ON HAPPINESS

 

IN Colm Toibin’s BROOKLYN, Eilis makes the sudden decision to leave her mother and friends in small town provincial Ireland to return to Brooklyn and a future that is more daring, filled with promise and potential, but infinitely risky. She does this because she thinks this course is the one that is most likely to bring her happiness.

In Alex Miller’s equally beautiful CONDITIONS OF FAITH, Emily Elder makes the sudden decision to stay in Europe and abandon her French husband and her new born child. It is a decision that is even more risky and momentous than Eilis’. When she tells her husband Georges of her decision whilst they are dancing at a Paris nightclub, he asks her ‘why?’, which is a fair enough question. She tells him it is because she is not content. His response is ‘Content? For Christ’s sake, no-one’s content.’

They are both interesting ideas because they are weighty decisions filled with risk. Each person knows something is lacking and they know they just need something more. To say that ‘no one’s content’ seems pretty meaningless to me. These are the cowards like most of us, me included, who travel on the road already taken, and are not prepared to risk everything for a life that could be so much better. Maybe the doors haven’t opened sufficiently. Maybe the mindset will mean that the doors will never open up, or widely enough. The world is filled with risktakers like Eilis and Emily, but they pale into significance when compared with the multitudes of us who settle for what they have.

It must be about security. It is just too scary to risk giving up all you have strived for. Joni Mitchell, in her song HEJIRA, sings ‘You know it never has been easy/ Whether you do or you do not resign/ Whether you travel the breadth of extremities/ Or stick to some straighter line.’ Mmmm… ‘travelling the breadth of extremities.’ It sounds easy enough.

Georges said ‘no-one’s content’, and I wonder how true this is. I read somewhere, posted on a wall for everyone to see, that you should be careful criticising someone else because you never know ‘what particular shit they may be going through.’ In many ways, I would love to be someone like Eilis or Emily. I don’t mean chucking everything in, after all that’s not what they were doing. They weren’t suicidal. Emily was wanting to continue her archaeological studies and her European adventure. Eilis was going back to Brooklyn to meet her husband and start their American dream. Both wanted more of being foreigners in a foreign land.

If there is anything that would make me truly happy, or even ‘content’- Emily’s word-( I am not even sure how close to ‘happiness’ this is),  it would be to go back to being a foreigner again. Van Morrison on ASTRAL WEEKS says ‘I’m nothin’ but a stranger in this world…’. Both Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Plath were strangers in a strange world. Both refused to go back to a potentially easier life with family in their home lands.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I arrived in the UK with my wife and began a European adventure of my (our) own. I dreamt of the day multitudes of times growing up where I could have Cornwall, Somerset, Yorkshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, at my fingertips. And then suddenly I did. I had experiences I will never forget, including motoring holidays around Italy and France and Switzerland. But was I content? After just over two years of this I suddenly wanted to ‘come home.’

Coming home. I will probably take this to my grave as the biggest mistake of my life. I look at Emily and Eilis with profound respect for the decisions that they made, how they chose the road not taken. But if we are ever going to live a life where we ever feel even remotely ‘content’ we have to live with these decisions, or doing something extraordinarily wild and unpredictable, and ‘travel the breadth of extremities’ like the trailblazers that have done this before us.

So, I salute those who are foreigners in foreign lands. I wish I could join you. But I also know many of you have given up important things and made extreme sacrifices along the way.

I come back once again to Nick Cave’s ‘There is a town…’

‘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’

I have no doubt that Eilis and Emily thought of home every day. And perhaps Sylvia and Katherine as well. Were they content? Well, illness and fate always play a part. I like to think that things worked out well for the fictional Eilis and Emily. For Sylvia Plath and Katherine Mansfield… the former took her life through gassing herself at age 30, and the latter died of tuberculosis at just 34. For the rest of us? Well we live a lot longer- most of us- snug in our protective cocoons, a satisfying, safe life, or a life devoid of mystery and filled with mediocrity… depending on your point of view.

