Dal Stivens

Australian novelist and short fiction writer.

• Born: December 31, 1911
• Birthplace: Blayney, New South Wales, Australia
• Died: June 16, 1997
• Place of death: Lindfield, Australia

Biography

Dallas George Stivens was born on December 31, 1911, in Blayney, New South Wales, Australia, to Francis Harold Stivens, a bank manager, and Jane Abbott Stivens. His father would exert a key influence on Dal’s writing by filling the boy’s head with tall tales. Aside from two years at Barker College, a private school, Stivens spent his formative years in the rural area near his home. He entered journalism after briefly attempting to follow his father’s footsteps in banking.

Stivens published his first book, The Tramp, and Other Stories, in 1936 to favorable notice from Graham Greene. These tales show the influence of Australian realism, but also of American authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. In 1939, Stivens married May Burke, who died two years later. In 1945, he married Winifred Wright, with whom he had two children before they divorced in 1977.

From 1939 to 1942, Stivens wrote for the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, gathering useful material for the literary pieces he published in local journals. During World War II, he worked in the Army Education Service, and later in the Commonwealth Government Department of Information. His second book, The Courtship of Uncle Henry, appeared in 1946, continuing the realistic vein he had developed ten years earlier. In this collection he also displayed a comic flair in stories based on Australian folklore. The blend of sardonic humor and hyperbole would become the best-known feature of his writing.

In 1951 Stivens’s first novel, Jimmy Brockett: Portrait of a Notable Australian, appeared in book form. It was originally serialized in 1948 as "The Entrepreneur," a prize-winning entry in a Sydney Morning Herald literary competition. Its title character—rivaling any member of William Faulkner’s Snopes clan—offers a lively but cynical description of his rise from working-class origins to wealth and power. By the time he dies of heart failure—a victim of his own high living—changing times have rendered his "entrepreneurial" avarice out of date. Again, Australian folklore, urban as well as rural, constitutes a strong element of the narrative.

For a time, Stivens did media-liaison work in England; but from 1950 on, he devoted himself full time to his own writing. He published three more collections of short stories through an Australian firm long known for promoting local literature. The Gambling Ghost, and Other Tales (1953), Ironbark Bill (1955), and The Scholarly Mouse, and Other Tales (1957) show his mastery of exaggerated, deadpan comedy served up in Australian dialect—somewhat analogous to the American tall tale and the humor of Mark Twain.

In his novel A Horse of Air (1970), Stivens went beyond this method. Even while presenting the story as a traditional exploration narrative, he employed such fully modern techniques as fragmented narrative and multiple viewpoints to convey the excitements and disappointments inherent in any quest for knowledge, and, ultimately, the ephemeral nature of reality. This novel brought Stivens the 1970 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most significant literary prize.

Stivens died June 15, 1997, in Lindfield, Australia, leaving a body of work that eagerly embraces all experience while also keeping an ironic distance. His distinctive blend of tall tale, sardonic humor, realism and fantasy marks him as a quintessential Australian writer of the twentieth century.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Jimmy Brockett: Portrait of a Notable Australian, 1951 (also known as "The Entrepreneur")

The Wide Arch, 1958

Three Persons Make a Tiger, 1968

A Horse of Air, 1970

The Bushranger, 1978

Well Anyway, 2012

Nonfiction:

The Incredible Egg—A Billion Year Journey, 1974

Short Fiction:

The Tramp, and Other Stories, 1936

The Courtship of Uncle Henry, 1946

The Gambling Ghost, and Other Tales, 1953

Ironbark Bill, 1955

The Scholarly Mouse, and Other Tales, 1957

Selected Stories, 1936–1968, 1969

The Unicorn, and Other Tales, 1976

The Demon Bowler, and Other Cricket Stories, 1979

Bibliography

Elliot, Brian. "The Author in Search of Himself: Some Notes on Dal Stivens." The Australian Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, Mar. 1962, pp. 69–76. Provides critical analysis of several of Stivens's most prominent works, ranking Jimmy Brockett in particular as a major Australian novel.

Goodwin, Ken. A History of Australian Literature. Macmillan, 1988. Includes discussion of Stivens as an important figure in Australian literature in the mid-twentieth century.

Heseltine, Harry. "Dal Stivens (1911–1997)—A Tribute." Australian Literary Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, Oct. 1997, p. 190. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9712050967&site=eds-live. This profile of Stivens draws on Heseltine's own friendship with the author.

Williamson, Geordie. The Burning Library: Our Greatest Novelists Lost and Found. Text Publishing, 2012. Williamson profiles various Australian novelists who have faded into relative obscurity, providing biographic overviews as well as critical analysis of Stivens and others representative of the uniquely Australian literature of the mid-twentieth century.

Williamson, Geordie. "Lost Gem from Writer Who Outshone White." Review of Well Anyway, by Dal Stivens. The Australian, 13 Apr. 2013, www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/lost-gem-from-writer-who-outshone-white/news-story/526f8016b57ae8d8ac33b3ee04ff9abb. Accessed 19 Jun. 2017. This review of Stivens's Well Anyway, a novel written in the 1930s but only published in 2012, discusses Stivens's relatively unknown status in the twenty-first century.