Review

Kim Scott, That deadman dance

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments
Kim Scott That Deadman Dance
(Image courtesy Picador Australia)

About a third of the way into Kim Scott‘s novel That deadman dance is this:

We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we’d lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours.

And, it just about says it all. In fact, I could almost finish the post here … but I won’t.

That deadman dance is the first Indigenous Australian novel I’ve read about the first contact between indigenous people and the British settlers. I’ve read non-Indigenous Australian authors on early contact, such as Kate Grenville‘s The secret river, and I’ve read Indigenous authors on other aspects of indigenous experience such as Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria and Marie Munkara’s Every secret thing. Kim Scott adds another perspective … and does it oh so cleverly.

The plot is pretty straightforward. There are the Noongar, the original inhabitants of southwest Western Australia, and into their home/land/country arrive the British. First, the sensitive and respectful Dr Cross, and then a motley group including the entrepreneurial Chaine and his family, the ex-Sergeant Killam, the soon-to-be-free convict Skelly, the escaped sailor Jak Tar, and Governor Spender and his family. The novel tracks the first years of this little colony, from 1826 to 1844.

That sounds straightforward doesn’t it? And it is, but it’s the telling that is clever. The point of view shifts fluidly from person to person, though there is one main voice, and that is the young Noongar boy (later man), Bobby Wabalanginy. The chronology also shifts somewhat. The novel starts with a prologue (in Bobby’s voice) and then progresses through four parts: Part 1, 1833-1836; Part 2, 1826-1830; Part 3, 1836-1838; and Part 4, 1841-44. And within this not quite straight chronology are some foreshadowings which mix up the chronology just that little bit more. The foreshadowings remind us that this is an historical novel: the ending is not going to be fairytale and the Indigenous people will end up the losers. But they don’t spoil the story because the characters are strong and, while you know (essentially) what will happen, you want to know how the story pans out and why it pans out that way.

What I found really clever – and beautiful – about the book is the language and how Scott plays with words and images to tell a story about land, place and home, and what it means for the various characters. His language clues us immediately into the cross-cultural theme underpinning the book. Take, for example, the words “roze a wail” on the first page:

“Boby Wablngn” wrote “roze a wail”.
But there was no whale. Bobby was remembering …
“Rite wail”.
Bobby already knew what it was to  be up close beside a right whale …

Whoa, I thought, there’s a lot going on here and I think I’m going to enjoy it. Although Bobby’s is not the only perspective we hear in the book, he is our guide. He is lively and intelligent, and crosses the two cultures with relative ease: just right for readers venturing into unfamiliar territory. He’s a great mimic, and creates dances and songs. The Dead Man Dance is the prime example. It’s inspired by the first white people (the “horizon people”) and evokes their regimented drills with rifles and their stiff-legged marching. There’s an irony to this dance of course: its name foretells while the dance itself conveys the willingness of the Noongar to incorporate (and enjoy) new ideas into their culture.

In fact there’s a lot of irony in the novel. Here is ex-Sergeant Killam:

Mr Killam was learning what it was to have someone move in on what you thought was your very own home. He thought that was the last straw. The very last.

And who was taking his land? Not the Noongar of course, but the Governor … and so power, as usual, wins.

The novel reiterates throughout the willingness – a willingness supported, I understand, by historical texts – of the Noongar to cooperate and adapt to new things in their land:

Bobby’s family knew one story of this place, and as deep as it is, it can accept such variations.

But, in the time-old story of colonisation, it was not to be. Even the respectful Dr Cross had his blinkers – “I’ve taken this land, Cross said. My land”. And so as the colony grew, women were taken, men were shot, kangaroos killed, waters fouled, whales whaled out, and so on. You know the story. When the Noongar took something in return such as flour, sheep, sugar, they were chased away, imprisoned, and worse.

I’d love to share some of the gorgeous descriptions in the book but I’ve probably written enough for now. You will, though, see some Delicious Descriptions in coming weeks from this book. I’ll finish with one final example of how Scott shows – without telling – cultural difference. It comes from a scene during an expedition led by Chaine to find land. They come across evidence of a campsite:

You could see where people camped – there was an old fire, diggings, even a faint path. Bobby was glad they’d left; he didn’t want to come across them without signalling their own presence first, but Chaine said, No, if we meet them we’ll deal with them, but no need to attract attention yet.

Need I say more*?

The book has garnered several awards and some excellent reviews, including those from my favourite Aussie bloggers: Lisa (ANZLitLovers), the Resident Judge, the Literary Dilettante, and Matt (A Novel Approach). Our reviews differ in approach – we are students, teachers, historians, and librarian/archivists – but we all agree that this is a book that’s a must to read.

Kim Scott
That deadman dance
Sydney: Picador, 2010
400pp.
ISBN:  9780330404235

* I should add, in case I have misled, that for all the truths this novel conveys about colonisation, it is not without vision and hope. It’s all in the way you read it.

