1984 Milk and Honey
In anticipation of the centenary of Elizabeth Jolley’s birth on June 4th, I read my Fremantle Arts Centre Press edition of Jolley’s fifth novel, Milk and Honey.
First published in 1984, Milk and Honey is in some ways classic Jolley: it features a lonely character alienated from and yet trapped in the society around him; but the Gothic elements in this novel were a departure from her previous fiction.
#Digression: One might think that the newly published Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel might offer some insight about a major writer such as Jolley, but no. On page 9 in the Introduction she gets a cursory mention as a teacher of creative writing for Tim Winton… and that’s it, other than half a dozen of her novels listed in a 36-page chronology that begins 65,000 years ago. (To be fair, I’ve only read half of this Companion so far, but one mention in the index doesn’t look promising.)
Anyway…
Somehow, I was able to get behind the paywall at the ABR to find Stephanie Trigg’s 1986 review of The Well, which makes reference to the common themes in Jolley’s fiction.
Comparing Jolley with Helen Garner whose work is said by critics and reviews to be similarly confined to a domestic canvas, Triggs writes that Jolley’s pictures of domestic life are much wilder, more dramatic, and more violent. Murder, madness, sexual and psychological violence abound, and many Jolley narratives in their bare bones are quite alarming and bizarre. That is most certainly true of Milk and Honey, despite the Biblical allusion of its title to a ‘promised land’ of abundance and fertility. There are unexplained deaths, illnesses and disappearances, and a death which is not a death though the ‘murderer’ thinks it is. The central character’s wife has a child but it’s not his because he is impotent with her, though not with his lover who is herself infertile. The sterile marriage is offset by the birth of a child through incest.
The ‘mad woman in the attic’ is not a woman and is not mad either, but rather a grotesque caricature whose tragedy is that he has been denied a life because of his parents’ fear of doctors. Reminiscent of the entrapment imposed by the destitute elderly Russian émigré, Nastasya, in The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981, see my review) Waldemar both traps his family and is trapped by them because they refuse to hand him over to institutional care. Childlike Waldemar, dripping with the honey that he loves to eat, is the only character who represents fertility and abundance.
And the musical prodigy turns out to be really rather ordinary, fit only for a provincial orchestra and then not even that when his own violence disfigures his hands. This is not a story of resilience or triumph over adversity and there is little kindness in it.
In Brian Dibble’s 2008 biography Doing Life (which I can’t find on my shelves, did I lend it to someone?), Jolley’s story begins with the enigmas of her own family life. As I wrote in my review, Jolley’s father bore his wife’s love for the enigmatic (and underfoot) Mr Berrington with fortitude, and this influenced Jolley’s interest in depicting sexual triangles.
In Milk and Honey, the central character Jacob is offloaded by his widowed father onto a family of European refugees, to whom he eventually brings his inheritance. The Heimbach household consists of Leopold, his sisters the termagant Tante Rosa and the gentler Aunt Heloise, and his two children. Louise is a few years older than 14-year-old Jacob, and Waldemar is about the same age as Jacob but has intellectual and physical disabilities. Leopold’s wife who was Jewish, was left behind when they fled Nazi Austria. Her fate is not spoken of, though there hints of blame attaching to her, along with nostalgic memories of the privileged life and the possessions they had to abandon.
(What was Jolley doing with that peculiar thread? Did they flee because they feared Nazism? Because Waldemar would have been subjected to the eugenics policies of the regime? Both the children would have been at risk because they would have been classified as Jewish because of their mother, but why didn’t this unnamed and apparently unlamented wife escape too? There are no answers to these questions.)
Jacob is hot-housed as a musical prodigy, perhaps as the son that Leopold yearned for. Constantly hailed as The Prince of a Cello, he grows up in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a house isolated from normal life. (He goes briefly to school, but it doesn’t last.) He becomes attracted to Louise, and somehow finds himself engaged to her despite the aunt’s vigilance in keeping them under surveillance.
I still had not experimented with kissing Louise. I watched for a chance but we were never left alone together. Tante Rosa or Aunt Heloise seemed to spring from behind doors or out of cupboards, from the very floorboards, as I stepped towards the kiss. (p.57)
(Note the narrator’s hyperbole in that excerpt. It’s not the only time this narration creates confusion about the boundaries between reality and delusion.)
Jacob, however, has also developed an attraction to Madge, a violinist in the orchestra that Leopold despises as vulgar, because the musicians were people who just played to make a living and had no feeling for music at all. At the same time that this teenager is trying to kiss the fiancée who seems to have been gifted to him unsolicited, he is plotting how to make time alone with Madge, who is much older than he is and married to a travelling salesman.
Jacob is also puzzled by a presence in the attic above.
