tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52194799908520245662024-02-21T06:34:41.231-08:00Lucy Lehmann's Book Of The MomentPlease be warned: I often give away the endings. Best to read these blogs after you've read the book yourself.lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-92066623916341958132013-11-01T14:49:00.000-07:002014-01-06T14:50:05.569-08:00Frank Moorhouse<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">November, 2013: I've been reading a lot lately - it's an activity that fits in well with having a baby sleeping on my lap. I've been reading almost too much, finishing novels too quickly, starting another immediately. In an effort to slow myself down, I decided to read Frank Moorhouse's 'Edith' trilogy, <i>Grand Days</i> (1993), <i>Dark Palace</i> (2000) and <i>Cold Light </i>(2011).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was prejudiced against Frank Moorhouse; being a writer who is struggling through the Great Arts Depression*, I find myself resenting those who 'broke though' and made a name for themselves in the Arts Boom of the 70s and 80s. [*Perhaps calling this current period an Arts Depression is like farmers bewailing a Drought, when really we live in a low-rainfall continent, and it's the <i>good</i> seasons that are the exception.] I have a tendency to doubt whether these writers are really any good - suspecting them of just coasting along on their comparatively easily-won reputations - and therefore to avoid reading them, as they've had enough attention already. As soon as I catch myself at this shameful sour-grapism, I make reparation. I borrowed Moorhouse's trilogy from Errol, took it home in a wheelbarrow, and winched it onto my bookshelf. There it sat, piled higher than my Shorter Oxford English Dictionaries and higher even than my yoga bricks, like a punishment I had to inflict on myself.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then came this phase in my life where long books are what I need. My first response to <i>Grand Days</i> was surprise. I thought, "This is almost <i>twee</i>!" And I wondered if I would have taken it less seriously if a woman had written it. I might have thought, with a shudder, "Chick lit." Here's a characteristic example from the third volume:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Janice took a piece of the Belgian chocolate and put it into her mouth, closed her eyes and exclaimed, "Divine."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There was a moment of silence while they ate their chocolate, making large eyes at each other.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Janice then asked, "Are you someone who eats their chocolate slowly or the person who gobbles it? I'm a gobbler. But I won't gobble yours."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Edith smiled. "I'm a gobbler who tries not to be. It's amazing that we have any of the chocolate left."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Although this tone - twee, or camp, affected, even silly - put me off at first, soon it was established as part of Edith's personality. She is, above all, <i>fun</i>, and a character with whom the reader will go anywhere - to bed with a man in a lacy nightdress, into Sir Eric's office to forge his signature, and even (rather reluctantly) into a conventional marriage in 1950s Canberra. At the times when the story loses its thrust, the pleasure of Edith's company is all that pulls the reader along - but it's enough.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is substance to the fun. Most obviously, the trilogy is a thorough and detailed portrait of Edith, following her trajectory for forty years. As in <i>Portrait of a Lady</i>, our youthful heroine, full of confidence, promise and idealism, is put through severe tests. Edith longs for grand causes - no less than world disarmament and the end to all war. She goes to Geneva in the '20s to work for the League of Nations. Where is the League of Nations now? With grand causes come grand failures. I find this worth examining, over three long novels: how the biggest disappointments are allotted to the biggest dreamers. So we follow Edith, hoping she doesn't give up or become embittered. Her urge to enjoy life vanquishes disappointment time and again; finally the fun <i>is</i> the substance. A sense of fun is an invincible weapon against life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People used to dream big, and the trilogy touches on some of the biggest dreams. On reading of, say, 'the Pact of Peace', my first reaction is to scoff: "Well, that certainly didn't end war forever!" - the barest knowledge of history turns the reader into a smug know-all. Then I marvel that so many people could have shared such a preposterous dream. <i>Then</i> I think it would be a great boon to have a cause, and to live in a time when there were still causes, still Utopian hopes. Lastly it brings me to feel sad that our time is one where we don't believe in much except the greediness of humankind, and the best we can hope for is that we don't destroy the planet and extinct ourselves...or maybe that we <i>do </i>extinct ourselves. No, my very last thought on the matter is that I should find myself a cause, to hell with the futility of it! In <i>Mr Smith Goes To Washington</i>, which Andy was watching last night with headphones on, while I watched it silent, knowing that Andy would fill me in on the best bits, Mr Smith said, "Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that Moorhouse is including in his shortlist of grand failures of the twentieth century, our capital Canberra, with its design that Edith, and the Burley Griffins, foresee as creating a new type of city. It's poignant to read of Edith's romantic projections about Canberra-to-be, such as: "the streets and roads that broke away from the old grid pattern were themselves a work of some art and reminded people that they were in a special city." In fact, those artistic roads are annoying and impractical; as an inveterate pedestrian, my experience of those roads is needlessly long and boring trudges relieved here and there by shortcuts - invariably straight lines - worn into the grass by other pedestrians. The satisfaction of being able to contrast the concrete reality of 2013 to the various futures imagined for us by earlier decades is one of the pleasures of Moorhouse's trilogy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is a curious echo between what goes on within the pages of the trilogy, and the actual work itself. For Moorhouse, this was clearly a Grand Project (Edith/Moorhouse likes to upper-case the important things). It took twenty years to write, and involved extensive reading and research, with Moorhouse living for several years in Geneva. There are pages of acknowledgments to benefactors and institutions. People clearly believed in and supported this work; Moorhouse himself must have been devoted to it. It was probably going to be bigger than <i>The Fortunes of Richard Mahony</i>, or even in the realms of Tolstoy. But like Edith's plans for ending war, Moorhouse's plans for a classic masterwork run up against the facts of imperfect reality, 'the human element' (to quote a poem of my father's). The trilogy is full of flaws, from the major - such as the superficial treatment of two of Edith's three marriages, or the artless and repetitive recapping that goes on in the second and third volumes, presumably in an attempt to make them capable of standing alone - to the minor - the misspelling of 'gnarled' as 'knarled', and grammatical inconsistencies and errors such as '...it allowed Ambrose and she to...'. But just as Edith's life is not a failure, although her plans didn't amount to much, Moorhouse's trilogy is far from being a lost cause. Edith and Moorhouse (and the reader) enjoy her life up to her last minute, or page. Because of the <i>joie de vivre</i> - the fun - of Moorhouse's writing, I would have gladly kept reading if it had been twice as long.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the moment, writers seem to be obsessed with the finish, the polish, of a work. The <i>spirit</i> of a work has often been polished right out of existence. I'd much rather a book with rough patches and a life of its own, than one with perfect prose, no mistakes, and unlovable, humourless characters.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Finally, I think it is almost a handbook on how to live a good life - Moorhouse seems to know his own fallibility too well to state answers, and instead, through Edith, proffers suggestions. </span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-12059532984288427422013-07-01T18:03:00.000-07:002013-11-08T18:12:58.099-08:00Eudora Welty<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">July/November, 2013: The arrival (earlier than expected) of our baby has had an impact on my Books of the Moment cataloguing, or bloguing. For a start, capital letters require more effort when the hand that usually holds down the 'shift' key is holding the breast-pump in position. Also, I think each blogue will have to be more concise, like everything in my life - showers, phone calls, sleep etc.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Several days before my waters broke, back in May, I spent a day in a bean bag at my mother's house reading Eudora Welty's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Robber Bridegroom</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> (1942). I'd recently applied for a grant to write a novella I'm describing as a modern fairy story. In writing the project outline, I began to think of modern fairy stories I've read, including </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Robber Bridegroom</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. The truth is, much as I love </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">real</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> fairy stories, I don't particularly like modern ones, which have the hand of their maker all over them, no matter how well the traditional style has been captured. Why I don't is an essay in itself (as opposed to a concise blogue).</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Eudora Welty's writing is clear and pure, sometimes almost childlike in its simplicity (and many of her short stories feature children as characters). But often, after reading one of her stories, I've felt the true meaning has eluded me - eluded my conscious mind, but penetrated me all the same. With her pure writing, she is capable of exploring murkiness and ambiguity, mysteries and paradoxes. A writer like her would be drawn to this story, where the characters twist and turn, with a lead male who is both hero and villain, and a heroine who faithfully loves him yet also mistrusts him. I would hazard to say it is a story about the murkiness of attraction, and the danger of truly getting to know one's lover, but months later, her version of the Robber Bridegroom still puzzles me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Here is some Welty wisdom...I've never liked presents from swains much, ever since that first rather contractual ring and a single-red-rose at age 15 (though I'd lied and said I was 16). The best presents are ones picked in back lanes, or found on the sand:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"I wonder what presents he will be bringing next," she said in a loud whisper.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This angered Clement, who said to her, "You will find that men who are generous the way he is generous have needs to match."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And a speech I liked, for its echoes of "the world is too much with us", a poem oft-quoted in our household:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"But the time of cunning has come," said Clement, "and my time is over, for cunning is of a world I will have no part in. Two long ripples are following down the Mississippi behind the approaching somnolent eyes of the alligator. And like the tenderest deer, a band of copying Indians poses along the bluff to draw us near them. Men are following men down the Mississippi, hoarse and arrogant by day, wakeful and dreamless by night at the unknown landings. A trail leads like a tunnel under the roof of this wilderness. Everywhere the traps are set. Why? And what kind of time is this, when all is first given, then stolen away?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Wrath and love burn only like the campfires. And even the appearance of a hero is no longer a single and majestic event like that of a star in the heavens, but a wandering fire soon lost. A journey is forever lonely and parallel to death, but the two watch each other, the traveller and the bandit, through the trees..."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This beautiful speech "on the lateness of the age" continues, but the baby is stirring, and I am striving for concision.</span></span></div>
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lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-21124468245997295312013-04-01T18:32:00.000-07:002013-04-18T18:33:03.651-07:00'BB'<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">April, 2013: After reading <i>Independent People</i>, I wasn't ready to start another novel. As with all good things, I needed some time for it to sink in: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested", says Francis Bacon in his essay <i>Of Studies</i>...that's the old Francis Bacon, not the new one (and that's paraphrasing Rambling Jack Elliot,: "That's the old Jimmie Rodgers, not the new one"). So to absorb the full benefit of <i>Independent People</i>, I held off from another novel, instead reading a few of Charles Fenner's lovely, short essays about Australia - limestone cocoons and basalt plains - and began <i>The English Essay</i> (1939), which Andy bought for a dollar at Bathurst Salvos.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Cowra at my grandfather's old house, I pulled out a book whose spine has always intrigued me - <i>The Little Grey Men</i> by 'BB' (1942). It turned out to be a children's novel about the last four remaining gnomes in England. I've always loved gnomes and all the Little People, so I was very happy to keep reading. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Three gnomes, Dodder, Baldmoney and Sneezewort, journey up their stream, the Folly, in search of their fellow gnome Cloudberry, who was stricken by wanderlust a year or more ago and has not been seen since. The woods, the stream, the seasons, birds, creatures and plants, are minutely observed. It feels like the author's lost landscape, a countryside he sees in memories and dreams; often one needs distance to see something vividly. The date of publication - in the middle of World War II - adds poignancy to these loving portraits of innocent places. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It's a book about the natural world, written at a time when the human world was particularly ugly. In <i>The Little Grey Men</i>, the human world is kept on the peripheries; people are dangerous, and must be avoided, but foxes and huge pikes are more of a threat to the travelling gnomes. I welcome an escape into the non-human world. It is one of those healthy and constructive escapes, as opposed to a head-in-the-sand escape. Books like this encourage readers to revere the natural world, and protect it.</span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-65188147531738232062013-03-05T19:48:00.001-08:002013-03-05T20:10:39.486-08:00*SPECIAL POST*<br />
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PORTRAIT PAINTING SESSION SATURDAY MARCH 9, FIRSTDRAFT GALLERY, SURRY HILLS, 7PM</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lucy Lehmann, published novelist and painter of portraits in words, is in the midst of a raffle-ticket-selling campaign to raise funds to print Part One of her newest novel.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Below, Lehmann answers the most frequently-asked questions:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">1: If you win the raffle, what do you get?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I'll be painting a<i> </i>full-length portrait in words of the winner, or any subject nominated by the winner. I envisage approximately 2000 words (as calculated by Stell's watertight reasoning about pictures telling a thousand words). Perhaps the portrait will be a description of a meeting between the subject and me - say, an informal chat over a cup of tea, or even a gala event such as a 21st or a wedding. Perhaps it will be 'a day in the life of'. Or the subject might prefer to sit for me over several sessions until I have described him or her from head to foot. A full-length portrait in words has never before been attempted, so I'm not placing any limits on myself. Except the word-count."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">2: How much is a full-length portrait in words worth?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"A question for you, Stella," defers Lehmann.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">McDonald, the brains behind the portrait-painting business, takes over, "Lu isn't really worth much at the moment, but for all we know, this new novel of hers might eventually sell a few copies. Stranger things have happened. Think of a full-length portrait by Lucy Lehmann as a long-term investment."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">3: How much do you have to fork out for a raffle ticket?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">McDonald: "Five dollars. Same as your standard-length five-minute portraits-in-words. The raffle ticket makes a good bookmark, if you're into reading."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lehmann: "I'm also offering a free ticket to anyone who can sell a book of ten tickets for me. I'm not the world's best salesman."</span><br />
4: When will the raffle be drawn?<br />
"I've set myself a minimum quota of 150 raffle tickets before the winner is drawn. I am considering scaling that back to something more manageable-"<br />
McDonald laughs, "How does 20 sound?"<br />
Lehmann: "Just keep an eye on this blog. I'll announce the drawing ceremony, which will probably take place at the Lord Wolseley in Ultimo because they have a raffle-ticket tumbler. I'm guessing it'll happen around September."</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">5: What will Lehmann do with the proceeds?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I'll print up Part One of my new novel. I love 'making things' - whether it's novels, songs, knitted blankets. Trying to get a novel published is often a long process, and it makes me feel a bit powerless to think that this novel of mine will have no life until some great publishing god deigns to smile upon it. So I like the idea of printing up <i>something</i>. If I sell 11 tickets, it will be a few photocopies of the first three chapters with a hand-painted cover; if I sell 150, I might be able to afford a larger print-run, with more chapters."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">McDonald interjects: "A copy of Part One might also be a good long-term investment, especially if Lu only manages to sell a few tickets, which is looking likely."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">6: Will Part One be for sale?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"I might sell some. I might leave some on bus-seats."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">7: What's the novel called?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"<i>The One Who Loved Best.</i> It's from Henry Lawson's poem, <i>Past Caring</i>. 'He's droving in the great north-west, I don't know how he's faring, and I, the one who loved him best, have grown to be past caring.' The novel's had about 5 names already, but I think this one is a keeper."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To buy a raffle ticket from Lehmann, email her at <a href="mailto:lucy_lehmann@yahoo.com"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px color: #3100b0; text-decoration: underline;">lucy_lehmann@yahoo.com</span></a>, or come to their next portrait-painting session, which will be at Firstdraft Gallery, 118 Chalmers St, Surry Hills, on Saturday March 9 from 7-11pm. No guarantees McDonald and Lehmann will still be there at 11pm. A two hour session is usually quite long enough. And don't forget to ask Lehmann about her great free-ticket-for-selling-a-book-of-ten offer. To see the latest portraits, go to: <a href="http://thestudioofsrmcdonaldandllehmann.blogspot.com.au/">http://thestudioofsrmcdonaldandllehmann.blogspot.com.au/</a></span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-58357212091937836512013-03-01T18:11:00.000-08:002013-03-05T18:17:22.409-08:00Halldór Laxness<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">March, 2013: I started to read Patrick White's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Tree Of Man</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, but having spent the past nine years writing a novel about a young couple living in an isolated bush hut, I found myself unable to bear White's setting - a young couple in an isolated bush hut. I mentioned this to our flatmate, Tony, and he said, "Then you wouldn't be interested in reading a novel about a family living in an isolated hut in Iceland." Perhaps guided by the spirit of contrariness, or else by my summer habit of reading books set in snowy places, I borrowed Halldór Laxness's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Independent People</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> (1946)</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I was immediately won over by Laxness's tone. Rural culture is very attractive to writers, not only because it's usually an exotic culture for anyone who spends their time stuck inside at a desk writing, and trying to get what they write published, but also because it is a good frame for that perennial theme of 'what have we lost or gained in adopting modern life?' There are plenty of writers who have thoroughly researched rural culture, and get all the details right, and many who use an insightful understanding of it to make some good points, but few who can write about rural culture from within. Thomas Hardy and Halldór Laxness are the best I've come across. They provide the reader with all sorts of fascinating and obscure details, and they are worldly enough to contrast traditional life with modern life. But their sharpest tool is their ability simultaneously to criticise and praise rural culture. This seems to be the proof of thoroughly knowing one's subject. I think of how the trait that most irritates us about a beloved friend is also often the one we most admire; it's because this trait is strong, distinctive, notable, and we have suffered at its hands.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Independent People</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, and Hardy's novels, there is a lot of suffering - </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">detailed</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> suffering. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Because of the suffering, these writers know that this way of life should and will end; yet they value it enough to document it before it disappears. