Interview with Michael Wilding
by Teresa Burns

The author or editor of more than 50 works of fiction and nonfiction, Michael Wilding is perhaps best known to aficionados of the western mystery tradition as the author of the documentary tour de force Raising Spirits, Making Gold and Swapping Wives: The True Adventures of Dr John Dee & Sir Edward Kelly.   In the 1970s and 80s, Wilding was one of the prime movers behind the Australian literary Renaissance: his account of the rise and decline of the alternative small press he started with Pat Woolley--Wild and Woolley: A Publishing Memoir--is both a whirlwind ride through a turbulent but more optimistic time, and an invitation to wonder about where small press publishing is going today.   

Excerpts from his most recent novel, The Magic of It,  the third in a series of very unusual detective stories, accompany or are linked to from this interview. A former Fellow of the Australian Arts Academy and Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, Michael Wilding has spent more than four decades writing and editing, and much of that time also helping promote and publish other alternative writers.  He may be the only John Milton scholar ever named Cosmopolitan Bachelor of the Month… and has also been a postman, milkman, detective writer and an essayist on modern radical thought.  We’re delighted to feature an interview with him this issue.

Q:  You have one of the most varied and prolific writing careers of any novelist writing today. I’d like to ask you particular questions about your most recent works in a moment, but if you don’t mind, I’ll start with the work our journal readers know best:  Raising Spirits, Making Gold and Swapping Wives (1999).  How did you wind up writing about John Dee and Edward Kelly?

MW: I was born in Worcester in England. At some point I discovered that Kelly had been born in Worcester and the idea of writing about him took hold. I think it was a reference in Hudibras, the work of another Worcestershire figure, Samuel Butler, that first alerted me to them. But he is not a figure of local folk-lore; no one remembers him in Worcester, quite unlike Prague where he remains notorious.

I thought about the materials and the characters for many years.  It was something waiting there for me to write.  I had been going to start it in the 1980s but a friend of mine, Neville Davies at the University of Birmingham where I’d taught in the mid 1960s, said, 'Oh, Dr Dee, the last person who wrote about him got knocked over by a car outside the British Museum and killed.  He'd just been in gaol for stealing rare books from libraries, and must have forgotten which way to look when crossing a road.'  He laughed throatily, but it rather put me off the topic. In the years I was not writing about Dee and Kelly other things were happening.  My wife at the time, Lyndy Abraham, wrote a doctoral thesis on Marvell and alchemy, edited an alchemical book by John Dee's son Arthur, and compiled a dictionary of alchemical imagery.  She also for a while was involved in a spiritualist group, and I went to some of the sessions.  I didn't know it at the time, but this was all basic groundwork for the story of Dee and Kelly.  Alchemy and spirit raising were the two major activities they were engaged in.

Q:  Several of your earlier works revolve around intimate threesomes and foursomes.  Is this notion of intimacy gone awkward, or challenges to sexual convention, part of what attracted you to the Dee & Kelly’s story?

MW: It was certainly one of the factors. It looked like interesting material for a novel. Though when I examined the material closely, it became clear the wife swapping occurred only on the one occasion. But with a lot of subsequent tension in the household.

And yes, my early writing tended to be focused on sexual themes; all that 60s liberation. Don Graham at the University of Texas has a study of my fiction exploring that aspect, Michael Wilding and the Fiction of Instant Experience: Stories, Novels and Memoirs, 1963-2012, Teneo Press, Amherst and London,  due for publication this year.

Q:  You seem to have gone out of your way to write this book as a documentary. Could you talk about some of the writing and research choices you made?

MW: I’ll get to the point of the question in due course in a rather round about way. The project I was engaged in in the 1970s was to develop new techniques in fiction order to represent new social patterns, to cut tissue samples in new sections to reveal the new, to develop new ways of taking soundings. This involved developing new formal techniques as well as new media of publication and distribution, new magazines and small presses. Realism may have been our intention in recording the realities of the society we were experiencing. But it was not a matter of just copying it down. Just copying it down is a matter of using unthought, pre-existent forms ready to hand. New forms had to be developed. That search for new ways of expression was focused on observed reality, it was never emptily formalist like the work of some contemporaries. Nor was it in the traditional realist mode still favoured in those years by the local literary magazines. We had no name for what we did. Why did it need a name? It was simply what you did, observing the world, developing your techniques, pushing the boundaries forward.

