The Hunter (movie)

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The Hunter. Daniel Nettheim. Porchlight Films, 2011

Tasmanian Tiger (lithograph)

Lithograph of the Tasmania Tiger, after H. C. Richter's illustration in The Mammals of Australia (Gould) (Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

A guilty confession. I hadn’t heard of or read Julia’s Leigh’s apparently highly acclaimed novel, The Hunter, before this recent Australian movie was made. I’m not quite sure why that is. Maybe it was just child-rearing busy-ness at the time of its publication. Anyhow, the film is now out and I saw it this weekend. It was produced – but not directed – by the same people who made the excellent Animal Kingdom, and its cast includes Willem Dafoe (as “the hunter”), Sam Neill and Frances O’Connor. All actors I am always happy to see. And it was set in our beautiful southern island state, Tasmania.

The basic plot is straightforward. Martin (Dafoe) is a mercenary sent by a biotech company to find and kill a Tasmanian Tiger in order to bring back the necessary biological specimens for, it appears, biological warfare purposes. Now, if you know your Tasmanian history, you’ll know that the Tasmanian Tiger has been officially extinct since 1936 – but, like the Loch Ness Monster, there are always reports of sightings. The story, of course, has complications. The company organises for Dafoe to stay with a widow (well, her husband has been missing for a year) and her two young children who live on the edge of the bush … and from there the mystery thickens somewhat. What did happen to her husband?

The movie tos-and-fros between Dafoe “hunting” in the bush and spending time in the large log house with Sally (O’Connor) and her young daughter and son. Dafoe, established in the opening scene as a task-oriented person who likes cleanliness and order, a loner, arrives at Sally’s cabin to find the children running free, the house dirty and disordered, and the mother out-to-it (from, we soon learn, prescription drugs) in bed. He finds nowhere else in town: the logging-oriented townsfolk mistake him for a “greenie” and are therefore not willing to accommodate him, so he settles into Sally’s house, fixing it up to suit his needs. While doing so, he starts to engage with the two children and then the mother, which doesn’t endear him to Jack (Sam Neill).

This is billed as a thriller, and there certainly is tension. Can he find a Tasmanian Tiger? And do we want him to? What happened to Sally’s husband? Is Jack hiding something? Does Bike (Sally’s son who doesn’t speak) know something? The film doesn’t quite have the sophisticated moral and emotional complexity of Animal Kingdom. It is more a film of archetypes: the hunter who becomes the hunted, the silent child who knows something, the withdrawn grieving wife, and so on. The tension is enhanced by the remote, forbidding landscape, and the cinematography used to convey it. The colours are cold blues and greens, the lighting dark. There is also the sense of menace suggested first by the loggers but then by something less definite, more mysterious. Is it animal or human?

This is a difficult film to review. I enjoyed the movie, but had some reservations. The performances are excellent, particularly the taciturn but expressive Dafoe, and the two children. The pacing is slow, and yet it’s not too long. The cinematography is captivating overall, though I didn’t always like the unsubtle way parts of a scene would move in and out of focus. The soundtrack – the natural sounds in the bush, and Martin’s classics set against Sally’s Springsteen in the domestic scenes – is effective. The plot is perhaps its main problem. The initial set-up – that of expecting to find an extinct animal – needs a major suspension of disbelief, which was not a problem on its own, but the plot is then so tightly managed it was a little difficult in the end to know exactly who had been implicated in what. And this leads, I think, to a confusion of themes.  The logger-environmentalist conflict is introduced but never really developed. Was it there for necessary background*, or for its red herring purposes? There’s a bevy of themes concerning nature and extinct animals versus man, science and corporate greed. These are all touched upon and developed to some degree, but not as strongly as they could be. The overriding theme though is probably Martin’s emotional journey – from an isolated, self-contained man at the beginning to … well, I don’t want to give away the plot, but his character’s development was, though somewhat predictable in that archetypal way, nicely and movingly done.

Having seen the film, I’d rather like to read the book – to see how I would interpret the characters, plot and themes. In the meantime, I would recommend the film … it may not be perfect but it has plenty to recommend it and is well worth the price of a ticket.

* For more on why this could be so, see my review of Into the woods.

What do Di Gribble and Steve Jobs have in common?

