Looking For, and Finding, The Lost Girl

I STARTED reading short stories and novels by D H Lawrence in 1989. At the time I was living in Wangaratta. I was browsing books at a newsagent on the main street. I didn’t know many people in the town. I had a lot of time on my hands. I’d read the odd short story during my university days. Probably about six or seven. The Rocking Horse Winner and You Touched Me, among others. Two of his best stories. So there I was in Wangaratta, with plenty of time on my hands and wanting to get back into reading, looking for a good cause to devote my energies to. Perhaps I had even read Sons & Lovers by then. And here it was, a paperback version of the Keith Sagar illustrated biography. I was hooked. His story was powerful, and led me in the following months to devour The Trespasser, Lady Chatterley, The Rainbow, Women In Love, etc, etc. but this wasn’t enough. Soon I found myself buying the hardback CUP editions of his letters, all eight volumes of them. Well, as they say, the rest is history- many first editions of books by him and about him, mostly courtesy of Michael Logie in Adelaide, and eventually visiting houses he once inhabited, in countries like England and Italy.

This past two years I have been wandering around, doing my job, carrying a tacky Penguin embossed aluminium water bottle of The Lost Girl (1920). It has occurred to me, on and off, that this is one of the few novels that has slipped my grasp. I had never read it. If people asked me about, I, the so-called ‘Lawrence expert’ would go totally blank. So I thought I had better do something about.

This past week I have had a couple of days where I found some rare space, some real solitude. I found a copy besides my first edition in the Niddrie library. One of those green ‘Phoenix’ copies. I found myself at the zoo the other day. The kids went off with some other kids and some adults, and I had a 3-4 hour stint alone next door to the carousel. I saw kid, after kid, after kid line up and go off on their $3.95 ride. But most of the time I was engrossed on this bench seat next to the carousel, reading The Lost Girl. By the time I was re-united with everybody, I was just over half way through. And, as everyone knows, the second half of any book is easier and quicker to devour than the first half.

I finished The Lost Girl that night, or the next day, I’m not sure. Reading, to me, and especially reading D H Lawrence, is a great adventure. The next port of call was the CUP volume of letters- Vol III, I think, marking the period leading up to and around 1920. Here, Lawrence was living in Taormina, Sicily, and quickly writing his novel (the novel was initially started, then abandoned, back in 1913 when Lawrence was still in England). So here were all the interesting references to his friends in his letters about the novel he was currently working on in Taormina. Initially it was called The Insurrection of Miss Houghton (!), then I think Mixed Marriage, and finally The Lost Girl (his publisher was apparently concerned that libraries would be scared away from this title- this was not long after the controversy of The Rainbow, you see).

So evidently Lawrence had great fun writing The Lost Girl, and thought it would be a success. The next thing to read was Vol II of the III part CUP biographies. Vol II covers the period around the 1920’s, and here was a great discussion about Lawrence’s intentions and his life at this time.  As is typical with Lawrence, the so-called ‘scandalous’ sections raised the most questions. Alvina Houghton is the daughter of a middle class businessman, owner of Manchester House drapery firm, and later joins a travelling theatre group as they play to audiences around England. Here she meets the working class Italian man with green eyes called Ciccio. Twice Alvina and Ciccio make love in the story- Alvina is a virgin until she meets Ciccio, well into her thirties. It is fairly dominant love-making, weighted on the male side, and according to the Lawrence scholar, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, there might be some anal sex in it as well (although I could not really pick that up in reading the sections he alludes to). So as it turns out, there are three variants in the Secker (English) first edition. The second variant, which is the one I have, has tipped in pages based on Lawrence’s apparently controversial intent. The first variant contained the altered text that was used to satisfy the prudishness of the libraries. The third variant (I think) contains Lawrence’s original intentions, not tipped in. all this is in the Lawrence bibliography I own, so I could pore over this with the second variant in my other hand.