I meant too to watch the upper staircase to see if Tante Rosa carried trays of food up there or if she came down with the rosebud pail. But Leopold wrote a cadenza and wanted me to practise it, and when at last I was free from the extra lessons and practice, there was no sign of anyone upstairs. (p.58)
Triggs, in her review of The Well, notes that
One of the most frequently remarked motifs in Jolley’s work is possession. The object of possession can be land, a person, a home, though wealth and property are never valued for their own sake: possessions are important as they mark out physical or psychological territory.
Jacob, in Milk and Honey, seems to be both possessed and a possession. Firstly, he is given away by his father as if the boy were a mere possession himself. He then becomes possessed by the strangeness of his life and by his obsessions, particularly his pursuit of Madge which involves the profligate spending of his inheritance. That inheritance represents dispossession because the money comes from the sale of his father’s vineyards over which the Heimbach family take control. Jacob is also possessed by the Heimbach family, as a husband for Louisa, as a father for Elise, and as a source of money for their declining years. And they will not let him go. Not until the denouement which brings clarity to the opening chapters which preceded Jacob’s back story.
Though the central character and narrator is a male, all the women of Milk and Honey are captive possessions too.
Milk and Honey won the 1985 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. I bet it was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin too, but all records of shortlists prior to 1987 are lost. (Jolley won the MF in 1985 for The Well.)
Wikipedia tells me that Elizabeth Jolley’s diaries are stored at the Mitchell Library but are closed until after the deaths of her children or 25 years after her death.
Bill reviewed this novel too, at The Australian Legend.
Author: Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007)
Title: Milk and Honey
Publisher: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984
Cover photograph by Roger Garwood
ISBN 9909144818, pbk., 185 pages
Source: Personal library, OpShopFind, $3.00
Dear Lisa,
Mmmm centenary of Elizabeth Jolley’s birth, I think . . .
Thank you for this post, and all the others,
Sincerely,
Bronwen Levy.
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By: Bronwen Levy on May 28, 2023
at 2:40 pm
Gasp, you are right, *chuckle* I’d better fix that!
Thank you, I always appreciate it when someone helps me fix my mistakes.
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 2:41 pm
An easy slip-up, Lisa!
Bronwen.
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By: Bronwen Levy on May 28, 2023
at 5:26 pm
Thanks:)
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 5:48 pm
So good to see Elizabeth’s novels continuing to be recognised
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By: carmelbird on May 28, 2023
at 4:32 pm
Did you know her, Carmel?
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 4:56 pm
Oh yes. She was brilliant, and lots of fun. Sly wit. Always a hit at festivals too.
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By: carmelbird on May 28, 2023
at 5:12 pm
I heard her once in the Great Hall of the Arts Centre. It was packed to the rafters, and up on the stage was this little woman in a grey cardigan and a ‘librarian’s skirt’, almost as if she was playing to an audience’s idea of an older woman and yet we all knew how her fiction subverted all the stereotypes.
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 5:51 pm
Oh yes! It always seemed to me that Elizabeth’s public persona resided deep in her private person, that she really WAS the Elizabeth Jolley who performed on the stage. She was always very kind to me.
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By: carmelbird on May 28, 2023
at 5:57 pm
I bet she loved the playful side of your writing…
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 6:02 pm
She was very generous about the writing of others. I believe she was a wonderful teacher. An early student of hers was the great Tim Winton – I expect you knew that anyway.
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By: carmelbird on May 28, 2023
at 6:46 pm
I did know that, and I was surprised by the tone as its reported in the Cambridge Companion…
“Often Australian novelists simply acquire some knowhow from their predecessors, some tricks of the trade, in the vein that Tim Winton describes with gentle irony in his piece “Remembering Elizabeth Jolley” (2007). The only influence that Winton owns up to from being taught by Jolley in creative writing at the Western Australian Institute of technology (now Curtin University) is a practical one. “Writing — the act itself — remains a personal mystery”; it is untransferable, but “the student of writing often learns despite what they are being taught.” What they learn, he claims, is the “public and procedural aspect of the writing life”; the “peculiar suite of skills, which have nothing to with art”; pragmatic strategies that can help the writer to get their writing published and “survive honourably”.
What do we make of that, I wonder?!
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 6:59 pm
I have this in the TBR and I was hoping to get to it this month of novella reading but failed! Maybe for Novellas in November :-)
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By: madamebibilophile on May 28, 2023
at 6:17 pm
Don’t worry, you have brought us a feast of novellas this month!
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 6:59 pm
I get so frustrated sometimes – Port Macquarie i a major growth area yet our library has only three of Elizabeth Jolley’s books, not this one. I cannot understand why our public libraries don’t prioritize books by notable Australian authors like this. It also has just three of Carmel’s novels. I really don’t think this is good enough – our libraries should support local writers!
i am envious of you and Carmel having seen and heard her live!
