Patrick White, John McGahern

September 2010: I bought The Aunt’s Story (1948), by Patrick White, while I was wandering round the streets of Adelaide's CBD, just in case I happened to finish The Secret Agent while I was in some potentially bookshop-forsaken town such as Lightning Ridge. The Aunt's Story started well; by that I mean there was little sign of his trademark "hard-won bilge" (Christina Stead's assessment of White, her fan). Theodora is a skinny, yellow girl with too many ideas - this being a phase in Australia's development where, according to novelists, people who displayed any signs of thinking were disapproved of. "Your father is a one for books, sighed Gertie Stepper, as the flour crept up her arms and her face grew red from squeezing so much dough. The tone of Gertie Stepper's voice made it something sad and incurable, almost as if it were an illness, what Father did with books."

It's a portrait of the life of a non-conforming woman; Theodora's life is horribly confined and narrow; nature, or the countryside, is the only place she can be herself, striding around with her girl-sized rifle on shooting expeditions with her sympathetic (-ish) father. Theodora scares off the occasional man who crosses her path; her more man-alluring sister marries the neighbour's son, whose interest was initially in the unsettling Theodora. Theodora ends up an 'old maid' - an aunt as opposed to a mother.

An old acquaintance of Theodora's father arrives at their farm; he's down on his luck and is hoping for a meal. The young sisters, Theodora and Fanny, chat to him:

"What do you do?' she [Theodora] asked.

"I look for gold."

"Why?"

"Because," he said, "it is as good a way of passing your life as any other."

A few pages later, after he has been given, begrudgingly, a feed...

"And we shall come," cried Fanny. "We'll walk at least as far as the bridge. So that you can tell us things."

But the man had stopped talking. He looked at his boots as he walked, and sucked the beef out of his teeth. Till Fanny had to shake his arm.

"Tell us something," cried Fanny. "Why don't you speak?" she said. "Soon we shall have gone."

But inside the man's silence, Theodora could feel his closeness. The sleeve of his coat touched her cheek. The sleeve of his coat smelt of dust, and mutton fat, and sweat, but it stroked her, and she bit her tongue.

"Yes," said the man, "it's as good a way as any of passing your life. So long as it passes. Put it in a house and it stops, it stands still. That's why some take to the mountains, and the others say they're crazy."

This was my favourite quote of the novel, just because it is one of those clues into the self-mystery of why I have so many indoor hobbies, as though I'm a prisoner finding ways to occupy myself during my sentence, and why when I'm out walking, to it-doesn't-matter-where, I feel as though, a last, I'm not waiting for anything.

Aunt Theo is yellow. White finds many different ways of reminding us that she's yellow and scrawny. She also has a black moustache. Here is an example of how what is generally considered repulsive - physical traits that most writers would point out only in their villains - White finds fascinating and therefore beautiful:

"Is Aunt Theo happy?" asked Lou.

"Why ever not?"

"Aunt Theo hasn't any children," said Lou.

"Aunt Theo," said George, "has a moustache. I felt it. It was soft."

"I forbid you to speak like that!" said Fanny.

Sometimes she smacked her children for the truth.

"You must respect your aunt," she said.

Respect became something written in a book for children to learn, just as Theodora Goodman became the Respected Aunt. She could make a dancer with a handkerchief. She could tell about Meroë. And, falling asleep, they raised their hands, but respectfully, to touch the moustache that was black and soft, and warm and kind as dogs.

Part One is worth reading. Part Two degenerates into hard-won bilge. I have dog-eared a few pages, but when I reread them, I think, "I must have dog-eared this page because the writing is so awful." Here's an example (it will be almost as obscure here without its context, as it is with its context):

Ohhh the long night rolled but studded with islands. Then the door-knob stood in the pale morning. Still for a moment. But you knew it was not for long. It would happen soon. Now.

The morning light saw the drawers fly out of the chest. Its tongues lolled. The whole cardboard house rejected reason. Then there was a running. They were calling on the stairs, Yanni the Moustache, and his daughter Science.

"Come," they called. "Run. It is the will of God. The earth is going to split open and swallow the houses of the poor."

Ohhh, that's right, there was a little earthquake. That's what he's talking about. In Part Two, Theodora goes to France and stays in a hotel. She seems to have developed the ability to commune directly with her fellow hotel-guests' souls: though in reality they may only be exchanging pleasantries, in alternate-reality Theodor takes on the identity of someone from their past and together, they relive old memories. I dragged myself through the rest of the book. Then I bitched about it at a Tavs dinner, and Deirdre said that The Aunt's Story was many people's favourite White novel. Her defence of it was valid: that it tells its story in such a wild and free way (yes, I'd agree), and breaks away from conventions of story-telling, that it makes the reader think, "When it comes to story-telling, anything's possible!" In my opinion, his experiment was a failure. But "Bravo!" for trying!

Also, what is his obsession - I'm sure there's some pointed point to it, but bugger me if I figured it out - with names that feature an umlaut? Meroë is the only one I can remember, but there were at least two others.

