D.H. Lawrence

March, 2011: "Dearest Lucy, happy 18th [decorated with a shower of sparks], love from Errol and Mumma xxoxx....etc 31.7.'92 [in a hand-drawn banner held up by two penguins]". I've been going through my books (too many of them), trying to prune them down. But it's a wrench to get rid of books that have been inscribed by my parents. Thankfully, my father didn't inscribe the twenty-three volumes of Rudyard Kipling's complete works that he gave me one birthday - presented to me by a convoy of him and my youngest brother bearing bulging plastic bags (plastic bags are our wrapping paper on that side of the family). I'm afraid the complete Rudyard Kipling will not remain on my shelf. He is too patchy. Mumma and Errol gave me D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915) for my eighteenth birthday. It won't be going. I remembered liking it at the time, so reread it as part of my D.H. Lawrence exploration.

The story follows an emotional thread, starting with the relationship between Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky, then going down a generation to Lydia's daughter (to her first husband), Anna, and her relationship with her husband, another Brangwen, Will. Part Three of the novel follows Anna and Will's daughter, Ursula. The drama of the novel takes place inside each character; outside, life trots along routinely. That's the case with most of us, most of our lives - not much happens, yet, every week is a tumultuous working-through of the various forces coming into or going out of our emotional lives. This is what D.H. Lawrence writes about, in intimate, unapologetic detail. I kept having to remind myself (sexistly) "And a man wrote this!" Most of us feel a bit ashamed of the tumult that is wrought upon our lives by the relationships that we have with those around us, and only keep a few trusted confidantes abreast of all the latest developments. But D.H. Lawrence declares, "This - the emotional life - is the most significant part of our lives, and anyone who disagrees is deprived!"

There's a lot of drama - veering from joy to hatred to grief to contentment - in his descriptions of his characters' emotional lives. For me, this is how relationships actually are. They are never still. Here is one bit that brought back all the horror of sharing (or not sharing) a bed with someone:

She could not sleep with him any more. She said he destroyed her sleep. Up started all his frenzy and madness of fear and suffering. She drove him away. Like a cowed, lurking devil, he was driven off, his mind working cunningly against her, devising evil for her. But she drove him off. In his moments of intensest suffering, she seemed to him inconceivable, a monster, the principle of cruelty.

However her pity might give way for a few moments, she was hard and cold as a jewel. He must be put off from her, she must sleep alone. She made him a bed in the small room.

And he lay there whipped, his soul whipped almost to death, yet unchanged. He lay in agony of suffering, thrown back into unreality, like a man thrown overboard into a sea, to swim till he sinks, because there is no hold, only a wide, weltering sea.

He did not sleep, save for the white sleep when a thin veil is drawn over the mind. It was not sleep. He was awake, and he was not awake. He could not be alone. He needed to be able to put his arms around her. He could not bear the empty space at his breast, where she used to be. He could not bear it. He felt as if he were suspended in space, held there by the grip of his will. If he relaxed his will, he would fall, fall through endless space, into the bottomless pit, always falling, will-less, helpless, non-existent, just dropping to extinction, falling till the fire off friction had burned out, like a falling star, then nothing, nothing, complete nothing.

He rose in the morning, grey and unreal. And she seemed fond of him again, she seemed to make up to him a little.

"I slept well," she said, with her slightly false brightness. "Did you?"

"All right," he answered.

He would never tell her.

A couple of paragraphs later, she says:

"I don't want to send you away. I want to sleep with you. But I can't sleep, you don't let me sleep."

His blood turned black in his veins.

"What do you mean by such a thing? It's an arrant lie. I don't let you sleep - "

"But you don't. I sleep so well when I'm alone. And I can't sleep when you're there. You do something to me, you put a pressure on my head. And I must sleep, now the child is coming."

"It's something in yourself," he replied, "something wrong in you."

Horrible in the extreme were these nocturnal combats, when all the world was asleep, and they two were alone, alone in the world, and repelling each other. It was hardly to be borne.

I tried to transcribe a big chunk, because the relentless documenting of every passing feeling, every attack and parry, is the whole point of The Rainbow. It is not D.H. Lawrence to say, "Then they got married," and leave the story at that, as if it were an ending. D.H. ends the story with Ursula being single, her love-relationships having played themselves out. To my mind, this is a more fitting point at which to end a story. While I was reading The Rainbow, it made me feel sad that I wasn't on the battlefield of an intertwined relationship; but it also reminded why I'm not. Sometimes I think I might have found a peacefulness that is too lovely to sacrifice for unpeaceful togetherness; most of my twenties I spent in intertwined relationships, full of longing and pettiness (mostly mine), resentment, fury, feelings of being trapped or suppressed, wanting more, wanting it to be better, wanting myself to be sweeter. Also some good feelings...utmost, mutual trust, and an abiding faith in our love. But I don't want to be like that again. And I do tend to pull up sharply and say, "No! No more! I've stopped liking myself." Reading The Rainbow, I think, "Maybe not liking oneself is part of being in a close relationship with someone."

