I once reviewed a Louis Nowra play (was it ‘Summer of the Aliens’?) and if memory serves said he often “writes with a brick dipped in ink”. I don’t rescind that after reading his article, although it seems the brick is now covered in Bob Ellis’ blood. And matted, disheveled, 70-year old hair.

The thing that is most interesting from my current (Caifornian) point of view is how little the rest of the world cares about either of them. So squabble on, lads.

Jonathan Franzen, on the other hand, is a lion; ‘The Corrections’ is genius. And if you disagree, I’ll hit you with a brick.

The Takedown Artist
By James Atlas
Published: Sunday, October 26, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/the-takedown-artist.html

The article mentions Wolcott:

“[Peck's] angry tone fit the tone of the New Republic’s back pages, from which the leonine-maned Wieseltier presides over a stable of famously hotheaded critics. Every few months he’ll let one go for the jugular: Wood on Don DeLillo, Helen Vendler on David Denby, James Wolcott on Jonathan Franzen.”

And, not liking The Corrections, I googled for the review, found at Powell’s Books online:

http://www.powells.com/review/2002_11_28.html

To me at least, Ken, that is actually his main redeeming feature.

Its hardly news to point out that Ellis is a buffoon. That is is whole persona. His best character is always himself, a sort of provincial Ubu Roi, casting about hopelessly, ingesting the world.

Its true, as Pavlov’s Cat says, that he is a figure from another time, and i was one of those teenagers who read him, and about him, in Nation Review. It all seems rather dated now, but given what became of Australian political culture, maybe not such a bad time after all.

But this for some is Ellis’ unforgivable crime: he is a writer of and about political culture. He is a constant reminder that Australia only ever had one great political culture — that of the Australian Labor Party.

For all his flaws — flaws Ellis himself constantly magnifies like a broken beer bottle — Ellis evokes a whole ethos. Its something no Tory writer has ever succeeded in doing in Australia.

Having failed to understand what Ellis has actually achieved, one concludes reluctantly that Nowra has failed to mark the passage of his own achievement as a writer relative to it. Its a missed opportunity for a writer to understand something of himself relative to someone so palpably different. He cut Ellis down to size by making himself smaller still.

But I’m interested by what you say about people talking about Ellis in the 1970s as if it was yesterday. I’ve always been aware of the way the people who were close to Patrick White speak about him as if he’d just stepped out of the room, and always, always refer to him as “Patrick”, as if he were someone not just alive, but who you both know well.