“I’ve been committed to writing since I was 21, 13 years,” Alex Miller wrote in his diary in 1971. “Quite a stretch considering I’ve yet to publish. Still, the seed is eternal.” Another diary entry, from 1975: “Am I a writer? If I write I am. If I don’t I’m not.” In 1976: “No juice for the publishers, nothing to set their hair on end. Anyhow; next time. Eh?”
That young man’s words, scribbled in slanted hand decades ago, feel profound when you know it took Miller a further 17 years to publish his first novel, aged 52; that he’d go on to win Australia’s biggest literary award, the Miles Franklin – twice, for The Ancestor Game and Journey to the Stone Country; and that he would one day come to be regarded as among Australia’s greatest living novelists.
His new book, A Kind of Confession, isn’t fiction: it is a collection of his most intimate diaries and letters, as close to memoir as he may come, timed in a way that feels final.
“Sadly, you’re wrong,” Miller says, now 86, and looking the opposite of sad about it. “I’ve actually just sent my next novel to my publisher. But I know, I know – it is time to quit.”
Really? “No, not really,” he says airily. “It’s time to quit when He knocks me off the chair. I love writing. I saw John Coetzee the other day, who said it’s terrible when he’s writing, but it’s even worse when he’s not. But it’s wonderful when I’m writing – and I’m always writing.”
We’re sitting in the State Library of Victoria, where Miller’s diaries and archives are held. That early diary, a little volume dubbed the Black Book, is brought out by library staff on a pillow, a quaint gesture that delights Miller. His wife, Stephanie, who assembled A Kind of Confession, is also there, a serene presence next to her husband, whose energy flits between elder statesman and naughty child.
“There’s a nude sketch in here,” Steph murmurs, holding the Black Book open.
“I’d bloody hope so,” Miller says.
The Millers met in Melbourne in 1975. Steph was 21. Miller was 38, unhappily unpublished and married, albeit separated from his first wife. “It took us six weeks to speak to each other, it was too important,” he says, with unmasked emotion. “We both knew on the spot – ‘Oh shit, this is it.’ And that was nearly 50 years ago. I thought, ‘Christ, she’ll think I’m a dirty old man.’ And she thought, ‘Oh God, he’ll think I’m this boring kid.’ But we both knew there was something there.”
She says: “He is a romantic man. He’s beautiful, he is sensitive and gorgeous.” (“She likes me,” Miller stage whispers to me.) “He’s the most perceptive person too, which I think is so wonderful. When I don’t know what I’m feeling he’ll understand me before I do.”
Miller had then only published one short story; the early works were, in his words, “unreadable”. Eventually Steph, a university academic, began reading his manuscripts and offering feedback; to this day they still unpick his work on daily walks. It was Steph who made A Kind of Confession happen: Miller wanted nothing to do with it. “Who wants to go through their own letters?” he says.
“I always loved looking at it,” Steph says of the Black Book. “There’s some wonderful things in there that really tell the story of a writer, writing but not being recognised and having the temerity to keep going through isolation and rejection. I thought, ‘That’s a really good message for people who may be writing: to just keep going.’”
“Without Steph none of this would have happened,” Miller says, simply. “None of it. Not even the novels. I don’t know what I would have done. Maybe I would have continued grinding on or killed myself, I don’t know.”
“No matter how well-disguised, the fiction is a portrait of its author,” Miller once wrote – and he has barely attempted to disguise himself in his novels. There are frequent glimpses of the working class boy who felt stifled by England’s notions of tradition and hierarchy (The Ancestor Game, Conditions of Faith); the 16-year-old who left for Australia alone to work on cattle stations in the northern Queensland hinterlands (Watching the Climbers on the Mountain; Coal Creek); the despairing would-be writer who spent years trying to get published (The Passage of Love).
As his close friend Raimond Gaita once wrote to him: “On a number of occasions, I’ve seen you described as the most loved Australian writer … I suspect it’s true because of the way you are so recognisably present in everything you write.” When Steph describes The Passage of Love as being “pretty much all true”, he interjects drily: “They’re all fucking true. Where else would all this stuff come from?”