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I keep thinking of the conversations the crofters have on the rare occasion of a get-together: although epic poetry might be momentarily touched upon, the recurring topic is parasitic worms. Laxness's sheep-farmers have much to say about worms, and it's not uninteresting. Sometimes, such as when they gather at the farm of Bjartur, our independent man, to see evidence of the gruesome sheep-massacre possibly perpetrated by a ghost, I was relieved when their conversation left the spooky, and reverted to the here-and-now of worms and sheep - the staff of life for the independent crofter. But we, like Bjartur's children, who know there's more to life, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">suffer </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">at the hands of the prevailing worm and sheep obsession, and long for beauty, love, anything else! Another writer would carefully recreate authentic-sounding sheep-crofter conversations, admiring the earthiness, immediacy, depth of knowledge; yet another writer would depict the oppressive and maddening narrowness; but Laxness presents the reader with both angles, and a few in between.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Often when a writer views a subject equivocally, it results in a coolly dispassionate tone - a kind of balancing act that ends up neutral. There's nothing neutral about Laxness's novel; it's full of extremes. There's a description of the farm in summer, where the whole family is harvesting hay for eighteen or more hours every day, and it's raining constantly, and everyone is sick (except the iron-clad Bjartur), with their noses streaming, forever hungry, one or another of them falling asleep in the wet grass with a load of hay on their back, the mother slowly dying of overwork and malnutrition. It's a horrific description of 'summer in Iceland', a time of year I would have thought beautiful and a respite. Later, it is contrasted with summer in Bjartur's valley as viewed by a well-heeled young man who camps there for pleasure over a week or two. Through the young man's eyes, Bjartur's valley is Paradise. Laxness is capable of seeing it as heaven and hell both at once. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The main character in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Independent People</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> is Bjartur, the most staunchly independent person of the whole lot. He sacrifices almost everything for the sake of independence - two wives, several children. Laxness somehow manages to pull off the balancing act even with this character, whom you couldn't exactly call the hero of the novel. Bjartur is a tyrant, who commits some unforgivable acts (such as slaughtering the beloved family cow); but somehow we don't hate him. He has a certain integrity, even if he is lacking in kindness. And he is driven by a dream - of being an independent farmer, owing nothing to anyone - and we like dreamers. We know there's more to Bjartur than sheep-and-worms. Laxness's ending is truly beautiful - Bjartur's dream is scuttled, he is forced to compromise, and is redeemed. In novels, I love the redemption ending - the whole, long novel existing to bring to life the moment of redemption.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The most remarkable thing about man's dreams is that they all come true; this has always been the case, though no one would care to admit it. And a peculiarity of man's behaviour is that he is not in the least surprised when his dreams do come true; it is as if he had always expected nothing else. The goal to be reached and the determination to reach it are brother and sister, and slumber both in the same heart.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A couple of pages later: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Everything that one has ever created achieves reality. And soon the day dawns when one finds oneself at the mercy of the reality that one has created; and mourns the day when one's life was almost void of reality, almost a nullity; idle, inoffensive fancies spun around a knot in a roof.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Independent People </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">has many passages I could have dog-eared (I'm reluctant to dog-ear a borrowed book) for their sheer beauty. The lyricism of the writing - which in this case is the characters' thoughts and feelings and observations - is probably the only reason anyone can bear to read nearly five hundred pages of abject hardship. The lyricism is like the novel's oft-repeated motif of 'the flower among the rocks'. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Here's an exchange between Bjartur's daughter (the flower of his life) and the young man who camps in the valley:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"What do they call you?" he asked, and her heart stood still.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"Asta Sollilja," she blurted out in an anguish-stricken voice.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"Asta what?" he asked, but she didn't dare own up to it again.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"Sollilja," said little Nonni.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"Amazing," he said, gazing at her as if to make sure whether it could be true, while she thought how dreadful it was to be saddled with such an absurdity. But he smiled at her and forgave her and comforted her and there was something so good and so good in his eyes; so mild; it is in this that the soul longs to rest; from eternity to eternity. And she saw it for the first time in his eyes, and perhaps never afterwards, and faced it and understood. And that was that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"Now I know why the valley is so lovely," said the visitor.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I dog-eared this passage partly because I found it beautiful, but also because there is something sweetly teenaged and romantic about it. As a youngish female writer, I sometimes feel shy of writing passages that have a teenaged, romantic scent about them. As I was editing my recently-finished manuscript with my father, he urged me to excise anything that showed tenderness (he would say sentimentality) towards children (e.g. "wide-eyed"), or, worse still, animals (he wanted me to get rid of all sightings of kangaroos). We struck compromises, and he was probably right. But I was reading </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Anna Karenina </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">at the time, which is full of sentimental and touching descriptions of children; I'm positive they were sometimes wide-eyed. Children are! Geoff's riposte was irrefutable: "You're not Tolstoy." However, I have a lingering resentment of the fact I'm not a dignified old man who can write the occasional soppy bit and be all the more loved and respected because of it. I just need to win a Nobel Prize (as Laxness did).</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I'll end with a poem that appeared in the novel. I don't know whether it is a traditional Icelandic song, or Laxness's own composition:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">When the fiddle's song is still,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">And the bird in shelter shivers,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">When the snow hides every hill,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Blinds the eye to dales and rivers,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Often in the halls of dreams,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Or afar, by distant woodland,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">I behold the one who seems</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">First of all men in our Iceland.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Like a note upon the string</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Once he dwelt with me in gladness.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Ever shall my wishes bring</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Peace to calm his distant sadness.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Still the string whispers his song;</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">That may break, a love-gift only;</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">But my wish shall make him strong,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Never shall he travel lonely.</span></span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-21049665512661626812013-02-05T15:57:00.002-08:002013-02-05T17:00:34.079-08:00*SPECIAL POST* From The Studio of Stella Rosa McDonald and Lucy Lehmann<br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Let A Published Novelist Paint Your Portrait In Words</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">: Stella Rosa McDonald and Lucy Lehmann first got their buskers' licences and started painting the portraits (in words) of passersby in 2010. McDonald draws in the punters with her irresistible patter - "Are you a fan of fiction? Do you have a passion for the page?" Lehmann, seated on a milk-crate, taps on her great-great aunt Janet's typewriter, describing the punter McDonald seats before her. No character speculation: just a sketch of the face. McDonald counts down the five-minute session, which is never long enough for Lehmann. The punter hands over five dollars for the original, and a carbon copy goes into the Studio archives. To see a few portraits, visit:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">2012 saw a suspension of the Portrait enterprise, with McDonald in Paris on an artists' residency, and Lehmann moving down to Melbourne. But come 2013, the spruiker and her word-painter are back in Sydney. They're ironing the banner, putting a new ribbon on the typewriter and drawing up a good supply of letterhead, in preparation for the next session. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The '</span>Let A Published Novelist Paint Your FULL-LENGTH Portrait In Words' <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Raffle</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">: For the past nine years, when not painting portraits, the Published Novelist has been doggedly scribbling away at her second novel. On several occasions, she has announced the completion of her great work, only to retract the glad tidings shortly afterwards and disappear yet again into her study. Finally, last year, it was official. It was nameless, but finished. But it was accompanied by no triumphant announcement, no celebration. It seemed Lehmann didn't even care if anyone read it. When McDonald returned home from Paris, she was dismayed by the despondent state in which she found her protegée. This state of affairs called for action: in fact, A RAFFLE.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">First Prize is a full-length portrait in words of the winner (or whomever the winner nominates as a subject). All proceeds of the raffle go towards printing Part One of Lehmann's new novel. In McDonald's words: "Lu was in the doldrums. I said, 'You need some wind in your sails - your </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">novel</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> needs some wind in its sails. We need to get it </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">out there</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">.' I came up with the idea of the raffle. At first Lu was a bit reluctant - she was afraid a full-length portrait meant she had to write a novel about the winner, or a nude full-body portrait. But I said, 'Everyone knows a picture tells a thousand words - according to my calculations, a FULL-LENGTH picture would be about two-thousand words.' Lu started warming to the idea. She even did a little drawing and got it made into a rubber stamp and printed up a batch of tickets. They're a bit hokey - but that's the Lehmann signature style, I guess."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Lunar New Year's Eve Portrait Session: </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">McDonald and Lehmann are kicking off the raffle-ticket campaign and saying 'goodbye Dragon, hello Snake' with a session of portrait-painting and raffle-ticket-selling this Saturday February 9, from 3-5pm. If it's sunny, the Portrait Painters will set up in Hyde Park (in the fig-tree avenue near the Archibald Fountain); if raining, in the Central tunnel. Portraits are the usual $5 for 5 minutes, and the hand-stamped raffle tickets are $5 each. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">If you can't make it to the portrait session and desperately want to buy some raffle tickets, email Lehmann at <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;">lucy_lehmann@yahoo.com</span></span> and she will figure out the best way to get some to you.</span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-61402434964923195952013-01-01T23:11:00.000-08:002013-01-14T17:13:16.808-08:00Mary Shelley<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">January, 2013: Andy brought home Mary Shelley's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Frankenstein </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1818) because he knows I am a big fan of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Vindication on the Rights of Woman</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1792). Poor Mary senior died a few days after giving birth to Mary junior. A Cowra heatwave seemed an appropriate time to read a dark, snow-bound tale like </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Frankenstein</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Shelley was only twenty-one when she wrote this; I have to remind myself to cut her some slack. I was disappointed by the story-telling, which was very basic: first, there's the narrative told in letters from young Walton to his sister, then he begins to makes notes of a narrative as told him by a man his boat picked up in peculiar circumstances, and then this narrator (Frankenstein, who is not the monster but the scientist), passes the narrative baton over to the very well-spoken monster for a while, then the baton goes back to Frankenstein, and finally ends up where it began, with Walton. Narrators are surprisingly difficult to manage; when they're retailing a story someone has told them, the question is: how much of the narrator's own story does the reader need to know, i.e. how interesting does the narrator need to be? Too interesting, and the reader wants to know about the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">narrator's </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">story, not the one he or she is narrating; not interesting enough, and we lose faith in the narrator's worthiness to guide us through the story. Joseph Conrad is the master of narrators. He makes his narrators mysterious, enigmatic, and occasionally opens them out as real, active characters at the end.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">My main problem with Shelley's tale is that our main character, Frankenstein, remained pig-headed and unchanged from beginning to end. What I wanted was - to use the modern parlance - for him to take responsibility for what he did. This is what his monster wants as well. But Frankenstein's emotional development goes from thirsting for knowledge, in the first few chapters, to regretting, for the rest of the book, this thirst for knowledge. He takes the lid off the can of worms, then tries (in vain) to stuff the worms back in the tin. It's not very interesting. Much more interesting, and helpful, is seeing characters deal with unwanted knowledge, because that's what we all have to do. Every time the monster pleads with Frankenstein to help him - seeing as he created him - Frankenstein ends with, "Begone, you daemon!" I kept waiting for some sign that the author knew how annoyed I was getting with stupid old Frankenstein, but it never came. I suppose we simply have to view Frankenstein's sorry end as the author's disapproval of what he did. But some change of heart towards the end would have been a great climax.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I wanted Frankenstein to be kind to his monster, and introduce him to his family, and help him make friends and find a place in society. That would have been interesting. But Shelley set out to write a horror story, not a human-interest story.</span></span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-50056042417080081632013-01-01T19:44:00.000-08:002013-01-03T19:47:23.550-08:00Richard Neville<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">January, 2013: I was sitting at the dining table, scanning my sister's bookshelf, and my eyes kept coming back to Richard Neville's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hippie Hippie Shake</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1995). It seemed fitting, in fact, overdue, to read Richard's book, seeing as he, Julie and their daughters, Lucy and Angelica, lived in our house before we moved in. It took Richard a while to shift all his Martin Sharp paintings; for a few colourful months, we lived among psychedelic swirls, faces of Luna Park and Tiny Tim, and a big pink penis entitled 'Don't Leave Me Standing Here All Alone'. In the kitchen we had three more penises, these by David Hockney and belonging to Richard and the two other editors of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Oz</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> magazine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I opened up </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hippie Hippie Shake</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. There's a reason why I hadn't read the book sooner: prejudice. Even though it's unfair of me, I'm sick of Bob Dylan, and people who came of age in the Sixties. I'm sick of hearing how they invented sex and music, and how Germaine Greer invented feminism. I started to read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Female Eunuch</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> several years ago, and by the first page, Greer was already pissing me off:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In the old days ladies were...anxious to allay the fears of conservatives, and in doing so the suffragettes betrayed their own cause and prepared the way for the failure of emancipation. Five years ago it seemed clear that emancipation had failed: the number of women in Parliament had settled at a low level; the number of professional women had stabilized as a tiny minority; the pattern of female employment had emerged as underpaid, menial and supportive. The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Greer thereby manages to dismiss 150 years of activism as a "failure", and snatch the laurels for herself and her generation. Due to </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">circumstances</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, not their extraordinary, natural-born attributes, Greer and her contemporaries were a big, powerful, confident generation that could afford to create their own history, and live in their own bubble without ever needing to leave it. That generation is a nation, a superpower, still giving Bob Dylan's latest tuneless rambles five-star reviews.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So my position has been declared - I'm a member of a resentful, powerless minority-nation. I expected </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hippie Hippie Shake</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> to be another a paeon to the glory days; the subtitle suggested as much, 'The dreams, the trips, the trials, the love-ins, the screw-ups...THE SIXTIES', as did the dedication, 'to everyone who was there'. But as I began to read, my prejudices were overridden: it was simply interesting. Neville looks back on his younger self without a desire to mythologise, or mock: he is trying to describe himself truthfully. As I read further, I realised it was more than an effort to describe truthfully - he is looking for truths. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I often think of authors as 'guides' through the book's material. Neville, both older and younger, is a great guide. As a young man at the heart of the London 'Underground', he provides us with the richest material you could ask for from that period - we go to Nepal with the first wave of backpackers, ride in Yoko and John's limo, go to the Wet Dreams Film Festival where Heathcote Williams heroically rescues a goose from having its head chopped off, a condom put on its neck and being shoved up a woman's vagina. Young Neville is thoroughly immersed in his times, but unlike a lot of his contemporaries, stops short of getting lost. He was a late-comer to acid and pot, which might have given him an edge; according to Louise Ferrier, he got a lot of air-time because he was one of the only spokesmen of the underground press who could finish a sentence. Ambivalence must have always been a strong characteristic of Neville's; a certain duality must have enabled him to be a convert with long hair and embroidered velvet, a fervent believer - almost a martyr - but also a satirist. The magazine Neville co-edited, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Oz</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, seemed to be a magazine of ambivalence, with no fixed views except freedom-of-view, continually reinventing itself, dethroning its own pin-up boys, and even giving its Neville's own book, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Playpower</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, a lukewarm review.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Balance in a memoir is usually achieved by the younger being immersed in the events of life, and the older looking back and doing the analysis, but Neville is self-critical even when young. Moreover, Neville's friends and colleagues were critical of him, too. Towards the end of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hippie Hippie Shake</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, the reader gets a long excerpt from what must have been a hurtful, humiliating letter from his best friend, Martin Sharp. Another memoirist would have buried or burnt it:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Tomorrow you'll be claiming flower power as your own. Don't get trapped in your fantasies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If revolution is your calling rather than your posture - and as yet it has only been a pose - then you better pay more attention to how you got there, and why - your motives are questionable - the stirring up of predictable controversy in search of applause.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Don't squander your energy. The coming court case offers you the most important chance to demonstrate your integrity in a public forum...Truth is the most revolutionary force of all.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">...You are surrounded by flatterers. I love you dearly so I write strong words.