THE CHILDREN OF THE KING -young adult gothic-

SONYA Hartnett is a skilful writer. You can tell immediately when she evokes place so vividly, and she loves words like all good writers do. She is supposedly a ‘Young Adult’ writer, but older adults can learn a lot from her too. Maybe not with all her books- some seem to be written to be placed in the teenage imagination, and get fixed there- but others like the moving story about incest at a caravan park- ‘SLEEPING DOGS’- are so well written and challenging that anyone post- high school would find something in them.


                                




I think ‘THE CHILDREN OF THE KING’ is one of those. The Lockwood’s live in London and they have two teenage children- Cecily a bit silly and selfish is twelve- and Jeremy is a bit older at fourteen and romantic and desperate for adventure. The story is set during the London blitz, and Mr Lockwood stays at home whilst the rest of the family relocate away from the falling bombs to the lovely sounding ‘Heron Hall’, which belongs to Uncle Peregrine and his staff. The Lockwood’s are fabulously wealthy and it is a big house in the safe countryside with a lot of staff helping run it.



On the way to Heron Hall Cecily ‘adopts’ for her family a young evacuee called May Bright and she is the best character in the novel. She runs rings around Cecily who has to grow up in order to keep up with her. She is perfect for Cecily as a role model of selflessness and maturity. Hartnett loves May, you can tell, and as a result we do too.



A place close by with an even better name than ‘Heron Hall’ is ‘Snow Castle’ where the children venture for some excitement. The whole time they are at Heron Hall they have to make their own fun because school is out and there are no other families close by.



This is the part in the story where it becomes more intriguing and complicated. The children venture across two brothers who seem to be living amongst the ruins. They are young and prince-like in their appearance- not to mention ghostly and mysterious. At the same time we meet them, Uncle Peregrine offers his nightly instalments about the Duke and the King and Queen of long ago at the time of Richard III, and the boys trapped in the Tower of London. These night time stories take up a large section of the novel with the children entranced, and meanwhile in the day time the children are running off to Snow Castle. The parallels are supposed to be obvious.

                                           


Uncle Peregrine’s long tale about the power hungry Duke and the unfortunate boys kept hidden in the tower is well told and enjoyable. There is another incredible tale told in the novel, this time by Jeremy Lockwood who feels young and useless at Heron Hall, away from his father and the horrific war being waged in London. Jeremy escapes from his suffocating family one night and – this could be partly allegory, I’m not sure- as he tells his expectant audience later, he rescues several people from a bombed out street somewhere in London, who are lying in the rubble under the earth and being slowly engulfed by water.



May is lovely. Intelligent, brave and kind-hearted. Cecily improves, but don’t be fooled by her desire to ‘adopt’ May, the little evacuee near the beginning. She sees May at the evacuee centre sitting next to her suitcase, and is drawn to her silky hair, clean skin and doll-like features as if she is something that might be fun to play with. And that’s how she treats May until May stamps her independence and authority. Jeremy is ok but a bit too precocious for my liking. Besides Uncle Peregrine, the adults don’t fare too well, as they don’t in other Hartnett books, and Harry Potter for that matter.



I enjoyed the novel the most when the girls swept over the hillside and over the stream to visit the boys at Snow Castle. I wanted to know more about them and where they came from. Were they the ghosts of the boys locked in the Tower all those centuries ago?



Here is an example of why Sonya Hartnett can be a very good writer. The physicality of her description, and the imagination, is terrific. On the subject of the aftermath of bombing on a building in a London street:



‘The rubble is ugly. It’s made of chunks of brick, a trillion chips of glass, smashed and splintered timber. All this sprawls over the road, into the gutters, heaps against its neighbours. Caught in the mess is furniture, carpet, birdcages, pots and pans, chests of drawers filled with clothes. Stinking dust floats everywhere, and the dirt ripped up by the impact is thrown over everything. And where the building once stood there’s an odd empty space, and light touches what it never touched before, and sparrows hop along towel rails, and dogs walk on roofs.’