Mikhail Bulgakov

February, 2011: In the absence of a new book to read, I've taken to rereading the books on my shelf about which I think, "That was good! But that's all I can remember about it." I used to read books too quickly. When I read a book too quickly, not only do I not remember it later, but I also paraphrase it into my own words and ideas, without taking the trouble find out what the author is really trying to say; as in those dialogues where one person says, "I had such and such and experience," and the other says, "That's like when I did such and such." No, it's not! Slow down and listen. So from my bookshelf, I selected The Master And The Margarita (1938; first published in 1966-7, published in full 1973) by Mikhail Bulgakov, which Mumma and Errol gave me for my 20th birthday, and which I have been meaning to reread since I read an extract of it in Clarence Brown's excellent Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader.

I've been trying to figure out why The Master and Margarita is so wonderful. I like novels that are more-or-less realistic (though that doesn't mean "depresso-realism" à la Raymond Carver and all those he spawned), and as I read of Margarita's night at Satan's Ball, where she shook hands with headless corpses and various other guests who spilled out of coffins, or the chaos wrought by Woland and his henchmen (including a giant black cat and a naked redheaded woman) on the streets of Moscow, I thought, "But isn't all this colour and fantasy meaningless? Why do I look forward so much to reading the next installment?" I knew it wasn't meaningless. In some ways, it's a fairy story - hypocrites and other villains are punished, while Margarita, fearless and good-hearted, is duly rewarded. Here's how Margarita describes herself to a little boy:

"Once upon a time there was a lady...she had no children and was never happy. At first she just used to cry, then one day she felt very naughty..."

But it's a novel, not a fairy story. The whole work is a concerted effort to evoke an emotion: breaking free, into a life where truth and love, and other nice, simple things, can exist. Every vignette is a breaking-free, in some way or another, which helps to make sense of the dozens of characters, each one with several different names, Russian style. The accumulation of mayhem, and freedom snatched during disorder, is exhilarating.

The ending (beware: I'm about to give it away) reminds me of the ending of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - the only way for the story's lovers, the Master and Margarita, to be truly together, is for them to die. The only true breaking-free is death.

Also, it's very funny. The humour adds to the exhilaration. The authorial voice is theatrical and anecdotal rather than restrained; Bulgakov would prefer something to be exaggerated and outlandish, than to be overlooked by the reader. Though maybe in the original Russian all those adverbs aren't quite so obtrusive:

"Just reassure me - you're not violent, are you?"

"Yesterday in a restaurant I clouted a fellow across the snout," the poet confessed manfully.

"What for?" asked the visitor disapprovingly.

"For no reason at all, I must admit," replied Ivan, embarrassed.

"Disgraceful," said the visitor reproachfully and added: "And I don't care for that expression of yours - clouted him across the snout...People have faces, not snouts. So I suppose you mean you punched him in the face...No, you must give up doing that sort of thing."

I also am guilty of using that expression (not the Russian expression, whatever it was, but Michael Glenny's translation). I won't in future.

One thing that I don't really understand, though I enjoyed reading it, is the vivid account of Pontius Pilate's meeting with Jesus (the Master is writing a book about it, and we are privy to various extracts from it). Being non-religious, and also living in a society where everyone is allowed to hold whatever beliefs they please (unlike in communist Russia), I know there is a significance to the Pontius and Jesus passages that I have missed.

Roger McDonald

January, 2011: At the airport, I bought a copy of When Colts Ran (2010) by Roger McDonald. I was on my way to New Zealand, to stay with Roger and his family - his daughter Anna is my bride-to-be, as soon as same-sex marriages are legal, assuming that marriage between friends is also legal, and - hell! - bigamy, too, so that I can marry all my friends. Friendship being the holy bond of society.

Colts is about friendship between men, specifically Australian men. This is a theme Roger has written about before; my favourite part of Mr Darwin's Shooter was the troubled, unfulfilled friendship, the intimacy and distance, between Covington and a character whose name I can't remember (not Charles Darwin). In fact, Colts began as a short story, which is now one of the later chapters, about a tentatively burgeoning friendship between two men that is cut short by an unforgivable betrayal. Maybe it's wrong to say that Colts is about friendship. I could say that it's about male identity, about being a man in Australia, about being an Australian man who hasn't been able to prove his manhood by fighting in WWI or II or by chopping down ironbarks or building a railway through wilderness, or all those manly feats that have already been greedily fulfilled by our ancestors. What manhood-proving feats are left?

A day or two later, I come back to my computer, thinking: what I liked best about Colts wasn't what Roger had to say about the various themes that cropped up; few of the questions that the characters ask - about life - end up being answered. Instead, it was a mood, or an emotion, of insatiable yearning that all the characters are gripped by at some point or another; a yearning for more of all the best parts of life - intimacy, fulfillment of one's potential, a sense of connection. The novel spans decades, so we get a chance to see the characters recognise the "limitations of their own being" (I read that phrase last night in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow). They yearn for the best parts, and slowly get used to the fact that most of 'living' is feeling disappointed, lonely, a failure: "Through every small opening in life, through the tiniest, most restricted nerve ends, through rips and tears and tatters, life pours."

