Beyond Words: A Year with Kenneth Cook

by Jacqueline Kent

In 1985 Jacqueline Kent met Kenneth Cook, author of the Australian classic Wake in Fright, and they fell in love. With bewildering speed Jacqueline found herself in alien territory: with a man almost twenty years older, whose life experience could not have been more different from her own. She had to come to terms with complicated finances and expectations, and to negotiate relationships with Ken’s children, four people almost her own age. But with this man of contradictions—funny and sad, headstrong and tender—she found a real and sustaining companionship. Their life together was often joyful, sometimes enraging, always exciting—until one devastating evening. But, as Jacqueline discovered, even when a story is over that doesn’t mean it has come to an end.

Genres: Memoir, Book Club, Australia

256 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 2019

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacqueline Kent, writer, editor (1948)
Kenneth Cook Australian writer (1929-1987)
She edited his book The Killer Koala in 1985
They fell in love....married and 3 months later he died.
We get a rare glimpse of the
gravitational pull between these two people.
Kent has written a very moving memoir
about the love of her life.
I could not put the book down...

[Danielle {halfdesertedstreets} · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exquisite and deeply readable memoir of two people and their brief time together. ❤️

4.5 stars.

[Joanne Osborne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was an interesting enough read although found it difficult to finish and skipped to the end. For me a little drawn out in the middle..

[Sally Piper · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and gently told memoir of a romance that flourished despite generational and financial barriers, sustained by a mutual love of words and storytelling.

[Chris Waterford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a surprising pleasure---a long ago relationship---but so well written ,it was completely engaging and delightful.
8.5/10

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacqueline Kent is the author of so many biographies of people in the arts, I'm surprised that I haven't read any of her books before this one. I've heard her in interview too, at the Woodend Winter Arts Festival in 2011, in conversation with Mary Delahunty about An Exacting Heart, the story of Hephzibah Menuhin, (which #SlapsForehead I meant to read but forgot about, which just goes to show that I should have bought it there and then.) Kent also wrote A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, A Literary Life which won the 2002 National Biography Award and the Nita B. Kibble Award. But I wasn't sure about Beyond Words, a Year with Kenneth Cook... a memoir based on just one year?

However, it turns out that this memoir is about more than one memorable year with an iconic Australian writer. It's also about a woman who had a satisfying life as a freelance book editor and an emerging career as a writer, and how falling in love meant she had to confront choosing between independence and companionship. Not only was Kenneth Cook a blokey bloke twenty years older than she was with a string of failed relationships behind him, he also had adult children from his previous marriage, and shreds of Catholic guilt still lurking within. He was bankrupt (literally) with creditors still harassing him, he smoked and drank (a lot), and he was undisciplined about his writing.

But he was gorgeous. She loved him. He was funny and clever and exciting, and even though he needed 'housetraining' (as we feminists say of men who haven't quite grasped the domestic implications of feminism) Kent and Cook were so happy together that they set up house and decided to marry. By the time this happens, the reader is delighted, because despite their differences, they seem so suited as a couple. (One of their more caustic friends comments that an author/editor marriage is a bit of a cliché, but it seems to me that it would be a kind of literary heaven, to write side-by-side with the one you love.)

The wedding was a relaxed and informal affair, despite the best efforts of the celebrant to indulge her taste for pink hearts, lace doilies, figurines of doting couples in eighteenth-century costume and Hallmark sentimentality:

Everybody was smiling except the celebrant. In her bag with the documents I noticed a biro with an enormous plastic feather quill, the sort of thing used by writers in bad historical movies; clearly this was her last-ditch attempt to impose a sense of ceremonial colour on the signing of the register, at least. Resplendent in maroon and cream, she stepped in front of the tree she had chosen for the ceremony, opened her wedding book and cleared her throat.

Ken walked towards me and stretched out his right hand, the one with the crooked middle finger. 'Come here, woman, and marry me,' he said. (p.178)

There are four photos of this joyful wedding, and I defy anyone to look without lips twitching in suppressed laughter at the one of Kenneth, hands on hips and almost daring the celebrant to go off-script!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/03/27/b...

[Helen Bookwoods · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, elegantly written memoir of Jacqueline Kent's one-year relationship and marriage to author of Wake in Fright Kenneth Cook in 1986/87. The circumstances of Cook's death at a relatively young age, while camping in the bush together, would have been traumatic in the extreme, so I can understand how it has taken so long to write this. It is a low-key examination of her love for a rough-around-the edges kind of man who had his ways and nothing was going to change them. What brought them together was both being part of the writing scene - he an author, she an editor, albeit Cook was at that stage writing humorous bush short story collections rather than novels. The one Jacqueline was brought in to edit was called Killer Koala - it sold quite well. I found the insights around Cook's writing life and habits interesting (like Hemingway, he thought alcohol and writing were synonymous), as were Kent's reflections on the Australian literary scene at the time. Having such a short time together gives a great poignancy to this memoir and Kent tells it with an honest appraisal that only the passage of time could achieve. She also brings the times alive, and conveys the fun of the relationship as well as touching on some of her own complicated, sad family background.

[Nathan Hobby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't put it down - the sense of doom, knowing Kent was only with Kenneth Cook for a year, and knowing it was at the end of his life. A vivid portrait of both Cook and Kent emerges, and an unlikely love story which is both beautiful and sad. Beyond Words is honest and confessional and surprisingly awkward, perhaps the mark of an experienced biographer unaccustomed to writing about herself. Take this sentence - 'I should probably add that when Ken moved in we did not go to restaurants nearly as often, and if we did they were not expensive ones or we made do with takeaways.' (p. 102). I was expecting a sleeker, more controlled book - perhaps more like Joanna Rakoff's My Salinger Year - but instead Beyond Words has a different, raw quality. The final sequence of part one as Kent and Cook set off on a road trip that ends in tragedy is especially compelling, a stark, precisely remembered day and night.

[Zora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots to enjoy and appreciate here - the tender but clear eyed account of the love affair between Kent and Kenneth Cook, the evocations of Sydney and the publishing world from back in the 1980s, Kent herself. At times I wished for a messier or darker book, but that would have been beside the point. This is not a grief memoir - Cook died a long time ago - but a story Kent clearly needed to tell, when she was ready.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacqueline Kent met Kenneth Cook, the author of the classic Australian novel Wake in Fright in 1985, and this memoir tells the story of their brief time together (he died unexpectedly in 1987). This is a brief and beautifully written book about an unusual relationship and an unusual man. It is also a portrait of the literary scene in Sydney in the 1980s. Recommended

[Felicity Waterford · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very simple story of a love, a marriage, a man.... so beautiful told by his widow 20 years later. “ I looked at this large, crumple-faced man with his greying hair and beard and concerned face and could not find the words to tell him what I knew; that he was my best companion, my lover, the man who made me feel, in the words of Isak Dinesen, ‘Here I am, where I ought to be’ .

[Noel Landry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great little book about writers, families, Sydney in 80s and a brief love affair