Christina Stead, For love alone (Review)

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In a recent communication with local author Nigel Featherstone about reviewing, he reminded me of Peter Rose’s advice for new reviewers for the ABR. One of the points Rose makes is:

with major books, ones that have been reviewed extensively in the newspapers, submit reviews that add to our understanding of the book, not just repetitious codas to or echoes of earlier reviews.

This stands also, I think, for classics, for books that have become part of the “canon”. Stead’s For love alone is such a book. My problem then is how to say something about this book that isn’t same-old, same-old. I could be lucky here though, because while Christina Stead is part of the Australian literary canon she’s probably not as well read or as well-known as she should be.

To gain some idea of her reputation amongst the literati, just look at these comments … Patrick White described this book as ‘A remarkable book. I feel elated to know it is there’. Now that is really something isn’t it? Helen Garner has said ‘I could die of envy of her hard eye’, David Malouf wrote that ‘Christina Stead has the scope, the imagination, the objectivity of the greatest novelists’, while American critic Clifton Fadiman called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf‘. He has qualified his praise with ‘woman’, but nonetheless, you see what I mean. What can I add to a discussion of a writer of this ilk?

Enough introduction. Those of you who don’t know the novel are probably wondering by now what it’s about. The title sounds a bit melodramatic, and the basic plot-line could suggest it, but in fact the book is low on drama. You don’t read Stead for page-turning excitement. The novel is set in Sydney and London, from 1933 to 1937. It concerns Teresa Hawkins, the 19-year-old daughter of an unloving, self-involved father. Neither she nor her three siblings are happy at home but seem tied to it, mostly for economic reasons. The novel opens with Teresa and her sister Kitty attending the wedding of their cousin Malfi, setting the scene for Teresa’s quest for love – for a real love, though, not for “some schoolfellow gone into long trousers”. Unfortunately, while she is an intelligent and resourceful young girl, she is also naive. She sets her sights on her Latin teacher, the 23-year-old Jonathan Crow*. Consider the name, and you might gain some insight into his nature!

“She believed firmly in the power of the will to alter things and force things to an end”

It’s hard when reading the novel not to think of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (surely it’s relevant that Teresa is also called Tessa?) and, even more, of Edith Wharton‘s heroines. However, while society’s rules and conventions underpin the plot, Stead is more interested in her characters’, particularly Teresa’s, psychology. What does Teresa mean by love, what is its impact on her, and how far will she go for it? Very far, we soon discover. She denies herself sustenance almost to the point of death, not once but twice, in the novel. Why?

Well, let’s look at Teresa/Tessa. Early in the novel, she’s idealistic. She will not, she says, compromise her life. “I’ll never give in” (p. 33) she says to her aunts, and a little later says to her cousin, “I’d work my fingers to the bone to keep my lover” (p. 127). As she becomes immersed in her love for Jonathan Crow, she enacts these vows: “I am killing myself for a man” (p. 314), she realises. “Love is hard” (p. 357). And yet, she continues for many more chapters, to believe in her idea of love (in which women can’t expect happiness) and in Jonathan. This, to her, is how love is. It’s an intriguing portrait of a woman who is strong and intelligent, and yet unable to let go of something that is patently going nowhere. When the inimical Crow describes her as “a true example of masochism and also a perfect example of mythomania”, it’s hard not to agree.

Teresa, then, is not a simple character. Her commitment to Jonathan is complicated: when opportunities arise for greater intimacy, she in fact pulls back. It’s significant that several times through the novel she mentions Ulysses:

she could sail the seas like any free soul, from Ulysses to the latest skipper of a sixteen-footer rounding the world.

Eventually, though, she discovers “true love … the love without crime and sorrow” but, as ABR editor Peter Rose also says “never give away the denouement”, I will leave it here. I’ll simply say that the ending is satisfyingly open and true to Teresa’s character.

“The world was hers and she had no doubt of the future”

The novel is, essentially, a bildungsroman. It’s Teresa’s coming of age, intellectually, psychologically and physically. Her youthful confidence takes quite a battering as she confronts the realities – presented by society and by Jonathan. She realises that society’s rules are counter-human:

Why the false lore of society? To prevent happiness. If human beings really expected happiness, they would put up with no tyrannies and no baseness; each would fight for his right for happiness. (p. 532)

This is not a social history. Despite the descriptions of poverty, the analysis of societal marriage conventions, the discussions about money and power, Stead is not writing a Dickensian novel. Rather, it’s about Teresa’s struggle to know herself as a mature loving women, something that is stunted for some time by her relationship with the slippery Jonathan: “In one speech he would be sardonic and naive, cruel and gay, tender and cold” (p. 380) And yet, Teresa cares for this man, and forgives, and forgives, and forgives again his erratic, careless, misogynistic treatment of her. In fact, she appears to be so in his thrall that her employer James Quick begins to wonder whether she is as intelligent as he’d believed:

What can she be, to tolerate such a contemptible, calculating worm […] this intellectual scarecrow (p. 477, 480).