One thing that's a bit daunting about Colts is the large cast of characters - each chapter focuses on a different character, often a person who was on the periphery of a previous chapter. This continues all the way to the end of the novel, so that the reader has to keep renewing their commitment vows to the novel, "Yes, I will take on a new character, one that I don't yet care two straws about; yes, I will leave behind the character of the last chapter, though I was just growing very fond of him." Kingsley Colts, whom we love the most, keeps getting a bit of a look in - this keeps us going. The themes, explored anew through each different man, are also strong enough to maintain a sense of continuum and advancement. But it was a bit like Moby Dick, when Melville would suddenly start discussing whale species - I'd have to take a breath, tell myself to let go, then catch hold all over again.

Here's a bit I liked, for its pantheism:

Colts turned off at Duck Creek, going up into the hill on a right-angled intersection taken on impulse. He felt an unsourceable excitement, a mixture of hope and despair, but where it came from was all around him. A desperation landscape made the heart feel glad concurrently with dragging him down. Hills and gullies were moods and emotions to him, part of his inexpressible being.

And another, for the two sides to 'unavailable'. A bit like the two sides to 'abandonment issues' (no, it doesn't mean we're afraid of being abandoned; it means we've gotten used to being abandoned, have grown to like the way it feels, and now have a dread fear of being trapped):

'Gil, are you there? The kids are frightened and they need you. Don't be unavailable when you're needed.'

An edge to that word, used by Erica when Dalrymple took jobs away from home, brooded, took long walks or went to the Five Alls until way after closing time and drove home blind as a bat. Unavailable, a word taken from a book about men and used to hobble him, he argued, whereas unavailable in Dalrymple's vocab meant something else - appetite defined as perfectly strange and perfectly beyond understanding. Unavailable to himself, which didn't mean don't try perfectly grasping.

Another line that came back to me was one that Veronica had read in "one of her novels" (slightly disparaging): "A woman goes where she is most appreciated."

Patrick White, Truman Capote, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville

December, 2010: I borrowed Patrick White's The Eye Of The Storm (1973) from my mother, who was cleaning up her bookshelves. I love Patrick White, and that's that. This novel is peopled by characters possibly even more repulsive than usual; though, as always, they are figured with love and fascination.

I just thought: maybe White's plays are generally more liked than his novels because his characters are played by real people, and the audience isn't exposed to how White has described them physically; his grotesque (to us - not to him) physical descriptions of his characters can alienate readers.

The Eye Of The Storm is about Elizabeth Hunter, an ancient lady, rich, once beautiful, who lives in her Centennial Park mansion with nurses, cook and house-keeper. Her two grown-up (-ish) children, Sir Basil (famous actor) and Princess Dorothy (ex-wife of a French prince) come back to Australia to get control of their mother's money. They decide that putting her into a nursing home will encourage her to die. She has been a pretty awful mother, so we tend to forgive their lack of love for her; but we also forgive her selfishness and cruelty, because there's something admirable about her - her selfishness is also uncompromising trueness-to-self. Being true to yourself often means doing things that don't work in the favour of those closest to you; when you suppress your own will to please someone else, it feels like a weak self-betrayal.

One redeeming characteristic about the three Hunters is that they know better than anyone else how disgusting they are. We are privy to all their private dark moments; dark moments, in White's hands, are rendered light moments, horribly light, with a harsh light shone onto scenes such as the ageing Sir Basil's drunken seduction of an aspiring young actress in Bangkok, that ends with him failing to get an erection, then vomiting beside the bed.

Janie Carson almost didn't glance; she switched off the light soon after. It was thoughtful of her. His nervous shanks might tremble less in the dark, the slacker skeins of flesh not swing. Balls too.

Ergh! He is so visceral! It makes us squirm with recognition and shame.

Another seduction, later in the novel, of one of his mother's nurses, the young, fecund, uneducated Sister Manhood:

"A genuine Botticelli!" He glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting some unseen spectator might have overheard his corny remark.

"My what?" she giggled as he stood out of his dressing-gown.

The breasts of this elderly man - her lover - were developing relentlessly inside the fur bra.

Here's a bit about Elizabeth Hunter and selfishness:

Lal Wyburd [the sensible wife of Elizabeth's lawyer] would naturally have interpreted as selfishness every floundering attempt anybody made to get out of the straitjacket and recover a sanity which must have been theirs in the beginning, and might be theirs again in the end. That left the long stretch of the responsible years, where you were lunging in your madness after love, money, position, possessions, while an inkling persisted, sometimes even certainty descended: of a calm in which the self had been stripped, if painfully, of its human imperfections.

I find that passage beautiful. If I had posters on my walls of cheering philosophical statements, maybe I'd make one out of that.

And another comment on the bygone Australia where people who showed signs of thinking were discouraged from that activity:

Inklings of transcendence had washed against Flora Manhood before, if only by brief moments: after some dream had driven her out from a house of threatened cardboard into a solid white night, to which her own white particle suddenly and miraculously belonged; or swimming with Col Pardoe against the tide of music, where inadmissible eddies would occur in which she was almost whirled to an understanding of mysteries such as love, beauty, fulfilment, death. Now, thanks to this crazy Jewess, she was again troubled; by a shimmer from a grotty dress in Elizabeth Hunter's wardrobe. When, like every good Australian, she must continue to believe only in the now which you can see and touch.