I’ll have to dig around the local op shops! Grrr.
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By: Sue on May 28, 2023
at 7:07 pm
Actually…
I just checked…
My library doesn’t have too many either! Only two…
That’s terrible, I agree.
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 9:10 pm
Your entry above re the quote from Tim Winton left no space for a reply. SO this is the reply. I don’t see any ‘gentle irony’ in it. Sounds like common sense to me.
Don’t get me started on what I call ‘creative rioting’ classes.
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By: carmelbird on May 28, 2023
at 7:28 pm
*chuckle*
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By: Lisa Hill on May 28, 2023
at 9:08 pm
I won’t read this now, but in my downsizing decluttering I found – well I knew where they were so I don’t mean found found! – my TBR Jolleys and I think this is there. I’ve read quite a few of hers, but I’ve a few to go yet. THEY have not been moved on but have been moved in! (You probably got behind the ABR paywall because it’s an old review? I think many of these places make old articles available – after 5 years? 10 years? Whatever? But I think I’ve seen some before.
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By: whisperinggums on May 28, 2023
at 11:12 pm
Good old Google, sometimes it does find treasure!
BTW I have joined Australian Literary Studies so that I could read Bronwen Levy’s article about Jolley’s Women., which showed up so tantalisingly in my search. It’s only $28 p.a. and you can access everything they’ve ever published doing back decades.
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By: Lisa Hill on May 29, 2023
at 9:11 am
I’ve been subscribing for years Lisa and I think Bill might too. I would have mentioned it to you if I’d thought … I wish I could find more time to actually read all those tantalising essays they publish. I used to print them out, but have given up that.
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By: whisperinggums on May 29, 2023
at 10:13 pm
TBH It was only because of Bronwen’s essay that I paid to access it. No disrespect to their authors,
I don’t really want to be reading academic papers any more, and I don’t think many people would be reading my reviews if I did. If they want reviews informed by academic research, there are much better sources than anything I might write.
I do a little bit of general research when I’m curious about something that I’ve read, and the rest of my time I like to spend in reading novels.
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By: Lisa Hill on May 29, 2023
at 10:32 pm
No, I agree – many of the articles interest me, but that’s not where I’m at, these days. I do like to support the endeavour though as it’s important to have active scholarship in Australian literature, isn’t it?
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By: whisperinggums on May 30, 2023
at 9:08 am
We need active scholarship in almost everything, and the problems becomes which scholarship to support…
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By: Lisa Hill on May 30, 2023
at 9:42 am
True … can’t argue with that. I guess we support the ones we feel are least supported and/or that we are most passionate about, which may or may not coincide.
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By: whisperinggums on May 31, 2023
at 3:57 am
Seeing as Garner has been mentioned, reading this was very Cosmo Cosmolino, as in what the hell is going on here. Though at least Garner was still writing about herself. Who Jolley was writing about I have no idea.
Thanks for the link. In reciprocity I was reading one of your old reviews today, Niall on four Australian women, which Melanie/GTL is planning to read.
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By: wadholloway on May 29, 2023
at 1:41 am
I’ve never read Cosmo Cosmolino, because (as you know) I don’t care for Garner’s writing. But I have read books that leave me wondering what on earth it was about, and I did feel like that with this one., and I needed to let it settle for a day before I began writing about it.
One of the things it says in that ABR review of The Well is that Jolley pursues the same themes and motifs from one book to another, until she’s reached wherever she wants to be. Speaking for myself, I think that’s why the more Jolley you read, the more you understand because you bring meanings from the other books to bear on the one you’re reading. She’s like Patrick White in that way.
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By: Lisa Hill on May 29, 2023
at 8:57 am
I have this same edition picked up at my local book store warehouse which is often stuffed with Jolleys (she must have had a loyal Perth fan base) it haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I have to be in the mood to tackle her as her characters are not easy to like. (Not that liking characters is important.)
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By: kimbofo on May 29, 2023
at 12:45 pm
Another title to add to my wishlist. I’d never heard of Jolley until a couple of years ago and that was only through you I think. Anyway the two I’ve read were wonderful and I have Claremont Street awaiting me. Good to know there is more delight to come
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By: BookerTalk on May 31, 2023
at 3:38 am
Oh I am glad to have found another enthusiast!
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By: Lisa Hill on May 31, 2023
at 8:41 am
[…] You can read Lisa’s excellent review of Milk and Honey here. […]
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By: “For me writing is an act of the will.” (Elizabeth Jolley) | madame bibi lophile recommends on October 31, 2023
at 7:48 pm