Short Takes VI

27/12/85

Gaze and Counter Gaze

Some weeks ago gentlemanly Stewart asked permission to pass my telephone number to his friend who wanted “professional” advice on the MS of a novel he had written. At 25pp per hour, a 400pp MS asks for sixteen hours of my time, and I have been put in the way of these unwelcome claims to read doorstops of fiction since the success this year of my own, The Man Who Stayed Below.

“And candidly, Alan, it might well be more tax-wheeze than literary work.”

“Thanks, Stewart.”

But Stewart has touched my life kindly at several points, so I agreed to look at his friend’s novel. Through inadvertence I did not catch the author’s name until some days later when he rang me and arranged a drop-off. The voice on the phone suggested a suave self-possession and belonged, I learned, to the surname Whittle. There was a half-hour interval between Mr Whittle’s putting down the phone and his knocking at my front door, in which time I was able to recollect, with considerable force, how it was I already knew that name, thirteen years having elapsed …

He had been head of personnel at the Research School where for many months in 1972–73 I was a handyman. Distinctive in crisp blue shirt and tweed jacket, his long face, I recalled, was brown as piecrust, and black hair came to his collar, groomed to suggest a sober Cromwellian authority that was apt for his responsibility. I used to see him wandering the labs, corridors and stairwells of the Research School, and can say that his was one of the more watchful countenances I have met in my life. Always he was silent, not so much investigating the detail of what was happening around the site, as absorbing the wholeness of an operation. Is a sovereignty at its most charismatic when at its most silent? Somehow it was known around the workshops that Mr W had a background in the Merchant Marine, and this gave us a sense of the steeliness we handymen might expect from him should we run foul.

Nonetheless, my attitude at the Research School had been the common workplace qui vive outlook; perform what was required, skive when opportunity allowed. So I worked hard when directed, but if direction petered towards lunchtime, I used to escape early through the hedge, follow the path beside Sullivan’s Creek, and take an ampler break than, I knew, the rules quite allowed. I believed my absconding was unnoticed and it troubled my conscience not a jot.

One sunny day, moorhens among the reeds, cutlasses of light on the creekwater, I ducked through the hedge, proceeded quickly along the little path, glanced ahead just once, and there, casually, Mr Whittle had strolled from behind a tree.

Wonderful in its blithe stage management was his ambush. He sauntered onto the little white bridge, affecting not to notice my oncoming person, then leaned on its parapet, and with a fixity that was not devoid of an amusement at my plight, he made me the object of his concentrated study. (Historian! Tell the Complete History of Authority, and nine-tenths of the human story is covered.) Now thirty yards separated an absconder from his chief, our distance closing quickly.

I should mention that another of my preoccupations must examine nicely just how my nerve will measure up in moments of peril.

Sun in the sky, birds in the reeds, light on the water, it was immediately evident to me that if I turned around, I would disclose my guilt. And if I behaved as though there were no ambush at all, I would be stopped, interrogated, and find myself defenceless before this profoundly detached scrutiny. A fluttery panic was the actual sensation in my stomach as I advanced towards this silent, leaning person who occupied, as it were, my entire future insofar I could, at that moment, conceive it.

Some fluke in my character had decided I should lock my own eye implacably upon his, and that I should continue walking towards him no matter what. So, stripling and seasoned man, our convergence endured a further half-minute. I suppose I might have blundered off the path to slosh stupidly in the reeds. Instead, I accomplished a draw in the contest of gazes. Not for a second did Mr Whittle’s gaze falter. Nor, thank God, did mine. For reasons I will never know he chose not to stop his miscreant employee, nor ever to pursue me with subsequent disciplinary action. We passed within a yard of each other without a word spoken and I am surprised the shudder I gave did not knock us both over. I went on to endure my ample lunchbreak, and never again to transgress the lunchtime hours of my terms of employment.

So when Mr Whittle arrived at my Queanbeyan doorstep before Christmas, and I took possession of his MS, a white block the size of a medium esky, my words to him were, “You probably won’t remember me from Adam, but I remember you from …” At which he affected cordial surprise.

Now I have read the esky and must return it with my comments. Was my reading experience that long-withheld disciplinary action, you ask. I am not at liberty to say. I am a professional.

11/7/05

Your Accent

During a visit with Mark and John to Russ’s upland farm yesterday, our host asked me what my accent was. His query took me aback, for I am not aware of having an accent and have never been asked this by city Australians, though countrymen have done so from time to time.

