Jacko by Thomas Keneally

won the Nobel Prize, culturally validating the nation in the mid-1970s.
    â€”I’ve met him, I admitted.
    â€”Have you read The Mother as Aphrodite ?
    â€”Yes, I lied. I had at least begun it, and it was customary for people to lie about how much Bickham they’d read. I had read all his early works and found them a revelation. I’d been defeated by the later ones.
    â€”He really knows women eh. The way he writes about that old lady who’s dying in that big bloody house in … what’s the name of the place? Holloglo. And her weird children. I was wondering, if I was ever in Sydney visiting that useless Jacko, d’you reckon you could …?
    â€”I don’t know Bickham that well, I rushed to say. He doesn’t mix with a lot of other writers.
    Even his name was a kind of reproach. When I was young I’d been compared to him, but I had – by that night in Burren Waters – disappointed those who had first nominated me to be his heir. I had met Bickham a few times at political events. He never had anything to do with the Sydney literary mafia, but invited people he respected to his house. If you were invited, you were proven to be a person either of taste or of talent. If you were not invited – and most writers weren’t – you could console yourself that you were in some way a challenge, or maybe not epicene enough to fit Bickham’s crowd. Either way, you knew you were telling only half the truth.
    Bickham was something of a misanthrope and a gnostic. In rawly democratic Oz, he believed undemocratically in the salvation of only a few chosen and shone-upon souls, and these were the ones he sought to choose for company. In the land of mateship, he despised the herd. That made it hard for his kinsmen to place him in the national pantheon.
    But it had to be done. Because the Nobel Committee had spoken … and made him the nation’s Nobel Prize winner, and so an institution, like the Monarchy or the Church of England or Anzac Day.
    For a start, he seemed to feel ambiguous about me, and the odds were that Chloe Emptor would lie far outside his list of the redeemed.
    â€”You could ask him to lunch, couldn’t you? she challenged me. He’d come to your place. And I’d bring Jacko eh, but not the astral bloody sisters. I wouldn’t stand for that.
    â€”Listen Chloe, I told her, knowing that I needed to be desperately frank. He wouldn’t come to lunch at my place. He doesn’t like me. Like you, he thinks I’m a journeyman. Not one of the washed. He thinks I’m shit.
    Chloe exhaled.
    â€”Then who’s his agent?
    â€”He doesn’t have an agent. He transcends agents.
    â€”I suppose he does. He’s an absolute genius. And I’ve got to ask him some questions.
    â€”He’s a misogynistic old bastard, I told her. But yes. An absolute genius as well. He wouldn’t go on Jacko’s show. He wouldn’t go on anyone’s show, and he wouldn’t be interested in lunch at my place. I’m sorry Chloe.
    Chloe went to the screen door and looked out at the same morning star which, on first waking, we’d thought she might bring indoors with her.
    â€”Well, I reckon it’s not good enough to write great work and leave your readers hanging for a bloody explanation. Maybe you could look into it for me eh. He might hate women but he knows us to the last atom of our bloody wishbones.
    â€”That’s how unfair the distribution of talent is, Chloe. Say you use the crappy old term muses. They don’t give a damn whether you’ve got an ounce of human kindness.
    Larson said, You’re right there.
    Chloe kept talking though, saying that she had to see him and she knew I could arrange it all if I wanted to. She half-suspected still that it was her criticisms of the night before which made me deny her access to Michael Bickham, that megalith of the Antipodes.
    â€”Anyhow, she said, we’ll be