 

Letter to Simon Read- remembering 20 years ago

 

HI Simon/Pauline

Did you know it has been almost 20 years since you picked us up in the pouring rain at Bearsted station, way back in October of 2000.

As people often say, I don’t know where the time has gone. But one thing I do know is that I have thought about England almost every day since we returned in December 2003. J says I was desperate to come home, but as I sometimes tell her, within minutes of arriving at my parents’ house after flying home, I felt ready to go back. And of course, probably for a few different reasons, we never did.

I think about England all the time, as I have already said. I think about each of the various schools, especially MGGS. I think about our frequent trips to London and seeking out bookshops along Charing Cross Road, and Ulysses in Museum Street, and countless others. I think about drives to lots and lots of villages and towns like Hawkshurst and Aylesford in Kent, and Ludlow and Much Wenlock in Shropshire, and Kingsand and Zennor in Cornwall. And I think about the various National Trust homes like Cotehele, also in Cornwall, and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and Monk’s House in Sussex. And of course all the D H Lawrence houses we visited, such as Mountain Cottage, and Chapel Farm Cottage and The Triangle and the long barn at Greatham, and the various other writers’ retreats, like the Bronte’s, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath's grave.

I think about all the counties and our travels in them, including ventures into Wales (my favourite ever holiday), Scotland, and Ireland to meet Colm Toibin, and great short holidays traversing Somerset and Wiltshire and Devon, and up higher, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and even as high up as the Lakes District, northern Wales and Yorkshire and Northumberland.

We lived, distinctly, for periods in 3 main counties if you recall- Nottingham, Newent in Gloucestershire, and of course the beloved Maidstone, in Kent.

Now I arrive at my fondest memory. And perhaps the greatest pleasure of my life. Living with you and Pauline on Gravelley Bottom Road, sharing your upstairs, having lots of day trips, such as the Churchill home, and Sissinghurst, Sutton Vallence, Sittingbourne. Negotiating your terrible shower. Beautiful walks amongst the leaves in the expansive backyard. Playing with Missy and Tiger on the stairs. You kindly getting cars for us. Your mother looking after us and taking us out to get food at Nettoes and not wanting us in the kitchen. The degus’ in their cage. Visits by Caroline and her kids and David, who would find all of this horribly sentimental. Remember our trip to (I think) to Elham for fox hunting protests, where you drove like we were on an autobahn, seeing you work in your garage and going to the dance together, seeing you in banger racing at Ipswich, the local cinema in Maidstone where we saw the Hannibal Lecter film, eating out expensively at the Tickled Trout, and meeting your interesting friends, the car mechanics, the one from Liverpool I think called Paul and the one who died suddenly, who used to go the pub called ‘The Sugar Loaves’, possibly Wayne, and walking along the Medway and seeing Leeds Castle. The list goes on.

I will never forget those days. They fill me with joy just thinking about them, but they also fill me with sadness because of some personal regrets, and how much I miss everything and would love to have it back again. But of course, time marches on and it is difficult to recapture things that you once loved and experienced. I dream, often, of England, and one recurring dream in particular is this one where I am on the verging of coming home to Australia and I am filled with so much dread about having to leave… and yet J says this was not how I was- almost 20 years ago.

I hear that you are still in the house, and Pauline is with you, and even Camilla is close by. What an incredible experience it would be for me to return and sit in the backyard and have everyone around us again. I have lots of photos of this time. We all look young and healthy and optimistic. It feels like another life ago. If you get time let me know what you remember and love to everyone, especially Pauline who was so good to us. In my dreams I am sitting with J, and you and Pauline, and we are in the conservatory, and we have just arrived, a day or tow, and it is cold but I am cradling your book of English villages, and my heart is racing and I feel like I am on top of the world.