At the time we called it the new writing. The term post-modernism was yet to achieve currency. It was a valuable phase. It liberated us from a tired, unadventurous, no longer effective realism. It allowed for disruptions and discontinuities, broke a lot of formal taboos, encouraged the awareness of the nature of literary structures and conventions, helped to exploit allusion and intertextuality and collage, and allowed a richer set of possibilities in all respects. But these formal breakthroughs were ultimately only valuable insofar as they enabled the writer to say something new, to bring a new vision to content. Minimalism and self-referentialism seemed fresh and lively, uncluttered by all the social baggage, until you paused to wonder what you were saying in the end, after removing all that social baggage. I had to stop and ask, where is this 'pure' writing taking me? It wasn't taking me where I wanted to be.

In those years when we were all post-modernists before the invention of the term, I remember being concerned to write stories without narrative. We had been looking at the achievements of the great modernists, and wondering what else was still to be done. And draining stories – or fictions, as even then they were coming to be called – draining fictions of narrative seemed like a good, and new, idea. I don't think we had any other motive than that of extending the modernist revolution – along with the removal of figuration, representation and so on, narrative was the next to go. This was a long time ago, before the more dubious implications of this late modernist or proto-post-modernist project had been thought through, before we had put our minds to the dehumanizing and de-politicizing, or at any rate de-radicalizing, agenda. At the time it just seemed another thing to do. I remember my friend the English poet Jon Silkin being very dubious about it.

After disporting around in the sea of self-referentiality, which was fun at the time for a time but which you wouldn't want to spend your life in, I started work on a documentary novel, The Paraguayan Experiment. And this involved an exploration in history. I had been asked to write the introduction to a reissue of The Workingman’s Paradise, a novel by the nineteenth century socialist William Lane.  Lane wrote his novel to raise money for the Queensland unionists gaoled on conspiracy charges after the collapse of the great shearers' strike of 1890. It was a time of massive defeat for the Australian trade union movement. From the end of those hopes came a new beginning. Lane decided to opt out of Australia, set off for Paraguay, and set up a socialist community there, New Australia.

Around the same time I was asked to write the libretto for a music theatre piece about Lane’s New Australia movement. The two projects involved months of researching Lane’s involvement in the establishment of the union newspaper The Worker, in the shearers’ strike and in the settlement of Australian trades-unionists, communists and socialists in Paraguay. I completed the introduction and The Workingman’s Paradise was in due course reissued. I wrote the libretto but the composer never got round to completing the music. Rather than let my researches go to waste, I decided to make use of the material I had accumulated and write a novel.One of the questions often asked is how writers choose their characters. Sometimes I think you don't. Sometimes I think it is the other way round, the characters choose you. They hang around in the upper ether, waiting for a suitable medium or channel and then hone in on it. I began to suspect this when I realized that the day I finally, after much delay and prevarication, set pen to paper, was actually Lane’s birthday.

With The Paraguyan Experiment I made a dialectical reversal from the post-modernism of The Short Story Embassy and Pacific Highway. The political was uppermost in the Lane material and I returned to a determinedly realist mode, though I retained the modernist device of collage to incorporate documentary material. The New Australia movement was an historical event and masses of contemporary reports, letters, diaries and newspaper commentary survive. Generally the episode is called utopian, with the implication that it was unrealistic, misconceived and bound to fail. The word utopian, even more than narrative, was a victim of the post-modern counter-revolution. But just as I believe in positive endings, so I don't believe utopian ideals are doomed to failure. What a careful study of the historical materials demonstrated was not that the movement was doomed to failure, but that it was monitored and consciously destroyed by the infiltration of secret agents. And in order to demonstrate this, I found that I had to re-establish the narrative. Instead of taking a broad general view of things, instead of adopting the static pre-existent tableau of utopia-doomed-from-the-beginning, I worked through the diaries and reports and letters and pieced together what the sequence of events was, who did what when and who responded in what way. Out of laborious documentary researches a narrative emerged, and the narrative told a story. Spontaneity was superseded by research, the incorporation of historical data and documents, and the renewal of a narrative line; only by finding out what happened when, could I find out why things happened. And so I re-engaged with narrative, re-engaged with society. I don't want at all to minimize the formal and aesthetic aspects of writing; but these emerge from an engagement with subject matter. I came out of post-modernism with a new interest in the story, in narrative, and with a renewed concern to engage with content, with the world around me, with the political. And this also changed my approach to literary criticism. With Political Fictions I had been concerned to elucidate political ideas in my reading of novels. Now I realized that a full understanding of the politics required a detailed exploration of the historical context and documentary evidence. This was the procedure I was to to follow in the work that issued in Dragons Teeth: Literature and Politics in the English Revolution and in Studies in Classic Australian Fiction.