Then there was the internet. The Australian scholar, Sandra Jobson-Darroch, has written an article claiming that Lawrence based his heroine, Alvina Houghton, on Katherine Mansfield. Another researcher, someone who completed her doctorate on this link, colludes with Jobson-Darroch, and says, yes, there are strong links suggesting that although Lawrence may have begun to use Notts woman Flossie Cullen as his model for Alvina Houghton, she became Katherine Mansfield when he took the novel up again just before 1920. It is interesting reading all this, yet I don’t get the sense at all, from reading The Lost girl, that there is more than just a passing reference to Katherine Mansfield in his novel (I certainly agree, however, she was the model for Gudrun in Women In Love).

All this is very interesting to me. I weigh up what these writers have written and I dismiss their ideas, but I can see how exciting it must be for them, to think they are on to something new, something the CUP biographers never seemed to think about. But I find their conclusions very non-conclusive, and I think it’s good to have an independent, critical mind as well ( I remember being at university, and the lecturer, Tony French, told me not to heed the ideas by the Cambridge scholar in his introduction to Hardy’s poems. The thought of rejecting the ideas of a Cambridge scholar in my Penguin copy of Hardy’s poems back then seemed to be almost sacrilegious).

What is more interesting than all of this, anyway, is the fact that Lawrence created another interesting and modern heroine in his Alvina Houghton, who paved a path for herself that is courageously completely at odds with her upbringing and those genteel influential folk around her (in this regard Lawrence’s own wife, Frieda, is a much more likely model for Alvina, although Katherine Mansfield forged a completely independent path for herself as well!).  Bravo to another of Lawrence’s heroines. Look closely, though, and you will see he is criticized by some well-meaning modern critics who detest Lawrence’s sexual politics and find fault with all of his heroines, and feel somehow that they are too male reliant and are victims of Lawrence’s so-called misogynistic world view.

Having read The Lost Girl I can, now, with greater confidence, saunter around the corridors and fields of my workplace, dangling my Lost Girl water bottle in my right hand, competently answering questions about the identity of this mysterious ‘lost girl’, and discuss the irony of the title- Alvina Houghton, a woman who discovers what she truly desires, and forges a courageous path to achieve it.

'Brooklyn': A Satisfying Adaptation

I SAW Brooklyn, the new Irish film, at the Westgarth Theatre in Northcote the other day. I already had an emotional investment in the film. The author of the novel, Colm Toibin, is someone I greatly admire. You could say that my emotional investment in the film stems purely from him. I discovered him early. I have collected his books, including small editions published by his Tuskar Rock Press. And I have met him on a few occasions, including one memorable occasion in his own house. So I really wanted to enjoy this film, just like I really want to like Mike Leigh’s new films. And I also knew that Colm Toibin played a strongly supportive role in the film, even though he wasn’t responsible for the screenplay.

And enjoy it I did. I will admit to being an emotional wreck throughout, actually suppressing my sobs, because my sister was sitting right beside me. She thought I had a cold.

The first time I found myself breaking up was in the first ten minutes. Eilis was leaving Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford for America, and, filled with uncertainty and insecurity, she was saying goodbye. The actress- Saoirse Ronan- made it all palpably real. Through her, I directly felt and related to her pain.

There are various times in Brooklyn, in the early stages in particular, where Eilis cries because of extreme homesickness. She struggles to begin conversations and is unable to greet customers warmly at her work. She cries in her stifling boarding house room at night. At a Christmas gig for old Irish men, a man stands up and sings an Irish hymn beautifully, with significant feeling. Eilis’ eyes welled up, and so did my own. This is an extract from Toibin’s novel. The film captures this sense of pain and longing beautifully:

‘"She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything . . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday."

Eilish meets Tony, an Italian-American, at an Irish dance. His name in real life is Emory Cohen. I thought he was equally as good. He was mawkish and uncertain himself throughout, and had this beautiful sense of not quite believing his luck when Eilis returns his affections. He is innocently uncertain around her, and in one memorable scene, on a tramcar, he awkwardly invites her to dinner to his parents’ house, prefacing his question with ‘I’m gonna  ask you something and you’re gonna say “oh it’s too soon, I don’t really know him well enough…”, then realising the implications of his question and hurriedly contextualising it with “oh it’s nothing so bad!” (it’s really just a simple request for his new girlfriend to come to dinner to his parents’ house).