                         

The eclectic early films of Catherine Deneuve

I HAVE revisited, of late, some Catherine Deneuve films and found it interesting to compare some major roles she undertook at the beginning of her career. I guess I have seen five or six of her films. Four good early ones are the fabulous ‘Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ (1964), ‘Repulsion’ (1965), ‘The Young Girls of Rochefort’ (1967) and Belle De Jour (also 1967).




‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ was her first major role. She was about 21. She plays Genevieve, the daughter of a widow. The two together run an umbrella shop. Genevieve has fallen in love with a young handsome man called Guy who, the morning after they consummate their relationship, has to leave for military service and is off the scene for a good deal of time. Genevieve is pregnant and, according to her mother, she needs a husband. This man will be a rich jewel merchant. It is difficult to know whether or not she is happily married. But the beautiful idea of Romeo and Juliet being created earlier has now dissipated. You do get the feeling of something ideal and romantic being destroyed.

When Guy comes home after finishing his service, there is no Genevieve and her mother and their umbrella shop. Bitter, he turns to drink and prostitutes, before settling on the love of his mother’s young nurse. His mother subsequently dies, and Guy’s life changes for the better when he discovers this unexpected love for Madeleine.

At the end of the film there is a beautifully wrought scene in which Guy and Genevieve see each other again after a long period of absence. She comes unwittingly to his petrol station. His wife and his little boy, Francois, depart to go out shopping. They are clearly content, a beautiful restful peace exists between them. Genevieve is outside. She has her little girl, Francoise, and her expensive fur and shiny black car. There is something wistful, regretful perhaps, in her demeanour. It is a sad moment when they talk again, guarded and a little distant. It makes us think about what could have been if their stars aligned better. We are reminded about how beautiful and romantic they were together.

Catherine Deneuve is spectacularly beautiful, pale and tall and blonde and girlish and innocent initially, and at the end of the film experienced and wistful. It is a good performance in a great film. She dominates each frame and the director, Jaques Demy, uses close up reasonably regularly to please his audience. In one scene, imagining marriage, Genevieve sits in her umbrella shop like a princess, resplendent with crown, and she is utterly absorbing. I like her as the young, impressionable, flighty and breathless young woman- less as the proud, wealthy aristocrat with the high fur collar.



A year or so later Catherine Deneuve plays Carol, a French woman living in London, in a black and white Polanski ‘horror’ film called ‘Repulsion’, menacing and unsettling- an incredible departure. Polanski, like Demy before him, loves looking at Deneuve. She spends most of the film in a partially see through nightie. In one scene she lays sprawled on the floor on her stomach, a sheet covering only the top half of her body to her hips.

Carol has a mental illness that becomes more severe as the film goes on. A photograph featured at the start and at the end of the film (it reminds me of a shot of a photograph in ‘The Shining’), is suggestive of a disturbance of some kind. As a young girl she has the look of unspeakable terror- some alien force seems to have interfered with her universe from a very young age. As the film plays out, we begin to think the force may have been a malevolent male, such is Carol’s abhorrence of all males, from the creepy, predatory landlord who sees his chance when she is completely vulnerable; to the flashy and egocentric ‘brother-in-law’ who flirts with her and unsettles her with his leering attitude, to the generally ‘nice’ wannabe boyfriend who is desperate to kiss Carol and is absolutely frustrated at her lack of response.

Carol kills men. She is absolutely psychotic. Even the smell of a used singlet or the sight of a shaving brush is enough to make her nauseous. And no-one, unsurprisingly, quite understands her. She has awful dreams of being violated in her own bed. Polanski springs these events on us unsuspectingly. The walls crack at regular intervals, a reflection of her deteriorating mind. ‘Repulsion’ is a good film, but not a great one. Polanski made it as a ‘bridge’ film like the Coen brothers sometimes do- to make money to finance something better and more heartfelt. Nevertheless it is still, in 2012, intriguing and unsettling viewing. And the homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ is huge, at times maybe even plagiarism. See the opening credits as an example, and the work in the enigmatic bathroom.

