Nancy McKenzie began typing for the author Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007) in 1968, long before Jolley became famous in the 1980s. She typed all of Jolley’s manuscripts right up until Jolley was admitted to a nursing home in 2002. The covering notes Jolley left when she dropped off her manuscripts give glimpses of Jolley’s humour and writing process. It was Jolley’s running joke that her writing was terrible and she would apologise for asking Nancy to read it. Even as she became world famous, Jolley would write things like, ‘Dear Nancy, here is something else Awful and Stupid. Elizabeth.’ In one note from 1988, Jolley is being paid well for a commissioned piece of writing and asks Nancy to increase her rate from $1 a page to $1.50. In 1992, Jolley insisted Nancy lift her rate to $2 a page.
In 2022, Curtin University Library interviewed Nancy for our oral history program. We asked if Jolley actually had a low opinion of her work. ‘No, I don’t think she did. Her attitude was she was compelled to write whether she wanted to or not. It was a real need in her.’ Nancy remembered reading Jolley’s early work:
Well they were short stories, the original ones and I thought they were good. I didn’t understand why they were rejected and also, I admired the way she kept going and she would come and say, oh, another rejection.
The first published short story listed in Curtin University Library’s extensive bibliography of Jolley’s work appeared in 1965, a few years before Nancy began typing for her. Nancy remembers the previous typist was based further away in South Perth and had trouble reading Jolley’s writing – as did Nancy at first. Jolley had one story published in 1968, the year Nancy began typing for her: “The Sick Vote”, which appeared in Quadrant and is ‘related via characters’ to the later novel Mr Scobie’s Riddle (1983).
Jolley was very set in her method of writing, using an old-fashioned pen dipped in ink; ‘she said that gave her time to think while she dipped’. Typing was a mysterious art to Jolley and she was ‘shocked’ when Nancy bought a computer. Nancy reassured her ‘it will all turn out the same’ and won Jolley over when she saw the results.
Nancy described her impression of the ‘essential Elizabeth’:
her humour and … her generosity—she was an extremely generous person. And a warm person too … just through dropping her things off she got to know all the family. She would chat with the boys and if I was out, my mother who lived in the flat here would sometimes answer the door and she got to know her and when she got sick she brought flowers for Mother.
Nancy donated the notes Jolley wrote her to the Curtin University Archives and we have a selection of them on display in our Centenary of Elizabeth Jolley exhibition. The exhibition is on level 3 of the Robertson Library until 31 August. You can also listen to the interview here.
