Duelling Pencils

He knows where the chapters are buried

After he left Brisbane Boys College and his straw boater behind, Craig Munro spent three decades traversing the streets of his home town, travelling incognito as the editor, and driving force, behind other people's books.

He cajoled people into writing for University of Queensland Press (UQP) where he shaped their books, he edited them, he titled them…and even promoted them with slickly-written blurbs on the back cover: like the one he wrote for David Malouf’s Johnno after creating a cover and then coming up with the title, which will never die:

Johnno is a typical Australian who refuses to be typical…his disorderly presence can disturb the staleness of tropically gothic Brisbane, or destroy the tranquility of a Greek landscape. But what is the truth about Johnno?

Yet who knew the truth about Craig Munro who sometimes wore a T-shirt which said DR MUNRO TO YOU.

Because he worked behind the scenes, people in the early 1970s sometimes thought they saw the handsome six-foot-two 12-and-a-half-stone editor out the corner of their eye as he flew past in one of his hotted-up Alfas; they didn’t recognise Munro as he strolled through West End in dark sunglasses that covered a small duelling scar, while carrying a world-shattering manuscript under each arm; was that him loitering in the sandstone colonnades of UQ…or was it Jeremy Irons revisiting Brideshead?

Very few knew that Craig Munro was the man behind the 2B pencil that shaped and sharpened so many Australian books that we enjoyed…without ever knowing the changes he wrought along the way, or how those books came to be in the first place.

But one thing is for sure: Dr Munro knows where all the chapters are buried.

In fact, he buried a few of mine.

A former rugby fullback, Munro is the man who gave the world the dual Booker Prize-winning novelist Peter Carey – but only because, while working for UQP in 1974 aged 23, he was able to obtain "special authorisation" from the University of Queensland to make an expensive INTER-STATE phone call!

Having received authorisation for such extravagance, Munro then had to approach the university switchboard to book the call on his behalf.

“Peter Carey was working at an ad agency in Melbourne that unfortunately glorified in the name SPASM,” Munro recalled. “The switchboard operator was sceptical and I could feel the waves of shock and disapproval vibrating down the phone line.

“Peter, like the operator, was immediately suspicious.”

Munro had been so impressed by a Peter Carey short story in a magazine, that he scribbled on the top: “Carey stuff is great – he deserves a book by himself.”

Those who know the book industry well, will know that publishers hide from people wanting to write the Great Australian Novel – even stamping “return to sender” on unopened unsolicited packages – but in this case here was a publisher chasing an as yet unknown writer asking him to create it!

From a safe house in suburban Brisbane – a Toowong Queenslander he shared with his then wife, librarian Sue Bell, and two young boys Tim and Simon – Munro went on to gift Australia many well-known authors…Carey, David Malouf, Olga Masters, Barbara Hanrahan, Gerard Lee and Adrian McGregor who wrote the hugely successful King Wally when the prevailing orthodoxy was “rugby league people don’t read books”.

Dr Munro – a racing car enthusiast who specialised in buying and racing old Alfa Romeos – once told me why authors needed editors like him: “Words on the page are like used cars standing on the lot: they can look right, even when they aren’t.”

Back in 1968, before Craig Munro became a book editor and was a cub reporter on Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, I had written a manuscript about my experiences as a Reuters correspondent covering the Vietnam War, including being there for the decisive Tet Offensive which showed America they had no hope of winning. My manuscript ended with the deaths of my Australian room-mate and two other reporters from our office, including my replacement…and later the first revelation that TIME Magazine’s Vietnamese staff correspondent in Saigon, Pham Xuan An, was all the time a Viet Cong Colonel.

I sent carbon copies to publishers: the Americans didn’t reply, and the Australians said no one wanted to read books about the Vietnam War. It was too divisive.

Twelve years later Munro heard about the manuscript blushing unseen in my bottom draw while he was editing a collection of my newspaper feature articles into a UQP book he titled Behind the Banana Curtain (with his cutely-named chapters such as “Copping the Raw Prawn” “The Bush can be a Bastard” and “An Innocent Queenslander Abroad”).