December, 2010: Suddenly short of a book once again, I picked Truman Capote's Breakfast At Tiffany's (1958) from Stella's bookshelf. Now a couple of months has passed since I read it, and so I look at the one page I dog-eared (perhaps I was being restrained in my dog-earring because it wasn't my book):

So I more than half meant it when I wished I were under the wheels of a train. The head-line made the desire positive. If Holly could marry that 'absurd foetus', then the army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over me. Or, and the question is apparent, was my outrage a little the result of being in love with Holly myself? A little. For I was in love with her. Just as I'd once been in love with my mother's elderly coloured cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named Kendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too.

Like Ethan Frome, my pleasure in Breakfast At Tiffany's wore off as soon as I'd finished it, especially as I went on to read the next short story, House Of Flowers, and the one after, A Diamond Guitar, and suddenly decided I didn't like Capote's writing any more. The narrator in Tiffany's is very likable (as the above passage shows), but I was thinking, like Ethan Frome, sometimes having a narrator can leave the story feeling very limited, and too objective. It's the reviewing of an episode that exists, all complete, in the narrator's memory. When I was a child, I used to hate comics, though I still read them (such as Snoopy and Footrot Flats), because the worlds that the stories too place in were so limited and confined. And in the case of Tiffany's and Ethan Frome, the story isn't even happening to the narrator - they are passive bystanders, on-lookers.

Maybe if I weren't a writer, I would enjoy spending a novel with these sorts of narrators. But I have enough non-participatory looking-on on my life, and prefer to spend time with characters who experience the world in a different way.

December, 2010: Short of a book, and Stell away in Broome, I browsed over her bookshelf and picked out Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton. Darren was driving someone else's newly-purchased motorhome from Melbourne to Gympie, and he picked me up as he went through Sydney; I'd been diligently at-desk for four or five weeks, and needed to feel some miles under my boots. Then I had to get to Canberra for my great-uncle Gavan's funeral, so caught the train back from Wauchope, and read almost the whole of Ethan Frome on the train trip.

It's great, simple story-telling. Ethan is a sensitive, inarticulate man in a beautiful, harsh landscape, who, in a panic of loneliness, marries a bad-tempered hypochondriac, Zenobia. Marriage being what it was, he is stuck with her (HOW CAN WE FORGET WHAT MARRIAGE USED TO BE? IT RUINED LIVES! FORGET MARRIAGE! FORGET DIVORCE! ISN'T LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP GOOD ENOUGH? That's one arm of my anti-marriage rant). Zeena's young, destitute cousin comes to live with the Fromes, inexpertly doing the house-keeping in return for her keep. Ethan and Mattie Silver slowly fall in love. Then something happens. The story is told by a narrator, who comes to the town twenty years later, and pieces the story together.

I eagerly turned the pages, and at the climax, I cried, not just a tear, but a suppressed sob. But now, a month later, something about it has left me cold: what is it? It's a perfectly-told tale - too perfect, I suspect. There's no groping, there are no false steps, no moments of ambitious failure. For a story about an inarticulate character, it's all too articulate. Wharton has Ethan in a little box. She knows him through and through. There are no ragged, fraying edges trailing off the page. That's why I love Stead, White, Mann, even when I don't like them - they are triers!

Here's the one page I dog-eared (sorry, Stella, for the book vandalism!):

He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto, the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether anyone else in the world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege.

In Tamworth the other day, while walking along the ridge of a sort of flood levee, through a weedy, bullrushy reserve, not a soul in sight, the boom of Peel Street buskers on the breeze, I witnessed a very beautiful sunset - the Tamworth hills turning purple, the nearly-full moon in the sky. I'd been needing a cry for a couple of days, and the beauty finally broke me. The beauty made me feel so lonely, and so alive. I suppose that passage above goes part-way to explaining why I cried.

December, 2010: A History Of Private Life

December, 2010: It was time for Moby Dick (1851). For a long time, I've been meaning to read it - also The Hunchback Of Notre Dame - but I'm running out of long classics. I used to rue my years of hasty reading, but in the future, perhaps I will be grateful to them - all those forgotten novels that I can reread!

Moby Dick is a very odd book. It has passages of action and colour, as rollicking as something from a Dickens novel, then a whole lot of outdated science about whales, and minute detail about the whaling business, a chapter devoted to the significance of the colour white, chapters (and, at the end of the novel, a collection of extracts) about the history of whales and whalemen, whales in the bible, whales in Egyptian hieroglyphs. There are chapters with stage directions, and crew members talking in sotto voce asides about each other. All this variety is how Melville deals with his structural problem: that his story is a long sea voyage, with all the attendant tedium and repetition, building up to the climax (namey: Captain Ahab has it out with Moby Dick), which is also the end. Oh, a tough story he has picked for himself! In our day and age, of messing around with time, we would solve that problem by making the climax the body of the story. We would pick the eyes out of the voyage and poke them into the three days of wrangling with Moby as strategic flashbacks. Moby Dick is proof that clever structures maketh not a work of enduring value. There is something pure and beautiful - unartificial - about this structure. It provides a simple setting for the work's jewels: the authorial voice (Herman, I love you!), and the incredibly vivid descriptions of incidents, sights, feelings, that I will never experience.