I initially thought the Dee and Kelly material would become a novel closely based on and incorporating available documentary materials, like The Paraguayan Experiment. The materials seemed perfect for an historical novel.  Dee and Kelly had transcribed thousands of pages of their dialogues with spirits.  They are full of life, of wit, of amazingly individuated characters.  The fables and apocalyptic warnings have an extraordinary literary power.  I plunged into them.  Even as I began I knew it was going to take me seven years.  I resisted.  I did not want to spend seven years on a novel. But it wasn't going to be a novel.  These amazing characters refused to be the basis of fiction.  Gradually, insistently, it was borne in on me that this material was too good not to use as it stood.  There was no room for making up fiction here.  Instead of my developing characters, the characters insisted that the true story be told. I retained a narrative form.  But what resulted was a documentary, with spirit records, diaries, governmental resolutions, reports from bankers and poets and spies and informers, and Dee and Kelly's own correspondence.  I gave up all ideas of fiction.  The characters began to emerge from the data I assembled, without any fictional additions from me.

With the spirit dialogues, I had an excess of material. The issue with them was how to reduce and select. So it was a matter of judicious excerpting. The contextual materials – letters from British merchants and spies reporting back to Burleigh, Fugger newsletters etc – were less overwhelming and I incorporated them pretty fully. And then there were the linking bits of narrative where I used my own words.

I have just completed another documentary, Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall, due for publication in 2013,about three writers in mid nineteenth century Australia. Adam Lindsay Gordon briefly went to the school I went to in Worcester. So once again that local connection. And I had written a fair bit of literary criticism on Clarke in the 1970s.  Again, I began it thinking I would write a novel, and once more the materials overwhelmed me. There are even fewer connecting bits in my own words. As far as possible I let the newspaper cuttings, letters, court reports and such like, tell the story. It was a matter of getting things in sequence.  Once again it took over five years. Incidentally, Marcus Clarke had a lifelong interest in alchemy. His friend at school, Gerard Manley Hopkins, drew an alchemist for one of Clarke’s first stories; and the serial version of Clarke’s great novel about the convict system, His Natural Life, has a complex alchemical structure.
 
Q:  At the end of many sections, after ‘translating’ an angelic conversation or excerpt from state correspondence into modern English, you do speculate.   Yet though you ask many questions, you rarely venture answers.   Was it difficult to avoid drawing conclusions?

MW: This was a technique I picked up from the short stories of the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš. He uses this question device, without providing answers, a lot. It seemed to me a good technique for dealing with history. Instead of speculating ‘Kelly must have...’ or ‘No doubt Dee felt’ and such like biographers’ devices, I thought it better to raise questions. It gets the possibilities into context, without closing off the interpretation.

Q:  In this work and in your biographic essay on Kelly,^[1]  you’ve pieced together materials no one had looked at before, in particular identifying one of the letters talking about Kelly as written by diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, who just happens to be in Prague as Kelly is arrested and rumors spread, and looking at the correspondence in the Fugger newsletters and elsewhere to see what other political informants were writing about Dee and Kelly’s activities.  Was there a particular part of the puzzle you’re most proud of piecing together?

MW: I was pleased about the Wotton. And pleased that his latest biographer, Gerald Curzon, accepts the identification. The letter had been ascribed to ‘an English merchant’ because the opening mentions merchants gathering at Frankfurt. But the writer doesn’t say he is a merchant. The letter is written to Wotton’s half-brother Edward, and mentions the house and vineyard at Boughton in a way that suggests familiarity with it. Both Wottons grew up there. And checking the known dates of Wotton’s journeys, it emerged he had travelled from Vienna to Prague at that specific time that Kelly and Sir Edward Dyer were in gaol. He was known to be involved in intelligence. Aubrey records how a set of lock picking tools was found in his desk after his death. Currently I am speculating about Wotton’s connection with Milton, and the complimentary letter he wrote that Milton published in his 1645 poems. It suggests to me Milton’s visit to Italy was part of that same surveillance of European Catholic conspiracies directed at England, that Dee and Kelly were reporting on. The latest disappointing scholarly life of Milton by Campbell and Corns fails to investigate the issue.

But questions like did Kelly have one ear or both ears lopped, and what was this punishment for, I was not able to answer. I’m pretty sure Talbot, who first visits Dee, and Kelly, were the same person. John Weever claimed so in his Ancient Funerall Monuments in 1633; this wasbefore any of Dee’s diaries were published, so he must have had some other source of information. The early spirit dialogues Dee recorded with Talbot were not available to Ashmole. Neville Davis alerted me to the work of Christopher Whitby, whose doctoral Ph D thesis at Birmingham University was an edition of these earlier dialogues. Putting that material together with Ashmole’s, it seems to me that Talbot and Kelly were the same person. Though the evidence in both these cases is circumstantial and deductive.  It would be nice to have found something a bit more specific.

Q:  Along similar lines, was there anything else that you’d hoped to find but gave up looking for?

