Thomas Hardy

September, 2011:  Mumma recently read Thomas Hardy's last novel, Jude The Obscure (1895), and recommended it.  A recommendation from Sally is enough to put a book on my list, but her comment, "It's very anti-marriage," put it right at the very top of my list.  I said, "Can I borrow it now?"

Jude the Obscure is a cry for understanding, a cry of reason - and a fading hope that anyone will hear in time.  "Someone might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian.  But nobody did come, because nobody does..."  Naturally enough, it ends with death and despair.  This is a very real purpose of writing - that it can be a communion, of writer and reader, from beyond the grave.  And it does actually improve the writer's immediate life, and alleviate his or her sense of profound, Cassandra-esque loneliness, to salt away these thoughts and ideas for a future reader.  When you write a letter to a friend, for example, you feel companionship - writing a letter can feel like a social interaction.  If you happened - heaven forfend! - to get run over by a truck on your way back from your stroll to the post-box, this wouldn't nullify the companionship that you felt while writing the letter.  This is how I (an atheist) console myself when reading the work of writers like Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Eve Langley, Isabelle Eberhardt - it is worth something that they are appreciated after they've died.  And maybe in some ways they all, like Langley, "prefer to work in the lonely silence of the unknown winter."  Otherwise the tragedy of their lives is heavy - that they were sane, clear-eyed people, who, like Sue of Jude, "saw all my superstitions as cobwebs that [they] could brush away with a word"; but who were treated as mad or aberrant or ever - for shame! - obscene.

"As for Sue and me when we were at our own best, long ago - when our minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless - the time was not ripe for us!  Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us."

Jude The Obscure is full of ideas.  It is principally a illustration of the damage caused by marriage.  It is also a case for making education freely available to those who really want it (as opposed to mandatory for all, as it is in our "qualification essential" society).  Jude grows up an orphan in a small, muddy hollow in Wessex, and develops an ambition to go to university at the far-off, glittering city of Christminster.  He prepares himself by learning Latin and Greek from a couple of old, secondhand grammars, while delivering bread for his great-aunt's bakery.  

But how to live in that city?  At present he had no income at all.  He had no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on which he could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour which might spread out over many years.

What was required by most citizens?  Food, clothing and shelter.  An income from any work in preparing the first would be too meagre; for making the second, he felt a distaste; the preparation of the third he inclined to.  They built in a city; therefore he would learn to build.

This is the soundest career plan I've ever read - what is required by most citizens?  Hardly a line of reasoning that would lead to the conclusion: "I know, I'll design apps for mobile phones."  

His ambitions are thwarted when a buxom young woman with dimples and abundant tresses (the first of which turns out to be studied, the second detachable and made of horse-hair) seduces him, then, following the advice of a girlfriend, pretends to be pregnant in order to make him marry her.  Jude, being serious and horourable, or "such an old slow coach", marries Arabella.  This soon turns out to have been a mistake.  

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a life-long companionship tolerable.

This simply-worded sentence sums up the core of my own disbelief in marriage.  Most of us want to find someone with whom we have these affinities, and getting married isn't proof that you've found him or her.  In fact, if you're lucky enough to find him or her, marriage is completely superfluous.  Even being together is superfluous, as Jude points out.  There are some affinities that endure to the end.  Marriage - and divorce - are irrelevant to these affinities.

I won't go on describing what happens over the next four-hundred pages.  For my own benefit, I will transcribe a few bits and pieces that appealed to me:

Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome with men because she was childishly ignorant of that side of their nature which wore out women's hearts and lives.

Jude, in a desperate bid not to give up his dream of going to university, sends letters to several heads of colleges in Christminster describing his situation and asking them for advice.  Only one writes back:

Sir, - I have read your letter with interest, and, judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course.

Jude goes out on the town and on the way back to his rooms, he chose:

"...a circuitous route homeward to pass the gates of the College whose Head had just sent him the note.

The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his pocket the lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote along the wall:

"I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?"  - Job, XII 3.

Sue says that universities ought to exist for people like him.  At the end of the novel, she says:

"Your worldly failure, if you have failed, is to your credit rather than to your blame.  Remember that the best and the greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good.  Every successful man is more or less a selfish man.  The devoted fail...'Charity seeketh not her own.'"

The dialogue between Sue and Jude is natural, idiomatic, idiosyncratic, and conveys the depth of their affinity.  Here they are on their way to the church to try to get married (having obtained divorces from their respective spouses), and both are having grave doubts about the act:

"We are horribly sensitive; that's really what's the matter with us, Sue!" he declared.

"I fancy more are like us than we think!"

"Well, I don't know.  The intention of the contract is good, and right for many, no doubt; but in our case it might defeat its own ends because we are the queer sort of people we are - folk in whom domestic ties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness."

Sue still held that there was not much queer or exceptional in them: that all were so.  "Everybody is getting to feel as we do.  We are a little beforehand, that's all.  In fifty, a hundred, years, the descendants of these two [the ones ahead of them at the altar] will act and feel worse than we.  They will see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as '...shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied...' and will be afraid to reproduce them."

"What a terrible line of poetry!...though I have felt it myself about my fellow creatures, at morbid times."