‘Repulsion’ is interesting from a Catherine Denueve point of view because Carol is such a departure from sweet Genevieve. Polanski continues the voyeuristic mode of Demy- even more so- but Carol is such a dark, troubled figure, almost as if Deneuve was crying out not to be typecast in what some would see earlier as a whimsical musical. There’s nothing gothic about ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’- but ‘Repulsion’, mostly set in a disturbing unit where all manner of evil takes place, is pure London Gothic. He has always had good ideas for apartment interiors.



So with ‘Cherbourg’, in ‘63/’64, then ‘Repulsion’ in ’65, Catherine Deneuve appears in ‘The Young Girls of Rochefort’ (’67), infectious, fun, even more of a musical, and seemingly pure whimsy. Gone is dark Carol, and we have a return to a Genevieve of a kind, however a bit more wordly-wise without the sadness. Deneuve this time is Delphine, acting with her real life soon to be deceased sister, Francoise Dorleac, being chased across the main square of Rochefort and teaching ballet and singing charming songs. This time, instead of an umbrella shop, mother runs a café where different characters drop on at will. It is Demy again, and lots and lots of singing and music, although this time the words are spoken. There is love and heartbreak as you would expect, but the tone is decidedly more relaxed and fun than ‘Cherbourg’, and as a result more easily forgettable.



Remarkably, Deneuve’s very next film was ‘Belle De Jour’, also ’67, and this time all whimsy has gone with her role as Severine Serizy, a prostitute by day as her unknowing surgeon husband is at work. Severine’s subconscious is filled with dreams about sadomasochism and bondage, while in her wakened hours she is unable to partake in physical intimacy with her husband- only, (very reluctantly at first it must be admitted) - with her clients at the brothel. This film deals with dark secrets, gangsters, murder, and it has to be said, the kind of leering men that inhabited ‘Repulsion’. But Severine is a very different creature to Carol and the other people she inhabits in her films around this time. There is something mysterious and hidden about her. Luis Bunuel, as director, treats her in a different way to these other directors. But she is still a kind of image of worship for those around her, and undoubtedly so for her audience as well. Some of the brothel scenes are quite frank, and Severine wears fashionable underwear in these scenes. Far more than the other films, fashion seems to be at the forefront. She wears fabulous dresses and fabulous shoes and accessories. A beautiful black hat. I’m not personally into fashion, but I am guessing that this film has had a huge impact on what was seen as chic and fashionable around the world. As far as the plot is concerned, it interested me less than these other films, although it was, it seems, meticulously made.

So bravo for Catherine Deneuve for taking so many risks and taking on so many challenges. And bravo to her directors for having the foresight to see her as something complicated, much more than a princess in an umbrella shop or a dancer and music teacher being chased across French boulevards. I don’t think she is or was ever a Liv Ullman or even perhaps a Jane Fonda, but interesting nevertheless and mesmerising for many close-up on the screen.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne: a Belfast Spinster

I CAN’T remember where I first heard about Brian Moore’s ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.’ If you read three or four fairly crummy or forgettable novels, then come across something as good as this as your fourth or fifth it is well worth it.

Judith Hearne is a lonely spinster who has spent a good deal of her life loyally looking after a sick aunt. Now she finds herself getting on in age and living in a series of bedsits in Belfast, each one as unsatisfactory for some reason as the last. Her co-inhabitants in this one include a memorably obese and troubled man named Bernie (fantastically described as a ‘monstrous baby swelled to man size’) who lives with the delusion of being a great poet and isn’t working and left Queen’s some years ago, his mother, Mrs Henry Rice, who means well but sickeningly fawns over him (she says he is ‘a little delicate’),  Bernie’s unfortunate secret lover, Mary, who is the bedsit cleaner and a victim throughout the novel one way or another, and Mr James Madden, a pretentious man who has lived in America, and is not who he at first seems, and is the unwanted object of Judith Hearne’s desire- her last chance, it seems, to become married and respected in a lonely and desperate world. Judith Hearne’s only escape from her problems are both desperate measures- the bottle, and her Sunday visits to Moira O’Neill and her put upon family.

