Australian author Alex Miller is 87 and still writing. Even 48 years after his first piece was published, he can observe in one of his letters, “I’m still learning so much about writing! I know nothing.”
A Kind of Confession is a collection of notebook observations, letters and later emails spanning the early-1960s to 2023. It is a delightfully quirky view inside the mind of an author, with all the fears, inadequacies and strong passions that you may expect to find lurking.
Miller sees himself as an outsider. He was born in London and arrived in Australia alone, aged 16. His early life was spent on a South London council estate; his father was a Glasgow Scot descended from the impoverished crofters forced from their homes by the English landowners. His mother was Irish and also displaced by the English.
At one point, Miller observes, “Growing up, it was made clear to me by the English that I was not and never could be English.” The genesis of Miller’s empathy for indigenous Australians can be clearly seen. He was a stockman in Queensland when he decided to become a novelist, but it would be 27 years before his first novel was published. Since then, Miller has won the premier Australian fiction prize, the Miles Franklin Award, twice – the same as Patrick White and Thomas Keneally. And he has been shortlisted a further five times. Only one of his major novels, 2017′s highly autobiographical The Passage of Love, failed to make the cut.
The title is apt. The book allows us a peep behind the facade of a successful literary writer. It explores the insecurities and inner struggles, but also presents a more human face. Miller delights in the friendships he makes and the things he learns from others. He shares letters with philosophers, historians, academics, readers and friends. As you might expect, he is a voracious reader, frequently giving his opinions on books.
The weighting of the material towards more recent years allows us to see the back story to Max, a biographical work from 2020 about Miller’s early mentor and friend, Max Blott. An academic who also came to Australia, Blott was a persecuted Jew who survived imprisonment and torture in Europe during the 1930s and 40s.
The twisting tale of finding the truth about a man who would often sit in complete silence is a compelling series of chances and diligence. “I used to see him sitting in his chair in the sitting room of his home with his wife, Ruth, smoking one cigarette after another and gazing into space, saying nothing but thinking, so it seemed, a great deal …” The letters between the various parties searching for information about Max fill much of the central section of the book.
A Kind of Confession also allows us behind the scenes of the writer’s methods, the many drafts that appear needed, but also some of the technique. “Telling is easy. The writer simply says this or that about the character. For the reader to decide for themselves there is work to be done by the author.”
As well as being a book especially for Miller fans, who will undoubtedly learn something new about their favourite titles, it also serves as a great introduction to many of his works. His description of the “ancient Playgrounds of the Old People” that he’d been taken to by Aboriginal friends left him “mesmerised and shaken”, places that were “trembling with depth of meaning far beyond my grasp, soul-shaking in their mysterious persistence”. If that doesn’t make you want to read Journey to the Stone Country, nothing will.