I am also conscious how I did not detect the accent in my Icelandic mother’s voice until my late teens when I had occasion to ring home and heard how the telephone could identify what eighteen years of living in her presence had not, that delicate difference of the foreign woman in one’s midst, exotic, a little vulnerable.

So I gave Russ a pedestrian response, and would have preferred something more pugnacious, such as the following. Thirty-nine-year Australian sedimentary crowning a six-year metamorphic of Cockney, both of which crust an igneous base of good Garrison English. Happy?

My pugnacity would have startled this affable, sometimes pugnacious fellow, and yet his enquiry still arises from the antique Australian tension. The native-born scrutinises the new chum with a curiosity that is 60 per cent polite good will and 40 per cent polite distrust. Is this the most intractable of Australian, of any New World country’s social tensions? I think of Fiji.

We turned from the geology of my accents to look south down Bannister Hill towards ranges that were rumpled like old bedspreads and interspersed with patches of blonde paddock, illumined haphazardly in the uncertain sunshine. Our vista commanded seventy miles or more. The wind was at full charge, its Antarctic sabres drawn. We continued our tour, and as I rode in the back of Russ’s ute the steel I clasped to steady myself was frigid as one might imagine the deep-cold of space to be. We inspected our host’s sapling windbreaks, watched Sophie, his magnificent black sheepdog with ginger points, a creature that rippled with strength and health, first circle, compress, then muster a broad paddock of sheep in perhaps a minute, all accomplished with scarce a command. “She’s a show-off,” confided Russ, side-of-mouth. At length we wandered into a waterlogged paddock of bones and the bleaching, leaking mattresses of sheep and cattle carcasses.

“These trees do well,” observed our host of the plantings in this vicinity.

And I knew this observation to be true at one level, while presumably at another level I did not.

4/10/08

So, Old Hip

At present I have a nuisance hip and a reflex, enduring since boarding school, to avoid doctors. Recently, on the coast, and in company with Roger, I had the task of hefting a sofa-bed up the Tuross stairs and into the house. There was some height involved. Readily I grasped the front end of the awkward thing, tried to move forward, and my body responded with a simple Nup!

This was not a case of being faced with lifting an object beyond my strength; I might strain at that before seeking an alternative heft. My willpower was there, but some older mental control had sent the memo that Gould’s body no longer trusted his willpower. You will not proceed, directed this adamant, bland voice from head office. And as I stood on the fifth step, ready to go, this directive was ridiculous to me, and absolute.

Indeed, the inference of that Nup! was clear as a cricket scoreboard. Gould, you are now elderly. The world you proceed towards is one where you will grow less confident of your powers. Sure, be perky, be defiant, but if you were a caribou, you would be one of the individuals that the wolves, loping on either flank of the herd, would have picked out as a possible. All that defiance, rehearsed in your head against the sudden appearance of mugger or evildoer, churns as fiercely as ever. The tricks you learned from boarding school scrapping remain to hand, but together with your bravura there is now your problem hip.

This subversion of morale has already played its first scene in my living. Some years ago I broke my patella when I tumbled from the roof of my O’Connor home. Encased in its wraparound cricket pad, the injury seemed to heal quickly. But months later, when I could walk with a jaunt once more, I came to the stormwater drain where I was wont to leap into the culvert and up the other side in one fluid motion. I made to leap, and … Nup! Some perfectly bland force prevented me from this simple act of physical trust. My mind said Leap, but the bland, blind, inarguable resolve said No way!

Meditating this mutiny in the ensuing days, I thought of the shell-shocked soldier who aroused General Patton’s special wrath in Sicily. General, the GI might have argued if full articulacy had come upon him at that moment where he understood his shame as little as Patton, I do not understand what has stopped me doing what others do and what I have done in the past. There is nothing at all in what I can say I-know-I-want-to-do that enlightens me as to why my body refuses my will. My will is what I want to be me. But my body, at present, is remote to my direction as a Saturn moon. I am sorry for this inconvenience, sir. It is not personal indulgence.

When, on the two occasions now that my body has made these refusals, there has been no adrenalin rush whatsoever, as there might be when faced by, say, a reared taipan. In fact the mind is rather calm with respect to the danger, for all that it may be anguished about the embarrassment of the mutiny. For instance, my Nup! at the foot of the Tuross stairs is in full knowledge that Roger is three years older than I am, gamely soldiering his sixties, and he has grasped the back-end of the wretched sofa with a determination he will ascend with it!