This novel, written in 1955, is bold, full of passion and is excitingly unpredictable. Judith Hearne’s slide from a dull, predictable God-fearing spinster, into a pathetic, drunken non-believer is remarkable, and tragic.

From page one, Judith Hearne holds onto her items of security- a photograph of her aunt, who gave her a reason for living until she died, and what she calls ‘the Sacred Heart’, wrapped initially in tissue paper, and now hung proudly on her wall for comfort and prayer. Many of us have a wall hanging for this very reason, whether it be a photo of a relative, a simple beach scene, or a picture of a famous singer or sports star. There is so much about Judith Hearne that is so ordinary and believable, and typical for her age, at least in this early part of the novel.

Judith is soon flattered and excited when another boarder- James Madden- shows an interest in her. She seems to be the only one receptive to his boastful stories about living in New York. Madden can sense this and soon has Judith enthralled. They begin to have walks together where the discussion is always about America -‘the States is a hundred years ahead of Europe in most things.’ The other boarders are amusingly disparaging about America- ‘The atom bomb-that’s the American contribution to Western civilisation. Am I right?’ but Judith always defends him.

In a passage that is reminiscent of Fitzgerald writing about Gatsby’s past, we get to know Madden better and how his own dream, like Gatsby, is to open up a new promising world for himself- ‘..he stood at the gateway to all the things he had left behind, all the things he had ever done.’

By the end of the third chapter we see a glimpse of Madden that Judith will never see. Coming back to the bedsit, drunk one night, his passion is aroused at the sight of naked Mary with Bernie in Bernie’s bedroom. Madden, seemingly disgusted at the goings on in a Catholic home, threatens to tell Bernie’s mother (which would see Mary is immediately evicted), but loses his head like a madman and rips the blanket from her and fondles her and smacks her bare thighs. As Bernie says, if alone, Madden may well have raped her. Brian Moore’s characters have all the problems of the world but his depictions of them are searingly honest.

It is the interior mind of these characters that is the most compelling. Moore exposes their thoughts continually, and it completely gives them away. We get glimpses into Judith’s fascination with Madden- ‘I wonder if he’s old? Over fifty certainly..’ and at the same time Madden is musing about Mary- ‘ahh, I’m no good, drinking like that, pulling at that kid, but she was old enough though, what a build. Christ…why did I think that right n the church, an impure and filthy thought right in God’s house.’

Father Quigley is the priest at the church that Judith attends. Brian Moore became an atheist after a heavy and devout Catholic upbringing- as an act of rebellion he joined the British Army when he left Belfast- and his Father Quigley is passionate, but is also a target of Moore’s ridicule- ‘Plenty of money! Plenty of time!..Yes the people of this parish have both of these things…But they don’t have it for their Church!..They’ve got time for sin, time for naked dancing girls in the cinema, time to get drunk…time to go to see the football matches… time to spend in beauty parlours..time to go to foreign dances instead of ceilidhes (!)..time to do any blessed thing you could care to mention. Except one. They-don’t-have-time-for-God.’

When Judith sees the patient O’Neill’s she begins to boast about her new, fabulously interesting life as an acquaintance and sometime walking partner and church attendee James Madden, and she is starting to have too much to drink. It is shortly after this that James Madden makes his proposal. He wants to start up an American eating house/ café in Dublin, and he needs Judith to be his partner purely and solely in business terms- Madden is under the misapprehension that she has money. Sadly, tragically, cruelly, when he finds out he is mistaken, he will abandon his plans with her, and cut off his once expedient social ties, and dump her, claiming that if she felt his intentions were otherwise, and if she got her hopes up, then it was all her imagination, and no fault of his own.

Bang smack in the middle of all this, in chapter 9, Moore gives us a diary entry of each of four boarders on the topic of Madden and Judith Hearne. He is absolutely fascinated by the inner going on of a person’s mind, and it is a fascinating subject. And the purpose of it all is for us to boldly see that everyone one of these boarders, Bernie and Mary included, can see right through Madden and his little schemes, and here is poor, sad Judith, hopeful and blinded because of her desperate hope of salvation from an untrustworthy Yank.