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MabBookPro

My current beloved MacBook Pro - aging but still fine

You probably think it’s strange to put these two luminaries together – one a lesser-known Australian publisher and entrepreneur and the other an international icon in personal computing. But the thing is, you see, that besides the fact that they both died this week – from cancer – Gribble and Jobs both entered my life in the mid 1980s. And their impact was significant. I have consequently decided to add my cyberspace tribute to these two people.

Di Gribble first. With Hilary McPhee, Di Gribble established a significant small Australian publishing house, McPhee Gribble. That was in 1975, but the real impact for me was about a decade later when I returned to reading Australian literature with a renewed enthusiasm – and it was through imprints like McPhee Gribble that Aussie literature was encouraged and promoted. McPhee Gribble were, in fact, the first to publish Helen Garner, Murray Bail and Tim Winton, all of whom I have reviewed here. Wonderful Australian writers, and we’ll surely be seeing tributes from them in the coming days and weeks. The company was sold to Penguin in 1989, with Gribble and McPhee going onto other things – but remaining in the Australian literature fold. Gribble’s post-McPhee Gribble ventures included the publishing company Text Media (later also sold, and still going strong as Text Publishing) and the independent digital media publishing company Crikey. She was, as they say, a goer – and we, in Australia at least, will miss her.

(You may also like to read Lisa’s tribute at ANZLitLovers)

And now Steve Jobs. Our first personal computer was one home-built by Mr Gums in the late 1970s. It was a great little computer – and as a librarian I was of course drawn by its possibilities, particularly for information management and retrieval. Our first database was one to manage our wine cellar! An excellent joint project to test the possibilities. This computer was, however, not particularly user-friendly. Mr Gums, the engineer, was well into DOS command lines but the computer didn’t easily engage we laypeople. Then along came Jobs, and Mr Gums, always on the lookout for improved technologies, saw the new world of personal computers coming. So, in 1985, we bought one of the first Macintosh models available in Australia – and I was hooked. The mouse, the GUI  interface with its WYSIWYG style, the continual improvements, not to mention the gorgeous designs (I even loved my often-maligned little clamshell laptop) have kept me in the orchard. Apple products are just so delicious! As most of my friends know, it is hard to separate me from my Mac (not to mention other Apple products, such as my latest gadget, the iPad2). Thanks Steve, we’ll miss you too.

Irma Gold, Two steps forward

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Irma Gold's Two steps forward Bookcover

Irma Gold's Two steps forward (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

Irma Gold’s* Two steps forward is, apparently, the last release in Affirm Press’s Long Story Short series. I have reviewed two others previously – Gretchen Shirm’s Having cried wolf and Leah Swann’s Bearings – but, before talking about this book, I must say how much I love the books themselves. I am starting to read eBooks. I recognise they are likely to be the future and they do offer advantages over print books. They take up less space, for a start. You can change font size to suit your eyes. And, eReaders have inbuilt dictionaries which can be useful when you are reading while out and about (or are just too plain lazy to get off your seat to find the dictionary). But, this doesn’t mean I don’t like print books – especially lovely ones to look at and hold like this Affirm Press series. I like their slightly smaller size and their simple, clear, modern design. The three I’ve read also have very stylish monochromatic covers. There’s little, in fact, not to like about them.

Now, though, the book. This is one of those short story collections, like Swann’s Bearings, that has its own title rather than one drawn from one of the stories within. I like that – and the title of this book, Two steps forward, is a particularly clever one, because of course it immediately calls forth the complete saying “two steps forward one step back”. This concept works well for the stories in Gold’s book.

Irma Gold is a writer and editor. She has been published in various journals, such as Meanjin and Island, but this is her first published collection. Well done her, because it’s an engrossing collection. Gold’s writing is clear and warm, and she demonstrates in this collection an ability to handle a range of voices and points of view. There are 12 stories in the book: five are told 1st person, two 2nd person, and the other five 3rd person. Her protagonists are mostly women, but there are a few male voices too. The stories could be described as “scenes from a life” (well, lives, really). Her characters include a single mother hoping for love (“The art of courting”), an empathetic woman working in a refugee detention centre (“Refuge”), a father experiencing his first access visit, after two years, with his 8-year-old daughter (“Tangerine”), an emotionally-neglected teen girl living in a caravan park (“Sounds of friendship”), an old homeless man (“Great pisses of Paris”), and so on. The characters are authentic. You know who they are, what they feel, and what they are confronting:

You notice how thin your lips have become, how the flash of greasy fuchsia looks almost crude. You pull at the loose skin on your neck, and the spongy puffs around your eyes filled with lines, the skeleton veins of a dead leaf. (“The art of courting”)

I want to touch him, but the space between us is fractured. (“Refuge”)

I compose sentences in my head, but none of them work. (“Kicking dirt”)

Says they can’t afford to waste cash on stuff they don’t need, though apparently alcohol is essential. (“Sounds of friendship”)

There’s a painful vulnerability to her characters, as they confront their particular challenges, such as visiting a terminally ill friend (“The visit”), facing a miscarriage (“The third child”), or trying to reconnect with a young daughter (“Tangerine”). Their lives are finely observed, so much so, in fact, that you feel you’ve been there – even if you haven’t. Their triumphs, when they have them, are hard won.

I also liked Gold’s use of imagery. It’s apt, evocative, and is not overdone or pushed too far – which suggests careful writing, good editing, or both:

 A day leaking away with a spill of apricot. Air stung with lavender. (“The art of courting”)

… and Abby catches the cold-barrelled words Mick fires at her mother. (“Sounds of friendship”)

But it was all icing slathered over stale cake. (“The anatomy of happiness”)

The tone doesn’t vary much, but this doesn’t spoil the experience. The stories, overall, have a somewhat melancholic air, as the characters struggle to keep a forwards momentum in their lives ahead of a backwards one. And, there are touches of humour (mostly wry) and some occasional irony (such as a reference to our anthem’s “boundless plains to share” in “Refuge”) that provide relief.

Endings are always hard … at least that’s what E. M. Forster told us in Aspects of the novel … but Irma Gold has handled them well. Keeping with the title, most of her stories have more hope than not – but none are fully resolved. Like life really.

Irma Gold
Two steps forward
Mulgrave, Vic: Affirm Press, 2011
(Series: Long Story Shorts, 6)
192pp.
ISBN: 9780980790474
Also available in eBook format

(Review copy courtesy Affirm Press)

* I was tickled to note in her Acknowledgements that Gold spent some time at Varuna Writers’ Centre.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian literary couples

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning

Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (Unknown date and photographer, Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Are you fascinated, like I am, by literary couples? It seems so romantic to share one’s calling with another … even if the reality is not always as idyllic or as successful as it sounds. We’ve all heard of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, to name just a few famous couples. I’m guessing, though, that not many have heard of our Australian couples, but we do have them – and so this week I’m sharing five (from the past) with you.

Vance (1885-1959) and Nettie Palmer (1885-1964)

While Vance and Nettie Palmer are not particularly well-known now (at least to the best of my knowledge), they were extremely significant in their heyday, the 1920s-1950s, as writers, as proponents of Australian literature and as mentors for younger writers. Nettie in particular corresponded with and supported many women writers, including Marjorie Barnard (1897-1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897-1956). They were literary critics and essayists. Vance was also a novelist (I read his The passage many moons ago) and dramatist, while Nettie was also a poet. They were political – egalitarian, anti-Fascist, and tarred, as were many back then, with the “Communist” brush! Their relationship seems to have been a productive and supportive one.

George Johnston (1912-1970) and Charmian Clift (1923-1969)

This is one of those troubled pairings, and it ended in the suicide of Charmian when she was not quite 46. They met in Australia, lived together in England and Greece (where they tried to live on their writing), before returning to Australia with their three children in 1964. Johnston wrote the highly successful My brother Jack, which some see as a contender for the Great Australian Novel and which is the first in a semi-autobiographical trilogy. Charmian wrote two successful autobiographies, Mermaid singing and Peel me a lotus. Both wrote much more across a wide spectrum: novels, essays and other journalistic pieces, short stories, and so on. Theirs was, in the end, one of the more self-destructive rather than mutually supportive relationships. Sad.

