Sumner Locke Elliott (1917–1991)

Sumner Locke Elliott's third novel continues the career of a writer who was, in his time, vastly underrated, but who has aged poorly in some ways.

To the positive: Elliott's delicate shading of character is stronger here than in his previous two novels. Orphaned Angus journeys to the Blue Mountains to stay with the St James family, ruled over by cold fish Eve, the matriarch who has lost her youthful passion in favour of a cool detachment. Her daughter Stevie has inherited Eve's passion, but show more it is wasted on the beautiful young man she falls for, who is - unbeknownst to Stevie - gay. Elliott's first book, Careful He Might Hear You, had been a fictionalised version of his own childhood; here, Edens Lost feels like a sequel, telling the tale of young adults in love.

The interesting difference here is that, while the queer Marcus is clearly a stand-in for the author, Elliott is also to be found in the other St James daughter, Bea. Bea has hidden her desires for physical and emotional connection by retreating to her creative pursuits. She is writing for radio dramas, and gradually developing a career out of this. But her rational, intellectual point-of-view is challenged when she meets an American serviceman.

Edens Lost is an engaging read, and feels more purposeful than the forgettable second novel in the Elliott canon, Some Doves and Pythons. Still, fifty years after publication, it feels woefully archaic. I read a review that described the book as "strictly matinee entertainment", and I think that's the problem here. Elliott was an immensely talented and creative writer; he had made his name for years in radio serials and live television dramas, so he knew how to spin several plates before bringing them down together, and he knew how to conjure up engaging dialogue and plots. But - despite some fetching attempts at modernism - he is not a particularly literary writer. Most enervating of all is Elliott's habit of directing the reader to how dialogue is spoken. Words and sometimes individual syllables are italicised; the radio dramatist doesn't trust his own dialogue without an actor to interpret it! As a result, Edens Lost feels like a high-class airport novel. Of the three sections, the second - Bea's - is by far the most successful, clearly connecting to the writer's own sense of self.

This is the kind of novel to pass the time on a train journey or perhaps, better yet, on a rained-in weekend at a hotel with a partner you are secretly planning to abandon for a more attractive new lover. If you're not in that situation, though, don't worry about it. show less

Sumner Locke Elliott remains famous for his first novel, Careful, He Might Hear You, a largely autobiographical tale of his childhood raised among aunts with vastly different views of his future. Elliott wrote that novel in his late 40s, having started a career in the Australian theatre and radio industry in the late 1930s as a beautiful young man with a quick wit and an ability to craft long-form stories with a popular slant. After the War, he moved to the USA where he spent twenty years as show more a highly respected name in the "golden age" of television drama. It was only when that era faded, in the mid-1960s, that Elliott seriously turned his attention to writing novels, largely because he was settled in New York City and did not want to make the trek out to that notoriously vapid West Coast.

Perhaps herein lie the clues to the fatal flaw of his second novel, 1966's Some Doves and Pythons. The novel focuses on Tabitha Wane, a talent agent who - when we open in medias res - is organising a house party that will prove crucial to retaining and obtaining key clients, while also stabilising her many personal relationships, which are equally as manipulated and driven by Tabitha's ego as her private ones.

Elliott's talent as a writer is evident from the first page. He writes polyphonically, with a chorus of voices interrupting each other, reflecting in flashbacks, with some sections in free indirect discourse, other sections lengthy conversation pieces. The expanding and contracting timescale is (somewhat) modernist and the structure, with Tabitha's rise and fall and rise, is expertly thought out.

Some Doves and Pythons doesn't fail, exactly, but it is ultimately unremarkable for two key reasons, both of which I believe relate to Elliott's lengthy experience in television and radio dramas. First of all, the subject matter is simply inconsequential. A scheming talent producer who realises, over the course of a country house weekend, that the people in her life must be valued as friends more than as means to an end, well that's just dandy. It would've made a great Sunday night drama in the era of live television, when audiences expected to see everything from Ibsen to Coward appear on their screens regularly. As the subject for a full-length novel the reader grows weary of the sheer emptiness.