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">My question turns out to be Neville's too - did that generation, with all their self-glorifying talk of revolution, actually change anything? </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It's almost laughable to read of their espoused anti-materialism, considering that as soon as they grew up and got their hands on some money, they became such a wealth-amassing, consumeristic generation - for example, Felix Dennis, former co-editor of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Oz</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> and now wealthier than Queen Elizabeth. Or Robert Hughes, who, on accepting the job of art critic of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Time</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> magazine, told all his friends to go to his rented mansion in Hanover Square (London) and help themselves to whatever he couldn't take with him as he fled across the Atlantic. "His Aussie mates turned into looters overnight - marble tiles, a water heater, velvet curtains, architraves, carpets, a chandelier...Hoppy, from </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">IT</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, staggered out with the kitchen stove. I was offered a brass showerhead. As a farewell gesture, the mansion's walls were daubed with graffiti - RIPPED OFF BY THE PARK ROAD PIG FUCKERS." This isn't revolutionary anti-materialism - this is selfish greed, and a very strong sense of entitlement. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There's 'the rock revolution' - I read the introduction to Arnold Shaw's book of that name a couple of days ago. Like </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Female Eunuch</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, Shaw seemed keen to write off any innovation from previous decades, in order to claim the 'revolution' for anyone who was under the age of thirty in 1969. Looking back now, the development of music in over the twentieth-century reads like a fairly logical, explicable unfurling, with every 'innovation' - even the mighty Bob - having its roots deeply planted in the soil of what came before it. New technology effected more 'revolutions' than did brilliant artists or great artistic ideas. Electrical-engineer boffins, not lead-singers, are at the heart of rock revolutions. In </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hippie</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, Mick Farren issues a bulletin following a rather disillusioning Isle of Wight festival: "...the hungry freak realise[s] rock is becoming an opiate designed to turn him into a docile consumer." Neville adds, "For once, as it turned out, Mick wasn't just Right On, he was right."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There's Women's Liberation - but women in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hippie Hippie Shake</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> are typically</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">short-skirted secretaries, or stuck at home with the kids, or on their hands and knees getting fucked with dildos (or headless geese) by performance artists. No revolution of sexual equality in evidence. It seems the only time women managed to get their voices heard above the rabble of men was when they were talking about women, or perhaps, sex. At first Neville's gushings about the beauty of his quiet girlfriend Louise Ferrier got on my nerves, but after a while, this became relevant. His portrayal of her seems a truthful reflection of the place women had in that world; valued for their beauty (a boost for their man's status), sexual accessibility, practicality (making coffee, cooking, doing housework etc.), and loyalty, rather than what they might have to say. Except by Betty Neville, the author's mother: "Any women who entered my mother's house and failed to tongue-trip like Dorothy Parker on her fourth martini was suspected of suffering from brain damage." The rise and fall of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Oz </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">magazine is the obvious narrative of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hippie</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, but it gradually became clear that <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">the book is also a remorse-tinged examination of the rise and fall, strangely in sync with </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Oz</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, of his relationship with Ferrier. At the end of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hippie</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, Ferrrier and Neville have drifted apart, with Ferrier becoming involved with some serious feminists, planning a 'gynarchic' magazine called </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Spare Rib</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. Neville says, "Despite her steadfastness [during the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Oz</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> obscenity trial], I had not evolved into a deep, caring companion for Louise, or even much of a friend. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Oz</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, obscenity and me, me, me, took centre stage, crushing all else."</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Finally there's all the talk about the sex revolution. What exactly did all the rampant fucking achieve? The 'sex revolution' annoys me because to</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> me,</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> it </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">seems</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (I put in all those italics because, how can I know? I wasn't there!) to have been male-driven, and at the expense of the females whose bodies they required to execute their revolution. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe women weren't as powerless as they, in retrospect, seem. But with this, as with all of my questions, Neville is there, asking them, too.</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Recounting how he and Ferrier were filmed having sex for a documentary, Neville says:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">We were the cutting edge of the sex revolution, slashing away at the media, academia, everyday life. This action proved something of vital importance, but for the life of me, I can't recall what it was.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">But I can't dismiss the 'sex revolution'. I've often thought that we live in 'the era of transparency'. Not only are our offices open-plan, but our personal relationships are expected to be completely open and honest, too. Lies between lovers are no longer considered 'being discreet'. If you're gay, you're expected to come out. We're </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">all</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> expected to come out, unashamedly, and be honest about our needs and desires (not just sexual), no matter how odd they are. I think this is a great way for a society to be. And all the fighting against hypocrisy and censorship that Neville's generation did certainly played a major part in how we are now. In the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Oz</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> obscenity trial, George Melly, a social commentator and film critic takes the stand, questioned by prosecutor Argyle:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font: 12.0px Arial; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Do you have any standards at all?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I think - publish everything, free people. Surely the result is a freer and more beautiful person than someone who has to pass it around under a desk."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"If you really believe more openness is better, what do you think is wrong with an advertisement that describes oral sex attractively?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Nothing. I don't think cunnilingus could do actual harm..."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">At the end of the book, Neville's conclusion is modest and apt:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I think we helped free things up, even if some of us got tangled in our own delusions. Orgies in Amsterdam were never the key to the New Jerusalem, but it was an age of hedonism and, steeped in the sexism of the time, I took to it like a duck to water.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">He also has a sweet concluding paragraph on marijuana, "Looking back, I am glad marijuana entered my life. Overnight, I became stupider, but nicer." He goes on to say, "Save the hooch for moments of celebration, I will tell my grandchildren, in the unlikely event they will be interested in my opinion. Treat it as a homeopathic elixir and not as a crutch. Opening the doors of perception is a prelude to one day closing the doors on drugs." Neville has made me feel much more kindly disposed, even grateful, towards his generation. Not for what they did for music, art, women's lib or politics, but for the openness.</span></span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-72583708158587798852012-12-01T20:32:00.000-08:002012-12-27T20:32:28.006-08:00Helen Garner<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">December, 2012: At a Christmas gathering, a friend described meeting her long-time hero Helen Garner, and when I came home I found my eyes lighting upon </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Children's Bach </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1984). I haven't read much of Helen Garner's work: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Joe Cinque's Consolation</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, some short stories, and articles in journals. I found </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Joe</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> interesting - in fact, a 'page-turner' - but felt as though I had to crane my head around Helen Garner to see what was happening - she writes so much about herself and how she feels about the unfolding events. Perhaps Garner considers it important regularly to remind readers that 'objective reportage' is a romantic fancy, and an impossibility. Readers are not so stupid; we know that every writer is influenced by his or her individual slants, prejudices and partialities, but we have the capacity for filtering out the writer and picking out the truths. And writers are capable of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">attempting</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> objectivity, and getting close to it, if not achieving it. Earlier this year, I met a man who was a personal friend of the woman made out, in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Joe</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, to be a cold-blooded murderess; this man said Anu Singh was not guilty, and Garner's book was inaccurate and biased. Garner's arguments in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Joe</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> were very convincing: if she got it wrong about Anu Singh, her book is a travesty in its own way. I'm glad, as a writer of fiction, I don't have to take such risks.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So I picked up </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Children's Bach</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, somewhat slanted and prejudiced against it. If I find her reportage too personal, I find her fiction too cold and harsh. I just don't think Garner and I will ever click. I remember one short story I read, pulling off a book from my friend's impressive Australian-fiction shelf while babysitting: two friends are talking; one sighs, "I just want a man to look after me," the other says, "Women like us don't get men like that." This comment both stung and enraged me, with its implication that independent feminist-type women (like me) disqualify themselves from supportive, loving relationships with manly men. But perhaps it was true in Garner's generation - the women's independence might have been too fragile, too recently-won, to yield some of it back to love.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I found the reading of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Children's Bach</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> to be on the unpleasant side. My father complains that Patrick White is "too ugly". I find Garner too ugly, even though her prose is elegant and clean. It makes me think of the Picasso exhibition I saw some months ago, which showed his trajectory from beautiful to brutish and ugly; beauty was so easy for him, he seemed to despised it. Beautiful prose is seductive and pleasant; Garner doesn't want her readers to relax, but squirm. I was feeling a bit queasy as I read it, and when I think of it now, the queasiness returns. I'll open three pages at random, to show you what I mean:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Arthur skipped around, squint-eyed with laughter. The photos were of a naked baby boy lying on his back like a frog, flashing the enormous, raw genitals of the new-born.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">At dawn Dexter stumbles in and stands looking at her. She thinks, I can't be bothered fucking if it's going to be obscure. But she does, they do, and the familiarity of his breathing by her ear brings up a rush of violence in her like vomiting...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The two mothers looked at her with their calm smiles. She felt as jerky as a puppet.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'Last time I had my hair cut short back home,' Vicki chattered on, rushing to the round mirror in the corner, 'I looked so ugly that I cried all night. And when I woke up in the morning my eyes were so swollen that I looked like a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">cane</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> toad!'</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Self-loathing seems to be a theme; the characters that aren't self-loathing are innocent, ignorant, lacking in self-awareness. Is the Garner 'tree of knowledge' one that reveals you to be loathsome? If you believe yourself to be lovable, that's only because you haven't bitten the apple yet.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">However, taking a step back from the experience of reading it, I enjoyed and respected it for its structure. The idea behind </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Children's Bach</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> seems to be "let's take two family groups with different moral codes and send them colliding into each other." I like it. And the execution is very skillful - somehow the realism of the characters, what they do and how they talk, decoys the reader's eye away from this underlying idea; while I was reading it, I thought it was a vivid portrait of a culture; once I'd finished, I realised it was a scientific experiment. A book such as Kate Grenville's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Secret River</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is too redolent of the author's intent for my liking - the author hangs over the stage, jerking the characters' strings and making them fulfill the author's requirements. In </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Children's Bach</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, the author's intent is kept secret, until it's all over. Then the reader can have a satisfying communion with the author, "Hm, very interesting! I like the way the innocent, stable, loving family-group-#1 was blown apart by the worldly, individualistic, independent family-group-#2, and this resulted in both family groups being better off than when they started, despite the disastrous climax!" My only gripe was the last two pages. Writers feel they have to put on some sort of lyrical fireworks display for the ending, and despite Garner's stylishness, she also succumbed to this with a sort of arty wrap-up of the future:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and the clothes on the line will dry into stiff shapes which loosen when touched,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and someone will put the kettle on,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and from one day to the next Poppy will stop holding Philip's hand: he will drop his right hand to her left so she can take it, but nothing will happen, and when he looks down she will be standing there beside him, watching for a gap in the traffic, and she will not hold his hand any more, and she never will again,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and Dexter will sit on the edge of the bed to do up his sandals, and Athena will creep over to him and put her head on his knee, and he will take her head in his hands and stroke it with a firm touch,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And so on. It's a daggy, unnecessary ending for a neat, ruthless novella. In my reissue, I'd cut off the last two pages and end it with Athena sitting at the table, waiting for her family to come home.</span></span></div>
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lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-44386315050730815102012-09-01T16:03:00.000-07:002013-01-03T19:57:25.932-08:00Mikhail Bulgakov<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">September, 2012: I find myself reluctant to begin reading a new book, as I have seven books read from July to now (November) that I haven't yet written about for my 'Book of the Moment'. These books are: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Vanity Fair </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1847-8), William Makepeace Thackeray; </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A Country Doctor's Notebook </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(mid-1920s), Mikhail Bulgakov; </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Victoria </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1898), Knut Hamsun; </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Anna Karenina </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1873-7), Leo Tolstoy; </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Still Life With Woodpecker </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1980), Tom Robbins; </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Woodlanders </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1887), Thomas Hardy;</span></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i>Mrs Robinson's Disgrace</i> (2012), Kate Summerscale.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Clearly, the trouble started with </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Vanity Fair.</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> It was such a wonderful novel, it deserved a long and detailed essay the like of which I hadn't written since high school. But I had to postpone it, as I had left my dog-eared copy in Sydney, unable to justify lugging it back to Melbourne on the train. So I began to read (for the second time) </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Anna Karenina</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. A writer could spend her whole life studying this novel - it demanded an equally detailed essay as </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Vanity Fair</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. Now I've just finished </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Woodlanders</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. Among these three monuments, I interspersed the other 'lesser' works; although they were good in their own ways, they're not so daunting. I'll break the log-jam by starting with the first* of them, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A Country Doctor's Notebook</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">While looking myself up on the Google, I read an unfavourable reader's-review of my first novel, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Showgirl and the Brumby</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">; the part I remember was, "</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">lurid with every possible unpleasant smear of snot, sex, and mastication</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">." Fair call, I thought. As truth is often found in the fine detail, I like writers who examine people closely - the workings of their psyches, bodies, any part of them. This is why I like doctor-writers. They don't shy away from things like eyeballs covered with a sac of pus, or head-ectomies on babies stuck in birth canals. They find it all interesting. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A Country Doctor's Notebook</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is a collection of accounts of cases that came to Bulgakov while he was an inexperienced doctor at an outpost in the wilds of Russia. Although each story is discrete in itself, and presumably published separately along the way, as a collection they plot the course of a young man growing to fit the responsibilities he has (somewhat prematurely) taken on. The phrase "you have to start somewhere" takes on a different shade when you're talking about amputations. As he faces the leg he has to cut off, Bulgakov seems almost as ignorant and unconfident as I would be if I had to do it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It makes me think about twenty-year-olds in our time; older people consider them spoilt, lazy, like overgrown children. The cure is to give them responsibility and leave them to their own devices, but the oldies seem reluctant to do this, either because they want to hold onto the responsibility (and power) themselves, or else because they enjoy fussing over their big babies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The collection ends with the diary (fictional?) of a young doctor who had preceded Bulgakov as the local doctor in this huge, snowbound wilderness. He found relief in morphine from loneliness, and the stress of being solely responsible for his patients' lives; he rapidly became addicted, tried to wean himself off it by taking cocaine, and finally killed himself. His parting advice, having used himself as a test-case, was: don't try to cure a morphine addiction with cocaine. This might be another lesson for our youngies in Bulgakov's book.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">*Alas, the remaining six are as yet still unblogged.</span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-64377289618569736942012-08-01T19:33:00.000-07:002012-12-27T20:38:49.082-08:00William Wordsworth<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">August, 2012: I always found poetry hard to read. Where does one read it - in bed or over breakfast? How does one read it - one at a time, followed by ten minutes of reflection? Despite coming from a poetry-writing and -loving family, I struggled to find a place for it in my life. I thought, "Oh, well, songs are my poetry." Last year, my father (Geoffrey Lehmann) and his old friend, Robert Gray, published an anthology, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Australian Poetry Since 1788</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. It got me reading poetry. I haven't written a post about it yet - as it's about the size of a house-brick, it doesn't come with me on my rambles, so I'm only two centimetres through it. But it makes reading poetry pleasurable; the poems have been carefully selected, and Geoff and Bob's introductions guide the reader surely through the material. For me, it has set a standard for reading poetry: if I'm not enjoying myself, then it's highly likely the poem is a dud. Here's an enjoyable poem written by Jamie Grant about the anthology*:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/grant-jamie/speech-for-the-launching-of-australian-poetry-in-the-twentieth-century-by-robert-gray-and-geoffrey-lehmann-0049020/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/grant-jamie/speech-for-the-launching-of-australian-poetry-in-the-twentieth-century-by-robert-gray-and-geoffrey-lehmann-0049020/</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So first there was Geoff and Bob's anthology. Then there were the Philip Larkin poems Bob Ellis read aloud from his lap-top - they were so good, I carried around a volume called </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Witsun Weddings </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">until I lost it. Then there was the Wordsworth line Thomas Hardy quoted in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Return Of The Native</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, "plain living and high thinking," that provoked me into seeking out the whole poem. With William Wordsworth, my conversion to poetry was complete. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">For the rambler, a slim volume or two of poetry slipped into the backpack equates to incalculable hours of pleasure and enrichment, at a mere 50g of additional weight. I took a Wordsworth best-of (selected by Stephen Logan from poems 1796-1845) off my grandfather's shelf, and have been carrying it around all year. Wordsworth doesn't have a broad range. He writes about love of the natural world, as opposed to the man-made world or "what man has made of man." This just happens to be the theme closest to my heart - it's practically my religion. I've never read anyone express the effect of nature on the soul as well as he does, and I don't care if it's the only thing he can write about. His short poems written from (apparently) his point of view are my favourites. They are pure, clear bursts of inspiration. The poem quoted by Hardy, 'Written in London, September 1802', is only fourteen lines; here are a few of them:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The wealthiest man among us is the best:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">No grandeur now in nature or in book</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expence,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This is idolatry; and these we adore:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Plain living and high thinking are no more:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The homely beauty of the good old cause</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Is gone;</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">He gets a bit murky and muddled when he writes longer poems (though I like his long story-poems, or ballads). I waded through the 206 lines of 'Ode' (1807), which, as far as I could gather, reiterates with each verse that the poet has become blinded to nature's beauty by a malaise, springing from his humanness. There are beautiful lines, such as the last two, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears", but the structure is weak - it has the simple, gem-like conclusion, but too few ideas leading up to it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Wordsworth is most successful when he has a narrative to hang his ideas on; often the narrative is as basic as "I went out walking and had an encounter that provoked an interesting thought," such as in 'Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman' (1798). He describes an old man - and manages to slip in a few points about the transience of youth and vigour - whom the poet sees one summer day trying to grub up a rotten old tree stump. Here are the last two verses (out of thirteen):</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'You're overtasked, good Simon Lee,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Give me your tool' to him I said;</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And at the word right gladly he</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Received my proffer'd aid.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I struck and with a single blow</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The tangled root I sever'd,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">At which the poor old man so long</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And vainly had endeavour'd.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The tears into his eyes were brought, </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And thanks and praises seemed to run</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So fast out of his heart, I thought</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">They never would have done.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">-I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">With coldness still returning.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Alas! the gratitude of men</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Has oftner left me mourning.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This unexpected conclusion brought tears to </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">my</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> eyes; despite Wordsworth's own misgivings about it - "My gentle reader, I perceive/ How patiently you've waited,/ And I'm afraid that you expect/ Some tale will be related" - 'Simon Lee' is a much more satisfying poem than the loftier 'Ode'.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I spend quite a bit of time lying in long grass looking up at the sky, and if anyone should ever charge me with being lazy or sluggish, there is a good retort in 'Expostulation and Reply' (1798):</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'The eye it cannot chuse but see,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'We cannot bid the ear be still;</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'Our bodies feel, where'er they be,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'Against, or with our will.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'Nor less I deem that there are powers,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'Which of themselves our minds impress,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'That we can feed this mind of ours,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'In a wise passiveness.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'Think you, mid all this mighty sum</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'Of things forever speaking,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'That nothing of itself will come,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'But we must still be seeking?</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'-Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'Conversing as I may,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'I sit upon this old grey stone,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'And dream my time away.'</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In 'Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey' (1798), he revisits a landscape he knows and loves. He speaks about these "forms of beauty":</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">...Nor less, I trust,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">To them I may have owed another gift,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In which the burthen of the mystery,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In which the heavy and the weary weight</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of all this unintelligible world</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Is lighten'd: - that serene and blessed mood,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In which the affections gently lead us on,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And even the motion of our human blood</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Almost suspended, we are laid asleep</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In body, and become a living soul:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">While with an eye made quiet by the power</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">We see into the life of things.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">For me, this perfectly describes the effect that nature - all that time I've spent looking up at the sky and stroking gum trees - has on me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The other lines quoted in my small circle are:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The world is too much with us; late and soon,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And also:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">My former thoughts return'd: the fear that kills;</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And hope that is unwilling to be fed</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The phrase 'Wordsworth's daffodils' is a shorthand for the solace that is to be found in nature:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I wandered lonely as a Cloud</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">When all at once I saw a crowd</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A host of dancing Daffodils;</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I can understand Wordsworth in terms of songwriters: he's no Cole Porter or Dolly Parton - versatile writers constantly exploring different emotions, characters, themes and scenario. He's more in the style of Stevie Nicks, capable only of one perspective (their own), but now and then producing a piece of work in which the intense subjectivity is pushed all the way through into universality, becoming the final word on that particular subject.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">*erratum: Grant's poem was about a <i>previous</i> Geoff and Bob anthology. It's still a good poem.</span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-83011580526388395642012-06-01T22:17:00.000-07:002012-08-02T22:18:17.174-07:00Shakespeare - Romeo And Juliet<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">June, 2012: I caught the train from Sydney to Melbourne, and to vary my diet of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Vanity Fair</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, I decided the slender volume of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Romeo And Juliet</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1597) would be worth squeezing into my pack. I haven't read a lot of Shakespeare, just as I don't own a Beatles album. I know the work is good without even looking into it; moreover, I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">know</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> the work - picking it up on the ether - without even reading it. But this is lazy and ignorant. Shakespeare is really easy to read - it took only a few days to read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Romeo And Juliet</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> - so there are no excuses to pass him over. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">What did I discover? He's good. He tells his story in brisk, powerful strokes. The only time the plot isn't being advanced is when he'll have a few characters standing around making ribald jokes; then the reader doesn't resent the slowing down, because it's funny and sexy. And despite the minimal characterisation, and the somewhat rushed pace, he manages to throw in enough human-content to make you feel sad when a character dies. Other surprises: I didn't realise that Romeo starts the play in love with Rosaline, and I like the depiction of a hungry-for-love young man. Also, I liked Juliet being so desperate to have sex with him. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Finally, it is amazing how much of this play has been incorporated into our language; numerous times, I came across commonly-uttered phrases, such as "A rose by any other name", or "A plague on both your houses". It was like hearing Johnny Cash sing </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I Walk The Line</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> at the Entertainment Centre, or getting out of the tour bus and seeing Uluru in all its might. These icons are perfectly comfortable in their own skins, and as well as evoking a thrill of awe, the beholder also shrugs her shoulders and thinks, "But of course!" Once again, it is proven that the literature we retain, century after century, is the good stuff - plot, poetry, human truths, humour.</span></span></div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-43732499441378124692012-04-01T20:56:00.000-07:002012-07-19T20:56:32.734-07:00Charles Dickens<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">April, 2012: I love a beautifully-crafted novel, but if Charles Dickens had slowed down to polish his novels, there would only be six or seven of them, instead of a hundred (please don't correct me, I like to believe there is a lifetime's supply). </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1837) was, of course, written in installments, and it rambles along, just like Mr. Pickwick and his disciples, who set out to see the world very modestly. I don't think they ever get farther than about twenty miles from London, and their adventures are on a very small scale; much of the fun of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Pickwick Papers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is derived from depicting insignificant events as momentous, and the homely Mr. Pickwick as a great sage. There's the chapter titled, 'Too Full Of Adventure To Be Briefly Described': the adventure is Samuel Weller and Mr. Pickwick erroneously breaking into a girls' school, with girls screaming and old teachers getting excited. Sometimes a chapter is merely an anecdote someone has retailed in a pub. Dickens always has a pointed message, even when he's having fun: in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Pickwick </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Papers</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">his humour flips back on itself, reminding us that in real life, there's nothing insignificant about small-scale events - doing your first back-bend in a yoga class! sending a text message to the wrong person! - and also that Mr. Pickwick's ordinary wisdom is exactly what we need to navigate through our small-scale lives.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">While I was reading </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Pickwick Papers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, I happened to see a friend chasing his hat down Glebe Point Road. Even Mr. Pickwick loses his hat from time to time, and here's how he deals with it:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head; smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span></div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-52765839002618448932012-03-01T16:33:00.000-08:002012-06-13T16:34:56.311-07:00Thomas Hardy - Return Of The Native<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">March, 2012: I've often wondered why I consistently like old novels more than new novels. I read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Return Of The Native </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1878) straight after </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (see below), and was completely accepting of Thomas Hardy's dramatic suicide ending; whereas Gillian Mears's dramatic suicide ending left me annoyed and unsatisfied. Why? I started to think about the authors' moral purpose, and the fable their characters were playing out. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I grew up reading fairy stories - perhaps this is why I write with a moral purpose (and read in search of one). Every work I've made has a moral purpose that can be expressed in one or two sentences; for example, I wrote </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Showgirl and the Brumby </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">to illustrate the problems that occur when truths about the family are kept secret. Recently I asked a writer, "Do you write with a moral purpose?" She looked taken aback, even slightly offended, and said, "No!" I'd never uttered the words "moral purpose" at a dinner party before, and hadn't realised I was making a gaffe. I vaguely grasp how in our free-market, multicultural, areligious world, morals are seen as reactionary and narrow-minded, or even unsophisticated. But I would have thought that in a world where morals are shifting and indistinct, it was more important than ever to explore them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Thomas Hardy's suicide ending is completely moral, which doesn't mean it's simplistic or 'black-and-white'. That's the whole point of morals, and why they're worth exploring: reconciling your conscience at the end of every day often requires delicate compromising, lowering of standards, cutting yourself and others a fair bit of slack, and embracing a passel of contradictions. It's a wonder anyone can ever reconcile their conscience. When Eustacia throws herself into the Shadwater Weir, it's an indictment; partly on Eustacia's restless, unsatisfied character, "an armful of wet drapery enclosing a woman's cold form, which was all that remained of the desperate Eustacia", but mainly on the times she lived in, which prevented her (as a woman) from seeking a life that would suit her better. All these desperate nineteenth-century heroines throwing themselves into weirs, under trains or stuffing their mouths with arsenic - the moral purpose driving their (male) authors was to illustrate how impossible the prevailing social conditions were for a certain type of woman. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Perhaps a reader could interpret these novels as condemnations of that type of woman, the ones that display traits such as quick intelligence, curiosity, ambition, passion, smouldering beauty. Often there's a counterpoint female character in these novels - in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Return Of The Native</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, there's Thomasin Yeobright, who is quiet, gentle, unintellectual, sweetly pretty, perfectly content to live her whole life in the desolate backwater of Egdon Heath, and moreover, has a baby (while Eustacia somehow manages not to). Eustacia ends up drowned in the weir, while the widowed Thomasin, after a respectable grieving period, marries the nicest man in the whole book. But I don't believe Hardy is saying Eustacia deserves to die, and Thomasin to live happily every after. He has made Eustacia an attractive, complex, challenging character. We want her to live, to reach her potential! It's a tragedy that she can't. In 1878, his readership - Victorian englishmen - might not have been as sympathetic to Eustacia as I am. But, crucially, Hardy has made Eustacia </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">sexy</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. Would any heterosexual male reader, on reading about the "wet drapery enclosing a woman's cold form", really be able to nod gravely to himself and think, "Well, that young lady got her comeuppance!" Wouldn't he have felt some shudder of regret? Eustacia must have played unsettlingly, ambiguously, upon the mind of even the most disapproving reader.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Thomas Hardy gives each of his main characters (five of them - </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Return Of The Native </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">is a love-pentagon) an inner life. He describes their emotions in the same observational, factual way he describes the local mores or the landscape. It is plain reportage, rather than a clever conjuring trick done in words. A couple of sentences my eye lit upon is: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">While the effigy of Eustacia was melting to nothing, and the fair woman herself was standing on Rainbarrow, her soul in an abyss of desolation seldom plumbed by one so young, Yeobright sat lonely at Blooms-End. He had fulfilled his word to Thomasin by sending off Fairway with the letter to his wife, and now waited with increased impatience for some sound </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">or signal of her return. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In this excerpt, room isn't respectfully cleared away for the emotional content - Eustacia's profound desolation doesn't even get its own sentence, but is squeezed up between Susan doing voodoo on her, and her husband feeling lonely, then is followed by a sentence that, in story-telling terms, is a bit of humdrum-but-necessary housework. It's one of the things I love most about Hardy: intense emotions are an everyday occurrence for him. He neither avoids nor dwells on them. It is a good lesson for apprentice writers (such as me) - the way he can write about passion without ever descending into melodrama.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So how does he handle his dramatic suicide ending? The abyss of desolation is the last glimpse we have into Eustacia. The next we know of her is when Wildeve (her lover) and Yeobright (her husband) hear a "dull sound" that is unmistakably the fall of a body into the weir. There are a few lines of dialogue between the two men, "Good God!" etc., then they hurry to the weir with lamps. After this are two paragraphs of specifications about the Shadwater Weir, the circular pool fifty feet in diameter, the ten huge hatches, the sides of the pool that "were of masonry, to prevent the water from washing away the bank", and so on. I remember coming across this device when studying Latin in high school: just when things get interesting, throw in a whole lot of pedantic details. It probably has a name. Finally, at the end of the second paragraph, we find what we want: "Across this gashed and puckered mirror a dark body was slowly borne by one of the backward currents."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">But Hardy doesn't pull a veil over the scene yet; over two pages, people plunge in, drown, get dragged out, are revived or not, all documented in the dauntless, plodding, Hardy way. From then on, the fire of the novel has gone out, and the remaining four chapters are a raking of the ashes. The last chapter is called </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Cheerfulness again asserts itself at Blooms-End, and Clym finds his Vocation</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> - if the marriage of Diggory Venn and Thomasin is intended to compensate for the unhappy drownings, then Hardy was unsuccessful on this count, but in a few hasty sketches, he is making the simple yet important point, "life goes on".</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Now I've started thinking about it, I've decided it's quite erroneous to think of suicide and/or marriage as a good ending for a story. They're much better </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">beginnings</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. Best to end with a beginning, and begin with an ending. Andy bought </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Romeo and Juliet</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> from Cowra Vinnies, so I have another suicide ending up ahead to examine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Some lovely lines from </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Return</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Of The Native</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Rejected suitors take to roaming as naturally as unhived bees.