For Keneally, There’s No Place Like ‘Oz’

IRVINE — He gave up the house he was leasing in Laguna Beach, stored his car at a friend’s home and for the few days he was back in Orange County, Australian novelist Thomas Keneally checked into the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach.

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That’s an unusual set of circumstances for someone who was hired by UC Irvine in 1991 as a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature.

But university officials were well aware that Keneally, one of two fiction teachers in UCI’s nationally acclaimed graduate Program in Writing, has a life beyond academia.

Indeed, during his first nine months at UCI, Keneally returned four times to Australia, where he is chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, a group trying to end constitutional ties with Great Britain.

Then in late January, with the independence movement gaining momentum, Keneally returned home again for more rounds of public debates.

“The Republican Movement is reaching its culmination,” he said in his campus office last week during a break in a national book tour for his new novel. “Ultimately, I said to the dean and the chairman of the department that the only honest thing to do was to take the time off without pay and go back and devote the year to it.”

Actually, Keneally said, the cross-country tour promoting his new novel--the Australia-set “Woman of the Inner Sea”--is “a bit of an interruption” to his political work.

But while his book tour ends this week, Keneally won’t be returning to Sydney until early May: Accompanied by his daughter Jane, he’ll travel next to Eritrea in Africa. (The former northernmost province of Ethiopia is having its own independence referendum, and Keneally, who wrote a book about the area’s long civil war, will serve as an observer.)

From Eritrea, they’ll be off to Krakow, Poland, where Steven Spielberg is filming Keneally’s bestselling 1982 novel, “Schindler’s List.” The fact-based novel, which earned Keneally Britain’s prestigious Booker McDonnell Prize for fiction, is the story of a German factory owner who saved 1,300 Jewish workers in Poland from the Nazi concentration camps.

Then, after “a few days on the set,” it’s finally back home to Australia (or “Oz,” as Keneally calls it) for the remainder of the year.

With all that traveling, it’s no wonder the peripatetic author couldn’t keep from yawning several times during an interview. (Apologizing, he explained that he had done a reading the night before in San Francisco.)

Despite his busy itinerary, Keneally is continuing to write while on the road. Among his projects are magazine articles to appear in connection with a political book he has coming out soon in Australia. It’s enough writing, he jokes in characteristic style, that “I’ll be kept off the street and out of the bars pretty effectively.”

“Woman of the Inner Sea,” meanwhile, is receiving the sort of critical acclaim that has given Keneally an international reputation as one of Australia’s leading literary figures.

The novel, set in Sydney and Australia’s exotic outback, tells the story of Kate Gaffney-Kozinski, the unhappily married wife of a wealthy contractor--a work-obsessed man who finds more time for his new mistress and political and financial schemes than for Kate.

When a mysterious tragedy strikes their two children, the grief-haunted Kate--”The Queen of Sorrows,” as her rogue priest uncle Frank calls her--flees from her coastal home in Sydney and settles in the tiny desert town of Myambagh, where she tries to change herself into a different woman.

Taking a job as a barmaid--”in training for being beneath notice”--she seeks the friendship of a kindhearted explosives expert named Jelly who saved the town during one of its periodic floods by dynamiting a railroad embankment to let the floodwaters escape.

When another destructive flood strikes and Kate suffers another loss, she travels farther into the outback with Jelly’s friend Gus and his pet emu and kangaroo. In the end, with Kate’s shattered soul on the mend, she returns to Sydney to confront the truth about the death of her children.

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The Sunday Express in London describes “A Woman of the Inner Sea” (Nan A. Talease/Doubleday; $21) as “an Australian fable, a spiritual voyage of self-discovery . . . highly original and deeply moving.” Kirkus Reviews praises it as one of Keneally’s best--”an unforgettable novel by one of the finest moral imaginations in literature.”

Keneally, author of 19 novels and three nonfiction books, got the idea for “Woman of the Inner Sea” in 1980.

“An American woman,” he recalled, “told me a story about losing her children and then leaving everything and going into places she had never been before and trying to change herself into the woman who hadn’t lost the children--and then finding out certain things about the responsibility for the death of the children and coming back and confronting the whole damn tragic mess on the grounds where it occurred. And, of course, redeeming herself in the process.

“It sounded to me like one of the most extraordinary adventures, and I’ve been wanting to write something about it ever since.”

Except, he said, “that there’s a rule that old sexists from Australia aren’t supposed to be able to write from the point of view of a woman, and I was a bit intimidated by that. I was also somewhat intimidated by doubts about my capacity to do that.”

Keneally didn’t begin the novel until 1990, but when he did, he said, “I felt that it was--at the risk of sounding New Age--very liberating.”

