Short Takes VIII

22/3/87

Below Dairy Flat Bridge

Returning to Queanbeyan in the pre-dawn after being present at the birth of my second son, I stopped at the Dairy Flat Bridge and went down to stand beside the Molonglo River. The east beyond the airport was beginning to brighten. The sky was a profound blue from which most of the stars had now receded.

But high above the horizon was a curved moon, and placed exquisitely below this, very bright, was the morning star. In their configuration the two resembled the fabulous sultan’s dagger with pendant miniature clock that I had once seen in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace.

At last the wait is over. Anne has endured the pain and convulsion of childbirth with the same fortitude she showed on the birth of our elder boy two and a half years ago. Throughout the labour, as a kind of protest at the indignity of the business, she had me play Eric Clapton’s howling guitar music for the Edge of Darkness television serial, and all of us about her in the ward, doctors, nurses, me, heard the caterwaul through several times. But by 3.45 a.m. George Langridge Gould had arrived, and, for all his dawdle in the womb, he bellowed lustily once he knew he was in the world.

Now the Molonglo lapped quietly at my feet, moon and star glittered, and an immense calm held the Canberra hills and the dark heaven above. This is my thirty-eighth birthday.

18/6/02

Salammbo’s Trivial Opulence

Is this performance essential or incidental Flaubert? I have come 170 pages into this novel that followed the fastidious Madame Bovary, and no single character matters to me yet. Not the heroine, not Spendius, not Matho, not Hamilcar. We have had sumptuous feasts described, a restive army’s march from Carthage, a striking spectacle of lions crucified by the side of the road, and a battle that is all spectacle and no pain. It has resembled the special effects menu afforded by my sons’ computer games. A penetration back into Carthage has been managed, fabulous beasts met, hardship endured, a veil stolen and a heroine unimpressed by any of this. But no worthwhile suspense has been introduced into the story because it would not matter if the four above characters met the same casual fate as the priest they kill, or the one or two other casual murders that happen. Events in this classic are as trashable as the Styrofoam detritus from a meal of Big Macs. Here is fiction where the complex impulse to depict has been over-ruled by the crude urge to parade.

We know that Flaubert researched ancient Carthage fastidiously for the historical and archaeological material of this novel, so we can be confident that the fabulous patina is underpinned by historical exactitude, while not being confined by it. But this most conscientious creator of intimate human reality, in Bovary, has turned the details of extravagance into the forefront of his story. This means, first, that the experience of reading Salammbo is one of continuous distraction. As in Star Wars and that film’s ilk, we travel through a serial of special effects, we witness a phantasmagoria as strange as any dream, but the phantasmagoria has no more status than dreamstuff because the novel, like all art based on spectacle, sorely lacks a focal point. What is this focal point? It is the ever-present sympathy in a reader or beholder which implies, “I am alive through all this representation, and you, the figures moving within its virtual reality, are alive through me.”

A novelist is free to experiment with form by dispensing with this essential focal point, but the effect of its absence is to maroon the reader in detail and arbitrariness.

So, how unlike Bovary this novel is! One thinks of the slip-up in pronouns at the beginning of that earlier novel and wonders whether, for all Flaubert’s scrupulous watch on the truth and balance of his paragraphs, it was his very painstaking that led him from depiction to distraction, from psychological sufficiency to a mere surface glitter.

But no! protests the post-mod. Why, here is the very cusp of Flaubert’s prescience. He has outgrown the novel-of-character to show the bedraggled tramp that characterisation is in the representation of actuality. He has displayed the world in its opulent, reptilian coldness because this reality is more fundamental, more persuasively subversive of bourgeois comforts than any work that mounts a critique of the bourgeois mindset, such as Bovary does.

This line of thought, it seems to me, is perverse, and stems from ressentiment. Have the bourgeois been so very reprehensible—even in the Rouen of the mid-nineteenth century? Is complacency a bad life-value if it has freed you to give the best you can to creation? I think of the myriad anonymous kindnesses a little surplus wealth has allowed folk of comfortable values to perform.

But then we must track why Flaubert’s lifelong “anti-bourgeois sentiment” was injected with new energy in the closing decades of the recent century. A boredom rather than a righteous anger was at the root of it, is my guess.

14/12/02

Tolstoy’s Realism

Tolstoy’s exquisite realism lies, I reckon, in the seamless texture of how consciousness is depicted from child to boy, boy to youth, that the novelist creates in this compilation, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, his first effort in trying to lift the European game on how much of the intricacy, the intimacy, of personal experience, one can arrange on a page of prose.

