Notes from David Malouf interview, London, Circa 1984.

These are written out notes from a David Malouf interview, London, Circa 1984.
I have been unable to locate the story, which was published in The Australian Financial Review.
It was the first time I had met him and we promptly became friends.
There is a scene at his kitchen table in London in the memoir Hunting the Famous.
This interview was for his book Harland's Half Acre, which seems to have promptly disappeared from the canon. It was a very interesting work, a kind of meditation on Australia.
At this point Patrick White was still alive and David was yet to take on the mantle of Australia's greatest living writer.
His work ethic, charm and kindness were always an inspiration.
A highly intelligent and erudite man, he also, as a former school teacher, has a kind of functioning humility about him which endears him to everybody high and low.
He is always ready to pass on what he knew, and has always been supportive of other writers, including myself.
David is now in his eighties (as of 2017), and continues to keep up a strict work regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Malouf

David George Joseph Malouf (born 20 March 1934) is an Australian writer. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.^[1] In 2016, he received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.^[2]

In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations, David Malouf was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for his role as an "Influential Artists".^[3]

Memo to an editor at the now defunct National Times, Janne Dannery, 1984.

Letter delivering story on interview with Joseph Heller and bombarding editor with ideas, as per usual. The Bulletin. 1984.

And here's the relevant chapter on the interview from Hunting the Famous. A Second Edition, the first being a bit untidy, aka all over the place, should be out by the end of 2017.

https://thejournalismofjohnstapleton.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/joseph-heller-catch-22.html

Have so far been unable to find the article itself, which was published in the now defunct The Bulletin, where one of my great heroes Henry Lawson used to publish.

JOSEPH HELLER: CATCH-22

BY JOHN STAPLETON

I soon worked out that plead as I might for an interview with another of my heroes, British author Doris Lessing, she wasn't going to make herself available just like that for some enterprising journalist from a remote island on the other side of the world. She was off writing a novel somewhere in the north, Scotland, if memory served, and while gracious when I finally met her, at the time transmitted her good will without obliging.

My preparedness to travel north was politely dismissed.

But if you were selling a new book and your writer was in contracted interview mode, a public relations person was happy enough to slot in an aspirant from bumfucknowheresville; or as the English still like to think of Australians, someone from the colonies.

Despite having crossed the first bridge and joined the queue of journalists lining up to interview whatever living legend was in London that week, there were other obstacles to overcome.

Would you like an interview with Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, went down a treat with the now defunct then historic news magazine The Bullettin, which back in the early part of the 20th century had published famous Australian authors, including that most lyrical of Australia's poet-alcoholics, Henry Lawson:

For the Southern Land is the Poet’s Home, and over the world’s wide roam,

There was never till now a binjied bard that lived in a poet’s home, old man;

For the poet’s home was a hell on earth, and I want you to understand,

That it isn’t exactly a paradise down here in the Southern Land,

Old chap,

Down here in the Southern Land.

It had become obvious why I was being slotted in at 9 am to interview people like Anthony Burgess.

I was low down the pecking order. In a busy day of being feted, the morning slots were the least prestigious in crowded schedules.

As I was doing many of the interviews for the Friday review section of Australia's well regarded Financial Review, known for its rigorous journalism, I soon worked out the trick words to get the public relations person onside.

My standard line was: “It's for the Financial Review, the Australian equivalent of the Financial Times.”

The Financial Times, then published distinctively on pale pink newsprint, was one of England's most prestigious newspapers and an organ any PR flack would like their subject to be showcased in. Unlike the leftwing Guardian , at least the readership of stockbrokers, investors and company directors had enough money to buy whatever was being promoted.

I sometimes heard the almost invariably young female public relations person shepherding around the author repeating my phraseology word for word as she explained to the interview subject who I was.

In those days, going through another phase of drinking and partying in the London clubs half the night, I wasn't always at my best at 9 am. But then neither were the authors.

So when it came to Joseph Heller I reacted with mock horror when the public relations woman tried to slot me in at the allotted hour.

Who wants to be interviewed at 9 am in the morning?” I snapped back. “Not me. Don't be ridiculous.”

“But he's got interviews scheduled for every hour of the day,” the PR woman protested. “There's nothing I can do.”

I held my ground.

And thus it was that I came to have lunch with Joseph Heller, the author ofCatch 22, one of the most famous novels of the 20th Century.

Joseph never repeated the success of the book whose title entered the English language and is now in dictionaries as a phrase meaning a double trap.

In fact many of Heller’s books were excruciatingly long and rather dull.

But in person he was charm personified.

I arrived at the trendy little French restaurant near Covent Garden nominated by the public relations professional – it got their backs up if you called them girls – ahead of time and sat a little uncomfortably amongst the starched white linen tablecloths, the restaurant yet to fill with the lunchtime crowd.

Nothing to be afraid of.

Interviewing one of the world’s most famous authors was just another incident in an already very crowded life.

Finally, a little later than the appointed hour, the PR woman with Joseph Heller in tow arrived, and I rose from the table to greet them.

They were full of the news that they had just passed an employment agency called Catch-22.

Which of course provoked the obvious question: what it was like to have written a novel whose title had literally entered the English language.

The PR woman didn’t get much of a look in after that; as the conversation sailed across seemingly everything; and the hour and a bit disappeared as rapidly as the meal in front of us.

Nothing to be afraid of.

Except a Catch-22.