Literature by period

Thea Astley, The monstrous accent on youth (Review)

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I was going to start this post with that well-known quote by Sophocles – or was it Plato – complaining about the young people of today, but a little bit of research turned up the fact that that quote is somewhat spurious. It was probably inspired by Plato’s Republic in which he presents a dialogue with Sophocles about the ideal education, advocating a “stricter system” to ensure young people “grow up into well-conducted and virtuous citizens”. It was not a tirade on “the youth of today”. That permutation was the work of variously identified twentieth century writers/speakers.

So, instead, I’ll dive straight into Thea Astley‘s essay, “The monstrous accent on youth”. It was written in 1968 and reproduced in last year’s Meanjin anthology which contains a selection of essays organised by decade, starting with the 1940s. I plan to dip into the anthology over the year as there are essays by writers like Patrick White and David Malouf, poems by Judith Wright, and so on. A treasure for dipping into.

I was, I suppose, surprised by the Thea Astley essay, though in retrospect I probably shouldn’t have been. She was never one to go lightly and she sure doesn’t here in criticising the youth of the 1960s. She talks of discussing moral dilemmas in a “middle-class girls’ high school” and being horrified by her students’ callous responses to her questions about conscription during the Vietnam War:

Girls, like female spiders, want to have their men and eat them, too. I was appalled by the selfishness of their reactions and wondered if this were merely a by-product of thinking in a Liberal Party voting area.

She suggests that the generation of the 1960s were frank and (by implication “progressive”) about sex and drugs but had a “hard conservative core”. She then talks of discussions at Macquarie University and says attitudes were more liberal there, “particularly noticeable in the nuns”. (I went to Macquarie University in the 1970s and had many nuns and seminarians in my tutorials. She’s right. They were usually thoughtful tutorial participants.) But, she’s discouraged by the narrowness of the reading. Her students hadn’t read, she said, “Compton Burnett, Cheever, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov, Gordimer …”. Hmm, must say that, with the exception of Nabokov, I hadn’t read those writers then either – in fact, I didn’t even hear of Gordimer until the 1980s – and yet I called myself a reader.

She ponders the reading issue, wondering if that generation spent more time drinking than reading, and worries that “their livers are in more danger than their morals”! I found this fascinating given the current concerns about drinking and the young …

Anyhow, I started to be concerned that the essay was simply going to be a rant against the young and, while it is that to a degree, her main concern is more to do with social change, I think. She writes:

The permissiveness of our generation to the younger has created the monstrous over-rated importance of youth. Oldies – pregnant, sick, reeling – can tremble vertical upon trains and buses while thick-thighed youngsters cling to their seats.

“Thick-thighed”. That sounds like Astley. But, back to the argument. Here in this paragraph near the end of the essay is her main point: “life is so easy for the young and, because of this, so difficult”. She is, in other words, not completely critical of the young. She sees their behaviour in a wider social context, as something that’s partly of her generation’s own making. Perhaps she would have approved of Plato’s “stricter system”?

Thea Astley
“The monstrous accent on youth” (1968)
in Meanjin Anthology
Melbourne University, 2012
(Kindle ed.)

David Foster Wallace, Twenty-four word notes (Review)

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David Foster Wallace got me in with the first few words of his essay “Twenty-four word notes”. They are:

Utilize A noxious puff word.

Oh yes! “Utilise” (as we down under spell it) is one of my pet peeves. Why use “utilise” when “use” is a perfectly good word? I regularly mutter.  Wallace is a little more direct:

Since it does nothing that good old use doesn’t do, its extra letters and syllables don’t make a writer seem smarter; rather, using utilize makes you seem either like a pompous twit or like someone so insecure that she’ll use pointlessly big words in an attempt to look sophisticated.

I wouldn’t quite have put it that way myself, but have quoted him so you can see the strength of Wallace’s feelings on the matter of words and usage. (By the way, did you notice the use of “she” here?)

Before I continue, though, I should say that I’m not sure that I’d call “Twenty-four word notes” an essay since it is exactly what it says it is, that is, it’s a set of musings and arguments about twenty-four rather ad hoc words. They do not seem to be presented in any particular order and there’s not really a coherent argument, but for those of us interested in language they are great fun to read … even if he touches the odd nerve or you don’t agree with his perspective. I was interested to discover in the Copyright Acknowledgements at the end of the book that this essay/article was originally published in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus (in 2004, 2008 and 2012).

I enjoyed the piece for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are the pet peeves, of which “utilize” is just one. Another is “that”. There are two issues, as he says, with “that”. One is the “that” versus “which” issue, but I won’t go into that (ha) now. It’s the other “that” issue which (or, is it that!) intrigues me. You see, I had been given to understand by some Americans, that “that” can be used for people as in, say, “Wallace is the writer that wrote Infinite Jest“. Over here, down under, we learnt that “who” and “whom” are for people, and “that” and “which” are for things. Wallace agrees and in fact calls misuse of “that” for “who” or “whom” as a class marker! Hmm … that’s a bit strong … but, class marker or not, I know that I always cringe (internally anyhow) when I hear “that” used for people.