September 2010: Errol recommended I read John McGahern's novel That They May Face The Rising Sun, a title he could never remember: "Sally, what's the name of that novel Ross called 'The novel where nothing happens'?" I went up to Cowra, and had forgotten to go next door and borrow the book from Errol...I looked in Ross's shelves for something to read and foundThat They May...Sun. I've since lent it to Deirdre, so (phew!) can't transcribe my favourite passages. The novel takes place over a year, following a couple who lead a quiet life in a small rural Irish community. There is something very big about this quiet, uneventful novel. When I finished it, I thought, "This is a novel about grief!" But didn't really know how to support my thesis. The other day, I thought, "John McGahern was reviewing the happiest year of his life: taking out the memories, bringing them into the light, and handling them with great care, because you only get one go at memories, and after that, they are memories of memories." There are vivid, detailed, frequent descriptions of the landscape, and the changes that occur to it over the seasons; the changes - modernisation, death - that occur to the people and community around our married pair are also carefully documented. There was one sentence I dog-eared, and the gist of it was that one day, our hero would look back on this time and consider himself to have been happy then. But the happiness he describes isn't skipping through beflowered meadows hand-in-hand with his wife. It's a good book. I could think it over for hours. But my curry is cooking on the stove and I'm sick of sitting. So John McGahern gets short shrift tonight.

Joseph Conrad

August, 2010: I was short of a book to take with me on my travels (entirely on land! – foot, train, and hire-van: from Sydney to Melbourne to Daylesford, back to Melbourne, to Adelaide, to Broken Hill, to ass’d western NSW towns, then back to Sydney), so I cast my eye over my own bookshelf. I have read a lot of Joseph Conrad’s work, but mostly back in the dark ages, when I used to read books quickly, passing my eyes over the pages, and often unable to remember anything about them except, “I liked it/didn’t like it”. So I looked at The Secret Agent (1907) and couldn’t remember a single thing about it, but I knew I’d read it because it had a bookmark in it (a Scrabble score-sheet, with several games documented on it, including one where my grandmother played, just for one turn, and another where I played against myself).

Phew! It is a relentlessly ugly book. There are so many depictions of London of this period (late nineteenth century) where outrage at its ugliness, its new, industrial-revolution ugliness, is a loud subtext (or, in Dickens’s case, an overt theme). The ugliness made The Secret Agent a hard read.

Here’s our main character (I can’t describe him as a hero), Verloc:

“His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.” “His big, prominent eyes were not well-adapted to winking.” “Undemonstrative and burly in a fat-pig style…”

Every character we meet, even incidentally, is unalluring:

“The bald top of a head, and a drooping dark whisker on each side of a pair of wrinkled hands.”

“…a face of pasty complexion and melancholy ugliness surrounded by a lot of fine, long, dark grey hairs, barred heavily by thick and bushy eyebrows. He put on a black-framed pince-nez upon a blunt and shapeless nose…”

The hideous physical descriptions aren’t done with relish (as they are by Dickens), or fascination (Patrick White), but doggedly, with a refusal to shy away from the truth. I don’t know about the rest of the population, but when I look at people’s faces and try to describe them, generally I end up making them sound grotesque. It’s easier to describe an ugly face than a beautiful one. Several years ago, a painter, who is less notable for his social graces than for his blunt honesty, took it upon himself to describe my body; to him, his description was a rhapsody, yet what he had actually chosen to mention were what could be considered flaws. And when I think of faces and bodies I’ve known, it is equally the white splotch on the front tooth, the pink scar on the forehead, the raspberry with hairs sprouting out of it, the dry, grey patches on the knees, as it is the round, hazel eyes that are often bright with what seems to be the beginnings of a tear, or the warm, brown skin (much more livingthan mine, which is white, cold and clammy, as though just cut out of a plaster cast). It would almost be fun to write a novel where I put to paper all the hideous observations I make (and tend to suppress) as I go about my day. Not fun to read. Joseph Conrad reaches the pinnacle of ugliness about three-quarters of the way through the novel:

“The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the proverb that ‘truth can be more cruel than a caricature’, if such a proverb existed. Crawling behind an infirm horse, a metropolitan hackney drew up on wobbly wheels and with a maimed driver on the box. This last peculiarity caused some embarrassment. Catching sight of a hooked iron contrivance protruding from the left sleeve of the man’s coat, Mrs Verloc’s mother suddenly lost the heroic courage of these days. She really couldn’t trust herself. “What do you think, Winnie?” She hung back. The passionate expostulations of the big-faced cab-man seemed squeezed out of a blocked throat. […] His enormous and unwashed countenance flamed red in the muddy stretch of the street. […] The man slowly turned his bloated and sodden face of many colours bristling with white hairs. His little red eyes glistened with moisture. His big lips had a violet tint. […]

“I’m a night cabby, I am,” he whispered, with a sort of boastful exasperation. “I’ve got to take out what they will blooming well give me at the yard. I’ve got my missus and four kids at ‘ome.”