So he asked to see this rejected manuscript.

I explained that it was bashed out during a few weeks on holiday in my parent’s house in Brisbane before returning to Fleet Street – years before I had become a feature writer. “It’s not much good,” I told him, now that I knew the difference between writing and typing.

The dogged Dr Munro kept at me until I dragged out the almost unreadable sixth carbon copy (the only version I had left) and he rang next day to say: “It’s not publishable.”

A bit put out, I said: “I told you that, Craig.”

“But it would be,” the Doctor countered, “if you made it more of a memoir than a novel and were prepared to expand on the stories instead of cutting them to the bone like a good reporter.” He said now was the time: “War books don’t sell until ten years after the war ends.”

 From then on, he pushed me to do the re-write: even coming around to my house every Friday night after I finished work at The Australian to check progress. He would ask questions like “but what do you think about when they are shooting at you?” and “what changed to make you and Pham Ngoc Dinh close friends?”

He even insisted I add a chapter “Getting Around”, saying readers would want to know how you did that in the midst of a guerrilla war. Then, when the manuscript was done, Munro decided the chapter held up the narrative and so my chapter itself crashed and burned. We had to get to the Tet Offensive and the deaths of friends…and the spy who came in from the rice paddies.

I had called my manuscript “Gooks and Pink Monkeys” because I thought this explained the problem: the Americans disparagingly called the Vietnamese “gooks” – and, unknown to them, the Vietnamese called the Americans “the big monkeys”. When these tiny people looked through the anti-grenade cage-wire into the Bars of Saigon, they would see these huge sweaty pink blokes with hairy chests…scratching the tropical prickly heat inside their unbuttoned shirts.

Munro said that with such a title no bookshop would know which shelf to put the book on – and so it would stay in the cardboard delivery box. NO! It must be called Vietnam: A Reporter’s War, because that was what it was about…and then it could go into a War section, a Journalism section, or a Vietnam section. Now he was thinking like a Librarian.

Then, on a trip to New York, Munro found an American publisher for my book – so now he had me exporting Vietnam War books to America!

Two years after Vietnam came out – and 19 years after I’d written the first draft – I resigned from The Australian to write a second memoir…this time on my childhood in Annerley, Brisbane. But publishers refused to even look at that manuscript. One said: “Everyone writes about their childhood. Their teachers, their parents their siblings...they’re boring and they don’t sell.”

A Sydney publisher who was faintly interested asked: “Were your parents famous?”

“Well, they had a very popular cake shop at Annerley Junction,” I replied…but strangely never heard back.

Even Craig Munro didn’t seem particularly keen, though he now says he was. Eventually he said: “I’ll do you a favour. Give me the first three chapters and I promise I’ll have a look at them.” “But Craig, we’re friends, you might have to say it’s no good.” He answered: “I’ve never had any trouble telling an author their book’s no good.”

Instead, I gave him the first 11 chapters on a 5-¼-inch floppy disc (after formatting it myself as you did in the 1980s) and the next day Munro rushed up my front stairs saying he’d read the lot while standing watching it come off his dot matrix printer one line at a time: “It will make a great Christmas book…more Jim…More Jim!” he said, offering me a contract.

A Presbyterian editing a Catholic writer made for some difficulties.

I had described the Catholic nuns at Mary Immaculate Convent, Annerley, as wearing white stiff material “coming out over their bosom”. Dr Munro crossed that out and wrote in his careful faint tiny pencil handwriting: “surely you mean over their breasts”.

I answered, with some elan: “In the 1950s, Craig, Catholic nuns had ‘a bosom’ singular!” (Authors savour these tiny victories over their editor.)

Though the Doctor in Munro went carefully through every word of every sentence, he was prepared to discuss changes. We didn’t always agree, but he would win me over saying: “You won the last one, now it’s my turn”.

