TBR reading

Randolph Stow, The merry-go-round in the sea (#BookReview)

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Randolph Stow, The merry-go-round in the sea

Randolph Stow is a writer I’ve been meaning to read for the longest time – since, would you believe, the 1970s? Embarrassing, really, given his significance. My plan had always been to read his Miles Franklin award-winning novel To the islands first. However, the first I actually bought was The merry-go-round in the sea – back in 2009 when it was re-released as a $10 Penguin classic. It’s taken me until now to read it – and I read it with my reading group, which made it an extra special experience.

BEWARE SPOILERS, albeit this is a classic with minimal plot so, you know …

The merry-go-round in the sea was Stow’s fourth novel, published in 1965 when he was 30 years old. It has a strong autobiographical basis, but is, by definition, fiction. It is essentially a coming-of-age story about a young Western Australian boy, Rob, who, like Stow, was born in Geraldton in 1935. It covers eight years of his life from 1941, when his favourite cousin, the 21-year-old Rick, leaves to fight in World War 2, to 1949, when Rob is 14-years-old and the now-returned Rick is about to leave again, this time to live in London. The plot is not a particularly dramatic one, but rather a lot happens nonetheless.

It all starts in 1941 with Rob and his family moving (“evacuating” is the strange word his mother uses) to a family station in the country, due to fears of Japanese invasion. There Rob enjoys the life of a “bush kid” and is unhappy to find, upon his return to town, that he is really a “townie”. Meanwhile, Rick is at war, ending up a POW on the Thai-Burma railway. His experience is told in three or four brief but vivid digressions from the narrative’s main focus on Rob’s life. We are told enough to prepare us for a changed Rick on his return. In the second part of the novel, the focus is on Rob’s growing up, on his gradual loss of childish innocence, and on Rick’s struggles to come to terms with his life after his experience of war. Nothing is the same for Rick, and Rob worries about his idol.

Now, this is a 400-page novel (in my edition, anyhow) and can be discussed from multiple perspectives, so I’m going to hone in on a couple that most interested me.

One of these is heralded by the book’s structure, by the fact that, although the protagonist, the person through whom we “see” most of the book, is young Rob, the book’s two parts are named for Rick, “1 Rick Away 1941-1945”, and “2 Rick Home 1945-1949.” Superficially, this can be explained by the fact that Rick is a major focus of Rob’s interest. However, I’d argue there’s something more here, that these two characters represent conflicting forces – a duality – within Randolph Stow himself, one being his love of place, of the land and country he grew up in, and the other being his discomfort with that same place and his need to get away, which indeed he did. This duality was, as I recollect, discussed by Gabrielle Carey in her book Moving among strangers: Randolph Stow and my family (my review).

So … through Rob’s third person eyes, Stow writes gloriously, authentically, about Geraldton and the surrounding areas in which he grew up. The language is lyrical, poetic, conveying an emotional intensity in addition to pure description:

By rock pools and creeks the delicate-petalled wild hibiscus opened, and the gold-dust of the wattles floated on water. Wild duck were about, and in trees and in fox-holes by water he looked for the nests, staring in at the grey-white eggs but touching nothing. Climbing a York gum, he was startled when a grey broken-off stump suddenly opened golden eyes at him. He gazed into the angry day-dazzled eyes of the nesting frogmouth and felt he had witnessed a metamorphosis.

There’s repetition of colours, plants, and landforms, but rather than becoming tedious they convey a deep familiarity with and love of place – and make the novel sing.

However, through Rick’s eyes – albeit eyes damaged by his war experience – we see a more conflicted, and arguably more adult, understanding of this place. At the end, he explains his decision to leave to Rob:

‘Look, kid,’ Rick said, ‘I’ve outgrown you…

[…]

‘I can’t stand,’ Rick said, ‘this – ah, this arrogant, mediocrity. The shoddiness and wowserism and the smug wild-boyos in the bars. And the unspeakable bloody boredom of being in a country that keeps up a sort of chorus. Relax, mate, relax, don’t make the place too hot. Relax, you bastard, before you get clobbered.’

Stow wasn’t the only intellectual to leave Australia in the 1960s. Others include Germaine Greer, Clive Robertson, Barry Humphries and Robert Hughes.

My other issue is trickier to discuss: it concerns Stow’s references to Indigenous people in the novel. It’s complicated to tease out, and to do so properly would require a re-read, but I can’t leave the novel without saying something about it, given our heightened awareness these days. As I’ve already said, the book was written in 1965 about the 1940s. In 1957, Stow had spent three months as a storeman at the Forrest River Aboriginal mission in the Kimberleys. His biographer, Suzanne Falkiner, argued (on ABC RN Late Night Live) that this experience created some conflict for him:

‘[His family] had achieved a lot: they had been colonists in America, in the West Indies, the earliest settlers in that region of Australia,’ she says. ‘But as he grew older and as he got to know Aborigines, having worked in the Forrest River mission, I think the conflict became a real source of pain for him.’

I believe that Stow tried to convey some of this in The merry-go-round in the sea. Several times, Rob quotes his family’s racist attitudes, including here:

Rob did not mind the blackn*****s, some of the older ones he rather admired. But his mother was furious because Nan [Rob’s sister] was sitting next to a blackn****r in school. ‘They’re dirty,’ said his mother. ‘They all have bugs in their hair.’

It was funny about blackn*****s. They were Australian. They were more Australian than Rob was, and he was fifth generation. And yet somehow they were not Australian. His world was not one world.*

In other parts of the novel, he describes seeing Aboriginal art in caves, and ponders the people who made them. Not all are so sensitive or interested, however. When he’s taunted at school with having “n****r blood”, he reacts defensively, but when he’s a little older, and schoolfriends once again express racist attitudes, he responds:

‘I like them,’ the boy said, ‘There’s some nice boong kids at school.’

A poor choice of words, but at least Rob stands up for his beliefs. If we take Rob as Stow’s mouthpiece, then it’s pretty clear that Stow is conveying in this novel some disquiet about prevailing attitudes to Australia’s Indigenous people.

There is so much more to explore in this book – including the motif of the merry-go-round itself. As a young boy Rob had been shattered by the discovery of “time and change”, leading him to cling to the idea of a merry-go-round, which revolves and revolves around a solid centre, his family, never changing. By the end, however, with Rick about to leave, he realises that this too is illusion, that the world is not quite as he’d seen it. A bittersweet ending – one that must come to us all at some time!

Several bloggers have posted on this novel in the last few years, including Lisa (ANZ Litlovers) and Kim (Reading Matters), and offer additional perspectives to mine.

Randolph Stow
The merry-go-round in the sea
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2009
400pp.
ISBN: 9780143202745

* I have blanked out this word to, hopefully, deflect the wrong sort of “hits” on this blog.

Elizabeth Jolley, The orchard thieves (#BookReview)

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Elizabeth Jolley, The orchard thievesElizabeth Jolley’s twelfth novel, The orchard thieves, is a little different from most of the other Jolleys I’ve read. It’s a little less black, a little less about alienation, but it’s unmistakably Jolley in style and preoccupations.

