reflections of which would make their mark in my first two novels almost forty years later.
Nor was I beyond recognizing the futility of pursuing my studies while I could not organize myself. I discontinued university studies without having a clear idea of what I was doing or where I was going. I wandered thus in spirit until December 1968 when I met a Dutch girl who had recently arrived in Australia on a working holiday. My mother said Ineke was the answer to her prayers.
A year later we married and another year later we set off for Holland without any plans of how long we would stay there. The immersion in a different culture and different language was exhilarating. Again, reflections on what I experienced and learned in Holland would appear in the same two novels. Despite the intellectual and cultural invigoration of living in another country, I decided with two children now on the scene that we would be better off in Australia. This was another life-changing decision.
On our return to Australia I could not get a job in the airline business where I had been working in Holland. It was January 1974 and there was a worldwide fuel crisis, the result of the Arab states withholding their oil. I was forced to look around for temporary work and in short time found myself on the short list for three jobs with educational publishers. I took the first position offered and found after a mere six weeks that Providence had led me into work that my education, ability and interests made just about an exact fit for me.
A couple of years later (1976) I returned to part-time university study. My major studies were first Dutch Language and Literature and then philosophy. I ended up studying through to an MA in philosophy. The title of my Master’s thesis was, Natural Law Conservatism: The Epistemological Foundations of the Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke. I am slowly revising and updating this work under the title of Edmund Burke: Knowing and Reasoning in Politics.
About halfway through my secondary school days, I began scribbling – both fiction and non-fiction. A big influence was my English teacher, Fr Timothy Kelly, who until he died surely had no idea that his enthusiastic classes on poetry and the novel exercised such a decisive influence on me.
I remember commenting to friends in 1964 that I wanted to be a novelist but would have to have broad experience in life before I could begin writing seriously. Around forty years of age, I said, would be a good time to retreat to the garret, trim the oil lamp and sharpen the quill (excuse the clichés) – a feeble excuse to prevaricate, which I was good at in those years. As it turned out, I eventually summoned up the self-discipline and sat down to write in 1982 when I was thirty-six. The feelings had been building for a long time and my head was full of thoughts which had to be got out. I scribbled around 350 foolscap pages before I decided I had written a lot of rubbish. There was something missing. I needed to clarify my thoughts in a moral and political sense. It was then that I switched from literary studies to philosophy. Another crucial decision.
I was entranced by the texts of the great philosophers: Descartes, Hume, Locke, Hobbes, Kant and others. Nevertheless, there was something unsatisfying about it all. I found myself in an intellectual dead-end of scepticism and moral relativism, both in contradiction of my faith – yes, miraculously I retained my faith which for me makes sense of the world – and of the everyday reasoning of ordinary people. The rabid lefties around me raged against the turpitude of bourgeois society. They could not think their rage meaningless. The philosophy lecturer who hammered the scepticism angle appeared oblivious to the fact that he arrived promptly at the right time in right lecture room after never doubting the multiple true decisions he daily made from leaving home until he arrived at his intended destination. Enter another person who had a decisive influence on my intellectual development.
Professor John McCloskey of La Trobe University’s philosophy department took pity on my struggle against the intellectual tide and suggested some fruitful avenues of reading. Among others I was introduced to the writings of one of the 20th century’s great political philosophers, Michael Oakeshott. His essay Rationalism In Politics gave me the clue. Modern philosophy had got is all wrong, I decided, the method of rationalism being the culprit; it was the method’s specious reasoning. For me there was a short step from Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism to Edmund Burke, father of modern conservative thought.
Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, which amounted fundamentally to an attack on the reasoning of the French radicals was utterly convincing. And I aimed in my thesis to show just that. On the way, I was introduced to the great tradition of classical realism and was led back through Hooker, the scholastics (the greatest of whom was Aquinas) to Augustine and to the source, Aristotle. Intellectually I was home.
With my thoughts clarified, particularly about the different modes of knowledge a person relies on depending on the field, and the harmony between faith and reason strengthened, I returned to my writing. But it was to non-fiction that I turned. I wrote two books on the media (The Media of the Republic and The Telecard Affair: A Diary of a Media Lynching). These two books were an application of the themes in my thesis on Burke. They received good reviews, particularly the first. With these two non-fiction books under my belt, I told myself it was time to get serious and return to my first love: the novel.
I threw out the 350 pages of rubbish and began anew. The story that had been floating around in my head for twenty years very quickly became an idea for a trilogy of novels. The first two books, The Castle of Heavenly Bliss and In This Vale of Tears received favourable reviews and an enthusiastic response from most readers (see the ‘books’ page for comments and reviews). I am continually asked when I am going to finish and publish the third book in the trilogy (it’s coming).
My third novel, Seeking the Divine Spark: A Satire in the Style of Evelyn Waugh, is very different from the other two novels. As the title says, it is a satire and much shorter in length. Not only have I attempted to write a form of satire similar to Evelyn Waugh’s satires, I have also tried to model my style on Waugh’s. Whereas The Castle of Heavenly Bliss and In This Vale of Tears run from the mid-50s to the mid-70s, Seeking the Divine Spark is situated in first decade of the 21st century. Seeking the Divine Spark is already available on Smashbooks. The other two novels will appear shortly, as will the four books in the family history series when they are published.
I am somewhat of an undisciplined writer. I have no trouble sitting down to the writing task. In fact, I love the process of writing with a strong cup of coffee not far from the keyboard. I have trouble remaining with the one idea. Presently I have a number of works in different stages: the four family history titles; a revised Edmund Burke: Knowing and Reasoning in Politics; and an untitled novel that is meant to be a rough modern version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion – at least of one of the major themes of that novel: constancy. There is also the story of the third book in the Winterbine trilogy which is continually developing in my head.
I have given priority to the family history series (see home page) which is intended to be what well-known Australian social commentator, Donald Horne, called a sociography.lihat lebih sedikit