MW: I was disappointed to go to the old Public Record Office in London to look up Queen Elizabeth’s letter to Kelly, and to discover that it had disappeared. As far as I know it hasn’t been found. And the entire business of the relationship of Kelly and Westonia, and whether Kelly married again in Prague, remains obscure to me. I would have liked to have clarified that.

Q:  One more question about Raising Spirits, Making Gold and Swapping Wives, and then I’ll move on.  Many of the reviewers of your earlier memoirs, especially Wildest Dreams, talked about how you seem to have an almost photographic memory, as if you’re placing a reader back in the bohemian Australia of the late sixties and seventies. Yet in Raising Spirits you intentionally limited yourself to what others had said or written with the exception of places where you can analyze that writing and show that a particular account has no merit.  Did you find it frustrating to have to limit yourself to the perceptions of what others had already written and the words they’d already chosen?

MW: No, it was a great relief. I had just written an autobiographical novel of the literary life, Wildest Dreams, my contemporary take on Balzac’s Lost Illusions, before beginning Raising Spirits.  By the end of it I was feeling uneasy about delving any deeper into my psyche, or indeed into my actions. With the changed world of the 1980s and 1990s, it was all getting too self-incriminatory. Why do writers feel compelled to reveal lived experiences?  Well, fortunately at some point the compulsions stops, some things you do shy away from.  I found at a certain point I'd had enough.  I really didn't want to drop the bucket down the well any more to see what came up.  Some things could just stay down the bottom of the well.  For the time being anyway.  I started to develop that nausea in the pit of the stomach as I got to the typewriter.  There comes a limit to how much self examination you can face.  I wasn't convinced it was making me a better person.  By the time I'd finished Wildest Dreams I'd reached that point. Finally - or at least for a while - the autobiographical impulse had been tamed.  I felt a great sense of relief. 

And I decided I’d written enough words. I no longer needed to project my own words. I could surrender that ego of the artist, and submerge myself into another world, start shuffling documents around, putting them in order, seeing what emerged once I’d established an accurate chronology and found enough sources. I enjoy that sort of antiquarian research; finding materials in unexpected and arcane sources.  And in aesthetic terms, it was an extension of the modernist technique of collage.

Q:   You were born in Worcester and started your career writing about literary figures in Worcestershire.  Would you mind talking about that a bit?

MW: The senior English master at the Worcester Royal Grammar School, Edgar Billingham, was himself a writer. He published his Midland Poems in the 1940s and it proved popular enough to go into a third printing. They were in the mode of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. He used to point out to us that Housman was a Worcestershire poet; Shropshire was the somewhere else he yearned for, the next county, but he was born and went to school in Worcestershire.

Midland Poems contained some moving poems from World War I, in which Bill, as he was always known, had served, though he is never represented in any of those endless anthologies of first world war poems. He said little about the war, other than having had to carry out the latrine buckets from the trenches in the frosty mornings. 'Never got chilblains,' he said, the splashed urine apparently a prophylactic against them.

He had a serial about a Midlands football team, Up, the Barchester Rovers, running on BBC radio. There was talk of a television version, but it came to nothing. In the late 1930s he had written a play about Shakespeare's legal entanglements with the Mountjoy family. It was scheduled for a London production, but the outbreak of war, the blackouts, the blitz, put an end to that and it was never performed. Already, at the very outset of my literary career, I was introduced to its disappointments.

When I left school he gave me the two volume collection of Shakespeare documents that he had used to research the project. Two items were from the Worcester diocesan records, now listed as missing. I went down to the diocesan record office and found them. Easy enough, they were catalogued. One document was for the marriage of William Shakespeare to Anna Whateley of Temple Grafton. The other, dated a few weeks later, was for the marriage of William Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway of Stratford upon Avon with only one reading of the banns. There is no record of which marriage actually took place. Some commentators have claimed that Whateley was a misspelling or mishearing of Hathaway, but Temple Grafton could hardly be a misspelling of Stratford upon Avon.

I had begun writing for the local paper on the literary associations of the region I lived in. My very first article was called 'Miserrimus’, most unhappy man, the inscription on a gravestone in Worcester Cathedral, celebrated in a poem by Wordsworth. It appeared auspiciously on April Fool's day, 1960. Often, as I hung onto my day job in the ensuing years, I reflected on the significance of such a start to a literary career, both the article’s title and the day of publication. The local paper, Berrow's Worcester Journal, claimed to be the oldest surviving newspaper in the world. I wrote a number of articles for it in the year between leaving school and going to Oxford, and continued to write them at Oxford. 'Turnip Shortage Annoyed Cobbet,' 'Defoe Spied On Worcester But Was Unimpressed With What He Saw,' ‘Bishop Wulfstan Not as Bad as Made Out to be’, ‘The Fox-Hunting Literature of Worcestershire’. That sort of thing. The headlines weren't mine, but I rather liked them. I showed them to a colleague when I first taught at the university of Sydney. He was deeply shocked and suggested I kept quiet about them.

