Short takes XXII

20/5/06 The very joy

I’ve now appraised nearly all the dossiers I must read for our June Literature Board session. This will be my seventeenth meeting and penultimate appearance for the appointment which I reckon to have been a fair call on my time, where I have been able to give back to my patrons some public service for the enabling they have provided for my own compositions over the years.

There are 105 applications, fewer than sometimes, and I have read these over four days at the rate of twenty-five per eight-hour day. They leave me with these reactions.

1. Most contemporary Australian literature gives me complex displeasure. Why so much urgency to prove and so little wish to please?

2. Acquaintance with the diverse wiles by which authors try to establish salient presence around the Lit-Board honey pot has taken me too far into a view of the beggarliness of this, my writer’s profession, with the result that I could easily lose interest in it. Why must the opportunity for patronage illumine the servile in people?

3. Over-exposure to the veritable cusp of Australian literature during the several annual dossier experiences deadens rather than enlivens any curiosity I might have in our literary culture. Sure, why not enable the creation of art where we can, as the aristocratic patrons of yesteryear recognised; certainly there are more barren ways to spend people’s taxes. And yet how, in our fair-go culture, do we distinguish between opportunist and authentic artist when the supporting material from both will wink with persuasive merit?

4. Over-exposure to this quarterly duty-reading also deadens the very joy to be had in reading itself.

Patronage by government committee is undoubtedly the fairest way to transform literary encouragement from aristocratic to democratic times. But I observe it to harm the morale of the artist on such committees, and protection of that morale is more critical to the making of the art than its funding.

9/9/2014 Helen Garner’s Spare Room

The Spare Room is a superbly managed story, in its pace, its acute observation of day-to-day, and how the things of everyday become estranged and heartbreaking when an acute illness arrives and colonises at the very heart of a friendship between two women.

The characters, particularly the narrator, Helen, and the stricken Nicola, are scrupulously drawn in their humour, anger, fear, sorrow, honesty and self-deceptions, and they are utterly contemporary. Helen G overstates nothing in this description of the ravages of cancer and its “cures” and yet she manages suspense, an unfolding, and a power to attach to everyday things like doing laundry or amusing a grandchild a charge that illumines complex emotions with complete clarity. The writing, which seems plain enough, has a fastidious register for truth at just that frequency where the exact is entirely confident of its sufficiency. It is the characteristic of Jane Austen, and the quality here.

Perhaps the most deft strategy of the book is to compose a novel where the reportage is so eye-witness. The reader can easily take the fiction to belong to the non-fiction portion of the Garner oeuvre. Is Helen the character identical to Helen the author? The art here has been to introduce this biographical confusion, not in order to serve biography, but rather to heighten the intimacy with which we, the readers, experience the conflict, turmoil and intensity of the emotional sequence that begins when the cancer-sufferer arrives for her three weeks with the carer-friend. The biographical ambiguity serves a universal human plight.

Most profoundly, the novel serves justice. It is just to the differing viewpoints, the forlorn sufferer, the carer, but more than anything else, to life as it unfolds itself. There are no miraculous cures, but there are wondrous realisations. And because the novel is a first-person narrative, there is, at every point of the storytelling, a most conscientious and intelligent examination of reaction and emotion. This is the mark of the fastidious artist.

Close to the beginning of the novel a grandmother must rebuff her granddaughter as the stricken one arrives and needs the same exacting care to undress and be put to bed as a child does. It ends with these two reunited, nestled on a bed as the eventual fate of the stricken one is recapitulated. The closure is unobtrusive and wholly satisfying. Here is a short novel, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

16/8/15 I step on the dogfox

Returning from my walk along the bridle path behind our house—an utterly black night—I began the descent to our back gate when suddenly the ground was a-writhe and the night a-snarl. I had all but trodden on a moderately large fox, evidently as astounded by me as I was by it.

