The Southwest Revisited : Novelist Keneally, Now Teaching at UCI, Turns Trip to ‘Place Where Souls Are Born’ Into Book

As a boy growing up in Sydney during the 1940s, Australian novelist Thomas Keneally spent countless Saturday afternoons hunkered down in an Art Deco movie palace watching John Wayne and Randolph Scott tame the American West.

It was there, in the darkness of the Vogue Cinema, that he first heard such exotic names as Denver and the Rockies and first saw the megaliths of Monument Valley and the great canyons of Sedona, Ariz.

The celluloid images of the American Southwest never failed to thrill young Keneally, who had no idea that, 8,000 miles away, such a “magical landscape” actually existed.

“Growing up in another country and watching American movies gives you the impression that Americans are very powerful and that they sort of construct this stuff just for the movies,” said Keneally, who made his first trip to the Southwest in 1975 to find out otherwise.

The author, who is best known for “Schindler’s List,” his award-winning 1982 novel about the Holocaust, has turned his most recent Southwestern foray into a book, “The Place Where Souls Are Born: A Journey Into the American Southwest” (Simon & Schuster; $20).

The travel book, which is part of the Destination Series featuring different authors on different areas of the world, chronicles the two-month journey Keneally made during the winter of 1989-90 with his wife, Judy, and their daughter Jane to the Four Corner states: Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

Combining firsthand observations with extensive historical research, Keneally has painted a vivid portrait of the Southwest--from the ski resorts and abandoned mining towns of Colorado to the Hopi Indian pueblos of Arizona. And the people Keneally serves up are just as diverse as the landscape--from Mormon leader Brigham Young and “Silver King” Horace Tabor to artist Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Abbey, “that remarkable, misanthropic environmental prophet.”

Interwoven throughout this colorful tapestry is the author’s unabashed enthusiasm for his subject. Even at 56, Keneally writes that he cannot visit the Southwest without feeling that same sense of “mythology and childlike expectancy” he felt watching those sagebrush sagas at the Vogue Cinema.

“I wanted to celebrate an America that wasn’t all one big sitcom, where everyone subscribed to the same values and had the same world vision,” he said.

Seated behind his desk in his office at UC Irvine, Keneally was a long way from the mountains and deserts of the Southwest. He’s even farther from his home in “Aus,” which he pronounces “Oz.”

Since last fall, the author of more than 20 novels, five plays and a number of film and television scripts has been on the faculty of UCI’s nationally acclaimed graduate Program in Writing. Under the longtime leadership of the now-retired Donald Heiney and Oakley Hall, the fiction program has turned out a string of master of fine arts graduates who have garnered immediate publishing success, including Michael Chabon (“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”), Marti Leimbach (“Dying Young”) and Whitney Otto (“How to Make an American Quilt”).

To entice the celebrated Keneally, who turned down the offer three times, the university offered him the title of distinguished professor of English and comparative literature, a $110,000-a-year appointment that includes a part-time secretary to help tend to the administrative details of the fiction program and a light teaching load: He teaches only three undergraduate and graduate courses a year, which allows ample time for his own writing.

“I said to them I don’t want to have to administer the program because I don’t know how to,” said Keneally, who served as a visiting professor at UCI in 1985. “I’m not a habitual teacher of writing--I’ve done it at UCI and NYU--and apart from that I was nervous of taking responsibility for a program which had been so successful.”

An as-yet-unnamed novelist will fill the second fiction-program teaching post next fall and will assume primary administrative responsibility for it. But as Keneally says with a laugh, “at the moment I am the fiction-writing program.”

For a man who received Great Britain’s prestigious Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction for “Schindler’s List” and the British Royal Society of Literature Prize for “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” in 1973, Keneally comes across as remarkably unpretentious, greeting visitors with a friendly “G’day,” and joking, when providing directions to his campus office, that “it’s just like any other psychiatric ward in the place: no distinction at all.”

The author, who sports a Buffalo Bill goatee and shields his bald head from the sun with what he says is the Australian equivalent of a Stetson, shuns traditional academic garb, favoring instead a wardrobe of striped rugby shirts, loose-fitting black track-suit trousers and jogging shoes.

Keneally acknowledges that he “really likes the latitude for casual dress Southern California gives one, particularly since, for two years running, I was named one of the 10 worst-dressed men in Australia.” It’s an honor of which Keneally is particularly fond. As he wryly notes, “When you become officially an ill-dressed person, it gives you enormous freedom.”

Back home in Australia, Keneally is known as much for his politics as for his novels. He is founding chairman of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM), “a movement to end the last constitutional ties with Great Britain.”

In fact, he had just returned from a 3 1/2-week trip to Sydney to launch a new ARM office and undergo a daily round of radio, TV and press interviews. The 2-year-old independence movement is having “considerable success,” Keneally said, joking that “there’ll be no redcoats or dead Australians at the end of the process. It’s mainly a matter of debate, persuasion and sanity.”

Upon his return to campus last week, Keneally had to face his biggest administrative task: to help select the fiction writers who will fill the six first-year openings in the two-year master of fine arts writing program next fall.

Stacks of brown envelopes in his office attest to the program’s reputation as one of the premier writing workshops in the country. The envelopes, containing short stories and portions of novels from more than 240 applicants, were lined up on a shelf in piles labeled Yes/Yes, Yes/No, Yes/Maybe, Maybe/Maybe, Maybe/No and No/No.

“The best and the worst thing about all the applicants,” said Keneally, who has been reading manuscripts since December, “is there’s none of them that can’t write.”

There are, he said, “wonderful imitations of New Yorker or Raymond Carver short stories, but we’re looking for someone who can transcend that: The stories that are individual and have a kind of fire. The story that’s being written out of a fire in the belly, that’s the sort of story and novel we were looking for.”

When he’s not on campus, Keneally is usually holed up in the study of the house he and his wife have rented near the beach in Laguna. (Daughter Jane, 23, who has applied to a dozen American law schools, is currently living with her parents; daughter Margaret, 25, is a reporter for the Irish Times in Dublin.)

Keneally usually spends a couple of hours a day writing letters and articles for English and Australian newspapers on the independence issue. That’s in addition to at least four hours a day working on his new novel, which he says is “about the Australian television cowboys in New York: (Rupert) Murdoch’s crowd of television Mafia who have brought to America programs of heroic bad taste like ‘A Current Affair’ and who are unambiguously proud of the fact that they have come to what a lot of people describe as the homeland of vulgarity and have out-vulgarized the Americans.”

“The Place Where Souls Are Born” is not Keneally’s first travel book. He wrote “Outback,” a book about Australia’s remote country, a decade ago, and he has a travel book about Ireland, “Now and in Time to Be,” due out from Norton in April.

Keneally said he enjoys travel writing, although “in a way, I don’t feel that it’s as genuine as writing novels. Writing novels, to me, is still the hardest or the more meritorious, but travel writing demands a lot of intensity of observation.”

For his new writing students, Keneally has one primary message.

“Writing is an intense psychological process as well as a creative one, and most of them have the talent to do it,” he said. “Above all, I’d like to promote the idea that you’re here for two or three years, you might as well leave here knowing whether in God’s name you’re a writer or not.

“So shake the tree, be emotionally tough. Be as tough as you can be about criticism, barrel on through the crises and see what comes out of it. I mean, it would be a tragedy if someone left here with their MFA without knowing whether they were writers or not, having the same doubt as when they arrived.”