Drawing on my researches, I wrote an article for Berrow’s speculating that Shakespeare had planned to marry Anna Whateley, but a couple of Stratford heavies had got the later permission issued to ensure that he married Anne Hathaway, already pregnant, without delay. The sub-editor produced the banner headline, ‘Did Shakespeare Ever Marry?’ A couple of weeks later there was a rejoinder from Levi Fox, director of the Shakespeare memorial trust at Stratford. ‘Disregard any recent reports you may have read about Shakespeare,’ he instructed an assembly of Worcestershire women. Shakespeare was a very decent man, he assured them, and you would have welcomed him, or at least his daughter, into your house. I was a bit shaken by the response. But later I wrote a note on my rediscovery of the documents and sent it to Notes and Queries. One of my first academic publications.

I then started to look through other materials in the diocesan archives, housed in the old church of St Helen’s near the Cathedral. In particular I started tracing the life of Samuel Butler and dug up a lot of material. When I got to Oxford I mentioned this to one of my tutors, Dennis Burden; he knew John Wilders who was editing Butler’s Hudibras. I met Wilders and he told me the materials I had thought I had discovered had in the main been published in a French journal in the 1920s, alas. I managed to get a couple of notes out of the material for Notes and Queries and Review of English Studies. We made a trip to Ludlow Castle together where Butler, Fulke Greville, and Philip Sidney had all lived and Milton’s A Masque was first performed and as far as we could establish, no written records survived.

On that other question of faking identities: births, marriages and deaths were from the mid sixteenth century recorded in parish registers which were kept in the church; a copy of the records was sent to the diocesan record office in the cathedral. It would be hard to fake these – it would require inserting an entry or erasing an entry in the parish register, and also in the diocesan record. On the other hand it would be easy to issue a passport in a false identity, since to check it would involve a visit to the local church or cathedral at a time when travel was time-consuming and not easy; on top of which, not all births &c were recorded. Peter Laslett’s assumption that he could present a total picture of England from the parish registers collapsed when it was pointed out that though the gentry and moneyed classes married in church, there was a whole class of labouring poor that did not pay tithes, did not attend church and so on, whose lives were not recorded; as well as Catholics and non-conformist sectarians. Passports were issued in order to leave the country: it would be easy enough to create a false passport for an agent being sent to Europe. However, since Ed Kelley’s birth is recorded (and that of his siblings) it seems pretty definite that he was who he said he was. Except when he said he was Talbot...

Q:  You mentioned something once about black swans in Worcester?

MW: As for the black swans, unique to Australia and not known before European voyages of discovery – mysteriously there is a medieval tomb in Worcester cathedral adorned with a black swan. It is on a tomb of the Beauchamp family. In the early 20th century the 7th Earl of Beauchamp became governor of New South Wales – he is referred to in the Hilaire Belloc rhyme – ‘Go out and govern New South Wales’. He was the original of Brideshead in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. After his return from Australia to the family seat of Madresfield, a dozen miles from Worcester, he had to leave the country because of his alleged homosexuality; visitors remarked on the heavy jewellery his menservants wore. The old Beauchamp Hotel in Sydney, a bar in the centre of what is now Sydney’s gay district, is named after him. Synchronicities, as we used to say in the 70s. Or was it the 60s?

Q:  Your recent memoir Wild and Woolley takes us through small-press world of Australia in the 1970s, and especially the partnership you and Pat Woolley created to publish Australian writers and to bring U.S. City Lights writers like Charles Bukowski to Oz.  Are you nostalgic for those days? 

MW: Yes, I miss the hands on involvement in books. The physical feel of new books just arrived from the printer. And the sense of a community that we had at the time, writers concerned with poetry and fiction, rather than with money. And the international connexions like the Beats. Kerouac was one of the early influences on my writing. We met Ferlinghetti when we went to California and offered to distribute City Lights books in Australia – and he agreed. We met Donald Allen with his Grey Fox and Four Seasons presses, John Martin with Black Sparrow, Michael McClure, Dick Higgins with Something Else press, Richard Kostelanetz and Henry Korn with Assembling Press and so on. It seemed like an international movement of like minded people.

I’ve recently begun publishing again. Phillip Edmonds, a writer here, was having trouble getting his book into print. I said, it will never happen till someone starts a small press who is interested in new fiction, not the financial aspect. Let’s do it, he said. We did it. Raised money by subscription – enough for one book, but we were not a legal entity, not financially incorporated, so could not apply for federal arts funding. Then Nick Walker who runs Australian Scholarly Publishing and had published the life of Marcus Clarke by Cyril Hopkins, brother of Gerard Manley Hopkins, that I had co-edited from an unpublished manuscript, phoned me. Would I like to help him with his fiction list? Sure, I said; but I’ve just started a press. Do you want to take it over? Why not? he said. I phoned Phillip, in some trepidation in case he thought I’d given away his baby. Thank Heavens, he said.

