Review

George Jean Nathan, Baiting the umpire

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I haven’t posted on the last few Library of America stories, mainly due to lack of time and the fact that they’ve been by well-known writers anyhow. However, the one that lobbed in this week, “Baiting the umpire” by George Jean Nathan, looked rather intriguing and so I read it. It is really an essay, but a satirical one, rather than a short story – and is about the “sport” of baseball.

According to the accompanying notes, George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) was an “acerbic theater critic” and worked, for some time at least, with “his partner in venom” H.L. Mencken.

Mad baseball player

Mad baseball player (Courtesy: OCAL, clker.com)

The essay starts with describing baseball as the “national side-show” and argues that “baiting umpires is the real big-tent entertainment”.  Using word play, hyperbole, rhetorical questions and mock-heroic comparisons (equating baseball with a Spanish bullfight and likening the “bleachers”/spectators to matadors, and in a cultural leap equating baseball promoters with Solons), Nathan goes on to suggest that the only reason Americans enjoy baseball is for the “sport” of baiting (“killing”) the umpire. He provides examples of countries where baseball hadn’t (we are talking 1909 here) taken off, such as Japan, and suggests that the reason for this is that the Japanese accept the umpire’s rulings!

In Australia, however, and here my ears picked up, he said they went about introducing baseball the right way:

In Victoria, Australia, where a determined effort is being made to popularize baseball, the prime movers in the campaign, appreciating full well the important and necessary relation that killing-the-umpire bears to the game, have tried the novel experiment of working up the hostile spirit towards the referee by playing the baseball contests – all or in part – before the huge football crowds. These crowds are demonstrative in the extreme, and it is hoped by the baseball promoters that part of the excess football emotional tumult may, in time, be directed against the umpires, thus insuring the success of the game…

Hmmm…well, 100 years later baseball is, I know, played here but I’m not sure to the extent that you’d call it a success. Maybe our football crowds decided they liked something more to their games than simply baiting the umpire! In fact, from my own admittedly superficial experience, I think it is a more popular game in polite Japan than it is here. His other example of a surefire success for baseball is the Sandwich Islands where … well, that will give away the punchline and I don’t want to do that. Read it … it’s short and will give you a chuckle if nothing else.

Meanwhile, I will conclude with one little observation. As an Australian, I have always been bemused by the notion of World Series baseball in which the only teams playing are from the USA and Canada. Now that would have been an interesting topic for Nathan to explore!

David Malouf, Ransom

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David Malouf reading Ransom

Malouf reading Ransom, National Library of Australia, August 2009

Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose on the world. (p. 61)

Is risk-taking only the province of the young? Do desperate times call for desperate measures? Or, more to the point, can the impossible be made possible? These are some of the questions that form the core of David Malouf’s most recent novel, Ransom.

WARNING: Spoiler if you don’t know the Iliad!

Ransom, as I wrote in my post last year, is Malouf’s re-visioning of the section of the Iliad (from Books 16-24) which chronicles Patroclus’ death at the hands of the Trojans, Achilles’ revenge killing of the Trojan prince Hector and his subsequent abuse of Hector’s body, and Priam’s visiting Achilles to ask for his son’s body back. Malouf says that he wanted to suggest a new kind of human, non-heroic consciousness, by re-visioning how Priam does this through deciding “do something extraordinary” (Malouf’s words). As Priam discusses with his wife Hecuba

I believe … that the thing that is needed to cut this knot we are all tied up in is something that has never before been done or thought of. Something impossible. Something new. (p. 58)

and

there might be another way of naming what we call fortune and attribute to the will, or the whim of the gods. Which offers a kind of opening. The opportunity to act for ourselves. To try something that might force events into a different course. (p. 61)

Ah, I thought, here is going to be Malouf’s vision (or recipe even) for our conflict ridden times. He wants to show, through Priam’s desire to do “something impossible. Something new” that  there is another way of managing conflict. But sadly, that is not what he is about. Sure, Priam does do something audacious – he enters Achilles’ compound as an ordinary man on a plain mule-driven cart driven by an even more ordinary man, the humble carter, Somax. But, I was disappointed, because after a lovely interval of humanity the story plays out as it always does with Achilles dying, and Priam being brutally killed by Achilles’ son. What I hoped Malouf was setting me up for wasn’t his goal at all. It was something both bigger and smaller. Smaller because he is not (really) making a political statement for our times, and bigger because he re-visions the story as one of humans rather than of heroes, and as one in which humans can be self-directed rather than at the whim of the gods. There is some irony here though because, as well as being accompanied by the humble Somax, he is for a while escorted by the god Hermes who facilitates their entry into Achilles’ compound. I did wonder about the meaning of this unlikely trio – common man, king, god – but it is in the original and so is not really part of a new message. That said, this is, as I am sure you are starting to realise, quite a complex book despite its small size – and I am only going to touch the surface here.