By preoccupations, I mean her interest in family relationships and dynamics – and, related to that, her humane, but clear-eyed, understanding of human nature. The orchard thieves was written when Jolley was in her early seventies, and revolves around a grandmother contemplating the meaning of family and children. It feels very much like the meditations a woman of her age would be having – which is not to suggest that the story itself is autobiography. Still, I can see once again, why Helen Garner loves Jolley (and doesn’t love Thea Astley). Jolley and Garner both draw from their lives, albeit Garner more so, and both focus on life’s interior challenges. They also both do so in spare but loaded writing.

The orchard thieves, then, has a minimal plot, and no named characters. Told third person from the grandmother’s perspective, it concerns a family whose members are identified by their roles: the grandmother, the grandsons who belong to the youngest sister, the granddaughter who belongs to the middle sister, and the aunt (who also happens to be the eldest sister who lives with the grandmother). There is also the son-in-law (the youngest sister’s husband.) The novel (novella, really) is constructed in three parts, and the plot, such as it is, revolves around the return from London of the middle sister with her daughter.

So, what is it all about? It’s about the family at a point in time, from the grandmother’s point of view. It’s about parents and children, about love and worry, and about age and wisdom – not that the grandmother pontificates her wisdom or is even really sure that she has it. She worries about the aunt, her eldest unmarried daughter, fearing she’s lonely. She worries about the grandsons, their safety now and their future. And she worries about the middle sister’s health and happiness when she returns home – for how long? – clearly pregnant but saying nothing. It is this sister’s return that ripples the surface of the family’s finely balanced relationships.

Jolley prepares us for this “rippling” with an initially mysterious Preface, which commences

‘If you have the house,’ the middle sister said to the aunt, the eldest sister, ‘if you have the house you’ll have to pay us each one-third of the current market price. One-third each of the value of the place.’

We immediately think of course that someone has died, and then, as the book commences we realise that the owner of the house, the grandmother, has not died. We then wonder if she will die, but Jolley’s purpose is more subtle. This is not an inheritance-fight plot. Instead, the conversation tells something about the sisters’ characters. It also suggests underlying tensions, and introduces some ideas which, when they re-appear in their correct chronological sequence, become clear.

This is not a depressing book. The tensions are real, but the grandmother’s hard-won wisdom re-stabilises without offering pat solutions – and it’s all done in a quietly meditative, but by no means dry, tone. I found it absolutely delicious reading, with its Jolleyesque references to pear trees and birds, orchards and gardens, music and myths, sexuality and lesbianism; its sly humour; and, dare I say it, its relevance to my own musings. I haven’t reached my seventies yet, but am soon to join the world of grandmas and am certainly the mother of adult children. Jolley captures the concerns, the lessons learnt and still being learnt – about raising children, about relating to adult children, about being a grandmother, and above all about love – so economically but with sensitivity and insight.

Here’s a scene, early in the book:

Alone on the grey rug in the deeply shaded garden, the grandmother began to understand that it was not until she was a grandmother herself that she, because of her own love for her grandsons, realised how much she, as a small child, had been loved. And the pity was that it was too late to acknowledge this to anyone. It was no longer possible to offer, unsolicited, a kiss, a caress or a tender phrase backwards, as it were, over her shoulder. Recalling momentarily the pain of a telephone reprimand, well deserved she was sure, and only one of many, the grandmother came to a very real truth, which was that the great love which holds the mother to the child does not necessarily travel in the other direction, from the child to the mother. She understood also that she would not be the only person in the world to have discovered this.

Such spare writing. With the exception of the descriptions in the opening phrase – “grey” and “deeply shaded” – which set the melancholic, reflective tone, the language is direct and largely unadorned, and powerful as a result.

There are several references to myths and legends, which the grandmother believes “were attempts to explain happenings which were too painful and hard for human endurance.” Wanting to share these with the grandsons, she starts to tell them the story of Ceres/Demeter and her daughter Persephone/Proserpina, but it gets all too dark and boring for them, so they

simply slipped from the grandmother’s hands and disappeared with a slight rustling of dry leaves into the surrounding bushes.

You can just see it can’t you? Elsewhere, this gorgeous elegant language is subverted when the grandmother, walking with her grandsons, uses their language:

The grandmother hoped that the river paths unlike the roads and houses and the trolleys in the supermarket, were not crap. She hoped they were not crappy crap. She hoped that the aunt’s game and the secret paths, the rocks and the rock pools along the river beaches would remain uncrapped for as long as possible.

Oh, I could go on, sharing more and more. There’s so much more to say about, for example, the imagination and how it can lead you to worry and worry, about mothers’ regrets for things they could have done differently, about the time when children need to grow out of thieving orchards, about the reality that the

little rogues and thieves … would, during their lives, do something perfect and noble and wonderful and something absolutely appalling.

And appalling is pretty much how we could describe the middle sister’s behaviour when she arrives!

Helen Garner concludes her tribute to Jolley*, “To my dear Lift-rat” (which she wrote after Jolley had succumbed to dementia), with this:

But it was too late for me to say goodbye, or to thank her for the last sentence of The Orchard Thieves, where an old woman points out comfortingly to her daughter that the difference between a bad haircut and a good one is only a week.

Garner’s right. It’s somehow the perfect, grounding ending for a book which is about both the importance of “the unseen things, the real feelings and the deep needs” and the business of “push[ing] on with living.” It’s a timeless book.

Read for Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) Elizabeth Jolley Week.

* You can read Garner’s essay on-line and in her collection Everywhere I look (my review).

AWW Badge 2018Elizabeth Jolley
The orchard thieves
Ringwood: Viking, 1995
134pp.
ISBN: 9780670865505

Nick Earls, NoHo (#BookReview)

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Nick Earls, NoHoNick Earls is a Queensland-based writer known mostly for humorous fiction about contemporary life. While I’d heard of him, I hadn’t read any of his work when I attended a session involving him at the 2016 Canberra Writers Festival. The session was titled “Modern Masculinity” (my report). Earls was there because of the recent publication of his Wisdom Tree series of five novellas, of which NoHo is the fifth. I chose to buy it because of my familiarity with its setting, Los Angeles.

The Wisdom Tree books are beautifully designed (by Sandy Cull), and just lovely to hold. For that reason alone, I’m glad I finally decided to pick NoHo off the TBR pile and introduce myself to this writer. The books are apparently “subtly linked”, but I don’t think that means you need to read them all, or read them in any order. I certainly haven’t, and I enjoyed NoHo regardless.

The five books in the series are titled by the name of a place: 1. Gotham, 2. Venice, 3. Vancouver, 4. Juneau, and this one, 5. NoHo. NoHo refers to North Hollywood where 11-year-old Charlie is temporarily living with his mother and 12-year-old sister Cassidy who is seeking her break into the movie business. It’s not this Australian family’s first stay in Los Angeles, so Charlie knows the routine. As Cassidy and her mother do the rounds of agents and auditions, Charlie is left to himself. He chases wifi at audition venues. He goes “dumpster diving” for bottles and cans he can cash in at a recycling centre. And, in the last part of the story, he’s left at an art gallery to work on a school assignment that has been posted on the Distance Ed Blackboard site. Dropped off at 1.15pm, he is still there at gallery closing at 6pm because his sister has a “call-back” – and her needs come first. That’s the basic set up. Oh, and there is a father, but he is back in Australia, due to join the family at Christmas.

