Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop

AMY WITTING was the pen name of Joan Austral Fraser, born on 26 January 1918 in the inner-Sydney suburb of Annandale. After attending Fort Street Girls’ High School she studied arts at the University of Sydney.

She married Les Levick, a teacher, in 1948 and they had a son. Witting spent her working life teaching, but began writing seriously while recovering from tuberculosis in the 1950s.

Two stories appeared in the
New Yorker
in the mid-1960s, leading to
The Visit
(1977), an acclaimed novel about small-town life in New South Wales. Two years later Witting completed her masterpiece,
I for Isobel
, which was rejected by publishers troubled by its depiction of a mother tormenting her child.

When
I for Isobel
was eventually published, in 1989, it became a bestseller. Witting was lauded for the power and acuity of her portrait of the artist as a young woman. In 1993 she won the Patrick White Award.

Witting published prolifically in her final decade. After two more novels, her
Collected Poems
appeared in 1998 and her collected stories,
Faces and Voices
, in 2000.

Between these volumes came
Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop
, the sequel to
I for Isobe
l. Both
Isobel
novels were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award; the latter was the 2000
Age
Book of the Year.

Amy Witting died in 2001, weeks before her novel
After Cynthia
was published and while she was in the early stages of writing the third
Isobel
book. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia and a street in Canberra bears her name.

MARIA TAKOLANDER is the author of a collection of short stories,
The Double
, as well as three books of poetry and a work of literary criticism. Her poems have appeared in annual best-of anthologies since 2005. Maria is a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Geelong and is currently working on a novel,
Transit
.

ALSO BY AMY WITTING

The Visit
I for Isobel
Marriages
(stories)
A Change in the Lighting
In and Out the Window
(stories)
Maria’s War
Faces and Voices
(stories)
After Cynthia

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Copyright © Amy Witting 1999
Introduction copyright © Maria Takolander 2015

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published by Penguin Books Australia 1999
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2015

Extracts from John Donne’s ‘A Feaver’ appear on pages 163 and 211, extracts from Gerald Manley Hopkins’ ‘Heaven-Haven’ (
Poems
, 1918) appear on pages 171 and 173, and an extract from Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Juliet’ (
Complete Verse
, 1954) appears on page 212.

Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

Primary print ISBN: 9781922182715
Ebook ISBN: 9781925095647
Author: Witting, Amy, 1918–2001.
Title: Isobel on the way to the corner shop / by Amy Witting ; introduced by Maria Takolander.
Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.3

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Walking Wounded
by Maria Takolander

Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop

Prologue

Chapter 01

Chapter 02

Chapter 03

Chapter 04

The Walking Wounded
by Maria Takolander

‘THE world is full of walking wounded.’ This is how Amy Witting accounted for the breakthrough success of her bestselling 1989 novel,
I for Isobel
. That book—republished as a Text Classic in 2014—introduces us to Isobel Callaghan, the victim of an abusive mother. It begins with the child Isobel masochistically anticipating her birthday, knowing that her mother will once again withhold gifts. It ends with Isobel as a young adult, resolving to forge an independent life for herself as a writer.

I for Isobel
, as Witting recognised, resonated with readers familiar with the wounds of childhood, wounds that often endure unseen into adulthood, wounds that can be secretly undressed—and redressed—in the private infirmary of reading. I was one of those readers. When I first encountered the novel, as a young adult, I was stunned by Witting’s insight. As is often the case with great books, I felt as if the writer had discovered my secrets, though I also knew that she was securely on my side.

If I initially avoided
Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop
, the sequel to
I for Isobel
published in 1999, it was because I felt a cowardly—and misplaced—sense of trepidation. While Witting’s insights are fierce, her writing is always humane.
Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop
is as devastating and as enriching as its predecessor.

In the second Isobel novel our protagonist still finds refuge in reading and has achieved some success as a writer. Yet she is troubled by poverty, hunger, isolation and, moreover, what she describes as the ‘dead country’ in her heart: ‘not a matter to brood on.’ Upon trying to write a romantic scene and confronting writer’s block, she must admit her tragic inexperience in love. Her identity has been defined by her mother’s hatred.

Among a group of writers in the pub, Isobel comes close to losing her cultivated façade of invulnerability and self-sufficiency.

Soon after, Isobel attempts a journey from her writer’s garret, a shabby attic in a Sydney boarding house, to the corner shop. On the way she experiences a breakdown and is transported to hospital, where she is diagnosed with tuberculosis and institutionalised for treatment.

Far from being alarmed, Isobel is relieved to ‘have all horrors assembled under the name of an illness, represented by a baby’s hand-print on her lung’. As the infant metaphor suggests, she remains afflicted by more than tuberculosis. Among the eccentric staff and patients of the sanatorium, Isobel finds treatment for both disease and childhood injury.

It is impossible to believe that Amy Witting could write so powerfully about such matters without firsthand knowledge of them. She once said that she would rather ‘dive stark naked into a barrel of rattlesnakes’ than write her autobiography. However, we know that Witting spent five months in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Blue Mountains. And her literary obsessions suggest that she survived a traumatic childhood. In fact, she confessed that the Isobel novels were autobiographical, that it was the ‘terrible truth of fiction’ which helped her ‘to conquer the truth of that situation’.

Witting was fifty-nine when her first novel appeared, and most of her life’s work—which includes other novels, and short stories and poetry—was published when she was in her seventies. Before that, Witting worked as a teacher; she married and had a son. She may well have spent these years coping with the demands of the present and overcoming the damage of the past. ‘I really was a very disturbed person,’ she said late in her life. ‘I don’t like to look back on it.’

Witting’s habit of using pseudonyms for her writing similarly communicates a desire to hide, although it also reveals an Isobel-like rebellious intelligence. Born Joan Austral Fraser in 1918, Witting published her first poem as a teenager under a pen name. As a student at the University of Sydney she hoaxed James McAuley with a mock avant-garde poem allegedly written by Sun-Setna—and this was before McAuley and Harold Stewart invented the infamous poet Ern Malley to hoax Max Harris.

Witting also published a parodic work of short fiction that exposed the sexism of a pair of stories by Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding about the rape of an unconscious woman. ‘A Piece of the Puzzle Is Missing’, attributed to the androgynously named Chris Willoughby, gives that unconscious woman a voice.

Her final pseudonym announces a commitment to policing the unconscious ideologies and behaviours not only of others, but also of herself. As a junior teacher in rural New South Wales, Witting worked for a sadistic headmistress named Amy Wicht, whom Witting surmised was inflicting suffering on others because of her own unacknowledged pain. Witting resolved that she would never be ‘unwitting’ in that way. This resolve is shared by Isobel, who learns in the sanatorium to self-consciously guard against her cruel past when interacting with fellow patients.

Witting’s choice of pen name thus attests to her concern with morality—not in an abstract sense, but as it is enacted in our day-to-day behaviour. Morality is not a sentimental concept for Witting; neither is it given by religion. It is hard won.

Individuality is another concern of Witting’s.
I for Isobel
highlights that interest in its very title.
Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop
continues the author’s exploration of social conformity, of how unconventionality is often feared and attacked. In an interview Witting referred to ‘the cage where you can neither sit nor stand nor lie’. Isobel rattles that cage by reading, despite others around her feeling threatened by this transgressively intellectual and individualistic activity.

Kafka famously wrote that ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.’ It is unsurprising that Isobel reads
The Metamorphosis
in the sanatorium, for Witting is Kafkaesque in her savage commitment to shattering our illusions and exposing our vulnerabilities, in provoking us to question our complacent understanding of ourselves and our relationships.