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Wildeve meets his old flame Eustacia, after he has affianced himself to Thomasin. He replies to Eustacia, who has been trying to figure out whether he still cares for her:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I care a little, but not enough to break my rest,' replied the young man languidly. 'No, all that's past. I find there are two flowers where I thought there was only one. Perhaps there are three, or four, or any number as good as the first."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Later, Eustacia manages to attract Wildeve away from Thomasin, but then loses interest in him:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of a dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Of Clym Yeobright and his mother:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The love between the young man and his mother was strangely invisible. Of love it may be said, the less earthly, the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful. It was so with these. Has conversations between them been overheard, people would have said, "How cold they are to each other!"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Yeobright says to Eustacia: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"But the more I see of life the more I do perceive that there is nothing particularly great in its greatest walks, and therefore nothing particularly small in mine of furze-cutting. If I feel that the greatest blessings vouchsafed to us are not very valuable, how can I feel it to be any great hardship when they are taken away? So I sing to pass the time."</span></span></div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-53706132912506336202012-02-01T19:43:00.000-08:002012-05-24T18:45:43.910-07:00Gillian Mears<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">February, 2012: I first read Gillian Mears's work about twenty years ago - her short stories, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Fine Flour</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1990), and novel </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Mint Lawn </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1991). I loved her cool, clear honesty. I haven't reread those books, though they're both still cherished in my shelf. I'm afraid now I'd find them too close to what I call "depresso fiction", where getting to the heart of the matter, the truth of something, always yields depressing nihilism; and where if you think something is sweet and happy, you're soon proven to be deluding yourself. But Mumma is no fan of depresso fiction, and when she was a third of the way through </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (2011), she told me it was wonderful, so I took it to Cowra, to get me through the hot days where all I can do is lie on the floor and read.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I said to a friend, "I liked </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> as a reader, but as a writer, I had a few problems with it." I don't know if I can really split myself in two like that; what I was really expressing to Clare was ambivalence. I loved the mise-en-scène of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> - '30s-ish rural Australia, centring around the show-jumping scene. I was surprised and delighted that a 'serious' writer like Mears would take the trouble to create a world so picturesque and appealing. This was certainly not depresso fiction. Moreover, there was a love story! A love story between two beautiful, young, champion show-jumpers. This classic, potentially cliquéed material was being handled by a writer who had not lost any of her clarity and honesty, but seemed less interested in hunting down 'harsh reality'. There was still a lot of dirt in the cracks of the chocolate-box imagery - in the first pages of the book, our tough little heroine, Noah, secretly gives birth to a child fathered by her old uncle. There's mud, poverty and cracked hands, as well as ribbons and flying horses. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Thinking about it now, and about how, like Mumma, I loved it in the beginning, and felt really let down by it at the end, I can see that at some point, the novel loses hope. At the beginning, the reader has reason to believe life will be kind to poor Noah, and despite her rough start, she'll pull through and be happy, by dint of her exceptional pluck and determination. That's when the judge hits a button that produces some dreadful noise - WRONG! Her beautiful young husband becomes impotent, the first symptom of a gradual creeping paralysis that kills him. Noah's hard-won happiness and stability starts to unravel in every possible way, until she ends up committing suicide with one last reckless jump. Nihilism - have faith in nothing! expect nothing! - is still the message. I think of Wordsworth, "Fear that kills, hope that is unwilling to be fed." If you look for nothing, you'll find it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Like a lot of work these days, though its heart is empty, its finish is perfect. Mears's writing is refined, pared-back and beautiful, her style and tone flawlessly consistent. This is no rough-and-ready novel, with eye-sores and jarring clunks. I actually have little objection to eye-sores and clunks; as I've said before, these are signs the writer is pushing his or her limits, groping for something out-of-reach. The jarring clunks, say, of Ruth Park's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Witch's Thorn</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, are the sound of the author making her way to her later novel, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Swords and Crowns and Rings</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, where she gets it all right: structure, poetry, and moral purpose. The style and tone of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">is perfect, but the structure isn't. It's always problematic, strangely flat, to end with the hero or heroine's suicide (Henry James's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Princess Casamassima </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">comes to mind). In </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, this problem is dealt with by presenting the reader with an epilogue, in which Noah's grown-up daughter revisits the site of the suicide. It's a case of unsatisfying added to unsatisfying. In some ways, the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">real </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> ending seemed to be the several pages of effusive acknowledgements - there was satisfaction to be found in the fact that writing this novel was a feat, and - hurrah! - Mears pulled it off. It was also satisfying, in the acknowledgements pages, to read Mears writing in a more natural voice. It makes me wonder: perfect finish, empty heart - does the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">personality</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> of the author, the author's own story, provide the content?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Sometime later</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">...I felt a bit remorseful for describing </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> as empty-hearted. I went on-line, thereby allowing the personality and story of Gillian Mears to influence me. I know there's a lot of love in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. But in what organ does hope and faith live? The most interesting fact I found was that </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is a near relation to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Yearling</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, which Mears has loved since childhood. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Yearling</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is an expanded folk tale, in my memory, an apocryphal story a grandfather might have told you one winter when you were snowed in. It's beautiful and perfect. After I read it, about ten years ago, I thought, "We knew, from the first moment it stepped onto the page, that the deer was going to have to die." I pondered this: why did I find the book so gripping, if I knew what was going to happen? It's the great theme of inevitabilities: the interest, and the lesson, is in the limitless and unpredictable ways in which people deal with inevitabilities. I think there's part of me that takes moral offence at the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Thelma and Louise,</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> glorious-release-from-the-trials-of-life suicide in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Foal's Bread</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. I don't regard Noah's suicide as an inevitability. I wish the author had found a way through for her.</span></span></div>
</div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-27803699569230324622012-01-01T23:35:00.000-08:002012-05-22T19:49:51.149-07:00Mikhail Bulgakov<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">January, 2012: I loved Mikhail Bulgakov's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Master and Margarita</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, so was keen to borrow </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Heart Of A Dog</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1925) when I saw it in my father's study. It starts from the point of view of a mangy dog roaming Moscow in search of food. A man gives him sausage and takes him to his luxurious apartment. The dog is overwhelmed to discover such kindness and generosity in the world. Of course, we know there </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">is</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> no such kindness in the world; the dog's new owner turns out to be a brilliant scientist, Phillip Phillipovich, who transplants the pituitary gland and testes of a dead criminal onto the dog. The dog turns into an uncouth and ugly man, who refuses to remain under the control of the scientist. The scientist and his household are almost driven mad by his creation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In writing the above summary, I'm trying to decode the story. I know it's about the danger of meddling with the natural order of things, and about everyone having an equal right to life - Sharikov, the man with the heart of a dog, is Phillipovich's inferior in every way, yet asserts his independence from his master, his right to get drunk, to have a girlfriend. But because I don't understand what it was like to be in the Soviet Union, the real point of this strange story eludes me. I enjoy it as a piece of crazy fun, but I don't learn much from it. Most Russian writers are very moral. I'm afraid Bulgakov would be disappointed by my literal and unsophisticated reading. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Sometime later...</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">After reflecting on my unilluminated take on </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Heart Of A Dog</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, I decided I was being lazy, so read a few bits and pieces of what other people have to say about it. Now I think the reason I feel something has eluded me is because satire is more effective the more you're familiar with what's being satirised. At a reading in 1925 of Bulgakov's new novel, his audience received a certain passage about galoshes being stolen in the communal hallway with "deafening laughter" - this was reported by a secret informer to the Soviet police (and more recently by James Meek in an introduction of a new edition). A reader who knows more about Bulgakov's world would undoubtedly recognise and laugh at detail all throughout the novel. </span></span></span></span><br />
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</div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-53306787402186428042012-01-01T23:29:00.000-08:002012-05-07T23:29:38.715-07:00D'Arcy Niland, Alice Munro, Kasey Chambers and W. Somerset Maugham<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">January, 2012: The books banked up at the end of last year - too much reading, not enough writing my 'Book of the Moment' commentary! I was writing the last draft of my novel, tentatively called </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Dust</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, and had very little writing-energy left over. So, draft all but finished, and a new year unrolling before me, I'm going to clean up last year in one fell swoop. The books of last year that will pass barely commented-upon are: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">D'Arcy Niland's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Big Smoke</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, a collection of short stories published in the 1950s. I can't give the exact date because I wasn't very impressed with the book and passed it on to Vinnies. [I am lazy when it comes to checking facts on the Google, but I rallied myself and found it was published in 1959.] Most of the stories are set in Sydney, and it's always interesting to read of your familiar old city in an earlier, exotic incarnation. Reading history enables you to spot the bits that still linger on, bits that you might otherwise just pass by. But Niland's brushstrokes are very careless and hasty, his colours squeezed straight from the standard-issue tubes; in the short story format, this equals cartoons and caricatures. In </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Shiralee</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, Niland's broad brushstrokes worked because we had a whole novel to see this archetypical character, Macauley, in various different scenarios. Subtleties - truths - gradually accumulated, almost despite him. That's the beauty of the novel - the gradual accumulation adding up to something that is expressible in no way other than several hundred pages.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Dance Of The Happy Shades</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1968), Alice Munro. One of my flatmates recommended this collection of short stories. Tony had seen Jonathan Franzen give a talk in which he had championed Alice Munro and Christina Stead. Stead is the most sophisticated novelist I've ever read; the reason her work has not been given the laurels it deserves is because it's too hard for most people to read. I'm not being snobby about this - I'm a well-practised and determined novel-reader, with the added advantage of a naturally long concentration span, and, moreover, it's my trade to read novels; someone who reads novels purely for pleasure would quickly get bogged down in Stead. I'd read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Dance Of The Happy Shades</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> when I was younger (and didn't bother to remember things, except which dress I'd worn when I last saw such-and-such boyfriend), so, on hearing of Munro being held up beside Stead, was curious to read these short stories again. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">When I was partway through the collection, Tony asked, "What do you think?" I said, "The writing is very feminine." It was a notable contrast, going from D'Arcy Niland's stories to Munro's. I have no preference between feminine and masculine writing - I just like good writing. And of course, some writers aren't particularly one or the other. Then I had to figure out what I meant by "feminine writing". Munro's main characters were frequently women leading confined, conventional, domestic lives, and privately thinking seditious thoughts. Her characters lacked the confidence, or the wherewithal, to act, to change the world they live in - the key is that </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">these stories</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> are the act, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">the author</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> makes herself into the protagonist. So the poor women left behind in their stories, where their interesting thoughts are smothered by their repressive neighbours, their dull husbands, the demands of their children, are given a glorious escape simply by a reader opening the pages of the book. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It's not only the domestic settings, and the small scale of the drama (e.g. woman plucks up courage to tell her husband that she is renting a room to write in, but by the end of the story is hounded out of it by bothersome landlord), but also the subtle truths, the fine detail and observation, that make these stories (to me) 'feminine'. Jane Austen, the self-described miniaturist - her stories written on "two inches of ivory" with "a fine brush" - is the obvious example of a 'feminine writer'. I think Austen was throwing us a decoy (which we have all eagerly latched onto) when she said that about herself; she was probably trying to make her occupation and success more acceptable, less threateningly revolutionary, to her milieu; for the surprising thing about Austen is that, just like other famous writers of her time, her novels are rollickingly plot-driven. Munro's writing fits Austen's description better; these stories have the feel of a private correspondence, or beautifully-crafted entries from a diary. I don't mean to belittle them by saying that - what's wrong with 'little'? This collection was her first; I'm curious to know whether the characters in her later work have the same timidity and voicelessness, and whether there is still the theme of trying to pluck up the courage to bring the inner self to the outer.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Little Bird</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (2011) Kasey Chambers. I'm a Kasey Chambers fan, but my wallet always seems to get hopelessly lost in my bag when it comes to proving my fandom at the merch table. Not so my friend and fellow-fan, Sophie. When we saw Kasey launch her memoir in Leichhardt, Sophie bought a copy, and I borrowed it soon after. It was a feel-good breakfast-time read for a week or two, with lots of photos and colourful anecdotes; the welcoming openness that is the signature tone of a Kasey show transfers perfectly to the page. Of course, it's a piece of marketing, and she's too young to be writing her memoirs, and she's rather recklessly robbing her stage-banter of its freshness by putting it down in print - she's going to start telling the story of her and Worm kissing at a party, and the audience is going to say, "Yeah, yeah, we know that one, we've read the book." But what's really worthwhile about the book is its moral content, and Kasey's depiction of how she and her extended family (including divorced parents, step-parents, half-siblings, children to two different men, an ex-husband, a new husband, the ex-husband's new wife etc.) find their way through their network of relationships. She has probably idealised it for publication, and there are undoubtedly tensions and problems that are too private even for Kasey to discuss, but I don't care - I think our world needs new standards, and new ideals for dealing with complex families. She is a great role-model for inclusivity. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I gave the book back to Sophie, so I can't quote from it verbatim, but at one point Kasey wrote that when her parents broke up after about twenty years of marriage, at first things were a bit acrimonious. I thought, "Oh, the usual sorry situation." Then she went on, "So it was really great to see them become friends again after a few months." A few months! I was impressed. Acrimony between people who once loved each other enough to have children should be frowned upon, or maybe pitied - it shouldn't be accepted as the decent and proper reaction to a relationship coming to an end.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The World Over Vol II</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1952) W. Somerset Maugham. Somerset Maugham has, it seemed, combed the world to find people in unexpected places tangled up in unexpected relationships. His short stories have the feel of anecdotes polished up over a few dinner parties before being written down - what an invaluable guest he would have been! Many good writers are first and foremost good conversationalists. I read Somerset Maugham for his warm and interesting company, rather than to worship at the altar of his craftsmanship.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Here's a passage I dog-eared. The dialogue is between a Somerset Maugham-type character and a man, Featherstone, he met in Malaya. Featherstone borrows </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Life of Byron</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> from W.S.M., and returns it the next morning, saying:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"What do you think is the real truth of that story about him and his sister?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Augusta Leigh? I don't know very much about it. I've never read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Astarte</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Do you suppose they were really in love with each other?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I suppose so. Isn't it generally believed that she was the only woman he ever genuinely loved?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Can you understand it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I can't really. It doesn't particularly shock me. It just seems to me very unnatural. Perhaps 'unnatural' isn't the right word. It's incomprehensible to me. I can't throw myself into the state of feeling where such a thing seems possible. You know, that's how a writer gets to know the people he writes about, by standing himself in their shoes and feeling with their hearts."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I knew I did not make myself very clear, but I was trying to describe a sensation, an action of the subconscious, which from experience was perfectly familiar to me, but which no words I knew could precisely indicate.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Not only do I like this simple description of what a writer does, and the modest qualification that follows, but this excerpt also shows his willingness to attempt to comprehend anything, even romantic love between a brother and sister. He knows that comprehension of human life comes by gathering up the fine details, the specifics, which is what he presents to his readers.</span></span></div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-35403815519853156532011-12-01T18:31:00.000-08:002011-12-28T18:32:02.776-08:00Gustave Flaubert<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">December, 2011: In a desperate panic to leave The Royal Hotel in Carcoar, I accidentally left behind my powdered goats' milk and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Folklore Of The Australian Railwaymen</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, a book of my grandfather's that I've been reading on and off for a year. I was sorry to lose* my book, but if that was the price I had to pay to escape the clutches of the two-bottles-down-the-gullet publican and his dark and empty ("I cleared out the riff-raff - I had to go to court a few times to do it") pub, so be it. So I arrived at Cowra bookless, but glad to be alive and free. I picked </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Madame Bovary</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1857), by Gustave Flaubert, off the shelves.