Some of the loveliest parts of the book are in fact the most human ones, such as the conversation Priam has with Hecuba when he reveals his idea, and Priam’s journey with Somax in which he learns to enjoy ordinary human (as against royal) pleasures. (“It had done him good, all that, body and spirit both”).

In the end after a beautifully rendered meeting with the conflicted Achilles, Priam achieves his goal and brings Hector’s body back for burial. It is a triumph of his vision, but

It is only a provisional triumph, of course; the gods are not to be trusted when they tilt the balance momentarily in your behaviour. And what sort of triumph is it to be bringing home the body of a son? But he has done something for which he will be remembered for as long as such stories are told …

Yes, he is “a man remade” because he has done a “deed that till now was never attempted”. Achilles too has been transformed (at least for a while): he is “visited by a lightness that is both new and a return”. But, and unfortunately there is a but, the story plays out as it always has…

So, what is it all about – besides, that is, the underlying themes relating to fathers and sons, grief, will versus fate, and humanity versus the gods? Perhaps it is simply this, that you can dare to try the impossible, and you can triumph. How big that triumph is, how long it lasts, is perhaps not the right question. The right question is the original one, “Dare I dream, and dare I do it?” It is also about the power of stories. Priam’s action will now be remembered “for as long as such stories are told”, while his killer, Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, is not so lucky. The murder is a messy one and so “for him … however the story is told and elaborated, the raw shame of it will be with him now till his last breath”.

David Malouf Ransom

UK edition cover (Used by permission of the Random House Group)

In its rather ironic and paradoxical way, then, Ransom is redemptive … and is beautiful for all that. And yet, I do have this little nagging feeling that I’d have liked it to have been a little more. I did in fact want a recipe for our times, a suggestion that we can move our humanity forwards!

David Malouf
Ransom
North Sydney: Knopf, 2009
224pp.
ISBN: 9781741668377

Helen Garner, The children’s Bach

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I’ve said a few times now that I rarely reread books, and then go on to write about something I’ve re-read. I must look like a liar, but the fact is that if I’ve liked a book so much that I’ve reread it it’s likely to find its way here. The funny thing is, though, that my reason for rereading The children’s Bach was not so much because I loved it first time around (though I did enjoy it) but because I read a critic who described it as one of the four best short novels – ever! It’s hard to ignore a commendation like that, isn’t it? And so I read it again …

It’s set in Melbourne, and concerns a couple, Athena and Dexter, who lead a self-sufficient life with their two sons, one of whom is severely disabled. This apparently comfortable life is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, from Dexter’s past. With Elizabeth come her sister Vicki, her sometime lover Philip, and his prepubescent daughter Poppy. Through them, Athena and Dexter are drawn into a world whose ideas and values test the foundations of their relationship.*

This sounds like a pretty standard plot, but from it Garner draws something quite special, something tight and marvelously observed, and something, in the way that Garner has, that is brutally honest. This is the thing that I admire about her most – even though I don’t always agree with her: she doesn’t flinch from unpleasant “truths”. And so, in this book, she tackles the challenge of parenting a severely disabled child. While there are people who talk about the joy and meaning a disabled child brings to their lives there are others who feel quite differently. This is the shock at the centre of this book.

Garner introduces a sense of uneasiness right at the beginning with a photo of Tennyson and his family (why Tennyson, I’m not quite sure) which shows them together but not quite together and which is described simply as “the photo of a family”. The photo is old but Dexter keeps sticking it back up again. This beginning is followed by a fairly idealised image of Dexter and Athena as a loving, supportive couple – “she loved him. They loved each other” (p. 4) – and then Garner slowly reveals the cracks. Dexter’s idealisation of Athena is one cause, but the disabled child who holds Athena back, is another. The arrival of Elizabeth and her entourage – with their different and challenging ways of viewing the world – is just the catalyst.