And I should also observe that, some weeks after refusing my leap in and out of the stormwater ditch, I approached it and leapt it easily. But I had learned my lesson from the former occasion. There was my willpower, and there was Gould’s bland internal director who could simply switch off and on the powers of the body, and on the rare occasions this authority turned up for work in my switch-room, took orders from nobody.

For years now my right hip has come and gone in its insistence on providing me with thrilling presence. Sometimes it drills directly through the middle of the ball-joint. Sometimes it twists, hernia-like in the hamstrings to tension my pelvic area with middle-range pain. Sometimes the sensation produces a complex of strains and fragility in the leg generally, transmissions from the archipelago—my instep, my tarsal joints.

As it tweaks me through the night’s small hours of distorting perspectives, my imagination rehearses the hypochondriac inventory. Is this pain transferred from some cause more malignant than any inheritance of my grandma Miriam’s rheumaticky gene? Is it a cancer transmitting its early signals, the semi-dream asks, or the rheumatoid arthritis that caused my shy father-in-law to grimace as he rocked his once magnificent physique back and forth in his efforts to rise from the sofa and see about providing his guests with a drink, punctilious for every guest, every drink? Or might it even be the onset of multiple sclerosis that has poor Jo slumped in her wheelchair, losing speech, striving to sustain interest in the everyday?

Then there come bright mornings when the ache at my equator is mild, and I can believe the complaint is no more than a common viral attack on my person, one that it is my democratic duty to wear in my joints where others must suffer it in throat or head.

Uncertainty is the hypochondriac’s condition. We all can have certainty that we suffer, but we lack two vital items of knowledge: what an instance of discomfort portends, and how much we should bear in the face of the suffering of others. How should I measure my hip discomfort when, just last night, I heard on television of a young woman vomiting faeces as she endured the last phase of colon cancer?

The country’s entire medical profession is overwhelmed by people who are alarmed about what a discomfort portends. “Don’t hesitate to consult me,” my good-natured doctor tells me at my rare appointments. But I do hesitate, doc, I fail to tell him, because I am uncertain how my own threshold for physical discomfort compares with that of other people, while I am acutely conscious of the humiliation I feel if my discomfort is found to be a trivial alarm, simply a new bodily rhythm with an arrival date and departure date not yet factored into my experience.

I’m touchy on the subject of being a patient. For one thing I am impatient with a situation that compels a writer to consult a doctor, but does not compel a doctor to consult a writer. Equity of livelihoods! But more feelingly, I am uncertain where, for dignity’s sake, the line of endurance should be in terms of my own mortal coil.

So, for the interim, old hip, thrill me.

5/11/08

The Sly Needling

I try you and I try you until I reveal that corner of you that dislikes me. Only then do I discover what is real in your attitude towards me.

Conclusion of the beleaguered ego and the beleaguered nation-state alike.

23/3/09

The Big One

“How does it feel to have passed the big one?” my close relations asked me upon my turning sixty yesterday. From behind the touchline of their well-regulated fifties they tilted their champagne flutes to me and their enquiries were half jocular, half reconnaissance.

“Well …” I look for an answer and conjure back when I was eleven and introduced to the game of rugby by trim, tartar Taffy Evans, ex-Navy, master of all physical education for my six boarding years who, in an illuminated gym on a grey Thursday of September 1960, held aloft the egg-shaped ball and told us that all life began from within the egg, gave us our positions, making of knobbly, fanciful Gould a hooker, first of the pack to scrabble for that sacred egg …

How does it feel? And my mind’s eye tells me it feels like being locked down in the scrum. I have no idea where the ball is or in which direction lies the try-line. The commotion from the spectators is a little more remote, perhaps, than on the previous decade-birthdays. Locked beside me are the heads of other players, some of them on my side though I am not sure they should be, or that I can take comfort in their allegiance. This scrum, sometimes cheerfully nicknamed “The Society”, seems to have endured forever and I would like to disentangle myself from it in order to look for further prospects the field may offer. But some frenzy keeps me shoving and scrabbling in that state of consciousness that is fully occupied but not sure it is quite fully alive …

How does it feel? Unfairly it feels too like the texture time has always presented to me, immediate, a fabric definitely for all it is invisible, propelling me along with the ruckus around me, but hankering, I recognise at odd moments, for the touchline view.