I leave you with the foreword to a book I put together about our travels. I must show you some day. All the best,

DH XXX

ENGLAND TRIP VOL 1

PREFACE

I WILL never forget the first days of the beginning of our pilgrimage after arriving in England towards the end of the year 2000. We had got married in Sunbury, spend a few weeks in Sri Lanka, then caught a train to London from Heathrow, then a bus to Bearstead near Maidstone, Kent. Simon Read collected us in the pouring rain at night. The next day, still no doubt jetlagged, we sat in Pauline’s conservatory. She placed a thick hardback in my hand. It was a book about English towns and villages. In my heightened and excited state, I had not fathomed our relative proximity to places like Italy, France and Austria. It was enough that it was England on our doorstep. 

England, my England. The names and maps ran off the page, like the Melbourne ‘Melway’, but a thousand times more exciting. Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire. Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. Mevagissey, Cornwall. Haworth, Lancashire. Bambridge, Northumberland. Much Wenlock, Shropshire. The names rolled on and on, all inspiring. I used the index and found many names that were familiar because of my research and reading. Morris, Lawrence, Plath, Hardy, Burne-Jones. Towns associated with glorious people. Even little Edenbridge, quite close by, where Lawrence stayed with Edward Garnett. 

My imagination ran wild and I felt like I had entered a new, golden sphere, a little like the character in the Woody Allen film called ‘Midnight In Paris’, who finds himself in 1920’s Fitzgerald-era Paris. Except I hadn’t travelled into the past. The present, alone, was entirely sufficient and satisfying. Pauline’s little conservatory was crackling with life and electricity.

 

 

 

Christmas 2018, reflection

Christmas, 2018

ON this Christmas Eve, of 2018, in this spacious lounge room, in this moderately sized house, in this fairly large suburb and this fairly highly populated city of Melbourne, in this large country and continent called Australia, as part of an overall tiny little plot or particle of a much bigger world or planet, I sit here contemplating the year I have had and wishing, like Sylvia Plath, I could have more days of inspiration:

‘On the stiff twig up there

Hunches a wet black rook

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident

To set the sight on fire

In my eye, not seek

Any more in the desultory weather some design,

But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

Without ceremony, or portent.’

I look for inspiration in the joy that others give me- the words of Sylvia Plath in poems like ‘Contusion’ and ‘Medusa’, the comfort I feel from listening to ‘Astral Weeks’ and lately rediscovering the joy of Paul McCartney, trying to feel grateful for the prolonged time spent living in England and in my mind recalling the Yorkshire moors and the rugged coastlines of Cornwall and Northumberland, playing netball in the backyard with the family, gazing on my beautiful books through the glass of my treasured bookcase, feeling tired but nourished work-wise…

In terms of heightened feelings of joy or anticipation, or experiencing a sense of wonder, or being moved by the simplicity of a beautiful wave or the colours of a fallen leaf, or that sense of uncontrollable laughter or bliss and breathless awareness or serendipity, joie de vivre, even transfiguration, rebirth, enlightenment, effulgence, epiphany, transmutation… I will be patient and await another year.

Contacting my angel, contacting my angel
She's the one, she's the one, that satisfies
Contacting my angel she's the one that satisfies
She's the one that I adore

In a telepathic message for my baby
In a little village, through the fog
Here comes my baby, I can tell, I can tell
By the way she walks
Said I've been on a journey up the mountain side
And I drank the water from the stream
It was pure, pure water and I got completely healed

I met a presence on the mountain side
And he looked so radiant and he was the
Youth of eternal summers
Like a sweet bird of youth in my soul
In my soul, in my soul, in my soul, in my soul
In my soul, in my soul, in my soul

(Van Morrison)

ON BEING IN ADELAIDE

WHEN D H Lawrence went to Florence to live in the late 1920’s, he found himself writing to friends about Florence and the Florentine people, within hours of first arriving. Rebecca West is witness to this, and I remember she was impressed that he could sum up a people and their character so quickly. Well, if he can accomplish this, then why shouldn’t I have a go? We have been in Adelaide about twelve hours.

Admittedly, I do have a past connection with Adelaide. I have been here before. Actually, I lived here once, albeit fairly briefly. Today, however, I am seeing it with fresh eyes, not having visited in quite a while.