I was just flicking through the novel, in search of a sentence which seemed too unremarkable at the time to dog-ear. Something about how men spend their prime years in search of fame, fortune, adventure, and only in their later years discover that all that matters is family, the fireside. This sentiment of Melville's has gradually found its way to the Christina Stead quote-of-the-moment, "She's [womankind is] desperate!" (see previous entry). It struck me that women's discovery is the opposite - they spend the first two decades of adulthood obsessed with family and the fireside - with men - then (post-menopause) discover all the other things life has to offer. In my limited but wide-ranging experience of men, those under forty think that your interest in them is a reflection of all their merits; your interest in them inspires them with the confidence to reach for even greater ambitions. Men over forty think that your interest in them is a fluke, and they try to grab as much of you as they can before you (inevitably) move on. As Jenny Winters said, "Older men - they're grateful." Men - especially the ones with the most charms - must feel a terrible loss when, for all their charms, women in their age-group simply aren't interested in them anymore, not they way they used to be. Maybe it's good and natural that women and men aren't "desperate" for each other at the same time in their life-cycle. But it seems a pity, too! Well, I'm looking forward to my revenge. I read a fairy-story in childhood where the hero had two choices: trials and tribulations in the first half of life, and peace and happiness in the second half, or vice versa. As I child, I decided that, in his position, I would have chosen the trials and tribulations in youth, while I had the energy to cope with it - "get it over with", I thought.

All right, some favourite parts:

...he [Ahab] cried out in his old lion voice, - "Up helm! Keep her off round the world!"

Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings, but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.

This set off a "demon phantom" theme for me - all the demon phantoms I senselessly chase, and not just men-under-forty. It would be nice just to live, rather than fill up one's time with difficult circumnavigations.

There is a wonderful passage about our hero Ishmael's first meeting with the tattooed cannibal Queequeg, who becomes his bosom friend. Ishmael is initially repelled and horrified by Queequeg's appearance, and the fact that he has spent the day trying to hawk a severed head around the town of Nantucket. Here, he is forced to share a bedroom with Queequeg in a cheap, crowded hotel:

As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, then it only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in on us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilised hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.

Ishmael starts up a broken conversation with his room-mate, and ends up helping him with his nightly ritual to the little ebony idol that he carries with him:

...that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.

Oh, it's tiring typing out another writer's paragraphs! There are so many more dog-eared pages, but I'll stop there for now.

Christina Stead

November, 2010: I suddenly remembered I had Christina Stead's For Love Alone (1945) sitting on my shelf, as yet unread. What a treat!

To me, it's a very detailed depiction of a relationship - I mean, a love-relationship. In many books, any love-relationships between the characters will be part of the background, with the story running across the top. Or a love affair will be an episode, not the story itself. Even love stories - for example, Jane Austen's novels, or D.H.L.'s Lady Chatterley's Lover - tend to depict the act of falling in love, or the meandering way two people got together, rather than the relationship itself, its day-to-day workings. It's almost as if there's an assumption that all relationships are the same from there on. Of course, that's patently untrue. Novels about relationships are hard to write (and read): they're long, gruelling, full of fastidious details, full of what you would call, if you were one of the two in the relationship, "nit-picking". Anna Karenina is a story about a love-relationship. One of the things I remember about it is that where a love-story would end (the two lovers have finally surmounted the obstacles and can be together), Anna Karenina goes on, and on, even past the point where a tragic-love-story would end. Anna Karenina reminded me of Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest (which I had read a couple of years previously): another relentless book documenting the beginning and end of a relationship (of a sort) between two music students in Leipzig.

To be with Johnathon Crow, Teresa Hawkins travels from Sydney to London (between the Wars), having slaved away at a badly-paid (women's wages) job, scrimped, and nearly starved herself to death in order to save up for the passage. The descriptions of Teresa's half-starved existence in 1930s Sydney reminded me of the graphic detail in Knut Hamsun's Hunger(damn! Who did I lend my copy to? A rat had chewed a hole in the cover). On page 445 of For Love Alone (500 pages), Johnathon finally admits, to Teresa's soon-to-be new lover, "I enjoyed her misery." I thought, "That's the sentence this book is about!" It's so hard to understand another person - just one other person. As you enter into a love-relationship with someone, their differences often become increasingly less, not more, fathomable. Perhaps Stead had experienced, close up, a person like Johnathon, who could put a lover through five or six years of pain and unhappiness, and then say, at the end, "I enjoyed her misery." It takes a whole novel to fathom a statement like that; and to fathom how warm-hearted Teresa got herself into a relationship with a cold-hearted sadist, and then got herself out.