5/6/09

The Welts of Orange Light

It is a moist Friday evening. Somehow Canberra winter evenings are always compositions of orange and charcoal. Welts of orange light gleam on our roads tonight, and in town. The thing I wish to recall is an orange/charcoal composition, and occurred exactly forty years ago this week. Canberra has swelled to four times its population since then, but moist winter Fridays have this common, frigid orange sub-glow, on bitumen, in shop windows and on the lower night sky.

We had convened in Garema Place to do some anti-war work among the late-night shoppers. Stalwart Rev. G was with us, Peter Mac the boffin on foreign aid, slim Ron C, our editor of Woroni, and the SDS crowd. I had just stepped down from the wall of the Eros Fountain, having boomed my piece through our common megaphone, and another speaker had climbed up to have a turn. Our audience comprised the usuals, Cordies from Duntroon in their smart tweeds, out to stir their ANU ratbag counterparts, and our short, equable Irishman in a raincoat whose manner was to quietly place himself at the centre of any spitting patriotic outrage and inexorably begin supplying his exact knowledge of the war’s background. Might he have been the ASIO watch on us, it occurs to me to wonder now, his attentive calm the perfect instrument for gathering intelligence, his erudition the perfect mask? He was a most likeable man. In addition were sundry curious folk attracted by the novelty of a Canberra’s Speaker’s Corner where opinion was allowed to go naked.

The next orator had commenced to boom through our inexpensive megaphone.

He had not proceeded very far before a soldier burst into our midst. The fellow was bare-headed, a lance corporal in his winter uniform, and evidently he was upset, demanding we deliver to him “that bloke up there just now who was talkin’ about Veetnam”.

“Several of us have spoken out against the war, friend,” the Rev. G engaged the fellow promptly. “Can we talk to you about it?” Several of us also turned from the speaker to the commotion. The lance-jack was a compact, quick man, and by now had acquired a mate on either side of him, both big fellows, in their civvies rather than uniform. They held their peace, watchful like our Irishman. I had the sense they would not have chosen to be there but must attend events as the lance-jack gathered his rage.

“No! You can’t talk to me! You know nothin’! I want the bloke up there just now who was goin’ on about Veetnam.”

Squarely, I recognised, that bloke was me, and the issue, I also saw in its primitive light. Did my anti-war side have sufficient nerve to face this, the real opposition? This was 1969, the anti-war cause was still (though not for much longer) widely reviled.

“It was me up there just now,” I stated to him. “What do you want to know about what I think of the war?”

When you are close to an enemy in the dark, any sense of what is happening further afield distorts. I could only see people, my horizon was heads with a dim idea of slicks of orange and charcoal in the beyond. I would have guessed the crowd to have been huge and centrifugal in how it intensified the presence of me and the lance-jack, but it probably numbered less than fifty.

“You git up there again and say what you said about Veetnam, so that when you step down, I can punch your face in.” The proposal was direct, though not entirely convenient to the evening’s agenda.

“Look, I’ve had my say up there,” I reasoned. “There is someone else speaking now.” We were all raising our voices to compete with the tinny megaphone message that was growing less certain of itself. “I’m happy to tell you here and now what I said.” Nor was I able to imagine a fairer offer to the insistent bloke.

He ignored this. “D’you wanna know why I went to Veetnam?”

“Why?”

“Because I get $132 a fortnight and as many roots as I want.”

“I’m glad to hear it!”

In fact I was not, particularly. My labourer wage at Korponay’s car spraypaint workshop over that last summer was about half this sum, and I was still a virgin at this time. Having no effective rejoinder to these incentives, I repeated my offer to state why I opposed the war, which only provoked him to repeat his challenge.

“So, you git up there and say what you said, and then I’ll punch your face in.” Remembering my first-year Logic, I saw that here was not the premiss, “If … then …” but rather, “when … then …” And the inane provocation of this, the illusion of a mass of people pressing from the orange dark around us, intent on our face-off, all this was firing me up. Dimly I sensed the person with the megaphone was glancing at us, though continuing with his message gamely.

“I will tell you face-to-face what I said,” I shouted at him. “I will not interrupt the bloke who is speaking now!”

“No, cunt! You git up …”

“I oppose this war because …” Our faces had moved closer together, hovered at what I can guess now was a critical distance. His two big mates remained silent on either side of him, one in a silvery suit, one in a beige suit. I was trying to fathom his insistence that I must take the megaphone before he could punch out my lights. Was my offer not tantamount to squaring off with him?