Athena’s harsh attitude regarding Billy, her disabled son, is psychologically real, but is shocking to see in a character who is idealised as the earth-mother. Our readerly assumptions take a knock! Early in the story Athena looks at handprinted cards of places for rent:

… Athena was … scanning the window covered in handprinted cards on which people advertised rooms to let in their rented houses. Athena lived, for as long as it took to read a card, in each sunny cottage, each attractive older-style flat, spacious house, quaint old terrace, large balcony room with fireplace, collective household with thriving veggie garden. Her children dematerialised, her husband died painlessly in a fall from a mountain. What curtains she would sew, what private order she would establish and maintain, what handfuls of flowers she would stick in vegemite jars, how sweetly and deeply she would sleep, and between what fresh sheets.

This could be typical daydreaming but it’s pretty specific in detail (children dematerialised, husband dead): it’s Garner telling us that Athena feels trapped and is ready for change. Then Philip comes along and she is attracted to him; she’s not morally repulsed the way Dexter is by his behaviour: “Dexter lay rigid as a board … but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden….”.

And so, Garner writes, “The edifice crumbles”. The cracks have been there, in the edifice, but Dexter is (has been) oblivious to them. He’s a kind man but he’s pretty unaware of how other people feel; he expects them all to see life as simply, as happily as he does. But this is not the case – as he finds out …

All this is told in tight, expressive language.  Here is a delicious description of Dexter’s mother:

Like many women of her age whose opinions, when they were freshly thought and expressed, had never received the attention they deserved, Mrs Fox had slid away into a habit of monologue, a stream of mild words which concealed the bulk of thought and knowledge as babbling water hides submerged boulders. (p. 101)

Garner focuses on the gap between appearance and reality, particularly regarding the problems of idealisation (of self and/or of other). Athena is idealised but is shown to have feet of clay; Dexter is also idealised and idealises himself – until his own fall from grace: “he was in its moral universe now, and he could never go back”.

We can read this book in two – not totally exclusive – ways. One is psychological and relates to the realisation of self, particularly for Athena. The other is social and relates to role definitions, again particularly for Athena in terms of the expectations of her as wife and mother. One of the things that Garner tends to do well, in fact, is explore the point where social expectations of how we should feel meet and often clash with our real emotional selves. We see this clearly in The spare room where the character Helen shocks us with her anger at her dying friend.

I have really only touched the surface of this book – there is the music motif to consider, and the conflict of values represented by the intrusion of Elizabeth and her entourage into Dexter and Athena’s world – but I have talked about some of the issues that grabbed my attention and that, I think, will do!

* This is, essentially, the plot summary I wrote a couple of years ago for the Wikipedia article on the book.

Helen Garner
The children’s Bach
Penguin Modern Classics, 2008 (first published 1984)
180pp.
ISBN: 0869140299

George Orwell, Confessions of a book reviewer

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It’s been a while since I wrote on a George Orwell essay so it seemed – while I’m still reading my current read – to be a good time to do another. And what better, given my recent “how to write a book review” post, than to do Orwell’s essay on book reviewing.

Book Stack

Books (Courtesy: OCAL, from clker.com)

Orwell, as usual, makes you laugh. The essay starts off describing a rather seedy sounding person who is either malnourished or, if he’s recently had a lucky break, is suffering from a hangover. This person, Orwell says, is a writer. Could be any writer, he says, but let’s say he’s a reviewer. Yes, let’s, I thought, this could be interesting. This poor reviewer has a bundle of books from his editor who says that  they “ought to go well together”. They are:

“Palestine at the Cross Roads” [the essay is dated 1946! Oh dear], “Scientific Dairy Farming”, “A Short History of European Democracy” (this one is 680 pages and weighs four pounds [the satire is not necessarily subtle!], “Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa”, and a novel, “It’s Nicer Lying Down” (probably included by mistake).

(Note: Square brackets, me; round ones, George)

He goes on to say that, for a few of these, this reviewer knows little and so will need to read enough to avoid making some howler which will betray him to the author and the general reader. See my “How to review post” and the injunction to “Be accurate”! Harriet and I were serious! And then he describes how, at the last minute, just before the deadline, the reviewer will produce something:

All the stale old phrases – ‘a book that no one should miss’, ‘something memorable on every page’, ‘of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc etc’ – will jump into place like iron filings obeying the magnet.

Remember what Harriet and I said about adjectives? That goes for clichéd phrases too. He says that “the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books … not only involves the praising of trash … but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatsoever”.

To remedy this, he suggests that non-fiction books would be best reviewed by an expert in the subject and that novel reviewing could be done well by amateurs, but concludes that this is all too hard to organise so the editor “always finds himself reverting to his team of hacks”.

And then, here comes the crunch. He says:

None of this is remediable so long as it is taken for granted that every book deserves to be reviewed.