At some stage in the film, Eilis’s sister, Rose, unexpectedly dies. Eilis misses the funeral, but gets back home as soon as she can. Her mother, alone and without both her daughters, places pressure on her to stay in Ireland, and not return to America. Eilis thinks about it. Not because of her mother, but because she has found someone else, an equally nice Irish man called Jim, who has much to offer, including greater financial security. Eilis is tempted. Saoirse Ronan really makes you feel her anguish over what to do. The airmail letters from Tony pile up, unread, in her drawer. She doesn’t dare open them. She wants a clear head.

In the end, an encounter with Mrs Kelly, a kind of gossipy counterpoint to Lady Catherine De Bourgh in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, solves the dilemma for her. Mrs Kelly has heard on the grapevine something about Tony, and now, hearing something about Eilis’ burgeoning romance with the Irishman, hints in none too subtle fashion that Eilis just might be embarking on a dangerously non-Christian path and possibly double dealing. Eilis is silently outraged by the woman’s impertinence, but the encounter is the trigger for a swift return to the USA. There, on a busy street, and across the road is Tony. They lock eyes and Eilis crosses the road towards him. Even at this late stage, he can still scarcely believe it. Further welling of tears.

One of my favourite things about this film is the growth in Eilis that Ronan manages to bring to the scene, which matches the growth felt in Toibin’s words. Not just her clothes, but her walk, and facial expressions, and the movement of her shoulders, all these things subtly change during the film as she gains confidence and feels like she belongs. Here is Eilis, on her return to Ireland, wearing a bright yellow dress and fashionable sunglasses, looking every bit the sophisticate and outsider, receiving a lot of attention when once she was demure, slight, and almost invisible.

I also enjoyed the contrast in settings. The blue, blue sky, and colour, and hedonism of Coney Island. Fairy floss, amusement rides, crowds and colour and bright bathing costumes, but in particular the crowds of people and the blue, blue skies. In Ireland again near the end of the film, (specifically a stretch of water in Wexford called Curracloe, I suspect), Eilis and Jim, and the two friends escorting them, walk along the clifftop of this Irish beach. Absent is the colour and the crowds and the excitement. Eilis comments on the difference, and her new potential paramour, Jim, tells her ‘there’ll probably be quite a few walkers along here later…’

 Ronan does wonderfully well- as does Cohen, as Tony, however, how do you build in the complexity of psychological minds in the medium of film, as you can with books? This is a good example of what I mean, from the novel.

“She discovered a vantage point from where, unless he looked directly upwards and to the left, he would not see her. He was, she thought, unlikely to look in her direction as he seemed absorbed by the students coming and going in the lobby. When she directed her gaze down she saw that he was not smiling; he seemed nonetheless fully at ease and curious. There was something helpless about him as he stood there; his willingness to be happy, his eagerness, she saw, made him oddly vulnerable. The word that came to her as she looked down was the word “delighted.” He was delighted by things, as he was delighted by her, and he had done nothing else ever but made that clear. Yet somehow that delight seemed to come with a shadow, and she wondered as she watched him if she herself, in all her uncertainty and distance from him, was the shadow of nothing else. It occurred to her that he was as he appeared to her; there was no other side to him. Suddenly, she shivered in fear, and turned, making her way down the stairs and towards him in the lobby as quickly as she could.”

As I said Tony does wonderfully well in the film. He does seem vulnerable and helpless at times, as well as ‘delighted’ by things. It is this ‘shadow’ that Eilis imagines, which is crucial to the story, and very difficult or impossible to replicate in film.

The film reinforces the idea that Eilis follows the only course of action that is really open to her at the end by travelling back to Brooklyn. If she chose not to do this and chose the safer option in Ireland, we would not have seen the light lit up in Tony’s face, a man who is, consistent to the end, unable to fully grasp his good fortune at having someone as exotic as Eilis fully interested in a simple Italian-American.

Night In The City

WE all suddenly decided to go into town. The papers were full of this ‘White Night’ event that had attracted vast numbers into the city in the past. We all thought we would see what all the fuss was about. Buildings lit up, apparently, with colourful imagery projected onto their walls, and family friendly events in different pockets of the city. Part of the appeal of the event was the long hours: 7PM-7AM. The downside would be the crowds.

