There is a town...

I HEARD the news today, oh boy. Apparently Dustin Hoffman helped a jogger in Hyde Park in London, after the jogger had suffered a heart attack. I am very hazy on the details- just a 20 second radio grab. But all these thoughts about London tumbled into my mind on the way to the train station. I never lived there though- only visited lots of times- but oh, to be back there again.

My days in London typically consisted of the horrendous drive from Maidstone to London. The busy traffic, the many lanes, the navigation around Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square, on the way to my sister-in-law's pad in Shad Thames. Or, less bravely, the Greenline bus from Maidstone, taking a lot longer, and the train from Bearsted Station in Maidstone to Victoria Station.



Once in London, finding myself near Fleet Street, there was a walk around the corner to see the beautiful Van Gogh and Leonardo paintings at the National Gallery, as well as Seurat's huge 'Bather's' (Une Baignade) near the front entrance. Then a skip across the road to the National Portrait Gallery, and Bramwell Bronte's famous portrait of his sisters. Outside are the black marble lions that Sylvia Plath sat amongst and drew some 50 or so years ago.


Visiting and staying at Shad Thames, Tower Bridge was around the corner. I remember Catherine Deneuve (as Carol) wandering languidly in Polanski's 'Repulsion', the Tower Bridge in the background. I would always visit my favourite second bookshops, at Long Acre in Covent Garden (Bertram Rota), the magnificent 'Ulysses' bookshop in Museum Street, and on the other side of London the molto expensive Peter Harrington's and Simon Finch. London's antiquarian bookshops leave Melbourne for dead.



The blue plaques always fascinated me. My favourites were the ones in Hampstead Heath- D H Lawrence in Well Walk (circa 1915) and Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry living in the block known as 'the Elephant' (or Portland Villas) on East Heath Road, I think it was. There are blue plaques everywhere- Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury, naturally, and the one poor Sylvia Plath shares with W B Yeats on Fitzroy Road near Primrose Hill, in which she suffered for a time the coldest London winter for many years, at the start of 1963.



London offers so many other grand adventures, and I would visit and re-visit the lovely green William Morris dining room at the Victoria and Albert, walk through Kensington Gardens to get to High Street, feel lit up inside walking along Whitehall seeing all the treasures, and find myself in one of the greatest corners of the modern world, up there with the streets snaking around the Spanish Steps in Rome, and the left and right bank of the Seine- the corner in which rests Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.


In London one Christmas, on the eve of my departure to Melbourne, I bought Ian McEwan's 'Atonement' for the plane ride. It wasn't snowy but there was a fog in the streets and it was icy cold. Lamps along Regent Street glowed and I looked towards the sadly now defunct Cafe Royal, imagining Oscar Wilde smoking cigarettes on its steps, and remembering the Domino Room which I was kindly shown where D H Lawrence talked of 'rananim' with his friends and became drunk and vomited sometime in the twenties.



I miss London a great deal, both new and old parts, places reuilt after the bombings of the war around Bank and St Paul's Cathedral, and going to the pictures at the Barbican seeing profoundly non-commercial cinema and the Australian Film Festival when it was on. I miss London a lot, but I miss the rest of England more- I miss Cornwall, and Bath, and Yorkshire, and Northumberland and Shropshire and Kent, all terribly, but I am reminded again and again of the Nick Cave song- 'There Is A Town' from the album Nocturama, yes the grass is always greener, blah, blah, blah.



'There is a town
Where I was born
Far far away
Across the sea

And in that town
Where I was born
I would dream
That one day
I would leave
And cross the sea

And so it goes
And so it seems
That God lives only in our dreams
In our dreams

And now I live
In this town
I walk these dark streets
Up and down, up and down
Under a dark sky
And I dream
That one day
I'll go back home

And so it goes
And so it seems
That God lives only in our dreams
In our dreams.'