The monstrous nature of that declaration of paternity seemed to strike the world dumb. A silence reigned, during which the flanks of the old horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery, smoked upwards in the light of the charitable gas-lamp.

The cabman grunted, then added in his mysterious whisper:

“This ain’t an easy world.”

It’s a novel about lazy, inept revolutionaries, and the bureaucrats, diplomats and policemen who waste their lives manipulating and managing these harmless old men. Conrad is in no doubt that the society he’s describing needs a complete overhaul, but he is equally contemptuous of the people who have put themselves in charge of effecting this revolution, as he is of those whose job it is to maintain the status quo. I have the feeling that it was a novel written with a pressing sense of purpose, one for the time and place, and one that is not quite relevant to a reader in 2010; perhaps the threat of revolution (and blood-thirsty, violent revolutionaries) was one exploited by the government of the day, and Conrad sought to defuse it, as it was a mere decoy of public attention away from the desperate need to improve life for the impoverished majority. The Secret Agent seems to say, “This is not an abstract question of politics, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary – plain and simple, it’s about being humane!”

Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf

July, 2010: I didn’t realise that Thomas Mann had written “that supposedly impossible thing, a good German comic novel” (Listener, quoted on the blurb), namely, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.

It was enjoyable to read, partly because our guide through the novel is the ridiculously handsome, intelligent, ambitious Felix, AKA Armand, AKA the Marquis de Venosta, whose pride never comes to a fall - quite the opposite! Most novels are about a character’s struggle through hardship or crisis; so novels that depict a character’s sure-footed passage through life (Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is another) are a pleasant change.

The structure is odd: it feels as though Mann started this novel at his usual pace - heavy with detail, accounting for every significant moment of Felix’s life. Felix’s perverse dreams are realised when a marquis wants him to impersonate him and embark on a year-long tour of the world. We start the journey with Felix, go to Spain, and then, about two months into his year-as-a-marquis, the book ends. I can’t help but feel that Mann got tired of his premise, and was called away to work on more dignified, Nobel-Prize-worthy novels. There is one typically obscure thesis through Felix Krull - Felix’s obsession with matched pairs. He is struck by, and refers to regularly, a beautiful, upper-class brother and sister, possibly twins, whom he spots on a balcony one day. The novel ends (abruptly) with another matched pair - Felix smooching a beautiful daughter, then her magnificent mother, to boot. I just don’t get the matched-pair idea. And as Felix Krull is a figment from Mann’s sexual-fantasy life, I suspect the matched-pair theme is, too; somehow I relate it to those men on manhunt.com who say, “Bi-man looking for other bi-men”, because they’ve rationalised this (after much internal argument) as a way of still being straight even while having sex with men. But, the strange thing is, that I have a matched-pair theme in my own life, when it comes to men. This is an enigma I haven’t quite figured out. In my case, it’s almost as though my heart can find what it needs in two men at once (and I’m not talking about threesomes). Maybe it’s the safe way for a ‘commitment-phobe’ to fall in love.

Beauty often comes up in Mann’s novels (did he always find himself very ugly in comparison to the people he admired?). Felix sees a performer, Müller-Rosé, and, like the rest of the audience, is transfixed:

Müller-Rosé dispensed the joy of life - if that phrase can be used to describe the precious and painful feeling, compounded of envy, yearning, hope, and love, that the sight of beauty and lighthearted perfection kindles in the souls of men.

I’m sorry to say that I left this ‘Book of the Moment’ entry unfinished, and now I hardly have the spirit to finish it. I might just transcribe a few of the passages I dog-eared. Here’s one that addresses the theme of together/separate (a preoccupation of mine and D.H. Lawrence’s), as spoken by Felix to a rather cynical young girl:

“Recently you said that Nature had carefully separated and divided one human being from another. Very apposite and only too true. That’s how it is and that’s the rule. But in love Nature has made an exception - a very marvellous one if you look at it with new eyes. [...] It is true: a man lives separated and divided from others inside his own skin, not only because he does not wish it otherwise. He wants to be as separate as he is because essentially he wants to be alone and cares nothing at all about others. Anyone else, everyone else with a skin of his own, is actually repulsive. His own person is the only thing that is not repulsive. [...]

“For now something in through which Nature deviates amazingly from her basic design, something through which man’s whole fastidious insistence upon separateness and being alone inside his own skin is annulled. [...] Well, then! What is the digression on Nature’s part that, to the astonishment of the universe, wipes out the division between one person and another, between the me and the you. It is love. An everyday affair, but eternally new, and, carefully considered, nothing short of miraculous.”

Sometimes Mann can be so damn sweet! There’s another soft-hearted scene, where a Scottish lord, who has developed a deep crush on the beautiful Felix, offers him a job as his personal attendant. Felix, no homophobe, rejects him gently:

“This require careful consideration, milord,” I replied finally. “I need not say that I am greatly honoured by your offer. But it comes so unexpectedly...I must take time for consideration.”