My other pet peeve that Wallace addresses is, hallelujah, “loan”. Wallace says, and I quote, because once again I’d only be muttering under my breath:

If you use loan as a verb in anything other than ultra-informal speech, you’re marking yourself as ignorant or careless.

But now here’s the thing. I have felt for a decade or more now that this loan-the-noun/lend-the-verb distinction is a losing battle. Language is, after all, a living thing. It changes. It has to, and, really, we want it to. This makes writing anything prescriptive like Wallace has done here a risky thing. Wallace doesn’t specifically address this issue of change but he does imply it. For example, immediately after the above statement about “loan”, he continues

As of 2004, the verb to lend never comes off as fussy or pretentious, merely as correct.

“As of 2004”. There’s his recognition, subtle though it is, that there are limits to prescription. I’m glad he makes that concession.

While there are other words about which he is similarly scathing regarding their misuse, not all words have been chosen for this reason. For example, there’s the word “pulchritude”* which he describes as an ugly word that is the complete opposite of its meaning. “Pulchritudinous” is even worse he says! I have to agree. He then goes on in this particular word note to list other words that are the opposite of what they denote, such as “big”, “diminutive” and “monosyllabic”. It is this sort of thing that makes language such fun, isn’t it?

Another word he discusses is one of my daughter’s favourites, “myriad”. I was anxious about reading this one for fear that he would be scathing about it too, but fortunately not. Rather he writes of the right and wrong ways to use it … and I’m pretty confident my word-loving, writing daughter gets it right.

Almost every word he discusses provided me with some entertainment or education – yes, I did learn “stuff” too – but I’m going to finish here on the last word he writes about. It’s “hairy” and his discussion of it is relevant to the book the article was written for – a thesaurus. This note – which in fact occupies some three pages – is about the huge number of descriptors for “various kinds of hair and hairiness” in the English language. I had heard of a few of them – such as “hirsute”, “glabrous” and “flocculent” – but others were a revelation. For example, the “cirrus” we use for clouds comes from the Latin for “curl” or “fringe” and gives rise to words like “cirrose”. And what about “hispidulous”? He describes this as a “puffed up form of hispid” and recommends avoiding it. I think I will. Then there’s “pilimiction”, which refers to an affliction we’d all like to avoid I reckon …

It is difficult to write on words and usage without being somewhat prescriptive, and Wallace isn’t afraid to be that. It is possible, I think, to write about words and usage without offending your readers, but this is not an example of that! Nonetheless, taken in the right spirit, it’s an interesting read and one which offers some good advice on writing. I enjoyed it.

David Foster Wallace
“Twenty-four word notes”
in Both flesh and not
Melbourne: Hamish Hamilton, 2009
ISBN: 9781926428185

*Wordpress’s spell-checker didn’t like this word either. Can you blame it?

Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the crowd (Review)

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Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the crowd was, as regular readers here might remember, one of my two Bah Humbook virtual gifts from Stu of Winston’s Dad. I ordered it on Christmas Day for my Kindle – after all, it was a Christmas present – and have now read it. Wow, what a read, but how to write about it?

Perhaps I’ll start by quoting something near the end of the novel:

There are people who are capable of recounting their lives as a sequence of events that lead to a destiny. If you give them a pen they write you a horribly boring novel in which each line is there for an ultimate reason: everything links up, there are no loose ends.

This is not such a novel. Things don’t link up, there are loose ends, and it’s both chronological and not. It is in fact a metafictional work. It has the old story-within-a story-within-a-story structure, the self-consciousness about fiction versus reality, all of which could be a bit old hat, except it isn’t. The first person narrator is a somewhat frustrated novelist in Mexico City. She has two children – the boy and the baby – and a husband. To make her novel, an autobiographical one, interesting, she has her husband leave her. (Wish fulfilment? we wonder.) Reading over her shoulder, he says:

Why have you banished me from the novel? What? You wrote that I’d gone to Philadelphia. Why? So something happens.

This fictional husband sometimes takes up the story, telling of his life in Philadelphia and of missing his children. Our narrator reminds us that “it’s only a novel, none of it exists” and says she is writing “A horizontal novel, told vertically”, and then “A vertical novel told horizontally”, and still later “Or a horizontal novel, told vertically. A horizontal vertigo”. Word play, you see! I can imagine the fun the translator had with this – and from what I can tell, she seems to have made a good fist of it because there’s a lot of humour here, humour that is linguistic, verbal, and that requires you to keep your wits about you.

Meanwhile, interspersed with telling the story of her current life in Mexico City and the “fictional” life of her husband in Philadelphia, she tells of her past when she worked in New York City “as a reader and translator in a small publishing house dedicated to rescuing ‘foreign gems'”. There are a few “digs” at Americans in the book and one follows this statement, when she continues, “Noone bought them, though, because in such an insular culture translation is viewed with suspicion!” I can see why Stu, with his love of translated literature, related to this work! This story, the one about her time in NYC, is full of unusual but colourful characters flitting into and out of each other’s lives, houses and beds, all told through little, sometimes interconnecting, vignettes which mostly serve to illustrate the contrariness of existence.