Stead's writing reminds me of my flatmate Enrique's painting style: what seems like a busy mass of blobs and quick strokes, drips, mistakes, boot-prints, gradually reveals itself to be a really clearly, precisely executed scene. Enrique hung a painting up in our kitchen - a person drinking a cup of tea, but where? in what setting? Enrique wouldn't tell. After weeks of eyeing the painting, I suddenly saw - it was in our own kitchen! There it all was, the cupboard with the door slightly hanging off its hinges, the window, the noticeboard, the mug I'd bought in Cowra Vinnies. "For Love Alone is as rough around the edges and as messy as a work by a major writer could be," writes Peter Craven in the introduction. After reading that, I didn't bother to read the rest of what Craven had to say, though "very nearly Mills and Boon for serious readers" also unfavourably caught my eye. Just because a novel is about love, doesn't mean it's a romance - jeez! Cormac McCarthy is "Mills and Boon for serious (namely, male) readers". And I mean that in a derogatory way. It's characteristic of a Stead novel that only at the end, or even a few days after finishing it, have I realised what it was about. That's a really satisfying feeling.

Is this romantic, just because it's about love? To me, it's almost terrifying:

Most young women are surprised to find themselves with a lover at all; the oblique remarks and casual slurs of relatives, the naked domestic drama and hate of parent and child, leads them to the belief that love does not exist, that it is a flare-up between the sexes, a fever, or a nugget which must be capitalised as soon as found. They are brought up with the idea that their cousins and aunts do what is next-door to blackmail, robbery, and a confidence trick to get married at all. They secretly agree with the Johnathon Crows that they are failures, freaks, if they don't. They love, but they are taught that their love is ridiculous, old-fashioned, unseemly, and inopportune, an obstacle to their life-game, an actual menace to their family society and to the lives of their children to be, for "show a man you love him and he runs in the opposite direction". This was her aunt's timid belief. A poor woman has only one property, her body; passion destroys all relations and liquidates property. So that open love is a serious stain on her character, even if she is as pure as the Virgin.

I quoted this bit to Bella on the phone the other day, talking about the biological differences between men and women, and what effect that has on us - women have an end, a kind of death, in the middle of their lives, when they can't have children any longer, but men don't have that, their first death is the big one:

Quick bounced up and down the room again, and quoted Jonathan aloud: "Christ gave no hostages to fortune." Then he rushed on: "Woman is haunted - as no man is haunted - by the fear of biological failure. She's desperate! They live contingently! And he knows it, the spider! We are allowed to doubt, they never."

If a man had written that women are desperate, it probably would have raised my hackles.

I liked this speech from a man who tries to pick up Teresa in Sydney:

"Look, wouldn't you go to a movie with me? I don't want anything, only your company. I just want to go to the movies with someone. I never spoke to no one," he said, lapsing suddenly. "I've been here seven days and the girls don't want to talk to you. I'm all right. I'm a counter man in a little ham-and-beef up there, on the other side of the station, in Mortdale. I saved up the whole year to come to Sydney for me holidays. They always say Sydney is lively. I never met nobody here. Yesterday, I took the train up to Arncliffe. I just took any ticket. The day before I went to the Zoo, I spoke to a couple of girls but they wouldn't speak to me. I came back. I've got a room in Darlinghurst."

He depresses the hell out of Teresa and she hurries away. She's too close to being just like him.

And a rape anecdote that Jonathan tells to Teresa, to make himself sound like a man of the world. The nonchalance with which Jonathan retails it is shocking:

"Anyhow, the girl turned back to make the bed and Burton, furious at being answered with his friends there - for I suppose he half-believes that rot of his - brutally pushed her onto the bed and invited one of the chaps to attack her. They were scared of course, so he tried to, but she twisted out of his grasp, although he's a hefty fellow - but shaky just then - and she rushed out of the room, bellowing. What a shindy! Wow! She ran downstairs, crying for the landlady. Do you know what the fellow did? A regular gallow's-bird. You've got to admire his almighty nerve in a way, none of us would have had the brass - it was this gentleman pose - he leaned over the stairhead and shouted to the landlady to send the girl up to do his filthy room, if not he'd leave that very day. That was pushing his gall pretty far, considering what he owed in rent there. What was his pull? The old lady was sweet on him, I imagine. The girl was crying downstairs and telling what was the matter, and Burton yelling upstairs. What a din! Some of the fellows were making a row too. Would you believe it? The landlady wouldn't believe the girl and sent her up, to satisfy him, and he raped her, and a couple of the other fellows did, but we just sat and grinned. What a scene!" he finished reminiscently, but with a sidelong glance at her.

Another woman, Clara, falls in love with Jonathan (I'm working backwards through my dog-eared pages):

"There's something about being a woman. I simply want to be a cave woman when I think of you. I want to work for you, I'd wait on you, I'd wash your feet and dry them with my hair."

"Like Jesus," said Jonathan.

"Yes," she said grudgingly, "like Jesus. As Martha, as Mary - but I wasn't thinking of Jesus."

"No, I know, slavery is a kind of instinct with women."

"We call it love."

"I call it the instinct of the millennial slave."