“There is very little time for consideration,” he replied. “Today is Friday, I leave on Monday. Come with me! It is my wish.”

He took one of the cigars I had recommended, regarded it thoughtfully from all sides, and passed it under his nose. No observer could have guessed what he was saying as he did so. What he said softly was: “It is the wish of a lonely heart.”

Who is so inhuman as to reproach me for feeling moved? Yet I knew at once I would not choose this by-path.

“I promise your lordship,” I murmured, “that I will make good use of this period of reflection.” And I withdrew.

He has, I thought, a good cigar to go with his coffee. That combination is highly enjoyable, and enjoyment is, after all, a minor form of happiness. There are circumstances in which one must content oneself with it.

I’ve dog-eared another passage, a very long passage, and I believe it is a dog-ear of protest, of “Why do you, Thomas Mann, think I want to read pages and pages of conversation - theme: human evolution - between Felix and a paleontologist he meets on a train?” I won’t transcribe any of it.

July, 2010: In Love In A Cold Climate, Fanny lends Lady Montdore a copy of Mrs Dalloway, and Fanny’s husband asserts that Virginia Woolf might be one of the few women capable of intellectual enterprises (I’m paraphrasing, too lazy to get Love and find the passages). So I read Mrs Dalloway, too. It is an unusual book, with the narrative a thread that floats from one character’s mind to another’s, against a common background of the sky overhead, the sound of bells tolling, the familiar landmarks of twixt-War London through which the characters meander, and against the background of one warm, summer day that ends with Clarissa Dalloway’s party. It’s a neat, ingenious way of structuring the life-stories of numerous characters, some of whom have almost no connection with each other, except that they’re in London on that day. I’m not a big fan of “neat and ingenious” - I prefer “rambling, groping and vainly trying to reach”. There were times when Mrs Dalloway seemed contrived, and Virginia Woolf seemed too in control of all her characters, with the method of telling the story, and the narrative voice, overpowering the voices of her characters. But there were enough passages groping towards something indescribable to keep me reading.

Here’s a short passage that describes the World War grief that must have been a constant undercurrent in that quarter of the twentieth century (it certainly is in literature from that period):

But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchard’s shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance, a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.

Lady Bexborough had opened a bazaar, as planned, and only later had Clarissa found out that the piece of paper she had been holding while giving her polite and proper speech, had been a telegram informing her of her son’s death in the War.

Here’s a description of the wife of the domineering Sir William Bradshaw:

But Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will. For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his. Sweet was her smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley Street, numbering eight or nine courses, feeding ten or fifteen guests of the professional classes, was smooth and urbane. Only as the evening wore on, a very slight dulness, or uneasiness perhaps, a nervous twitch, fumble, stumble and confusion indicated, what it was really painful to believe - that the poor lady lied. Once, long ago, she had caught salmon freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through; so that without precisely knowing what made the evening disagreeable, and caused this pressure on the top of the head (which might well be imputed to the professional conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life, Lady Bradshaw said, ‘is not his own but his patients’’), disagreeable it was; so that the guests, when the clock struck ten, breathed in the air of Harley Street even with rapture; which relief, however, was denied to his patients.

One thing that’s really enjoyable and admirable about this book, is that although it follows some tortured and miserable characters, including a man who hears voices and finally throws himself out a window, the main character, Clarissa, is happy and conventional - an atypical heroine; but Woolf certainly makes her heroic, and not by burdening her with unexpected depths, talents or dark sides, but by celebrating her mysterious ability to be happy. I liked this defence of frivolous party-throwing:

Why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another [...chopping out a bit...] Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was it!

Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.

“That’s what I do it for,” she said, speaking aloud, to life.

Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically existent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties - what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague. [...I cut out another little bit...] She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.

Thomas Mann, Nancy Mitford

June, 2010: I read Death In Venice and Other Tales (other tales including Little Herr Friedemann, Tonio Kröger and Harsh Hour) by Thomas Mann. He’s a favourite of mine, and after these short stories, he became even favouriter: he is a very serious novelist, and in his short stories, he dealt with material that he might not have deemed ‘serious’ enough to be part of his opus. Not that the short stories were trivial; rather, they were very personal, and about the trivial emotions and incidents that loom very large in our trivial lives. Thomas has, perhaps, two themes, explored from all angles in each piece of work; the first (the ‘serious’ theme) is the sacrifice, the self-denial and the isolation involved in being an artist; the second theme is infatuation - secret, impossible, unrequited, explosive (or implosive). Thomas’s obsession with these themes eventually twist together to paint a picture of the author himself, as someone who has decided that he couldn’t endure the life he would find himself leading if his desires were unleashed, so has cut a deal to stay on the sideline, safe in chair at desk, experiencing life only through the barrier (barrier in this case having positive connotations, such as ‘zinc and castor oil barrier cream’ or perhaps, a spermicide) of art. “He worked in silent and invisible seclusion, disdainful of those small-minded people for whom talent was a social asset, who, whether rich or poor, went about wild and dilapidated or lived high on the hog with very individualistic neckties, who were devoted to their charming and artistic lives and unaware that good works can emerge only under the pressure of a bad life, that the person who lives does not work, and that an artist must virtually die in order to be fully creative.” (from Tonio Kröger).