Sue finds her first husband, Phillotson, who is twenty years older than her, so physically repugnant that she shrinks from him when he tries to give her a kiss on the cheek, and soon after their marriage moves into a separate bedroom.  One night, after their in-house separation, he absentmindedly goes into her room instead of his.  She wakes to find him undressed and about to get into bed with her, and she jumps out the window, falling a storey or two.  Phillotson is heroic, in his way, and this incident convinces him that he has to let her go.  Later, Sue finds out that Jude and Arabella spent a night together:

"Your story was that you had met as estranged people, who were not husband and wife at all in Heaven's sight - not that you had made it up with her."

"We didn't make it up," he said sadly.  "I can't explain, Sue."

"You've been false to me; you, my last hope!  And I shall never forget it, never!"

"But by your own wish, dear Sue, we are only to be friends, not lovers!  It is so very inconsistent of you to-"

"Friends can be jealous!"

Sue concludes the argument by saying:

"O it was treacherous of you to have her again!  I jumped out of the window!"

And a bit later:

"O don't you understand my feeling!  Why don't you!  Why are you so gross!  I jumped out of the window!"

"Jumped out of the window?"

"I can't explain!"

I read, in a Good Weekend column, the trite phrase "about as funny as Thomas Hardy", i.e. not at all.  It's true that Jude The Obscure left me convinced of the cruelty of the world - specifically, of groups of people towards anyone who differs from them.  And it paints being alive as a grinding-down process, in which all hopes, dreams, hearts etc. are slowly worn away.  But against this harsh backdrop, Jude and Sue's thoughts and feelings are beautiful and interesting (and sometimes funny); thoughts and feelings make life worth living.  Jude describes Sue as, "a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a diamond." 

Ruth Park

August, 2011:  In a romantic mood, I bought Ruth Park's The Witch's Thorn and D'Arcy Niland's The Big Smoke from Sappho's Books, thereby reuniting the two lovers as they bumped along together in my bag.  Helen and I looked up Park and Niland on the Google - they are a beautiful couple:

And a line in the bio of The Witch's Thorn makes me almost sigh with envy: "...after her marriage to the author D'Arcy Niland, [she] roamed around the outback with him doing a variety of jobs, all of which has provided rich source material for her writing." 

The Witch's Thorn is Park's third novel, and I didn't dog-ear any pages - her writing, in these early novels, is ungainly.  She doesn't seem to have lingered over her sentences, carefully crafting them, nor her characters; her eye is on the plot and structure, and on getting her main point across.  This gives The Witch's Thorn a workmanlike feel, which I thoroughly approve of.  I walk away from Park's novels with new ideas in my mind; whereas from an unstructured writer like Eve Langley, I walk away with a feeling that the author has impressed her personality upon me.  I value both experiences, but the latter is more limited.  Inevitably I want more breadth than is offered by one personality, however fascinating.

Once I'd finished The Witch's Thorn, I suddenly saw how planned and plotted the whole novel was; while I was immersed in it, the story had felt pretty natural and organic, and only two or three times had I felt a clunk underneath me as the story moved to the next gear.  Park examines the social strata of a rural town in New Zealand, using a parentless (if not exactly orphaned) child, Bethell, as the tool with which to test the values of five different households, starting from the top - the respectable, church-going shop-keeper and his wife, who grudgingly accept charge of their niece - and one-by-one working down through the layers, as Bethell is rejected and failed by everyone in the town, even the nice old priest, and even the reformed prostitute with a dozen healthy children and a heart of gold.  Finally, Bethell is rescued from the brink of death by the ones well beyond the pale of the conservative town - a Maori family, who gladly sacrifices, for Bethell's sake, the skerrick of respectability and social acceptance that they have garnered over the years.

Once again, Park's boldness is notable.  I suspect that Park and Niland were a good influence on each other in this respect, encouraging each other not to shy away from the shadowy corners of society.  Such as, in The Shiralee, the part where Macauley has sex with an Aboriginal maid; he despises himself and her for doing it, and most callously gives her money when he leaves the property, thereby turning their encounter into a base transaction (while she had put a red ribbon in her hair, and probably had a big crush on him).  In The Witch's Thorn, there's a similarly dirty, degraded passage: Johnny Gow hates his downtrodden wife, Ella, who is debilitated by all the children she has borne, including a new baby about a week ago.  They are driving back from the funeral of the woman he loved:

"If I had any guts I'd murder you.  But I haven't.  I haven't the nerve to buck the rope, even for you.  There's only one way to get rid of you, Ella."

She stared at him, terrified.

"Get out," he ordered.

"No, Johnny," she quavered.  

He threw the reins over the pony's head and leapt to the ground.  With fierce, hating energy he dragged his wife out of the trap.  Her limp, flabby body both repelled and frenzied him.

"Johnny," she moaned, "give me a little time.  Just a little while.  I'll do anything if only you'll leave me alone for a while."

He dragged her after him over the rough ground to the lonely paddock with the broom hedge spiking along the ridge.

"Johnny, I 'll die if I have another one so soon.  Think of the children.  What would happen to them?  Oh.  Johnny, please, please."

He began to laugh.  She felt his body rumbling with mirth.

"Men have been murdering their wives this way for centuries," he said softly and gently.  "And it's all so nice and legal, too."

