Bob Ellis: what do you do when a literary hero is accused of sexual abuse?
Those seeking to cure themselves of the romanticism about the free love era should read Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal and the two books just out this week by the daughters of Australian playwright Dorothy Hewett: Tilt by Kate Lilley and Do Oysters Get Bored? by Rozanna Lilley.
Last weekend, speaking to the Australian, sisters Rozanna and Kate Lilley talked about how their Sydney bohemian childhood was marked by “wild parties” and lack of “moral boundaries” which resulted in the teenage girls being sexually abused by a variety of famous male houseguests.
“It was unbearable at home,” Kate Lilley told the Australian. “I used to have sex with men to prevent them having sex with Rosie, and then I would find out they did have sex with Rosie.”
She also described her childhood home as “a brothel without payment”.
The sisters named Australian cultural icons Martin Sharp, Bob Ellis and photographer David Hamilton as men that abused or exploited them. All three are dead.
But first to Roth – who died last month. The Dying Animal is not considered one of his greatest works – in fact Vulture listed it recently as “for fans only”.
But reading the novella for the first time last week, it stood out as one of the most depressing and realistic portrayals of an aging lech.
For all the accusations of Roth’s misogyny, his hideous man here – the recurring character of Prof David Kepesh – is not glorified. He’s brought to his knees by crushing on a student almost four decades his junior, and felled also by jealousy, fears of ageing, disease and death.
The book is a disavowal of the sexual revolution and the unhappiness caused by a constant churn of sexual partners. Kepesh abandons his family for free love and sex with his students, and finds himself despised by his son. Decades later, his son eventually leaves his own wife and children. Here, the desire for new partners and new experiences is a source of torment and misery, not enlightenment and freedom.
The son Kenny says with scorn: “[T]he sixties? That explosion of childishness, that vulgar, mindless, collective regression, and that explains everything and excuses it all?”
Do the 60s (and 1970s) really “excuse it all”?
One of the many things the Me Too movement has forced many of us to consider is whether the sexual revolution really was a revolution for all or just for some men.
The casualties of the free love generation are emerging as part of the Me Too movement. Kate Lilley calls it the “we too generation” – and in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, says the incidents from her childhood weren’t restricted to the Sydney arts scene but were part of a larger cultural problem at the time.
“In many ways, it was a very ordinary story,” she says. “It was very prevalent. A lot of women have reached out saying they grew up in a celebrity milieu and ‘we too’.”’
Kate and Rozanna Lilley have been in therapy for years. The experience with these men was not characterised by the “free love” of the era, it was traumatic, not liberating.
This brings us to Ellis – former Labor speechwriter who died of liver cancer in 2016 – and one of the men the sisters say abused them at parties.
I single Ellis out because I knew him in his later years. I adored much of his writing – and from afar, his life seemed glamorous. Via mutual friends, I sought him out, and tried to make him a mentor.
But finding out your literary hero is not only a grub (that was apparent after he wrote a vile piece published in the Drum about the so-called ADF Skype scandal in 2011, since removed from the internet) but had sexually abused underage girls, forces a major reconsideration of the man and his work.
I’ve spoken this week to half a dozen people who knew Ellis (although not during the era Hewett’s parties took place – their friendship with him was more recent) and one or two are of the opinion “judge the times, not the person”. The rest of us are taking our weighty copies of Goodbye Jerusalem off the shelf and hurling them across the room.
Other women I’ve spoken to this week have had bruising and horrible encounters with Ellis – of the verbal, not the physical kind. They’ve left dinner tables angry and humiliated about how he talked about women. Their anger is not just with him but the literary and political communities that knew of his behaviour towards woman and accepted it (the Lilley sisters describe Ellis’s behaviour as an “open secret”). Powerful individuals and organisations continued to give him work, which then contributed to strengthen his “brand” and his cultural power, which then, in a feedback loop, contributed to his allure for younger writers.
For a younger generation coming in after the baby boomers, Ellis became a bit of an elder statesman around the early 2000 mark. He crossed genres with an ease that many of us trying to get a foothold into creative careers envied and wished to emulate: politics, the movies, journalism, playwriting. He did it all. Marieke Hardy even named her dog after him.
As for me, when I wrote my first book I spent a pleasant dinner at the man’s elbow. As he talked about writing, I scribbled notes in my diary, his words falling like money that I tried to grab and pocket. He spoke like he wrote, in a sort of hypnotic and lyrical cadence that sometimes ended with a mumbled “and so it goes”.
The uncomfortable question for me is this: does trading off Ellis’s cultural cachet and wisdom and turning a blind eye to the occasional misogynist rant and ugly rumours become a form of oppression of victim’s voices and a sort of collusion with the aggressor?
After reading the Lilley sisters accounts of sexual abuse, the answer can only be “yes.”