Weekends with T.S. Eliot (2)

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959), British writer

Jeanette Winterson, 2005 (Image: Courtesy Mariusz Kubik, via Wikipedia using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

We are all everyone and everyone is us. (Fiona Shaw, talking about The waste land)

Last weekend I finished the Perspectives section of The waste land app, by listening to Fiona Shaw, Frank Turner and Jeanette Winterson. The fascinating thing is that they all say the same things, albeit in slightly different ways.

Timeless, universal, undated

Shaw talks about the timelessness of the poem, saying it doesn’t need to be brought up to date. Cities still exist, we still commute, we still visit suspect clairvoyance, she says. She also argues for its universality in the sense that we can be Hector sitting in the chair, or ourselves. We may only have one life but through poems like this we can also have many different lives. But we readers know this don’t we.

Turner’s take is a little different. He likens Bob Dylan to Eliot suggesting that both were “bottom feeders of the culture around them”. Putting it another way, he says they both have a “prophetic voice of judgement”, like prophets from the Old Testament. And you can’t get more timeless than that!

Winterson argues that Eliot, way back in 1922, saw where we were going: The waste land, she says, is “about now”, and is not “dated in any way”.

Captures the twentieth century

I love Shaw’s description that Eliot

Scraped a rake around the 20th century and gathered a leaf mould heap of what it was about.

Not bad, if you agree with her, for a poem written in the first quarter of the century.

Turner, similarly, describes the poem as “zeitgeisty”. He says Eliot identified that the forward progression that had been happening from the Renaissance to the first World War had come to an end. The waste land documents, he says, the failure of the progressive idea.

Winterson and Turner both call it a prophetic poem. While many saw a bright future after World War I, Eliot, says Winterson, saw the spiritual malaise coming. She suggests that if Eliot visited London and New York today he would not be surprised to see the economic crisis we are in, the way we have forgotten all values except “making money”.

Reinventing the language of poetry

Shaw talks of the way Eliot mixes banality (the throbbing of cities and machines) with lyricism (“the violet hour” for example). Turner, likewise, talks of how Eliot’s language can be angular and uncomfortable, and then suddenly be intersected with something lyrical, with more traditional “poesy”. Winterson articulates all this beautifully by describing how Eliot recognised (consciously or unconsciously?) that the language of poetry needed replenishing. He used, she says, fresh, direct, colloquial language, “the language of the everyday” to express “eternal things, the big ideas”.

As I listened to these various perspectives and how each saw the relevance of The waste land to now, I wondered whether it has been continuously relevant over the nearly 90 years since it was published – and somehow I think it has been. World War 2, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the troubles in Ireland, not to mention strife in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and South America. Even when on the surface – as in the 1920s – life has seemed comfortable for many, there has been something not quite right, and so:

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
(from “V. What the thunder said”)

I’ll just leave it at that.

Jane Austen, The Watsons (Unfinished)

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Book covers for Jane Austen's The Watsons

Book covers for Jane Austen's The Watsons

In one of those coincidences that we often bother about in fiction, my local Jane Austen group scheduled Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, The Watsons, for our July discussion. A coincidence because, if you are an Austen fan, you’ll know that just this week the manuscript was sold at auction for nearly £1 million. Thank goodness it was bought by an institution – the Bodleian at Oxford. Next time I’m in England I know where I’ll be going!

Anyhow, onto The Watsons. This unfinished novel was written in Bath probably around 1803-1805, though there is not consensus about this. A common belief is that she abandoned it after her father’s death due to sadness and the resultant uncertainty in her living conditions. Whether this is true or not, it is a fact that she didn’t take up serious writing again until she settled in Chawton in 1809 – which gives rise to the more interesting challenge. That is, why didn’t she take this one up again as she did with other early works such as First impressions which became Pride and prejudice. Enough of that, however, as all we can do is speculate. Let’s look at the work instead.

English novelist Margaret Drabble describes The Watsons as “tantalising, delightful and highly accomplished”. And it certainly is tantalising. We have only 68 pages (manuscript count). The story concerns 19-year-old Emma Watson who has returned, after living with her well-off aunt and uncle for 14 years, to her “poor” family. At the time of her return, just her oldest sister, the 28-year-old Elizabeth, is at home with their invalid father. The family however comprises four daughters and two sons, of whom only one son is married. The main plot-line is, of course, likely to be marriage, and so in these first chapters we are introduced to three men who could vie for Emma’s hand. We are also introduced to the characters belonging to Austen’s favourite subject, “3 or 4 families in a Country Village”. We know, from her sister Cassandra, how Austen intended the plot to play out. So tantalising that we never saw her do it!

Drabble’s next word is “delightful” and it is that too … because it contains those wonderful character descriptions and social observations that we have come to expect of Austen. I’ll share just a couple. The first one describes Emma (at the Ball where we meet three potential beaux):

… a lively Eye, a sweet smile, & an open Countenance, gave beauty to attract, & expression to make that beauty improve on acquaintance …

Contrast this to the following description of her sister Margaret:

Margaret was not without beauty; she had a slight, pretty figure, & rather wanted Countenance than good features; – but the sharp & anxious expression of her face made her beauty in general little felt.