However, she is, of course, intelligent and in true bildungsroman-style does experience “true” love. But this is Stead and it’s not simple. At one point her new love tells her:

he will send her to university – make a woman of her, make a brilliant woman of her … He would take her to Paris, and elsewhere, no-one who knew her now, would know her then; he would make her over entirely.

Oh dear …

Australian Women Writers Challenge

This is a delicious book – rich in ideas, gorgeous in writing, passionate in conception, and complex in psychology. The more I delve into it, the more I want to say. Perhaps, I will another day.

Postscript: By coincidence, I finished For love alone just as the ABC’s Australian Story broadcast the strange story of revered Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, her librarian husband and his daughter by his first marriage, Susan Swingler, whom he left in England without telling her the truth. The first thing that crossed my mind as the story – I have Swingler’s book, unread, on my shelves – unfolded was “the things people do for love”. Jolley’s novels, like this one of Stead’s, are emotionally intense and explore some of the darker sides of familial and romantic relationships.

Christina Stead
For love alone
Carlton, The Miegunyah Press, 2011 (orig. pub 1945)
575pp.
ISBN: 9780522853704

* The novel is autobiographical, but by no means autobiography. Here is an article on Keith Duncan who inspired Jonathan Crow.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Conversation launches its Arts + Culture Section

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I think I’ve mentioned The Conversation before. It’s a blog produced by a consortium of Australian academic institutions. The posts are written by writers who are academics, and each post has a disclosure statement regarding whether the writer has affiliations with/receives funding from organisations that could “benefit” from their article. It’s a good source of thoughtful commentary.

They have “sections” such as Politics + Policy, Business + Economy, and Education. Today they launched their newest section, Arts + Culture. That’s exciting because while there have been articles before on arts-related topics, they’ve been scattered. I was a bit disappointed, though, I must admit, to see that on this launch day there are no articles (as they call their posts) devoted to literature but I suppose that’s the luck of the draw. There are articles on Visual Arts, Music, Film, TV and Gaming. I’ll be watching out for Literature.

Julian Meyrick, Professor of Strategic Arts at Flinders University, wrote the new section’s foundation essay, “Does Australia get culture“. He suggests we don’t. He says:

We are a country not without culture but without a sense of culture. That distinction is crucial. Australia does not lack art, artists or audiences. But as a nation we find it hard to see culture in any but consumerist terms.

He suggests two reasons for this – the fact that our language is English makes it easy to “free-ride the cultural goods and services” of the UK and USA, and that our history is ‘peaceful’. ‘Our cultural consciousness’, he says, ‘has never been pushed into sharp awareness by invasion or forced colonisation … unless you are indigenous of course’. Funnily enough, I read a similar point in my current novel, Christina Stead‘s For love alone. In it, an American character keeps describing an Australian character as English, and in terms of her Englishness. I was starting to wonder about this when he says, “She’s not English but Australian of course, but it’s the English race unadulterated by any revolution”!

But, that’s a bit by the by. The article is interesting but a little odd. For example, the author suggests that Australia doesn’t have a written constitution? Huh? What about this? But, I guess my main question to Meyrick is what does he mean by “culture”? It’s a rather nebulous term that can range from something quite narrow to something that encompasses pretty well everything about how we live. It’s not clearly defined in the article. I assume he’s focussing on “the arts”. And I think by “sense of culture” he is concerned about something that seems to have been crossing my reading quite a bit lately, the “Australian identity” – or what he calls “the internal order of value that allows us to articulate who we are”. Since “the arts” are the prime means by which we explore and present who we are, Meyrick’s “culture”, as I read him, is the exploration and presentation of the who we are via “the arts”.

At least I think that’s at the bottom of what he is saying, but I could very well be putting my own spin on it. Regardless, his concern is that these arts are constantly being frustrated, by a

situation whereby commercial imperatives block artistic ones because the internal order of value that should keep them in productive tension is not present to the needed degree.

I’m not sure that Meyrick completely explains what he means by this but I think I get his point. He concludes that Australia is good, however, at strong and bold cultural policy, and that all we need is good leadership from the centre. What do you think?

Murray Bail, Portrait of electricity (Review)

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A couple of weeks ago I quoted Murray Bail on compser-house-museums from his latest novel, The voyage. But this isn’t the first time Bail has expressed his attitudes towards turning the home of a famous person into a museum. It was the topic of a short story, “Portrait of electricity” which, as far as I can tell was first published in 1975. And this story, I gather, was probably the inspiration for his novel Homesickness (1980) (though I haven’t yet read that).

I was tickled by the quote because in our recent overseas trip we’d visited the house where Beethoven was born and where Liszt spent the last twenty years of his life, not to mention the residences of writers Goethe and Schiller. We enjoyed visiting these places, because each was well presented providing us with insight into the lives of their erstwhile residents. We probably would have got that from a straight museum, of course, but a museum (usually) needs a building and if it is to be a dedicated museum, why not in a building connected to the subject? The question is, what do you put in that building and how do you present it? The temptation with using a building in which the person lived is to imbue it with an additional layer of “meaning” which can result in what Bail satirises – and that is excessive (defining this is a judgement call of course) reverence, the turning of the space into a shrine.