Park points the torch at numerous domestic taboos - Bethell's respectable cousin tries to rape her, and Bethell is blamed.  Her uncle has an inappropriate attachment to one of his daughters - there's a repulsive scene where the daughter has to give her father a head-rub.  Bethell's nicest aunt becomes a prostitute after being widowed with eight young children.  And Bethell herself is illegitimate, her mother having had an affair with the married Johnny Gow. Johnny Gow not only rapes his wife, but beats her regularly, too.  Johnny and his wife both beat Bethell.  And when I remind myself, "This is a society that stoned Eve Langley for wearing trousers!", I really admire Park for her fearless crusade against hypocrisy and social cruelty.  And although I get a bit irritated by her idealism of the characters at the outer edges of society - they're all so cheerful! as though they lack the depth to feel things such as existential crises or self-doubts - perhaps if I were living in '40s or '50s New Zealand, I would feel the same disgust with the inner-circle, with the ones with the power to change the rules.

There was one passage I puzzled over:

"My old daddy had some funny Scots ideas," said Lachie Gow.  "He used to tell me about a thorn tree that the Highlanders believed in.  When it pricked, it poisoned.  It was a witch's thorn.  And whoever it pricked could pass on the poison to someone else, just with a touch.  He believed in that thorn, my old man."

"I never heard of it growing around here," said Mrs Hush, puzzled.

He tried again.  "It's just a story, don't you see?  But it means that one bad action influences everyone else.  My brother Johnny loved your sister when he shouldn't have, and look what came out of that, ruined lives and changed lives, all through this town and out of it, too, for all I know, for who knows how many people Queenie met and altered in some way?  [He cites some more examples]...It's all mixed up in some way, and there's no getting away from it."

Fascinated and awed, Bethell held up her hands in the dusk, examining them minutely.

"I haven't been pricked by the thorn.  Mr. Wi hasn't.  Hoot Gibson hasn't.  But perhaps we will be someday."

The mystery, and the fear of the mystery, prickled her skin, and she crept out of the grass and ran like a hare for the light and the warmth and crowded companionship of the house.

It's a passage that isn't as straightforward as it first seems.  Considering that Park, in Swords And Crowns And Rings, wrote, "She had accepted that no one could come into another's life without consequences.  Jackie had taught her that.  She would not want him to feel guilt for anything in her life", I'm not so sure that Park is saying that being pricked by the witch's thorn is a bad thing.  Maybe she is saying that being altered by life's experiences and encounters, even to the extent of being poisoned by them, is the price we pay for being alive, just as losing innocence is the price we pay for knowing more.  We can't keep ourselves intact.

D'Arcy Niland

August, 2011:  I went to Cowra with no book, so had the pleasure of picking out one from my grandparents' shelves.  As I had just been reading about Ruth Park, and the Australian novelist for whom she was leaving New Zealand, I chose The Shiralee (1955), by D'Arcy Niland.  

I don't have The Shiralee here with me, so I have to write about it from memory, which is probably a good thing (seeing as I presently have a back-log of 'Books Of The Moment' to write about).  It's a story about a freedom-loving swagman/itinerant worker, Macauley, who unexpectedly gets lumped with his 4-year-old daughter, Buster.  He is unwilling to change his ways; the story follows his gradual compromising, and the increase of happiness that comes to him in exchange for taking on the burden, or shiralee (another name for a swag), of a child.  It's a simple, archetypal story about 'freedom versus attachment' - themes that I, for one, never tire of puzzling over - but it is made unique by the voice it gives to Macauley.  

Macauley is an ultra-masculine man, who expresses himself by action, not words, and is therefore a difficult subject to make the bearer of a written story.  These are men who frequently appear in stories (or more often, films) as the object rather than the subject; they are useful protagonists, as they so readily do things, and cause plot to advance, but few novel-readers or movie-goers would identify with them, would expect to be guided through a story by one of them.  The people who would identify with them aren't often, I'm afraid, reading novels.  Ethan Frome has a similarly inarticulate main-man, but I reckon Niland does it better than Wharton.  Niland shows the reader Macauley's thought-process, in all its rough, simple language and broad strokes, in its lack of detail, in its cruelty and every-man-for-himselfishness, and yet without leaving Macauley looking like a brutish Neanderthal or a lump of stone.  As an inveterate lover of this type of man, it was a great insight for me to read of Macauley's thoughts and feelings - so different to mine!  So impossible for me ever to understand!  

One passage I partially remember is when he is taking shelter from a downpour under a bridge, and thinking about the woman who served him in a bakery.  He is tormented with sexual frustration, and finally thinks (to paraphrase), "Leave it at that: he was a man, he wanted a woman.  Leave it at that."*

A passage that made me "well up" was when he meets up with a crazy old fellow with a few verbal tics, who nevertheless understands Macauley's type and gives him some advice, which will sound hackneyed when I put it down here without a context, and without Niland's straightforward language: it's all very well to keep on the move, but isn't this almost an act of despair, rather than an exercising of your freedom?  Isn't it because there's nowhere you want to be, nothing you want to be doing, isn't it a fleeing from, rather than an aspiring to?  Instead, find something you like and stick to it!  (Sorry, D'Arcy Niland, to Musak your beautifully-couched sentiment.)  Macauley reacts to this piece of advice not by moving into a little cottage and becoming a potato farmer - Niland never sacrifices his man for the sake of a moral - but by investing in an ancient horse and cart, and otherwise keeping up his itinerant ways.  

Another thing that I loved about The Shiralee was its lack of materialism.  Macauley doesn't have a tent - he has a bit of tarpaulin.  He doesn't have special walking boots.  He doesn't have a pram for Buster, or one of those baby-backpacks.  He makes her walk.  And when she starts to fall asleep walking, he picks her up and carries her.  It's good for us - we live in a time of great dependency - to read something that reminds us that all we need to live is our body.  We don't need equipment, a licence, or to have done a course.  We don't actually need money.  We certainly don't need mobile reception!