There are also those delightful little set pieces we are used to finding in Austen, pieces that illuminate character as much as they move the plot along. One concerns Emma’s offer to dance with a 10-year-old boy when the snooty aristocrat Miss Osborne, doesn’t follow through on her promise to dance with him. “Oh Uncle”, the young lad says to one of the possible beaux, “do look at my partner. She’s so pretty.”

Sweet as she is, Emma proves herself to be well able – rather like Elizabeth Bennet – to hold her own. She refuses to pander to the flirtatious Tom:

Emma’s calm curtsey in reply must have struck him as very unlike the encouraging warmth he had been used to receive from her Sisters, & and gave him probably the novel sensation of doubting his own influence, & of wishing for more attention than she bestowed.

The last sentence of The Watsons starts, “Emma was of course uninfluenced …”. How sad we didn’t get to see more of this resourceful, delightful heroine.

Finally, “highly accomplished“. I’m not sure I totally agree with Drabble here. What we have is intriguing, tantalising us with its potential. It demonstrates much of what we know and love about Austen – and yet, despite evidence of extensive editing in the recently auctioned manuscript, it has (to my mind anyhow) an element of clumsiness. I find this particularly in an overuse of dialogue to convey information which the characters involved would surely already know – such as Elizabeth’s saying to her sister, Emma, “though I am nine years older”. It works well enough in the context but I believe the later, experienced Austen would have better conveyed this through authorial comment.

Nonetheless, it is accomplished. Its realism is remarkable and, like all her novels, it is clear from the beginning just what the targets are going to be. In this case, I see a major theme being the contrast between exterior and interior “refinement”. The fragment we have focuses heavily on the distinctions of class, often contrasting the superficiality of those who possess this so-called “class” with Emma whose refinement is more of the interior kind. This has the makings of a fascinating novel.

And yet, while it was not to be, we can point to many characters in later books who seem to draw, albeit with variations, from the characters here: the invalid father in Emma, the money-fixated brother in Sense and sensibility, the independent-thinking heroine in Pride and prejudice, the flirty young man of means in Mansfield Park, to name just a few. For whatever reason, Jane Austen did not return to this manuscript, but it’s obvious that she did not forget the characters nor some of the ideas behind their creation.

Jane Austen
“The Watsons”
in The Oxford illustrated Jane Austen. Vol VI, The minor works (ed. R.W. Chapman)
London: Oxford University Press, 1969
pp. 315-363

Willa Cather, A Wagner matinée

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

Willa Cather's childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska

Willa Cather's childhood home, Nebraska (Public Domain, By Ammodramus, via Wikipedia)

Willa Cather‘s short story, “A Wagner matinée”, was Library of America’s “Story of the Week” back in May. However, I was busy then, but I like Cather, so I put it aside to read later. And later has finally come!

I’ve reviewed another Cather short story here, “The sentimentality of William Tavener”, which was published in 1900. “A Wagner matinée” was first published a little later, in 1904. Like the previous story, and the novels of hers that I’ve read, this short story deals with her favourite preoccupation, the tough life of the pioneer. It is not, though, set in the midwest, but in Boston. The plot is slight, and can be summarised in a couple of sentences. The first person narrator’s aunt comes to visit him in Boston from Nebraska to which she’d eloped, against her family’s wishes, some three decades previously. Our narrator, Clark, has “a reverential affection” for this aunt who’d provided him with “most of the good that ever came my way in my boyhood” and so he decides to treat her, an ex-music teacher, to an afternoon concert of Wagnerian music. The story chronicles the emotions aroused by this visit.

As usual, the Library of America’s brief introductory notes are illuminating. Apparently Cather attracted a degree of wrath after its publication, from Nebraskans and from her family. A Nebraskan editor slammed her depiction of prairie life suggesting that fiction writers who portray Nebraska should “look up now and then and not keep their eyes in the cattle yards”. If they did “they might be more agreeable company”. Take that, Willa!

Her family was upset because they felt she’d based the story’s Aunt Georgiana on her Aunt Franc who, like Georgiana, had lived in Boston and studied music before marrying and moving to Nebraska. Cather was apparently hurt by this as she’d maintained an affectionate correspondence with her aunt. Nonetheless, the notes say, when she revised and shortened the story for her 1920 collection, “she altered the portrait of Georgiana out of consideration for her Nebraskan family”. Hmmm … I should do my research and find the original as I believe the version provided by the Library of America is this 1920 one. In it, Georgiana seems a fairly sad case so I’d love to see what she’d written first. Regardless, it reminds me yet again of that fine line between fact and fiction that novelists who draw from life must tread.

Anyhow, the story. Aunt Georgiana arrives in a somewhat “battered” state, partly due to the arduous journey and partly, Clark implies, due to the hardness of her life. “For thirty years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead” which she had established side-by-side with her husband. Clark describes the time he’d spent out west with his aunt and the support and encouragement she’d given him. He also remembers her telling him once when he was “doggedly” practising a piano piece:

Don’t love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you.

