Elaine Lindsay

Barbara Hanrahan [1939-1991] was a South Australian printmaker and novelist. She kept a diary of most days from 1967 until the last month of her life, when cancer and the therapies to which she was subjected impaired her sight, coordination and eventually deprived her of consciousness. Elaine Lindsay has pared the volume of the diaries to a selection of about 350 pages, with a brief prefatory account of Hanrahan’s life. The diaries are a record the working life of a writer and artist; they are unlikely to be of interest unless one has read some at least of the novels and unless one knows the style of the lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and linocuts.
After some hesitation, I have given the Diaries a five star rating, though I would not rate even the best of Hanrahan’s novels so highly. She is a minor provincial artist and writer. The novels are comparable in their considerable virtues and rewards to those of the similarly provincial Shropshire writer, Mary Webb (‘Precious Bane’, &c), with whom Hanrahan shared an acute pantheistic perception of the world and its people. The Diaries, however, are an intensely personal account of an artist’s evolving consciousness. They are often witty, often experimental in their techniques of observation and description, often bitchy and frequently naked in their exposure of Hanrahan’s ambition, her fragility and her occasional volcanic tantrums. So, after hesitation, there seemed no alternative to a five star ranking for a book that is an example of excellence of its kind, as a record of a particular artist’s creative life.
I read Hanrahan’s diaries slowly, over a couple of weeks, taking in a few days at a time. That seemed to me the best way to read a journal which is almost always concerned with the immediacy of her perceptions of the world and the translation of those perceptions into images or words. Over her last painful years of suffering, which could be grotesque in its humiliations, Hanrahan continued to write, resembling one of Samuel Beckett’s protagonists who must go on despite increasing debilitation, unwinding the spool of consciousness. But Hanrahan, unlike the Beckett unnameables, was never bleak. She cultivated throughout her life a child’s clarity of perception, vulnerability and optimistic faith in a spectrum of personal deities. Courage that is cheerful and bright is no less moving than grim determination to see things through.
Elaine Lindsay’s editing is unobtrusive. Her selection of entries eliminates the merely pedestrian accounts of unmemorable events and eliminates, too, some of Hanrahan’s acerbic or scathing descriptions and comments that could have caused needless pain to people still living. Those exclusions would have been approved by Hanrahan, who was acutely sensitive to derogatory comment or criticism on her own account and often felt guilty about the freedom she allowed herself in the privacy of the diaries to scarify her contemporaries. There is a very detailed index to compensate for the almost complete absence of running notes in the text. Lindsay made a conscious choice to avoid distracting editorial clutter and present the diary entries as a transparent record of consciousness. It would have been better, however, if some unobtrusive way could have been found to indicate when days had been excluded. Hanrahan was not rigid in keeping a daily record; every now and then she makes a little apology to her diary for a day or days neglect. I would have liked to know which of the elisions were a consequence of editorial choice. The other criticism to be made is that very few of Hanrahan’s prints are shown. A selection of some of the works to which she refers most often in the diaries would have enhanced the transparency of the record.… (plus d'informations)