Actualités

On June 27, Text Classics is publishing two of Helen Garner.s screenplays, for 1986's Two Friends and 1992's The Last Days of Chez Nous, with an afterword by screenwriter Laura Jones (High Tide, The Potrait of a Lady, Brick Lane).

Jones is the recipient of the 2016 Australian Writers' Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and will be appearing in conversation with Holding the Man's Tommy Murphy at an Awg event in Sydney next week.

Two Friends was directed by Jane Campion and released as a made for television feature in 1986, while The Last Days of Chez Nous was directed by Gillian Armstrong and starred Lisa Harrow, Bruno Ganz and Kerry Fox.

Courtesty of Text, Jones' afterword is reproduced below.

All Those Tears, by Laura Jones

Most of us watch films but don.t read screenplays. They are odd pieces of writing because they only exist in order to become something else.

My new voice belongs to Edward Herrmann. He has allowed me to use it for 448 pages. The actor has recorded the audiobook version of my memoir, Life Itself, and my author's copies arrived a few days ago.

Listening to it, I discovered for the first time a benefit from losing my own speaking voice: If I could still speak, I suppose I would probably have recorded it myself, and I wouldn't have been able to do that anywhere as near as well as Herrmann does.

My editor, Mitch Hoffman, suggested a few readers he was confident would do a good job. Herrmann's name leaped up from his email.

I've always admired his acting, and there is a little newspaperman in his lineage: He played William Randolph Hearst in Bogdanovich's "The Cat's Meow." If my voice is performed by the actor who played Hearst, doesn't that make me only two degrees of separation from Orson Welles?...

"Death disports with writers more cruelly than with the rest of humankind," Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic.

"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.

"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?

"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag,...