Catherine Peake

Catherine Peake's Books and Writing

CP

Living it Up

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A bestseller when it was published in 1955, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade by Patrick Dennis had fallen by the wayside by the time it was rereleased in 2001. A funny and fun-filled gallop through the homes, hotels, parties and lives of both the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, Auntie Mame has become a classic of twentieth century American writing.

Although the novel is stated to be fiction, the narrator has the same name as the author (a pseudonym for Edward Everett Tanner III)and the character Auntie Mame possesses characteristics that were similar those of an aunt of the author. The action follows the narrator, who begins as a ten-year-old orphan and ends as a married father, relating the adventures involving his Auntie Mame, who begins as his guardian and ends as – well, that would be telling.  

Written by the narrator looking back from a period some time after the second world war, the story begins in the late 1920s. Much of the story reflects the glamour that could be found in the interwar years in a certain stratum of American society, and much of the humour is derived from satire based on the social pretensions found there. Despite many of the main characters, including Auntie Mame, being avid society people who would have you believe they were pristine to their fingertips, there are episodes in the book that can only be described as earthy.

The structure of the novel is that of a series of stand-alone short stories that could be read individually but which have been brought together to form a coherent whole. In a curious counterpoint to the main story, the narrator begins each chapter with a reference to a female ‘unforgettable character’ he has read about. He then compares a trait of the character to a similar trait he sees in his Auntie Mame, and the story proceeds with an illustration of it through the narration of an episode in Auntie Mame’s and the narrator’s lives.

Each chapter contains a riotous adventure, from setting about finding the right school, to managing the results of the stock market crash, to surviving an ill-judged engagement. Dealing with the fallout from other people’s disagreeable actions is an underlying theme of most of the stories.

Auntie Mame has been turned into films, a play and musicals, with the 1958 movie version proving to be as popular as the book. Dennis published a sequel to Auntie Mame, Around the World with Auntie Mame, in 1958.

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Surrounded by It

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If hipster history is your thing then this could be the book for you. Covering the sizeable period of 60,000BCE to 1824 (the year Australia was formally named Australia), historian, children’s author and comedy writer Richard Hunt has written a funny and informative popular history with Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia, published in 2014.   

The title gives a nod to Australia’s national anthem ‘Advance Australia Fair’, composed by Peter Dodds McCormick and first performed in 1878, and epitomises the geographical situation of Australia that impinged on the conditions experienced (and which are still experienced) by the settlers and citizens of Australia.

Starting with stories of the original inhabitants, then moving on to the discovery of land by European explorers and its settlement by British convicts and their keepers (and incidentally contributing to that nation’s great maritime reputation), Girt is not your standard history book. This doesn’t mean that it is not filled with facts and anecdotes from the time (even if some of them cannot be said to be central to the development of the nation), because besides its comedic narrative it is also a work of scholarship. 

Hunt looks at his subjects in some detail, even if taking an unconventional approach, and Girt covers the reactions of the original inhabitants and the Europeans to each other, the colonisation of Australia by the British, the first convicts, and the early governors ending with Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Hunt retains his geographical focus on Port Jackson and Botany Bay, and the notorious First Fleet plays a prominent role in the story.

Led by Captain Arthur Phillip, the eleven ships comprised the first convict and supply vessels to arrive in Australia with their occupants intending to stay there. Sketching the careers and personalities of prominent characters such as botanist Sir Joseph Banks, wool entrepreneur John MacArthur, and explorer and governor William Bligh, Hunt gives a personal touch to his narrative.

The gruesome nature of some of the events and conditions of the early years of the settlement are not passed over, but are treated to a comedic interpretation that some readers might find a less than sympathetic depiction of the conditions the settlers and indigenous people endured. The light touch nonetheless renders the book entertaining and easy to read, and Girt has been the winner of several awards. Hunt published the second title of his ‘The Unauthorised History of Australia’ series, True Girt, in 2016.

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Funny Failings

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Erasmus had a sense of humour. History and all of its current connotations and interpretations aside, the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote In Praise of Folly  in 1509 (printed in 1511) and it is still read today. One of the best-selling books ever, it was written in Latin, although today known mostly through translation, and its comments on society, superstitious beliefs and the excesses of the contemporary Christian church, all delivered with a touch of humour, have proved to be compelling reading.

There is far more to the book than its attack on the 16th century church, even if it did play a role in the movement that led to the Reformation, and one focus of the book is the human failure to live in the best way possible. Erasmus addresses the human traits of frivolity, vanity and greed through the persona of Folly, a fictional character dressed as a jester.

Perfectly satisfied with herself, Folly claims responsibility for such activities as marriage, childbirth, drunkenness and pleasure- seeking, and states that it is better to be foolish than wise. (And yes, Folly is female, although there is perhaps not a lot that can be read into this as much of the criticism contained in the tale is aimed at clerics and academics, all of whom were at that time male.)

Erasmus follows a loose three-part structure in the book, drafting it while staying with his friend Sir Thomas More in London, and the title can be translated as ‘In Praise of More’, a pun which continues throughout the book. In the style of the time classical allusions abound, easy to interpret when it was written, less easy now with our different education, but the meanings are readily available with a bit of research.

Despite its popularity, In Praise of Folly nonetheless attracted criticism, mostly from the quarters at which its satire was directed – that is, other scholars and clerics. But in the end the book confirms Christian ideals, shown to their advantage when contrasted with the values espoused by Folly who continues to laud the link between herself and happiness.  

In the course of the book, self-deception is given a hammering, the point is made that no one is wise all of the time, and prudence in regard to self-love is promoted as a good thing. Embellished and focused by Erasmus’s command of language, wisdom, wit and wordplay, all the components of his humour are recognizable today.