So I now have Press On. I find the manuscripts. All the publishing, printing, design, marketing, finances &c are handled by Australian Scholarly in Melbourne. I miss being able to go into the office, but it probably is for the best that it’s in Melbourne and I’m in Sydney and I can’t interfere and waste everyone’s time. We’ve published a dozen or so titles, with another half dozen in the pipe line. With digital printing we can do small runs at a low unit cost; instant reprint if we need them.

The state of publishing here is, as it was when we started Wild & Woolley, grim. Lots of material around not being published. Interestingly, much of this is from established writers with a track record and a recognized brand. A couple are very successful crime writers (Peter Corris and Garry Disher) whose publishers won’t publish their non-genre non-crime fiction – so Press On published it. Others are literary writers like Morris Lurie and Inez Baranay whose works are what they call mid-list – that is, not enough sales for the debt laden, entertainment corporations that have bought up all the independent publishing houses. So we are in a good position to get good material; and the bookshops, insofar as any survive, recognize the names of our authors. And now we’re picking up some new, first time authors. So that’s all very exciting. Though I miss having the office-warehouse to hang out in.

Q:  The 70s literary Renaissance also coincided with the rise of neo-paganism, New Agers, Wicca, ceremonial magic, and in many ways the era is what kicked off the revival of Dee and Kelly’s works.  Back then, were you at all involved in the occult counter-culture or interested in magic and alchemy?

MW: No, not at all. I was more than fully occupied writing fiction, writing politicized literary criticism, teaching at university, publishing, editing a short story magazine and a series of Asian-Pacific writing, playing around with movies, writing a newspaper column and trying to have a good time. I went to some spiritualist meetings in the early 80s, at my then wife’s behest. I’ve drawn on my experiences of that in the story ‘Space Circle’ from Superfluous Men and in The Magic of It.

Q:  (Sorry for yet another broad question, but) how on earth did you shift from your earlier work to the three recent Plant private-eye novels, National Treasure, The Prisoner of Mt. Warning, and The Magic of It?  Are you consciously trying to change the “detective” genre, or just having a good time?

MW: I’d read private eye and espionage fiction on and off over the years; but when I took early retirement in 2000 I no longer had to prepare classes, and I found time to read some more. Literary fiction was struggling – a declining market – and much of the literary fiction seemed to me, and still seems to me, etiolated, evasive, empty. It was hard to say anything about society or politics in the current mode of literary fiction. So I thought, since I read crime, why not try writing it, I might even become commercial. And the interest of crime fiction for me is in the way it allows the narrator to look at contemporary society; and indeed past society. The private eye novels I’ve written are all like The Count of Monte Cristo in that the contemporary crime has its roots in a political event of an earlier generation. This is a good way of writing about political events and social change, which literary fiction seems committed to avoiding. Crime fiction at its best can be like those 1940s and 1950s B-movies, which are much more interesting than the big production numbers.

In a visit to the States in 1978 I found the small press scene in disarray, the alternative in retreat, and the place rife with conspiracy theories. I found the conspiracies fascinating – they provided plots, which literary fiction had lost. I began writing a newspaper column about them and really got into the theme. The column was called, because I failed to come up with a title, Wilding’s paranoia. Didn’t do my marketability much good. People thought I was mad. Then the conspiracies I theorised about started being revealed as true, the way we live now. Not sure that helped matters either. Anyway, when it came to writing crime fiction, I still had all these paranoid conspiracy theories floating around in my memory. It seemed like a good way to unload them and use them as plots for the private eye novels.

I’m not consciously trying to change the genre. Both Chandler and Hammett had a political dimension. I thought I’d just go commercial and become rich and famous. But, as ever, the books didn’t quite turn out like commercial crime fiction, somehow it all got a bit bent on the way... But I’ve had a good response to them.

Q: In the most recent book in the series, The Magic of It, your main character Plant returns to England, and winds up investigating a situation concerning an academician who writes on magic.  At one point, a character describes this professor as ‘Archer Major, the would-be arch-magus.’ Plant seems to encounter magicians or magical wanna-bes who are sure they’ll encounter the secret workings of the M16 and quizzes Major about whether or not he’s involved in sex rituals (among other things).  Dare we ask what inspired you to create this particular character (Major), and how much of yourself do you see in Plant?