The story is told in the first person voice of Charlie. At the Canberra Writers Festival session I attended, Earls said that he used an 11 to 12-year-old boy as a protagonist because this is the age of starting to push boundaries, of wanting to be successfully independent but also being a little fearful. He wanted, he said, NoHo’s narrator to be naive about what he was seeing. That’s pretty much what he’s achieved: Charlie is starting to push boundaries – willing to be independent to a degree – but is not so confident that he isn’t a little anxious when his mum leaves him too long at the gallery. He’s lucky that a down-to-earth warm-hearted security guard, Wanda – “a tough woman who has had difficult times, I can tell” – stays with him.

Charlie isn’t, however, completely naive. He’s an intelligent boy who has some insight into the treadmill his mother and sister are on. He comments on the sorts of dream-and goal-focused mantras that his sister follows:

I’ve seen sports clothes that say, “Never, never, never give up,” but is that right? Never? Triple never? What if your dream is to win a marathon and your body with triple-never do that? It’ll finish, if you work at it, but it’ll never cross the line first and could fall apart trying. What if your dream is to be a movie star before you’re old, and it’s a million other people’s dreams as well? More than a million, actually. And some of them, lots of them, have perfect teeth and better luck than you.

Good questions, Charlie.

The second part of the novella involves Charlie choosing an art work for his art assignment. He chooses an anthropomorphic sculpture titled Family #5, which features three creatures made primarily from found objects. There’s irony or, at least, poignancy, in Charlie’s descriptions of the work:

She could have put three creatures in a row, ignoring each other, but these ones aren’t. They’re relating to each other in a way that says family. We can’t help but see it that way. It’s an instinct. So, it makes you connect with them more … It’s a good family. How a family should be, looking out for each other.

[and]

The child creature has no idea how good life is in this moment before trouble comes, however long the moment might be. It’s the care the parent creatures are showing that keeps you looking.

There’s also a lovely humorous little scene in the art gallery between the guard, Charlie, and a couple of other gallery visitors, that provides a wry little comment on art, what it is and what it means.

Anyhow, NoHo is an engaging, lightly told but not light story about family relationships. Charlie is generous, tolerant even, about his lot. He doesn’t rail about the attention his sister garners (and expects) again and again. It’s not an abusive or consciously neglectful family. The mother and sister don’t exactly ignore Charlie, nor are they intentionally cruel to him. It’s just that Cassidy is the centre of the mother’s energy and Charlie is expected to understand this. And this is, perhaps, where the naive narrator comes in. We see the family dynamics and recognise the potential pitfalls. Life is seemingly good now but trouble is very likely around the corner. Will the family unit hold?

I thoroughly enjoyed NoHo, partly for Earls’ evocation of the place – it made me laugh at times – but mainly for its delightful narrator and his insights into what makes a family. I wish him well!

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has reviewed 1. Gotham and 2. Venice.

Nick Earls
NoHo
(Wisdom Tree 5)
Carlton South: Inkerman & Blunt, 2015
142pp.
ISBN: 9780992498573

Helen Garner, The last days of chez nous, and Two friends (#BookReview)

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Helen Garner, Last days of chez house & Two friendsHelen Garner must have loved prize-winning book designer WH Chong’s cheeky cypress-dominated cover for the Text Classics edition of her two screenplays, The last days of chez nous and Two friends. You’d only realise this, though, after reading her Preface, in which she explains that she had incorporated cypresses into her screenplay for their “freight of meaning”, but that, because an appropriate location could not be found, they were replaced by a spire! For the published screenplay, however, Garner says she’d taken “the liberty of removing the spire and putting the cypress trees back in.” Love it.

I enjoyed reading this book much more than I expected. I’ve seen and enjoyed both films – a long time ago, as they were made in 1992 and 1986, respectively – but reading screenplays didn’t seem very appealing. How wrong I was. I’m glad, therefore, that Text decided to republish this volume in its Text Classics series. As always, they’ve value-added by commissioning an expert to write a commentary, which, in this case, given there was already an author’s Preface from the original 1992 edition, they appended an Afterword. It’s by well-regarded Australian scriptwriter, Laura Jones (who, coincidentally, is the daughter of the late Australian writer, Jessica Anderson.)

Both the Preface and the Afterword are informative and engaging, but I’ll start by discussing the plays. They are presented in the book in reverse chronological order of their writing, which means The last days of chez nous comes first. Both stories chronicle relationship breakdowns. This is common fare for Garner, but here as in all her work I’ve read, it’s not boring. Her skill lies in the intelligent, clear-sighted way she explores these situations, and in her ability to inject both humour and warmth. She’s never maudlin, and she never judges.

So, in The last days of chez nous, the breakdown is the marriage of Beth and her French husband JP, while in Two friends it’s the friendship between two 14-year-old girls, Louise and Kelly. Both, as is Garner’s wont, draw from her life. She was married to a Frenchman, the marriage did break up, and her husband did fall in love with and eventually marry her sister, most of which happens in the play. In Two friends, Bernadette Brennan reports, she drew on a friendship her daughter had had, but, when she saw the film, she realised that it was “really, in a funny sort of way, about me.” And the “me” character was not the sensible daughter, based on her own daughter, but the friend from the troubled background.

In her Preface, Garner tells how the impetus to write her first play, Two friends, was money. She needed it at the time, so when the idea was put to her:

I rushed home and rummaged in my folder of unexamined ideas. Out of it stepped Kelly and Louise, the young girls who became Two friends.

She continues that, although money had been the initial driver, she found, as she got down to it, the writing was “powered by the same drives as fiction” – curiosity, technical fascination, and “the same old need to shape life’s mess into a seizable story.”

This latter point is important, not only because it confirms her lifelong subject matter, “life’s mess” aka relationships, but because it answers those criticisms that she “just” presents her journals. She doesn’t, she “shapes” what she’s experienced (and seen) into “a seizable story”. She also shares in the Preface some of the things she learnt from film writing, including the challenge of working collaboratively which is something writers don’t usually have to do, the “priceless art of the apparently dumb question”, and that she was “forced to learn and relearn the stern law of structure.” She explains, using Last days of chez nous, how her “perfectly smooth narrative curve” was turned into “a little Himalaya of mini-climaxes”.

This is a good place, though, to talk about the structure of Two friends which chronicles the girls’ relationship breakdown in reverse. That is, we start at the point where it appears to have broken down and move back through the months to the peak of their togetherness. Experienced scriptwriter Laura Jones discusses this in her Afterword:

The story … is daringly told in the present tense, backwards, although each of the five parts is told in the present tense, forwards. We hold these two storytelling modes in our minds at once, the forwards momentum and the backwards knowledge […] Such deft playing with time–elegant, formal and musical–offers great storytelling pleasure, as we move from dark to light, from the painful separation of two adolescent girls to the rapturous closeness of ten months earlier.