What was taken from her? Her music? Her old life? Was it taken or did she, willingly at the time, give it up? Her pain made clear, nothing more is said on this point. And I like the writing for it. The rest of the story describes the matinée and how he and his aunt react. The language is clear and strong, as you can see from this excerpt roughly half-way through the story. It describes the first piece in the concert, the Tannhaüser overture, which is particularly meaningful for me as Tannhaüser was my first opera:

… When the horns drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim’s chorus, Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve. Then it was I first realised that for her this broke a silence of thirty years. With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat; and I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress …

Pretty stark stuff … and it becomes more stark as he describes his aunt’s physical reactions to the music and draws his own conclusions from it. Here she is reacting to “The prize song”:

Her eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening on her cheeks … It never really died, then – the soul which can suffer so excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only; like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again.

Why Wagner, I wondered when I saw this story? It would be anachronistic to invoke our era’s discomfort with the man and, in fact, LOA tells us that Cather was passionate about Wagner. His is powerful, emotional music: this seems to be its relevance here. It is music which can stir the soul – and Georgiana’s soul has been stirred. She is no longer “semi-somnambulant” as she was when she arrived. Clark leaves us contrasting his emotional aunt with the “black pond” and “unpainted house” of home. However, because the story is told through Clark’s – albeit loving and sympathetic – eyes we cannot know what this all means for her. Instead, we are left to think about the sacrifices that attend the decisions we make and whether or not we can live with them. A thoughtful, moving story.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian Poetry Library (online)

/ Whispering Gums / 7 Comments

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson, circa 1902. (Presumed Public from the Sydney University library, via Wikipedia)

It seems appropriate now, when I’ve been exploring the iPad app for TS Eliot‘s The waste land, to introduce the Australian Poetry Library website that was launched in late May. Essentially a digital library, it contains over 42,000 poems from over 170 poets. That’s a pretty good start, particularly when the poets range from pioneers like Henry Lawson to current poets like Les Murray, Tracy Ryan and Alan Gould (whose novel, The lakewoman, I reviewed recently).

The home page is clean and bright, if a little busy. Here is the main content (of which some is dynamic ensuring new content for each return visit):

  • Talking poetry: a selection of poems. Click on a poem and you are taken to a page for that poem where you can hear it read, and follow further navigational links. When I looked at it today, two of the six poems were by Gould, and one was by Rosemary Dobson whose late husband used to work in the office next door to mine (way back when). These readings must surely engage more people in poetry.
  • Featured glossary term: a definition of a poetic term – sestina when I looked – plus the opportunity, a click away, to explore the glossary further. I can see myself checking this out in future.
  • Features: a selection of poets. Click on a poet and you are taken to his/her page containing an image; a biography, bibliography and a further reading list; and a list of poems that you can click on to read. I would love it if the further readings – particularly journal articles – were hyperlinked to the full content, but I didn’t find any that were. I expect copyright is an issue.
  • Review: a review of a poem
  • Poems: a couple of poems from the site
  • Themes and occasions: a list of categories to help find poems on likely topics such as Animal poems, Anniversary poems, Love poems and so on. A nice idea.
  • Poetic forms: a list of forms and styles, such as Iambic Foot, Haiku, that can be clicked on for a definition. (Strangely, the clicked-to page contains some empty clickable headings for titles, surname, and first name, as well as the definition.)
  • Search

There are also useful menu bars/tabs. The main one for the site contains the following self-explanatory options regarding the content: Home, Poets, Poems, Guest collections. The other is geared to the users of the site: For teachers, Glossary, Poetry resources, FAQ and My selections. Overall, the site is easy to navigate, and should appeal to (and be useful for) the general public, educators and students, and the poets themselves.

So that’s the rundown. It’s a lovely site. I checked for several poets and most of them were there – with access to extensive lists of their poems. For Geoff Page, whose verse novel The scarring I reviewed here, there are 857 poems. That alone would keep me well occupied for the next little while! But, not all poets are there. Bruce Dawe and Kevin Hart, for example, are not. Chances are, as the FAQs tell us, this is because permission was not given (by the poet, or the publisher, or whoever owns those rights) to reproduce the poems. This is a POETRY not simply a POET site, so providing the poems is integral – and must have been a challenge to negotiate. The site does, however, allow for some monies to be paid to the poets, when visitors to the site choose to download their “My selections”.

There is an issue though regarding updating. According to the FAQs, no more poems are being added at present. They say: “It is intended that subject to funding, the editorial team will open the site for inclusion of more poetry”. This runs a little counter to the media release on the site’s launch. It says: “The site will continue adding new poets as well as critical and contextual material including interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings which will be a boon for students, teachers and other researchers.” Hmm … according to this release, the project received the highest ever ARC Linkage Grant for a humanities project and yet, ongoing funding is clearly an issue. I do hope that this great start is not all it is!

And now, just because I do like a bit of nonsense, and because this poem is about poetry and is out of copyright, I’m going to end with “Who wrote the Shakespere plays”, by W.T. Goodge (1862-1909):

No lover of poetry, I,
For the qualification is lacking,
And indeed it were vain to deny
That I couldn’t tell Browning from Blacking.