This is where “Portrait of electricity” comes in. That the story is satirical is pretty obvious from the opening sentences:

There were three guides. One did all the talking, the others nodded in agreement.

Three guides – with only one talking? What were the rest there for? To increase the sense of import?

The visitors/tourists are given special shoes (as we were given in Weimar’s Anna Amalia Bibliotek) but

inside, it was a museum like any other. The rooms strangely impersonal, exhibits arranged in cabinets against the wall, special objects located towards the centre.

It’s hard to imagine how Bail could fashion an 18-page story out of this premise but he does, and it engages. Sometimes you squirm, but other times, fortunately, you are able to adopt Bail’s satirical stance and see how ridiculous such museums can be when taken to extremes – and, being the good satirist Bail is, he takes the fascination for all things belonging to the revered person to rather grotesque extremes. But it would spoil the story to give away here just how far he goes.

The story also satirises the people who visit such museums, including little digs at different nationalities, at gender behaviour, and different tourist types (the sceptical, the smart alec, the unimpressed, the tired, and so on). People take photographs of the chair with its flattened contour “caused by his body weight”, “women put on the expression they use when choosing wallpaper”, and all follow the guides feeling as though they are drawing “closer to him, acquiring greater knowledge”. Meanwhile, the guide conjures up the man’s life in the house, reminding them that “his body travelled through what you see before you”. No object is too small to have meaning. When one visitor asks “Is that worth preserving?” (“that” being a fingernail), there is only one possible answer, “It’s part of him”.

Bail knows his museological stuff, because he also satirising sacred principles such as that of maintaining objects in “original state”. The question behind the satire is whether there should be limits to the collection and presentation of a person’s effects. This is a serious question, one faced by archivists and museum curators every day. Bail’s story is an effective reminder that common-sense should play a role in this decision-making.

I will leave it here. The items the guide draws their attention to become more and more peculiar if not downright absurd, the reliability of the guide’s analysis of the man and the import of the evidence becomes increasingly shaky, while the visitors feel (or hope perhaps) they are drawing towards “important, intimate knowledge”. Can we ever really know a person – famous or otherwise – through a bunch of objects they owned or used? This story is a great read, whether you work in museums or visit them. It may not change your mind about visiting such museums if, like me, you enjoy them, but it will make you think about them next time you do. And in our celebrity-focused, materialist culture that would be a healthy thing.

Murray Bail
“Portrait of electricity”
Published in:
Marion Halligan and Roseanne Fitzgibbon (eds), The gift of story: Three decades of UQP short stories (1998)
and in
Murray Bail, Contemporary portraits and other stories (1975) (and various other Bail collections)

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Jane Austen on politics

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I was going to label this post “Jane Austen and plus ça change” but then decided to be provocative, because Austen is regularly criticised for not discussing politics, what was happening in her time, in her novels. Of course, I disagree that novelists have to specifically write about the political background to their stories. Those living in her time would have known, for example, about the Napoleonic Wars and their impact on society, about ongoing discussions regarding slavery, parliamentary power, free trade, and so on. Austen didn’t need to explain that background, and those issues weren’t the matters that she wanted to write about. She had something bigger in mind – human nature.

Nonetheless, I was tickled when reading one of her juvenilia pieces, Catharine, or the bower*, the other day, to come across the following**:

the Conversation turning on the state of Affairs in the political World, Mrs Percival, who was firmly of opinion that the whole race of Mankind were degenerating, said that for her part, Everything she believed was going to rack and ruin, all order was destroyed over the face of the World, the house of Commons she heard did not break up sometimes till five in the Morning, and Depravity was never so general before; concluding with a wish that she might live to see the Manners of the People in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, restored again. “Well, Ma’am,” said her Neice [Catharine aka Kitty], “but I hope you do not mean with the times to restore Queen Elizabeth herself.”

“Queen Elizabeth,” said Mrs Stanley, who never hazarded a remark on History that was not well founded, “lived to a good old age, and was a very Clever Woman.” “True, Ma’am,” said Kitty; “but I do not consider either of those Circumstances as meritorious in herself, and they are very far from making me wish her return, for if she were to come again with the same Abilities and the same good Constitution She might do as much Mischeif and last as long as she did before-.”

Of course, this doesn’t address specific political events or situations, but it suggests (to me anyhow) that politics and history were topics of conversation in Austen’s neighbourhood, and that she was well able to satirise the quality of that discussion. It also demonstrates Austen’s ability to describe and satirise her characters through their own mouths!

Oh, and despite – or in addition to – my comments above, I would argue that Austen’s novels can have a political reading, can show how political debate and events were shaping her world, but that’s a topic for a different post.