Books with female protagonists

I HAVE read a number of memorable novels that feature female protagonists. Anne Elliot in Persuasion comes to mind, as well as Anna Karenina (although it could be argued that Kitty and Levin are just as crucial in this novel), and Emily Elder in Conditions of Faith, Eilis Lacey in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, and so on and so on.

Of late I have read a few more novels that feature strong central female characters, all interesting and unique in their own right. I found The Member of the Wedding to be up there with my favourite reads. Frankie is a misfit teenager who would like to be older than she is. There are a number of memorable passages that show her restlessness and naivety, especially in connection with her soldier boy acquaintance who tries to take advantage of her. In her meanderings and uncertainties she reminded me of a girl in another Southern story- As I Lay Dying (one of my favourite novels), a girl called Dewey Dell from memory. Carson McCullers other great book is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter which I tried to describe elsewhere.  I didn’t enjoy Reflections of a Golden Eye, or The Ballad of the Sad Café nearly as much as these other two. However, in all four of her important novels she has created memorable outsiders, both male and female; all seemingly unusual and complex people that struggle to fit in with those around them, but with the same needs and desires as the rest of us. They remind me of the type of characters that attracted Montgomery Clift when he searched for film roles. He almost played in the film version of Reflections of a Golden Eye as a matter of fact, however death got in the way (in 1966) and Marlon Brando took over. Tennessee Williams, also from the South, writes about people like this too, Blanche being the obvious example.

Then when I finished with McCullers, I somehow came across Muriel Spark on the library bookshelves. The Driver’s Seat was intriguing. I read it twice, which I don’t normally do, just so I could pick up a few more subtleties that exist in the storyline. Muriel Spark’s writing is a little avant garde. The Driver’s Seat is about an eccentric woman named Lise who is desperate to get to Italy for a holiday. The reader thinks she is looking for male company for a relationship, however it soon becomes apparent that she is looking for someone who will be able to kill her because she wishes to die what she sees as the perfect death. We find this out during the course of the novel- in fact, very early on we discover that she is going to eventually die- which is an interesting aspect of Spark’s narrative style- this kind of flash forward. In the end I didn’t really care for Lise’s eccentricities, and the book left me quickly.

Another book of hers that features this ‘flash forward’ style is The Prime of Jean Brodie. Jean Brodie is a school teacher who cultivates a young group of impressionable girls that are heavily influenced by her and become known as ‘the Brodie set.’ The Headmistress doesn’t approve of Jean Brodie’s unorthodox methods and is looking for an excuse to be able to dismiss her. The girls, however,  are loyal to her for a long time. Instead of teaching the regular curriculum, she is secretly talking to them about art, literature, the imagination, and controversially (it is slightly pre- WW2), Mussolini and the Blackshirts. Jean Brodie favours the Italian Fascists, and this will be the trigger to have her removed, when one of her girls eventually decides to become disloyal. Jean Brodie is amusingly and refreshingly different, non-comformist and rebellious in a lot of ways. In other ways she is self-indulgent, reckless and egotistical, so I had a very ambivalent attitude towards her. When she is being dogmatic and supercilious she is very aggravating. She keeps telling the girls she is in the ‘prime of her life’ which is doubtful anyway. Once again Spark offers ‘flash forwards’, so we find out the fate of the ‘Brodie set’ early on- Mary will die in a hotel fire in a certain year for example, etc, etc and Jean Brodie will be dismissed from her school. One thing that we do have to wait a long time to find out is ‘which one of her set will become the disloyal one?’ And, as in the case of a good Agatha Christie novel, it is quite difficult to predict.

Judging by these two stories, Muriel Spark is a clever writer but not a magical one for me. The writing didn’t enthral me like the writing of someone like Carson McCullers. And yet, in the book ‘1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die’, Muriel Spark has four entries, and Carson McCullers has none! Give me Carson McCuller’s anytime, with her fascinating people and their utterly convincing flaws and predicaments.