But Shakespere’s the author, I’ll vow,
And nothing my faith can be shakin’,
For it would be ridiculous, now,
If we talked about “Lamb’s Tales of Bacon”.

With thanks to Lisa of ANZLitLovers for drawing my attention to this site.

Weekends with TS Eliot

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

Reading TS Eliot's SELECTED POEMS

Reading TS Eliot's Selected poems (Image: Courtesy RubyGoes via Flickr, using CC-BY 2.0)

Breakfast in bed is my weekend treat. It’s when I kick back with a book and simply relax – except this weekend and last I kicked back instead with my iPad and app for TS Eliot‘s The waste land. What fun I am having and intend to have over a few more weekends.

So, what have I been doing?

Fiona Shaw’s performance

Well, last weekend I pottered around the app checking out what’s there and how to navigate it, trying a couple of the readings (but not listening to the whole), and so on. And then I listened to/watched Fiona Shaw‘s performance of the poem. This is a performance rather than a reading. She uses gesture and limited movement (around the upper storey room in a house in Dublin somewhere) to convey the drama, humour and mystery of this rather tricky poem. If you hold the iPad in landscape orientation, Fiona Shaw’s performance fills the screen. However, if you rotate it to portrait orientation, the poem appears below the image with the text synchronised to the performance. This is what I did and, being a textual person, I preferred it this way. I loved seeing the words played out on the screen – and she was almost word-perfect.  I didn’t time it properly but it took, I’d say, 15-20 mins. I’d recommend this as a good way to start re-acquainting yourself with the poem if, like me, it’s been an embarrassing number of decades since you last read it.

Perspectives, from Seamus Heaney, Paul Keegan, Jim McCue and Craig Raine

I said above that I am a textual person and that’s true but, paradoxically I suppose, the thing that most grabs when I’m reading is rhythm and sound (something I’m loving in my current read, Kim Scott‘s That deadman dance, but that’s for later). And so, I have always loved TS Eliot:

In the room women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
(from ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)

And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots.
(from “Preludes”)

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
[…]
This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
(from, of course, “The hollow men”)

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
(from “W. What the thunder said” in The waste land)

…  and so on. Staccato or sing-song, repetition or not, rhyming or not. It gets into your bones.

This weekend I decided to explore the Perspectives section of the app which is where various luminaries talk about aspects of Eliot and the poem. I listened to/watched Irish poet Seamus Heaney, poetry editor from Faber and Faber Paul Keegan, Eliot expert Jim McCue, and English poet and academic Craig Raine …. and I gained some new perspectives! I’m not going to comment on all they say since you really should explore this app yourself (if, that is, you have access to an iPad). I’ll just focus on an aspect that most comment on, one way or another – Eliot and sound.

Heaney comments on the “musicality” of the poem. Paul Keegan goes a little further. He suggests that
“acoustic things, tonalities” are what attracts people more, today, to the poem than the “monolithic meanings”. These “acoustic things” though do convey meaning, don’t they, particularly when the allusions elude us. I do not, I admit, “get” all the allusions, but I love the sound of the poem and can sense his concerns even if I may not be able to articulate them in an analytical way.

Somewhat related to this, Keegan argues that Eliot showed it was possible for a poet to write without knowing exactly what larger meanings he was conveying. He suggests that Eliot didn’t necessarily know what he was getting off his chest and that he was more interested in “what poems do than in what they say”. This rather ties back to sound doesn’t it? Or, it does for me. What his poems “do” to me is complex – they move me emotionally but can often mystify me intellectually. They can sound at times like nonsense and yet you “feel” or “hear” something profound. How does he do that? Anyhow, Keegan expands his point, suggesting that Eliot’s poetry encouraged a new fearlessness about poetry “having to make sense, forensic sense”. It freed up, he says, some of those questions*.

Jim McCue’s contribution is a short but interesting one on the history of the poem’s publication. And then, Craig Raine takes up the sound issue again, but from a slightly different perspective. He describes Eliot, the American born English poet, as, really, a world citizen. The waste land is full of “voices” – something conveyed well by Shaw in her performance – from around the world including, most obviously, Germany, France and India. It’s like, Raine says, changing the radio dial (which was still a fairly new technology then.) He also describes the poem as “a fantastic operatic selection”, a not surprising description, I suppose, for a poem which Eliot considered titling “He do the police in different voices”!**

A technical (sort of) note

The app doesn’t always behave exactly as I would expect or like. Changing the orientation will sometimes bring a surprising result and take you away from where you were. It’s not hard to get back as there’s always the Home icon available at the bottom, but it can be disconcerting.

* I will though come back to meaning in my next post after I’ve finished the “Perspectives” section of this App.
** From Dickens’ Our mutual friend

Margaret Mendelawitz, Charles Dickens’ Australia. Book 1, Convict stories

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

Charles Dickens' Australia, Book 1

Book cover (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

So true may fiction be in the hands of a genius
(from “Convict in the gold region”, by Richard Horne)

Richard Horne, in his article “Convicts from the gold region”, describes a scene from Don Quixote in which Quixote meets and sets free some convicts by driving away their guards, only to have his generosity (which included delivering them “a noble speech”) met by ridicule and “a volley of stones”. Horne suggests that the convicts he met would do “the same thing to any eccentric philanthropist in a broad-brimmed hat who should set them free and make them an address on liberty and humanity”. An interesting analogy to draw and one, I might add, that he doesn’t test, but I did like the way he used it to see the truth in fiction!