Ruth Park (1917-2010) and D’Arcy Niland (1917-1967)

Ruth Park (born in New Zealand) and D’Arcy Niland were more than a literary couple. They created a literary family, with two of their five children, twin daughters Deborah and Kilmeny, becoming successful children’s book writers and illustrators. I have written about Ruth Park before. She and D’Arcy worked as free-lance writers and shared a concern in their writings for the battlers in Australia. They worked hard to survive on their writing, turning their hands to a wide range of forms and genres, including novels, short stories, plays and journalistic pieces. They were, like the Palmers, a successful and happy couple until D’Arcy’s early death.

Rosemary Dobson (b. 1920) and Alec Bolton (1926-1996)

Rosemary and Alec were a little different from the other couples I’ve chosen to discuss here, but I’ve chosen them because they lived in my city, and I (ta-da) met and worked for a few years in the office next door to Alec. Rosemary Dobson is a significant Australian poet who associated with other major Australian poets like A. D. Hope and David Campbell. She has published around 14 volumes of poetry, edited anthologies, and translated poetry from French and Russian. Her husband was not so much a writer as a publisher. According to the AustLit* website he “was a creative force in Australian publishing for almost half a century. After his war service he worked as an editor for Angus & Robertson and Ure Smith before establishing the publishing program at the National Library of Australia”. He established one of those wonderful small presses, Brindabella Press, in 1972 while still working at the Library, and then continued working on it after his retirement. It was a labour of love, and among the authors he published was, of course, his wife!

Dorothy Porter (1954-2008) and Andrea Goldsmith (b. 1950)

Dorothy Porter, whose last book The bee hut I have reviewed here, is (was) another Australian poet. She lived with her partner, the novelist Andrea Goldsmith, for 17 years before she died through cancer in 2008. Goldsmith, whose latest novel The reunion I’ve also reviewed here, said in an interview after Porter’s death that “I’ve always loved Dot’s work – indeed I fell for the poetry before I fell for the poet”. Porter, who also wrote several verse novels, was more prolific than Goldsmith, but both produced well-regarded work during the course of their relationship. Another productive and successful pairing.

Some time ago I read an article about literary couples and the challenges they face: financial (supporting themselves from writing), space (finding room for each to write), and the big one, jealousy or competitiveness. I’m impressed that, despite such issues, four of the five couples I’ve described seem to have been remarkably successful – and this is beautifully exemplified by Ruth Park’s words at the end of her autobiography, Fence around the cuckoo:

We lived together for twenty-five years less five weeks. We had many fiery disagreements but no quarrels, a great deal of shared and companionable literary work, and much love and constancy. Most of all I like to remember the laughter.

After sharing five children and a rather insecure career, that’s pretty impressive.

I’d love to hear about other literary couples – Australian or otherwise, past or present – that you have come across.

* I have not provided a link to this site since most of its content is available by subscription only.

Hazel Rowley, Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage

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First Family of the United States

Roosevelt Family, 1919 (Courtesy: Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, via Wikipedia

I wonder what would make an Australian biographer decide to write about an American couple? And I wonder, having now read Hazel Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage, what she would have made of, say, Joseph and Enid Lyons, Australia’s own political power couple. Unfortunately we’ll never know as Rowley died just around the time this, her latest biography, was released. There is, of course, good reason for writing this story: Franklin and Eleanor are an interesting couple, and they did have an impact on the international stage, as well as their national one.

In her acknowledgements at the end of the book, Rowley writes:

I learned quickly that all sources, both primary and secondary, were unreliable. There was so much that could not be said, even in private letters…

Therein lies the rub for the would-be biographer of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. There’s a lot of primary source material available. They wrote copiously to each other and to others, others wrote copiously to them and to others about them. There are diaries written by many in the Roosevelt circle. There’s Eleanor’s newspaper column, My Day, which she wrote for nearly three decades. And there are memoirs, interviews, and sundry other items documenting their private and public lives. Indeed, even though it’s known that some significant letters were destroyed, the biographer of Franklin and Eleanor is challenged by a surfeit of records, unlike those poor biographers of Jane Austen who try to make a lot out of what is a rather small historical record.