*In Cowra with my grandfather's bookshelf and my computer.  I feel the obligation to transcribe the passages as they are, putting my paraphrasing to shame.  Here's the bit about sexual frustration:

He twisted his hands with tension, but it was going from him, and he was feeling easier, and in a little while he was all right, quiet and reasoning.  He took a look at himself and he stood by what he saw.

I'm a man, he thought.  And I want a woman.  That's straight.  I wouldn't deny it before God himself.  If I didn't want one I'd start to think there was something the matter with me.  I want a woman all right.  Leave it at that.  For all the good it is thinking about it, I might as well be docked.  Leave that as it is, too.  I don't have to go on like a pimply-faced whore-chaser, do I?

Here's the conversation between Mac and Desmond, the philosophical crackpot:

Desmond suddenly said to him, "Do you know where you're going?"

"Going?"

"I don't mean going away tomorrow, or the day after, and so on.  I mean do you know where your life's going?"

Macauley looked puzzled for a moment.  He shrugged.  "Who does?  Do you?"

"I have a fair idea.  But I don't think you follow me.  I'll put it this way: Why do you move about?  Carry on the life you do?"

"Here and there and all over the place like a fly, you mean?"  Macauley sighed, gazing into the fire.  "Some people can move slow and get on all right, I don't know, I never could.  All my life, something's been biting me - urging me on."

"Yes, but where to, that's my point."

"How do I know?" Macauley said.  "Does it matter?"

"Listen!" Desmond exclaimed.  "Hear that river?  There's water coming from somewhere and going somewhere and so on.  It flows on a set course for thousands of miles.  It's not only getting away from something, it's getting to something.  It's getting away from the mountains and getting to the ocean.  Well, I'll tell you something.  That's the was a man's life should be and so on."

"Why?" Macauley asked.

"Well, otherwise there's no purpose.  A man is right to get away from evil, from trouble, and the things that are bad for him.  But he can spend all his life running away from them.  He should stop and think and so on.  Then he should pick something that will better him, that is good for him, and try to achieve it.  Then he's running towards something.  See what I mean?"

Macauley nodded his understanding.  "But who's talking?" he said.

"What I just said," Desmond replied, "I never thought of it till just a few months ago.  It took me all those years and so on to find it out.  And it's too late for me to start doing anything about it now."

Rudyard Kipling/Craig Raine

July, 2011:  About ten years ago, my father gave me the complete Kipling.  I loved Kim and The Jungle Book, but hated The Light That Failed, and didn't think much of one or two other volumes that I looked at.  In an effort to rectify my low opinion of Kipling, Geoff recently lent me A Choice of Kipling's Prose (1987), selected by Craig Raine.  Every one of these short stories is a jewel.  Thankfully, Raine didn't let the title of the selection put him off including some of Kipling's poems, too; I find poetry hard to read, as it is so dense and rich, and seems to demand repeated poring-overs - the kind of attention that I give to songs - so to have a few of Raine's favourites slipped in between stories was a good way of making prose-readers eat their poems (the way Geoff used to slip a whole lot of spinach into the spag bol he used to make for us children).

It's hard to write about short stories; each story ought to have at least a paragraph, and, alas, I don't want to spend that much time on the task.  One thing that made me love him was his great interest in every person who crossed his path.  He makes two old English ladies having afternoon tea together just as interesting, colourful and moving, as, say, the ill-fated love affair between a Hindu woman who and an Englishman (she ends up having her hands cut off).  And although I usually dislike dialect being put down in print - because it divides us into 'people who speak properly' and people who don't - when Kipling does it, it is because he has such a fine ear for voices, and the words people use is clearly of profound interest to him.  His ability to replicate a person's verbal style is miraculous.  His own voice is almost inaudible, so that I will find myself thinking, "Who told me that story about the handsome man getting his come-uppance?"  Then I'll remember - it was the story Love-o'-Woman, where the handsome man is dying, and all he can think about is a certain past love.  He finds her working in a brothel; his affair with her 'ruined' her.  

'"Fwhat do you do here?" she sez, an' her voice wint up.  'Twas like bells tollin' before.  "Time was whin you were quick enough wid your words - you that talked me down to Hell.  Are ye dumb now?"  An' Love-o'-Woman got his tongue, an' sez simple, like a little child, "May I come in?" he sez.

'"The house is open day an' night," she sez, wid a laugh; and Love-o'-Woman ducked his head an' hild up his hand as tho' he was gyardin'.  The Power was still on him - it hild him up still, for, by my sowl, as I'll never save ut, he walked up the veranda steps that had been a livin' carpse in hospital for a month!

'"An' now?" she sez, lookin' at him; an' the red paint stud lone on the white av her face like a bull's-eye on a target.

'He lifted up his eyes, slow an' very slow, an' he looked at her long an' very long, an' he tuk his spache betune his teeth wid a wrench that shook him.

'"I'm dyin', Aigypt - dyin'," he sez.  Ay, those were his words, for I remimber the name he called her.  He was turnin' the death-colour, but his eyes niver rowled.  They were set - set on her.  Widout word or warnin' she opened her arms full stretch, an' "Here!" she sez.  (Oh, fwhat a golden miracle av a voice ut was!)  "Die here!" she sez, an' Love-o'-Woman dhropped forward, an' she hild him up, for she was a fine big woman.