*Written in 1792, her 17th year
**This rather idiosyncratic-looking text is based on the original manuscript in the British Library from the Oxford World’s Classics edition published by Oxford University Press (on my Kindle)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Reading Australia

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You know how when you go to a conference you pick up all sorts of pamphlets and brochures advertising this and that? Well, at the Writing the Australian landscape conference I attended back in August, just before I went overseas, I picked up an interesting leaflet from Australia’s Copyright Agency. The leaflet is titled: Reading Australia: Sharing great Australian stories. I decided then that it should be a Monday Musings topic so, here I am, nearly three months later telling you about it.

Reading Australia’s aim is “to promote the study of Australian works in the classroom”. It has kicked off with “the First 200” works selected by the Australian Society of Authors. The selection includes

stories from Indigenous Australians, from the colonial past and rural epics through to the cosmopolitan melting pot of the cities … classes and new favourites

The list, which is available on the Copyright Agency’s website, covers fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry, and includes selections for primary and secondary schools. From these they have selected a subset of 20 – split 50-50 for secondary and primary schools – and created teacher resources which they say will be trialled “later in the year” (which must presumably be now).

English: Chloe Hooper.

Chloe Hooper. (Photo credit: Ottre, released to Public Domain via Wikipedia)

The selection for secondary students, which is the area that most interests me, is nicely diverse, and is not dumbed-down. It includes the major forms (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, short stories), classics and contemporary titles, and works representing indigenous and multicultural Australia. The ten are:

The project is an initiative of the Cultural Fund of the Australian Copyright Agency, with the Australian Society of Authors and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature as partners.

I was disappointed by the dearth of Australian literature taught to my children at school and so am delighted to see this initiative.  I don’t know, however, how well it is being promoted, how easy it will be for teachers to incorporate into their existing curricula, whether schools can resource providing the books, but I do hope it gains traction.

The Role of the Arts Critic: a Childers Group Public Roundtable

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Last week, I reorganised my Friday Lunch Group’s schedule in order to attend a public roundtable on the role of the arts critic organised by the Childers Group. This group, formed in late 2011, describes itself as an “independent arts forum … committed to the long-term viability and vitality of the arts”. It aims to advocate for the arts across government and private sectors. Last week’s roundtable was, I think, the third public forum they’ve held. All have been well-attended, which hopefully bodes well for the arts!

The event ran for two hours and featured a large panel of local critics/reviewers, administrators and practitioners in a wide range of the arts. They included the universally well-known, like Robyn Archer and Marion Halligan, and more local luminaries such as arts critic Helen Musa and Canberra Times editor-at-large Jack Waterford. It was emceed by writer and arts administrator Yolande Norris, who put questions herself and managed contributions from the audience. The ideas and viewpoints flowed – with a lot of concordance but some differences as well. Below is my summary.

Trader in ideas

Lucy – with a self-deprecating “I’m a poet so you won’t know me” – Alexander made the point of the day, for me. Late in the panel, she (from the audience) suggested that the critic is a trader in ideas. By this she meant that, in looking at a work, the critic picks up the ideas contained within it, weighs them, and explores what they might mean for people.

Another arts practitioner from the audience said, along similar lines, that she values information and insight into what is going on – into what the creator may have intended and what the critic actually “read”.

Somewhat related to these ideas, Marion Halligan said earlier in session that she regularly reads reviews (or criticism) of books, plays etc, she doesn’t expect to see or read, because “a critic tells you what’s going on” and gives you “a sense of the arts landscape”. A critic, therefore, she and others said, needs to be able to write (or speak) authoritatively and engagingly.

All this neatly sidestepped discussions about negative and positive criticism and got to the nub – to my mind anyhow – of the real value of criticism. While negative or constructive “criticism” of a work may be useful for the creator, Alexander’s point captured the bigger picture value of criticism. And it reflected, I think, what Robyn Archer meant at the beginning of the session when she suggested that “the arts” comprises three prongs: artist, audience, and the dialogue between them. These three need to be in balance she said for there to be a strong culture.

There was some discussion about the form of this dialogue, with film critic Cris Kennedy suggesting that dialogue is easier in the digital age. Robyn Archer queried the role of expertise in the digital age. She was concerned about the rise of “a new cultural democracy” – the world of “likes” and “unlikes” – and the resultant attitude that “if it’s popular it’s good”. I suspect there has always been this tension – but I guess it’s increasingly visible in our social media dominated world, isn’t it?

Overall, it was agreed, at least as far is there was agreement, that the critic should be knowledgable, that criticism should be “artful”, but that the important thing is opening dialogue.

What is criticism?

There was, of course, quite a bit of discussion about what criticism is. The point was quickly made that a review or criticism does more than describe. It takes up broader questions relating to the art form being reviewed, and should involve a studied reaction drawing on knowledge. It should illuminate and “bind things together” and requires a “critical” frame of mind. This was contrasted to “opinion” which seemed to be defined as “judgement” without a firm basis of knowledge.