So we read of the growth of sensibility, from the enthusiasms and sudden, unfathomable weeping-fits of childhood, the fervent loyalties and rages of boyhood, the gaucheries of adolescence. Oliver Twist is unimaginable as an adult, Goriot unimaginable as a child, but Tolstoy’s view is dynamic, and his child will merge with boy will merge with youth because his narrative pace is so finely tuned in the impressions that are registered at each stage. It is the swim of these impressions that are so well judged. Into the weave comes also his sense of the crystallising image, chinks of sunlight through a linen curtain, a girl’s see-through sleeve. Not very much is happening—visits, lessons, a dance, a death or two. At the same time everything is happening. The recording consciousness is so awake to both the surface ebb and flow, and the pressures from the currents below. Here is the novel-as-texture, the novel freeing itself from plot in favour of life-as-it-presents, this in the 1850s.

11/8/03

Imp and Angel

The angel of a writer’s effort is the voice that speaks a truth as though no personality uttered it. The imp is the egomania that guards this same voice, like an only child guarding its toys against a visiting playmate.

14/4/06

How TV Contaminates the Very Fabric

As unconsciously as I possess a shadow, I learn by imitation and most often do not know I am learning. In this, I am the same as all sentient life, but O, insidious can become this reflex to imitate when I thought I had won myself a distinct voice and I am writing a novel in that confidence.

In the evenings customarily I slob before the television. With some exceptions, recent British serials have given up the commendable grain-of-life naturalism of their 1970s programs in favour of contriving the action to bring out emotional responses, in actor and audience alike, that are over-charged, crude, phony. Script and direction seem somehow to have grown dim-witted in their effort to contain all of topicality within, say, a police station or a parish. Such programs have forsaken their watch on life for a watch on the recommendations a committee might make to assure their popularity.

And slyly, when I sit down to work each morning, my own television watching infects me with these crudities such that they inform how I invent my characters. I have caught myself, in my present novel, being all too ready to supply a substitution of television emotions for those that I must guess are intrinsic to my still half-awake characters. I do my daily words, Alec and Viva, my two protagonists, will flirt with one reaction or another that I begin by believing is my own invention, but on re-reading, recognise as having been distracted by some recent television emotional formula.

What is happening? I absorb this verbal, gestural substance in the same passive manner in which the infant takes in the provision of tone and vocabulary from the adults around his playpen. The crude stuff interposes itself in my imagination between the exact thing I hold in the mind’s eye as needing to be said, and the facile desire to resolve that need quickly. Slob television watching provides this coarse but convenient pap at the very fold of my imagining in what is, essentially, an infantile level of imitation. Then I detect the intrusion and must laboriously unpick the callow stuff from my narrative fabric and think out what, from inner necessity, should have been there in its stead. My detection of it is helped by how often I observe the same infection in the books and manuscripts that come my way to read.

I am grateful, at least, to be aware of the distraction. For I find I cannot settle to tell my story until I have first finessed the texture, the veritable geology, of the prose itself. Why? Well, it is as though, au fond, the prose-fabric were the subject of my effort rather than the fortunes of hero or heroine. In this, I hear Conrad, Faulkner, Woolf, White giving me the counsel of their own hard-won findings. We cannot give you our people without giving you what we make of The Life Fabric. It is the earth of which our people are the plants. So your sentence, your paragraph, must find its life in the milliseconds before they enable the figures in your mind’s eye to take their own life within that soil.

And this is what, casually, we refer to as “a style”.

10/9/06

A White Dog

As busy Civic roiled outside her window this afternoon, Anne waited for her bus to depart. Then an unaccompanied white dog hopped on board, strolled the length of the bus, casting glances left and right. Then it returned and hopped off to join the uproar outside.

A woman in the seat immediately in front of Anne looked up from the Minette Walters thriller that had engaged her, flashed a comprehending smile, and concluded for the sundry watching folk, “Wrong bus, evidently.”

23/7/09

Why Further Being Is Useful

We can conclude, very easily, that life ultimately means nothing beyond its own expression between birth and death. And we do so because reasoning and the evidence will lead us so far.

Equally we know we cannot surmise whether our lives have a wider meaning in the patterns of Reality unless we survive death with some powers of spirit intact. We hypothesise this in order to gain an angle on existence enabling us to look at that former being from the perspective of how it contributed to a whole rather than merely was within a pointless series.

2/1/10

My Vital in My Virtual

I am bringing to completion my overhaul of the mainmast of my Cutty Sark. I’ll resist calling this two-and-a-half-metre vessel a model.

Some months ago I unshipped this composite mast with all its yards, shrouds, stays, sails and other hamper. I repaired, repainted and re-lacquered the complex thing to pleasing effect, and, with the access the mast’s absence gave me to the maindeck, I cleaned the entire ship of its three decades of greasy dust and dead insects. Then I re-installed the mast in its mortice on the keelson and began the task of re-connecting the rigging. It is easy to cast rigging loose, hard yakka to reconnect it.

My miniature is as exact a replica as I had eye and patience to create when I laid its keel in July 1978. A shackle is a shackle turned up from copper wire, and the shackle pin of the smallest shackle on board will be one-eighth of an inch long and infinitesimal in diameter. Ye gods, had not ADG made work for himself by succumbing to his modeller’s discontent in taking the thing out in the first place.

