VIRGIN SOCK-WASHERS AND TWEED JACKETS

VIRGIN SOCK-WASHERS AND TWEED JACKETS
by
Adrienne Sallay

In the 1970s the short story changed in form and content and offered increased publishing exposure for writing by women. The ephemeral magazine, Tabloid Story, arose along with anthologies published by new small presses. Arguably there were textual and personal dialogues between authors and their works, two of whom were Vikki Viidikas and her sometime lover, Michael Wilding.
One of the aims of the ‘new writers’ was to challenge the censor: they wrote about topics such as the Vietnam War, sex, sexuality and drugs. New writing manifested itself as short fiction and poetry, because, as Carl Harrison-Ford explained in a 1977 issue of Australian Literary Studies devoted entirely to new writing, a poem took up less space in a magazine, and collections of poems or short stories were less of a risk for a publisher (“Fiction” 173).
Critic Judith Brett explains how new offset printing methods that bypassed the censor led to “an explosion of publications —little magazines, newsletters, poetry and short story collections”. They were usually self-funded or funded by “literary enthusiasts” (456). Often the publications only lasted for one issue, sometimes longer.
Frank Moorhouse describes the rise of roneo-ing (using a duplicator), Xeroxing (using a photocopier): new technologies that replaced the old ‘hot metal’ printing of linotype and monotype, thus avoiding intervention by an interfering typesetter or printer. He recounts the rise of little magazines, sometimes only two sheets of poems or stories stapled together, sometimes multiple copies roneoed and distributed by friends on street corners, at the universities and at poetry readings (“The Great Censorship Fights of the 1970s”). He says there was

[A] bursting of anthologies in the 70s. Seventeen were published in the survey years 1970-77 compared with 10 in the period 1950-57 […] The anthologies represent the effervescence of the early 70s and the conflict over changes in the short story. (“What Happened to the Short Story?”180)

He detailed the events writers used to popularise short fiction: the anti-Vietnam War rallies, the public reading of stories, story telling workshops at universities and at Balmain, and poetry readings hijacked by short prose pieces (181).
Michael Wilding parodied the literary “climate” of the early 1960s in his 1972 short story, “Somewhere New”, in his anthology, Aspects of the Dying Process. Gavin, the narrator, is discussing with a colleague, Mulgrave, the difficulties of writing:

It’s absurd writing books in Australia. Who would ever want to read them? The glare’s too strong on the beaches. You’re just pounding your fingers to the bone for a few neurotic housewives and for university intellectuals who’ve got a vested interest in print culture to keep their jobs. (6)

Wilding argues that it was to confront the dismissive attitude expressed by Mulgrave that “the explosion of activity” occurred in the late 1960s and the 1970s (“Short Story”). During these years, short fiction gained exposure in little magazines, underground newspapers and collective anthologies, and less often in glossies such as Pol, and single-author collections such as Wilding’s Aspects and Viidikas’ Wrappings. Wilding explained that he:

Wrote [him]self out of acceptability to many existing media. The only avenues open to writers exploring sexuality, [and] works that weren’t committed to the old outback tale and other formulae that the established literary quarterlies ran
were the girlie magazines such as Squire, Casual and Chance. (“A Survey” 121)

He saw the repression of writing about sexuality as a form of “social and political control” (122) which did not change until the liberalisation of the Whitlam years. By accepting their short stories, the girlie magazines provided exposure for new writers.
Believing that there was a large audience, if only they could reach it, Wilding established a separate underground magazine, Tabloid Story. He claimed, “[w]e wanted to reach that new audience that normally wouldn’t pick up the quarterlies with their daunting, expensive, permanent format” (“A Survey” 126). It began in 1972 as an insert (thus providing free circulation) in student newspapers, Bulletin, Nation Review and National Times, which had existing large circulations and Jenny Sheahan’s feminist Warringah Women’s Times (“Short Story”).
According to Carl Harrison-Ford, the editors of Tabloid Story returned manuscripts of “good, conventional stories […] with a suggestion they be submitted to other journals” because Tabloid Story wanted to be known for publishing “experimental and unconventional prose”. He described it as:

A prose equivalent of the underground poetry magazines that had appeared four or five years previously [… ] intended to uncover and foster fresh and possibly unconventional talent, writing that hadn’t found much of an outlet in the literary, or even the sub-culture and girlie, magazines. (“Fiction” 173-74)

The plan worked and many new writers gained exposure in the thirty or so issues of Tabloid Story. In the 1978 anthology, The Tabloid Story Pocket Book, which brought together a collection of stories from previous Tabloids, Wilding explained how the editors (Wilding, Moorhouse and Carmel Kelly) wanted to “promote the short story and to get better conditions for short story writers” (249):

We knew there was good prose around that wasn’t surfacing into the quarterlies or the overground publishing houses; we knew once we got TS going it would attract a lot more new prose we didn’t even know about, people we had never read, heard of or encountered. (302).

As well as exposure for the short story, the editors wanted to gain better conditions for writers. Funded initially by the Commonwealth Literary Fund and then by the Literature Board of the Council of the Arts (later named the Australia Council), Tabloid Story claimed to be the first literary magazine to pay Australian Society of Authors’ recommended minimum rates to all contributors (Tabloid Story Pocket Book 300). It published new and experimental poetry and short fiction written by both men and women, enabling and encouraging voices from the margins, and changing the literary field as writers challenged the canon.
Many new women writers gained exposure in the magazine: represented in the 1978 hardback volume are Vicki Viidikas, Carmel Kelly, Geraldine Willesee, Angela Korvisianos, Antigone Kefala, Amy Witting, Avril Fink, Christine Townend and Carol Novack.
The increased interest in short fiction and poetry written by women, and passed over by the mainstream publishers — perhaps, as critic Bronwen Levy argued, because of their speaking position that “problematised questions of sex and gender, sexuality, class, race, and sexual preference” (Reading/Writing Women 191) — led to the rise of “more active publishing programs” and, particularly, small publishing houses, often owned and run by women.
According to Wilding, he and Pat Woolley, who began the boutique publishing house Wild and Woolley in 1974, tried several times that year to commission a volume of stories by women, but they could never get anyone to produce it (“Short Story”). Perhaps this was because in the early stage of the second wave women’s movement women were busy being activists rather than writers. Wild and Woolley handed over what they had collected to Sandra Zurbo, who edited an anthology for Outback Press.
Retired publisher Hilary McPhee recalls in her memoir Other People’s Words that during this time women writers had more success with exposure through the women’s presses which had sprung up (123). They published single and multiple author anthologies and single author titles. In 1978 Carole Ferrier edited and published a volume of short stories, Hecate’s Daughters. In the introduction she maintained that she wanted to provide an outlet for women’s writing that “ha[d] something significant to say and [said] it effectively and imaginatively” (2).
Critic Paul Salzman described Hecate’s Daughters, together with Kate Jennings’ 1975 landmark poetry anthology, Mother I’m Rooted, and Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn’s 1986 volume, The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, as “wide ranging collections of poetry and prose varied in style”. He contrasted these with later anthologies, which were either realist texts exploring female experience, or experimental texts exploring new modes and styles, “but very seldom both” (Gelder and Salzman 60).
Stories of Her Life, edited and published by Sandra Zurbo in 1979, bemoaned an absence of progress of the Women’s Movement, because “we still seem to relate to ourselves primarily as mothers, wives, lovers, bleeders, the-one-who-takes-care-of-others” (vii).
A text that was experimental in mode was Frictions, published in 1982. The editors, Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson, asserted in the introduction that “all writing is political”. They wanted to control publication and distribution, maintaining that “publishing houses and distribution networks determine not only which writing circulates publicly, but how it does so” (3). They chose a new feminist press, Sybylla, as their publisher, because “a feminist perspective is nevertheless the raison d’etre of the collection itself: women are still under-represented in most mainstream anthologies” (2).
Another landmark anthology was And So Say All of Us. The editors, Pearlie McNeill and Marie McShea, recognised a demand for Australian material, written by and for Australian women. McNeill explained: “[o]ur particular aim was to produce a feminist collection” (And So Say 130). Salzman argued that the anthology, “while very much in the realist mode, is important for its attempt to move out into the community and offer women from many backgrounds the opportunity to get into print” (Gelder and Salzman 61).
In 1985 the anthology Difference emerged from Melbourne’s “Women 150 Writers’ Week”, at last beginning to evidence the gains made by marginal voices. Editor Susan Hawthorne explained that Difference celebrated new modes and reflected:

The diversity of backgrounds and interests displayed in women’s writing […] Aboriginal women, migrant women from Europe and Asia, as well as white Australians; writers whose works take up issues of class in literature and those whose works express our specific sexual identity. (1)

Several of the writers included in these anthologies went on to enjoy long literary careers. However, it is interesting to note that many others, whose work flourished in this brief period, did not. Levy suggested that factors mitigating against the success of women writers involved reviewing, marketing practices and audience reception:

Getting a good review, particularly for texts that are likely to be read as provocative, may well involve negotiating a minefield. But there’s more to the withholding of literary value than critical condemnation. An even more reliable method is not to review at all. (Women and the Literary Pages 7)

Ignoring a publication, and/or reviewing it from within a paternalistic framework both worked against valuing a text. An author who sometimes appeared in multiple author anthologies, but whose work, it could be argued, was undervalued at the time of publication, was Vicki Viidikas. Reviews of her work were mixed; she was often quite scathing about them.
From 1967 until her death in 1998, she published in literary journals and small presses such as Wild and Woolley. In Reading/Writing Women Levy describes how Viidikas, in the early 1970s, “wrote provocative prose-poem explorations of the lives of newly independent, ‘feminist’ women, including the politics of sexuality” (88), arguing that “writing the body and representing female sexuality [was] especially politically provocative” (192). An example of this occurs in Viidikas’ short story “The Incomplete Portrait” from her second volume, Wrappings:

Somehow the woman must write from a peculiar ‘other’ set of sensibilities, grinding her tenses and mincing her participles; she must convey her sense to the idiosyncrasies of a ‘masculine’ logic, and measure up to its structures and law. To be a good male writer might be to have ‘guts’; to be a good female writer might be to have ‘cunt’ — yet somehow this predetermines exposures which are not acceptable, and possibly self-righteous. (125-26)

In this excerpt, mixing critical commentary with poetic form, Viidikas juxtaposes feminine, domestic kitchen language (“grinding”, “mincing”) with “not acceptable” ideas, and employs challenging imagery of female corporeality. The effect is a provocative representation of a woman writer’s frustration at working with the limits of a patriarchal language. Her work constantly strains to represent the unrepresentable of women’s experience.
In “Four poems on a theme” from Condition Red, the poet, lamenting the betrayal of her lover, expresses her frustration about the difficulty of finding words to represent what she wants to say, rifling through a (metaphoric) “trunkful of structures” which “might fit”. The narrator rages, “Yes, you’re a coward, want to blow you up with words. Got a match? I can’t replace you. I’m saying there’s more to life than love. Eh? Yeah. Words. Structures” (62).
French writers Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer asserted, in 1983, that “[w]e’re in the age of micro-narratives, the art of the fragment […] There is only collage, cutting and splicing” (35). Viidikas and her contemporaries had already been working with this form of micro narrative for ten years or more to create new meanings, where affect was as important as plot. Reminiscing in his 2006 memoir, Wild Amazement, Wilding describes their writing as:

Without manifestoes […] We were not much into plot. We stood aside from the ravellings and unravellings of genre fiction. We were less concerned with narrative than with lack of structure. Metaphor, maybe, or setting, image, mood, the encapsulation of character and moment. Some self-consciousness of formal strategies, some self-reflexive moments in which the fiction demonstrated an awareness of its own structuring. (56)