Once I’d finished the memoir, he arrived clutching his stomach, looking pale and sick. He flopped into the Genoa lounge: “What have you done? That last chapter has to go – you can’t take readers on this wonderful, happy journey and then drop them in it like that at the end.”

“But Craig, that was precisely where I was heading all along – to show that my childhood hadn’t at all prepared me for what was to come.” There was a standoff for a few weeks, but Craig prevailed, and – judging by reader reaction – he was correct.

Last week I read that chapter for the first time since and I also think Munro was right.

My inspired title this time was “Annerley: A Child’s War” because we Convent boys fought the State School Kids; my brother Jack and I carried bone-handled knives in sheaths, Daisy air rifles, and bows and arrows; and meanwhile I was pursued by a posse of Nuns with lawyer canes, Brothers with wide, stitched, stained leather straps, and Priests who dispensed Penance for impure thoughts.

Publishers hate author titles and Dr Munro rejected mine out of hand.

“But Annerley Junction was a dangerous place,” I protested.

One of my chapters was “Jim Goes Over the Top” and Munro – who believes that chapter titles can lead to the author’s unseen book title – came up with Over the Top with Jim, which was perfect.

But he wasn’t finished yet. He had observed that childhood memoirs up to that time were infamous for always being about devastating trauma – so he wrote a tag line on the cover: Hugh Lunn’s tap-dancing bugle-blowing memoir of a well-spent boyhood. Then he briefed an artist to paint the title in a 1950s-style font and selected head shots of Jim and me as boys for the hardback cover – with my family in front of our little cake shop on the back.

Dr Munro decided not to have a photo section as is normal in a memoir, saying: “Your book reads like a novel, so people will create their own Fred and Olive and Jim and we don’t want to spoil that for them.”

But he was nowhere near finished.

Next, Munro had to convince Penguin in Melbourne – who distributed UQP books through a secondary sales team – to agree to market the book for Christmas 1989.

“It’s not another bloody Catholic childhood, is it?” the Penguin on the other end of the phone asked Munro. Yes.

“It’s not set in bloody Brisbane, is it?” Yes again.

“Then we can only sell it in if it doesn’t mention Brisbane or Catholic on the cover.” And it didn’t – and nor have any of the numerous covers with several different publishers since.

In fact, Munro was the perfect person to edit that memoir because 15 years before, in 1973, as a novice editor he had edited another South Brisbane childhood book: David Malouf’s Johnno.

When UQP publisher Frank Thompson handed the Malouf manuscript to his 23-year-old editor, he merely said: “It started out as a memoir about growing up in Brisbane.” After reading the manuscript, Craig said he immediately saw the potential because of “the beauty of the writing and the excellent portrayal of the Brisbane characters”.

Munro once told me he didn’t know how I could write so openly about my life: “I wouldn’t be able to do that.” But in 2015 he did produce his own memoir Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing where he revealed that at the end of the Malouf manuscript, he scribbled a notation: “Have to change or disguise real names”.

Dr Munro met David Malouf to discuss what was Malouf’s first novel in the downstairs bar of the Staff Club of UQ with the manuscript on a table between them.

“The more we talked the more I sensed that David’s ‘fictional’ characters were coming to life as real people from his past…When I asked him about this, David confirmed that not only was the central character named for his old schoolfriend, but also that Johnny Milliner’s uncle had been a federal senator, as in the novel.”

In Under Cover, Craig said he began to question his own “categorical assumptions”. “Could a work of imaginative fiction be peopled by a documentary-style cast, including one’s closest friend? Johnny was the real name of a real person…yet he also took centre stage as the novel’s larrikin hero.”

Because personal memoir was “not the popular genre it has since become,” Munro and Malouf agreed the book “would fly under fictional colours”. Thus, Craig suggested that the nickname of the hero be changed from Johnny to the “more archetypally Australian ‘Johnno’. We could then move further away from the real person by deriving ‘Johnno’ from his surname which would now become ‘Johnson’. David laughed and agreed to this suggestion.”

For the title, Malouf had suggested "Blind Man's Buff" (buff being an old English word meaning push) and "Jack in the Box" among several others.