There’s Moby, for example, who “forged and sold rare books that he himself produced on a homemade printing press”. “My husband reads some of this”, our narrator writes, “and asks who Moby is. Nobody I say. Moby is a character.” Is he? Your guess is as good as mine. Suffice it to say that Luiselli plays these games with us from beginning to end, all the while challenging us to consider what is fiction, what is real. Is any of it real, she seems to be asking? She writes, “Writing this is coarse. But reality is even more so.” There are ghosts, blindness, and shadows; people and objects suddenly slip from being substantial to being insubstantial. And gradually our narrator, herself, seems to merge with the obscure Mexican poet, Gilberto Owen, about whom she is writing, while running into (or does she?) other poetic luminaries like Federico Garcia Lorca, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.

There’s a fantastical element to the story, but it’s not the same as Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s magical realism. It’s more slippery, if that makes any sense at all. While Gabriel Garcia Marquez expects us to comprehend “the magical” as part of it all, Luiselli seems to be saying the opposite, suggesting that perhaps “nothing is”.

This all might sound rather depressing, but it’s not. It is in fact a fun read. And while the novel is, I think, about the challenge of living an artistic life in which the things of the real world threaten to overwhelm the imagination, the final word is positive – albeit ironically so. You’ll have to read it yourself though to find out what that is.

Valeria Luiselli
Faces in the crowd
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
London: Granta Books, 2012
ISBN: 9781847085580 (Kindle ed.)

David Foster Wallace, Federer as religious experience (Review)

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David Foster Wallace‘s essay “Federer as religious experience” is several years old now. I did plan to read it a couple of years ago when I first came across it but, somehow, I didn’t. However, this week, Lisa at ANZLitLovers reviewed a David Foster Wallace essay collection which includes this essay*. She decided not to read it because tennis “is just running around on a court hitting a ball with a racquet”. I suggested in my comments that there’s some congruence, affinity perhaps, between sports and the arts in that sport is (can be) about drama, beauty and character. She dared me to review the essay on my blog, so here I am! Never let it be said I’m a wuss!

Roger Federer, Master Series Monte Carlo 2007

Roger Federer, Master Series Monte Carlo 2007 (Photo credit: Lijan Zhang, using CC-BY-SA 2.0, Wikipedia)

Unlike Lisa, I have read David Foster Wallace. Hmm, I’m cheating a little when I say this – something Roger Federer, the god of modern tennis, would be above I’m sure – because I’ve only read one short story, “All that”, which I reviewed two years ago. A couple of commenters on that post suggested that Wallace’s essays and magazine articles are a good place to start. I enjoy essays, so liked the sound of that.

Wallace does not specifically discuss the “drama” and “character” aspects of tennis, although drama is implied at times such as in his description of the 2006 Nadal-Federer Wimbledon final as a “revenge-narrative” and he does touch on some players’ personalities. However, I was thrilled to find the following discussion of “beauty” on page 2 of my printed out version:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

[ …]

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace of the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s…

Beauty is not, really, the goal of literature either, but those of us who love reading love it best when the writing is “beautiful”. That beauty can take many forms, but we all know it when we see it – not, of course, that we all agree, but that’s partly the fun and challenge of it all. I’d say that Wallace’s writing in this essay is beautiful. It’s there in the way his language slides between the formal, the journalistic and the colloquial; in the way he slips in appropriate classical, literary and pop culture allusions expecting us to get them all even though he’s writing about something as pedestrian (!) as sport. It’s there in the touches of satire, the slices of tongue-in-cheek wit, and the sly digs at some of the hallowed aspects of the sport. (“Wimbledon is strange”, he writes. “Verily it is the game’s Mecca, the cathedral of tennis; but it would be easier to sustain the appropriate level of on-site veneration if the tournament weren’t so intent on reminding you over and over that it’s the cathedral of tennis”.) And it’s also there in the essay’s very structure and its shifts in tone. Despite all this beauty, though, I did get a little lost in the blow-by-blow description of an actual point played between Roger Federer and the hunky Rafael Nadal. Wallace is clearly a connoisseur of tennis.

Robert Atwan, the man behind Best American essays, defines the best essays:

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process–reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

Wallace’s essay embodies all of these. Wallace clearly loves the sport and knows his stuff. Not only can he identify all the tennis strokes, from cross-court backhands to forehands with topspins, but he knows the history of the game and has his own views on who was the progenitor of the power-baseline game. I particularly enjoyed his analysis of the game’s trajectory in the modern era and his assessment of Federer’s impact on it. There is also a sense, as Atwan likes, of his working out as he goes along what makes Federer Federer.

