Three Uneasy Pieces

Three Uneasy Pieces (1987)

John Brack, Pears (1957)

“If only I could share my laughter with someone who would see the point.”

Editions:

  • Pascoe Press (AU, December 1987, 59pp)
  • Jonathan Cape (UK, October 1988, 59pp)
  • Penguin (AU 1990, 59pp)
  • [No US publication]
  • Association for the Blind of Western Australia (Audiobook, read by Jay Townsend, 1990)
  • Arlea (France, trans: Jacqueline Delia, Histoires peu ordinaires, 1994)

Original price: Australia $14.95 (hardback) and $7.95 (paperback)  // UK 7.95.

History: In 1986, Melbourne magazine Scripsi asked PW to contribute some short pieces for a special issue to be published in 1987. PW duly completed these three pieces by the deadline, but the small magazine struggled with getting the issue together. As 1987 drew to an end, PW became determined that he would not have anything published in 1988, the year of Australia’s Bicentenary, which PW viewed as a self-serving nationalistic year. As a result, he took them from Scripsi and arranged to have them published by Primavera Press, a printing house run by Bruce Pascoe, in December 1987. The works sit somewhere between short fiction and fact; David Marr calls them “prose poems”. Marr notes that the inspiration for these pieces may have been his conversations with PW about the latter’s childhood, while working on his biography. The Australian edition remained in print until 1997.

PW’s UK publisher, Jonathan Cape, released the volume in October 1988 with a print run of 3,500 copies, an offset reprint of the Australian edition. By this time, however, PW was becoming cantankerous with his US publisher Viking. The author had split with his agency Curtis Brown after half a century, angry that they had restructured and sacked his Australian rep Barbara Mobbs. When he learnt that Viking was still giving royalties to Curtis Brown, PW refused to let them have the copyright to Three Uneasy Pieces, which subsequently did not receive a US release.

Reviews:

  • Don Anderson, SMH 26/12/1987
  • Barrett Reid, Age 26/12/1987
  • Judith White, SMH, 3/1/1988
  • Katharine England, Advertiser Magazine, 23/1/1988
  • Anthony Burgess, Weekend Australian 20/2/1988:
    • “This is direct, simple, and very moving. It has to be read.”
  • Robert L. Ross, World Literature Written in English 28.2 (Autumn 1988)
  • Nin Dutton, Overland 111 (June 1988)
  • Carolyn Bliss, “Crusades Against Hoopla and Pain”, Antipodes 2.1 (Spring 1988):
    • “These stories lack the convincing density and scope of the major novels and even much of White’s short fiction. Instead of proceeding by means of a rich proliferation of ambiguous, evocative, but finally consonant detail, they merely gesture toward implication through a shorthand predicated on suggestive imagery.”
  • Lucy Ellmann, Guardian 27/11/1988
  • Philip Horne, London Review of Books, 8/12/1988

The Screaming Potato (1986)

A short reflection on the redundancy and uncertainty of the elderly.

History: Written in 1986 on request from Scripsi magazine in Melbourne.

First published in Three Uneasy Pieces. Published in The Second-Largest Island: Modern Australian Short Stories (1994, ed: Belinda Rikard-Bell)

Dancing with Both Feet on the Ground (1986)

“Life doesn’t end on the kitchen floor while there is the will to dance”. In dreams and memories, the ageing author recalls his youth in Europe, and slips between the realities.

History: Written in 1986 on request from Scripsi magazine in Melbourne.

First published in Three Uneasy Pieces. Collected in Selected Writings.

The Age of a Wart (1986)

A man lives life unable to escape the memory of a childhood friend who touched something in him.

History: Written in 1986 on request from Scripsi magazine in Melbourne.

First published in Three Uneasy Pieces.

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