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I've read it before, in that shadowy time between being a child and being the mature, worldly, sophisticated adult I am today (but perhaps wasn't before yesterday). I remember thinking it was cold and spiteful; I remember my brother, John, saying, "People accused Flaubert of being cold, so he wrote four short stories to prove that he could write with heart." Now that I think about it, I don't know why I wanted to read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Madame Bovary </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">again. It is still cold and spiteful. Flaubert spends a whole novel, and (according to the introduction), five years of his life, crafting a beautifully-finished novel about characters who are either stupid, boring and rather sweet (Monsieur Bovary), or else not stupid enough to be sweet (Madame). If his characters are not utterly stupid, then they spend their superfluity of mental resources on trying to serve their own sensual, materialistic, narrow interests. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As I read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Madame Bovary</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, I kept complaining about it. Naturally the advice was, "Stop reading it!" Errol, in his shadowy youth, had abandoned it halfway through. No one said, "Oh, persevere, it's wonderful." Any doubt I had about Flaubert's attitude towards his characters ("Maybe he's going to redeem them?"), especially his attitude to Madame, is swept away by what he does to her. He has her using her wiles with the young Justin (who is seemingly the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">true </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">romantic hero of the novel, or rather, of a different novel; I wonder - is Justin actually Flaubert?) to gain access to the chemist's supply-room. She grabs a handful of arsenic and stuffs it into her mouth. Flaubert makes her die in gruesome detail over ten pages. Her beauty putrefies. Here's a soupçon:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Soon she was vomiting blood. Her lips were drawn tighter. Her limbs were rigid, her body covered in brown patches, and her pulse raced away beneath your fingers like a taut thread, like a harp string just before it breaks.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The odd thing was that by the end of the novel, I despised Madame as much as Flaubert does, and didn't mind reading about her dreadful comeuppance. But why - why write a book about it? The way I see it is that we can find dispiriting ugliness just by walking out the door and mixing for a few minutes with our fellows. Books and art help me to find, out of all the ugliness, the beauty of life. So what was Flaubert doing - was he making himself and his craft the beautiful thing, set off by the foil of the stupid provincials? Or did he find something positive in his novel, something that eludes me? The detail is beautiful, the writing is beautiful. But to me, he, heartless, is even-worse-than-completely-stupid, just like his characters. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Obviously, I am puzzled by this book. I am puzzled about why it has survived for a hundred-and-fifty years. Most books that survive are written with great love. Maybe Flaubert's has survived because </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Madame Bovary</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> appeals to our worst traits (when it comes to reading, which is a pretty harmless activity) - our love of petty, ghastly, sordid detail, our desire to put everyone else down in order to feel our own superiority, our ability to be entertained by someone else's miserable downfall. It is a moral tale, after all. Maybe every reader who makes it through to the end has failed Flaubert's moral test.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">*Mumma, driving back to Sydney with a car-load of native Christmas trees, bravely stopped by the Royal and rescued </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Folklore</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. </span></div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-72629054350104382602011-10-01T23:56:00.000-07:002012-02-05T18:58:52.212-08:00Francis Ratcliffe<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">October, 2011: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Flying Fox, Drifting Sand </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1938), by Francis Ratcliffe, has turned out to be a book I'm still talking and thinking about, months after having read it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I've puzzled over Australia and my relationship to it since I was a child. When I was 19 or 20, I wrote, for a short film: "I really love this country - not a motherland to me, but my husband-country." There's something particularly intense about optional love, chosen love, an elective affinity - I can't afford to be complacent about my love for Australia, for there's the danger that, if I stray, I might go and fall in love with another country. There's also the danger that Australia might prove, after all, to have no love to spare for me. More from that short film: "I know this place, I want to know this place, I want to be inseparable from this place." This passion of mine has endured. Filling in a questionnaire for the Telstra Road To Tamworth a couple of years ago, in the 'Biggest Influence?' space, I answered: "Australia. I've been eating, drinking, breathing, listening to, looking at and thinking about it all my life - I am made out of it."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Few of us feel we really belong here; rather, we long to belong. Francis Ratcliffe was a young English biologist commissioned in the early '30s to come to Australia and, first, to conduct a survey of the flying fox colonies that lived along the east coast of Australia; later, a survey of the 'desertification' of South Australia and western N.S.W. The times being what they were, these surveys were done not for the protection of the flying-foxes or the landscape, but of primary industry - fruit growers and graziers. Ratcliffe was exactly the type - young, adventurous, curious, full of his own sense of purpose - who had been coming to Australia for more than a century, ostensibly to make his reputation, to 'get ahead' by means of pillaging and plundering (hundreds, or even thousands, of flying foxes were shot and boiled down in the making of this book) all in the name of progress. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Australia attracts do-ers and dreamers alike, and often one turns out to be the other. Ratcliffe, the do-er, wrote up his surveys on flying foxes and drifting sands; but then Ratcliffe the dreamer wrote this book, which is one of the most poetic responses to Australian landscape, and the people who live in it, that I've ever read. Ratcliffe is a biologist, not a poet; he doesn't conjure up the poetry from inside himself - he, with his keen eyes, notes it down as it appears before him. His responses have that vivid clarity, or purity, of senses open wide with surprise, even shock. When he came to Australia, it had not crossed his mind that he might fall in love with it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"The power of a willy-willy is amazing. I know, because I have been in the middle of one. It was just such a day as this - scorching and still; and I had been helping a man put up a windmill. We were resting from our labours, and the billy was on the boil. I had been reading the instructions about the oiling of the mill, and was holding the printed folder in my hand. I remember my companion had just made the delightful statement that he hated shaving at that time of year, because you felt every one of the six legs of the flies which walked over your face, when I noticed that the foliage of some trees about fifty yards away suddenly began to dance and toss in a most unnatural fashion. I simply could not understand it; for, as I say, there was not a breath of wind. The branches heaved more and more wildly and a cloud of dust rose up between the trunks and started to move in our direction. I hardly had time to pull my hat over my face before the willy-willy hit us. Some seconds of mad confusion followed; and when I deemed it safe to open my eyes, the dust column was a hundred yards away. In it was entangled most of the litter which had been lying about from the unpacking of the windmill parts; while the lubrication brochure, which had slipped out of my hand when I grabbed my hat, was floating like a little white butterfly high up in the sky. A pair of eagles, which had been circling overhead for the last half-hour, was apparently so smitten with curiosity that they swung over to investigate it."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It's the sort of writing that I love - like Felix Bartlett's, Richard Henry Dana's, and Albert Gaston's (the latter wrote a great account of his time on the Coolgardie goldfields), because I can trust it. They are observers who can also convey; they are not artfully 'making things up' - they are telling me, to the best of their ability, 'what happened'. I seek this in fiction, too. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Ratcliffe's observations of people are equally trustworthy. So many people made an impression on him, it's inadequate for me to cite one or two. Please just read the book! I think about this passage, especially "the saddest-faced girl":</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"A man wise and experienced in bush travel once gave me counsel as follows: 'If you want the best directions on a strange road, get them from a woman. I don't know why it is - whether they don't credit you with any intelligence, or whether they have the imagination to realise how useful it is for a stranger to have a list of signs and details to let him know that he is on the right track...'</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I remembered this advice when it became perfectly clear that the rather self-satisfied gentleman, who was trying to give us directions for a road which (as it subsequently turned out) he had not travelled upon for nearly twenty years, preferred to send us on our way with inadequate and inaccurate information rather than lose face by asking the advice of his family...So I sought out the womenfolk, while the other two listened politely to the lord and master. From one of the saddest-faced girls I have ever seen, I obtained an astonishingly detailed and accurate map. It was drawn on the lid of a cardboard box; and I kept it for some time as a memento and exhibit. Later, in a fit of depression, I threw it away, wishing to wipe out all my memories of a place which I thought was a little bit of hell on earth."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">His survey of people makes me think that, in Australia, human-animals grow like the flora and fauna - very diverse, and peculiarly adapted (by isolation, by extreme conditions) to the spot where they live. Australia is not a place that gives birth to cultural movements, but to exceptional individuals (by exceptional, maybe I mean </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">weird</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">), who often disappear without discernible trace. My unfounded belief is that these individuals - the people who loved Australia at the cost of their lives! - have a great influence on the way we live. Australia is dangerous, and deep-down, we all know it. We are safer around the outskirts, in the cities, all huddling together...saf</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">er</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, but not entirely safe.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">For his second commission, Ratcliffe drives along the Birdsville Track. It's affecting to read of a scientist getting a case of the heebie-jeebies (more so than reading of a poet getting them - poets go out of their way</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">to get them):</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"We arrived at the main channel of Cooper's Creek in a weird three-quarters light, with the western sky shining a luminous green. As we dropped down from the stony slopes to the flat bed of silt, a chill fear took hold of me. The dry bed of that dead river, which rose in the plains of inland Queensland, and vanished in the salt-pans of Lake Eyre without knowing the sea, was the most eerie and haunted spots I have ever visited. Moreover, it was haunted by no friendly and comprehensible ghosts, but by the spirits of broken tribes which died misunderstood.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"For mile after mile we drove over the smooth grey silt, through a forest of dead and dying coolebah trees. It was an awful scene, so colourless, so utterly unfriendly as to be almost menacing. I peered ahead through the crowded trunks, hoping every minute to catch the faint pale gleam of sandhills, which would mean that we had reached the north bank of the channel."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Looking back on it [his trip along the Birdsville Track] now, little but the interest and humour remain. The uneasiness, which almost overpowered me at times, has faded. It has faded, but not disappeared. I can never think of the Cooper and the Diamantina as mere rivers. They have spirits of their own, which are not friendly to man."</span></span></div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-72324979353517661792011-09-01T23:53:00.000-07:002012-02-05T19:06:16.753-08:00Felix Bartlett<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">September, 2011: I was in Cowra for the launch of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Bush Doctor (The Memoirs of Dr. Felix P. Bartlett)</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, edited by two of Felix Barlett's descendants, Jane Caiger-Smith and Michael Bartlett. I bought a copy, and after </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude The Obscure</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, felt too wrung-out to start on another novel. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Bush Doctor</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> was a good antidote to </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. Bartlett was born in Brixham, England, in 1855, and spent nearly twenty years in Cowra as the local doctor. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This was the prime of his life. I think people often look back on their lives and see one passage of it as particularly vivid - story-worthy! The rest of their life looks more ordinary, less exceptional, but this one period stands out, made of an different substance. By chance, I'm concurrently reading Francis Ratcliffe's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Flying Fox, Drifting Sand</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (but I haven't finished it yet so will leave it uncommented-upon), another young Englishman whose vivid passage took place in Australia. It's not just that this is the 'exotic' passage in their lives; another person could have come to Australia, or gone to India or Africa, and gathered just a few dull memories. It's not what they did or where they went - it's the way they experienced it. Sometimes you experience things as though you are freshly sharpened hour-by-hour. Sometimes you are blunt for months, years, on end, hardly grazing the world as you pass through it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Bartlett found his time in Cowra stimulating; he was taxed to the limits of his resources, trying to keep everyone in the district alive. Saving people's lives must give you a sense of satisfaction, purpose, and of your own almost super-human strength. I felt envious, reading about Bartlett's life; being, as I am, a writer who writes things that might never be read, I often lack a sense of purpose, and am more likely to feel non-existent, or unreal, than super-human. Bartlett is a real man; I am one of those semi-children, suspended in development, or maturity - an artist (why would anyone want to be one?, I have been asking myself in the past few years). Yet even a real man like Bartlett succumbed, in the end, to making a story out of his real life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And I'm grateful that he did! My favourite part of his memoirs is titled 'Cowra: Medical Matters'. His sub-headings include 'Sandy Blight', 'Accidents', 'Cancer', 'The Typhoid Epidemic of 1885', 'Hydatids'; I also liked 'Cowra: The Town', with the tantalising sub-headings that would keep me reading into the night, 'The Madmen', 'The Drink', 'The Carcoar Murders', 'The Mouse Plague'. Perhaps because he was a doctor, he writes in graphic and intimate detail - after all, he was the medical student who didn't faint when his professor chopped off part of a patient's face and "the blood began to fly in arterial spurts. Then came another incision through the upper lip and along the side of the nose nearly to the eye and Timothy's face was again sprayed with blood." Bartlett's description of this operation covers a whole, long paragraph. He ends with, "It was by far the most blood-thirsty fracas that I have ever seen, but as for feeling faint or even pale, it had no effect on me." What a fearless observer for us readers to have on their side! </span></span></div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-59495136912857535152011-09-01T23:50:00.000-07:002011-09-22T23:51:16.830-07:00Thomas Hardy<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">September, 2011: Mumma recently read Thomas Hardy's last novel, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude The Obscure</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1895), and recommended it. A recommendation from Sally is enough to put a book on my list, but her comment, "It's very anti-marriage," put it right at the very top of my list. I said, "Can I borrow it now?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude the Obscure</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is a cry for understanding, a cry of reason - and a fading hope that anyone will hear in time. "Someone might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does..." Naturally enough, it ends with death and despair. This is a very real purpose of writing - that it can be a communion, of writer and reader, from beyond the grave. And it </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">does</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> actually improve the writer's immediate life, and alleviate his or her sense of profound, Cassandra-esque loneliness, to salt away these thoughts and ideas for a future reader. When you write a letter to a friend, for example, you feel companionship - writing a letter can feel like a social interaction. If you happened - heaven forfend! - to get run over by a truck on your way back from your stroll to the post-box, this wouldn't nullify the companionship that you felt while writing the letter. This is how I (an atheist) console myself when reading the work of writers like Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Eve Langley, Isabelle Eberhardt - it is worth something that they are appreciated after they've died. And maybe in some ways they all, like Langley, "prefer to work in the lonely silence of the unknown winter." Otherwise the tragedy of their lives is heavy - that they were sane, clear-eyed people, who, like Sue of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, "saw all </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">my </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">superstitions as cobwebs that [they] could brush away with a word"; but who were treated as mad or aberrant or ever - for shame! - obscene.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"As for Sue and me when we were at our own best, long ago - when our minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless - the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude The Obscure</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is full of ideas. It is principally a illustration of the damage caused by marriage. It is also a case for making education freely available to those who really want it (as opposed to mandatory for all, as it is in our "qualification essential" society). Jude grows up an orphan in a small, muddy hollow in Wessex, and develops an ambition to go to university at the far-off, glittering city of Christminster. He prepares himself by learning Latin and Greek from a couple of old, secondhand grammars, while delivering bread for his great-aunt's bakery.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But how to live in that city? At present he had no income at all. He had no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on which he could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour which might spread out over many years.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">What was required by most citizens? Food, clothing and shelter. An income from any work in preparing the first would be too meagre; for making the second, he felt a distaste; the preparation of the third he inclined to. They built in a city; therefore he would learn to build.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is the soundest career plan I've ever read - what is required by most citizens? Hardly a line of reasoning that would lead to the conclusion: "I know, I'll design apps for mobile phones." </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">His ambitions are thwarted when a buxom young woman with dimples and abundant tresses (the first of which turns out to be studied, the second detachable and made of horse-hair) seduces him, then, following the advice of a girlfriend, pretends to be pregnant in order to make him marry her. Jude, being serious and horourable, or "such an old slow coach", marries Arabella. This soon turns out to have been a mistake. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a life-long companionship tolerable.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This simply-worded sentence sums up the core of my own disbelief in marriage. Most of us want to find someone with whom we have these affinities, and getting married isn't proof that you've found him or her. In fact, if you're lucky enough to find him or her, marriage is completely superfluous. Even </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">being together</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is superfluous, as </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> points out. There are some affinities that endure to the end. Marriage - and divorce - are irrelevant to these affinities.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I won't go on describing what happens over the next four-hundred pages. For my own benefit, I will transcribe a few bits and pieces that appealed to me:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome with men because she was childishly ignorant of that side of their nature which wore out women's hearts and lives.