Anyhow, I have now read Book 1 in this fascinating set of books from the Sydney University Press, and it pretty well does what Mendelawitz says in her introduction. That is, it provides a first-hand, informative and entertaining insight into mid-19th century Australia – in this case, relating to the role of convicts in that society. The focus is on social conditions and social justice but there’s no heavy-handed proselytising. Dickens’ aim was to create a magazine that would be “cheerful, useful and always welcome” but that would also “assist the reader’s judgement in his observation of men”. Badness and wrongdoing aren’t glossed over but, wherever possible, mitigating circumstances are also provided.

There are 15 articles in the book, written by 9 different authors, some in collaboration. The last 6 are written by Australian-born barrister, journalist, novelist John Lang and are short case studies of individual convicts, including those who were unjustly (or, at least, unfairly) transported, those who deserved what they got but made good, and those who couldn’t give up their criminal ways. Representing this last group are the convicts described in “Three celebrities”. Fox, Pitt and Burke were three thieves who were “transported under the names of the three most celebrated orators of their time”. For whatever reason, they did not knuckle down to honest work in the colony, but instead escaped and operated as bushrangers. Even in their story, though, a positive is given: by the time they were captured they had set up a well-stocked farm with an abode that “was in the neatest order” and land that “was very well-tilled”. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the rather melodramatic tale of star-crossed love and a stolen horse resulting in the transportation of young “Kate Crawford”. Noticed by Mrs Macquarie, the wife of Governor Macquarie, and placed in the home of the chief constable in Parramatta, she was pardoned within three years and (eventually) died a very wealthy woman. These 6 stories are told with a light touch and in a conversational tone as tales relayed by a woman who knew the convicts in question.

A few of the articles are set in – or tell of – the Norfolk Island penal colony, a colony I have written about before in reviews of Jessica Anderson‘s The commandant and Price Warung‘s Tales of the early days. Both of those were written after the events and people they describe, and it is reassuring to our search for the “truth” that the articles here basically confirm the worst and best of the colony as conveyed by Anderson and Warung in their fictional pieces.

The centrepiece of this volume though is the story of William Henry Barber, who was transported to Norfolk Island in 1844. The story, told over two articles “Transported for life [Part One]” and “[Part Two]”, chronicles his imprisonment, trial and conviction for a crime he claims he did not commit,  his transportation to Norfolk Island (including details of the long boat journey) and subsequent removal  to Van Dieman’s Land from where he was, in 1847, released. Not long after, he received a free pardon with acknowledgement of his innocence. The articles are told first person but in fact were written by journalist and novelist William Moy Thomas. The Notes on Contributors suggest that the articles were based on the account Barber wrote in 1853 of his experiences, an account which is known to have been in Dickens’ library. The aim, as stated at the beginning of the first part, was to show “what transportation, at the present time, really is”.

In my overview of this set I wondered whether Dickens’ tight control over style would result in the articles being somewhat formulaic but I’m pleased to say that they aren’t. While the tone is overall more light than heavy and the content informative with a light persuasive edge, the style does vary. Some are factual chronicles of a life or situation while others have a more literary bent, some use dialog while others comprise descriptive prose, some are a little more obviously didactic while others simply present the situation for the reader to draw conclusions. The message, though, is always there, whether stated or not, and it is essentially this:

It is no miracle that has been here performed; men bred to crime in England by the ignorance and filth we cherish, are bred out of crime again in Norfolk Island, by a little teaching and a little human care. (from “Norfolk Island”, by Irwin and Henry Morley).

I must add, in the services of “truth”, that Norfolk Island had a mixed history regarding treatment of convicts but there was a short period, under Alexander Maconochie, when rehabilitation was taken seriously.

To conclude I can’t resist a quote from pickpocket Barrington in another of John Lang’s case studies, “An illustrious British exile”:

There was a time when ladies boasted of having been robbed by Barrington. Many whom I never robbed gave it out that I had done so; simply that they might be talked about. Alas! such is the weakness of poor human nature that some people care not by which means they associate their names with the name of celebrity.

And we thought the celebrity culture was new? Once again history tells us otherwise!

Margaret Mendelawitz
Charles Dickens’ Australia: Selected essays from Household Words 1850-1858. Book 1, Convict stories
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2011
187pp
ISBN: 9781920898670

(Review copy courtesy Sydney University Press)

TS Eliot’s The waste land, app-style

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

TS Eliot plaque SOAS London

Would Eliot have liked this new way of publishing? (Image, via Wikipedia, released into Public Domain by Man vyi)

Hands up if you’ve seen Touchpress‘s gorgeous iPad app for TS Eliot‘s poem The wasteland? Now, if your hand is up, why didn’t you tell me about it? Luckily, though, I have a real-life, dinky-di librarian friend who told me what my online friends didn’t!