I can see I'm going to have to read the introduction (I rarely do), as it reveals some of the many secrets encrypted in his stories - Love-o'-Woman was dying of syphilis, of course!  And "I'm dyin', Aigypt - dyin'" is a quote from Anthony An' Cleopatra!  And the nephew in another of my favourite stories, The Gardener, is actually an illegitimate son!  I should have known this from:

...though she was, at the time, under threat of lung trouble which had driven her to the south of France.

Perhaps I would have picked that up if he had added, "for nine months." 


His stories about India, or ghosts, or lovers, are like dreams, and have stayed in my mind only as pictures or brief moments without their contexts, but his stories about war are memorable, maybe partly because they're written with intent.  My father says Kipling was a real "warmonger" until his son was killed in battle (but which one - the Boer or WWI?).  The Madonna of the Trenches is about a traumatised soldier  who had been at 'Butcher's Row' in France, where corpses were used as sand-bags to keep back the tide of mud.  This was all right in winter, but "all those trenches were like gruel in a thaw", and when the duckboards were missing a slat, you'd unavoidably tread on the corpses, and they'd "creak".  To the reader, it seems more than understandable that this would leave a person permanently unhinged.  But Kipling's Brother Keede (a local doctor) doesn't buy it, and over the course of the story, he unlocks the real cause of Brother Strangwick's anxiety.  Kipling is telling a good story, but he is also making the point that when you have been calibrated to the daily horror of war, walking down Butcher's Row is as traumatising as say, cleaning out a grease trap (which is pretty disgusting).  But do we want to reach that level of calibration?  


He writes just as well about the people left at home in England, and how they become calibrated - not to say hardened - to the constant dying around them.  Mary Postgate is a story about a 'lady's companion', an inert woman who has no family of her own, seems to have no desires, no impulses or emotions, excepting a slightly maternal attachment to her lady's nephew.  He dies in WWI, and she gathers together his belongings and burns them in the incinerator at the bottom of the garden.  An enemy pilot chances to have parachuted down to the ground nearby, and is mortally wounded.  As Mary incinerates, she listens to him dying.  Mary, when young, had a lot of experience with people dying - her mother, father, "cousin Dick", and "Lady McCausland's house-maid".  One line reveals her as she was when young, before life had cauterised hopes and emotions out of her: "Her long pleasure [in listening to the soldier's death rattle] was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life."  Mary Postgate might be the strangest anti-hero ever.  The Gardener is the other war-at-home story that really struck me - struck me so hard I cried, and not just a tear or two!  Helen goes to Belgium to see where her 'nephew' has been buried:

She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath.  She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already.  All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces.  She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.

This is one of those descriptions that is so odd and specific, I suddenly realised I was reading a first-hand experience, though Kipling has hidden himself in a woman's body.  The mass slaughter was one thing that made me cry; but the other tragedy was the grief of Helen, a self-contained, controlled, sensible, cool-blooded Englishwoman.  Her grief is so low-key, it isn't expressed in any way - she doesn't cry, she doesn't get flustered, she doesn't feel sick.  The only expression of her grief is via someone else, a man she takes to be a gardener at the mass cemetery.  He looks at her with "infinite compassion" - and that's the first and only suggestion that Helen might not be coping with the experience as well as we think she is; in fact, might be looking distraught and grief-stricken.  He looks at her slip of paper:

"Come with me," he said, "and I will show you where your son lies."

She had said "nephew", but he took it in spirit, and reinterpreted it (correctly, as the introduction points out) as "son".  She doesn't correct him.  All this small-scale drama is extremely moving - I suppose I can be recalibrated, too, and accept that subtle feelings are as significant as tumultuous ones.  Being a tumultuous feeler, I hesitate to say "or more significant!" - though perhaps they are, in that they occur, for one such as Helen, less frequently.  

Joy L. Thwaite/Eve Langley

July, 2011: When Mumma gave me, in 2006, The Importance of Being Eve Langley, by Joy L. Thwaite (1989), I put it on the shelf with no immediate plans to read it. Then, after reading about Isabelle Eberhardt (see below), I found myself thinking about Eve Langley. These two books, or rather, their subjects, are parts of a puzzle, one for which I don't have the box, so I don't know what picture it is that I'm trying to piece together.

I loved The Pea Pickers, Langley's first novel, when I read it ten or fifteen years ago. I thought it was wild and exuberant, o'er-brimming with love, crazy but catching itself just in time. Later, I read Wilde Eve, a selection of her writing edited by Lucy Frost. All those qualities were still apparent, but Langley had a struggle to keep them from drowning in a cess-pit of desperation, sadness, depression, poverty, dysfunction, isolation and loneliness. Her story is incredibly sad. Ruth Park says, "I have thought long and seriously about the following comment: she was the sanest, most stable person I ever knew. She was, I believe, born into the wrong age."

Thwaite's book is a biography, told mainly by Langley's own writing. Langley kept journals, which she revisited a decade or two later and fashioned into novels; all but two were deemed unpublishable by Angus and Robertson (who published this book of Thwaite's), and although Thwaite says that this might have been a misjudgment, I think only a handful of hardcore Langley fans would be able to stomach anything more undisciplined and fanciful than The Pea Pickers. Says the reader's report on Land Of The Long White Cloud: "VERY SAD AND QUITE HOPELESS...It is the aimless chronicle of an irresponsible person who follows her own moods till they run her into misery, but never considers she has any duty to anyone." This statement could apply as much to her way of living as writing. Yet someone published, many bought and many read Infinite Jest, a work in equally dire need of editing as Langley's.