You were excited about leaving home in the car with your older sister at a time in which you would normally go to bed. You assured us you would make it through to early morning. On the way you were filled with childlike curiosity and wonder at people in other cars, and shopfronts, as dusk descended upon the city.

We parked opposite the museum and briefly watched a trapeze act. Then we caught a tram into town. By now it was past 8 o’clock and fairly dark. All four of us walking the city streets like we owned them. Tram-less, and car-less, walking in carefree fashion in the middle of normally busy wide streets was a pleasant novelty. Russell Street, Swanston Street. All the way up to the State Library, and then around the bend to the Old Melbourne Gaol. It was here I told you about Ned Kelly, except I didn’t say how he died. Your sister tried jumping in sync to the illuminated skipping ropes. You were more or less happy to watch.

Then we visited your uncle’s studio on Hosier Lane and looked at his fabulous paintings. It was here, under the studio lights, that we all saw S’s swollen eye. Earlier in the day she scratched her cornea on something, and we realised her complaints were founded. The nurse at the Eye and Ear Hospital said it would take some time to see her, so you and I left, with mother to look after S, as well as use of the car.

We walked solemnly to Parliament Station, the city still very crowded. It was midnight by now, on a Saturday night when any self-respecting parent would ensure their seven year old daughter was at home, asleep. But this was ‘White Night’. And besides, we hadn’t factored in that we would be going home by train.

Yes, the train. This was when the adventure started. I had my arm around you at the station, both of us worn out after a long day and a lot of walking. You still seemed dreamy and cheerful, although quieter and more placid in the early hours. We saw that the train would only be six minutes. We played a game, you might recall, where both of us guessed in which direction the train might be coming from.

I’m pretty sure I summed up the mood of the carriage quicker than you did. But hey, I am older. A group of young men at our end, fairly placid and calm, and an outspoken group at the other end, more on edge and irritated and restless, their ‘leader’ pacing the floor of the carriage like a panther enclosed in a cage at the zoo. Abuse began to be hurled. The young agitated guy, about 20, wearing a black hoodie and dark tracksuit pants, was challenging the main guy at our end for a fight. For the next twenty minutes or so the atmosphere in the carriage was electric with uncertainty. Would a fist fight break out? Would someone get their face mangled in front of both of us?

You seemed to be at least partly aware of the danger at this point. You wanted to sleep but you were unable. Your head was nestled into my chest but your eyes were wide with expectation, if not fear. I sat there, cringing at the language: ‘I wanna smash your fuckin’ face in. Do you want me to fuckin’ hit you now?’ I wanted to protect you from the words. Everybody seemed to be aware of us, or you, in particular. There were a number of young people, mostly males, looking at the floor, or sitting there awkwardly with the plugs of their iPod’s jammed in their ear.

This main guy, the aggressor, would go back to the other end of the carriage shouting out with bravado to his friends, and then come back to our end with further vitriol. It didn’t occur to me to stand up and protest about the sheer injustice of having an innocent and beautiful girl witness such ugliness. But it did occur to me to change carriages. Mostly, though, I just wanted to will it all away.

I counted the stations for you. You kept asking ‘how much longer to go?’ One of the participants, on the more passive side, sat right next to us. I doubt you even noticed this. And this is where the ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ factor came into play. Read it, when you are older, and think back to this scene. In the Harper Lee novel Scout’s mere presence has an influence over the lynch mob who are after the black man, Tom Robinson, who Scout’s father is protecting. The sight of this little girl, about your age, meant that the awful men, with their sinister aims, recoil at their objective, and wander away feeling foolish and regretful.

All the players on the train the other night were looking at you. You, clutched to my stomach, having your back rubbed and patted the whole time, up and down, up and down. You, as Scout, showing them how wrong they were, the old story. It takes a little kid for them to realise they were about to do something wrong.

Well, honey, that’s not quite true. You made them abandon it for a while, that’s all. But that’s something. Your presence spared all the people on the train some spilled blood and heavy atmosphere. The people hiding in their mobile phones and staring at the floor. Those others like the two of us looking bewildered and uncertain. The aggressor walked over to the people on our side again and said he would wait until Coburg Station. That’s where the big statement would be made. Did you hear him say this? That he was going to ‘smash (his) fuckin’ face in’ when they got off the train at ‘Coburg’? Well, if you did, you might have had the same thought as me. ‘That’s our stop.’