I would, though, add to Atwan’s definition, that the best essays have to be interesting (durr) and, I think, they need to surprise the reader with some new angles or fresh ways of seeing. Wallace does this too. He doesn’t knock Federer-worship – in fact he’s a worshipper himself – but he explores Federer from what he calls metaphysical and technical points of view. And he entertains us while doing so. That to me is a good essay.

David Foster Wallace
“Federer as religious experience”
Published in The New York Times’ Play Magazine, August 20, 2006
Available: Online nytimes.com

* The essay is apparently retitled “Federer Both Flesh and Not” in this collection.

Frank Moorhouse, Cold light (Review)

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As I reached around the two-thirds point in Frank Moorhouse‘s Cold light, the third tome in his Edith trilogy, I wanted to cry out “Enough already”! It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying (most of) it, and it’s not that it’s a bad book, but it does go on – and on. It’s a book, I think, that could do with a severe prune. But perhaps that’s just li’l ol’ novella loving me talking!

For those not familiar with Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Trilogy, a little summation. The first book, Grand days (1993) sees Edith Campbell Berry join the League of Nations as an enthusiastic, idealistic ingénue. She’s “plucky”, as most reviewers point out, which she needs to be because she wants to change the world. It was, as I recollect, a thoroughly engrossing  a thoughtful insight into Europe at that time. The second book, Dark palace (2000), I haven’t read, though it is in the TBR. Embarrassing eh? It won the Miles Franklin Award after Grand days had been controversially rejected for not being, according to the judges’ interpretation of the award conditions, “Australian enough”. Dark palace chronicles the failure of the League and, with it, of the ideal of internationalism. This ideal, or at least her desire to make the world better, is something that Edith still hankers for at the start of Cold light. Unlike the first two novels, which are set in Europe, Cold light is, until the last few chapters, set in Canberra. That of course gave it added interest for me.

The three novels cover the middle half of the twentieth century – from the early 1920s to the early 1970s – with Cold light “doing” 1950 to 1973. Edith must be in her 40s when the novel opens and is well into her 60s by its close. This can be a challenging time of life for a woman and Frank Moorhouse’s exploration of the issues women face – biologically, socially, and intellectually – is sensitively and authentically done. Edith’s challenges are compounded by the fact that she wants to work – in the public sphere – but in 1950s Australia married women, as she was, were not entitled to work for the government. Edith does manage to get around this in various ways, mostly by being employed under honorariums and the like. Not very satisfactory, but better than nothing.

What I most enjoyed about the novel was its coverage of some of the big issues of its time, particularly in relation to Australia: the planning of Canberra which was still in its infancy, the Cold War and the attempts to ban the Communist Party of Australia, and nuclear energy. One way or another, Edith becomes involved in each of these issues and serves as our guide. I particularly liked the discussions about Canberra and what sort of city it should be. Early in the novel it is described as a “toy city”, a “make-believe city”, an “unfinished city”, “a city that is not a city”. Some of those criticisms still hang over it now, though less so I hope. Certainly, Edith begins to warm to it and enthusiastically works for a few years with the Town Planning section. She initially envisions it as a place of “communal memory”, as “the living memory of the nation”. Fifteen years on, as the will-we-won’t-we-will-we-won’t-we artificial lake is finally “opened”, her thinking has moved on. She would like to see Canberra as a “social laboratory”, which would “try out all sorts of ideas for good living”, and as a “place for citizens to ask questions”. Moorhouse’s thorough research into Canberra’s planning shows through here, as it does in the other topics he covers in the book.

I also enjoyed much of his characterisation. The novel has a large cast of characters, so his list of “Who is who in the book” at the end, with the “real” people asterisked, is very useful. But, beware, because if you read Edith’s entry, you’ll find a potential spoiler. The best drawn characters are the fictional ones: Edith, her cross-dressing “lavender husband” Ambrose, and to a less extent her brother and Communist Party official Frederick, and his girl-friend-partner, Janice, for whom Edith has some confused feelings.

Edith is, of course, the focal character. The novel’s voice is third person subjective, that is, it is told through Edith’s eyes, her perspective. And Moorhouse does it well. Edith’s a living, breathing, believable human being – but there’s just too much of her. We spend too long with her questioning and ruminating on just about everything she confronts. She ponders, and wonders, she asks herself multiple questions – and it is all just too much. And yet, and I know I’m being contradictory, she’s an engaging character. But not “plucky”. Surely that’s a bit twee for a professional woman? I’d use the words resourceful and confident. Even when she doesn’t feel confident, she knows how to put on a show. Despite this, by the book’s end, she wonders if she’s “bungled” her life. She wonders, in fact, for many pages, and asks many questions (have I said that before?) in the process. She tries to recast her life as “a journey” rather than as a failure to achieve goals, which seems fair enough to me. She’s most concerned, at this point, with her personal rather than her professional life, and the fact that she’s had three husbands. Alluding to Othello, she concludes:

She had loved not too wisely, nor too well. But she had tried with all her might.

She sure had.

I also enjoyed the themes of the novel. There are many of them, in fact, but the two that interested me most are the failure of idealism and the challenges of aging. As the book draws to a close she wonders:

Perhaps she was wrong to assume that evolution was moving towards some humanistic paradise.