His preference is that we should ignore the majority of books “and give very long reviews – 1000 words is a bare minimum – to the few that seem to matter”.  He goes on to say that it is useful to publish short announcements of forthcoming books, but that 600 word reviews (even of books the reviewer likes) are “bound to be worthless”. (Phew, mine here tend to be around 1000 words, give or take! But, I do also think that there is something to be said for succinctness.)

There is a little more but this is the gist. Don’t you think Orwell would be rather fascinated to see today’s rather anarchic world of litblogs where amateur reviewers are doing exactly what he said – and where publishers, even if not newspaper and magazine editors – are starting to see the benefit of people reviewing books they want to review. Of course, he may not like the potential impact on his professional reviewer income stream, but them’s the breaks!

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Appetite

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“Appetite” is a short story by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, an American-born author of Iranian descent. It was recently published in The New Yorker, and you can read it here. It is, I have to say, a strange little story. The 25 year-old first-person narrator is a cook in a restaurant where he has been working since leaving school. The opening sentence of the story – “Things were not going as I had hoped” – applies, we soon realise, not only to the particular event he is describing, his request for a raise, but to his life in general.

Having been refused the raise, he ruminates on his life and wonders why he is still where he is:

Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me.

Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Grilled Cheese (Courtesy: quarrygirl.com using CC-BY-NC-SA)

He talks about how, at high school graduation, he felt that he “had already been consigned to a life of mediocrity” – because he was one of the indistinguishable five hundred other students and not the valedictorian! A bit of an over-reaction, eh? Anyhow, there are, essentially, only three characters in the story – the narrator, the newly arrived “anorexic waitress” and the manager (who is described – several times – as having a “kind” face, even though he does not give our man a raise, and in fact criticises his grilled cheese sandwiches).

The story is quietly compelling. We  want to know why he is the way he is. There are hints that he does not feel “grown up”. In one little anecdote, he describes watching two black boys riding by, one of whom notices him:

“What are you looking at, white man?” he yelled out … I was humiliated, not by the use of “white” but by the use of “man”. He sees me as a man, I thought.

And then remembers a time, when he was eight years old and a friend’s father sent a black boy home, with “Go home, boy”. He provides no further explanation as to why this story from the past comes back to him, but near the end of the story, when the anorexic waitress says “You’re a funny boy”, he wonders

When had I crossed the line from being boy to man? Whenever it was, the line had been so faint, so subtle, that I had missed it entirely. Maybe if I had been paying closer attention things might have turned out differently for me.

The story is full of little anecdotes and digressions whose prime intent is to show his disconnectedness. In fact, there is a slightly absurd air at times – such as the anorexic waitress picking him up on a rainy day just as he has reached home and driving him home after dropping off her other passenger on the other side of town. Many things don’t make logical sense in the story, but perhaps that is perfectly appropriate for a story about how easy it is to get lost in the crowd, to let life pass you by if you don’t do the expected thing of setting a goal and working towards it. Rather than give away the ending which is a little too open for comfort, I will close on a quote from the first paragraph:

Somewhere I had learned that it’s best to put your goals into clear terms, straightforward terms, and that once these goals had been thus stated all would follow accordingly. I think I heard this discussed on television. Or I had read it somewhere. The counsel had seemed wise at the time, and I had determined to remember it if ever an occasion presented itself.

The occasion turns out to be his plan to ask for a raise in his go-nowhere job! Need I say more?

How to write a (book) review!

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If you go looking for advice on how to write a book review on the web, you won’t be looking for long. There are hundreds of sites which provide such advice or offer courses on how to do it. Reviewing 101 is alive and well out in cyberspace. Much of the advice, though, is step-by-step – first choose your book – and seems geared to students needing to write book reports. However, recently, Musica Viva published on the web some advice for people who’d like to enter their concert review competition. The advice comes from music reviewer Harriet Cunningham – and you can read it here.

It comprises useful, mostly common-sense, advice in the form of Dos and Don’ts. In summary:

The Dos are (adapted slightly for book reviewers): “Really” read the book; Listen to yourself (to your response); Tell a story; Beware of adjectives! (good advice that I should heed more); Be accurate (the author will rightly take offence and ignore all else you have to say, and nit-picking readers will love you!).

The Don’ts are: Be mean; Be obscure; Be trivial (such as, focus on the work, not your pet!); Worry.

Hmm … funny how all the “Dos” work quite well as they are without the “Do” heading, while the “Don’ts”, well, don’t? In fact, they look like more “Dos”, don’t (ha!) they?