I nudged you when the train left Moreland, the preceding station. We were not going to hang around. The doors opened and we were out of there. I was the first to see the police ten or eleven carriages away. They moved fast when I spoke to them. We crawled through the quiet but now eerie streets. We were so glad to be home. Turning the key in the front door, the phone rang. It was mother to say they would be hours yet. At least they would have the car.

Life is full of sobering experiences. There will be other times that you will find bewildering, or cruel, or confusing. You cannot be protected forever. But just the other time, on this awful, confronting night, I am happy to say you were spared the worst, and I’m so glad you still do not know the sight or sound of fist smacking flesh.

ON LONELINESS

SHE buries her face in her books in class. Students around her giggle about boys in their old primary school. They take photos of themselves when the teacher is distracted. She continues with her work. She feels a strange sort of bond with her teacher. She can sense that her teacher cares about her, even if it is in some fairly insignificant way. In class, the students are seated at round tables. It must be a new kind of learning. There are six girls at most of the tables. One table has eight students. Her table has two. She has something in common with this other student. This one, also, comes to the school without a familiar peer from her primary school. The rub, though, is that they are both shy. Too shy to talk. Suddenly there are two more students coming over to balance things up. They are from the noisy table of eight. See, the teacher is thinking of her. She knows it is an opportunity to shed some loneliness, to discover an unlikely kindred spirit. To have somebody to communicate with, even to conspire with or giggle about boys from the old primary school with, and secretly take photos. However, all her flimsy dreams are dashed when she sees the downcast look of the girls approaching. They hate this. They are scornful of having to move. The look on their face says it. Anger and utter contempt for having to move, and embarrassment and disdain for having to sit with her, the girl who buries her face in her books.

HE waits for the bell so he can trudge off to class. The office he has been allocated is dull and suffocating. Almost everyone is female. He has nothing in common with the other men. The women gossip and talk about their night out and their dinners. Sometimes there is nauseating, artificial laughter. The classroom is his sanctuary. The students smile at him. It is the first smile he has received since leaving his children at home at the beginning of the day. He feels there may be some genuine interest. They ask him about mobile phones. His ignorance of this subject amuses them. He seems of another world entirely. They tease him about Instagram and they queue up to show him the new applications they have discovered, ones that are buzzing around the schoolyard.

SHE waits for the bell so she can trudge off to lunch. All the girls from the entire school sit around in small groups, talk, laugh insanely, cross their legs and play with their mobile phones. At primary school she was attached, like an afterthought, to a large group that tolerated her weirdness. It was somewhere safe to go each day, and it mattered to her less and less that it was manufactured by a kind teacher. At this school, the high school, there are new rules and new cliques, and she hasn’t worked them out yet. A pale, undernourished girl has smiled at her a couple of times on the first few days, and each morning she thought she might seek her out more and more. But then, a week and a half into her new environment, the pale girl has found a place, and now their eyes never met. What to do each day. There is the beautiful library. Keeping busy by filling her water bottle. Speaking to the teacher on yard duty. She soon becomes worried that her solitariness will be noticed, and an uncomfortable primary school pattern will emerge. She thinks she might have Asperger’s.

HE sits in the staffroom alone at lunch, eating simple sandwiches, and trying not to feel odd and look odd, amidst the swarming buzz of teachers interacting with each all around him. He picks up threads of conversations, and sometimes the earnest discussions sound important and meaningful. ‘Don’t forget we need to arrange a time for the guest speaker’, or ‘Have you had time to go over the curriculum that we discussed at the meeting?’ Then there are other snippets of a more personal nature that make him feel downcast and solitary, and alien, like he might have Asperger’s. ‘How is your daughter getting on in her new job?’ ‘When does Marcie get out of hospital?’ ‘Are the kittens you bought at Christmas showing any signs of improvement?’ He feels floored by all of this. It makes him feel sick to the stomach. He cannot find any appetite for his food. He wants to let out a scream. He knows nothing about any of these people, and yet, they know so much about each other. He waits for the bell so he can trudge off to class.