Langley was born in 1904, somewhere between Forbes and Molong. In 1928, she and her sister June, or Blue, dressed in men's clothes and rambled around Gippsland, picking peas and doing other seasonal work. Langley was a lover of men, but eschewed marriage. She loved men so much, she wanted to be one: "I knew that I was a woman, but I thought I should have been a man. I knew that I was comical but I thought I was serious and beautiful as well. It was tragic to be only a comical woman when I longed above all things to be a serious and handsome man." [The Pea Pickers] Later in life, she even changed her name by deed-poll to Oscar Wilde. She gave birth to a daughter, fathered by a car salesman from Milan, but the baby died a few weeks after she was born. Living in Auckland, Langley became obsessed with an artist, Hilary Clark, who seems to have had a long-term male lover, Franz. But she forcefully wooed Clark, became pregnant, and they married in 1937, when she was 33 and Clark was about 21. They had three children, in abject poverty and poisonous wedlock. Clark spent a lot of his time in his studio in Auckland, and Langley shut the children up in a shed in the backyard and wrote The Pea Pickers, which was published the same year she was committed to Auckland Mental Hospital.

She was in there for seven years, and when she came out was, according to Molly Kilbride, who worked with her at the Auckland Public Library, "...a sad little woman...She had big, luminous eyes, which wouldn't hold your gaze directly - they were fearful, side-wandering eyes - and a pudding-basin haircut...Her eyes were very troubling. She had a very nervous manner and her eyes flickered up and down." Langley now took a doll to bed with her. She gradually acquired a horde of dolls, and was attached to all her worthless (by anyone else's standards) possessions, including lots of little paper-wrapped packages of feathers, leaves, debris. She went on a disastrous and most peculiar trip to Greece, having had a life-long romance with the ancient civilisation; unsurprisingly, to anyone but Langley, she found it, in the late-60s, nothing like her dreams. She died in 1974 in her little tumbledown hut on Clydebank Avenue, Katoomba, possibly having been beaten up by louts, and was undiscovered for about a month, her face having been "chewed by rats" - this last aspect of her death wouldn't, I feel, have much bothered Langley, a woman who could find the warmth of her own urine comforting: "I had a strange night. I let the fire go out and lay all night long in a fever on a bed soaked with urine and heard myself muttering and laughing before I sank into fevered sleep. But the great great darkness was soothing all night and the urine helped me."

This is a book for the fans. It is disorderly and repetitive, but contains a lot of good material, and is certainly more accessible than Langley's unpublished manuscripts that lie in the Mitchell Library - when Langley's typewriter ribbon ran out, she simply kept typing, and the poor Angus and Robertson readers were forced to try to decipher the faint impression of the inkless keys. This in itself encapsulates the weakness of Langley's writing: she considered her genius and vision enough, and no subsequent effort on her part was necessary to make her writing palatable - not even a fresh typewriter ribbon. She is partly right: her vivid observations, and her mode of putting them into words, is enough. It's enough to make her notable and intriguing, and a really Australian writer - Australian in her wonderful descriptions of landscape, her love of the country, and also her isolated, individualistic, eccentric (as in, away from the centre) way of thinking. But it's not enough to make her a great novelist.

There are thousands of passages worth reading. Here are a few:

I went down the steps past the irises and daisies, very white and determined in the strong morning breeze, and picked up the bumble bee...in a moist hand. He was quite dead. His tongue hung far out of his mouth, brown, thin like the hairs on a tree fern, and his arms were about his face...just as if he had been crying. [Demeter of Dublin Street]

Autumn began to come brownly along the paddocks and the river that we loved. All the way down the valley, the road swung in white dust, and the dusty trees leant over it and the yellow sallows in the swamp all the way to Myrtleford darkened their roots in stagnant water and penny royal smelt purpling and green in the dry places. Now slow along the valley we loved, autumn was coming, all golden and the huge tall poplars began to glitter and fly with the golden flags and bitter odours of winter. [The Victorians]

She is a woman after my own heart:

[There was] only one perfect place on this earth and that was the bark hut...with little in it, the less the better; the only luxuries a good suit of mens [sic] clothes, two volumes of Horace, one volume of Greek plays and six or seven good rifles...[The Pea Pickers]

...I considered these clubs [literary clubs], for which I had a profound distaste, wasters of good energy and mental reservoirs...I'd feel like a caged animal in those talky drawing rooms. I'd sooner run shouting through the Kickareeki ranges with a deer's tail about my thighs...But I dislike any sort of literary gathering, you know, and prefer to work in the lonely silence of the unknown winter...[from Demeter Of Dublin Street]

Her single-minded pursuit of Clark is a salutary lesson in not chasing someone who doesn't chase you back - although she seemingly achieves her end by marrying him, the marriage is a nightmare, and destroys her.

"You courted me. You threw yourself into my arms, I had to hold you up against that; I told you" he turned his hard white face toward me, "that I would rather take the sluts off the street, than you...pity I didn't too."

"But Hilary," I cried, "I love you." We lost women are all the same; we think the repetition of our old charmed words will awaken the dead.

...Hilary knotted himself up into a branch of hate, the blossom of which was his mouth. His face was distorted with hatred, his mouth was white with it, and his face so twisted that his small moustache was nearly under his ear.

Even in describing this scene, her sense of humour gets a look in; at least, I find the description of his face wicked and funny.