MW: Plant is a sort of ‘I am a camera’ to use Christopher Isherwood’s phrase. Isherwood like Kerouac was an early influence on my writing. I liked the clear eyed, self abnegating way they observed society and let the reader make the judgements. Some of Plant’s view of the world I share, sure; though he is a reduced and selected aspect of my consciousness. I try to keep him a cipher, as it were. The focus is on the people he investigates.
As for Major, he represents an opportunist academic type I have encountered all too often. All the stuff about academics working in intelligence cracking codes I got from the official university gazette or alumni magazine at Sydney, where this material was proudly revealed. And the rest drew on my suspicions abut the way the protest movement and the left might have been controlled and targeted and generally done over on campus. Whether magic was used, or whether magic is a metaphor for other control mechanisms, I leave as an open question. Revill has aspects of myself in his disillusioned radicalism: and I take him back on a visit to my home town, which is pretty much based on actuality.

Sex rituals were just a speculation, not something I’ve ever encountered. Though there was a famous witch in 1950s Sydney, Rosalie Norton, who was mixed up with the conductor Eugene Goosens who was arrested for possessing pornography on re-entering Sydney at one point, and his career somewhat ruined. I’ve not looked into this material but it has been written about. But my background is English Puritanism with all its suspicions about ritual and magic and so on: so I’ve always steered clear of that world. I’ve been more interested in quasi-political issues.

Q:  Another English occultist Aleister Crowley (who claimed to be the reincarnation of Edward Kelly), wound up briefly involved with an Australian “Scarlet Woman,” Leila Waddell, who died in New South Wales, and recent writers have explored Crowley’s connection to espionage.  Have you ever thought of taking on that story, whether as comedy, tragedy, or documentary?  Or was Crowley part of your model for Major?

MW: No, I just checked Wikipedia which I hope is reliable on this, and it says Crowley was born in Warwickshire. The adjacent county to Worcestershire. All of twenty miles away – another world. Shakespeare and George Eliot territory. I’ve not got caught up with him, and I don’t know anything about Leila Waddell, I’ll have to check her out. Olaf Ruhen, a New Zealand writer, told me a story about P. R. Stephensen who told Ruhen a story of meeting Crowley in London. Jack Lindsay was approaching. Cowley didn’t want to see him. What will you do? Stephensen asked. No problem, said Crowley who proceeded to make himself invisible. I knew Jack Lindsay, another Australian writer who’d lived in England since the 1920s. I published a collection of his essays Decay and Renewal, and wrote the introduction to Penguin’s reissue of his autobiographical trilogy, Life Rarely Tells. I asked him about the episode – rather pointlessly since if Crowley was invisible Lindsay wouldn’t have seen him. ‘Oh, quite possibly, said Lindsay. I didn’t want to see Crowley any more than he wanted to see me.’

Stephensen and Lindsay were educated at the University of Queensland. Lindsay went to London and set up a small press, collectors’ items, hand printing, called Fanfrolico Press. Stephensen for a while joined him, then left and set up his own press and published D H Lawrence’s paintings, I think, and then Stephensen wrote a life of Crowley. Earlier Stephensen had been a founding member of the Oxford University communist party. Along with Graham Greene. In the 30s Stephensen returned to Australia, started a small press, and got caught up with the Australia First movement, a pro-Nazi group. He was interned throughout World War 2. I asked Jack Lindsay why Stephensen got mixed up with the Australia first movement: He wanted to turn the theme of Lawrence’s Kangaroo, about an ultra right wing group attempting a coup, into actuality, Lindsay said. Altogether a strange world.

Q:   I can’t help but ask about a particular chapter in your novel  Academia Nuts.  In “Raising the Curtain,” one of your characters is struggling to locate one of Dr. John Dee’s books in the University of Sydney library.  True story, partially true, total invention, or no comment?

MW: When Douglas Grey, my former tutor in medieval literature at Oxford, visited me on his way to New Zealand in the mid 1970s he asked if I would check the annotations in a book once belonging to Dee, and now held in Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, for Julian Roberts’ and Andrew G. Watson’s John Dee’s Library Catalogue. It took a week or so for the library to locate the volume – like Edgar Allen Poe’s purloined letter it was on display, in a glass cabinet. Having looked through it, I arranged to have the pages containing annotations photographed, but it returned unphotographed. It was sent back to photography and then became lost in the system. It took some further weeks before it was found again and photographed. The librarians agreed there was some magical resistance going on. Though others remarked that it would have been more persuasively magical, given the decline of the university and its facilities, if the book had been photographed with no problems or delays.