And yet, there are still gaps. This is, in the end, what makes fact different from fiction, isn’t it? When you are writing about real people you cannot know everything in their hearts, you cannot be sure of their real motivations, and so whatever biography we read, no matter how thoroughly researched and well written it is, there are things we will never know. With fiction – and maybe I’m being a little ingenuous – the character only exists in the author’s mind and on the page. Whatever the author tells us is all we can know and we must work with that …

Enough intro, let’s get to the book. Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage is an extraordinary read. The research Rowley did was clearly comprehensive – as the endnotes demonstrate. Rowley takes, she says, a different tack to the other biographies out there by choosing to focus specifically on the marriage. Her thesis is that it was not simply a patched up compromise (after Franklin’s betrayal with Lucy Mercer) or simply a political marriage, but “a joint endeavour, a partnership that made it possible for the Roosevelts to become the spectacular and influential individuals they became”.

And that’s certainly how she presents it … and, moreover, how the evidence she presents suggests it was, though we’ll never know, really, what interior compromises the couple made in terms of their personal happiness. Eleanor was devastated by Franklin’s love affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918, and divorce was apparently mentioned. Threats of disinheritance and of loss of his political career plus, it seems, his love for Eleanor resulted in reconciliation and the marriage continued. However, it did shift gear, particularly after Franklin’s polio attack in 1922, and began to encompass a variety of “romantic friendships” for both. Eleanor wrote, many years later in her book You learn by living that

You must allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it.

That tells us, I think, that the “new” marriage was not easily come by. But it also tells us that it was come by. And so, in the mid-1920s during Franklin’s “recovery” from polio,

Franklin had Warm Springs [resort bought by FDR]; Eleanor had Val-Kill [cottage]. Franklin had Missy; Eleanor had Nancy and Marion. Both had Louis Howe.

The fascinating thing about the Roosevelts is the loyalty they inspired in the people who worked with them. Many of the long-standing friendships and relationships chronicled in the book are with the secretaries, body guards, campaign managers, journalists who were in their employ or worked alongside them. There are stories galore in the book about how they opened their homes, including the White House, to others, enjoying communal living way before the 1960s.

The book is, as I’ve already mentioned, well-researched. Most of what Rowley tells us appears to be based on primary records (that are well documented in the extensive endnotes at the back of the book), and she occasionally indicates when she thinks the “facts” have been modified with an eye on posterity. But there are also times when she makes assumptions, such as her belief that Franklin and Lucy did not have a real “affair” because they had little opportunity to be alone; because Lucy was Catholic, single and probably a virgin; because they would have feared pregnancy; and so on. All logical enough but the facts aren’t known.

While the book is about their marriage, we don’t learn a lot about their parenting style. However, their political life is told at a general level – FDR’s New Deal, CCC and Lend-Lease programmes, his relationship with Churchill, and Eleanor’s political works including her involvement in the creation of the United Nations. We learn a little of how Eleanor’s more radical ideas were tempered by the supportive but more political Franklin. I loved a government official’s description of Eleanor at the United Nations General Assembly:

Never have I seen naiveté and cunning so gracefully blended.

As a 21st century reader, I was also interested in the behaviour of the press and how the extent of FDR’s handicap was either hidden from the press or, sometimes, hidden by the press from the public:

From today’s perspective, it is astounding that the press stuck to the rules. Even journalists who disliked Roosevelt respected the dignity of a handicapped man.

They weren’t perfect though. Towards the end of his life when he was sick and convalescing in the South, FDR was driven in his car one day in front of the press simply to halt the rumours that had started to fly. He apparently said:

Those newspapermen are a bunch of God-damned ghouls.

Little did he know!

It’s a great read – for its analysis of the “extraordinary marriage” and for its picture of the times. I thought, as I read of Eleanor’s debut early in the book, that her young womanhood was somewhat close in time and place to the women who populate Edith Wharton’s novels, but Eleanor, through either luck or good judgement, escaped the lives and fate of those characters. How lucky, really, for the world that she did.

Hazel Rowley
Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage
New York: Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, 2011
345pp.
ISBN: 9780374158576

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Albert Camus on world peace

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How’s this for a bit of communication across cultures: an Australian biographer reporting a French writer commenting on the death of an American president. It comes from the book I’ll be reviewing in the next couple of days, Hazel Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage. In it Rowley quotes Albert Camus on the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945:

‘His face was the very image of happiness,’ Albert Camus wrote in the French Resistance newspaper, Combat. ‘History’s powerful men are not generally men of such good humour … There is not a single free human being who does not regret his loss and who would not have wished his destiny to have continued a little longer. World peace, that boundless good, ought to be planned by men with happy faces rather than by sad-eyed politicians.’

