This is another short book, an essay, really, in the Australian series Writers on Writers that took me back to books I loved.
While there’s much in it about Carey’s life and all his novels, the focus is on his book True History of the Kelly Gang, the fictional account of the 1870s outlaw who is a heroic figure in Australia. The oppression of the Irish, which the British carried with them to Australia, made it a challenge to make a living, and contributed to the sympathy for Ned Kelly in modern times. Carey was inspired to write about Kelly by two things. Kelly wrote a long letter in 1879 and if you read it here, you will see what inspired Carey. The twenty-some paintings by Sidney Nolan painted in the 1940s were also important to Carey. After he moved to Manhattan, the paintings were brought there for an exhibit and Carey says, “‘One by one I brought my new Manhattan friends uptown and walked them around the 27 paintings as if they were the stations of the cross…I explained why, while we had no Thomas Jefferson, our imaginary founding father was a convicted murderer named Ned Kelly.”
Carey grew up in Bacchus Marsh, a small town west of Melbourne in a middle class family. He was sent to a boarding school which did give him early knowledge of great music, and he does mention the joy of hearing The Messiah there, but being away from home had an effect.
‘I suppose it did solve a few child-care problems,’ Carey told The Paris Review, of boarding at the school from 1954 to 1960. ‘I never felt I was being exiled or sent away, but I was only eleven years old. No one could have guessed that the experience would finally produce an endless string of orphan characters in my books.’
I have a strong memory of the first time I heard The Messiah, too. I was ten years old and went with my father to his practice when local choir members around the Washington, D.C. area performed The Messiah with the National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Howard Mitchell. It was the first time music really moved me.
The author makes the point that the Australians at the time thought of themselves as English. At age twenty-four Carey left Australia and many years later he remembers how it felt to arrive in England, “reeally good.” He was very pleased when the immigration guy said he looked more English than the English. “I felt deeply, deeply at home.”
Here is a quote from this book that I want to remember. Though I am not clear how it relates to Peter Carey, it is relevant to our world today, and I guess it always is. It comes from Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric.
Anybody can be angry, that’s easy, Aristotle said a couple of millennia ago, ‘but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.’
Sarah Krasnostein, On Peter Carey, Black Inc., 2023, 65 pages (I read the Kindle version).