Glenda Adams:'I distinctly remember the word 'callow' when I came across it for the first time," remarks a character in Glenda Adams's exhilarating, outlandish novel Dancing on Coral(1988). She could be speaking for the writer herself, who has died at the aged of 67; she delighted in language from an early age.
She had been brought up in Sydney, the daughter of Leonard and Elvie Felton, both accomplished pianists. At primary school she did not particularly shine until she was inspired by a present from her mother: a book on writing stories, which she began to do with enthusiasm. She lost the habit when faced with the rigours of Sydney girls high school, but so enjoyed foreign languages that she studied Italian at the University of Sydney, then branched out into learning Indonesian.
As a character remarks in her novel Longleg(1990), the world then seemed, from an antipodean viewpoint, "a giant seesaw, poised on its axis, and to keep it steady, we down here have to press hard into the ground, doing coalmining and everything, so that the Europeans up there are free to do their art and their music and think clever thoughts above the ground. They couldn't do it without us down here keeping things steady, tamping the ground down. The world wouldn't spin properly."
Adams had a strong impulse to leave. Unable to break into journalism, she travelled in Indonesia for two years working on a thesis about travelogues. There her thoughts turned to the US and she later applied to Columbia University, which accepted her. In 1964 she was the sole passenger on a New York-bound freighter.
That was the inspiration for a more animated voyage in Dancing on Coral; in reality she just read and wrote aboard. In Manhattan she met her husband, Gordon, and they had a daughter. Study, teaching, domestic life and work for AP and the UN distracted from her own writing.
In the early 1970s, when she was in her forties and far from Australia, she turned again to fiction. Her stories, often brief vignettes, appeared in the US, Britain and Australia: a 1976 collection, Lies, was partly incorporated in The Hottest Night of the Century (1979).
She always heeded Rilke's advice to aspiring writers: "Pretend you are the very first man, then write what you see and experience." At its best, her work springs from a view of childhood, both innocent and knowing. The stories are often set in childhood (with cats) and they make readers hoot with constantly fresh, sidelong glimpses of young life. One describes a Manhattan wedding - the bride, alluring nightgown at the ready, hungers to escape the groom's friends, whose earnest talk exhausts him.
In another, "the mother pinched Diana's cheeks rapidly before she set out for school in the mornings, uttering an affectionate clucking sound to cover this disappointment at her daughter's appearance. She said it was lucky that Diana had turned out to be clever." After her divorce, Adams returned to Australia for the first time in the early 1980s, and then spent a decade in both continents after publishing Games of the Strong(1982). This was set in a futuristic, totalitarian state not unlike Indonesia, and it was disappointingly different from her stories, to which she returned.
She took the fittingly named Lark from a story and developed her into the giddy protagonist of Dancing on Coral.The title refers to the life-changing moment when the German captain of the freighter pretends he will leave Lark behind, mid-ocean, along with her ever-taunting friend, who "in her gray slacks, gray turtle-neck sweater, gray socks with silver threads, brown leather sandals, the long gold earrings dangling under the brim of her straw hat visor and a large beige chiffon scarf resting inert on her shoulders, looked like some kind of rodent in a school pantomime".
The novel, a variant on the trajectory of Adams's own life, exudes elegant malice and won the Miles Franklin award. It was soon followed by the substantial, prizewinning Longleg, which also follows a story beginning with a 1940s childhood and unusual parents: the alienated, domineered lead character, preoccupied by underground life, travels, by way of a boarding house, to Europe and a splendid Brussels riot.
Adams returned to Sydney to teach full-time at the University of Technology, and the last of her four novels was a racy Gothic work, The Tempest of Clemenza(1996). Her literary wit has helped balance that global seesaw in Australia's favour.
She was diagnosed with cancer, which abated only to return soon after the death of her partner, Chris Clarke, a psychologist. Her children, Caitlin and Gary, survive her.
Glenda Emilie Adams, writer, born December 30th, 1939; died July 11th, 2007