There’s Little Herr Friedemann, whose physical deformities make him unfit for love, and on the sidelines of life he manages to find his versions of happiness and fulfillment:

He learned to understand that everything was enjoyable in its way and that it is almost foolish to distinguish between happy and unhappy experiences. He most readily took in each mood and sensation and cultivated them, the sad as well as the cheerful ones - and also the unfulfilled wishes, the yearnings. He loved them for their own sake and told himself that with fulfillment the best would be past. Aren’t the sweet, vague, painful yearning and hoping of quiet spring evenings a richer joy than any fulfillment that the summer might bring? Yes, indeed, he was an epicurean, that little Herr Friedemann.

Here’s a nice description of the effect that nature can have on a troubled human:

All his tender love of life trembled through him at that moment, all the profound yearning for his lost happiness. But then he looked around at the silent, endlessly indifferent peace of nature, saw the river flowing along in the sunshine, saw the grass quivering and moving and the flowers standing where they had blossomed in order to wither then waft away, saw everything, everything yielding to existence with that mute devotion - and he was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation of friendship and rapport with the inevitable, which can make us superior to all destiny.

But poor, brave little Herr Friedemann is destined (and in just a few more pages) for a very undignified end. His infatuation with a real, live woman reveals to him the hollowness of impossible yearnings, and the fact that without some kind of consummation, life is not worth living.

The main character of each story is, I believe, a Thomas proxy. They share similarities: male, not handsome (to the point of being deformed or obese), often dark in colouring, dreamy rather than robust and active. They suffer terrible public humiliations, often brought upon them by themselves, e.g. (in Little Lizzy) the attorney whose legs, “in their column-like shapelessness...always inserted into ash-grey trousers, recalled the legs of an elephant”, whose slavery to his beautiful younger wife culminates in him performing at a party, wearing a blonde wig and a blood-red silk dress, singing a song composed by her lover, and dropping dead of a heart attack. Often his main character is even a writer, such as Herr Spinell (inTristan, which seems to be a preparatory sketch for Magic Mountain; I’ve read it somewhere before...but where?):

...Herr Spinell announced that he wanted to work this afternoon - he liked using the term “work” for his dubious activity.

A few pages later, he is writing a letter:

“Dear sir...the words come flooding toward me so vehemently that I would choke on them if I could not unburden myself of them in this letter...”

To give truth its due, “flooding” was not quite the case, and God only knew the vain reasons Herr Spinell asserted it. In no wise did the words seem to be flooding toward him; for someone whose stated profession was writing, he was woefully sluggish about getting started, and anybody watching him would have had to conclude that a writer is a man who has more a more difficult time writing than anyone else.

With two fingertips, he clutched one of the strange bits of fuzz on his cheek, twirling it for whole quarters of an hour as he stared into space without advancing by a single line; then he wrote a few dainty words and stagnated again.

All writers must recognise themselves in this description, and perhaps excommunicate Mann for revealing secrets of our hallowed trade.

I could write for hours about these stories; this daunting prospect goads me along to the passage in Tonio Kröger that I loved: Tonio, a writer, is having a crisis of disgust about art and being an artist, “I tell you, I’m often utterly exhausted from depicting what’s human without participating in it. Is the artist even a man? Ask a woman!” His disgust goes on for pages. “No one suspects that this [artistic talent] maybe be an extremely bad, extremely dubious ‘gift’...deep, deep down, I nurture a suspicionof the artist as a type - the extreme suspicion that each of my honorable and respectable ancestors up north [like Thomas, whose family were bourgeois merchants from the northern city of Lübeck], in that cramped town, felt toward any mountebank or adventurous peformer who entered their town.” It’s a very sweet diatribe, and his friend Lisaveta provides this observation:

“I’ve listened to you carefully, Tonio, from start to finish, and I will give you the answer that fits everything you’ve said this afternoon, and it will solve the problem that has unsettled you so deeply. Here it is: The solution is that as you sit here you are quite simply a burgher.”

“Am I?” he asked, drooping.

“That really hurts, doesn’t it? As well it should. And that’s why I’d like to soften my verdict a little, which I can do. You are a burgher who’s gone astray. Tonio Kröger - a lost burgher.”

I read that and laughed, having been with Tonio through much of his argument. I thought, “And I’m a lost housewife! A housewife that’s gone astray.”

And so I skip over a whole lot of other dog-eared pages, over Harsh Hour, an hour in Schiller’s (I believe) life, when he is having (yes) a crisis about being an artist, “One thing was crucial: a good heart for giving his life grand and beautiful names! For not blaming his sufferings on indoor air and constipation!”

