Month: February 2012

Monday musings on Australian literature: Jessica Anderson

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Every now and then I feature a specific writer in my Monday Musings – and they’ve usually been women because they tend to be overlooked. Take Jessica Anderson (1916-2010), for example. Most keen AusLit readers will know her because her novel Tirra lirra by the river made quite a splash when it was published in 1978, but my sense is that her “fame” doesn’t go much past this.

She is, however, one of our great writers:

  • She won the Miles Franklin Award award, twice: Tirra lirra by the river in 1978, and The impersonators in 1980.
  • The impersonators also won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 1981.
  • Her book of short stories, Stories from the warm zone and Sydney stories, won The Age Book of the Year in 1987.
  • Tirra lirra by the river was included in Australian classics: 50 great writers and their celebrated works, by Jane Gleeson-White.
  • Tirra lirra by the river was also included in the admittedly eclectic, but international, The modern library: The 200 best novels in English since 1950, by Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín
  • She is taught in many university (and, I believe, high school) literature courses.
  • She’s a good example of a late bloomer, with her first novel, An ordinary lunacy, being published when she was 47.

An ordinary lunacy was, in fact, published in England, having been rejected by Australian publisher, Angus and Robertson. Gleeson-White quotes Anderson saying that she didn’t think Australian publishers in the 1960s would like her novel about “how a utilitarian society treats those with unserviceable gifts”. Ouch!

Of course, like most late bloomers, Anderson had been writing long before she was first published. It was probably the increased focus on women stemming from the second wave of feminism in the 1970s which resulted in authors like her getting their chance. There’s that fashion thing again, eh? But this doesn’t mean that she didn’t deserve it. Beatrice Davis, one of the Miles Franklin judges, said that Tirra lirra by the river “has an unpretentious elegance, an individual quality so different from the realistic documentary that still dominates the field in Australian novels”. Here is the opening sentence:

I arrive at the house wearing a suit – greyish, it doesn’t matter. It is wool because even in these sub-tropical places spring afternoons can be cold. I am wearing a plain felt hat with a brim, and my bi-focal spectacles with the chain attached. I am not wearing the gloves Fred gave me because I have left them behind in the car, but I don’t know that yet.

I love this opening, which introduces us to the narrator, Nora Porteous, late in her life, as she returns “home” after many decades away. It’s so precise, and yet with tantalising hints of uncertainty. Oh dear, as I pick it up, I feel I want to read it all over again and follow Nora as she reviews her life, and the decisions she made in search of “her place”, only to end up back where she started, thinking, processing and wondering.

Most of Anderson’s work was contemporary, but she did write one historical novel, The commandant (1975), which she calls her favourite. I reviewed it as part of Sydney University Press’s Australian Classics Library. Like Nora in Tirra lirra, the main character here, Frances, is not in her “place”. She’s with family, but her views, her aspirations, are different to those around her. She must navigate this family, this society, to develop her self.

According to Gleeson-White, Anderson greatly admired the novelist, Henry Green (recently featured by Stu at Winston’s Dad) for his “poetic brevity”. I think this brevity is partly what draws me to Anderson. Stories of women feeling at odds with their lot are not, after all, unusual, but it takes some skill to cover several decades in less than 150 pages, as Anderson does in Tirra lirra. Anderson was also, says Gleeson-White, inspired by Christina Stead for showing her “there was an Australian background I could use: the urban background of For love alone“. I’d love to understand this a little more … what was it about Stead’s urban background that differed from that of other Australian writers?

Near the end of Tirra Lirra, Nora says:

I find myself thinking that we were all great story-tellers at number six. Yes, all of us, meeting in passages or assembling in each other’s quarters or in the square, were busily collating, and presenting to ourselves and the other three, the truthful fictions of our lives.

“Truthful fictions”. An intriguing concept that we can read several ways … but that is for another day. In the meantime, I commend Jessica Anderson to those of you who haven’t read her. Meanwhile, I must read her One of the wattle birds which has been languishing on my TBR for far too long.

Note: This post is not a review for the Australian Women Writers 2012 challenge, but I plan this year to write a number of posts supporting the challenge’s promotion of Australian women writers … which is not a hard ask given my reading priorities!