Dennis Potter, Joseph Westermeyer

October, 2010: Errol noticed Blackeyes on a bookshelf on Lord Howe Island - Dennis Potter has written a novel? Dennis Potter who made the crazy television series The SInging Detective? Errol read it in a night, then roundly recommended it. Deirdre found a secondhand copy, read it, then lent it to me. Dennis Potter’s virtuosity is structure. When I use the word ‘virtuosity’, it does indeed come with a tinge of disapproval. As in The Singing Detective, Potter’s story in Blackeyes goes simultaneously forwards and backwards, runs alongside itself, sees itself reflected between two mirrors. To draw a diagram of Potter’s story would be an effort, and helpful, too. To give you an idea, and to prove that I’m not just being wordy, here’s how the story starts: a former model, Jessica, is trying to write a novel, or rather, to rewrite the bestseller that has turned her decrepit old uncle into a celebrity. His novel is called Sugar Bush. The story is hers, or his version of hers, told to him over a succession of lunches (paid for by her). His novel is now inscribed in her memory - she knows it by heart. She had hoped his novel would give her a voice; instead it has portrayed her as a mute and thoughtless object, named Blackeyes; it has made her into a man’s toy all over again.

Dennis Potter has a lot of fun playing with Jessica’s novel (she is an inept writer), Uncle Maurice’s novel (he is a purple-proser), and Jessica’s actual experiences of the events depicted in Sugar Bush, these experiences described (possibly) by the only nice man that entered her life during her modelling days, a man she has completely forgotten. Phew! - it’s complicated.

Potter’s trickery (his virtuosity) is the honey to help the tablet to go down. The tablet, thankfully, is really interesting - Potter is not a story-teller with expertise but without ideas: with his handful of characters, Potter seems to be examining his own responses to a beautiful, sexy, young girl. This is a great use of fiction - the author can lay down all his or her complex, contradictory, disturbing feelings about something, not in a reasoned essay where every assertion would be cancelled out by its opposite - boring! fence-sitting! - but by embodying each feeling in a different character, who then argue it out amongst themselves. Fiction is more about exploration than about coming to a conclusion. And even the filthy old uncle, and the drooling executives, are explored, and subsequently granted some sympathy. Here’s a casting session, where Blackeyes is desperate to get the job:

Blackeyes unscrewed the silvered cap from the bottle and shook out some of the amber lotion onto the tips of her fingers. The Sleepy Lagoon music was playing again, and it became like an ache at the back of her eyes. She would henceforth always remember this syrup of a waltz with a slow, viscous drip of melancholy.

The stuff felt tacky on her fingers.

She began to rub and then smooth or caress it into the top of her arm. The small circles slowly widened as she moved her fingers with what seemed to be an increasingly erotic deliberation towards her shoulder and her neck. Her head tilted back a little as she worked the slightly gooey dribbles of liquid into her skin, which meant that she could no longer see the shadowed faces of the men seated on the far sides of the room.

These faces were showing signs of sexual yearning, and, in some cases, torment. Fog at the window, fall in the air, a stuffy room, and a succession of bikini-clad young women had somehow deadened the emotions and yet quickened the senses: or, at least, the one sense they usually thought about the most. None of the previous girls had drawn from them quite so powerful a longing.

Most people feel enslaved - in varying degrees - by the sex they are attracted to. Blackeyes examines sexual power and sexual exploitation, and no one really seems to have the upper-hand.

Errol was a bit disappointed by the ending - he thought Potter had grown tired of the whole thing and quickly wrapped it up. The ending is far more ‘plotty’ than it needed to be: flashbacks yield up a pivotal event, Blackeyes is given a happy ending with that nice man she forgot, and Jessica and Uncle Maurice are also well and truly wrapped up. Lots of novels that have been notable for their delicacy or intricacy, suddenly degenerate at the end, as though the last gobbets of paint are squeezed impatiently out of the tube and slapped onto the page, quantity (of plot and action) intended as a substitute for subtlety, and to compensate for failure of inspiration. Endings are what counts, alas - but even so, Blackeyes is a bold look at what arouses us, and why.

Just a little note: the strangest, or most strangely moving romance I’ve ever come across in a book is the one between Uncle Maurice and his teddy bear. All closet toy-huggers will feel dreadfully exposed by the depiction of this relationship. Is Potter outing himself as a toy-hugger? It is a piece of characterisation as brave as Thomas Mann’s make-up wearing old man inDeath In Venice.

October 2010: Poppies, Pipes, And People (Opium and its Use in Laos) by Joseph Westermeyer. Stella borrowed this book for me from the COFA library because she knew there was an opium addict in my novel, and that I’d had trouble finding books about opium. First I turned to the chapters that I thought would be of use to me - such as the parts where Westermeyer describes techniques for smoking opium, and its physical effects. But then the book turned out to be so clearly written, with a great balance between subjectivity and objectivity, that I turned to the beginning and read it cover-to-cover. It’s a book written by someone who has a lot to say about a subject, and who has put in the thought and effort to structure it, so that it will be accessible to any reader. Because I have a few books waiting in the ‘Book Of The Moment’ pile, I’m just going to note down the passages I dog-eared before I give it back to the library, via Stella.