Somehow I didn’t expect something quite so sunny-sounding from Albert Camus, but perhaps I don’t know him as well as I thought I did. We are, I think, more cynical these days about the concept of “world peace” but we can still hope, can’t we? Does anyone know of any happy-faced world leaders out there that we can call on to promote the cause (besides the current Dalai Lama that is)?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers from Victoria

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Coat of Arms of Victoria (Australia)

Victoria's Coat of Arms (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Over the course of these Monday musings have been occasional posts on writers from specific geographic locations in Australia – but I have not done our two most populous regions, the states of Victoria and New South Wales. The time has come to confront there two – and so, today, I present you Victoria.

Now Victoria is a special state – not only does Mr Gums Jr live there, but its capital Melbourne was the second city to be designated as a UNESCO City of Literature! That’s a pretty impressive achievement. I have written some literary road posts on Victoria, which have mostly focused on writers and works from the past, so in this post I will, as I have done in other regional posts, list (in no particular order) five of my favourite current writers from Victoria – some were born there, some migrated there.

Helen Garner

Garner is one of our most controversial writers – and has been, really, since the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip, which some critics argued was simply her writing her own life. They meant by this that it had no creative merit, no literary value. This didn’t deter our Helen though, and she has gone on to become one of our significant writers – of both fiction and non-fiction. She has also written some successful screenplays. She writes about relationships and the things that cause disconnects between people, no matter how much they wish it might not be so. As regular readers of this blog will know, I don’t always agree with Garner, but I am always happy to read her because the woman has style. I’ve read too many of hers to list here, but if you’d like a recommendation, please ask!

Elliot Perlman

You may not have heard of Perlman, particularly if you are not Australian, because he is not particularly prolific. The first novel of his that I read was the multiple point of view Seven types of ambiguity (which makes a sly reference to literary theorist William Empson‘s book of the same name). It’s a good, thoughtful book about love and obsession, and the ambiguities therein! I then read Three dollars which explores the question of what happens “when bad things happen to good people” and how consumerism challenges (compromises) our values. It was adapted for film, starring the gorgeous David Wenham (aka Diver Dan if you are a Sea Change fan). Both these novels are set in Melbourne. According to Wikipedia he has a third novel out this year.

Arnold Zable

If you have been reading this blog recently, Arnold Zable will need no introduction. His focus is human rights, with a particular interest in the migrant experience. I’ve read two of his novels – Cafe Scheherazade and The sea of many returns – and will happily read more. His prose is lovely, his attitude warm and generous. I’m looking forward to reading his new novel, Violin lessons.

Beverley Farmer

I’m going to throw in a somewhat forgotten, I think, writer here. Way back in 1988 when my reading group started, we focussed on Australian writers, particularly Australian women writers. One of those was Beverley Farmer. We read her collection of short stories Milk and not long after I also read her second collection of short stories, Home time. Both these were published in the 1980s. She has also written novels, and one of those writers’ notebooks, A body of water, in which she documented her ideas and thoughts over a year, the books she was reading, the people she met. I was drawn to her because of the evocative way she conveyed her experience of being a young Australian wife in a Greek village. Like Perlman, she’s not prolific, but in 2009 she was awarded the Patrick White Award (for writers who “have made a substantial contribution to Australian literature but … may not have received adequate recognition for their work”) which says something about the quality of her work.

Peter Carey

I’ll conclude on another controversial writer. People, it seems, either love him or hate him – and I fall more in the first camp. He is one of only two writers to have won the Booker Prize twice. I have by no means read all of his books but I like the fact that he takes risks in his writing. I think his Oscar and Lucinda is a worthy contender for the Great Australian Novel (should we take that notion seriously). His True history of the Kelly Gang makes a significant contribution to the Ned Kelly myth by attempting to tell the story in Kelly’s voice. It is not all “true” in the factual sense, but it contains a “truth” that Carey thought worth exploring. His most recent novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, took more risks – in voice and subject matter. Carey, as many of you will know, now lives in New York, but he was born in Victoria – and that’s good enough for this post!