Dorothy Porter, On passion (Review)

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Do you read “little” books? You know those small books that are carefully placed on bookstore sales counters where you are buying the book you really came for? I don’t often, but every now and then one catches my eye. Today’s review is of such a book from Melbourne University Press‘s Little books on big themes series. It’s by Dorothy Porter and is titled On passion. She finished it just before she died in December 2008. I think I could be justified in calling that poignant, don’t you?

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book’dout – Shelleyrae)

Dorothy Porter was (is, really) a well-regarded, successful Australian poet. I reviewed her last collection, The bee hut, a couple of years ago. It’s a wonderful collection full of the pains and joys of living. It is, you could say, a passionate book. One of the poems I quoted in that review is about the passion for writing, for finding the perfect way to express an idea:

and your pen slashes ahead
like a pain-hungry prince
hacking through
the bramble’s dragon teeth
to the heart’s most longed for
comatose, but ardently ready
princess.
(“Blackberries”)

So, writing, of course, was one of her passions but in this little essay Porter explores all sorts of meanings of the word (for her). She starts with her adolescent passions – her youthful religious faith which was replaced by her “dark gods, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix” whose “daemonic songs” were her “new hymns”.

From here she explores the various ways passion has been part of her life … woven always with poetry, hers and others, and music:

Music has been my draught of intoxication since the very moment I first heard the Beatles in early 1964 […] I have been a Beatles pop/rock music maniac ever since, and have written virtually all my poems to rock riffs and rhythm – the catchier, the darker, the louder, the gutsier the better.

She talks in one section of Dionysus and moderation, strange bedfellows, eh? She argues that Euripides best understood the Dionysian, by exploring “how best to respect and live with it”. She admits, though, that “moderation was not something I embraced with Delphic calm, but something I gutlessly and gracelessly caved into” because, for example, she and drugs did not mix!

Nature too features, snakes in particular. “Real and living snakes are sacred to me” she says and then explores Minoan snake worship versus “the debased and diabolical serpent-demon of the Judaeo-Christian Garden of Eden”. She talks of the Rainbow Serpent in Australian Aboriginal Dreaming but admits that, when she actually confronts a King Brown snake in the desert, her worship did not stop her getting “the shock of my life”. She also refers to DH Lawrence‘s poem “Snake”, which I fell in love with in my teens. Lawrence describes the visit of the snake  as “a sacred event”. Porter says she always forgets the ending, how Lawrence’s fear gets the better of him so that he scares the snake away. She remembers only the vision of the wild thing being watched (and appreciated) by the poet.

There are other passions, but I’d like to conclude on the one dear to the heart of readers. She writes

I wonder if some of the most deeply passionate experiences of my life have happened between the covers of a book.

Not only do I love the idea that books have such an effect on us, but I also like her qualification: “some”, she says! Life is, after all, important too!

She describes Wuthering Heights as “the most scorching novel in the English language”; says that “there is, paradoxically, much more convincing grown up sex in Jane Austen than in Emily Brontë“. Oh, yes! She talks of Sappho’s love songs; admires one of my favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, for “pushing language as hard as it will go into ecstasy – and despair”; and describes Ginsberg as convincing her “of the power of language to shock”. She talks of love and desire, of wanting “to find and deliver scenarios, characters and poems that are magnetic with sexual energy” but asks, provocatively,

… how many readers have we lost because we have ignored the ancient silent cry: ravish me.

Near the end she wonders if reading had been the greatest passion of her life. She says – reminiscent of Francesca Rendle-Short and Michael Sala’s comments that writing/reading is dangerous – that

… at a more profound level I recognise that there is something very unsettling about a book.

Absolutely … but what say you about books, reading, passion?

Porter, Dorothy
On passion
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2010
(Series: Little books on big themes)
96pp.
ISBN: 9780522858358

Michael Sala, The last thread (Review)

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Michael Sala The last thread bookcover

The last thread (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

It’s clear why Affirm Press chose a comment by Raimond Gaita for the front cover of their latest publication, Michael Sala’s autobiographical novel, The last thread. Gaita, for readers here who don’t know, wrote an award-winning memoir, Romulus, My Father, about growing up as a migrant with mentally unstable parents. Sala’s story is different but both boys suffered emotional deprivations that they chronicle in their books … except, and this is a big one, Sala’s book is classified as “fiction”, and we must therefore read it as such. A bit, in fact, like Francesca Rendle-Short’s Bite your tongue!