EVERYBODY files in. The high pitched chatter of people who have just met. She finds her seat at the round table nearest the window. Everyone sits at the same seat each day. She likes this. It is one of the only things she likes about school. She knows this teacher better than all the others. She loves his bearded, serene face. She loves the vulnerability. She knows she is the only one who can sense it. Yes, his voice booms out sometimes, especially when he is reading. And yes, he strides around the room purposefully, checking hand writing and checking books. But she catches his face at other times, and she sees it is sometimes pained. The mouth pursed, the eyes glazed, the brow furrowed. She yearns to touch his hand.

THE bell goes. He dismisses them quickly, with a strong sense of relief. His mind’s not right, like the insane man in that Robert Lowell poem about skunks. He feels the class didn’t go particularly well. He felt more vulnerable than usual. And now he has to face the challenge of going back to his office. Suddenly he is filled with dread. He had a panic attack at the dentist recently, and now he feels something similar coming on. It’s these walls. He feels like they are closing in. He longs to rush outside and breathe in the air through to his lungs. He is glad the students have left. But then he sees her. The quiet girl who has had trouble making friends. She has, for some reason, decided to linger behind. He glances up at her, looking at her behind a valley of tears. It is excruciating but he cannot help it. Then her face puckers up, and she is crying too. Her hand is on his shoulder, and together their cries reverberate around the otherwise empty classroom.

England, My England

I HAVE decided to put together my written and photographic memories of living overseas into an on-line book. It stems from the period 2000-2003. This will be the preface. it will be time-consuming but fun. the next best thing, perhaps, to actually going back there to live.

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. 

Dear Facebook

 

 

OK. I have given it a realistic go. People pressured me to try it. ‘You are missing out’, they said. They also said ‘do you realise you can join groups and communicate with other like-minded people?’ I was told once I start I will be hooked. That there’ll be no turning back. Endless hours of sated curiosity and soothing reminiscence. And more friends that you can shake a stick at.

I am talking about Facebook. I started it six months ago. Now it’s the New Year and it’s time to give it the boot. Well, mostly, anyway. I can’t take back that time wasted on looking at mindless posts and naively falling into loads of traps.

The first trap was to accept the ‘friendship’ of people I knew long ago. Some of these were women who have now had children. Others, men I didn’t really click with way back when. The children ones were the most disturbing. Endless ‘selfies’ and other shots holding their sweet little babies. ‘Friends’ gushing and posting ‘likes’ and comments like ‘aaawww, too cute!’ Me thinking, but not posting, ‘aha, at last you have found a reason for living.’

The second trap was to join endless groups to find out what other people around the globe are thinking about the people or the things that you like. This is not always a complete loss. For instance, the people on the Katherine Mansfield website don’t post very often, and when they do it is usually informative and useful. I found out, for instance, about a 2016 symposium for Mansfield in France somewhere. Someone who does post sometimes is a woman called Gerri Kimber, who is a major writer and publisher about Mansfield, a world-wide expert if you like, and it is an honour to see and receive her posts. Another writer, Colm Toibin, as you might expect, is very sensible and sensitive, and he often alerts his followers to interesting newspaper articles he comes across, or posts from critics and journals that reference his works.

 

On the other side of the coin, I was, until recently, a member of the Justin Hayward appreciation group. I don’t really know any Moody Blues fans over here in Melbourne, and I thought it might be fun to converse with some online. What tipped me over the edge, and caused me to give it the flick once and for all, was a recent post by somebody starting off an A-Z list of things about Justin Hayward. The first ones were ‘A is for amazing, B is for beautiful, C is for charismatic’, and so on, and I’m thinking ‘what’s going on here? are we in primary school? are these people all idiots?’

The Melanie Safka appreciation society is a bit better, but it got me fed up and depressed as well after a while. Melanie herself does lots of posts, and the other day she put up a video of her singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in a croaky voice, with a Santa hat on, next to a Christmas tree. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Joni Mitchell or Van Morrison would never do that. Maybe it’s better to grow old a little more gracefully.’

And don’t get me started on the trivial little themes people employ. How many ‘Happy New Year(s)’ have there been? And ‘Merry Christmas’, and the posting of clichéd music videos, such as a famous one by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (ok, I’ll admit I also posted a Christmas song- River, by Joni- but at least this one wasn’t quite as obvious).