But she still believes that

Safety lay in candour – the open personality in an open society.

And I love her for it.

Finally, I liked the fact that this novel of uncertainties has a very certain end. Moorhouse was clearly determined to end with a bang, not a whimper. Overall though, I would have like some zing, some wit, or alternatively, something to wrench my guts. Instead, it was just a little too laboured for me to feel the “wow” that I’d hoped for. A good read? Yes. An interesting read? Definitely. But a great read? Not quite.

For a thorough and totally positive review, check out Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

Frank Moorhouse
Cold light
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2011
719pp.
ISBN: 9781741661262

Happy 200th birthday to Pride and prejudice

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Pride and prejudice book covers

Just a few editions of Pride and Prejudice

It is a truth … no, I can’t go there but, just in case you haven’t caught up with the news, I’m here to tell you that today, January 28, is the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and prejudice.  And so I’ve decided to give Monday Musings a break this week and talk a little about this book. But where to start? What can I say that hasn’t already been said?

How about what the book means to me. It is the book that turned me from being a book reader to a literature lover. I hope that doesn’t sound snooty but what I mean is that Pride and prejudice is the first book to teach me that there can be more to reading books than quick page-turning to find out what happens in the story. There’s nothing wrong with page-turners – they serve a very important purpose in helping us to escape the daily grind – but books can offer a lot more if we want something else from the time we spend reading. They help us better understand the human condition, they can challenge our intellect, and they can appeal aesthetically.

Pride and prejudice, like all of Jane Austen’s novels, satisfies the first of these in spades. Through her characters, Austen demonstrates an in-depth knowledge of human nature. She shows us kindness, compassion, envy, selfishness, stupidity, thoughtlessness, integrity, anger, pride, prejudice and more, including, though Charlotte Bronte (who once wrote that “she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement”) would not agree, passion. Mr Darcy’s ghastly “in vain have I struggled” proposal is nothing if not passionate. I for one don’t need ripped bodices to feel the passion!

Regarding challenging our intellect, one of the delights of reading Austen is the mind games she plays with us – the irony, the wit, keep us on our toes, encouraging us to see the meanings beneath the surface. And, if you read for plot, try reading an Austen novel a second time and you will see how perfectly she plots. Rereading books like Pride and prejudice brings so many pleasures. It’s like meeting an old friend and learning new things about her that enrich your relationship and remind you why she became your friend in the first place.

The aesthetic pleasures are something else – and I fear I’m on thin ground here because I’m probably using the term quite differently to the way philosophers and literary theorists might use it, but it’s the best I can come up with. What I mean is appreciating the novel as a work of art, regardless of its content. Readers from the 20th and 21st centuries can, I think, find Austen’s “art” a little quaint, if not downright dated, but in fact she was innovative. Susannah Fullerton in her latest book, Happily ever after: Celebrating Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and prejudice’, spends a few pages on this. Austen’s main innovation lies in her use of “free indirect discourse” (FID) or “free indirect speech”. She was not the first writer to use it, but was, says Fullerton, “the first English novelist to use FID consistently and extensively”. It is used in third person narratives and involves “hearing” what a character feels or thinks without the use of dialog and not via authorial interaction or the omnipotent narrator. We feel, in other words, that we are in the character’s head rather than being “told” what s/he feels. Austen slips between third-person and this interior mode regularly in her novels. It allows us, in Pride and prejudice, for example, to feel right along with Elizabeth – but the advantage of this technique is that it can shift from character to character in between omnipotent third-person narration. These and the rest of Jane Austen’s grab bag of literary techniques are another reason why she’s such a pleasure to read – and why her books are just plain beautiful.

In other words, Pride and prejudice is the real deal – great story and characters, along with food for the mind, the intellect and the heart. No wonder it has never been out of print.

Suzanne Edgar, The love procession (Review)

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Amongst the madness of last year’s silly season was a little oasis, namely the launch of local poet Suzanne Edgar‘s latest collection, The love procession. It was an oasis not only because the launch was for a book of poetry, but also because it took place in the peace of a garden. Poetry and gardens – a match made in heaven don’t you think?

And in fact, there are gardens in this collection of poems, but before I write about the poems, I’d like to mention the title and cover. As Edgar explained at the launch, the title comes from a painting she loved in the Renaissance Exhibition held at the National Gallery of Australia a year ago. The painting, “Love procession”, is attributed to Marco del Buono and Giovanni di Apollonio, from the 1440s. Apparently it took many months for Edgar and the publishers to negotiate the rights to use the painting, but it was worth it because the end result is a simple, yet rich and stylish cover.