Second, and more importantly, is the dialogue. Now, don't get me wrong, the dialogue is vibrant enough, if not quite sparkling. But it struck me, midway through the novel, that I was reading a play. Truly. During his decades as a popular scriptwriter, Elliott had also written a play which appeared (very briefly) on Broadway in the 1950s. I wouldn't be surprised if this novel began as an idea for a stage piece. Elliott is stage-managing a production, and nowhere is that more in evidence than the endless use of italicising of individual words in a sentence or often of individual syllables! Yes, he is prone to informing the reader of exactly how a line should be spoken, because he doesn't trust his dialogue to do its work without an actor speaking the words. (A problem Elliott must have worked through, as his later novels like Fairyland attest.) Anyone who is familiar with writing will see the script-based nature of the dialogue in sections such as this:

"Marvelous," Tabitha said to Barney. "Both Flora and Harry are marvelous people. Good people. Of the earth, earthy." She was moving a green glass to replace the pewter on the mantel. "But they don't understand charm."

In essence, the novel is appealingly written at times but can't overcome these qualms. Where Elliott succeeds more is in the moments of individual character analysis, which had made his first novel so appealing and would earn him justified acclaim for some of his later works. The sequence where Tabitha finally asks her longtime confidante Barney about his sexuality (in a very roundabout way) feels poignant and sensitive. And the most well-drawn character is Tabitha's housebound mother, who tolerates the house parties while being unable to see her daughter as anything other than the troubled but determined child she had once been. Edith:
"disdained the trappings of the past, however. She was, by nature, unsentimental. She would not pick and pry through old boxes of mementoes, faded pictures of the dead. She avoided the obituary columns, preferring not to know that another of her friends was dead, relying on the distillation of her mind to summon them at will to her, and so the slow-motion figures revolved around her, untouched by age, bright-eyed and brown-haired, immortal. The past and present merged."

As far as I can tell, the novel has not been reprinted in several decades. When I went to my local library to request their archived copy, the librarian wasn't even sure if it still existed, as they had lost some books in a flood several years ago. The copy had survived but, even then, I had to create the Goodreads entry! Perhaps I will be the only person who reads this novel in the 21st century, and I don't think it will be a great loss if that is so. But still, for the sake of the thoughtful and sensitive Mr Elliott, I'm glad someone did. show less

A subtle, appealing, assured debut novel, Careful, He Might Hear You is still regarded as an Australian classic six decades after publication. The story centres around a boy whose peaceful life with his aunt and uncle (the only parents he has ever known) is interrupted by the arrival of another aunt from London, who enters a legal battle to take custody of him.

It is not often that a writer's debut novel remains their most famous (and best, for that matter), but there are two common reasons show more why this might be so, and Elliott evinces both of them. First, it is autobiographical, based on the author's recollections of being raised by aunts in Sydney in the 1920s. Second, it is the work of an experienced writer. By the time he published his first novel, Elliott had spent 25 years writing first radio serials in Australia and then live television dramas in New York City. He was already skilled at the art of sketching multiple points-of-view, of softening seemingly villainous characters and toughening apparent heroes, and composing dialogue which reveals both the inner and outer lives of the people speaking.

Elliott had some interest in modernism, which comes across strongly in some of his later novels, but if we're honest he was perhaps not a serious, by which I mean linguistically difficult writer. This is subtly drawn but still ultimately melodrama. As such, it remains an easy read decades after publication but shows signs of age in the dialogue and character interactions. What it gains, perhaps, in retrospect is a historian's view of an Australia long gone but still casting shadows over us all. show less

I haven't read this for maybe twenty years or so. I didn't even make it through to the end of the first page this time before I started getting anxious about what lay ahead for PS.

The way Mr Elliott described PS's thoughts and reactions to the chaos the adults in his world were creating was marvellous. His journey from his initial innocence to the loss of it was at times heartbreaking as he struggled to make sense of who he was and where he felt his loyalties should lie.

The honest show more description of who Lila and Vanessa were - not being confined to either the good or the bad, but covering both - showed them to be more complex as the story wore on. Being 'inside their heads' like that, and after uncovering much of their past as I read on, I sometimes found myself confused as to whose side in the battle for PS I was really on.

I even happened to find a version of the book with a wonderful foreward by Robin Nevin (who played Lila in the movie version)! show less