Jack Waterford suggested that a lot of cultural discussion is occurring, such as on local ABC radio, but that this isn’t necessarily the same as criticism. Related to this, an audience member mentioned the issue of public art in Canberra, suggesting there’d been a lot negativity in the news pages and not enough criticism in the arts pages of the newspapers.

There was discussion about the need for disinterest, and that this was tricky to achieve in a small arts community like Canberra. (Marion Halligan suggested most arts communities are small – take England, she said, where the writers all review each other!)

One contributor suggested that food criticism is currently leading the way, and that the arts could look at what’s happening there! (There wasn’t discussion, however, on what this criticism entails and how it is leading the way.)

Who is criticism for?

The general view was that criticism is for the reader, though who the reader is wasn’t fully teased out. Those writing for papers and journals clearly see the reader as their public, and feel a responsibility to inform. One panel member made the point that criticism written for, say, a specialist dance journal should be different to that written for a general newspaper. An audience member pointed out that in the online world, the audience is international, and that this can (should) impact style and content.

There was also some discussion about creators and the role of criticism for them. Many appreciated constructive criticism, but quite a few said they use trusted friends to vet criticism, as negative criticism (that written from a point of ignorance) can be destructive. Criticism is also affirmation that people are looking at their work. As Marion Halligan said, the worst thing is silence. No review, she said, is worse than a bad review.

What is the aim of criticism?

In addition to the ideas implied above – contributing to the culture, informing the consumer and increasing people’s knowledge, providing constructive feedback to creators – it was also suggested that “the critic is a cog in the marketing machine”. I wouldn’t like to think that “marketing” per se is the critic’s role – and I don’t think that’s quite what was meant. But the critic does help promote the culture, can function as an advocate – in both cultural and political spheres.

This is certainly how I see my blog – as an advocate for Australian (in particular) literature . Of course, I’d like to think my reviews encouraged people to actually buy books, but my specific goal is to raise awareness about Australian literary culture.

Conclusion

Hmm … this is the hard part. Did the roundtable come to any final agreement or resolutions? No, I wouldn’t say it did. But I assume the organisers will take away the ideas presented and feed it into their future activities.

Near the end, it was suggested that it’s time to start populating the digital media with criticism and dialogue. This is an area that was not really tackled – that was just played with around the edges – and is possibly a good subject for the Childers Group to take up for their next roundtable.  What is happening in the online world and how can it best be harnessed to support and promote the arts. What impact does the growth of the amateur reviewer/critic have? Is there a difference between reviewer and critic?

Finally, returning to the opening idea of the critic as a “trader in ideas”, I liked the related suggestion that arts criticism is about the big things, about living and who we are. Can’t say better than that, eh?

A big thankyou to Nigel Featherstone and the Childers Group for holding this roundtable.

Murray Bail, The voyage (Review)

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Murray Bail, The voyage, book cover

Courtesy: Text Publishing

It took me a while to read Murray Bail‘s latest novel The voyage. I started it before we went overseas but didn’t quite finish it, and decided not to carry it with me. So, 8 weeks later, I picked it up and found it surprisingly easy to continue. I say surprising because it is a rather astonishing novel – in style, structure, and also, I think, theme. Like other works of Bail’s, particularly Eucalyptus, it manages to feel old and new at the same time, which is rather the point, since it shifts back and forth between the Old World (Europe) and the New (Australia), between high society Vienna and a cargo ship returning to Australia with piano inventor Delage and escapee from the Old World, Elisabeth von Schalla, on board.

It’s a short book, just 200 pages, but it’s by no means simple. Short books, I’ve found, often demand the most of their readers. Anyhow, Bail, you may remember, gave the opening keynote address at the National Library of Australia’s Writing the Australian Landscape conference. It was a provocative talk, but I won’t reiterate what I’ve said before. Instead I want to refer to his plea for writers to take stylistic and intellectual risks. This is what Bail has done here.  There’s a Patrick White-like intensity, but the style is all Bail.

First though, as usual, a few words about the plot. The story concerns 46-year-old piano-inventor Frank Delage coming to Europe – specifically Vienna – to sell his new Delage piano. It’s a cheeky thing to do, this, but he gives it a go with a certain naiveté perhaps that comes with being from the New World. He meets the Schalla family, first the mother Amelia von Schalla and then the husband, Konrad, and their 36-year-old daughter Elisabeth. There are two main plot tensions – will he sell his piano, and what will happen between him and the two “landlocked women”. The piano plot is resolved clearly (though not necessarily neatly) while the relationship plot is not so clean, even though early in the novel we know that Elisabeth is on the boat with him going to Australia.