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude, in a desperate bid not to give up his dream of going to university, sends letters to several heads of colleges in Christminster describing his situation and asking them for advice. Only one writes back:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sir, - I have read your letter with interest, and, judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude goes out on the town and on the way back to his rooms, he chose:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"...a circuitous route homeward to pass the gates of the College whose Head had just sent him the note.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his pocket the lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote along the wall:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> - Job, XII 3.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Sue says that universities ought to exist for people like him. At the end of the novel, she says:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"</span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Your worldly failure, if you have failed, is to your credit rather than to your blame. Remember that the best and the greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...'Charity seeketh not her own.'"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The dialogue between Sue and Jude is natural, idiomatic, idiosyncratic, and conveys the depth of their affinity. Here they are on their way to the church to try to get married (having obtained divorces from their respective spouses), and both are having grave doubts about the act:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"We are horribly sensitive; that's really what's the matter with us, Sue!" he declared.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I fancy more are like us than we think!"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Well, I don't know. The intention of the contract is good, and right for many, no doubt; but in our case it might defeat its own ends because we are the queer sort of people we are - folk in whom domestic ties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sue still held that there was not much queer or exceptional in them: that all were so. "Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are a little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, a hundred, years, the descendants of these two [the ones ahead of them at the altar] will act and feel worse than we. They will see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as '...shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied...' and will be afraid to reproduce them."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"What a terrible line of poetry!...though I have felt it myself about my fellow creatures, at morbid times."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Sue finds her first husband, Phillotson, who is twenty years older than her, so physically repugnant that she shrinks from him when he tries to give her a kiss on the cheek, and soon after their marriage moves into a separate bedroom. One night, after their in-house separation, he absentmindedly goes into her room instead of his. She wakes to find him undressed and about to get into bed with her, and she jumps out the window, falling a storey or two. Phillotson is heroic, in his way, and this incident convinces him that he has to let her go. Later, Sue finds out that Jude and Arabella spent a night together:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Your story was that you had met as estranged people, who were not husband and wife at all in Heaven's sight - not that you had made it up with her."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"We didn't make it up," he said sadly. "I can't explain, Sue."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"You've been false to me; you, my last hope! And I shall never forget it, never!"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"But by your own wish, dear Sue, we are only to be friends, not lovers! It is so very inconsistent of you to-"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Friends can be jealous!"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Sue concludes the argument by saying:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"O it was treacherous of you to have her again! </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">jumped out of the window!"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And a bit later:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"O don't you </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">understand</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> my feeling! </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Why </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">don't you! Why are you so gross! </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> jumped out of the window!"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Jumped out of the window?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I can't explain!"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I read, in a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Good Weekend</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> column, the trite phrase "about as funny as Thomas Hardy", i.e. not at all. It's true that </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Jude The Obscure</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> left me convinced of the cruelty of the world - specifically, of groups of people towards anyone who differs from them. And it paints being alive as a grinding-down process, in which all hopes, dreams, hearts etc. are slowly worn away. But against this harsh backdrop, Jude and Sue's thoughts and feelings are beautiful and interesting (and sometimes funny); thoughts and feelings make life worth living. Jude describes Sue as, "a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a diamond." </span></span></div>
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lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-35375567978521490642011-08-01T20:11:00.000-07:002011-09-20T20:14:21.661-07:00Ruth Park<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">August, 2011: In a romantic mood, I bought Ruth Park's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Witch's Thorn</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> and D'Arcy Niland's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Big Smoke</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> from Sappho's Books, thereby reuniting the two lovers as they bumped along together in my bag. Helen and I looked up Park and Niland on the Google - they are a beautiful couple:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And a line in the bio of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Witch's Thorn</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> makes me almost sigh with envy: "...after her marriage to the author D'Arcy Niland, [she] roamed around the outback with him doing a variety of jobs, all of which has provided rich source material for her writing." </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Witch's Thorn</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is Park's third novel, and I didn't dog-ear any pages - her writing, in these early novels, is ungainly. She doesn't seem to have lingered over her sentences, carefully crafting them, nor her characters; her eye is on the plot and structure, and on getting her main point across. This gives </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Witch's Thorn</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> a workmanlike feel, which I thoroughly approve of. I walk away from Park's novels with new ideas in my mind; whereas from an unstructured writer like Eve Langley, I walk away with a feeling that the author has impressed her personality upon me. I value both experiences, but the latter is more limited. Inevitably I want more breadth than is offered by one personality, however fascinating.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Once I'd finished </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Witch's Thorn</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, I suddenly saw how planned and plotted the whole novel was; while I was immersed in it, the story had felt pretty natural and organic, and only two or three times had I felt a clunk underneath me as the story moved to the next gear. Park examines the social strata of a rural town in New Zealand, using a parentless (if not exactly orphaned) child, Bethell, as the tool with which to test the values of five different households, starting from the top - the respectable, church-going shop-keeper and his wife, who grudgingly accept charge of their niece - and one-by-one working down through the layers, as Bethell is rejected and failed by everyone in the town, even the nice old priest, and even the reformed prostitute with a dozen healthy children and a heart of gold. Finally, Bethell is rescued from the brink of death by the ones well beyond the pale of the conservative town - a Maori family, who gladly sacrifices, for Bethell's sake, the skerrick of respectability and social acceptance that they have garnered over the years.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Once again, Park's boldness is notable. I suspect that Park and Niland were a good influence on each other in this respect, encouraging each other not to shy away from the shadowy corners of society. Such as, in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Shiralee</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, the part where Macauley has sex with an Aboriginal maid; he despises himself and her for doing it, and most callously gives her money when he leaves the property, thereby turning their encounter into a base transaction (while she had put a red ribbon in her hair, and probably had a big crush on him).</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Witch's Thorn</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, there's a similarly dirty, degraded passage: Johnny Gow hates his downtrodden wife, Ella, who is debilitated by all the children she has borne, including a new baby about a week ago. They are driving back from the funeral of the woman he loved:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"</span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If I had any guts I'd murder you. But I haven't. I haven't the nerve to buck the rope, even for you. There's only one way to get rid of you, Ella."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">She stared at him, terrified.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Get out," he ordered.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"No, Johnny," she quavered. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">He threw the reins over the pony's head and leapt to the ground. With fierce, hating energy he dragged his wife out of the trap. Her limp, flabby body both repelled and frenzied him.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Johnny," she moaned, "give me a little time. Just a little while. I'll do anything if only you'll leave me alone for a while."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">He dragged her after him over the rough ground to the lonely paddock with the broom hedge spiking along the ridge.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Johnny, I 'll die if I have another one so soon. Think of the children. What would happen to them? Oh. Johnny, please, please."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">He began to laugh. She felt his body rumbling with mirth.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Men have been murdering their wives this way for centuries," he said softly and gently. "And it's all so nice and legal, too."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Park points the torch at numerous domestic taboos - Bethell's respectable cousin tries to rape her, and Bethell is blamed. Her uncle has an inappropriate attachment to one of his daughters - there's a repulsive scene where the daughter has to give her father a head-rub. Bethell's nicest aunt becomes a prostitute after being widowed with eight young children. And Bethell herself is illegitimate, her mother having had an affair with the married Johnny Gow. Johnny Gow not only rapes his wife, but beats her regularly, too. Johnny and his wife both beat Bethell. And when I remind myself, "This is a society that stoned Eve Langley for wearing trousers!", I really admire Park for her fearless crusade against hypocrisy and social cruelty. And although I get a bit irritated by her idealism of the characters at the outer edges of society - they're all so cheerful! as though they lack the depth to feel things such as existential crises or self-doubts - perhaps if I were living in '40s or '50s New Zealand, I would feel the same disgust with the inner-circle, with the ones with the power to change the rules.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"My old daddy had some funny Scots ideas," said Lachie Gow. "He used to tell me about a thorn tree that the Highlanders believed in. When it pricked, it poisoned. It was a witch's thorn. And whoever it pricked could pass on the poison to someone else, just with a touch. He believed in that thorn, my old man."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I never heard of it growing around here," said Mrs Hush, puzzled.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">He tried again. "It's just a story, don't you see? But it means that one bad action influences everyone else. My brother Johnny loved your sister when he shouldn't have, and look what came out of that, ruined lives and changed lives, all through this town and out of it, too, for all I know, for who knows how many people Queenie met and altered in some way? [He cites some more examples]...It's all mixed up in some way, and there's no getting away from it."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Fascinated and awed, Bethell held up her hands in the dusk, examining them minutely.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I haven't been pricked by the thorn. Mr. Wi hasn't. Hoot Gibson hasn't. But perhaps we will be someday."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The mystery, and the fear of the mystery, prickled her skin, and she crept out of the grass and ran like a hare for the light and the warmth and crowded companionship of the house.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It's a passage that isn't as straightforward as it first seems. Considering that Park, in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Swords And Crowns And Rings</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, wrote, "She had accepted that no one could come into another's life without consequences. Jackie had taught her that. She would not want him to feel guilt for anything in her life", I'm not so sure that Park is saying that being pricked by the witch's thorn is a bad thing. Maybe she is saying that being altered by life's experiences and encounters, even to the extent of being poisoned by them, is the price we pay for being alive, just as losing innocence is the price we pay for knowing more. We can't keep ourselves intact.</span></span></div>
lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-65142632383058795942011-08-01T19:52:00.000-07:002011-11-04T17:59:55.034-07:00D'Arcy Niland<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">August, 2011: I went to Cowra with no book, so had the pleasure of picking out one from my grandparents' shelves. As I had just been reading about Ruth Park, and the Australian novelist for whom she was leaving New Zealand, I chose </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Shiralee </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">(1955), by D'Arcy Niland. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I don't have </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Shiralee</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> here with me, so I have to write about it from memory, which is probably a good thing (seeing as I presently have a back-log of 'Books Of The Moment' to write about). It's a story about a freedom-loving swagman/itinerant worker, Macauley, who unexpectedly gets lumped with his 4-year-old daughter, Buster. He is unwilling to change his ways; the story follows his gradual compromising, and the increase of happiness that comes to him in exchange for taking on the burden, or shiralee (another name for a swag), of a child. It's a simple, archetypal story about 'freedom versus attachment' - themes that I, for one, never tire of puzzling over - but it is made unique by the voice it gives to Macauley. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Macauley is an ultra-masculine man, who expresses himself by action, not words, and is therefore a difficult subject to make the bearer of a written story. These are men who frequently appear in stories (or more often, films) as the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">object</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> rather than the subject; they are useful protagonists, as they so readily </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">do</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> things, and cause plot to advance, but few novel-readers or movie-goers would identify with them, would expect to be guided through a story by one of them. The people who would identify with them aren't often, I'm afraid, reading novels. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Ethan</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Frome</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> has a similarly inarticulate main-man, but I reckon Niland does it better than Wharton. Niland shows the reader Macauley's thought-process, in all its rough, simple language and broad strokes, in its lack of detail, in its cruelty and every-man-for-himselfishness, and yet without leaving Macauley looking like a brutish Neanderthal or a lump of stone. As an inveterate lover of this type of man, it was a great insight for me to read of Macauley's thoughts and feelings - so different to mine! So impossible for me ever to understand! </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">One passage I partially remember is when he is taking shelter from a downpour under a bridge, and thinking about the woman who served him in a bakery. He is tormented with sexual frustration, and finally thinks (to paraphrase), "Leave it at that: he was a man, he wanted a woman. Leave it at that."*</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A passage that made me "well up" was when he meets up with a crazy old fellow with a few verbal tics, who nevertheless understands Macauley's type and gives him some advice, which will sound hackneyed when I put it down here without a context, and without Niland's straightforward language: it's all very well to keep on the move, but isn't this almost an act of despair, rather than an exercising of your freedom? Isn't it because there's nowhere you want to be, nothing you want to be doing, isn't it a fleeing from, rather than an aspiring to? Instead, find something you like and stick to it! (Sorry, D'Arcy Niland, to Musak your beautifully-couched sentiment.) Macauley reacts to this piece of advice not by moving into a little cottage and becoming a potato farmer - Niland never sacrifices his man for the sake of a moral - but by investing in an ancient horse and cart, and otherwise keeping up his itinerant ways. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Another thing that I loved about </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Shiralee</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> was its lack of materialism. Macauley doesn't have a tent - he has a bit of tarpaulin. He doesn't have special walking boots. He doesn't have a pram for Buster, or one of those baby-backpacks. He makes her walk. And when she starts to fall asleep walking, he picks her up and carries her. It's good for us - we live in a time of great dependency - to read something that reminds us that all we need to live is our body. We don't need equipment, a licence, or to have done a course. We don't actually need money. We certainly don't need mobile reception!</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">*In Cowra with my grandfather's bookshelf and</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">my computer. I feel the obligation to transcribe the passages as they are, putting my paraphrasing to shame. Here's the bit about sexual frustration:</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">He twisted his hands with tension, but it was going from him, and he was feeling easier, and in a little while he was all right, quiet and reasoning. He took a look at himself and he stood by what he saw.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I'm a man, he thought. And I want a woman. That's straight. I wouldn't deny it before God himself. If I didn't want one I'd start to think there was something the matter with me. I want a woman all right. Leave it at that. For all the good it is thinking about it, I might as well be docked. Leave that as it is, too. I don't have to go on like a pimply-faced whore-chaser, do I?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Here's the conversation between Mac and Desmond, the philosophical crackpot:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Desmond suddenly said to him, "Do you know where you're going?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Going?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I don't mean going away tomorrow, or the day after, and so on. I mean do you know where your life's going?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Macauley looked puzzled for a moment. He shrugged. "Who does? Do you?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"I have a fair idea. But I don't think you follow me. I'll put it this way: Why do you move about? Carry on the life you do?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Here and there and all over the place like a fly, you mean?" Macauley sighed, gazing into the fire. "Some people can move slow and get on all right, I don't know, I never could. All my life, something's been biting me - urging me on."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Yes, but where to, that's my point."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"How do I know?" Macauley said. "Does it matter?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Listen!" Desmond exclaimed. "Hear that river? There's water coming from somewhere and going somewhere and so on. It flows on a set course for thousands of miles. It's not only getting away from something, it's getting to something. It's getting away from the mountains and getting to the ocean. Well, I'll tell you something. That's the was a man's life should be and so on."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Why?" Macauley asked.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Well, otherwise there's no purpose. A man is right to get away from evil, from trouble, and the things that are bad for him. But he can spend all his life running away from them. He should stop and think and so on. Then he should pick something that will better him, that is good for him, and try to achieve it. Then he's running towards something. See what I mean?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Macauley nodded his understanding. "But who's talking?" he said.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"What I just said," Desmond replied, "I never thought of it till just a few months ago. It took me all those years and so on to find it out. And it's too late for me to start doing anything about it now."