She’s right, it’s clever because the end is bittersweet – we love the close friendship but we know what’s coming.

Now I want to share some of the experience of reading these plays. Here is an example from early in Two friends when Matthew, Louise’s wannabe boyfriend, tells her he’s seen Kelly:

LOUISE: What did she look like?
MATTHEW: All right.

He shrugs; like many boys he is not good at the kind of detail Louise is after.

These instructions to the actor about his character also enliven the reading. It’s the sort of sentiment you’d find in a Garner novel, though perhaps expressed a little more creatively.

And here’s some scene-setting in the next part, where Louise, Matthew and Kelly are together:

Kelly plays up to Matthew–almost as if she can’t help it. (Kelly will become one of those women who, when there’s a man in the room, unconsciously channel all their attention towards him.)

Similarly, in Last days of chez nous. Here is a scene where Beth has eaten some French cheese that JP has been storing carefully until it reaches maturation. He’s very upset, and eventually Beth senses the importance to him:

Beth is silent. They stand looking at each other. She has not quite succumbed, but for once he has her full attention–and this is so rare that he does not know what to do with it …

All this is probably what always happens in scripts, but Garner’s way of describing the situations and characters certainly made the screenplays more than just readable. They were engrossing.

Of course, I read Shakespeare’s (and other) plays at school – but that was school and, although I enjoyed them, I haven’t really gravitated to reading plays/scripts since. I won’t be quite so cautious in future.

Do you read them?

AWW Badge 2018Helen Garner
The last days of chez nous and Two friends
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2016
243pp.
ISBN: 9781925355635

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Jenny Ackland, The secret son (#BookReview)

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Jenny Ackland, The secret sonMelbourne-based author Jenny Ackland has tried something rather audacious in her debut novel, The Secret Son. Instead of following the autobiographical route that many first novelists do, she has leapt right in and tackled, albeit from left field, one of Australia’s most controversial legends, Ned Kelly. But, here’s the rub: it’s not exactly about Ned Kelly. It’s far more complex than that.

The secret son spans more than a century, from the 1880s to 1990 and beyond. It is set in both Turkey and Australia, and it weaves two stories. One concerns the 19th-century-born James who ends up living in Turkey, having gone to fight at Gallipoli in 1915, and the other tells of Cem, a 23-year-old Turkish-Australian man who is related to the village where James had lived and who travels there in 1990, ostensibly to learn about his heritage and identity. These two men – James/Jim and Cem/”Jem” – work subtly as foils or parallels for each other. James is intelligent, gentle and hardworking, but somewhat passive. He imagines who his father might have been, what sort of man he was. Cem, on the other hand, is young, directionless, well-meaning but rather self-centred. Turkish taxi-driver, Ibrahim, pins his uncertainty immediately, telling him:

You must know who you are and what man you want to become.

What sort of man he wants to become is something Cem struggles with, making this, partly but by no means primarily, a coming-of-age novel.

This brings me to one of the delights in reading this book, which is Ackland’s depiction of life in the Turkish village she calls Hayat (Turkish, she says, for “heart”). It reminded me of some books I read years ago, such as Beverley Farmer’s stories set in a Greek village. Farmer had married a Greek man and lived for some time in Greece, which explained her convincing insight into village life and relationships. Ackland’s depictions were similarly convincing, so I wanted to know how she’d done it. I found the answer in an ABC Books and Arts interview with her. She too had travelled to Turkey, married a Turkish man, spent time there as a bride and young mother. With this knowledge and experience, and an ability to individuate characters, Ackland creates a world that engaged me.

But now you are probably wondering how Ned Kelly fits into all this. It has to do with a historian named Harry whom Cem meets on the plane. Harry has a theory that Ned Kelly had a secret son who fought at Gallipoli and ended up staying in Turkey. His quest is to prove this theory and, in one of those coincidences that all travellers know about, the village where he believes this son went to is the same one that Cem’s family was from. So the scene is set – but the story that unfolds has less to do with Ned Kelly than with families and secrets, paying debts, and growing up.

I started this post by saying that Ackland has been audacious in this, her debut novel, and I implied that it was because of the Ned Kelly plotline. However, her audaciousness extends beyond this. It’s in the novel’s complex structure, too, in the way she weaves the two men’s stories, to-ing and fro-ing in time. It’s in the recurring motifs like bees and honey, tea and sugar, and woven rugs, that she uses to help keep us grounded. And it’s particularly in the change of voice between the more traditional third person voice used for most of the story to first person for the perspective of Berna, who is the village’s wise woman-cum-fortune-teller. Berna also happens to be Cem’s grandmother and James’ daughter, which effectively connects the two story lines. (The family relationships in this book are, I must say, complicated, and require an attentive reader to keep track!)

Anyhow, Berna provides the main link in the novel’s second plot which is about the “debt” Cem discovers he is expected to pay for something his grandfather Ahmet had done long before he’d left the village for Australia. This plotline exposes dissension in the village, and through it Ackland explores ideas about love and loyalty, truth and lies, revenge and forgiveness, not to mention the application of wisdom versus tradition. As the novel progresses, more of the “truth” about what happened comes out, and the plot thickens as we wonder what will be asked of Cem and what he will do in response. Meanwhile, the Ned Kelly storyline weaves its own path between James, Harry, and the village with the help of a woman pilot called Linda. While complex, it’s sensitively done, with, in the end, enough resolution to be satisfying without being too neat and implausible.

There are many angles from which this book can be talked about, besides those I’ve mentioned. There’s a father-son theme, a cheeky metafictional theme about a book called The secret son, Cem’s family experience in Australia as a child of immigrants, and gender. There’s also the idea of debts due by later generations, which Berna argues is not valid, but which her brother Mehmet supports. It’s relevant, I think, that Berna has the last word in the novel.

Early on Berna tells us that “truth” is not the be-all, that sometimes “life is better with surprises in the recipe”. She’s a wise woman, and this, The secret son, is a wise book. It might be a debut novel, and it might push its readers to keep up at times, but the ideas it explores, and its tolerant, generous treatment of its flawed characters, are those of a humane writer.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) was impressed by the book too.

AWW Badge 2018Jenny Ackland
The secret son
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015
327pp.
ISBN: 9781925266160

Gabrielle Carey, Moving among strangers (#BookReview)

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Gabrielle Carey, Moving among strangersEmma’s guest Monday Musings post last week on Randolph Stow provided the impetus for me to finally retrieve Gabrielle Carey’s Moving among strangers: Randolph Stow and my family from my TBR pile. I’ve been wanting to read it for the longest time, but … well, those of you with big TBRs will understand.