Anyhow, I think these are pretty self-explanatory, but there are a couple of comments I’d like to make about the don’ts.

First one is: Don’t be mean.

I’ll start by quoting Harriet verbatim: “Writing a review puts you in an unusual position – you are passing judgement on a performance you could almost certainly not do yourself. It is not about pulling your punches, but do always respect the skill of the artists and the long journey they have taken to get where they are. Most importantly, if their performance disappoints, try to analyse why. It might not necessarily be wrong notes or poor ensemble. What was missing?”

Hmm… I certainly agree with not being mean, but I think I would have worded it a little differently. Something along the lines of: Be critical and honest – this means analysing what you like and don’t like, explaining why it does or doesn’t work for you, but don’t be rude or insulting.

I agree we should recognise (respect) the skill of the person whose work we are critiquing but just because we may not be able to do it ourselves doesn’t mean we should feel we can’t critique it does it? Of course, those people critiquing modern art with “even a five year old could have done that” seem to think they are well-placed to critique! There’s a happy medium in there somewhere, which I’m sure was Harriet’s point.

The second one is: Don’t be obscure.

Her message is that reviewers shouldn’t dumb down, but neither should they get into erudite discussions that will lose readers. She is, of course, pitching her advice to  lay reviewers writing for a general audience – which more or less describes most of we bloggers. However, this is an area where the ability to hyperlink helps we who review online: we can link to those more erudite points that we think might interest some of our readers but not others. Probably the best “rule” to follow here is: Know your reader, and pitch yourself at that.

This is all pretty obvious to most experienced bloggers, but you never know … Oh, and just in case, this hasn’t scared you off, the following may:

From my close observation of writers…they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review. (Isaac Asimov)

Alan Bennett, The lady in the van

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It is a truism that truth is stranger than fiction, and Alan Bennett’s The lady in the van is one work that proves it. It is strange – and wonderful – that a woman could have lived the way the eponymous lady did for as long as she did, and it is equally strange – and wonderful – that Bennett allowed her to do so in his front yard for as long as he did.

This piece was first published in the London Review of Books in 1989, but I only happened across it this year, twice! First was in the form of a BBC-4 audio CD given to my mother-in-law for Christmas by my brother. She was both mystified and entranced by it and insisted I hear it. Second was, soon after, in a review by kimbofo at Reading Matters. It became clear that this was meant to be my year for The lady in the van! And so, a couple of weeks ago I finally heard the CD, and today I finished the book. Like many before me, I was charmed.

The lady in the van is a simple tale about an eccentric old lady (though she’s only in her late 50s when the story starts in 1969) who lives in a van which Bennett eventually allows her to park in his front yard. That was in March 1974 and it continued until her death in 1989. Fifteen years! It reminded me a little of the Maylses Brothers‘ documentary film, Grey Gardens, which documents the lives of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, also Edith Bouvier Beale, Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and cousin. Due to lack of funds they lived for years in dilapidation and squalor. But, while Bennett’s lady, Miss Shepherd, also lived in squalor, it’s the feisty eccentricity in all these women that associate them in my mind. They are all women who, despite their rather desperate circumstances (for whatever reason), refused to be ground down by it, who maintained some sense of pride and self in the face of a life most of us could not comprehend.

Anyhow, back to Bennett. The story is told primarily through diary excerpts, with a brief introduction, and a postscript added in 1994. In the beginning, there was Miss Shepherd (the name she gives but not her real name) and she was parked in the street in Alan Bennett’s neighbourhood. The first diary entry starts in October 1969, nearly 5 years before she moves into his front yard. Bennett explains how it is that she managed to live in her van on the neighbourhood streets for so long:

What made the social set-up funny was the disparity between the style in which the new arrivals found themselves able to live and their progressive opinions: guilt, put simply, which today’s gentrifiers are said famously not to feel … There was a gap between our social position and our social obligations. It was in this gap that Miss Shepherd (in her van) was able to live.

The whole thing does, I have to say, sound particularly English – the tolerance that enabled her to live that way for so long, and the polite and reserved rather than familiar “relationship” she and Bennett maintained over the years. Throughout the twenty years that the story covers, we learn a fair amount about Miss Shepherd despite her pretty effective attempts to keep herself to herself. We learn that she is committed to the Catholic Church (had in fact tried to be a nun) and politically conservative, and that she occupies herself selling pencils and writing letters and pamphlets. We also learn some things about Bennett, that he is kind (keeping an eye on her throughout, while respecting her privacy) but also that he likes a quiet life:

I was never under any illusion that the impulse [to let her in and stay] was purely charitable … But I wanted a quiet life as much as, and possibly more than, she did.