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span></div>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-44472753753843019222011-07-01T23:51:00.001-07:002011-09-19T19:50:46.300-07:00Rudyard Kipling/Craig Raine<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">July, 2011: About ten years ago, my father gave me the complete Kipling. I loved </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Kim</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Jungle Book</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, but hated </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Light That Failed</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, and didn't think much of one or two other volumes that I looked at. In an effort to rectify my low opinion of Kipling, Geoff recently lent me </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A Choice of Kipling's Prose</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> (1987), selected by Craig Raine. Every one of these short stories is a jewel. Thankfully, Raine didn't let the title of the selection put him off including some of Kipling's poems, too; I find poetry hard to read, as it is so dense and rich, and seems to demand repeated poring-overs - the kind of attention that I give to songs - so to have a few of Raine's favourites slipped in between stories was a good way of making prose-readers eat their poems (the way Geoff used to slip a whole lot of spinach into the spag bol he used to make for us children).</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It's hard to write about short stories; each story ought to have at least a paragraph, and, alas, I don't want to spend that much time on the task. One thing that made me love him was his great interest in every person who crossed his path. He makes two old English ladies having afternoon tea together just as interesting, colourful and moving, as, say, the ill-fated love affair between a Hindu woman who and an Englishman (she ends up having her hands cut off). And although I usually dislike dialect being put down in print - because it divides us into 'people who speak properly' and people who don't - when Kipling does it, it is because he has such a fine ear for voices, and the words people use is clearly of profound interest to him. His ability to replicate a person's verbal style is miraculous. His own voice is almost inaudible, so that I will find myself thinking, "Who told me that story about the handsome man getting his come-uppance?" Then I'll remember - it was the story </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Love-o'-Woman</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, where the handsome man is dying, and all he can think about is a certain past love. He finds her working in a brothel; his affair with her 'ruined' her. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'"Fwhat do you do </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">here</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">?" she sez, an' her voice wint up. 'Twas like bells tollin' before. "Time was whin you were quick enough wid your words - you that talked me down to Hell. Are ye dumb now?" An' Love-o'-Woman got his tongue, an' sez simple, like a little child, "May I come in?" he sez.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'"The house is open day an' night," she sez, wid a laugh; and Love-o'-Woman ducked his head an' hild up his hand as tho' he was gyardin'. The Power was still on him - it hild him up still, for, by my sowl, as I'll never save ut, he walked up the veranda steps that had been a livin' carpse in hospital for a month!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'"An' now?" she sez, lookin' at him; an' the red paint stud lone on the white av her face like a bull's-eye on a target.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'He lifted up his eyes, slow an' very slow, an' he looked at her long an' very long, an' he tuk his spache betune his teeth wid a wrench that shook him.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">'"I'm dyin', Aigypt - dyin'," he sez. Ay, those were his words, for I remimber the name he called her. He was turnin' the death-colour, but his eyes niver rowled. They were set - set on her. Widout word or warnin' she opened her arms full stretch, an' "Here!" she sez. (Oh, fwhat a golden miracle av a voice ut was!) "</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Die here!" she sez, an' Love-o'-Woman dhropped forward, an' she hild him up, for she was a fine big woman.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I can see I'm going to have to read the introduction (I rarely do), as it reveals some of the many secrets encrypted in his stories - Love-o'-Woman was dying of syphilis, of course! And "I'm dyin', Aigypt - dyin'" is a quote from </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Anthony An' Cleopatra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">! And the nephew in another of my favourite stories, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Gardener</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">, is actually an illegitimate son! I should have known this from:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">...though she was, at the time, under threat of lung trouble which had driven her to the south of France.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Perhaps I would have picked that up if he had added, "for nine months." </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">His stories about India, or ghosts, or lovers, are like dreams, and have stayed in my mind only as pictures or brief moments without their contexts, but his stories about war are memorable, maybe partly because they're written with intent. My father says Kipling was a real "warmonger" until his son was killed in battle (but which one - the Boer or WWI?). </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Madonna of the Trenches</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is about a traumatised soldier who had been at 'Butcher's Row' in France, where corpses were used as sand-bags to keep back the tide of mud. This was all right in winter, but "all those trenches were like gruel in a thaw", and when the duckboards were missing a slat, you'd unavoidably tread on the corpses, and they'd "creak". To the reader, it seems more than understandable that this would leave a person permanently unhinged. But Kipling's Brother Keede (a local doctor) doesn't buy it, and over the course of the story, he unlocks the real cause of Brother Strangwick's anxiety. Kipling is telling a good story, but he is also making the point that when you have been calibrated to the daily horror of war, walking down Butcher's Row is as traumatising as say, cleaning out a grease trap (which is pretty disgusting). But do we want to reach that level of calibration? </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">He writes just as well about the people left at home in England, and how they become calibrated - not to say hardened - to the constant dying around them. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Mary Postgate</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is a story about a 'lady's companion', an inert woman who has no family of her own, seems to have no desires, no impulses or emotions, excepting a slightly maternal attachment to her lady's nephew. He dies in WWI, and she gathers together his belongings and burns them in the incinerator at the bottom of the garden. An enemy pilot chances to have parachuted down to the ground nearby, and is mortally wounded. As Mary incinerates, she listens to him dying. Mary, when young, had a lot of experience with people dying - her mother, father, "cousin Dick", and "Lady McCausland's house-maid". One line reveals her as she was when young, before life had cauterised hopes and emotions out of her: "Her long pleasure [in listening to the soldier's death rattle] was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life." Mary Postgate might be the strangest anti-hero ever. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The Gardener</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> is the other war-at-home story that really struck me - struck me so hard I cried, and not just a tear or two! Helen goes to Belgium to see where her 'nephew' has been buried:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">She</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is one of those descriptions that is so odd and specific, I suddenly realised I was reading a first-hand experience, though Kipling has hidden himself in a woman's body. The mass slaughter was one thing that made me cry; but the other tragedy was the grief of Helen, a self-contained, controlled, sensible, cool-blooded Englishwoman. Her grief is so low-key, it isn't expressed in any way - she doesn't cry, she doesn't get flustered, she doesn't feel sick. The only expression of her grief is via someone else, a man she takes to be a gardener at the mass cemetery. He looks at her with "infinite compassion" - and that's the first and only suggestion that Helen might not be coping with the experience as well as we think she is; in fact, might be looking distraught and grief-stricken. He looks at her slip of paper:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Come with me," he said, "and I will show you where your son lies."</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">She had said "nephew", but he took it in spirit, and reinterpreted it (correctly, as the introduction points out) as "son". She doesn't correct him. All this small-scale drama is extremely moving - I suppose I can be recalibrated, too, and accept that subtle feelings are as significant as tumultuous ones. Being a tumultuous feeler, I hesitate to say "or </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">more</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> significant!" - though perhaps they are, in that they occur, for one such as Helen, less frequently. </span></span></div>
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lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5219479990852024566.post-9781314251886411002011-07-01T23:51:00.000-07:002011-09-13T21:48:16.034-07:00Joy L. Thwaite/Eve Langley<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">July, 2011: When Mumma gave me, in 2006, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Importance of Being Eve Langley,</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> by Joy L. Thwaite (1989), I put it on the shelf with no immediate plans to read it. Then, after reading about Isabelle Eberhardt (see below), I found myself thinking about Eve Langley. These two books, or rather, their subjects, are parts of a puzzle, one for which I don't have the box, so I don't know what picture it is that I'm trying to piece together.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I loved </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Pea Pickers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, Langley's first novel, when I read it ten or fifteen years ago. I thought it was wild and exuberant, o'er-brimming with love, crazy but catching itself just in time. Later, I read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Wilde Eve</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, a selection of her writing edited by Lucy Frost. All those qualities were still apparent, but Langley had a struggle to keep them from drowning in a cess-pit of desperation, sadness, depression, poverty, dysfunction, isolation and loneliness. Her story is incredibly sad. Ruth Park says, "I have thought long and seriously about the following comment: she was the sanest, most stable person I ever knew. She was, I believe, born into the wrong age."</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Thwaite's book is a biography, told mainly by Langley's own writing. Langley kept journals, which she revisited a decade or two later and fashioned into novels; all but two were deemed unpublishable by Angus and Robertson (who published this book of Thwaite's), and although Thwaite says that this might have been a misjudgment, I think only a handful of hardcore Langley fans would be able to stomach anything more undisciplined and fanciful than </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Pea Pickers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. Says the reader's report on </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Land Of The Long White Cloud</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">: "VERY SAD AND QUITE HOPELESS...It is the aimless chronicle of an irresponsible person who follows her own moods till they run her into misery, but never considers she has any duty to anyone." This statement could apply as much to her way of living as writing. Yet someone published, many bought and many read </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Infinite Jest</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, a work in equally dire need of editing as Langley's. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Langley was born in 1904, somewhere between Forbes and Molong. In 1928, she and her sister June, or Blue, dressed in men's clothes and rambled around Gippsland, picking peas and doing other seasonal work. Langley was a lover of men, but eschewed marriage. She loved men so much, she wanted to</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> be</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> one: "I knew that I was a woman, but I thought I should have been a man. I knew that I was comical but I thought I was serious and beautiful as well. It was tragic to be only a comical woman when I longed above all things to be a serious and handsome man." [</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Pea Pickers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">] Later in life, she even changed her name by deed-poll to Oscar Wilde. She gave birth to a daughter, fathered by a car salesman from Milan, but the baby died a few weeks after she was born. Living in Auckland, Langley became obsessed with an artist, Hilary Clark, who seems to have had a long-term male lover, Franz. But she forcefully wooed Clark, became pregnant, and they married in 1937, when she was 33 and Clark was about 21. They had three children, in abject poverty and poisonous wedlock. Clark spent a lot of his time in his studio in Auckland, and Langley shut the children up in a shed in the backyard and wrote </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Pea Pickers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, which was published the same year she was committed to Auckland Mental Hospital. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">She was in there for seven years, and when she came out was, according to Molly Kilbride, who worked with her at the Auckland Public Library, "...a sad little woman...She had big, luminous eyes, which wouldn't hold your gaze directly - they were fearful, side-wandering eyes - and a pudding-basin haircut...Her eyes were very troubling. She had a very nervous manner and her eyes flickered up and down." Langley now took a doll to bed with her. She gradually acquired a horde of dolls, and was attached to all her worthless (by anyone else's standards) possessions, including lots of little paper-wrapped packages of feathers, leaves, debris. She went on a disastrous and most peculiar trip to Greece, having had a life-long romance with the ancient civilisation; unsurprisingly, to anyone but Langley, she found it, in the late-60s, nothing like her dreams. She died in 1974 in her little tumbledown hut on Clydebank Avenue, Katoomba, possibly having been beaten up by louts, and was undiscovered for about a month, her face having been "chewed by rats" - this last aspect of her death wouldn't, I feel, have much bothered Langley, a woman who could find the warmth of her own urine comforting: "I had a strange night. I let the fire go out and lay all night long in a fever on a bed soaked with urine and heard myself muttering and laughing before I sank into fevered sleep. But the great great darkness was soothing all night and the urine helped me."</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This is a book for the fans. It is disorderly and repetitive, but contains a lot of good material, and is certainly more accessible than Langley's unpublished manuscripts that lie in the Mitchell Library - when Langley's typewriter ribbon ran out, she simply kept typing, and the poor Angus and Robertson readers were forced to try to decipher the faint impression of the inkless keys. This in itself encapsulates the weakness of Langley's writing: she considered her genius and vision enough, and no subsequent effort on her part was necessary to make her writing palatable - not even a fresh typewriter ribbon. She is partly right: her vivid observations, and her mode of putting them into words, is enough. It's enough to make her notable and intriguing, and a really Australian writer - Australian in her wonderful descriptions of landscape, her love of the country, and also her isolated, individualistic, eccentric (as in, away from the centre) way of thinking. But it's not enough to make her a great novelist. </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">There are thousands of passages worth reading. Here are a few:</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> I went down the steps past the irises and daisies, very white and determined in the strong morning breeze, and picked up the bumble bee...in a moist hand. He was quite dead. His tongue hung far out of his mouth, brown, thin like the hairs on a tree fern, and his arms were about his face...just as if he had been crying. [</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Demeter of Dublin Street</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">]</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica; min-height: 12.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Autumn began to come brownly along the paddocks and the river that we loved. All the way down the valley, the road swung in white dust, and the dusty trees leant over it and the yellow sallows in the swamp all the way to Myrtleford darkened their roots in stagnant water and penny royal smelt purpling and green in the dry places. Now slow along the valley we loved, autumn was coming, all golden and the huge tall poplars began to glitter and fly with the golden flags and bitter odours of winter. [</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Victorians</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">]</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">She is a woman after my own heart:</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[There was] only one perfect place on this earth and that was the bark hut...with little in it, the less the better; the only luxuries a good suit of mens [sic] clothes, two volumes of Horace, one volume of Greek plays and six or seven good rifles...[</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Pea Pickers</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">]</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">...I considered these clubs [literary clubs], for which I had a profound distaste, wasters of good energy and mental reservoirs...I'd feel like a caged animal in those talky drawing rooms. I'd sooner run shouting through the Kickareeki ranges with a deer's tail about my thighs...But I dislike any sort of literary gathering, you know, and prefer to work in the lonely silence of the unknown winter...[from </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Demeter Of Dublin Street</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">]</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica; min-height: 12.0px"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Her single-minded pursuit of Clark is a salutary lesson in not chasing someone who doesn't chase you back - although she seemingly achieves her end by marrying him, the marriage is a nightmare, and destroys her.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"You courted me. You threw yourself into my arms, I had to hold you up against that; I told you" he turned his hard white face toward me, "that I would rather take the sluts off the street, than you...pity I didn't too."</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica; min-height: 12.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"But Hilary," I cried, "I love you." We lost women are all the same; we think the repetition of our old charmed words will awaken the dead.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica; min-height: 12.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">...Hilary knotted himself up into a branch of hate, the blossom of which was his mouth. His face was distorted with hatred, his mouth was white with it, and his face so twisted that his small moustache was nearly under his ear.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Even in describing this scene, her sense of humour gets a look in; at least, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> find the description of his face wicked and funny.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Less funny:</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But, oh, the anguish of that which I have to call 'pain', and which I do not believe to be pain, or grief or sorrow. I think it is an ecstasy so cramped in a little human soul that its struggle is called 'Grief'. [</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Last, Loveliest, Loneliest</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">]</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica; min-height: 12.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The deserted-house feeling came over me; the sense of being locked up, if anyone spoke, of having a loose blind sagging somewhere in my face, and of everyone looking close into me, as into an empty window, and seeing nothing because of the darkness of the rooms. [</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Last, Loveliest, Loneliest</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">]</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Helvetica; min-height: 12.0px"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Thwaite's apt conclusion is that Langley "achieved the disillusion without the maturity." I think she suffered from having memories that didn't fade the way they are meant to (let us be grateful for fading memories!). And undoubtedly, as Ruth Park says, she suffered from being unable to be anything but herself in a repressive society. The fact that Langley was stoned by boys for wearing trousers (as she walked to the doctor in Auckland to get her anal fissure attended to) is sufficient proof that what was right and natural to her, was roundly seen as wrong and punishable. This is a terrible dilemma - do what is right, and suffer isolation and persecution; or warp and degrade yourself for the sake of being in step with those around you? In some ways, I see people like Langley and Eberhardt, and also D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, as being martyrs for the sexual equality and sexual freedom that we enjoy today.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"></span><br /></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I asked my father if he had ever met Eve Langley. He said he had only a vague memory of meeting or seeing a dumpy woman at some literary occasion, but he also said that she had once sent him a letter to say how much she liked his poem about the possum that died in the roof of his childhood home. That was always a favourite poem of mine, too! Langley died a month or two before I was born. I wish I could have met her. Soon I'll do a pilgrimage up to Clydebank Avenue, Katoomba.</span></span></p>lucylehmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18066509896440966878noreply@blogger.com1