Death In Venice is really, truly wonderful. It was a brave act for Thomas Mann to have written this story: it features another Thomas Mann character, a well-respected, ‘serious’, national-treasure-type author in his sixties who takes himself, uncharacteristically, on a holiday to Venice. Oh, just read it! There’s another impossible infatuation (with an adolescent boy), and more grotesque humiliations (Thomas Mann starts dyeing his hair and wearing make-up!), and the obscure happiness and fulfillment that we sometimes find, and rarely admit to, in odd, dark corners.

June, 2010: While reading Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, I was reminded of Nancy Mitford and Love In A Cold Climate, which I bought secondhand for $6.50, only $3.50 cheaper than its ‘rrp’ - I really do love those Penguin classic reprints, not the concept of them (on first seeing an orange-and-cream stand of them, I thought, “How twee!”) so much as the reality, which means that I can cheaply buy books I actually want to read at airports and railways stations. Yesterday at Spencer Street station, I baulked at spending $25 on a Tim Winton novel; if it had been just $10 cheaper, I would have done it!

Love In A Cold Climate has that atmosphere of despair and hilarity that I associate with writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, who have lived through the two World Wars. I looked forward to picking up Love every night, yet when I put it down, it would leave me feeling melancholy. These novels are underpinned by a kind of absurdism, or an almost complete lack of belief, at least in the things in which they’re supposed to believe.

Belief in love, and its redeeming qualities, does not underpin Love In A Cold Climate. The main plot thread deals with Polly, the beautiful, young, rich daughter of Lord and Lady Montdore, who, season after season, refuses proposals from eligible bachelors. Eventually we find out why...I’m reluctant to give away in a cheap sentence what Nancy develops so beautifully and outrageously over a hundred pages. Love, in this novel, is grotesque. Our narrator, Fanny (who I couldn’t help thinking of as the grown-up Maisie - her oft-married mother is known as The Bolter) undramatically marries a fellow called Alfred of whom we hear very little, except for things like:

A more difficult and exacting relationship was the one which now developed between me and Lady Montdore...nobody has ever sapped my will-power as she did, and like Lord Montdore, but unlike Polly, I was quite completely under her thumb. Even Alfred lifted his eyes for a moment from pastoral theology and saw what was going on. He said he could not understand my attitude, and that it made him impatient.

Fanny’s marriage occurs and stays in the background, without a trace of the grotesque, which, in this context, makes it seem a bit loveless. The real love story occurs towards the end of the novel, when Cedric, the new heir to the Montdore estate (with Polly being disinherited), turns up at Hampton Park from Nova Scotia to acquaint himself with his distant relatives:

A glitter of blue and gold crossed the parquet, and a human dragon-fly was kneeling on the fur rug in front of the Montdores, one long white hand extended to each. he was a tall, thin young man, supple as a girl, dressed in a rather bright blue suit; his hair was the gold of a brass bed-knob, and his insect appearance came from the fact that the upper part of his face was concealed by blue goggles set in gold rims quite an inch thick.

He was flashing a smile of unearthly perfection; relaxed and happy he knelt there bestowing this smile upon each Montdore in turn.

“Don’t speak,” he said, “just for a moment. Just let me go on looking at you - wonderful, wonderful people!”

Lady Montdore falls happily in love with Cedric, who picks up a handsome young lorry driver and gives him a live-in job at Hampton. Cedric and Lady Montdore spend their days working on their beauty, taking in “Facial operations, slimming cures, exercises, massage, diet, make-up, new clothes, jewels reset, a blue rinse for her grey hair, pink bows and diamond daisies in the blue curls.” Cedric “lived in a perfect welter of parties, dragging Lady Montdore along in his wake.”

“Isn’t she wonderful? You know, she’s seventy - eighty - ninety - “ her age went up by leaps and bounds. “She’s a darling, so young, so delicious, I do hope I shall be just like her when I’m a hundred.”

So Cedric had transformed her from a terrifying old idol of about sixty into a delicious young darling of about a hundred.

On the last page of the novel, the love story, in all its grotesque beauty, finally falls into place.

Here’s one passage (out of many) that made me laugh:

A motorcar was now heard approaching, the scrunch of tyres, and a low, rich hoot...not at all the Chubb Fuddler’s little Standard, but the huge black Daimler from Hampton Park containing both Lord and Lady Montdore. This was indeed a sensation! Callers were unknown at Alconleigh, anybody rash enough to try that experiment would see no sign of Aunt Sadie or the children, who would all be flat on the floor out of sight, though Uncle Matthew, glaring most embarrassingly, would stand at a window in full view, while they were being told ‘not at home’.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Willy Vlautin

May 2010: The weeks of rain we’ve lately had in Sydney might have influenced my reading choices - after Turn Of The Screw, I started on Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, which provided me with more dark, spooky, English country houses of “grey, lichened-blotched stone”, “stained and streaked with damp and bad weather”.

All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amidst the light green of the new foliage.

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried, with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

But Holmes shook his head gravely.