“You git up!”

I was aware I had jutted myself nearer still as I continued to give my rundown on the war’s iniquity, and I experienced that frisson of expectation, recalled from boarding school scraps, that preceded the resort to blows. Then …

“Listen mate, best if you made off.”

The voice was quiet, there was a hand on my elbow. The beige fellow had interposed himself while the silvery fellow was quietly restraining the lance-jack, saying soothing things.

“I will not run away from him,” I declared, for I was in full, blushing cry.

“No one will think that, mate. If you would just, like, kind of make yourself scarce … for me.”

He had black hair, and the light beige suit may have been another benefit of Vietnam service, good Asian tailoring but too summery for this Canberra June. He motioned with his hand, and I had no doubt then, and none now, that he wanted the Good, and not a Win.

So I chose to walk away, as evenly as I could contrive, not happy, but disarmed by an intervening calm, and a certain kindness of intention.

“You just walked away! I would have run like hell,” was Ron’s comment, when we all met later. The compliment mollified me a little, but I remained unhappy, for something vital had been touched in this small confrontation. If we were arguing a case, then suddenly an occasion arose requiring a spot of physical nerve and we lacked that, how could whatever moral or political reasoning was in our favour attain any standing in the eyes of those who opposed us? Here, I suppose now, is the reasoning that takes martyrs to their fates.

I know the sheer luck and chanciness that had allowed me to get angry with that lance-jack, and stay on until the good will of his mates saved us both from an undignified scrap which would have been British boarding school roughhouse versus Australian army unarmed combat training. I suspect I was preserved.

Nor can I surmise how I might have held up had I accepted the conscription laws, done my year of jungle-bashing, crept down tunnels, watched for booby traps, dealt with the daily tensions and mutilations. $132 per fortnight and as many roots as I wanted were never an enticement, but something in the hunger for larger life experience was.

And now this is exactly forty years ago. I would oppose the Vietnam involvement today for the same reasons I opposed it then, but now might recognise ironies, how the argument for disengagement belonged to Realpolitik more than ratbag idealism—the disarming of horror when dealt a bad hand, and how starry idealism, alas, belonged to the warheads. The same is true of the more recent Iraq adventure, I think.

In forty years I have not wondered especially what became of the belligerent lance-jack, but I do wonder what happened to that big soldier in the beige civvies, quiet peacemaker, and hope he has prospered.

17/5/09

Cheerful and Unstinting

This evening I wandered into the dining room and found my love helplessly crying. She had just finished reading a biography of the Irish writer Maurice Walsh, attracted to it casually because the popular novelist had been a favourite of her father. Now, some bygone qualities depicted in the writer, of élan, courtesy, cocking a snoot at the high-falutin’, had brought John’s presence vividly to mind and released in her a huge sorrow for him seven years after his death. Anne’s eyes were puffy, her face red, and it breaks the heart to see the one I love in distress. For she is such a cheerful soul, unstinting in what she gives to living, and to the lives of others.

Another aspect of the scene struck me as astounding. The book lay closed on the table. Not many people read Maurice Walsh these days, and this biography is just an old hardback in plain paper dustjacket, published by a small press in the west of Ireland, dredged up from the public library archive, proficiently if not outstandingly written.

And yet here it was, an ordinary object, charged with one of the afterlives of Prof John Langridge. It had become a vessel for the migration of a person’s presence beyond his physical presence. The ordinary was not so very ordinary at all. It showed that, whatever possibilities of being may open beyond physical extinction, the miracle of afterlife also has this everyday, attaches casually to things. It is the chemistry of response, yes, but it is also the thing itself, vivid, continued presence of past lives. I think it is what Yeats meant in the lines from “Under Ben Bulben”:

Many times man lives and dies

Between his two eternities,

That of race and that of soul,

And ancient Ireland knew it all.

Whether man die in his bed

Or the rifle knocks him dead,

A brief parting from those dear

Is the worst man has to fear.

Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,

Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,

They but thrust their buried men

Back in the human mind again.

And indeed John’s presence had its distinct élan, of courtesy, irreverence, merriment, as when his young daughter used to press him to sing her a sad song because she liked sad songs, and he would sing her “Clementine”, which she used to think was a very sad song indeed, until she grew wiser.

Alan Gould’s seventh novel, The Lakewoman, was published by Australian Scholarly last month. This article is the sixth in his series of “Short Takes”, which began in the September 2004 issue.