Nonetheless, one by one, I set the shrouds up on their deadeyes, tuned the lanyards until the mast had its desirable rake. Capstays, topmast, topgallant, royal and skysail stays were all set up on their lanyards and tuned likewise. Ditto the mainstay and topmast stay around their bull’s eyes athwart the cable locker hatch. Halyards were led through their chainblocks, triple blocks or double blocks as required. Buntlines, leechlines, clewlines, lifts, sheets and downhauls were reeved through their fairleads to where they belayed on fife-rail or main-rail with a half hitch and a neat stow of the slack. Vangs were re-set for the Spenser gaff, braces reconnected to the yards, the mainsheets and maintacks taken to deck-winch and bollard to be secured. And for the modeller, as each line was reconnected, so the cage of lines became denser, the task of reconnection more finicky, the creator gradually caged-out rather than caged-in. There was some bad language from ADG, but no compromise was tolerated as to the standard required. Puritanism lives, for all that it might migrate from ecclesiastical dispute to creating verisimilitude in a totem object.

And what standard was required? If any jib halyard, topsail downhaul did not follow its most friction-less lead from its altitude to its belaying point, then it needed to be re-arranged to its most practicable route. If any yard brace in that jungle area of ropes between mizzen and main mast fouled each other, then ditto. If a block was too heavily or too lightly made for the task it was required to do to clew the sail or bring in a stunsail boom, it needed to be remade. This is to say, I take a random piece of wood and fashion a twelve-inch block that I will render down to a scale where twelve inches equals three eighths of an inch. A few of Cutty Sark’s blocks are four-inch blocks, meaning a smidgin of wood one eighth of an inch long must have a hole drilled, grooves made for the strop and to simulate the sheave, rounded corners and sides. Certainly these are pernickety requirements, but how else, other than being tirelessly pernickety, does one approach the true?

And yet I was unprepared for the reward of all this frustration. Last night I sat in our small ante-room between kitchen and dining room where my Cutty Sark rests on her honey-coloured kauri stand. She occupies the entire wall, as she should, and much virtual space besides.

As I inspected my work, I did not feel it was complete. But I did feel abreast of what needed to be done on a ship. For instance, I knew there was a small tear in the mizzen sail where the clew-iron was becoming unstitched. And there was another in the starboard clew-iron of the fore topgallant sail. I was aware too of the main course buntlines that had originally been cut too short to belay properly. And here (unaccountably in a model—was it mice?) I found a royal sheet too skimpy to be belayed should the ship ever be on a starboard tack where one required that extra length of port sheet for the sail to be trimmed.

And now my mind’s eye, aroused to an attention within its scope to experience while outside its historical reach to be usefully participant, was wandering about this ship of mine. In the housings of the poop rail there were supposed to be twelve fire-buckets, lacquered exteriors, white interiors. In the original building, what sloth on my part had provided only eight? I was reminded of that telling moment in Conrad’s Typhoon, where Captain MacWhirr is introduced to his ship by the proud owners and, phlegmatically, goes straight to the hatch that has inadequate hinges to show up corporation weakness. On my vessel, the entire hull needed repainting in its black, white and gold if it was to keep up the pride of John Willis, its owner. And so on through an inventory of concerns.

The sorcery was this. As I looked at my ship, I felt a vital intimacy with it. And immediately I equated this with what a first mate on such a vessel-in-the-large might have experienced at any unheralded moment during his rigorous working hours. He is at sea, conditions, let us say, allow him reflection, and he is going through his own inventory of what needs to be brought up to the mark. Sailmaker to attend to the port mizzen clew iron where it is tearing away from the canvas. The watch to deal with the lead of the fore-topgallant sheet where it passes through the top fairleads so it will not chafe. And so on. These were all defects I had noted in my vessel that needed to be brought up to the mark.

And the emotion was one of intimacy and some pride. I knew my ship and felt the knowledge connected with that partook of what you might expect to find in one of those seasoned fellows who had gained a certificate by their mid-twenties, having gone to sea at thirteen. In my case I live with this vessel as a daily condition of existence, and as I inspect and modify it, I seek out verisimilitude with the material original. But I was unprepared for the sensation of knowing, as though from habit, an object in this manner of professional workaday familiarity, where it is live, dear, in need of attendance if it is to be kept up to the mark thirty-two years after its keel was laid. Up to the mark! That was the phrase, only now it was charged with a particular emotion for me, a sensation rather, of having an immensely intricate, all but live thing, within the care of my practical knowledge.

Alan Gould’s new collection of poetry, Folk Tunes, has recently been published in the Salt Modern Poets series. His most recent novel, The Lake Woman (Arcadia), was reviewed by Stephen McInerney in the May issue. This article is the eighth in his series of “Short Takes”, which began in the September 2004 issue.