Moving among strangers, whose title comes from a line in Stow’s novel The girl green as elderflower, is an unusual book. It’s partly a biography of Stow, and partly a memoir of Carey and her family, but Carey wouldn’t call it either. She says in her prologue:

… this book is not a biography. Neither is it a work of literary analysis or scholarly enquiry. It is more like a ‘mostly private letter’, to use Stow’s phrase, written out of curiosity, and tenderness towards a man whom I have come to think of as an almost-relative, a dear friend of my mother’s, and the ideal literary mentor.

It all started when, as her mother was dying in 2009, Carey wrote to Stow in England letting him know of her mother’s condition. It was his response, which came four days after her mother’s death, which set Carey off. She’d known there’d been a connection, of course, but she didn’t know much about it. Stow wrote that Joan’s letters from London, when he was a schoolboy and undergraduate, “were like a window on the world”. Why, Carey wondered, did her mother correspond “with a young man, an adolescent, thirteen years her junior, who wasn’t even a relation?” This question is never properly answered in the book, not because there’s something salacious to discover (in case you were wondering), but because some connections made in life don’t have explanations beyond the fact that they occur. If that makes sense.

So, as the book progresses, Carey follows a Stow trail, “like a groupie”. She interrogates his novels and other writings, and reactions to them. She reads the letters Stow wrote to members of her and his family. And she visits the places in England where Stow had lived and meets some of the people who knew him there. One of the main strands in her story concerns Stow’s unease with Australia – with his feeling rejected by Australia and/or his rejecting Australia. There is no answer to this question either, but Carey’s exploration of the issue is enlightening (particularly given all those other Australian intellectuals who left in the 1960s – some well known like Germaine Greer and Clive James, others less so like Jill Ker Conway and Ray Mathew. Each story is different but there is probably a thread that links them too?)

There are many angles, in fact, from which I could write on this engaging but slippery book. There’s Carey’s sharing of her own history – the loss of her mother, her tricky relationship with her sister, the death by suicide of her father, and so on. There’s the form of the work and how it fits into what seems to be a new breed of biography-memoirs that is popping up. And of course, there’s Stow, himself. He comes across as an elusive character, and that’s probably because he was. When she, having made connection with him, enthusiastically tries to engage him, by correspondence, in a literary discussion about his and her mutual interest in James Joyce, he shuts her down, albeit politely, explaining that he was “old and ailing” which, in fact, he was. He died the next year.

This doesn’t deter her – for which we should be grateful because although the book is not, as she forewarns us, a biography, we do, nonetheless gain insight into Stow. She paints a picture, in the end, of a man at odds with the country in which he was born though exactly why is hard to say. Did he reject Australia – with its “depressing tolerance, even worship, of the second-rate” (his words) – or did Australia reject him with its inability to understand his work. Australian critics, apparently, panned his novel Tourmaline, for example, rejecting its combination of “fable and poetry” with “realism”. A later critic, Carey says, notes that Tourmaline represented a change, a move away from “bush realism … towards something more experimental”. However, at the time, as is so often the case with innovative creators, this was not recognised and Stow’s “too truthful, too confrontational of conventional attitudes” novel was not appreciated in his own country. Stow felt the rejection.

But, Carey is wary of coming to conclusions, as she constantly reminds us. At one point, when she has questions and no answers, she tells us that given there’s no one alive to tell her “the real story”, she “can only imagine”, but a page or two later, she says

But I could be wrong. Being wrong, I realised, is how I’ve spent most of my life: misinterpreting, misunderstanding, misjudging, miscommunication. Words slip and slide, as T.S Eliot said, or as Stow put it, ‘words can’t cope’.

A strange thing for a writer to say, perhaps? And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps, it’s something only a writer could say?

You are probably getting the gist now of this unusual book – and hopefully, realising what a delightful, engrossing and stimulating read it is. It is not a long book, and is therefore not comprehensive. If you want, for example, to read about the Stow book I know best, his first Miles Franklin winner, To the islands, you won’t find it here. What you will find though is an intelligent analysis of Stow the man and of his work. You will also gain, or, at least I did, some insights into literary Australia of the mid to late twentieth century – not a list of luminaries, or even a history, but a sense of the life and times, and of how one particular writer did (or didn’t) navigate it.

Near the end, Carey returns to a theme she introduced earlier in the book, that of twinning or duality of perspectives. She concludes that, in the Essex pub where she met people who had known Stow in the latter years of his life, she found “twin versions” of him, one “content in his lifestyle, in his aloneness, who was self-sufficient and independent” and one “who was uncomfortable in his own skin, internally and perpetually in conflict over his sexuality, his nationality and his identity.”

If you are interested in Stow, in Australian literary history more broadly, and/or in Carey herself, this is a book for you.

aww2017 badgeGabrielle Carey
Moving among strangers: Randolph Stow and my family
St Lucia: UQP, 2013
232pp.
ISBN: 9780702249921

Claire Battershill, Circus (Review)

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Claire Battershill, Circus

Metaphors and allusions can be dangerous. The inside-front-flap-blurb for Claire Battershill’s debut collection of short stories, Circus, concludes that the book “is a beautiful reminder that sometimes everyday life can be the greatest show on earth”. A reviewer on the back cover describes it as “the kind of book you’ll want to run away with”. As I finished it, however, my first thought was that “life is a circus”, meaning it can be disconcerting and unpredictable. Luckily for Battershill, all these work, and are encompassed by her epigraph from ee cummings’ play Him which says “Damn everything but the circus … damn everything that won’t […] throw its heart into tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence.”

A selection of stories from this book co-won the 2013 Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award, and, before that in 2008, the title story won the CBC Literary Award for Short Fiction. It has some cred in other words, but you might be wondering how I came to it. It was, in fact, a Mothers Day gift from Daughter Gums (DG) back in 2014. She and I had seen the book on a Canadian authors stand in a Toronto bookshop a couple of months earlier that year, and she noticed that it was one that I had eyed particularly covetously. (It helped that it is a beautifully designed book and is lovely to hold!) I was thrilled when I opened my gift, and apologise to DG for taking so long to complete it.

There are nine stories in the book, with the titular story “Circus” occupying the middle. Two are told first person, the rest third. I do like short story authors to mix their voices up a bit and to not be afraid of third person, as sometimes new writers can seem to be. Battershill uses the voices well. The guide in the Hendricks Memorial Miniature Museum (“Each small thing”) talks to the reader as though we are in her tour group. First person was needed here to effectively convey the guide’s self-absorption. It’s perhaps not so critical in “Two-man luge: A love story”, but the first person voice does enable us to feel the narrator’s uncertainty and longing for connection.

What I love about this collection is the variety of her characters and the often bizarre situations they find themselves. We have Henry Bottlesworth (“A gentle luxury”) who “has given himself  thirty-one days to find love on the internet” after ten years of enduring the matchmaking efforts of friends and family. This is not so unusual a situation, and the ending is probably the most predictable, and yet Battershill injects such warmth into what could be a frustrating character. The next story (“Sensation”) switches gear completely to a story about a single father and the tent he buys for his daughter’s 16th birthday. They pitch it in the living room:

Annie loves it … She loves how the energy saver-light bulb glows like a dying star through the waterproof nylon, how scents from the rest of the house filter in, from time to time, through the mesh windows … She is open to the elements, but there’s no danger of rain or mosquitoes, no need for thermal underwear or finicky gas lanterns. This is camping at its finest.