Writing a novel with a woman as the lead character--his first--actually came relatively easy to Keneally.

Remarking that men “share one chromosome with women, so there’s womanhood in us,” he said that “writing enables that sort of stuff, if you’re receptive, to come up from the bottom of the ocean--stuff you never knew was down there--and present itself.

“I never found myself in a position where I said to myself, ‘Tom, how do you reckon a woman would feel in this situation?’ I believe, rightly or wrongly, that I knew. You know, all books are based on a great delusion, and maybe that was my great delusion. But I felt internally that I didn’t have to grope for what I would have considered maternal or feminine responses.”

While writing the book, Keneally spent time in a town in Australia’s outback called Nyngan where, with the cooperation of a pub owner, he researched the way country pubs operate.

“I worked a couple of shifts serving beers, which I’ve never done before,” he said, adding with a grin that “it’s very therapeutic. Out there, people mainly drink beer, and it can’t have too big a head on it (a technique Kate must learn). Cleaning up the puke or the mess afterward might not be so good, but it’s great fun doing.”

“Woman of the Inner Sea” was nearly completed when Keneally arrived at UCI in the fall of 1991, a date that marked the end of an era in the graduate writing program after the long reign of retired fiction gurus Donald Heiney and Oakley Hall.

With the January arrival of London-born novelist and veteran writing instructor Judith Grossman to fill the long-vacant second spot, the new regime is now in place.

Keneally and Grossman have taken over at a time when the UCI Program in Writing is considered one of the best in the country--a reputation galvanized in 1988 with the high-profile publication of Michael Chabon’s first novel “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” and solidified with more recent successes of grads Whitney Otto (“How to Make an American Quilt”) and Marti Leimbach (“Dying Young”).

The result has been a quadrupling of applications. More than 300 fiction writers applied for six first-year openings in the two-year program this fall, the top 50 of which Keneally deems “very impressive.”

Out of last year’s graduating class, Keneally said, two now have their books under contract: Jervey Tervalon, whose South-Central Los Angeles-set novel, “Understanding This,” sold to William Morrow/Avon Books; and Michael Golding, whose novel “Simple Prayers,” which is set in a 14th-Century mythical island off Italy, sold to Warner Books and has been optioned by Warner Bros.

“It strikes me,” Keneally said, “that their temperament has a lot to do with their final success.”

Golding, for example, “had an earlier book considered (by publishers) for a long time, and then nothing ever happened with it. Now, this is a terrible blow (to a writer), and to be able to deal with that and come back with a second book and put up with all the uncertainty . . . that sort of temperament helps a great deal in getting them published.”

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Keneally stresses, however, that the students’ major focus should be “on writing well, which is a great gift even if no one else ever reads your stuff; excellence in itself. But it’s hard to keep a balance between the pressure to get published and that privately cherished, divine craft of writing well.”

Grossman, who joined Keneally in his office for a discussion of the program, agrees.

“I think the stakes have been raised by past successes of the program, so I think they have to feel a certain edge of competition,” said Grossman, who looks for more than “competence” from writing students.

“Competence,” she said, “is something that you can get as a student doing the work of a student; I want to see them take it beyond that point”--to take “whatever perfectionism, whatever feel for language” they have and to “really work intensely.”

They should also have an “ethical investment” in their writing, she said. “I’m not talking about a moralistic (investment), but it should be deeply felt.”

To augment its budget, the writing program is now seeking financial support from the community. Donations would help pay to bring in visiting writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston to do public readings and talk to the students about their writing and would go for graduate fellowships, primarily for out-of-state students who must pay higher student fees.

Keneally, who has been maintaining a lively fax correspondence with Grossman during his absence, said he’s looking forward to returning to UCI next January. At that time, he acknowledged, he’ll be more of a “fixture” on campus.

“I’m always telling Judith I’m very guilty about abandoning her, and she knows that in a sense I mean it,” he said, chuckling: “What I’m really saying is, ‘Judith, don’t hate me.’ ”

With a grin, Grossman said that “I’m pointing out to the students constantly that Tom is an excellent role model. As a fiction writer, he tends to business: He writes the books, which is crucial. Whatever else they’re doing, they’ve got to write their books. Tom does that; he comes through.”

“So my view,” Grossman added with a laugh, “is we have no complaints. He’s also a presence in the world, and we’re happy that he does good work of the kind that he does for the public good. That’s a gift. I think you’ll find the students are very proud of him.”

“Oh, that’s nice of you to say, Judith,” said a beaming Keneally, taken aback by Grossman’s unsolicited accolade. “That’s great. “