A fan appreciation group you think would be safe is the one devoted to the films of Ingmar Bergman. But after a while this too got me totally fed up. How many times does one want to see somebody posting an image from ‘The Seventh Seal’ or ‘Fanny and Alexander’, and getting 80-100 ‘likes’ for their monumental effort, or, just as stupid, a comment that comes up frequently like ‘what do you think is IB’s best film?’ or ‘was Harriet Andersen in Persona?’ (to these people I say either go and watch the film or look it up).

Besides all this there is the vast multitude of people out there who use it as an excuse to encourage others to admire their legs, or their teeth, or their hair, or whatever else it might be. Maybe their car. And usually people do. ‘Looking good sister’, or ‘LOL gosh you’re beautiful’, with an ‘aaawww thanks’ in reply.

So why have I decided to refrain from giving Facebook the flick completely? Well there is the matter of keeping in touch with local and some overseas people you actually do like, and it is an easy and convenient platform for this. Sometimes curiosity can get the better of me, and I might wonder how such and such is going now that they are now 40 instead of 20. And finally there are people you might respect and admire from afar, and seeing what they are thinking or feeling or posting can be somehow interesting. How does someone like Salman Rushdie, or the editor of the Cambridge D H Lawrence, or an old friend of Ted Hughes spend their free time?

So Facebook, even though I detest and loathe you, and feel used and somehow unclean because of you, I won’t give you up entirely, but at the same time I won’t allow you to take away so much of my precious time, either.

 

 

 

Tim Winton's musings and meanderings: Island Home

 

I WANTED, very much, to like Tim Winton’s beautiful looking new book about Australian landscapes and Australian culture. I did enjoy aspects of it quite a lot. At other times I felt restless, like I was a bit stuck in a discussion he was creating, one that holds enormous meaning for him, but less significance for me and perhaps other readers. I didn’t feel this way when I read Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, the glorious ‘Landmarks.’ Yes, his was personal as well, but less like a diary, less egocentric in some way. They do have much in common, especially the enjoyment and exploration of naturalistic terminologies, for landscapes, birds, flowers and trees, especially.

The best parts of Winton’s book (probably like Macfarlane’s as well) was the beautiful detail. You can see this writing in other works of Winton’s, in his fiction. Perhaps not as lyrical as it is here though. I am thinking of ‘Cloudstreet’, and ‘The Turning’ in particular, my favourite works of his. Sometimes the prose is lyrical here, but often with a kind of contradictory brutal edge as well, and lots of colloquialisms and earthiness, the kind of language that Winton gets in trouble with for ‘intellectuals’ who might prefer Patrick White or David Malouf.

Here is a section from ‘Barefoot and Unhurried’- ‘So often a child’s reveries spring from rhythms present in nature: the lapping rise and fall of birds stirring, settling, stirring anew; the swoon and sweep of wild oats in the wind; cicadas counting off the day in a million disapproving clicks of the tongue…I used to lie in the sun and listen to the metronomic tick of blood beneath my temples. I remember how hypnotic the stroke of my newly mastered freestyle became. There was strange comfort in the hiss of the stick I trailed in the dirt all afternoon, and in my whispery footfalls on the empty beach.’

Wow. The stick and the footfalls. Some of the best sensory writing I have read this year.

Fishing, at Cape Keraudren in 1977, Winton lands an extraordinary fish that is ‘chrome-sleek’ and it escapes his clutches, but not before it coats him with mucus that he describes as an ‘adhesive slime.’ As a result he spends ‘half the hot night scraping the fish’s ectoplasmic smegma from my hands and shins.’ In the morning his ‘fingers are webbed.’ I can only imagine how much people like Ernest Hemingway and Ted Hughes would enjoy an experience like this.

 

Winton’s observational skills are extraordinary, more so than even Sylvia Plath with her Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’, and the crabs’ ‘glittery wisp and trickle’ in that particular poem. Here he is wandering at low tide, observing ‘thin strips of water’ busy with ‘crabs and fingerlings, spider stars, bivalves.’ Further on there are ‘wallows of skippers, the sandballs of ghost crabs and the mud-poots of worms.’ Winton notices- and to me this is extraordinary- how the beach ‘looks lifeless’, but in fact ‘pops and sighs and rattles.’