Haha, love it. From here, the tent becomes a conduit first to a closer relationship between father and daughter, and then with the neighbourhood, and then … well, I don’t want to spoil it, but it is a gorgeous story that manages to be warm while also having a little dig about art, fads and fame.

And so the stories continue. Here are some more. There’s the couple who buy a house in the country (“Brothers”) only to find that they’ve also acquired two elderly brothers, shepherds, one blind, the other deaf. Or the widowed grandfather who listens to the Northern Lights and wants to share this love with his grandson (“The collective name for Ninjas”). Or the wife who goes to New York with her husband for their first no-children holiday, only to return alone (“Quite everyday looking”).

The stories are warm, and humane, sometimes humorous, but all about relationships (with partners, parents, children, others) and the decisions made and not made. They are written with a lovely eye for those details that can lift them out of the ordinary:

Henry has, with time and experience, learned a thing or two about the culinary ins and outs of first dates. Sushi, for instance, invites a rice explosion. Ordering a saucy noodle dish or a dressing-laden salad is asking for a spill, and Chinese broccoli is impossible to eat all in one bite without losing one’s dignity. (“A gentle luxury”)

Karen has the face of someone who has swan-dived into love and never hit bottom. (“Brothers”)

The New York version of her was slim, with bare, smooth legs rather than thick, sturdy calves in support socks. And surely as soon as the plane touched down at JFK, she would instantly know how to apply liquid eyeliner precisely and her hair would emerge in elegant finger waves when she lifted her head from the neck pillow. (“Quite everyday looking”)

So, “greatest show on earth”? Not if you think this means fireworks and high drama. But if it means for you the idea that seemingly ordinary lives can be surprisingly varied and rich, then, yes, Circus fills the bill – and fills it with confidence and aplomb.

Endings are hard. Everyone knows it – the end of life, the end of a holiday, and of course the end of a novel. EM Forster knew it – and wrote about it in Aspects of the novel. Endings are particularly important in short stories, I’d argue, and Claire Battershill’s endings are good ones. There are no twists or neat resolutions here. Just a sense that characters have reached some point in life, major or minor, and are now moving on – in a direction that is usually clear to the reader but not completely spelled out. I like that.

POSTSCRIPT: It seems that Circus is out of print, but you can read one of the short stories, “Two-man luge: A love story”, online.

Claire Battershill
Circus
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2014
207pp.
ISBN: 9780771012785

Louise Mack, The world is round (Review)

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Louise Mack, The world is roundI’ve had Louise Mack’s debut novel, The world is round, on my TBR for about 20 years. Published in 1896, when she was 26 years old, it’s a fairly straightforward tragicomedy about a young well-to-do 21-year-old girl, Jean, who aspires to be a writer, and the two men who love her, the 30-plus-year-old self-confident, successful lawyer-and-writer Musgrave, and the around-25-year-old, shy and financially struggling Harrison. It’s a short work, a novella really, being just 93 pages in my edition.

Now, when I was searching Trove for information about Mack for this week’s Monday Musings, I found a couple of articles about her writing, amongst a myriad about her lecture tours. One was written in 1895, before this novel was published but after some of her verse and short prose pieces started appearing in journals like the Bulletin. The article quotes Mrs Bright, editor of Cosmos:

In these early days it is not possible to predict the place that Miss Mack is destined to fill in Australian literature. At present she shines chiefly in dialogue and a quaint, satirical style; peculiarly noticeable in sketches like “A study in Invitations.” In time she may develope [sic] a faculty for descriptive writing, which will supply the only quality now lacking to ensure her high rank among the popular novelists of the day.

The other was written in 1896, soon after the publication of her novel. The writer says:

Miss Mack has a particularly taking satirical style, but her descriptive writing is hardly up to her ability in the other department. Were she to but slightly improve in that qualification it would enhance the already strong position she has attained in the ranks of popular writers.

So, the praise is qualified. Her niece, the writer Nancy Phelan who wrote the introduction to my edition, discusses her not living up to this early potential. She notes that a common view is that she was “praised too soon, told she was good and encouraged to rush into print” when she needed time to sit back and think, and “be disappointed”. Phelan writes:

She wrote instinctively … but without proper guidance and criticism her work too often became facile. Facility, with a fertile imagination and love of inventing stories, made her a successful romantic novelist but it eroded her talent, and years of formula writing elbowed aside the poet. She never lost her poetic awareness but had little occasion to use it. Haste, lack of reflection, putting words on paper before they were ready robbed them of their true value; it was quicker and easier to write of trivial events than to try to address deep, difficult thoughts and emotions.

Yet in all Louise’s books there are glimpses of the writer she might have been. Even in her most idiotic novels there are occasional patches of true feeling or sensitive descriptions …

Why have I written all this? Well, partly because it might explain why this particular writer from the past has sunk from view. However, I’d argue that The world is round is worth reading – for a couple of reasons. One is that it is a good read, in which you can see why she received early praise. As our 1895 and 1896 writers above say, her dialogue is good and she has a lovely, light, satirical eye. (I’m going to share an excerpt which shows both of these in a Delicious Descriptions next week.) The other is that it is a good example of why “classics” (or older works) are worth reading. I’m going to focus my post on these two points.

a “brilliant little study”

The 1896 writer notes that “the reader’s report” for this novel described it as a “brilliant little study of two men and two women, sparkling and witty, and told in a graphic style”. It is a fun read, still today. It has a light touch, never wallowing in the issues it raises, and not weighed down with long explication or too many adjectives that you sometimes find in debut novelists. There are moments of sadness or pathos – obviously at least one of the would-be lovers is going to be disappointed, for a start – but Mack never becomes sentimental. (You can see this skill in those columns I referred to in my Monday Musings.)

The story is told third person, chronologically, in named chapters – “Musgrave”, “Jean”, “In which a friend is brutal” – and takes place in various interiors, such as James Musgrave’s chambers, Harrison’s classroom, and Jean’s home. Mack draws on the life she knows, presenting a picture of a small group of characters moving around each other in a small environment. This is very reminiscent of Jane Austen, to whom there is a tongue-in-cheek allusion in this conversation between Jean and Musgrave:

“I don’t suppose I will ever be a George Eliot, or a Thackeray, but perhaps I may be a–”
“Miss Austen.”
“Miss Austen! oh, surely I’ll be something b–I mean surely I won’t be like her.”
“She did some good work.”

I mean to say! Anyhow, Mack’s descriptions of her small group of people and their interactions ring true, while also drawing on standard literary tropes, like the well-to-do heroine and her poor friend, the experienced confident suitor and the awkward poor one. The plot plays out, perhaps more through little vignettes than a flowing narrative, but it is enjoyable to read, largely because these vignettes are well-drawn, and confidently mix a light tone with the occasional darker one. I’ll leave the story there.

on reading “classics”

As I was reading this old book or forgotten “classic” (let’s not get into the definitions of “classic” here now), I started thinking about why we read such books. It’s easy to explain those classics that belong to the canon: they address the big universal themes or ideas, their writing is skilled and timeless, and, often, they have innovated or contributed something to literary culture. But, what about what we might call the second rung, books like Mack’s The world is round? Are they really worth reading over contemporary writers? I’d say yes, and one of the justifications is in the first line of Mack’s novel. It starts:

Sydney was revelling in the clear, cold weather of June, the most delicious month of the Australian seasons.