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Laughing Alone?

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For a writer whose work was included in the collection, ‘The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse and Very Bad Poetry’, American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox has attracted a surprisingly large share of literary attention for her poem ‘Solitude’. Published in her book Poems of Passion in 1883, it is a popular rather than a literary poem, with the broad base of its subject matter, dealing with life’s vicissitudes, perhaps having something to do with this.

Inspired by an encounter by a woman dealing with grief, ‘Solitude’ is a meditation on the human condition and is not in itself funny. Expressing as it does the common experiences of humanity, parts of the poem, in particular the first two lines, have now reached the status of aphorisms:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;

The two lines set the scene for what is to follow. Constructed using a standard metre, ‘Solitude’ consists of three eight-line stanzas encompassing the rhyming of even-numbered lines. The poem is easy to read and straightforward to analyse, partly because Wilcox anthropomorphises earth in the first stanza and follows this with the conception that the world and its component parts act in unison, whether in joy or sorrow, giving a solid structure to the poem.

Joining the line rhyming scheme is the expression of light and shade in human experience, and happiness is followed by sadness in its different manifestations throughout the poem. The role of laughter takes pole position, emphasised as the desirable state of being, and is contrasted with the difficult state of dealing with hardship.

The alternating scheme continues, with one line celebrating happiness while the next illustrates sadness, one line emphasises the presence of other people when it comes to enjoyment, the next is a comment on the solitary nature of difficulty. Friends are only there for the good times with no one there to help in the bad, success is for crowds with its opposite to be endured alone, and death takes its place after life.

The poem seems to equate laughter and the positive things life with being part of a group, while solitude is always paired with loneliness. Whether or not this is an accurate reflection of reality depends upon the reader and their own experiences. Despite the poem not being in itself funny, the reader is free to read what they like into the lines and come to their own conclusions.

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End of the World – or not

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Who would have thought that witchcraft, religion and comedy could be the ingredients for a science fiction bestseller? But they can be, as was proved in the novel Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, writtenby Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and published in 1990. The novel is in the style inaugurated by Douglas Adams in his The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), and has become popular beyond its original audience of science fiction devotees.

The story has several strands that weave throughout the narrative, all of which are loosely based around the coming of the end of civilisation and the appearance of an anti-Christ. The anti-Christ has been misplaced after his birth on earth, and the human-looking demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale, who despite their being on opposite ends of the good and evil spectrum are friends, have taken up their abode on earth and are attempting to put things to rights (or wrongs from Crowley’s viewpoint).

Two humans, Anathema Device who is a descendant of the 17th century witch Agnes Nutter (author of a book of omens) and Newton Pulsifer, a member of the Witchfinder Army, are also aiming to thwart the coming of the end of the world. They attempt to interpret and follow the prophecies Agnes has written in her book with mixed results.  

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in their manifestation as harbingers of the Last Judgement in the Book of Revelation from the Bible’s New Testament, have an important role to play in the story. The intervention of the child Adam in their activities (the Anti-Christ who has been brought up as a normal child by mistake, rather than having the training in evil as planned for his earth placement) brings together the different storylines of the novel.

In dealing with such big subjects, Pratchett and Gaiman initially split up the writing of the book into different areas. Pratchett wrote about Adam and his group of friends as well as Agnes Nutter, and Gaiman attended to the Four Horsemen. Gaimen directed the opening and Pratchett the ending, but in editing the book, all sections were treated equally. The book became a true composite of two very different writers working together to create one funny, transcendent novel of what it could be like if we let disconnected and uncoordinated supernatural forces take over life as we know it.  

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Authors

Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams

Titles

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, New Testament, Bible  

Time for Lunch

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In the tradition of humorous fictional diaries, Christina Hindhaugh’s quintessentially Australian take on life on a sheep property, For Better, For Worse and For Lunch, is a light and funny read. Published 1992, in a time before the ubiquity of mobile phones, the novel gives a realistic portrait of life on an isolated farm in the latter part of the 20th century.

The humour of the novel begins with the trials and tribulations of the fictional diary writer, Jess, who is newly married and living on the farm with her husband Edward, whom she variously nominates as ‘Edward the Industrious’, ‘Edward the Immodest’ or ‘Edward the Emotional’, depending on the situation at hand.

City born and bred, and miles away from her family and friends, Jess confronts the many challenges that present themselves in the daily run of farm life. Sheep drenching, shearing and pest control, not to mention bushfires, too much rain, not enough rain, crop blight and faulty water pumps test her courage and inner resources. But she manages to triumph over the situations thrown at her, or at least humorously learns to deal with them, and the book is in a sense a coming of age novel for those in their mid-twenties.

Highlighting the differences between city and country life, and her past life with her present life, the character Jess yearns for Melbourne, her former home city. Anticipated trips there are highlights that don’t always eventuate due to pressing events on the farm, and by the end of the book Jess has come to recognise the advantages invested in her new life on the farm.

The various compromises required in a marriage provide further scope for humorous situations. But with growing support from the local community Jess accepts the situations she has not previously had to contend with, including the changes in her husband’s behaviour due to stresses induced by particular times in the farming year such as harvest and lambing.

Jess doesn’t entirely leave her former life behind, and her love of literature shines throughout the book, with literary quotes and book titles making regular appearances. Awarded an OBE for services to women in agriculture, Hindhaugh drew on her own life experiences for the novel. Much of her other written work, encompassing articles, fiction and biography, is also a source of education for people wanting to know about life in the bush, all with a dash of humour thrown in.  

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Author

Christina Hindhaugh

Title

For Better, For Worse and For Lunch by Christina Hindhaugh

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