Bennett gives us a vivid picture of Miss S, through her bizarre sense of dress (including a skirt made of dusters) and her little speech mannerisms, such as her frequent use of the word “possibly”. One of Miss S’s problems is hygiene and toileting, and by the end she is incontinent. Throughout the story, Bennett refers to the smell (stench, actually) of her van. One day he mentions the smell to her, and she responds:

Well, what can you expect when they’re [construction workers] raining bricks down on me all day? And then I think there’s a mouse. So that would make a cheesy smell, possibly.

This is a woman with pride, despite the destitute situation she finds herself in. She is also resilient and sly, and contrives to pretty well always get what she wants. Bennett tells the story with humour but not patronisingly – and this is because it’s a humour that contains admiration for her resourcefulness, for someone who “even when she is poorly … knows exactly what she is about”. How could he do otherwise with a woman who announces to him: “I was a born tragedian … or a comedian possibly”. He clearly struggles with how much he should intervene and how much he wants to intervene. It’s a pretty invidious position to be in really – how far can you (should you, do you) extend charity?

All this said, there is something uncomfortable about it all, as there is about Grey Gardens, and this is the voyeurism involved. Both are truly fascinating stories – but a fascination tinged with horror. Are we plundering their lives for our own entertainment, or are we learning something about the resilience of the human spirit? It’s a fine line: I think Bennett, like the Maysles, has managed to draw it in the right place, and this is because of the humility and real affection with which they have presented these women. Bennett ends up, in the postscript

wondering at the bold life she has had and how it contrasts with my own timid way of going on – living, as Camus said, slightly the opposite of expressing. And I see how the location of Miss Shepherd’s van in front but to the side of where I write is the location of most of the stuff I write about; that too is to the side, and never what faces me.

Bennett, Alan
The lady in the van
London: Profile Books, 1999
92pp.
ISBN: 9781861971227

Bennett, Alan
The lady in the van (audio)
BBC Audiobooks, 2009
85 mins running time

Dorothy Porter, The bee hut

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The bee hut, by Dorothy Porter

Cover image (Courtesy: Black Inc)

The most powerful presence
is absence
(from “Egypt”)

The above lines open Australian poet Dorothy Porter‘s The bee hut, a collection of poems mostly writen in the last five years of her life. The lines are prophetic … and they appropriately open a collection which deals very much, though not exclusively, with the tension between life and death. The poems are, in turn, angry, resigned, beautiful, humorous even, and philosophical. Some draw on Christian and other mythology, some allude to other poets, and some are simply founded in the unembellished here-and-now. And, despite the fact that we and she know that death is coming sooner rather than later, they are life-affirming.

The collection is divided into eight groups:

  • Head of Astarte
  • The enchanted ass
  • Poems: January – August 2004
  • Smelling tigers
  • Jerusalem
  • Africa
  • The freak songs
  • Lucky

The title poem, “The Bee Hut”, is in the “Poems: January – August 2004” group:

But do I love the lesson
of my thralldom
to the sweet dark things
that can do me harm?

In her brief introduction to the collection, novelist Andrea Goldsmith, Porter’s partner, writes that:

The bee hut became a metaphor for these last years of her life … She marvelled at the bees, as she had always marvelled at life, but she was also aware of the danger amid the sweetness and beauty.

Danger in life, the darkness that is found alongside beauty, is the defining paradox of the collection: “In living there is always/the terror/of being stung” (from “Bluebottles”). Not all poems explore this idea but many do.

There is some sort of thematic underpinning to the poem groupings, and there is a strong autobiographical flavour. The “Africa” section, for example, clearly relates to travels in Africa; “Poems: January – August 2004” were written about her time undergoing chemotherapy for the breast cancer that was to kill her; while “The Freak Songs” are “a song cycle written for performance with the music of Jonathan Mills“. These last are older poems, and therefore predate her diagnosis, but are an apt inclusion. They are wild and defiant: “I bite the apple/I lick the fire/I kiss the sweet sweet snake” (from “The Fruits of Original Sin”). But even here there’s recognition that death, in the end, has the upper hand: “You live your life/as if there’s a secure cage/for the clipped wings/you’re planning” (from “The Bluebird of Death”).