So, what is his story? The novel is told from Michaelis’ (later Michael’s) point of view. It is divided in two parts: Bergen Op Zoom and Newcastle. It starts, then, in the Netherlands when Michael is around three or four years old, and his brother, Con (Constantinos) three years older. But it’s not quite this simple, as in the first part which is told third person we follow them from the Netherlands to Australia to the Netherlands and then back to Australia. The family’s unsettled state physically – they also move multiple times in Australia – works metaphorically too because there is little emotional stability in the boys’ lives. At the start of the novel, the mother has left the boys’ father, the Cypriot Phytos, and is living with the physically and emotionally abusive Dutchman, Dirk. (“There’s no problem”, Michael writes of this handyman stepfather, “that he can’t solve with his hands”.) By the end, when the boys have grown up, the mother has been married a couple more times. She is skilled, you would say, at choosing wrong men: “The men in my life take advantage of me”, she says.

What makes this somewhat age-old story compelling is the writing. It is told more or less chronologically but in little vignettes. The two parts are divided into chapters, but the chapters themselves are broken into smaller sections that provide an eye into scenes from Michael’s world. It’s a child’s eye, until near the end, so we readers must try to fill the gaps between what Michael describes and what we know could be the meaning behind what he’s seeing. Why, we must ask ourselves, would a young boy think this:

Michaelis can’t imagine anything more frightening than living forever.

And Michael’s eye, though a child’s one, is very observant. He particularly notices faces, watching them it seems for signs of warmth and connection, but

Each time light blazes from the screen, it washes across Con’s face and reveals it like something carved from stone.

and

She [mother] holds her belly and sighs, and there’s a look in her eyes as if she might burst into tears.

I could be mistaken but it felt to me that as we moved through the second part, Newcastle, which is told first person by the adult Michael, the chronology became more disjointed, mirroring I think Michael’s growing awareness of what lies behind the dislocations in his family, and of its impact on him.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, there are secrets in this family that contribute to the dysfunctional behaviour. These secrets are not mentioned on the backcover, so I won’t mention them either. Sala handles them well. He doesn’t labour them but rather lets them hover in a way that we know they are there but that doesn’t let them occupy centre-stage. We learn to live with them, the way the family has to. In the way of modern novels, there’s no dramatic denouement …

In talking of the writing, I’ve mainly discussed the narrative style but I should also mention the language. It is, in a word, gorgeous. Here are just two descriptions that convey Sala’s ability to capture the essence of things. First, being dumped by a wave:

There is such strength in the sea. He has forgotten it until now. It pulls at his limbs so that his feet touch nothing and only his desperate grip keeps him there. A sensation comes to him of being separate, of seeing it all from a great distance as if he cannot reach out and touch the world. Then the noise dies in his ears, the sky appears again above him.

And next, of his mother’s house:

The rooms and corridors of my mother’s house became like the arteries of a heart attack victim, all clogged up. Even the breeze had to bend in half to get through.

I’ve read quite a bit of autobiographical/biographical fiction, fiction-cum-memoirs, and memoirs in recent months, and some I’ve found a little wanting here and there. This, though, is hard to fault – if, that is, you like reading more for the interior than the exterior, for what’s going on inside rather than for what’s happening in the material world.

In the very last pages of the book, Michael’s mother says that “words and stories can be dangerous” (echoing Francesca Rendle-Short’s “to think, to write, is dangerous”). They can indeed, but sometimes that danger can have positive outcomes. I hope that, for Sala, the dangers of putting his story, his truths, on the page will be restorative. There’s no guarantee though that such bravery will have its just rewards … in life or in fiction.

Michael Sala
The last thread
Mulgrave: Affirm Press, 2012
238pp
ISBN: 9780987132680

(Review copy supplied by Affirm Press)