But it was Munro who came up with Johnno.

It was published in 1975 and the initial reception in some quarters so discouraging “that David questioned whether he would ever write fiction again”.

The next year UQP licensed the paperback rights to Penguin “despite Penguin’s stated belief that the story was too Brisbane-centric to have any appeal outside Queensland. But it was to sell in excess of 100,000 in paperback…(and) David Malouf has since become an international literary treasure and the worthy successor to Patrick White in our literary pantheon.”

In Under Cover Munro revealed one regret: that first hardback edition contained a spelling error that “has haunted me for a quarter of a century”. In the Johnno typescript the Brisbane suburb of Coorparoo was spelled phonetically – but incorrectly – Cooparoo.

“I should have checked it in a street directory, or the Yellow Pages,” he wrote.

At a Brisbane Writers Festival event to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Johnno’s publication, David Malouf rose to the podium and addressed himself directly to Dr Munro: "But Craig, there were so many errors!" causing the surprised audience to burst into nervous laughter.

Malouf quickly added, "Of course there is no way Craig could know just how bad a speller I am."

Munro told the audience that, as a fulltime editor, he had learned that "names have an infinite capacity to misspell themselves".

At about that time Craig lay awake in bed “reflecting on the delicate relationship of mutual trust and respect between editors and authors…David had visited me at UQP and I’d asked him to sign my first edition hardback. He wrote: ‘For Craig, this shared book, affectionately David’.”

Which shows just what an intimate process editing a writer can become – like a waltz, or a jive, depending on the relationship the two develop. And why some authors desperately seek out an editor for their life’s exertion.

After Craig Munro turned 70 recently and I had turned 80 I told him that when I was a by-lined journalist I found it wiser to say at a party that I was a school teacher…to save a grilling.

Munro replied: “I often said I was a panel-beater!”

I assumed he had done this because he had driven racing cars, but he added, only half in jest: “After all I’d beaten many manuscripts straight when the authors mis-judged where they were going.”

In writing Under Cover, Craig Munro obviously bore in mind George Orwell's dictum: "Autobiography is only to be enjoyed if it reveals some disgraceful things about the author". So there was also the big book that got away from him – Xavier Herbert's Poor Fellow My Country.

Xavier, 72, already a celebrated novelist, was sending down chapters from Cairns to UQ English Professor Laurie Hergenhan who told Munro he'd recently read "an extraordinary chapter about the 1942 bombing of Darwin which crackled with chaotic energy and violence”.

Munro at that time was attending lectures in the English Department at UQ: it never occurred to him that he would soon be creating the literature he was studying. With Laurie's intercession, Xavier agreed to let this 23-year-old editor be the first person to read the complete text – which he had typed in a tin shed at the back of his house outside Cairns.

The manuscript was a million words of carbon copy that arrived at Munro’s home in an old battered Globite suitcase. It had been stored, chapter by chapter, in a bank vault in Brisbane. A $1000 grant from the Literature Board was needed to pay for photocopying!

Two months later, Munro sent Xavier a telegram: "VAST stop TRAGIC stop BEAUTIFUL stop". Then he posted north a three-page letter saying two central figures were "a work of genius"…but criticising the character who was clearly the author's mouthpiece as “an artificial, unconvincing, static narrator”.

In Under Cover Munro recalled wistfully: "My letter was patently undiplomatic and revealed my inexperience as a fiction editor. Had I known that Herbert fought bitterly with his previous editors I might have toned down my critical comments, or saved them until after a contract had been signed.”

Xavier Herbert did not respond, but Munro knew he was unhappy because Xavier wrote to Laurie Hergenhan saying: “Craig has exchanged the blue pencil for the blue knife.” Herbert then signed with William Collins a contract which, Munro says, contained a clause preventing them from changing “a single word” of his million-word text. But Munro still believes his was an accurate appraisal of the novel’s one major flaw.

Munro and Xavier did eventually meet.