Now, that is not an attitude most Australians would have today, but is clearly how the colonials, those transplants from mild temperate Britain, felt about Australia’s climate. In other words, books written in a different time can provide a fascinating insight into the attitudes and values of that time. They might be fiction, but they can’t help also betraying their era. For students of colonial Australia, Mack’s novella offers some delightful insights into “the life and times”.

I don’t want to bore you with details, but will just share one more example. It concerns the poor friend who tells Jean that she “can’t write about Australia, it doesn’t appeal” to her. She admits she’s a “Colonial” but she knows nothing of bush life. She says, “I’ve never taken my country into my soul, and never will until I get away from it”. However, she’s poor, and is offered a job governessing in the bush on a cattle station. She learns to love the Bushies and to prefer them over “the posturing, pseudo-intellectual Sydney set”. She writes several pages to Jean on the subject. Now, this friend plays a role in the plot in terms of providing a counter assessment of Jean’s literary skills and there’s a plot reason for sending her away, but I can’t see much reason for this little outburst, except for Mack to make some point about colonial society and its values.

So, there you have it. This is less review, more wandering reflections, but I hope I’ve convinced you that Louise Mack is a worthy addition to the list of past writers who should be kept alive.

aww2017-badgeLouise Mack
The world is round
Pymble: Angus & Robertson, 1993 (orig. pub. 1896)
93pp.
ISBN: 9780207180163

Christina Stead, Ocean of story, Pt 1: The early years – Australia (Review)

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Christina Stead, Ocean of storyContribution no. 2 for Lisa’s Christina Stead Week from Ocean of story: the uncollected stories of Christina Stead.

My first post was on the titular story, “Ocean of story”, which is also used as the collection’s Introduction. After this Introduction, the stories have been organised into 7 sections by editor RG Geering. These sections are presented chronologically, Geering says, reflecting Stead’s timeline, not when they were written. The first is, therefore, logically titled “The Early Years – Australia”. It contains three stories – “The old school”, “The milk run” and “A little demon” – all of which have children as their central subject, which is, perhaps, interesting given Stead had none of her own.

Now, if you ever went to primary (or elementary) school, and that’s all of you I presume, you will enjoy “The old school”. If you were a girl, you’ll probably enjoy it even more. “The old school” was, Geering says, one of the few things Stead worked on in the last years of her life. It was published in Southerly in 1984. It’s like a little slice of life, and like the other two stories, starts with a fairly detailed setting of the scene before she gets to her main subject matter.

So, “The old school” starts with a description of the school, followed by a description of what happens at the school, or, more precisely of what the rumours say happens. But, we are told, in spite of this, “cause and effect” are clearer at school than at home, and “mostly concerned the boys”. Boys who are bad – who truant for example – will go to “the reformatory”. And if you go to the reformatory, your next stop will be prison. And who knows all this? Why “the informants” of course. And who are these “informants”, these “small sages”? Well, Stead writes, they are the “natural moralists, two or three to a class and as far as I knew, all little girls”. From here we are regaled with stories about these informants’ moral pronouncements by this “I”, this “I” who appears in two of the stories and who is an observer, rather than a participant, from within. In “The old school” then, the “I” is a student at the school.

The rest of the story explores the “moral questions” debated by these “informants”, whom Stead describes in more detail:

The informants, our moralists, had clean dresses, pink, blue or sprigged, patent leather shoes and white socks, and curls natural or rag. They did clean school work too, even when we got pen and ink. Goodness alone knows how, with their pink cheeks and shiny curls and neatly dressed brink little mothers, they got all this news about jails, reformatories, judges and sentences, lashings, canings, bread and water.

They are, of course, often little tyrants, deciding which child will be approved and which won’t. The rest of the story chronicles some of their pronouncements and their impacts on their peers. Whenever anything happened in the school “they knotted together, a town moot: they discussed, debated and delivered an opinion.” What the teachers said was to them only “hearsay”. Our “I” character doesn’t have an opinion. She “thought then that cruelty and injustice were natural and inevitable during all of a poor creature’s life”. (The use of “then” would be worth exploring.)

The main story concerns poor little Maidie Dickon who is, literally, “poor” and thus ostracised by our “natural moralists”. She didn’t have the right shoes, didn’t bring the right notes from her mother, and didn’t have her own pen and paper and so would be given some from the school supply. “It isn’t fair” cry the well-provided “informants” who also prove, mystifyingly to our “I”, to be excellent “newsgatherers”. They somehow know about Maidie’s roadworker father, who is (illegally, in those days) striking, and washerwoman mother.

You are getting the drift I’m sure of the story and will be realising that Stead’s focus is on the “natural” justice delivered by these “sages” or “moralists” to those less able to defend for themselves, while the “I”, Stead’s young self, tries to make sense of it all, of how the world works. The ending is gorgeously sharp. The story could take up a whole post – I loved its vivid picture and its passion – but I’ll move on.

“The milk run” was published in The New Yorker in 1972 (and later appeared in a Penguin anthology, The Penguin book of the road, published in 2008). It is set in the same area of southern Sydney as “The old school”, but it tells the story of a family and a little boy whose job it is to get the family’s milk from the grandfather’s dairy a mile away. Stead takes some time setting the physical scene, and describing the family and the boy, Matthew, who worships his father.

It is a beautifully detailed story of a particular place and time. Stead captures ordinary family life and tensions with such precision – a comment here, a brief conversation there, convey all we need to know about the various relationships. It conveys a child’s eye view of the world, the child’s incomprehension of adult behaviour. Things happen. Sometimes they make sense to Matthew, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the father he worships supports him, sometimes he doesn’t. But, after a lucky find, Matthew gathers to himself a warming thought, something that offers him comfort when all else is uncertain.

And finally, “A little demon”, which was published, Geering says, in “an almost identical version” in the Harvard Advocate in 1973. It’s a satire, which again starts with setting a wider scene by describing a large and successful but rather insular family, the Masons. On the surface, they seem to be perfect, but asides and hints suggest that the surface is just that. There’s something a little claustrophobic and inward-looking about them with their “same notions” and suspicion of travel.

Into this family is born Stevie, the titular “little demon”. We hear a lot about him – the horror of his behaviour and what a trial he is to his mother, though, strangely, not to his teacher who finds him “very good” – but we don’t meet him until the last couple of pages. We are told what an “adorable” person his mother is, and how much she loves her two dogs, Duff and Rags. And here come some hints about who this adorable Mariana really is because, you see, she loved Duff and didn’t want her to ever have puppies. Why would you, after all, “spoil” that beautiful dog by letting her have puppies? Hmm, does this tell us something about Mariana’s attitude to motherhood? Ironically though, she falls in love with Rags, one of Duff’s unwanted puppies, the irony doubled because she doesn’t love her own offspring.