It’s a good title because the collection is about love – romantic and other – and about procession. About the procession of our lives – about love, life and death, about work and the things that keep us going, about friends and family, about nature that travels with us. The subject matter reflects the poet’s stage of life, someone who’s lived more than a few decades, who’s travelled, worked, lost friends and family, managed homes, experienced passion and peace. Well, you know what I mean. I could mention for example a poem about clutter, which conveys the melancholy of time passing:

Wilting hats from our salad days
match skirts too small at the waist.
(from “Silt”)

Or one about the real ravages of age:

A patch of muddy clay could well betray
unwary folk who have a metal hip
and hope to play again another day.
(from “Winter Sports”)

The collection’s first poem is – as you might expect – titled “‘Corteo d’amore’ (Love procession)” and is Edgar’s response to the painting. She imagines the groom waiting at the other end of the procession, reflecting. It’s a cheeky poem that contains both a sense of excitement and uncertainty, setting just the right tone for the rest of the collection:

To bed the girl had always been his goal
but laughing in the square, she’d seemed less grand.

I particularly like the way Edgar varies her tone throughout the collection. There are wry poems, and downright funny ones, and there are the passionate, the sorrowing, and the resigned ones. The style varies too. There are poems that rhyme and poems that don’t. There are three-line poems, a four-page poem, and even a bunch of sonnets. There are story poems and there are ones I’d describe as reflections. The imagery is generally accessible – at least it is to those of us who have lived (are living) similar lives in similar places. She invests the places and objects of our lives with meaning. There’s the woman, for example, who upsizes –

She tries a sea change, a tree change,
an elevated view change
(from “The Leavings”)

– losing, in the process, “her ghosts/ghosts of her children’s cries”. The doggerel-like rhyme and rhythm here are perfect for what Edgar clearly sees as the woman’s silly decision. Other poems speak of chairs that know our lives (“The Life of Chairs”), roll-top desks that trace a family’s history (“A Family Servant”), and of course the gardens that provide “refuge from summer’s sultry hours” (“Two Gardens”).

The poems are unmistakeably Australian with their references to the bush and of course gums, to wattlebirds and magpies, to drought and the pleasures of rain that only dry places know.

My favourite poems, though, are those scattered throughout that chronicle her relationship, at least they feel autobiographical, with her husband/lover/partner/significant other. They are often addressed to “you”. These poems speak of a long and deep love, but one also peppered, as real love is, with differences and squabbles. These poems made me smile, even where they spoke of loss, because they are honest.

Nearly halfway through the collection is a poem that starts:

I wonder where the poems went,
I used to think them heaven-sent.
Life is cluttered with noise and news
(from “Turn Off the Noise”)

Well, the poems are still here and I’d happily recommend Edgar’s collection as the perfect one to dip into whenever you want a respite from “noise and news”. These aren’t difficult poems, but that doesn’t mean they are trivial. Try them, if you can, and you’ll see what I mean.

Suzanne Edgar
The love procession
Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2012
107pp.
ISBN: 9781740277754

Barbara Baynton, A dreamer (Review)

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Finally, having reviewed three stories in Barbara Baynton’s collection Bush studies, I start at the beginning with the story “A dreamer”.

This story is a little different to the three* I’ve reviewed to date, primarily because men do not play a significant role in the action or denouement of the plot. The plot is a simple one: a young pregnant woman arrives at a remote railway station, at night, expecting to be met by someone with a buggy. When that proves not to be the case, she decides to walk “the three bush miles” despite the windy, rainy night because it was “the home of her girlhood, and she knew every inch of the way”. Except …

… as it turns out, on a dark rainy night, she doesn’t. Baynton recounts the drama of the young woman’s walk – a wrong choice at a fork, near drowning on a creek crossing – and in the process idealises the mother-child relationship against hostile nature:

Her mother had planted these willows, and she herself had watched them grow. How could they be so hostile to her?

How indeed? This story is another example of Baynton’s gothic, of her non-romantic view of the Australian bush which is, for her, alienating and forbidding, particularly for women. If the language of the opening paragraph is unsettling – “night-hidden trees”, “closed doors”, “blear-eyed lantern” – it only gets worse as nature seems to conspire against the woman. The wind fights her “malignantly” and the water is “athletic furious”, but the woman sees “atonement in these difficulties and dangers”. Atonement for what is not made quite clear but it might simply be that the young woman has been away for some time: “Long ago she should have come to her old mother”. Visions of her mother and memories of her childhood keep her going: “soft, strong arms carried her on”. To avoid spoilers, I’ll leave the plot here. You can read the story at the link below.

In my last post on Baynton, I wrote briefly on reading short story collections in the order they are presented, rather than in the ad hoc way I’ve done with this collection. Mostly, I do read collections from beginning to end. Had I done so with this collection, I would have had, with this story, an effective introduction to Baynton’s style and themes without being confronted with her full fury. In other words, “A dreamer” is the perfect first story in a collection which ends with “The chosen vessel”*.

Barbara Baynton
“A dreamer”
in Bush studies
Sydney University Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781820898953

Available online: in Bush studies at Project Gutenberg.

This review will count towards my Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.

*For my first three reviews of stories in this book, click the appropriate title: Scrammy ‘and, Squeaker’s mate, The chosen vessel.

