In A Kind of Confession, Alex Miller drops the 'mask of fiction' to reveal the intricate depths of a writing life
- Written by Brigid Rooney, Associate Professor (Affiliate), Australian Literature, University of Sydney
Alex Miller’s A Kind of Confession is subtitled “the writer’s private world”. It is comprised of excerpts from his notebooks, diaries and selected letters. Spanning 1961 to 2023, these documents sit at a small but decisive distance from the author, having been curated by his wife, Stephanie Miller.
I was wary, at first, of “confession” and “private world”. These words seemed to task the reader with divining Miller’s private life. But the book’s James Baldwin epigraph – “All art is a kind of confession” – disrupted this notion. Gentle teasing is by no means inconsistent with Miller’s fiction, where all is not as it seems.
Stephanie Miller claims the book provides “a direct and intimate narrative without ‘the mask of fiction’”. But readers of Miller will likely know there is no access to the writer’s “private world” that is not already mediated by artful stories.
I will come back to that key phrase, “the mask of fiction”.
Reservations aside, I found myself drawn into the book’s lively, often thought-provoking exchanges with family, friends and readers. Its recurring preoccupations range from the domestic and homely to the worldly and philosophical. Many details resonate with and illuminate Miller’s other writings.
Review: A Kind of Confession – Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)
Author of 16 books to date – mostly fictional, but also non-fictional – Alex Miller is a man of humble origins, adventurous journeys, and a slow-burning but ultimately impressive literary career.
Aged 15, he left his home and family on a South London housing estate to labour on a farm in Somerset. A year later, inspired by images of the “outback”, Miller migrated alone to Australia.
In A Kind of Confession, the closer we move to the present, the greater the mass of material. This inverted cone mirrors a gradual shift in orientation. Letters overtake the solitary notebook. Connection and community spring from myriad exchanges with friends and readers, longstanding and new. Eventually, email becomes the primary mode for correspondence, accommodating frequent exchanges between the mature, established writer and his widening network of correspondents.
It isn’t surprising that Miller’s letters and email exchanges vary in tone and intimacy. We witness the slightly tentative, even guarded relation between the writer and academic literary critics. Miller’s letters to such readers are courteous, even friendly, though often tinged with formality. One exception is his esteem for Robert Dixon, whose book Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time (2014) occasioned much correspondence.
Letters to particular recipients and close friends are, by contrast, open and relaxed. Correspondents include philosopher Raimond Gaita, academic Robert Manne, US academic Ronald A. Sharp, historian Tom Griffiths, artist and neighbour John Wolseley, poet Ouyang Yu and writer Sylvia Martin, among many others. These letters are by turns entertaining and warm, thoughtful and compelling.
We get a brief, tantalising glimpse of Miller’s friendship with the late Hazel Rowley. His admiring letter about her biography of the Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage (2012), holds retrospective interest in light of his later biographical work Max (2020), in which Miller writes of his journey to uncover the hidden history of his friend and mentor Max Blatt.
Whether frank or formal, the letters in A Kind of Confession testify to Robert Dixon’s claim that the gift – gift exchange – is central to Miller’s imaginative project. When they refer to key figures, such as Blatt, the poet Barrett Reid or Miller’s mother, the letters often contemplate debts owed and the repayment of debts through the long-delayed reciprocating gift of story.
A Kind of Confession revisits other questions too. What does it mean to have been an English migrant to Australia? How has this positioned Miller with respect to the settler Australian establishment and First Nations people? Miller’s thoughts about home and belonging intersect with these themes in his fiction. To fellow novelist Pico Iyer he writes:
We all wonder what home might be. We are all strangers in this world and yet indigenous to it. The enigma of home is in all of us.
Yet Miller also recognises that the freedom he enjoys has been afforded by his (partly) outsider status, by his severing of “ancestral ties” and by his choice not to belong to “the establishment”. That he has actively protected this freedom is evident from his 2021 letter to Ian McPhee detailing his reasons for declining an Order of Australia.
And yet, as Miller says, Australia is a beloved land, the place where he feels most at home.
Alex Miller in June 2003.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Read more:
'Unhappy, unfaithful women': middle-aged growth replaces self-absorption in Alex Miller's A Brief Affair
An accidental scratch
Miller’s Central Queensland novels, as his letters confirm, are profoundly shaped by his close friendship with elders of the Jangga and Barada Barna peoples – notably Colin McLennan and Frank Budby. Again to Pico Iyer, Miller writes of ancient sites he was permitted to visit:
at 84 I know I’ve barely left more than an accidental scratch on this rock. The real work has yet to be even looked at. I have seen the Playgrounds of the Old People and know my writings to be of no consequence in the place where they have their meaning. It is not mine and never shall be. And this is to know something about myself and the European invader culture from which I come.
These words go to the heart of Miller’s Central Queensland novels. To Tom Griffiths, he writes that what he most cares about in Journey to the Stone Country is
the realisation that the province of Western science has a boundary in relation to the sacred in other cultures […] History surely shows that the more we understand the more we destroy on our way to the heart of the matter.
The Western will to know is decisively curbed in that novel’s moral turning point. Yet, in fiction, restraint paradoxically fosters other ways of knowing. There are other means of opening what Tom Griffiths calls “vast spaces of reflection”.
It is clear that Stephanie Miller is central to her husband’s writing life. She is also a former academic and an astute reader of his writing. Her introduction offers the insightful observation that this material illuminates the “thinking behind the writing and publication of his books, much of which he had forgotten and had re-written into his own concocted history”.
I am struck by the phrase “concocted history”. It suggests a personal history that is thoroughly fictionalised, even to the point of self-mythologisation. For Miller, the true quarry is the self, and the self’s elusiveness necessitates the mask of fiction.
Recalling Flaubert’s famous “Madame Bovary, c'est moi”, Miller often adopts the mask of a female protagonist. He explains to Sylvia Martin:
the business of fiction for me is a strange place where self and other begin to meld in mysterious ways, again, not in the combining of facts but in the combining of the sense of someone who is me is not me.
This pattern is repeated in Miller’s recent novel A Brief Affair (2022). This late work reprises, in distilled form, situations and themes familiar to his readers. Its protagonist Fran is a kind of self-portrait. Like its predecessors, A Brief Affair unearths, in Stephanie Miller’s words, “material from his earlier life”.
At the same time, Miller’s fiction engages with landscapes, social life and ideas, presenting “our interior lives within the artful carapace of story”.
“Nothing is really new,” he writes to novelist Githa Hariharan in 1994. “It’s all the old stuff finding a voice.”
Miller emerges as a writer less interested in stylistic experiment than in achieving, as he puts it to Hazel Rowley, “a limpid simplicity through which the depths are visible, are present to us, but are not obscure in the sense that complexity is often rendered”.
From this perspective, complex depths don’t become visible through confession. Rather, they are yielded by artful simplicity and the indirect means of “the mask of fiction”. Time and again, Miller returns to places, people and situations formative of the ever-elusive, ever-insistent self.
Authors: Brigid Rooney, Associate Professor (Affiliate), Australian Literature, University of Sydney
Hashtag.net.au