A sense of adventure-seeking may also be a part of such curiosity. Undertaking an adventure often relieves boredom and can lead to increased well-being. Soldiers surviving battle and women surviving childbirth commonly experience increased self-confidence and self-esteem. Similar feelings may accompany the experience of having exposed oneself to the risk of addiction, not having succumbed to it, and thus having shown strength of character and self-control. (p. 63)

...males in all ethnic groups were at greater risk to opium addiction than were women...One explanation has been that depression or neurosis in women may be an equivalent of substance abuse in men. Careful family studies by several researchers strongly support this theory (p. 120)

Dumont’s tavern dwellers bore other resemblances to the den habitués in Laos. They were alienated from their families, worked only irregularly, and spent several hours each day at the tavern. A certain stability of intoxicant usage was maintained by regular adherents to the group. For these regular members, the tavern group became their main, or only, reference group. Each of these characteristics applied to the den-using addicts in Laos. (p.145)

I have followed the lives of these eight people...since their smoking opium in one or another Loatian den. None has ever become and opium addict...Had any of them done so, I would have been greatly remorseful. Was the risk, while small in my opinion, worth our small adventure? That is difficult to answer directly. We were all explorers of a kind, or we would not have been in Laos - and in an opium den at that. I might beg the question by saying were were all several years younger then and more bent on riskful adventure than cautious conservatism. Such ventures together also cemented the bonds between us. but there is a risk to curiosity about opium...especially if it remains readily available to the experimenter and if the experimenter has an ongoing problem, such as chronic pain, loneliness or fear. (p. 166)

The French Drug Dealer. Jacques’s father had been a colonel with the French Army in Indochina during the 1940s and 1950s. After Jacques had dropped out of the lycée, impregnated the daughter of a prominent family, and proven unable to hold down any of several jobs, his father suggested that he might seek his fortune in Indochia. Besides giving his son a one-way airline ticket, his father promised to send s small monthly stipend from his service pension. (It seems likely that his father sent him with the expectation that Indochina would make a gentleman or a corpse of his wayward son.)

Jacques soon met two other countrymen like himself, both selling heroin to world travellers and using it themselves. Within a month of arriving in Vientiane, he was addicted. During the subsequent two years, he fared better than he had in France...As I repeatedly encountered Jacques and his two friends around Vientiane, the steadfastness of their three-sided partnership became evident. All three comprised an armed, mobile heroin business. They carried concealed small handguns and volumes of heroin and could make change in several currencies on the spot. yet they were known to be fair to their clientele and generous in their charitable contributions to the police. perhaps in his own way, Jacques was on his way to growing up. Pity I was not able to see over time whether the colonel ever got back a gentleman or a corpse. (pp.171-2)

In Search Of A Stern Parent. Hans was one of the more skillfully obnoxious people it had been my fortune to meet. The youngest son of a wealthy German industrialist, he was a past master at the art of alienation and social masochism. Within five or ten minutes, he could antagonise the most phlegmatic government functionary at the Narcotic Detoxification Centre. It seemed to be the only skill he had acquired in his twenty years, at least besides linguistic proficiency in several European languages. He had no difficulty conversing with the Lao staff in fluent French. With me he spoke a flawless, clipped, London version of English, without a hint of Germanic overtones (except perhaps in his haughty mien). His appearance was as initially intriguing as his surface sophistication. Delicate, with finely chiselled features, he wore an expensive embroidered black silk tunic over a pair of rough canvas pants cut high above his Asian thongs.

Hans had developed his brief social exchanges to a high art. They began with his smoothly attracting someone, anyone, into conversation. There followed in short order some outrageous demand: a wish to be served breakfast at a restaurant in the afternoon, a request for a watch on credit in a jewellery store, approval from the medical staff at the Centre that he receive morning doses of methadone to stave off his withdrawal so he could have glorious heroin trips in the evening. When refused, Hans would launch into a cool, scathing string of insults and diatribes against the individual whom he had so recently engaged - and who in many cases then became (ambivalently) his persecutor, tossing him out of a shop, clinic, or restaurant on his ear.

In several brief snatches, Hans allowed me some glimpses into his past life. He had been raised by a series of French au pair girls and English matrons, none of whom could apparently tolerate him (or possibly his parents) for more than several months. When old enough to attend school, he matriculated transiently through a series of Swiss and English private schools. At eighteen, when he came into a small annual inheritance, he promptly dropped out of school and began his world travels. Two years later found him in Laos on heroin, again replicating the isolated and alienating lifestyle that he had learned many years earlier. (pp.184-5)

These two descriptions of people whom he had come across are so well-observed; not only did they remind me eerily of my own Theodor, but they also caused me to wonder (acutely) what happened to Jacques and Hans. And I almost wish I haven't been working for seven years on a novel about drug addiction, and male partnerships, loyalty, disloyalty etc., because reading about these characters make me want to write a novel set in the 1970s about drug addiction, male partnerships etc. Or maybe my interest in the subject isn't yet exhausted. Well-tilled soil, it's true - but where do the women fit in? This is a question I direct not just at stories, but at life, more importantly. Where does a non-drug- or risk-taking woman fit into this world? Why the hell would such a woman be drawn to that world, drawn to the men in those worlds?

There's a lot of very interesting information about addiction in Westermeyer's book. If you're an addict - of anything - wanting to give it up, I'd recommend reading it. Or if you wonder whether you'd be considered an addict, or wonder how serious your addiction is, from page 288-90, there is a really clear table that I might even photocopy. I applied it to my addicted friends, and found it strangely helpful.

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.