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought that comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

I didn’t feel like reading short stories. I had started a Kipling collection, and though the three short stories I made it through were truly wonderful, I had put the book down, because...because I wanted some continuity in my fits-and-starts, fractured life! Sherlock Holmes was all I had left in my bookshelf, and I hesitated when it came to packing it into my bag, to take to Melbourne. Would it do the job? Would it be a companion? I’d read the first few stories, and they’d been enjoyable, a bit populist, with the story-telling stomping along in heavy boots (i.e. very easy to follow). I packed it. And I didn’t regret it - the continuity is, of course, in Watson and Holmes’s friendship, which is subtle, complex and very interesting, and more than makes up for the walk-on, walk-off characters that fill out the detective stories.

Towards the end of this collection, Holmes, in a bad mood (coming down from one of his cocaine and shag-tobacco binges, perhaps) is criticising the “little records” that Watson writes (and we read) of Holmes’s cases.

“You have erred, perhaps,” he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs, and lighting with it the long cherrywood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood - ‘you have erred, perhaps, in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.”

“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” I remarked, with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular character.

“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. “If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing - a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a series of lectures into a series of tales.”

It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs, through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit, and shone on the white cloth, and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not been cleared yet.

The constant intermingling of dark and light, good and bad - in Sherlock Holmes more than anyone - is another aspect that makes these stories, as a whole piece of work, more sophisticated than they seemed at first. It’s atmospheric, but it’s also one of the difficulties that we have to cope with in life: how much bad can we bear to see in what we love, and how much good can we bear to see in what we despise? I think of this as ‘the ugly truth’ conundrum; truth being, by definition, beautiful, and something I want to see.

Joseph Bell, on whom Sherlock Holmes is partially based, was an Edinburgh surgeon who taught Doyle, a medical student. Bell also taught my great-grandfather, who emigrated to Australia as a doctor and died of a morphine overdose in Eidsvold, Queensland. Sherlock Holmes enjoyed a bit of intravenous cocaine, and my father has always drawn connections between Sherlock Holmes, Joseph Bell and our ill-fated relative, William Rainer - perhaps it was common for medical men to have intravenous drug habits. Part of WIlliam Rainer’s story was that he kept (as was discovered after his death) all the delicate glass ampoules that the morphine had come in. It was my grandmother, aged fourteen, who found him dead.

May 2010: In reference to Benjamin Britten, Chris mentioned Turn Of The Screw by Henry James, and Death In Venice by Thomas Mann, and I was annoyed at so narrowly missing the opportunity, all too rare, to discuss books with Chris; though Henry James and Thomas Mann are among my favourites, I haven’t read these two works, simply because they are short, and I prefer ‘em long. So I started with Turn Of The Screw. Reading it was scary - at the foot of my bed, the wardrobe doors, left ajar, gaped darkly at me until I jumped up and closed them; when I would finally turn out the light, rain pouring down outside, I’d pull the blankets right over my head and breathe through a gap. It’s a ghost story, and it worked. But some elements were disappointing, and almost seemed unfulfilled, possibly because the story is about one-hundred-and-ten years old. The fact that the eerie young siblings’ parents had died, simply and conveniently died, was not considered, in 1898, an issue that needed working through, as it was fairly commonplace. But I thought James missed out on an extra layer by not featuring the parents in the plot, or at least in the children’s psychological profiles. The other assumption that James makes, and that present-day reader won’t make, is that Quint and Miss Jessel are damned. Miss Jessel seems to have died giving birth to an illegitimate child (Quint’s), and Quint seems to have been a lower-class man who rebelled against his place in society - this present-day reader rather likes the sound of Quint and Miss Jessel. And the mere fact that they are ghosts, rather than in heaven with the angels, means that they’re bad. I struggled to go along with all that, much as I tried.

Here’s one bit I liked, because it could loosely be applied to a man I had just (briefly) been involved with: [The children’s governess, who is also our narrator, is discussing the weird goings-on with the cook, who, unlike Quint, does know and accept her inferior place]:

“...the very things that have delighted, fascinated and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a game,” I went on; “It’s a policy and a fraud!”

“On the part of the little darlings?”

“As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace it - follow it all up and piece it all together. “They haven’t been good - they’ve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them because they’re simply leading a life of their own. They’re not mine - they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers!”

“Quint’s and that woman’s?”

“Quint’s and that woman’s. They want to get to them.”

Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs Grose appeared to study them! “But for what?”

“For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back.”

“Laws!”said my friend under her breath.

‘Evil’ is a concept that puts me on the wrong side of an author (e.g. Lionel Shriver, in her silly and sloppy Something Or Other About Kevin). I don’t accept evil. An author has to work very hard to convince me a character is bad-at-heart - they can’t just slap the ‘evil’ label on someone and expect me to believe it. I don’t think Turn Of The Screw is one of Henry James’s best works. I suspect it’s one of his quickies - one of those works that has contributed to his reputation of writing a paragraph (containing a zillion commas and one full-stop) when, with a bit of self-control, he could have conveyed the same information in a couple of lines.