This is not going to be a proper review as I only downloaded it yesterday, but it’s worth sharing sooner rather than later. At least , I think it is, because it’s a great example of how technology can enhance our reading experience, particularly of complex texts. The app comprises the following menu items:

  • Poem (the full text)
  • Performance (a filmed performance of the full poem by Fiona Shaw. You can watch the performance on its own, or with the text synced to it!)
  • Manuscript (facsimile of the original typed manuscript showing Eliot’s handwritten edits)
  • Perspectives (commentary on the poem and Eliot, by various people including Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson)
  • Readings (several audio renditions of the poem, including two by Eliot himself, and others by Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes and Viggo Mortenson)
  • Notes (annotations and references explaining the poem)
  • Gallery (images relating to the poem).

There is a Home icon so you can quickly return to the menu screen to navigate around the app. And there are also well thought through navigations on other screens. For example, on the screen containing the straight text of the poem are icons linking directly to the annotations (Notes) and the list of audio versions (Readings).

I feel like the proverbial child in a lolly shop. Where do I start? Do I simply read the poem? Probably not, since if that’s all I wanted to do I’d have taken my lovely old Collected Works down from my bookshelf. So, what do I do? Do I read it with the annotations? Or listen to TS Eliot read it or watch Fiona Shaw perform it? Or do I play around with the edited manuscript facsimiles? Whatever I do, though, I’ll be in good company. The app – for a rather challenging poem, remember – was one of the topselling apps the week it was released and was named “app of the week” in the US.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter
(line 18, The waste land)

It will take many nights to read, watch and absorb this terrific production, but it’s winter here so I’m starting now…

TS Eliot
The waste land
iPad app (AUD16.99) 
Touch Press and Faber and Faber, 2011
951mb

Margaret Mendelawitz, Charles Dickens’ Australia: Selected essays from Household Words 1850-1859

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

It was not to be a high-brow intellectual periodical. Above all he wanted to reach and entertain the masses and, at the same time, help shape discussion and debate on the important social questions of the time. (from Introduction, by Margaret Mendelawitz)

Five covers for the Charles Dickens' Australia set

Set book covers (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

Charles Dickens‘ Australia is a set of five volumes containing essays, stories and poems relating to Australia from the magazine, Household Words, that Dickens established and edited. The magazine was published from 1850 to 1859 which, as Margaret Mendelawitz says in her introduction, was an “extraordinary decade in Australian and British history”. The discovery of gold in Australia (and California) transformed the world. Social justice was becoming a serious issue for debate and action. And it was when “the age of capital” really began.

So, it is rather fortunate that a writer of Dickens’ calibre produced a magazine in this period – and that he was sufficiently interested in Australia (as I described in a post last year) to actively seek and commission articles about life and social conditions here for his magazine. As you might expect, the magazine is available online (in gorgeous facsimile and for electronic downloading) but the value of these five volumes is that they have been carefully researched by Mendelawitz and contain the articles specifically relating to Australia. According to the Sydney University Press website, of the 3000 articles published in the magazine over its lifetime, only 100 dealt with Australia in some way. Unless you like the fun of the chase, these volumes are an excellent way to get to the Australian content without having to do the searching and sifting yourself.

This isn’t the only reason though for reading the articles via this set. It is a beautifully conceived anthology. Firstly, the articles have been thematically organised into five manageable volumes:

  1. Convict Stories
  2. Immigration
  3. Frontier Stories
  4. Mining and Gold
  5. Maritime Conditions

And there’s more. Each article  starts with a small panel containing a brief description of its content, its publication details (the volume and issue numbers, pagination, and date) and the amount paid for it! The articles are footnoted, with those original to the article clearly identified as such. Curiously, the editorial additions – the introduction, etc – are referenced differently, with the notes placed at the end of each piece rather than in footnotes. The additions are: a foreword by Geoffrey Blainey; an introduction by Mendelawitz; a list of contributors providing a brief, targeted biography and a list of their articles included in the set; and, a short but appropriate bibliography. These are all repeated in each volume, presumably so the volumes can stand alone.

I was initially perturbed that the article authors are not named in the table of contents, but then I read the introduction which tells us that “regardless of their source, all articles appeared anonymously”. Mendelawitz has followed that practice in her table of contents, but has identified the author/s on the articles themselves, providing another reason for reading this set because knowing the authors and their backgrounds adds a further dimension to the reading.

Mendelawitz covers a lot of ground in her introduction. She talks a little about Dickens himself and about the history of Household Words, she describes the era in which it was written, and she discusses the writers, the content and the “house” style. I found these last two particularly interesting. The articles, as I’ve said, were published anonymously. They were also carefully edited to meet what Elizabeth Gaskell called a “Dickensy style”. This meant they had to be bright, regardless of how dry the subject, and would characteristically start with a snappy, provocative paragraph. It also meant that those that did not accord with Dickens’ views were rewritten. I can’t help thinking that, if slavishly enforced, this adherence to a set style could result in the articles feeling formulaic. It’s something I’ll check out as I read the volumes in depth.