“In 1976 Xavier turned up at my office in a wheelchair…He admitted that my comments had frightened him because he had poured so much of himself into his ‘magnum opus’. In a shaky hand, Xavier signed my copy of Poor Fellow My Country ‘For Craig, my first reader and critic’."

Literature rarely arrives in a Globite suitcase. Sometimes it’s hidden in plain sight.

As Munro recalled in The Writer’s Press, [UQP’s 50^th anniversary history]: “On two memorable occasions I asked to see a collection after reading a single short story. Neither author had published a book before and neither was personally known to me.”

The two authors were Olga Masters and Peter Carey who were both to become famous writers.

When 23-year-old Munro read that magazine short story by Peter Carey, he knew immediately he had found “a promising young writer whose edgy high-octane fiction has plenty to say”.

Carey’s literary imagination “roamed the wild and quirky outer limits of the psyche”.

Carey’s path to becoming a world-renowned novelist was unusual.

“Peter’s first ever ‘literary’ prize was for ‘Most Improved Handwriting for Under-12’ at Geelong Grammar,” Munro wrote. “He felt that his school experiences and his time spent in his room above the spare parts department of the family car yard gave his writing its characteristic angst.”

At about that time, UQP was looking for a third fiction title to publish in 1974. Munro asked Carey if he had any more stories for a possible collection. Yeah, I might have, Carey replied, “with more than a touch of challenge in his voice. I knew next to nothing about his ten-year struggle to publish his challenging fiction.”

Munro flew to Melbourne and talked to Carey over many beers.

In Under Cover, he tells how the beer made their inhibitions fly out the window. Munro asked Carey if he wanted to be a full-time writer. “No!” Carey said, “writing’s a boring f-ing insular silly occupation.” But, after a few more beers, Carey confided that his consuming ambitions were to write novels and maybe make films as well.

“I sensed even then his extraordinary determination and the depths of his creative talents,” Munro wrote.

Their memorable encounter brought about a lasting friendship.

“On a winter’s day in 1973 I received a brown paper parcel containing the typescripts of 18 stories…The thrill of discovery was intense. I encountered story after story of astonishing originality and power. My report on the collection for UQP’s publications committee was sprinkled with words such as brilliant, bizarre, and timeless.”

Munro ventured that Peter Carey was the best short story writer in Australia, and chose the book’s title from the longest story, The Fat Man in History. He wrote to Carey outlining his reasons for choosing some stories and rejecting others.

Munro’s favourite piece was “American Dreams” but he suggested removing the last section of that story. “I felt it weakened the story, and Carey agreed.”

Sixteen years later, in 1989, Peter Carey referred to this deletion in an introduction to an Australian anthology, saying Munro thought it was “one ending too many, and so I cut it. I thought he was right at the time – indeed I still think he was right – but I wish I had had the wit and the skill to include this thought in the fabric of the story somehow.”

Munro recalled: “The Fat Man in History [now a cult classic] holds a very special significance for me as the book’s commissioning editor. For Peter, it was the culmination of a long struggle to spin such powerful stories out of his imagination that readers everywhere would want to come back for more.

“And they did.”

Despite two Bookers and world fame, Carey stayed with UQP for 28 years until 2002. Craig Munro left two years later, whereupon Carey wrote thanking him for everything – “most particularly that very first thing for which I will always be in your debt. Fondly, Peter”.

As David Malouf so insightfully said when launching the history of UQP in 1998: “The most important thing is who it was who published people first; who it was who actually recognised that talent and set them going; and there is no publisher in Australia that has done more than UQP.”

Dr Craig Munro at University of Queensland Press in the mid-1970s reading a high-octane Peter Carey short story so steamy it’s making him sweat (Courtesy Craig Munro)

Illustrations © profuselyillustrated.com

Books by Craig Munro

Literary Lion Tamers: Book editors who made publishing history [Scribe 2021]

Under Cover: Adventures in the art of editing [Scribe 2015]

Wild Man of Letters: The Story of P.R. Stephensen [MUP 1984]