May 2010: Darren lent me Northline by Willy Vlautin, and I duly read it. I sent a text to Andy, “I’m in bed reading a depressing book.” “Why read it then?” “Because when someone lends me a book, I want to finish it so that at least I can talk about why I didn’t like it.” I enjoy talking with a friend about a book we’ve both read (recently enough to remember), and it doesn’t happen very often. One reason I write ‘Book of the Moment’ is to impress on my mind the books I’ve read - I forget books, movies, love affairs and TV shows scandalously fast, a failing of memory that I’d like to improve.

I’m no fan of Raymond Carver. I read one book of his short stories (Cathedral, I believe) several years ago, and discovered that its surface of austere, unembellished honesty covered up no great truth (too ugly for most of us to bear), but just a stunted, self-involved sentimentality. I thought he had nothing much to offer, and - to think! - he has spawned (or rather, misled) so many followers! Every second modern American book I pick up (true, not that many) doffs its hat to Carver. That kind of bleak ‘realism’ gives me the shits, and Northline plays this one note without a break, from the seedy beginning to the egg-shell-fragile hope-of-happiness ending. It’s not that interesting to read about Allison trying to cut her wrists then hating herself for not having the guts to go through with it. I don’t want to see the world through her grey haze of depression. That’s not realism; that’s not reality. That’s someone who is too self-involved to see the world for what it is, namely marvellous.

The Carver-genre should not be known as realism; in fact, it is romance, dressed down so that men won’t be embarrassed to be seen with it. The female characters are vulnerable and bruised, the males are scarred (and all the more manly for it!), the settings all empty bottles, full ashtrays, bare mattresses and rundown cars, and the emotions are pubescent.

Charles Dickens

April 2010: I bought a discounted copy of Tale of Two Cities in a newsagent in Tamworth (as an aside, though there are many things that make me despair of humankind, the fact that the novels generally known as literary classics also happen to be exactly the ones I consider novels at their finest is very reassuring, and the fact that these books are endlessly reprinted in great masses, and sold at cheap prices all over the place, is one of the wonders of the modern world). I started reading what the anonymous introduction describes as Dickens’s “masterpiece” while I was at the Railway Hotel, Koorawatha; the introduction also deems Barnaby Rudge, which I loved, one of his weakest works, and erroneously claims that Two Citiescontains little of Dickens’s typical humour.

Just as some people’s faces can’t look stern or grim no matter how hard they might be trying to reprimand someone, Dickens simply can’t keep humour out of his writing, no matter how bloody and cruel the subject matter, in this case the French Revolution. As usual with Dickens, I have dog-eared dozens of pages, sometimes simply for a turn of phrase or a passing idea that made me smile:

“The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction...The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea.”

His descriptions of places and faces are always vivid, and also handy. Because his stories always involve a large cast of characters, and numerous locations, Dickens labels each one with at least one memorable detail. There is the road-mender in the blue cap; there is the wine-seller’s wife with her impassive face and interminable knitting. Our heroine, Lucie Manette, has predictably wavy golden locks and blue eyes; the less morally righteous characters are more interesting physical specimens, such as Jerry Cruncher, with his “spiky hair looking as if it must tear the sheet to ribbons” or else “like an animated bit of the spiked gate at Newgate”. Cruncher, when provoked, cries out, “B-u-u-ust me!”. Towards the end of the book, he is accused of the unsavoury crime of grave-robbing:

“...Mr Lorry looked at Jerry in considerable doubt and mistrust. That honest tradesman’s manner of receiving the look, did not inspire confidence; he changed the leg on which he rested as often as if he had fifty of those limbs, and were trying them all; he examined his finger-nails with a very questionable closeness of attention; and whenever Mr Lorry’s eye caught his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of short cough requiring the hollow of a hand before it, which is seldom, if ever, known to be an infirmity attendant on perfect openness of character.”

Dickens’s stories always work, though sometimes he gets them to work with passages that could almost have a heading - such as, “Lucie Manette and Charles Darnay experience a period of domestic bliss” - that would tell the readers in a sentence all that we find out in a few padded-out paragraphs. Most novels, especially plot-driven novels, have a few of those unnatural ‘snapshot’ passages, or else bits where a contrivance has been inserted and the author does his or her ineffectual best to disguise the entry and exit scars. But in this novel, the drama works - some nights I read Two Cities far longer than I intended to, skimming ahead a page or two to find out what happened. But it wasn’t my favourite Dickens novel. Heroes and heroines freeze up his descriptive powers. Charles Darnay, principal goody, is described merely as “well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark eye”. He doesn’t really do anything remarkable. His counterpoint, Sidney Carton, a debauched drunkard or a “dissipated cat”, is much more colourful. “Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard”; Carton, after a binge, pulls himself together to help his colleague with a law-suit:

“Sullenly enough, the jackal [Carton] loosened his dress, went into an adjoining room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and a towel or two. Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them out, he folded them onto his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down at the table, and said, “Now I am ready!”

“...Two or three times, the matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp head-gear as no words can describe; which were made more ludicrous by his anxiety.”

This passage ends with:

“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.”