Even more than with a short story collection, it is impossible to discuss every poem in a collection – and, to be honest, I would find it hard to do so since while  some spoke to me easily and some I could grasp with a little thought, there are others that elude me, mostly because their allusions are not familiar to me. I am not, for example, an expert on French poets like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, so when she invokes them I can guess at their meaning but am not totally sure I “got” it. Consequently, I’m just mentioning a few of the poems which particularly appealed to me.

Her poem “Blackberries” in “The enchanted ass” deals with the imperative to write poetry and the urgency to get it down, to locate and express the idea:

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

Most of the poems are like this – strong, vivid and comprised of short active lines. There are quite a few recurrent images – blood, birds, incense. All very concrete and yet all highly evocative as well. I think that’s what I like about most of the poems – they work well on a visceral as well as a philosophical level. You feel them as well as hear them.

Also in “The enchanted ass” are “Three Sonnets”. The first refers to Byron, the second to Woolf and the third to Blake. In the Woolf one, she writes:

Life is so dangerous,
but this morning you can take
the wave
right to the sparkling shore

You can bear knowing
the street will one day dump you.
(from “What a plunge!”)

One day she finally is dumped … and yet, even then, just two-and-a-half weeks before her death she can write:

Something in me
despite everything
can’t believe my luck.
(from “View from 417”)

There are poems here that are a little obscure to me – that I will need to read again with Google at my side to check the allusions – and there are no amazingly new revelations about life and death, but their passion and vigour engaged me from the get-go! I’m glad I’ve finally been introduced to Dorothy Porter.

Dorothy Porter
The beet hut
Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009
146pp.
ISBN: 9781863954464

Richard Appleton, Appo: Recollections of a member of the Sydney Push

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Richard Appleton, Appo

Appo book cover (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

I wanted to start my review of Richard Appleton’s memoir, Appo: Recollections of a member of the Sydney Push, with a mention of its evocative cover, but I now see that my friend Lisa, at ANZLitLovers, has already done this, so I’ll start more boringly with definitions instead! According to Wikipedia, the Sydney Push was a left-wing intellectual group that operated in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. On the back of the book, the Push is described as “our most original Bohemia”. What Appleton (1932-2005) describes in his memoir though is something rather less romantic, rather more earthy, than these descriptions connote. In fact, it seems that drinking and sex were about as important as protest and debate.

At the beginning of the book, Appleton lists what he sees as the strands of Sydney Libertarianism which defined the Push:

  • sexual liberty (as “a necessary precondition for political liberty”)
  • permanent protest (which Push member and academic Jim Baker describes as “the permanent struggle to keep alive libertarian values and interests”)
  • pluralism (which he describes as “the recognition of different and frequently conflicting interests, both within and between societies”)

I’m sure readers here know what Libertarianism is but, to make it simple, here is the neat definition from Wikipedia: “term for political theories that advocate the maximisation of individual liberty in thought and actionand the minimisation or abolition of the state.” This equates with Wikipedia’s description of the Push as being defined by “rejection of conventional morality and authoritarianism”.

At first glance the title raises the expectation that the book is about the Push but, when you look at the title carefully, what it actually says is that it is “the recollections” of  “a member of the Push”. That means, really, that it’s about him! And it is. There is a lot of Push in it, because clearly the Push and the relationships he formed within it, frame his life, but it is not a thorough history of the Push. He talks as much about his membership of the Communist Party of Australia and of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), his various forays into work in rural Australia, his poetry, and his work as an editor/encyclopaedist, as he does about the Push. And that’s fair enough, given the title!

Like most memoirs, it’s a pretty straightforward read. The style is chatty, with light attempts at humour that sometimes work, but  can sometimes be a little smart-alecky (“A new cycle of Push deaths had by then begun, and I had no wish to conform to that mortifying fashion”). He is (mostly) honest about his failings, which is something I like in a memoir. Structure-wise, the book is largely chronological, with the odd thematic tangent but he signposts these for us, such as this at the end of chapter 18: “While I was involved in politics I still had of course a professional and a private life. Both are dealt with, in that order, in the following chapters”.

It’s a frustrating book at times – partly because to preserve people’s privacy he is selective about what he does and doesn’t cover, and partly because there are many anecdotes (often drinking stories) in the book which seem to add little to our understanding of the Push or of him. Or perhaps that’s the point – and they do! Because the Push, as he describes it and I have no reason to argue with him, seems to be a very slippery beast. Also, presumably in the same attempt to maintain privacy, he drops hints that he doesn’t follow up. For example he refers a few times to his obsessive compulsive disorder, implying he was diagnosed late, but he never does really explain this. I found that a little mystifying, but perhaps it is this very “condition” which informs the way the book plays out.