Now to the risky business. This is a novel with no chapters, and it mostly comprises long paragraphs that last several pages. These are somewhat unusual, though not particularly risky. The chronology alternates between Delage’s time in Vienna and his voyage home on the ship, with occasional flashbacks to Australia. This sort of narrative structure isn’t unusual these days either. But, what is unusual, what is risky, is how he alternates his chronology. It is done organically, fluidly, mid-paragraph and even – sometimes – mid-sentence. For example, the following sentence starts in the present, on the ship, with the subject being two of the passengers, and then shifts back to Amalia in Vienna. The next sentence returns to the ship, but now with Elisabeth:

Now the sisters faced the sun, closing their eyes, allowing the warmth to soften their thoughts, the older, forsaken one undoing the top buttons of her blouse to extend the tan, after first rubbing cream into her feet and throat, the buttons on Amalia’s, pleated, high-collar blouse he found to be imitation buttons, decoration only, on her back well-hidden by the Italian pleating, which gave the impression of vertical stripes was a tiny zipper of unexpected elegance. For Elisabeth, it was too hot on the small deck, she went back to the cabin, favouring an Austrian complexion over acquiring a tan … (p. 142)

Bail, it seems, loves the comma! It looks tricky to read: if you try to analyse a sentence or paragraph, it defeats you, the syntax is odd. And yet, it flows seamlessly from place to place, character to character, idea to idea. It is artful, carefully composed, but reads naturally, surprisingly so.

The important question, however, is how does this style relate to the theme? And here I’d like to return to Bail’s address. He spoke of Australians not being sure of who we are. We have a thin layer of history, he said, by contrast with the Old World and its long, albeit often grim history. “What is bad for a country can be good for art”, he proposed. Oh dear, I’m not sure we want to generate a few revolutions or civil wars for ourselves just to give artists something to chew on! He also said that “I hadn’t quite realised my novels are centred around journeys … My people are instinctively hot-footing it out of here, turning away from the apparent barrenness.” Bail senses a continuing discomfort about the New World’s “place”, which is articulated by Delage: “It goes without saying that they [the Viennese] would stick their noses up in the air at an intruder, a concert grand made in a hopeless backward place, Australia”.

And so, in The voyage, we have a dialogue between Old and New, which is mirrored in the style. Bail sees a tension between respecting the old and encouraging or supporting the new, between certainty and uncertainty, between world-weariness and naivete. I was initially surprised. Surely we have resolved our identity crisis; surely Old World-New World discussions are old hat. But he has a point. The Old World does, whether it’s justified or not, seem sure of itself in a way that we aren’t – “the old buildings, industrial, older than anything in Sydney or at least different, carved stonework above the windows and doors, left him feeling out of place”. It’s natural to feel out-of-place in a different culture, but there’s something else going on here too – and it’s regarding the fact that we Australians often feel lesser, and apologise even, for the fact that we, as exemplified by our buildings, are new. You hear it all the time – the awe and admiration – from Australians travelling overseas. And yet, our land is older, and indigenous Australian culture is probably the oldest continuous culture in the world. No wonder indigenous writers like Jeanine Leane get a little fired up!

Anyhow, Bail explores this tension through Delage’s attempts to sell his New World piano to the Old World, and his triangular relationship with the von Schalla mother and daughter. What happens to his piano – who buys it, how it is used – provides a biting comment on both New World and Old World pretensions. How the relationships develop is more nuanced and less resolved, leaving the way open for growth and change. Because, of course, the novel is not simply about Old World meets New World. It is about New in a much broader sense. It’s about “being open to the new”, in all fields of endeavour, whether this be piano manufacture, writing, the arts in general, or even the self. Indeed, at the book’s conclusion, Delage, who had earlier felt “without edges”,  senses that he has “become a slightly different person”.

For all this seriousness, though, The voyage is a quietly funny, satirical book. Bail delights in skewering self-importance and pomposity in critics, avant-garde artists, architects, and business men, to name a few of his targets. Women generally fare better. Viennese Amalia says she enjoys “the discomfort of the unexpected” and Elisabeth demonstrates that she does by joining Delage on his cargo ship.

I’ve laboured over this review as you can probably tell. I’ve rambled, and may not have made much sense. It’s a slippery novel that can be tackled from many angles and it doesn’t resolve all its tensions. This is good. I enjoyed the novel, but I suggest you ignore my review and read the book yourself. I’d love to know what you think.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has also reviewed the book, and enjoyed its inventiveness.

Murray Bail
The voyage
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
200pp
ISBN: 978192192261

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writing the Australian landscape (3)

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Wide Brown Land sculpture

Wide Brown Land (National Arboretum)

Back in August I wrote two posts (here and here) about the National Library of Australia’s conference, Writing the Australian landscape. At the time I said that I would provide a link when the talks became available on-line.

Well, they apparently went on-line a month or so ago and the NLA very kindly tweeted the fact to me. However, I was overseas at the time and having a semi-break from constant on-line connection – and have consequently only caught up with the tweet now. Better late than never eh?

So, if you are still interested in checking out any of the wonderful talks I discussed in my posts, here is the link.