So there you are, five Victorian writers. Now’s your chance to tell me what Victorian writers you like – or simply whether the writers I’ve listed here interest you.

Willa Cather, When I knew Stephen Crane

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American author Stephen Crane in 1899

Stephen Crane, 1899 (Photographer unknown; Presumed public domain, via Wikipedia)

I haven’t reviewed a Library of America offering for a while and so have decided it’s time I dipped again into its offerings. Willa Cather‘s essay/journalistic piece “When I knew Stephen Crane”, which they published last month, appealed to me because of a couple of synchronicities. One is that Lisa of ANZLitLovers reviewed Crane’s The red badge of courage a few days ago, reminding me that I have yet to read Crane. The other is a little more obscure. Colleen of Bookphilia wrote a post earlier this week in which she complained about Anthony Trollope‘s admission that he would, in order to meet a deadline, submit work that he believed was not very good. The synchronicity is that in her essay Cather writes that Crane

gave me to understand that he led a double literary life; writing in the first place the matter that pleased himself, and doing it very well; in the second place, any sort of stuff that would sell. And he remarked that his poor was just as bad as it could possibly be …

Not having read Crane, I don’t know whether he really did present poor stuff, but Colleen, I suspect, would not be impressed with this admission!

“When I knew Stephen Crane” was first published in 1900, two weeks after Crane’s death. It documents 21-year-old Cather’s meeting with 23-year-old Crane in 1895 at the offices of the Nebraska State Journal not long after the journal had published The red badge of courage. The introductory notes state that she changed some facts and suggests she did this “to foretell his tragic fate and to reflect [her] own interest in writing and literature”. I can believe this may be the case as the article is peppered with foreshadowings of his early death. Nonetheless, the notes argue that her report “sounds authentic”.

Certainly, she doesn’t try to present him in a heroic light. She describes him as “thin to emaciation, his face was gaunt and unshaven … His grey clothes were much the worse for wear … He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a necktie.” He had, in other words, “a disreputable appearance”. She writes that she had read and helped edit, for the journal, The red badge of courage:

… the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty that the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the careless sentence structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable performance.

She writes eloquently of her moment of revelation from Crane, saying that

The soul has no message for the friends with whom we dine every week. It is silenced by custom and convention … It selects its listeners wilfully, and seemingly delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who meets us in the highway at a fated hour.

Hmm … I think there’s a lot of truth in this, at least in my experience as a giver and receiver of such “messages”. Anyhow, Cather, on a night when “the white, western moonlight threw sharp, blue shadows below us”, felt lucky to have had such a moment with Crane, one in which he talks about his craft, “his slow method of composition”. He tells her that while The red badge of courage had been written in 9 days, he had been unconsciously working on it throughout his boyhood. He also tells her that it would be months after he got an idea for a story before he’d feel able to write it:

‘The detail of a thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a native product, but it takes forever’, he remarked.

Cather also briefly refutes the criticism by some that Crane is “the reporter in fiction”, arguing that his newspaper account of a shipwreck he’d experienced was “lifeless” but his “literary product” (“The open boat”) was “unsurpassed in its vividness and constructive perfection”.

She concludes the article on a somewhat sentimental note which is not surprising given its publication so soon after his death … but even this sentimentality is expressed in the robust language that we know Cather for:

He drank life to the lees, but at the banquet table where other men took their ease and jested over their wine, he stood a dark and silent figure, sombre as Poe himself, not wishing to be understood …

It is for Cather’s own writing and her insights into character, as much as for what I learnt about Crane, that I enjoyed reading this offering from LOA. I will still, however, read Crane one day.

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Arnold Zable on survival and stories

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Arnold Zable is not, I believe, very well-known even in Australia, but I think he is a beautiful writer. He has a lovely way with words but, more importantly I think, his writing is warm and generous. I’ve read two of his novels – Cafe Scheherazade and Sea of many returns – and enjoyed them both. Zable was born in 1947 in New Zealand to Polish-Jewish refugees, a fact which clearly has driven his interest in human rights in general, and the migrant experience in particular. He has a new book out – Violin lessons – and so I thought now would be a good time to introduce him.