Less funny:

But, oh, the anguish of that which I have to call 'pain', and which I do not believe to be pain, or grief or sorrow. I think it is an ecstasy so cramped in a little human soul that its struggle is called 'Grief'. [Last, Loveliest, Loneliest]

The deserted-house feeling came over me; the sense of being locked up, if anyone spoke, of having a loose blind sagging somewhere in my face, and of everyone looking close into me, as into an empty window, and seeing nothing because of the darkness of the rooms. [Last, Loveliest, Loneliest]

Thwaite's apt conclusion is that Langley "achieved the disillusion without the maturity." I think she suffered from having memories that didn't fade the way they are meant to (let us be grateful for fading memories!). And undoubtedly, as Ruth Park says, she suffered from being unable to be anything but herself in a repressive society. The fact that Langley was stoned by boys for wearing trousers (as she walked to the doctor in Auckland to get her anal fissure attended to) is sufficient proof that what was right and natural to her, was roundly seen as wrong and punishable. This is a terrible dilemma - do what is right, and suffer isolation and persecution; or warp and degrade yourself for the sake of being in step with those around you? In some ways, I see people like Langley and Eberhardt, and also D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, as being martyrs for the sexual equality and sexual freedom that we enjoy today.

I asked my father if he had ever met Eve Langley. He said he had only a vague memory of meeting or seeing a dumpy woman at some literary occasion, but he also said that she had once sent him a letter to say how much she liked his poem about the possum that died in the roof of his childhood home. That was always a favourite poem of mine, too! Langley died a month or two before I was born. I wish I could have met her. Soon I'll do a pilgrimage up to Clydebank Avenue, Katoomba.

Cecilia Mackworth/Isabelle Eberhardt

July, 2011: The Destiny Of Isabelle Eberhardt, by Cecilia Mackworth (1975) was, I'm pretty sure, given to me by my mother, but uncharacteristically for her, it has not been inscribed. Over the years, Mumma has given me quite a few books by feminist historians, or books about exceptionally bold and intrepid women from earlier times. I'm not sure whether this is because I have always shown a tendency towards boundary-bustin' feminism, or perhaps Mumma and her choice of birthday presents subtly urged me in that direction.

Isabelle Eberhardt is one of the most boundary-bustin' people I've ever read about. And it's unfair to keep her within the limits of feminism, because she was a boundary-buster by anyone's standards. "She was that which attracts me more than anything else," writes Colonel Lyautey after her death, "A rebel. What a joy to find someone who is truly himself, refusing all prejudice, all servitude, all banality, and who passes through life as freely as a bird through the air." In brief, she grew up in Geneva; her mother was an illegitimate German Jew who had kept her origins secret and married a Russian of noble birth (i.e. a big snob) in the Tsarist Army. After having several children with him, she ran off with their tutor, a handsome Armenian with all sorts of extreme philosophies. Isabelle Eberhardt, born 1877, was the youngest daughter from the second litter (to use my mother's terminology). Her childhood was bad enough to make her run, and keep running, until she was drowned, at twenty-seven, in a flash flood in Ain-Sefra, Algeria. By then, she had converted to Islam, dressed habitually as a man, had lost all her teeth and had malaria, was married to a handsome but rather spineless Arab soldier whom she had met one night in an oasis, and spent her days and nights riding around the Sahara, taking shelter (or not) in various Bedouin tents, army camps and tiny villages.

After reading her story (and it's very nicely told, too), the main impression left on me was that someone who lives so resolutely according to her nature, and by what seems right to her (rather than by what she is told is right), leads a very lonely life. Enemies spring up around Isabelle for practically no reason. She writes in her diary, on Christmas Day 1902, "The most difficult of all things - the only difficult thing, perhaps - is to enfranchise oneself and - even harder - to live in freedom. Anyone who is in the least free is the enemy of the mob, to be systematically persecuted, tracked down wherever he takes refuge. I am becoming more and more irritated against this life and the people who refuse to allow any exception to exist and who accept their own slavery and try to impose it on others."

Her ideas about freedom are further advanced than mine, and therefore exciting - nay, inspiring! - for me to read. Forget Jack Kerouac! He was a dilettante compared to Eberhardt.

One night, stretched out on the rush matting of some Moorish café far out in the Main or in the mountain country, she scribbled some notes in pencil:

'There are few intellectuals who care to claim their right to the life of a wanderer, to vagabondage.

'Yet vagabondage means escape from slavery and the life of the road means liberty.

'To take the decision, to cast off all the bonds with which modern life and the weakness of our own hearts have charged us, to arm ourselves with the symbolic staff and sack of the pilgrim and to depart...

'For anyone who understands the value and also the exquisite flavour of solitary freedom (for one is only really free when one is alone) the act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all.

'A selfish happiness perhaps. But it is happiness, for him who knows how to appreciate it.

'To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere, and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world...

'To possess a home, a family, property or some sort of public function, to have some definite means of existence, in fact, to be a cog in the social machine - these are the things that seem necessary and indispensable to the great majority of men, even to intellectuals and to those who believe themselves to be enfranchised.

'Yet all that is only a variety of the slavery into which we are dragged by the contact with our fellows, and, above all, by a contact that is regulated and continual...

'All property has its bounds and all power is subject to some law, but the tramp possesses the whole vast earth, whose only limits are the unreal horizon, and his empire is intangible since he governs and enjoys it in the spirit.'