As you may remember from my posts, I found it all excellent, but if I had to recommend some to you, these would be the ones:

  • Murray Bail‘s keynote address on day 1, which was provocative about what he sees as our (Australian) need to define ourselves by our landscape. He concluded by asking readers to be “explorers” and open to new ways of writing, to not expect “landscape” to be the way into Australianness.
  • Bill Gammage‘s keynote address on day 2, which was provocative in a different way, arguing that there is a progression from notions of “landscape” and “place” to “country” which, in indigenous terms, is synonymous with “culture”. He argued that we still “view” the land as outsiders, rather than seeking to relate to it in a more spiritual, organic way, and challenged us to be willing to learn from indigenous Australians.
  • Jeanine Leane’s paper which, among other things, confronted us with our (that is, white/non-indigenous) preconceived notions about what we define as Australian classics. Now I have the paper I can quote directly. It was powerful. She said:

Through Xavier Herbert, Patrick White, David Malouf & more recently Kate Grenville who among others have been hailed as nation writers & what I saw and still see to some extent in Australian literature to date is a continuous over-writing of settler foundation stories which overwrite Aboriginal experience and knowledge. Settlers are always re-settling and Australian literature really reflects this and the critics and scholars write of such works as if everyone reading it is also a settler reader.

It is very hard, Leane showed us, to step outside our own world-view … but that’s why we read, talk about reading, and listen to readers and writers isn’t it? I certainly found my world-view shifting as we went through the weekend. How do I, as a non-indigenous Australian, need and want to relate to this land I also call home. It would be presumptuous to try to relate to it as an indigenous person does. But we are lucky here to have people with such a deep knowledge of and relationship with the land. We can learn a lot from them: practical things about how to care for the land, and, perhaps more importantly, what a true relationship with the land really means and the responsibility accompanying that.

Anyhow, I’m very glad to be able to share the link to the papers, and would love to hear from you if you do read any of them.

Dorothy Johnston, Eight pieces on prostitution (Review)

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Dorothy Johnston, Eight pieces on prostitution book cover

Lifted, with approval I hope, from Johnston’s website

A few months ago I wrote a Monday Musings on the Australian Society of Authors’ digital publishing initiative, Authors Unlimited e_Book portal. At the time I decided to try it out and bought Dorothy Johnston‘s collection of short stories, Eight pieces on prostitution.

The collection comprises 7 short stories and a long story or novella. One of the stories, ‘Mrs B’, I read earlier this year in Meanjin‘s Canberra edition. Some of the other stories have been published before too: ‘The Man Who Liked To Come With The News’ (The State of the Art, 1983), ‘Commuting’ (Island, issue 52, Spring 1992, and elsewhere), and ‘The Studio’ (Southerly, Winter 1996).

The first thing I should say about this collection is that it is not salacious reading. That is, it’s not erotica. Johnston’s interest is the lives, the experience, of prostitutes as people. Who are they? Why are they doing what they are doing? How do they negotiate their relationships, professional and personal? How do they live the life they’ve chosen and are they happy?

Johnston’s prostitutes are neither glamorous nor tarty, and most work for themselves or in small establishments. They are not the prostitutes of popular imagination. That is, they tend not to work in fancy parlours under control of a madam nor in that sleazy underworld borderland managed by pimps. They are, instead, either ordinary employees or small businesswomen. Some are career prostitutes, others are university students or single mothers who need to support themselves, while still others, like Eve in ‘The Studio’, are a little more mysterious:

She lives in a small flat. She chose the national capital because she imagined it to be a city where she could fade into the background, where she could hide.
Johnston’s characters are often wistful or even a little sad, but they are never pathetic. They are intelligent, and Johnston respects not judges them. They are not powerless, either, though sometimes the power they have is limited to their domain and can be tenuous. They can be a little lost, or perhaps just at a cross-roads in their lives. Maria in ‘The Cod-piece and the Diary Entry’ is uncertain about the world and her place in it. She thinks, when she moves and loses a client:
Looking back, she could not shake the feeling that she’s been on the point of understanding something important while in Harry’s company, that understanding had been no more than a breath away.
Sandy in ‘Names’ admires university student Gail’s strength and resilience:

She never let herself fall into a chair like I did when she came back from a client, slumping my stomach and letting the smile drop off my face.

There is a continuity between these characters and the three women in her novel The house at number 10 which I reviewed earlier this year. Like Elizabeth Jolley, Johnston is not afraid to re-use or develop characters across her oeuvre. I rather like that.

The pieces are set in places known to Johnston – Canberra and Melbourne. We get a clear sense of those cities, but even more we are let into the rooms the prostitutes inhabit – the ones they work in, the ones they relax in between clients. We learn about the things that are part of their daily routine. Sophie, for example, in ‘Commuting’, finds that when she steps outside work
petrol fumes are a relief after hours of perfumed towels and bubble bath.
The final piece is the novella ‘Where the Ladders Start’. The title comes from Yeats’ poem, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’:
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

It concerns a three-woman brothel established by Sue, who’d been dreaming for years of a “better system”. It’s “a co-operative … Tough that word, but they’d risen to its challenges”. Now though, the dream is being severely tested as they cope with the death of a client, on the first page, from erotic asphyxiation, “the choking game”.  The story explores the “one for all, all for one” ideal. Are there limits to trust, and how far should you take loyalty, particularly when it starts to be to your own detriment? Johnston sets the story at the beginning of the new millennium adding an ironic overlay to the situation confronting the women. What sort of millennium are they setting up for themselves by their response to the death?