Rod Howard, A forger’s tale: The extraordinary story of Henry Savery, Australia’s first novelist (Review)

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Rod Howard, A forger's tale

Cover: courtesy Arcade Publications

“Name Australia’s first published novelist” is, I think, a question that would trick most Australians at a trivia night. Rod Howard, who wrote the biography, A forger’s tale, about this writer would agree, as would the writer in the West Australian in 1950 to whom I referred a couple of months ago. Henry Savery, in other words, is not a household name in Australia though, as Howard says in his Author’s Note, there are a couple of minor streets and a biennial short story competition named for him which prevent his complete slide into obscurity.

Why is this? Besides describing Savery as “a son of fortune undone by folly and fate”, Howard argues that the book, Quintus Servinton, received little attention during or in the years after his lifetime, partly because “it had neither the ghoulish titillation of a Newgate novel nor the fashionable allure of a society saga”. Moreover, its publication year, 1830, was a time he says “when public debate was dominated by Arthur’s Black Line* – a brutal but farcical attempt to corral the island’s remaining native inhabitants into the island’s southwestern corner”. Howard concludes, in the Author’s Note, that  “once you have become obscure it can be terribly difficult to enter the limelight”.

And so, as was also characteristic of the author’s life, the book’s poor “fate” was the result of a combination of factors – Henry’s own history (about which I’ll talk more next), the work itself, and external issues like the political and social situation of the day.

Who, then, was Henry Savery and how did he come to write the first “Australian-made novel”? He was born in England in 1791, the son of a generally respected country squire and magistrate. His father, Henry claimed, believed his son’s future had been foretold by a gypsy. Unfortunately, much of what the gypsy foretold did eventuate. Henry was three times “in danger of sudden or violent death”, by his own hand it must be said, and he did, at least three times, “undergo great reverses of fortune”, as much by his own poor decisionmaking, particularly regarding money, as by bad luck or the actions of others.

It’s a rather tortuous story characterised by politics, naiveté, poor decisionmaking, loyalty and betrayal. Howard manages to keep the narrative clear, though you do have to concentrate to keep all the characters straight. The Savery Howard presents is intelligent, hardworking, often foolish or imprudent rather than dishonest (though dishonest he was), and sometimes just plain unlucky. Right until near the end, he had influential friends who somehow managed to soften the legal impact again and again of his failures and misdemeanours. Howard’s book, in fact, provides an interesting and useful insight into the often grubby workings of 1820s-1840s colonial Tasmania, albeit through the specific lens of Henry’s life.

Fortunately (for us anyhow), Henry’s life was a colourful one. When young, he apprenticed himself as a gardener, but he was also interested in literature and demonstrated a capacity for business. However, it was the failure of an early business venture and a conviction for forgery that resulted in his being transported to Van Dieman’s Land in 1825 where his career, as it had been in England, continued its eclectic path and encompassed, among other things, various business enterprises alongside newspaper writing and editing.

Henry was, apparently, a good satirist. The columns he wrote anonymously for The Colonial Times while he was in prison in the late 1820s, and which were later published as The Hermit in Van Dieman’s Land, resulted in his employer being tried and imprisoned for libel. Although protected to the end by his employer, Henry of course lost the job. He couldn’t, it seems, take a trick. As soon as he got himself up, something would bring him down. Nonetheless, there were successes, one being that he established the colony’s first vegetable market. That gardening apprenticeship clearly came in handy. Howard writes at one point that “more lyrebird than magpie his situation provided ample scope for reinvention”. How, one wonders, could such a creative, hard-working man come to the ignominious end that he did? I suggest you read the book to find out more!

But now, the novel, Quintus Servinton (available at Project Gutenberg Australia) which was written in 1830 after a stint in gaol for debt. It is an autobiographical novel in which, Howard writes,

Henry had taken the Hermit’s merciless gun, and turned it, with deadeye aim, upon himself.

Henry, himself, writes in his Preface:

Although it appears under this shape,—or, as some may perhaps call it, novel,—it is no fiction, or the work of imagination, either in its characters or incidents. Not by this, however, is it pretended to be said that all the occurrences it details, happened precisely in their order of narration, nor that it is the mere recital of the events of a man’s life—but it is a biography, true in its general features, and in its portraiture of individuals; and all the documents, letters and other papers contained in its pages are transcripts, or nearly so, of originals, copied from the manuscript, which came into the author’s hands ….

In his Author’s Note, Howard writes of the challenges he faced in researching the book due to the paucity of primary source material. He recognises the dangers in mining fiction for fact but he discovered that “many important aspects of Quintus Servinton (subtitled A tale founded upon incidents of real occurrence) could actually be verified as fact”. Fact in fiction, fiction in fact. It was ever thus, eh?

I would love to report that after writing this – our first – novel, Henry went on to have the happy, successful life that he envisaged for himself in his book and as had in fact been foretold by the gypsy, but that’s not quite how it turned out. Henry, described as “a man of talent” by the last judge to try him, ended his days in the notorious Port Arthur gaol.