The final point I’d like to make in this overview concerns the issue of fact versus fiction. Mendelawitz argues that the articles are “literature, not history”. They are valuable, she says, for the insight they provide into 19th century Australia but this “does not depend on them being the literal truth”. She writes:

As a collection they demonstrate the complementary nature of storytelling between the writing of history and fiction. The stories in Household Words frequently draw a fine line between fact and fiction, giving voice to characters and events that could easily go unrecognised and unrecorded. In many ways they exemplify the fundamental problem  encountered by historians through the ages of how to separate and present fact, fiction, myth and truth.

Regular readers of this blog know that this issue interests me. I expect to come back to it when I review the first volume in the near future … from what I’ve read so far, I think I’m in for a fascinating ride.

Margaret Mendelawitz
Charles Dickens’ Australia: Selected essays from Household Words 1850-1858
5 volumes
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2011

(Review copies courtesy Sydney University Press)

MJ Hyland, Carry me down

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

MJ Hyland, Carry me down bookcover

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

If you like writers who unsettle, then MJ Hyland is a writer for you. Carry me down is my second Hyland. I read, loved and reviewed a later book of hers, This is how, nearly a year ago, and said then that I’d like to read more. I finally have, and am not disappointed.

Carry me down is a pre-coming-of-age story. John Egan is an 11-year-old boy living in Ireland with his parents. He’s an only child and is keen to be special, different. He is clearly pre-adolescent – he’s naive, for example, about some of his 15-year-old cousin’s behaviours. He’s an unreliable narrator: the world he sees and describes is rather skewed but the unsettling thing is that we, the readers, know it is skewed but we are not quite sure in which way. What is going on in this family is the question in our minds from beginning to end.

Like This is how, the novel has a vaguely unsettling beginning. The first paragraph sets up what looks like a cosy family scene. The three are sitting, companionably it seems, around the table on a Sunday evening. The third and fourth paragraphs read:

From time to time we stop reading to talk. It is a good mood, as though we are one person reading one book – not three people apart and alone.

These kinds of days are the perfect ones.

That “alone” is a little jarring, though not dramatically so. But then comes this on page 2:

“John,” she [his mother] says, “please come with me. “She is taking me out to the hallway, away from my father. She is taking me out of his sight, as though I am rubbish.

“Rubbish”? Now, that’s a strong word. What she tells him in the hallway is to stop staring at her:

“You were staring at me, John. You shouldn’t stare like that.”

“Why can’t I look at you?”

“Because you’re eleven now. You’re not a baby anymore.”

There seems to be something slightly strange going on here, or is there? Is this just a pre-adolescent bumping up against the adult world he is about to join, or is something far more complicated going on? As the book progresses, John’s relationship with his mother verges on “too close”. He seems a little too emotionally and physically needy, and she seems unsure of how to manage it. Is his need normal, is the question we ask. Meanwhile, his relationship with his father seems more typically adolescent. He wants his father’s approval and love, but he wants to be independent too. And, he wants to be special. He is an avid reader of the Guinness Book of Records, and decides early in the novel that he has a gift for lie detection for which he’d like to be included in the Guinness. He reads up on lie detection, and starts his own Gol of Seil (Log of Lies).

The situation is complicated by a number of facts which come out in the first chapters of the novel. John is unusually tall for his age and is under medical care for this. He regularly scratches a spot on his head until it bleeds. And he is bullied at school, because he is clearly a little different. His father is out of a job and studying for exams to be admitted to Trinity College. The book his father is reading at the start of the novel is Phrenology and the Criminal Cranium. Is this a hint to us – or a red herring? His mother works with a puppet show. This is interesting, too, as the idea of puppets subtly undercuts the desire for control and independence that John, like any pre-adolescent, is starting to strive for. The family lives with the paternal grandmother, with whom John’s father has a prickly relationship, mainly around money. And, underlying all this is John’s growing obsession with truth and lies.  This obsession is the framing motif in the book. John catches adults lying and takes them to task for it, all the while telling lies himself. He does not, by the end, come to a real understanding of how lying functions, of the difference between white lies and more serious ones. For this reason I don’t see it as a true coming-of-age story.

And now I come to my problem. How do I write about this book without giving it away? There are events – powerful, troubling ones – that occur in the book and that can be “read” in different ways. I’d rather like to analyse or explore the possible meanings, but that would require giving away some significant plot points. I don’t want to do that because this is a book that you need to discover for yourself, sentence by sentence.

What I’ll say though is that this is one of those books that has an open ending. (Indeed, giving nothing away, the last word of the book is “open”). How we read it depends on our own world view, on the weight we give to the various events in the novel, on how we read the specific words and images used by Hyland to describe the events and characters, and our personal understanding of adolescent and family psychology. The way I see it, the book’s ending hints at a number of possibilities but we do not know, at the point in their lives that we leave these characters, which of these possibilities will eventuate. And that, as they say, is life!

MJ Hyland
Carry me down
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2007 (orig. 2006)
313pp.
ISBN: 9781921145780