We know the foxes infiltrate our suburbs from their hides on our hills. I have seen a neighbour’s chicken run with its freshly headless chooks. Once we’ve had a fox try to get into our house by our dog’s cat-flap, deterred only by our own dog’s eruption into frenzy; I was quick enough to glimpse its profile against the night sky as it fled. And years ago I sat in a field newly-ploughed near Lincoln in England as shotguns popped away in the spinney below, watching a fox gallop towards me, and I wondered at what distance it would register my immobile presence. It veered at thirty yards—my stink zone, I suppose.

But last night is my closest vulpine encounter, a little strange, because the kangaroos along my path had been more than usually tolerant of my passing this evening, murky presences that continued to graze as I passed less than a metre—yes, metre—from their delicate noses. After the initial scare, it is rather a privilege, these material appearances one makes inside the poems of Ted Hughes.

29/11/15 The imprinted

This morning Anne and I attended a neighbourly breakfast where we met an elderly Estonian couple. The woman, M, had fled Tallinn with her parents and numerous siblings at the time of the Soviet takeover. A part of their escape had involved a sea-crossing during which one of her sisters had fallen overboard and drowned.

“So when I come to Australia I decide I will have only two children,” she explained to us, then waited to see if we had cottoned on, before deciding better to leave no doubt. “Two children. Two hands.”

13/12/15 Our evenings grow longer

Our evenings lengthen, we are eight days from the summer solstice, and I walk our bridle path above the gardens. Along the stormwater ditch the grass is newly mown, grey-blonde now the sun slips below the horizon cloud. In squeak and wrench, the cockatoos make their last palaver, so many mechanics torquing down the last nuts and bolts of the day. There is no wind. The gum trees blacken into cutout and look somehow Chinese in this. From the further track I hear joggedy conversation along the treeline, two young women taking an evening run.

Reaching the limit of my walk, I turn back to face the striations of the setting sun in their foundry brilliance. The sky shows some vanguard cirrus, followed by bulkier hulls of cloud, blue-grey with a suffusion of purple. These the sun has underlit with facets of orange that, moment by moment, grow more intense as they catch the sunward irregularities, then broaden and intensify until the whole earthward face of the cloud is phosphorus orange. The cockatoos have gone quiet, the mynahs are now murmurous, a remote rub of traffic from the Canberra side. Again I hear voices, now approaching me on my bridle path, the two lady runners, chattersome as they deal with their topic which seems to be about well-being.

“You ladies have done well!” I call out. “It was only a minute ago you were passing me on the far side.”

“Thanks for that,” calls out the one in the loose yellow shirt, and I realise my remark has been encouraging. As it happens, I have been thinking about my usefulness on the planet, downcast by the usual reasons of author-fortune, and look! Unplanned I have roused a moment of pleasure for two ladies who run our town’s back-paths for their well-being. What a tiny contribution to the good I’ve made, but it is not nothing. Whatever span I get, I know I’m now in the latter part of a lifetime. What is a lifetime—an entity that forever goes short of entirety?

The trees are now two-dimension and jet-black, lacework on the west’s vermilion. Dusk’s kookaburras have not yet commenced their hubbub from further in the scrub. I head home and also, I suppose, towards my day of entity because my material reduction presses that, but also to my place in an entirety because my projective mind can conceive that.

2/1/16 Click-a-gram

Golly! Leftist is an anagram of Litfest.

16/2/16 The handbook on my work

And so I plan the twenty-second century’s handbook on my work.

What will be its title? The Weird Squandering: Essays on the Work of Alan Gould to Celebrate His 100th Birthday (publ March 2049)?

And its introductory sentence? … In the peculiar, but decisive collapse of Australian poetry that coincided with the new millennium, nothing was more perverse than the seemingly coordinated prevention of the literary art of Alan Gould …

There will follow cogent and well-researched argument. It will deal with the (by then) trivial politics of Australian poetry of the millennial cusp, the confusion of what had quaintly been conceived during that era as taste, the degradation of what had been an equally quaint notion, the open mind.