It all starts to go bad for Stevie when the cat that he found upset the dogs. He took the cat’s part, “just for a day or two; and then he saw which way the wind was blowing and lost interest”. And here the rot sets in. Stevie is depicted as having no feelings for animals, and as doing everything he can “to be disagreeable, to annoy, to tease”. How old is this Stevie that everyone – except perhaps his grandmother who defends him – hates? About 5!

It’s a satirical story in which Stead skewers shallowness and self-centredness, not to mention lack of maternal feeling. The language here is more heightened, using exaggeration and exclamation, than the more natural language of the previous two stories. It also has a somewhat stronger plot: we are set up to want to meet this Stevie, and there is a delicious little twist or sting in the tail, which the other two stories don’t have.

I’ve enjoyed reading these stories for Christina Stead Week. I’ll try to read more down the track, but in the meantime they have given me added insight into Stead, into the variety in her writing and into some of her broader themes. Thanks Lisa for the little push to read at least a bit of Ocean of story!
AWW Logo 2016

Christina Stead
“The old school”, “The milk run” and “A little demon”
in Ocean of story: The uncollected stories of Christina Stead
Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1986
552pp.
ISBN: 9780140100211

Christina Stead, Introduction: Ocean of story (Review, possibly)

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Christina Stead, Ocean of storyI am so glad Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has given me an excuse, her Christina Stead Week, to finally pick up Ocean of story: The uncollected stories of Christina Stead. I bought this book, in 1991, from a sale table for all of 98 (Australian) cents! What a bargain. I then popped it on my Australian literature TBR shelves, where it has sat, and sat, and sat – until now.

Before I get to it, though, I must confess that this post’s title is a bit of a lie. Christina Stead just called this story “Ocean of story”, but RG Geering, the editor of this “uncollected” collection, made it the Introduction to the book. I decided that I could use this to differentiate in my post title that the post is just about this introductory story. Fair enough?

Now to the overall collection. I am on record as stating that I don’t read introductions to books before I read the book itself. I would in fact prefer these “introductions” to be called “afterwords” and placed at the end. And that’s what Geering has done here except, being perverse, I’d rather that for such a “curated” collection it had been at the beginning! Consequently, I didn’t see it until I’d read the first story and, finding it a little unusual, wondered why there wasn’t some sort of editor’s introduction. So, I went looking. And there, at the end, was his Afterword!

Geering writes that the book

brings together for the first time most of the short prose writings that appeared in various places (journals, magazines and newspapers) outside the thirteen volumes of fiction published during her own life, along with other unpublished pieces found among her personal papers after her death.

And then he says that he has grouped the pieces “according to their settings and contents rather than chronologically”. In this way, they will “follow the contours of [her] somewhat wandering life.” Then, right towards the end of his Afterward, he finally describes the opening piece: it’s

a contribution to ‘The International Symposium on the Short Story’ in Kenyan Review, 1968 … [and] is a highly personal essay, rather than a conventional article.

And that is exactly what it is, a “highly personal essay”, one that, by its end, has given us a “highly personal” understanding of what stories, and particularly short stories, meant to Stead. It starts:

I love Ocean of Story, the name of an Indian treasury of story; that is the way I think of the short story and what is part of it, the sketch, anecdote, jokes cunning, philosophical, and biting, legends and fragments. Where do they come from? Who invents them? Everyone perhaps. Who remembers them so that they pass endlessly across city life? I know some of those marvellous rememberers who pass on their daily earnings in story; and then they are forgotten to become fragments, mysterious indications. Any treasury of story is a residue of the past and a record of the day.

I love the open-endedness of her conception. It’s a free-flowing one that allows stories to take all forms. She goes on to say that “what is unique about the short story is that we all can tell one, live one, even write one down.”

Then she turns autobiographical, starting with her childhood with her father. She was, she says, “born into the ocean of story, or on its shores”, the daughter of a “lively young scientist”. He

told his tales. He meant to talk me asleep. He talked me awake.

Ha, the impact of stories on an imaginative child, which Stead clearly was. He told her stories drawn from his zoological work, and “stories of the outback…and even a few historic events.” But then comes the important thing – the thing that is important to all who read – that is, what stories do for us. She writes that the thousand stories she heard between two and four and a half

formed my views – an interest in men and nature, a feeling that all were equal, the extinct monster, the coral insect, the black man and us; and another curious feeling in me, of terrestrial eternity, a sun that never set.

This feeling came via her father’s nature-related stories which taught her that while death was necessary, there was always “a frail print” left. However, the storytelling – these times that allowed her “to see the unseen” – ended when she was four and a half and her father remarried. The magic was imprinted by then though!

“the million drops of water”

Indeed, she sees stories as “magical”. You only need for someone to say, she says, “Here’s a story; it happened to me” and all will listen. We seek stories – even those “twisted, inferior, cramped, and sterile stories on TV” – because we hope to recognise and “have explained our own existence”. She’s right – on both superficial (what am I doing) and deeper, more psychological (who am I) levels – don’t you think? She continues:

It isn’t necessary that these stories should be artistic or follow formula or be like Chekhov or the last metropolitan fad, or anything. The virtue of the story is its reality and its meaning for any one person: that is its pungency.

She argues that while the “masterpiece” might be appropriate for professionals, “the essential for us is integrity and what is genuine.” She then, interestingly given she wrote this in 1968, harks back to stories of the 1930s:

not all are memorable (some are) but all record the realities of the days when America was suffering and looking for a way out and thinking about its fate; and – look at those same today – they are a vivid and irreplaceable memento. That is what is best about the short story: it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one.

In other words, “the story has a magic necessary to our happiness”! We seek “the powerful story rooted in all things which will explain life to us”. I love all this. It is such an argument for the importance and value of the arts.

Stead concludes by telling a story about a group near London that she once joined. All were asked to stand up and tell a story, and

everyone, those stuffy and snug people came to life, became mouths out of which bubbled stories poor and ordinary or before unheard of.

There it was, she says, “the ocean of story”. And this happens everywhere, anytime. So,

The short story can’t wither and, living, can’t be tied to a plan. It is only when the short story is written to a rigid plan, or done as an imitation, that it dies. It dies when it is pinned down, but not elsewhere. It is the million drops of water that are the looking-glasses of all our lives.

I classed this post as “(Review, possibly)” because I haven’t really written a review. Rather, I’ve described/shared Stead’s attitude to stories – and to story-making and storytellers. I love her egalitarianism, even when describing stories that are “poor and ordinary”; I love her flexible idea of what makes a story; I love her chatty, idiosyncratic style; and most of all I love her passion for the importance of stories (particularly short stories) to our lives. I look forward to reading at least some of those in this book.

AWW Logo 2016Christina Stead
“Introduction: Ocean of story”
in Ocean of story: The uncollected stories of Christina Stead
Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1986
552pp.
ISBN: 9780140100211