Adelaide is filled with contradictions. My impression today is that it is getting better. People from the bigger cities, like Melbourne and Sydney, have always seen Adelaide as a sleeping cousin. Young people who grow up in Adelaide often want to leave when they are about 18 to find new, more fulfilling adventures, like Melbourne and Sydney people seeking London. It is true Adelaide is a bit country townish, but perhaps less so now than it was last time I was here.

Today I have walked around the commercial precincts. Nothing much has changed here. The shops are contemporary and sophisticated enough, but it was deathly quiet in David Jones and Myer. There were, conversely, a lot of people of both sexes walking up and down Rundle Street wearing shorts. I found a library that might be pretty new. I don’t remember seeing it before. It’s called the ‘City Library’ and it was busy and relaxing. There is lots going on roadworks-wise on North Terrace, which is where the State Library is. Could it be that it has popped up whilst the State Library is out of bounds?

Later on, we went to the other end of the city down Hindley Street (I always seem to go to the same places when I go to Adelaide). There are seemingly new lanes and little hubs of people eating and drinking quietly. We found the back entrance of the hotel where we are staying, called the ‘Ambassadors’. I was impressed by the life of the city at dinner-time on a Tuesday night. I think it’s a good sign, that a city is feeling good and prosperous, if so many people are out and about on a Tuesday night.

Tonight, I ran from here, 107 King William Street, to the Piccadilly Cinema on O’Connell Street in North Adelaide. So all along King William Street on a pleasant, warm night, over the bridge that crosses the Torrens, past the beautifully revamped Adelaide Oval, across a path that leads you directly into the mouth of St Peters Cathedral (which was chiming madly), and along O’Connell Street to the Picadilly Cinema where many years ago I had the pleasure of seeing Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’, via any number of busy restaurants and the iconic Oxford Hotel.

I said before that Adelaide is filled with contradictions. Today, as much as any other time I have visited, I have been aware of the genteel aspect of the city. Here it feels treacherous somehow to do something so simple as jaywalk. The people are so polite, that they always walk to the Grenfell Street corner, or the Currie Street corner, before they cross King William Street. It is the same when waiting a long time for the North Terrace lights or the Rundle Mall/ Pulteney Street corner. People also walk in a leisurely way, and chat amicably to the friend next to them. There is little sense of dog eat dog and rushing for the lights and crossing on any section of the road and frantic anxious pace. People actually queue orderly, for buses and the like, just as it would have been in the 1950’s. And yet, Adelaide is supposed to have this underbelly of danger and murder and broken glass and blood. It is true, apparently, that the murder rate per capita is quite high, or at least it used to be.  And amidst all this, you do have Hindley Street, which is one of the dodgiest streets around, especially at night. Even today when we walked about it, we saw a young woman, probably a teenage girl, in fact, being searched by police, her hands up against the wall. A casual glance, and you could see she had a bag of white powder extricated from her handbag, and a few sharp knives, of all things.

The other very noticeable thing for me this time is its Anglo-Celtic whiteness. Yes, there are Aboriginals, and tourists and other visitors, yet the vast majority of people seem to be very white, not many Asian, barely any Muslim, very few African, or it seems, Lebanese, Turkish or Greek.

It really reminds me of Kent, UK, in relation to the rest of England. Over there, you have this little early twentieth century bubble of whiteness in Kent, the England of yesteryear, villages, and village greens, and English fare for food and castles and oast houses and English heritage and old-fashioned cooking, the lark ascending, the gentle Medway, nothing really that resembles the rest of England. And it is like this here in Adelaide too. People here have their little cushion of comfort, and go out with their families on hot nights to have pizza and beer, and apart from some of these new buildings and new shops and restaurants, Adelaide might be the same as it was about 50 or 60 years ago. And good luck to them if that’s how they like it. But travel to the real world one day- perhaps with the exception of Kent- and your head might go into a little spin.