Campuses and their fiction can seem like an enclosed and isolated Arcadian enclave. But writing Academia Nuts, I tried to make a point of showing connections with other worlds. Life, thank heavens, is not just an endless campus novel. The characters include a bank robber and a con-man and a working girl and an American friend. Dope-smoking Pawley insists on an unreconstructed 1970s radical conspiracy interpretation of the past and the present, and brings into focus political issues of control and surveillance. A couple of writers, Sam Samson and Francesca Templar, make an appearance from my study of the literary world, Wildest Dreams. And magic and otherworldly realms come in at the novel's end, to suggest that there are other realities. I used this episode as the final chapter of Academia Nuts – putting it at the end to indicate there were other worlds than the university. It got displaced to the penultimate chapter in the second edition because Pat Woolley who was publishing it wanted me to write a new ending (about the English department impounding the copies of the first edition I’d put into the departmental mail to send to academics and others round the world). The deal was she would mail out those copies, if I wrote a new final chapter.

Q:  At the end of Academia Nuts, Pawley’s novel  Academic Theme Park gets, shall we say, “re-packaged” by someone else as the “non-fiction” New Idea of the University.  Is it fair to say that you’re rather cynical about how well the arts can flourish on modern campuses or how much education actually happens?  And if so, what advice would you give to the current generation of young men and women?

MW: At the end of the 1970s Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA began to pay back for the radical student activities in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s. Most of that protest had come from arts students – in English, History, Philosophy etc because those subjects encouraged discussion, debate, interpretation and argument. To study them was not just to rote learn formulae or legal cases or computer programmes. Reagan had already purged the Californian system. Funds were cut back for the humanities, and reallocated to vocational studies like Education, business, computing etc – subjects that would not encourage free ranging speculation and radical political action. Australian universities duly followed the purges in the USA and UK. The English department at Sydney dropped from a staff of around 80 to around 20. Then literary theory was introduced as a way of superseding all the advances in reading literature in an informed political and historical context so that the old committed approaches looked out of date. Now we see the culmination of this process in the world wide purges of university libraries – removing anything not taken out in the last five years. This directly affects the arts – scientific and economic and business studies are not interested in records of past theories which have been jettisoned and replaced, so they don’t want old books. But old books are the life blood of the arts and humanities. We are in a situation comparable to the destruction of the cathedral and monastery libraries in Tudor England. Dr Dee tried to salvage the books and manuscripts that had been thrown out and he proposed a national library to preserve them. His suggestion was ignored.

So, cynical? I am beyond cynical. Eventually the idiocy of our present ways will be seen. But by then it will be hard to restore the traditional idea of a university, and the books will have vanished. And if they happen to have been digitized and preserved on the internet, then it will cost money to access them – as is already happening with journals. The bound volumes have been thrown out. Now libraries have to pay a subscription to access the archive.
[See “The Great Purge of Our Libraries” and a related radio interview with Paul Comrie-Thompson on Counterpoint, ABC Radio National about the library issue.]

Advice to students? Wallace Robson, my main tutor at Oxford, used to go through the lecture list each term. ‘Oh, no, you wouldn’t want to go to that. Oh dear, she’s no good. Oh really, I think he would be a waste of time.’ He would turn to me. ‘I wouldn’t bother with any of them. I think the best thing is just go to the library and read.’ Which is what I did. That is the advice I would pass on to students today. If they can find a library that still has any books you’d want to read.

Q:  Is there any question you’d wished I asked instead of the ones above?

MW: No, I think that’s plenty. As the Lady says in Milton’s A Masque: ‘Shall I go on, or have I said enough?’ I think I’ve said quite enough.

JWMT:  Thanks much for taking the time for this interview.

Selected Works by Michael Wilding
Aspects of the Dying Process (short stories)
Living Together
The Short Story Embassy: a novel
The West Midland Underground
Scenic Drive
The Phallic Forest
Pacific Highway
Reading the Signs
Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall (forthcoming)
Raising Spirits, Making Gold and Swapping Wives: The True Adventures of Dr John Dee and
Sir Edward Kelly
The Paraguayan Experiment
The Man of Slow Feeling
The Prisoner of Mount Warning
The Magic of It
Under Saturn
Great Climate
Her Most Bizarre Sexual Experience
This is for You
Book of the Reading
Somewhere New: New and Selected Stories
Wildest Dreams
Wild and Woolley: A Publishing Memoir
Academia Nuts
Wild Amazement
National Treasure
Superfluous Men

Selected literary criticism by Michael Wilding
Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution
Studies in Classic Australian Fiction
Political Fictions
Milton’s Paradise Lost

Selected Works Edited by Michael Wilding
The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories
Marvell: Modern Judgements
Confessions & Memoirs: Best Stories Under the Sun - 3

Notes

1. Wilding, “A Biography of Sir Edward Kelly, the English Alchemist and Associate of Dr. John Dee,” in Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture, ed. Stanton J. Linden, New York: AMS Press, 2007