The writing of Viidikas and her contemporaries represents the beginnings of post-modernism in Australia. Wilding and Moorhouse wrote fiction such as The Short Story Embassy and The Americans, Baby with ironic, masculine voices, parodying themselves, writing and the world at large in loosely connected pieces that Moorhouse termed discontinuous narratives.
David Lodge argues that experimental writing “ostentatiously deviates from the received ways of representing reality — either in narrative organization or in style, or in both — to heighten or change our perception of that reality…”, where “…fragmentation, discontinuity, montage” are present (The Art of Fiction 105). Writers such as Wilding, Moorhouse and Viidikas used experimental techniques including fracture, slippage and discontinuity. Moorhouse described the new literary devices as: “sub-titling, intercalation, itemisation, use of visuals, found stories, the use of spacing for timing and rhythm”. He argued that these devices “helped free up the narrative” and “caused the short story to look different” [his italicisation] (“What Happened to the Short Story?” 181-82).
The writers often alluded to each other, sometimes even inserting each other into their work, as Wilding did with “Valda” (his fictional name for Viidikas in all his writing) and “Joe” (his fictional name for Moorhouse). The Short Story Embassy, a post-post-modern story about a communal household in which all the members are writers struggling with their craft, is dedicated “to Vicki” (v) . Wilding delights in romping his literary characters through the “Embassy”, the “Earlier Brautigan potting shed”, the “O. Henry Guest Suite”, the “G K Chesterton Refectory”, the “Borges library”, the “Borges chicken-run”, the “Department of Dirty Tricks” and the “Edgar Allan Poe Graveyard”.
Wilding plays with the truth in his post-modern blurring of Viidikas as a fictional and a real character. Valda, the object of all the male characters’ desires, wanders confused, hopeful, productive and golden-haired (12) through the pages of a collection of fragments that detail the writerly efforts of a coterie of “New Writers” housed in the “Embassy”.
Moorhouse writes about the new politics of the sexual revolution in which women can have sex without attachment in the same way as men. The male protagonist, Becker, in The Americans, Baby, engages in a sexual encounter with a young woman:

He looked at her. She arched her backside and pulled her jeans and pants down — he pulled them from the ankles. She sat up and bending forward pulled off the Women’s Liberation tee shirt. Naked, she was of excellent figure.
He took off his undershorts — “let’s get this job done” – and rolled onto the bed.
For simplicity, directness and lust, Becker thought, it was hard to beat. (201)

The last line is an ironic comment on the fantasy life of the 1970s hip young man. The woman discards her messaged T-shirt, while the man sees the encounter as “this job”. That he has been screwing his (male) boss at the same time does not matter. The masculine double standard is also evident in The Short Story Embassy: when Valda writes about the life of a prostitute, the male character, Lazlo, is unable to enquire about whether Valda is writing about her own life because, if she is, he will feel “sick to the stomach” (86).
Wilding’s and Moorhouse’s self-conscious representations ironically satirise a politics of masculine sexuality in which women are useful only as sex objects and as “sock-washers”. In Viidikas’ “Four poems on a theme” in Condition Red, the speaker has been dumped by a character bearing a marked resemblance to Wilding, whom she labels a “tweed coat betrayer”, adding: “I couldn’t believe anything, seeing you drive away into another’s arms. I’m no virgin sock-washer, either” (62).
In a retrospective piece in Overland (2004) that reveals much about how he viewed Viidikas’ attitude to life, Wilding relates her scorn at his betrayal:

“If you want some squeaky clean virgin fresh off the shelf, why don’t you go and buy one?” Valda would say. “She’ll wash your socks for you. She’ll sew your leather patches on. Go on, piss off, don’t hang around here asking me all those stupid questions, go out and buy yourself one.” (“Amazing Things” 92)

Wondering why his tweed jacket “featured so much in her diatribes”, Wilding muses about the cause of her vulnerability, listing a stream of (mostly) male reasons. To Valda, the jacket was a symbol:

Of everything that she resisted. It stood for class and authority and conservatism and repression and masculinity and colonial oppression and English superiority and solicitors and clergymen and doctors and private school masters and publishers and pipe-smoking intellectuals and cosiness and warmth and privilege and security and wealth and middle class suburbs and golf courses and afternoon teas and Agatha Christie detective stories and cricket matches and confidence and assurance, an immense thesaurus of the enemy. (Wild Amazement 46)

But the narrator in Viidikas’ “Four poems on a theme” sees the man who has abandoned her as emotionally bereft: “How many lovers do you want? Are you never full, leaky bucket?” and determines to refuse his further advances, saying, “I’m getting tired and angry and thinking hell, I’m no sock-washer” (63).
Wilding describes Viidikas’ fierce belief that “life” was the most important ingredient for writing in a conversation he relates in “Amazing Things”. Valda says to the narrator: “How’re you ever going to write anything if you don’t live? Look at you, what do you know? Nothing but books. Books isn’t what it’s about. You’ve got to get down there in the gutter and experience things” (83). The dialogue between Viidikas and Wilding in their respective writings itself creates a unique discontinuous, question-and-answer, comment-and rejoinder experimental narrative, notably self-conscious and intertextual.
Viidikas referred to her pieces as “things” rather than stories or poems. Wilding explains these “things” as:

Expressions of emotion, states of mind [… With] the indeterminacy of things, they floated there with an undoubted specificity but unanchored in consequence or cause, never located that minutely in time or place as a realist treatment might have required. (Wild Amazement 51)

In 1975 Viidikas described Wrappings, her second volume, to interviewer Hazel de Berg as “little prose pieces, nothing with set plots” (Conversation). Anne Vickery argues “the revolt [was] against institutional constraints [… and] the rules of syntax. Grammar, poetic form and genre” were all subverted by the new writers. John Tranter and other poets, including Viidikas, were concerned with “the relationship between politics and aesthetics” (267). I would suggest that Viidikas used experimental form, somewhere between the poem and the short story, to explore the relationship between politics and a new feminist aesthetic, at the same time creating a sense of disruption and vulnerability juxtaposed against a lively strength and freshness.
Critic Susan Higgins [Sheridan] suggested in her 1975 review, “Breaking the Rules”, that while Viidikas’ experimental form resembled “working notes for poems and stories”, fragments, letters and sketches, yet they were “complete” (419). She maintained that marginal female voices writing often from an outsider point of view were gaining increasing exposure through the 1970s. Emerging female protagonists in books like Wrappings were “outsiders in a world that seems to offer […] room to move and yet […] brings them up against barriers, material and psychological that contradict their apparent freedom”. The main theme of Wrappings is the feeling of “the isolation and ambiguous freedom” women experience when trying to live independent lives “without guilt or compromise” (415).
In the broadcast Vicki’s Voice, friend and poet Robert Adamson maintains that Viidikas’ second volume “put her on the map, although she disparaged it as ‘scratchings on a mirror’”. As a description of her writing, “scratchings” implies both engagement with and distortion of a reflection offered by the mirror of self-reflective writing. The mirror throws one’s own reflection back, but the mirror may also alter the reflection and disrupt the meaning, as Viidikas argues in the last line of her poem “Cracked Windows”: “mirrors/refract a thousand meanings/The head distorts what it can’t bear” (Condition Red 18).
This kind of linguistic expression has interesting parallels with Kristeva’s conception of the disruptive force of our unconscious drives, which she calls the chora. In her feminist work on psychoanalysis and structures of discourse, Kristeva extends Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage to argue towards a gendered language which moves “with and against the chora”, unconsciously shaping our powers of signification (25), and, like scratchings on Viidikas’ mirror, simultaneously depending upon and refusing meaning.
The word “scratchings” also invokes a hastiness, an unedited, first-thoughts approach to one’s work; perhaps even a sort of illiteracy. Viidikas’ use of the metaphor might imply a view of her early work as unpolished, indicating that she undervalued her work in those years. She had amassed some two hundred and fifty typed short pieces which, according to Wilding, she kept in a suitcase under her bed (Wild Amazement 42). Viidikas told interviewer de Berg that when she first showed them to Wilding in 1973 she didn’t think they were “any good” (Conversation). He replied that they were “extremely good” and helped her choose fifty pieces to publish as Wrappings. Perhaps Viidikas turned to Wilding for help because he was interested in the same sorts of writing and had already managed to get a book published by the University of Queensland Press, so knew about the processes of selection and presentation (“Short Story”).
The first piece in Wrappings, “Trying to Catch the Voice”, parallels the notion of “writing by the voice” that Hélène Cixous and Cathérine Clément described in 1975 in The Newly Born Woman. Their concept is that of a female voice arising from the unconscious that speaks through the body: “the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? It is, they say, the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood” (ix).
Enduring the pain of a failed relationship, Viidikas’ narrator struggles to “catch the voice”. In the attempt, the very word “words” is personified to express her frustration about the difficulty of representation — “words die and new ones come”. “Words” are also objectified as “bright daggers”:

Things have been loved and fallen, lies burnt to death, and still I want to speak, still words die and new ones come, been talking and writing words down, read words aloud and seen them poised bright daggers over people’s heads. (Wrappings 7)

The phrase “bright daggers” transforms “words” into shiny harbingers of violence and sudden death. It conflates two contradictory ideas, speaking metaphorically to the danger or even the impossibility of representation itself.
In Wrappings, Viidikas explores linguistic devices of resistance while using the trope of vulnerability as a vehicle for her literary experiments. Vulnerability is foregrounded in the photograph of Viidikas on the cover of the paperback edition, in the apparent shy smile, the way one foot kicks the other and the smallness of the figure against the empty background. The hard-cover volume conveys the same notion, with a picture of three soft, velvety coats hanging in a row on pegs fastened to a rough brick wall. The unsealed bricks summon feelings of roughness: almost an unfinished work-in progress or, as Viidikas asserted, “scratchings”.
In the last piece in Wrappings, “The Incomplete Portrait”, the narrator addresses her lost lover. Trapped in her “skin linings”, her frustration as her mind swings “between acts and bodies” renders her unable to say what she wants to say. She can only create a “literature of myth” while simultaneously desiring her thoughts to reach her lover, even as she knows the distance between them will prevent that which she most desires:

I do not trust this distance, this portrait that does not resemble the original matter, this abstraction that allows minds to swing between acts and bodies. This personal mythologising to make others love us, when we may be unlovable with our six o’clock shadows and bad morning breaths. I’ve had enough of this distance, this literature of myth, as I sit here encased in skin linings, watching my wrists and fingers move across the page propelling my thoughts towards you. (124)

The contemporary relevance of Viidikas has perhaps been underestimated. Her work possesses a strength and independence that arises from her use of experimental language and form. It expresses a feminist aesthetic with its particularities of disruption, fragmentation and changeable expressions of subjectivity, sexuality and desire. Her use of contradiction and obfuscation aligns with the feminist project of finding new ways for representation to work.
The relationship Viidikas explored between language and meaning, the creation of discontinuous narratives with other contemporary writers, and the questioning, confrontational aspect of her work opened up new fictional ground. Texts like Viidikas’ opened up ways of expressing meaning that still speak to contemporary feminism and modes of feminist writing while flagging a particular moment in Australian literature.
Viidikas and her contemporaries published a plethora of short stories, prose pieces, poetic prose and discontinuous narratives in literary, feminist and ‘girlie’ magazines, and in student underground and left-wing newspapers, often by small presses begun by the writers themselves. Their work grew out of a certain set of social, historical and political circumstances. While their legacy lives on, and some of these authors continue to write, young experimental writers today often use different publishing vehicles: electronic venues such as multimedia, blogs, ezines and mobile phones have introduced new modes, structures and content. But that’s another story.

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