As in all her stories, Johnston’s view of human nature here is warm but realistic, clear-eyed. She pits the “never let a chance go by” attitude against the desire to protect, care and trust, and then tests that against the need for self-preservation.

Johnston’s language is a delight to read. She’s precise but expressive, using imagery with a light touch:

The freedom to ask each other questions danced and shimmied in the air.

She can be quietly ironic:

Laura went on sitting in the kitchen like a Buddha, or more accurately a simpleton, a girl who’d left her mind someplace and forgotten to go back for it.

Is Laura simple or not is the question we ponder through most of the story.

In dealing with a mysterious death, “Where the Ladders Start” introduces us to that other string on Johnston’s writing bow, the crime novel. It’s a clever story, well-plotted, nicely maintaining a tension between mystery and clarity. Like most of the stories, there’s no simple resolution. Life, Johnston shows, is a messy business.

You’ve probably gathered by now that I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. While there is a commonality between the women, giving the collection a lovely coherence, there is also difference. Each character is unique, each story engaging. If there’s an overall theme, it is one of survival, or perhaps more accurately, resilience. Her women get on with life. They make decisions, some good, some bad, some we are not sure about, but, and here’s the important thing, they don’t stand still. Do read it. At $9.95, I reckon this is a steal.

Dorothy Johnston
Eight pieces on prostitution
Australian Society of Authors, 2013
202pp.
Availability: Online download for $9.95 from the ASA site

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Murray Bail on composers’ houses

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Beethoven's birth house

Beethoven’s birth house

During our recent trip to Europe we managed to follow the trails of a few composers*. We saw statues of JS Bach, CPE Bach, Felix Mendelssohn and Ludwig van Beethoven. We visited Eisenach, where Bach was born and saw the church where he was baptised. We visited Leipzig, where he worked for 27 years and saw the church where he wrote most of his best-known compositions. We visited the house in Weimar where Franz Liszt was based for the last 20 or so years of his life, and the house in Bonn where Beethoven was born. In a previous European trip we visited the house in Salzburg where Mozart was born. We’ve enjoyed this aspect of our tourism, the way it helps put these composers into some sort of geographic and historical perspective.

Given this, and my current interest in the meaning and value of travel, I was therefore rather tickled to read, just this morning, Murray Bail‘s comment in The voyage on composers’ houses:

… the idea of turning composers’ houses into holy houses with perfect wallpaper, bare desk and polished floorboards is more a display of falsity than history, although it hardly deters the visitors who go into every room, wanting to add layers to their general knowledge, mouths open in wonder, in Mozart’s case, amazing how a family with so many children could fit in such a space, how Mozart managed to work with his family around him, making the usual family racket, or the curator’s immaculate recreation of Beethoven’s rooms, not a speck of dust to be seen, though everyone knows he lived in disorder or squalor.

Oh dear, he does have a point!

Franz Liszt's bed

Franz Liszt’s actual bed

Indeed, in our experience, some (many, in fact) of these homes no longer have the composer’s furniture but have been furnished in period style. The curators don’t always even know what sort of furniture the famous inhabitant had, unless there are letters or some sort of contemporary inventory to tell them. In Liszt’s case though, his perspicacious supporter/ruler, Grand Duke Carl Alexander ordered within days of his death that the house be preserved because he knew fans would want to pay homage:

Since […] it can be assumed that Liszt’s innumerable friends and admirers […] will pay homage to the memory of the departed by visiting the rooms which he lived in, the Grand Duke strictly commands that nothing may be changed of the furniture and decorations, that is to the furnishings in the broadest sense, in the rooms in which Liszt lived.  (from the audioguide)

The furniture there really was Liszt’s. Does that make a difference? Do we feel more reverence or awe because we know the great man (or woman) sat on that chair? Is our experience somehow less, if we know the furniture isn’t original? I guess it depends on the tourist.

How does a composer’s house turned into a museum differ from a “straight” museum. Does displaying objects – authentic and/or “only” contemporaneous – in the composer’s own space add value to our experience? Is it better than seeing these objects in an all-purpose museum space, perhaps alongside those of other composers or people of the same time? What sort of experience or knowledge are we seeking? What, to take this to its logical conclusion, is the role of museums? These are the questions I’ve been pondering, in a heightened manner I must admit, since reading Michelle de Kretser‘s Questions of travel (my review).

Bail has discussed museums and tourists in other works – in his novel Homesickness, and in a story that I plan to read soon. Watch this space! Meanwhile, do you have thoughts on the topic? Do you like to visit writers’ homes for example? Why?

* Not to mention writers, and other famous or infamous people, of course.