Despite being published in an unusual, diminutive format, A forger’s tale is a traditional biography. I appreciated the Author’s Note and list of sources at the end, but would have liked an index. This though is a minor quibble. Howard has an engaging style making the book an enjoyable read for anyone interested in Australian literature, colonial Australia, convict stories or Tasmanian history. Thanks Brother Gums for a great Christmas gift!

Rod Howard
A forger’s tale: The extraordinary story of Henry Savery, Australia’s first novelist
Melbourne: Arcade Publications, 2011
197pp.
ISBN: 9780987171481

* The Black Line has been the subject of some recent Tasmanian fiction, including Richard Flanagan’s Wanting and Rohan Wilson’s The roving party.

Barbara Baynton, Scrammy ‘and (Review)

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Barbara Baynton.

Presumed Public Domain: via Wikipedia

Back in November, Trevor at Mookse and the Gripes, decided that rather than write a single review of Alice Munro’s latest collection of short stories, Dear life, he would, over a period of time, read and review the individual stories.  Now, there’s something to be said for reviewing a collection of short stories as a collection because authors do put a lot of effort into the order of those stories. Reading them over a long period of time or, worse, out-of-order, could disrespect the author’s art. However, reviewing each story individually, enables us to give each one real recognition, and that has its value too methinks. Anyhow, this is what I’ve decided to do with Barbara Baynton‘s collection, Bush studies. I have, so far, reviewed the second story, “Squeaker’s mate”, and the sixth and last story, “The chosen vessel”. Today I’m going to review the third story, “Scrammy ‘and”, partly because Debbie of ExUrbanis likes it. Next, maybe, I’ll start at the beginning! I hope Baynton isn’t turning in her grave.

In her post on Australian classics for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012, Australian novelist Jennifer Mills wrote of discovering Barbara Baynton, saying that reading her was “an absolute pleasure”. She wrote:

Her work is distinguished by her rural character studies and a poignancy which verges on despair, and her stories are prototypes for the proliferation of outback gothic in our literature now. Baynton is part Henry Lawson, part Eudora Welty, and a master of the tension and texture of the short story form.

I couldn’t say it better myself! Mills’ comment that Baynton’s a master of “tension and texture” in the short story form is particularly true for “Scammy ‘and” because this story commences, quite deceptively as it turns out, with a fair dose of humour. It concerns an old shepherd and his dog Waderloo (Waterloo). The story starts with a flashback to a few weeks previously when the old man’s neighbours had headed into the nearest town to await the birth of their first baby (which, the old man thinks, “will be a gal too, sure to be! Women are orlways ‘avin’ gals. It’ll be a gal sure enough”.) The story then jumps forward to when the old man, having notched up the passing weeks, expects the young couple, who clearly provide some sense of security, to be back.

The humour in the first part of the story derives from Baynton’s description of the relationship between the man and his mate Waderloo as they go about their business. Here for example is the man talking to the dog about fixing a hat:

‘It’s all wrong, see!’ The dog said he did. ”Twon’t do!’ he shouted with the emphasis of deafness. The dog admitted it would not …

… and so on. The man and his dog resemble a Darby and Joan pair, dependent on each other, loyal to each other, but also having their little tiffs. However, underlying what seems like a light-hearted character study are intimations of something darker. First there’s the misogyny which features regularly in Baynton’s work. The old man is critical of the young woman despite her apparent attempts to help him, including fixing the hat. “‘The’re no good'” he says of women. This misogyny becomes more pointed in the parallel story of the man’s irritation with the ewe whose “blanky blind udder” means she can’t feed her “blanky bastard” of a lamb, and that he must feed it. Later on though the ewe is shown to be perfectly capable of teaching her lamb to drink.

But, there are intimations of other menace too.  Things are awry at the farm – including a tomahawk and an axe gone missing. Scrammy is mentioned in the second paragraph. The old man says:

”twarn’t Scrammy.’ But the gloom of fear settled on his wizened face as he shuffled stiffly towards the sheepyard.

As the story progresses, our disquiet increases, though for a while we are not quite sure where the problem is – is it an external threat or is it internal? The old man suspects “ther blacks”, “not poor ole Scrammy, ‘cos Scrammy wouldn’t ‘urt no-one”.  Baynton builds the tension slowly, but gradually, inexorably, it becomes clear – and halfway through the story the perspective shifts from the old man to the vagrant one-handed Scrammy, who’s seen the old man counting out his money. The menace grows. It’s melodramatic and almost a comedy of errors as Scrammy misreads clues … but I’ll leave the plot here.

Again, there’s none of Lawson’s pioneer romanticism here. Rather, this is a powerful story about refusing to see the truth –  or perhaps being scared of the truth. It’s not only the old man’s aloneness that makes him vulnerable but his prejudices. In the end, we see that wisdom is, in fact, more likely to be found in the ewe and the mother.

Barbara Baynton
“Scrammy ‘and”
in Bush studies
Sydney University Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781820898953

Available online: in Bush studies at Project Gutenberg

This review will count towards my Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.