All this aside, I did enjoy the book. It is at its most lively when he describes his several forays into rural Australia for work. His aim was to work and save money so he could return to Sydney and support his Push life of writing (poetry) and drinking. He worked hard at a wide range of jobs – destroying rabbit burrows and then catching rabbits was one such job – but for one reason or another, none of these jobs resulted in the benefits he desired. They made for some good stories though – and they provide insight into the times. I also enjoyed hearing about his life as an active member of the ALP (particularly the machinations of the factions that underpin that party) and about his experiences as an editor/encyclopaedist. He worked on The Australian Encyclopaedia, and was editor-in-chief of two editions. I would like to have heard more on this – it would, I’m sure, make a book in its own right. I also enjoyed the references to people in the Push, some of whom, just a generation older than I, have crossed my path (some in person, some by hearsay, and some through their writings). It’s interesting seeing them in (their often formative) context. The most well-known, to me anyhow, members include feminist/author Germaine Greer, author/commentator Clive James, artist John Olsen, writer Frank Moorhouse, poets Les Murray and Harry Hooton, and film producer Margaret (née Elliott) Fink.

Since Lisa started with the cover, I’ll end with it. It comprises a portrait of the author by David Perry (an Australian avant-garde filmmaker). It is shadowy, with just a few telling details; it teases us with the possibility of a bigger story. One could almost say the same of the book. It is what it is, a set of recollections, and as such provides a readable entrée to the world of the Push, but it is not, and does not pretend to be, the main course.

Richard Appleton
Appo: Recollections of a member of the Sydney Push
University of Sydney: Darlington Press, 2009
300pp.
ISBN: 9781921364099

(Review copy supplied by the Sydney University Press)

Kate Chopin, A respectable woman

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Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin: What a lovely face (Public domain, via Wikipedia)

Besides Jane Austen’s works, there are only a few novels that I have read more than once. One of these is Kate Chopin’s The awakening. I was trying to think of an adjective to describe it or my feelings upon reading it, but couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t clichéd. The best way to convey my response is, in fact, the way I have – and that is to say that I’ve read it more than once!

Kate Chopin’s short story, “A respectable woman” (1894), is this week’s Library of America (LOA) offering – and you can read it here. I haven’t read and blogged all of the LOA stories that have lobbed in since I subscribed, but I have done so rather more than I originally expected. This is because they have confronted me with:

  • Authors I’ve never heard of, but who, by LOA’s brief introduction, have intrigued me;
  • Authors I’ve heard of but haven’t yet read, and so have taken the opportunity to be introduced; and
  • Authors I’ve read before and loved (or at least liked a lot!).

As you’ve already realised, Kate Chopin falls into this last category. I was stunned by Chopin when I first read her back in the early 1980s – and this was because I hadn’t before read a 19th century novel that was quite so honest about women’s experience. Thank you Virago!

Written in 1894, 5 years before The awakening was published, “A respectable woman” made me laugh. That’s not quite what I expected when I started it. After all, it is by the author of The awakening! “A respectable woman” has a simple plot. Mrs Baroda (we never learn her first name, she being the woman of the title!) and her husband have just come to the end of the of a busy entertaining period, and she is looking forward to “a period of broken unrest, and undisturbed tête-a-tête with her husband”, but it’s not to be. Her husband, Gaston, has invited his friend Gouvernail to stay…

This is a very short story – just 4 pages – but Chopin is well capable, through some well chosen words, of leading us along. The title for a start sets us up with a number of impressions and expectations that tease us as the story progresses. Will she, won’t she, is the question that follows us. The introductory description of Gouvernail subtly tells us as much about her (and her life with her husband) as about him:

He had been her husband’s college friend; was now a journalist, and in no way a “man about town”, which were, perhaps, some of the reasons she had never met him.

Clearly they are a well-to-do couple moving in other circles. They have a good though not perhaps a passionate relationship: “her husband – who was also her friend”. The story is 3rd person, and told from her point of view – and it explores her reactions to this rather taciturn, self-possessed man who, towards the end, admits that all he now seeks is “a little whiff of genuine life”. What she is learning about herself though is something different:

She wanted to draw close to him and whisper against his cheek – she did not care what – as she might have done if she had not been a respectable woman.

This story is not as iconoclastic as The awakening, but it moves in that direction with Chopin exploring the inner workings of women and their hearts in an honest and sympathetic way. The story plays ironically on the notion of respectability and what that means for women. As for whether she does or doesn’t, well, that’s for you to find out. My lips are sealed.