At one point, Sliman gets a job in Tenes, a small town in Algeria. He and Isabelle have been so impoverished that the prospect of a regular income is appealing. But small-town life is excruciating for Isabelle (and the poverty continues, forcing Isabelle to beg friends for the odd ten francs, so that she can buy food).

Raymond Marival [a friend in Tenes], ...commemorated, after her death, one of these fits of despair which both he and Randau attributed to the insults and cruel mockeries of the town:

'Behind the house in which I lived at this period was a garden enclosed by a fence; a vine, a wild fig tree and a few flowering rose bushes were its only ornament. The noise of the town did not reach it and one could hear nothing but the confused murmur of the sea and of the great sea-gulls that circled in the air with piercing shrieks.

'Isabelle loved this retreat and used to come there almost every evening. She would sit on a bench, legs crossed and eyes vague, and silently smoke cigarettes of pale tobacco perfumed with musk. On the evening of which I speak, dusk had fallen and moths were fluttering around the lamp. Suddenly, in the shadow, I thought I heard a sob. Isabelle was crying, her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

"What is the matter," I asked. "What is the matter, Si Mahmoud?"

'She lifted her wet face reluctantly and fixed me with eyes full of distress, the eyes of a hunted animal. It lasted only for a second. As I approached, anxious at this breakdown, her face was masked again with the rather cold mask of careless serenity with which she usually faced her troubles.'

She makes me think of Rudyard Kipling's poem Untimely, except that Eberhardt's time hasn't come even yet. She writes to Barrucand, who published some of her articles and stories, and posthumously 'co-wrote' her work Dans l'ombre chaude de l'Islam, "We are all poor devils, and those who refuse to understand that are even poorer than ourselves."

I was moved to write a song about Isabelle. I started to play it to Nic; first he interjected, "Hmm, arty..." then he started to look appalled, "It's so depressing!"; then I started giggling, so stopped. I think it's a song to be played for myself when I'm by myself.

Isabelle Eberhardt only asked to live

To see what lay past the next sandy ridge.

Dressed as a man, she rode across the sand,

Following Islam and vagabondage.

Where the stars are bright and the night is clear,

And there's not a soul, far or near,

That's when you might hear the song of Isabelle, passing along...

"Oh, it's lovely out here!

Oh, how lovely it is to walk upon this ball of stone!

Am I the only one out here?"

Everywhere she went, she made enemies,

People feel discontent to see someone live so free.

We all want our share of what she found out there,

But few of us can bear that cold desert wind.

Where the stars are bright and the night is clear,

And there's not a soul, far or near,

That's when you might hear the song of Isabelle echoing on...

"Oh, it's lonely out here!

Oh, how lonely it is to walk upon this ball of stone!

Am I the only one who can see

We're all just vagabonds?"

Thea Astley

June, 2011: I bought  It's Raining In Mango (1987), by Thea Astley, from the Anglican Church Book Sale in Cowra for 50c (also the Readers' Digest Guide To Needlecraft, $1).  Back in 1996, when my novel The Showgirl And The Brumby was a finalist in the Vogels Award, one of the judges describe my novel as having "flashes of Thea Astley".  I thought it was about time I read one of her novels, to see what I was a bit like.

I'm afraid to say I'm glad S&B had only "flashes" of Thea Astley, rather than long stretches, and I hope that by novel number three (the one I'm working on tomorrow), I have completely extinguished any trace of her at all.  The worst thing is that I can see what the judge was talking about: colourful language, a strong Australian flavour, clunky plot, and the vague sense that the author is trying to say something serious.  Here's a bit of her colourful, clunky language that I found by opening at random:

Looks rippled between them. One of the girls - Flute! - spluttered with laughter that sounded rude.

Will's face became an interrogation mark. "Did I say something?"

"Grass," Bo explained kindly. "It's pot. Dope." He grinned rather stupidly. "Marijuana."

"Oh," said Will stiffly, "of course. I've heard the term."

Even in that short exchange, we can see how Astley has to poke and prod the story along, poke and prod the characters to play their parts, using a superfluity of adverbs, and exaggerating moods and expressions to make sure the reader doesn't miss what's going on. There were a few Aboriginal characters; as I'm not Aboriginal, and I'm of my generation (rather than Astley's), I'm genuinely uncomfortable with a non-Aboriginal novelist writing a few awkward passages from an Aboriginal character's point of view. If the passages had been good, I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it! Here's an excerpt from one part that made me cringe:

She bin chase that buggy two miles till one of the police he ride back on his horse an shout at her an when she wouldn take no notice she bin run run run an he gallop after her an hit her one two, cracka cracka, with his big whip right across the face so the pain get all muddle with the cryin and she run into the trees beside the track where he couldn follow.

The only part I really liked was reclusive Will's ill-fated love for the beautiful hippie boy, Buckle, about forty years his junior. Flashes of Death In Venice. It's an interesting description of a man who represses his gayness, eschews human relationships, sinks his energy into his huge garden, then, in his sixties, falls violently in love, and experiences for the first time all the humiliation and pain that comes with unrequited love. He finds it unbearable. His sister, Connie, understands what's going on:

[Connie says:] "Sixty years of passivity, Will. Well, it wasn't even that, was it? More like indifference."

"And that's the way I'd like it to go on. If it could. Right to then end. I don't like what's happening inside me. It's as if all my nerve centres have been wired up again and wrong. Hell, Con, I don't want to go on like this."

I'll be giving It's Raining In Mango to Glebe Vinnies, and I bet they mark it up by about six-hundred percent.