Then it will seek a deeper stratum of discourse touching the intractable Australian divide between “native-born” and “new-chum” because this sub-rational defensiveness touches the elusive subject of ear. How can an ear that is Englished (or Poled, Magyar’d, Slovacked, Turked et cetera) until seventeen, be trusted to know anything that tricks the Australian ear? This invokes mystical stuff, but parallels a similar difficulty when the “Native-born” sought to penetrate the guarded mystiques of the “Indigenous-born”.

Of course my proposed posthumous festschrift is vainglorious! Of course I assess my longevity and my century as both laughable and oddly unimportant. Of course the dispensations of fortune are utterly cold. “Old men forget and all shall be forgot,” Henry V tells his sodden troops, and that’s the existential situation.

And yet the urgency persists unanswerably. Did I contribute? Was I worth my While? And where, in any case, might that worth attract interest? How might that While know itself not to have been squandered?

3/4/16 A page still luminous

As an undergraduate I absorbed Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest, then a little while later her penetrating study of a man’s descent into madness, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. I relished both works. But over the decades I’ve neglected to read The Getting of Wisdom, nor have I seen the film. So I took it for company as I went to hospital to have a hip done. Could the sensation of pleasure I presently take in reading this masterpiece of the novelist’s art have been as vibrant had I read the book earlier?

What is the novelist’s art as it discloses itself here? The mental quickness and simultaneity of the circus-juggler gets at it, that presence of mind to have several streams of consideration unfolding at the same time, but as fabric rather than distraction. Laura is being got ready for school, her mother makes adjustments to the clothes she will need. Laura will not wear the skirt if it is too short … This is trivial, heart-breaking, comic. But its family dynamic is quietly comprehended at every point, oldest daughter to widowed mother, sibling to sibling, the licence of affectionate impertinence to a trusted maidservant. Then, at a level, more slight but no less painstaking, in the names the children call their chickens—Napoleon, Garibaldi—or in the nicknames they endow—“Res’vor” is the younger sister, reservoir because she is prone to tears—names alive with the intelligence of the everyday. The life-drawing is painstaking, exquisite, modest, no observation appearing unless it both ignites an intelligence and implicates a reader’s place in story (like Garner’s The Spare Room above). It may be wordstream that is in my air, but it is the touch of comprehending, light and sure, that is before my mind’s eye, to encompass.

16/4/16 The right sock

Presently I am unable to draw on my right sock. The left sock is fine: crook the leg backwards, nose foot into the cavity and haul. Underpants and trousers ditto: like two trout at the edge of possibility, I tickle my feet towards these respective trouser-apertures, then promptly draw … and experience an angler’s satisfaction at my catch. But the right sock resists human guile, and presents horrible risk.

For I have had the top of my right femur sawn off, a ceramic/titanium device lodged into its marrow with bio-glue, and then a cup to receive this knob screwed to my pelvis. In the healing required by this surgery, for three months I must observe three conditions rigorously: no bending my body at the pelvis more than ninety degrees, no crossing my legs, no gyrating on either leg. Should I do so, my new ball-joint might leap from its cup to go marauding around the soft tissue of my right rump, burst through flesh to stick out like something from Viking times. Consequently I am a compliant patient.

So the right sock is presently beyond my powers, such a simple, everyday thing. Yesterday, hearing the stonemasons at work next door and Anne being out, I hopped along the back to their site with my sock and bare foot. “Scuse I, mate,” I said to a lean, tanned man. “Could I ask you to do me a slightly peculiar favour?”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting that,” he said, drawing my sock over its pale foot.

Reader, are you acquainted with baffling helplessness? O preview for Gouldilocks of the years ahead, when he will wander his house, one sock on and one sock off, mentis compos of course, though no longer able to prove it to any chance caller noting a bare foot and a distrait composure.