Cafe Scheherazade (2001), which is based on the stories told by Jewish refugees in the real Cafe Scheherazade in Melbourne, is, as much as anything, about survival – and, as is obvious from the title, about the importance of stories to this survival.

… but they persist with their opinions as if to argue is to know they are alive. They continue to tell their tales, as if to talk is to know they have survived.

and …

I feel the limits of my craft, the limits of what words can convey.

and …

panic … that … I would perish; and my tales would perish with me.

and, reflecting the practice of many survivors of the Holocaust (and other trauma) …

This is when the stories began to be suppressed … an urgent need to forget and to rebuild their aborted lives.

It’s a beautiful book … and well-worth reading if you ever get the chance.

PS If you Google Cafe Scheherazade Melbourne you’ll find some images (including those from a play that was adapted from the book) but I couldn’t find any that were free for me to use here.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Japanese poetry in Australia

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Engraved writings by Suiin Emi, Onomichi

Haiku by Suiin Emi, along the Path of Literature in Onimichi, Japan

Papa Gums loves to give me clippings of obituaries that he knows will interest me. Last week, from his hospital bed, he gave me one for an Australian poet I’d never heard of, Janice Bostock. She was, according to the obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, “one of Australia’s leading writers of Japanese poetic forms”, and won awards here and overseas. She particularly loved haiku.

Haiku, I must say, was the only form of Japanese poetry I had heard of until my first trip to Japan in 2006 when, on the railway station of our son’s tiny town of Tsugawa, we met an ex-teacher at his school who was heading off to her annual tanka conference. Tanka? Well, we discovered that tanka is an older Japanese verse form than haiku, and its basic structure is 5-7-5-7-7 “onji” (which we roughly translate to “syllables”). I guess most people reading this blog will know that haiku’s structure is 5-7-5. And here endeth the lesson on Japanese verse forms because the story is far more complicated than I’ve presented here, both in terms of these forms and other forms I haven’t mentioned. You can Google if you want to know more!

Bostock, who is briefly mentioned in the Wikipedia article on haiku in English, described haiku as “one-breath poems”, meaning that each poem “spans the length of one breath”. She also, and this was another new thing to me, practised a variation of haiku called “one line haiku”. Here is one quoted in her obituary:

no money for the busker I try not to listen

The obituary says that Bostock created the market for haiku in Australia by founding a journal called Tweed. She also wrote – and this of course appeals to me – The gum tree conversations. This was a series of articles aimed at showing “the relevance of haiku to the Australian landscape and experience”. Eventually her work led to the foundation of the Australian Haiku Society in 2000, of which she was patron at the time of her death. She was clearly a busy, engaged and passionate woman.

And so, haiku is alive and well in Australia … and it seems appropriately so. John Bird, who co-edited The first Australian Haiku Anthology with Bostock, has described haiku as follows: “a brief poem, built on sensory images from the environment. It evokes an insight into our world and its peoples.” As I understand it, haiku tends to involve the juxtaposition of two ideas or images in a way that a relationship is drawn between them. Australia, with its stark, dramatic environment, its odd vegetation and its strange creatures, must provide excellent subject matter for this sort of writing. Here is an Aussie haiku by E.A. Horne:

Brown paddock
Brown sheep
Blue bloody sky.

You can feel the pain of a farmer facing drought! It’s from an article first published in 2006 in the Australian poetry magazine, Five bells. Reeves, the author, says that “Contemporary haiku rarely consist of 17 syllables, may be written in one to four lines, and don’t have to be about the seasons. What they seek to retain is the brevity, clarity, immediacy and resonance of Japanese haiku and to record and share a moment of seeing”. I’m no expert in haiku, but it’s a form that appeals to me – because of this brevity that gives rise to a spareness, an attempt to pare to the essence of a thing. There’s no opportunity in haiku for effusive or loquacious explorations!

Tanka poems show a similar restraint and so, because it’s nicely appropriate, I’ll conclude with one of those:

our front yard gum
grown from a sapling
to a giant –
all those black cockatoos
fair exchange for a lawn

(Michael Thorley, Eucalypt Issue 1, 2006)

Are you familiar with – and do you like – these tiny poetic forms?