The letters in A Kind of Confession reveal Miller to be an affectionate father (who signs off as “Daddy-Pooh”), an effusive friend and an audacious grump. Take the penultimate entry in the Black Book, on 11 May 1993: “[The Ancestor Game] is shortlisted for Miles Franklin and I’m waiting to hear I haven’t won it. They keep the six of us waiting three weeks. Who does this help? Gatekeepers masturbating.”
Eight days later, the final entry: “Someone just rang from Sydney to say I’d won the MF award. Big deal.”
For a writer who owns up to being unable to sleep ahead of first reviews, praise and recognition is clearly important to him, I say. “Winning the Miles Franklin was a big deal,” he admits. “My publisher had said, ‘You haven’t got it, they would have told you last night.’
“The following night the phone went and this hushed, sexy woman said, ‘Is that Alex Miller? I’m delighted to tell you that you have won the Miles Franklin.’ ‘Fuck, this is better than sex, darling,’ I said. ‘Really?’ And I got off the phone and went to my knees like they do in the tennis. I went from zero to 100.”
Miller grew up in a working class family in south London. “In England, I was at the absolute bottom of the pile,” he sayhs. “I knew that being taken seriously wasn’t possible.”
He arrived in Australia at 16 and finally felt free, one of two white men in a mostly Indigenous workforce on a cattle station in the Gulf of Carpentaria. “I had no idea about racism – that was a crushing realisation. But I found out I was getting £4 and 10 shillings a day, and they were getting £4 and 10 shillings a week. I’d gone from being at the very bottom socially in England, to suddenly being at the fucking top.”
His notions of social justice and dignity, his clear empathy for others – all so present in his books – are rooted in this perspective. He is often praised for his ability to write complex, authentic women; in one letter he attributes this to his early realisation that “women of all classes had had to confront similar prohibitions to my own, and so they, women, often became my subject. It was easier than writing directly about myself.” When asked about this, he says: “Well, there is only one chromosome difference, isn’t there? And your generation has broken the bind that we were all in, where we had to be either a man or a woman. I have no problem understanding women.”
He is fiercely against hierarchies; when “well-meaning friends” made a submission for Miller to receive an Australian honour, the governor general’s office agreed but he refused it. “There seems to me to be urgent unfinished business that needs to be seen to in this country before we hand out awards and honours to ourselves,” he explained to Steph in a letter in A Kind of Confession. “The first and most urgent business, I believe, is a treaty between the newcomers and the First Nations people.”
“Even if we had a treaty and everything was hunky-dory, I still wouldn’t accept an honour,” he says now. “It’s hierarchical. People think you’re being a bit up yourself or something when you say this, but I’d much rather be in Paul Keating’s club than Tony Abbott’s, thank you.”
When he’s writing, life is wonderful but, between books, Miller tends to drift into depression. In a letter written during one dark period he describes “feeling that I’m done with writing books that might ever be considered important”.
That despair was only momentary, he says now. “If I had a hand in this book, I probably wouldn’t have put those things in. There’s an element of negativity that you’d rather not confess.” But then he confesses something that isn’t in the book: “I attempted suicide once. When I was at Araluen on my own, fielding rejections. I didn’t write about it, as I was so ashamed afterwards.”
Steph interjects here: “Alex has always been fending off the meaninglessness of life, which we all grapple with to certain extent,” she says. “And writing has been the saviour. He goes into his room and he comes out absolutely elated. He’s with his characters. He’s creating something beautiful and dealing with ideas. His life is a happy life.”
After so many books, does he feel he’s close to finishing the self-portrait? “No,” he says. “Nothing has changed.” His own answer makes him laugh. “How can it?” He adds. “Life is so brief! Even at 86, it feels brief. You haven’t gone anywhere yet.”
A Kind of Confession by Alex Miller is out now through Allen & Unwin
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