Seven years later, Winton is at Mitchell Plateau, and driving a LandCruiser across a rocky terrain. So, ‘…trundling blindly through the head high spear grass…’, Winton charts the extraordinary insect life he encounters as he rolls the window down: ‘As we mow down the wall of grass and vines, grasshoppers, moths, dragonflies and birds peel upward from it in vivid rushes. Bugs and grubs, mantises and spiders gather in our hair, sucking the perspiration on our faces, catching in the gaps in our teeth. The air is soupy. The whole plateau is choking with life and we chug against this mad plenitude like a boat in a sluggish, druggy sea.’

 

‘Soupy’, ‘choking’, ‘chug’, ‘sluggish’, ‘druggy.’ Winton having fun with words. These seem to me to be very Australian notions. This is one of any number of bits that celebrate the wildness of Australian life: ‘The thickness of the air. I have just returned from camping. Bushwalking in 35 degrees heat and being mauled like this by flies, some of them those awful heavy march flies, a runnel tunnelling across my face and into my ears, desperately thirsty, trying to suck down a bit of my sweat before I brush it away with a cruel, impatient swipe of my hand.’

Perhaps the strangest, and most pivotal, and mythical moment in his book, occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Cape Range, 2009.’ Winton is alone, looking for endangered rock-wallabies, and comes across a cave. Then there’s this: ‘The cave is the size of a child’s bedroom. Its rear wall is tawny where the ceaseless southerly has reamed it. When I see the roos folded down on their joints in the chalky dirt I give out a little squawk of surprise. But they did not stir. They lie curved against one another, pooled head to haunch in a rest that seems regal, even holy. I pause a few moments, taking it in. Then I step up and squat before them, peering closely. They really do look as if they’re sleeping. But their hides are translucent, like the vellum of medieval manuscripts.’ (192).

Their bodies, it seems, have been ‘mummified by the high desert air.’ Winton’s notions are very dreamy and romantic, but beautiful. The roos are ‘keeping vigil’, high up near the bluff, ‘even in death.’ All this is a world away from his vernacular style of many of his ‘characters.’

He also spends time discussing philosophical issues away from land and nature. Aboriginal issues and what it means to forcibly take ownership of land, and then what he calls ‘The Gallipoli Myth’, both explored in the chapter ‘Paying respect’: ‘…Anzac has been coarsened by the politics of political regression’ (a phrase that, for some reason, makes me think of John Howard); he refers to Gallipoli as a ‘bungled adventure’; images of the first war don’t conjure up ‘nationalistic charge’, but rather ‘tragedy and blind waste’; ‘a life squandered by jingoistic nonsense’; and then, on our fairly recent past, ‘…I feel ancestral shame for the dispossession of this country’s first peoples, shame for the despoliation of their lands and a kind of national shame, too, for the mess my nation helped create in Mesopotamia in recent years…’ This is about as far as you can get from the rhetoric of today’s far right, like Messrs Bolt and Abbott, and completely in tune with the Left, like Phillip Adams and others, who, incidentally, gave a lovely interview with Winton on Late Night Live recently. Winton also, as you might expect, offered a scathing critique of the major parties’ asylum seeker policy on the same programme.

I would love to have a similar attachment and reverence for the land and the sea, like Winton here, like Macfarlane is his beautiful books about Britain and elsewhere. Sometimes I feel I am getting close. Times like when it is dusk on the Great Ocean Road, and I am facing the black sea. Or driving along a winding path in autumn with its rivers of leaves (what Hopkins calls ‘wanwood leafmeal’). Then there was my first time in what has become the land of my heart. I was staying with friends, in winter, at Port Isaac in Cornwall. The little cottage was yellow and was called ‘Wave’s End.’ It was right on the harbour. I would race down, at dusk, bucketed and billowed by roaring winds. Down the cobbled hill, turn right, along an escarpment, down to the raging harbour, waves smashing onto the concrete path, next to an old rusted anchor. And just standing then facing the rising seas, feeling like an old Norseman, seeing the hills on either side, enriched and totally enchanted.