When Madden, becoming a more grotesque character by the minute, visits Mary in the middle of the night, aroused because he saw her ‘short slip, white creamy legs’ going up the stairs, he finds her in her bed in the dark and, Moore tells us, ‘tore and shook her like a dog at meat.’ It reminded me a little of what a poor, very young Maya Angelou went through- ‘easy, easy, be nice, be nice…’

Madden suddenly goes cold on Judy Hearne- perhaps he knows she isn’t loaded after all, and would make a useless business connection Judy meanwhile is becoming anxious, desperate, knowing at heart her last chance is slipping… and now taking to the bottle and singing like Blanche Du Bois too loud and causing a stir. He tells her flatly one lovely day in Belfast when she pressures very firm for an answer- ‘Who said anything about getting married? Did I? I never even considered it.’ There is a sort of Joycean stream-of-consciousness thing happening straight after in a long passage without any paragraphs and full stops- poor Judy’s thoughts tumbling out at a rate of knots. Church sermon is not much help- it’s back to the O’Neil’s I’m afraid, and a tall story seeping out- ‘As a matter of fact, he proposed to me’ (!)

On the bus Judy’s disintegration is continuing, noticeably shaking, trembling on the way to an illegal after hour’s public house. A sad and shocking thing to see her receiving a brown paper bag with a cheap bottle of whiskey inside and then Bernard waiting for her back at the bedsit to cruelly fill her ears with the notion that she needs to keep pursuing Madden because really loves her…vile characters in this story! High drama follows when Bernard’s mother comes on the screen with Madden. Madden finds out Bernie’s lies about Judy and then Bernie’s mother finds out about Bernie and sixteen year old Mary.

Judy is evicted and her reflex action is to see Father Quigly in church and ask why. Poor Judy doesn’t get any comforting response- or any that, by this stage, have any mean g for her. ­Five Hail Mary’s has lost all meaning for her. ‘An unhelpful  God. Why does He make men suffer?’ Like many before her and since, Mary is pleading for a sign.

Mary books herself, incredulously, into the Plaza Hotel and continues her drinking. It seems she will simply end up, like Dylan Thomas, sliding into oblivion. There is a final, pitiful excursion to the O’Neil’s. Any faint remnant of respectability is gone when Judy begins sobbing and begins a Blanche type rant about being left on the shelf, about drinking too much and about losing her faith. ‘Nobody wants me, Moira. I’m too old. And I’m too ugly.’ Moira O’Neill plays the pacifying Stella Kowalski type role perfectly. And what to make of Judy, weeping in front of such respectable company. Nothing but pity. She is an awful, pitiable sight. But what a wreck and how sad for her, for anybody who feels so alone and unwanted and desperate.  We can all turn out like this, anyone at anytime, it just takes a cruel twist of fate.

Moore is really wound  up now. He really has Judy, and the reader, exactly where he wants them. He wants to explore this lunatic woman even more closely and with even more scrutiny. Judy is very much at the stage of relying on the kindness of strangers. Tennessee Williams would be loving it, and Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner- in fact all those Southern writers, and James Joyce for that matter with Nora on his knee.

Back in church, Judy is drunkenly asking Quigley ‘are you sure he’s there?’ she becomes obsessed with the tabernacle and what is really there. ‘Is it just bread?’ she spies the ‘little white curtain that screened the tabernacle door.’ Judy does a terrible thing in her terrible state. She opens the Communion rail and tries to scrabble open the ‘golden door’- very cinematic this, with Quigley in pursuit running down the aisle- she is dragging on the door until there is blood running from her nails- but it will not budge!

Finally, inevitably, like Blanche at last, Judy has become the sick woman with nurses at her side, and now referred to as the ‘sick lady’, now almost Judy Hearne no more. She is placed by Moira O’Neill (Stella Kowalski) in a private room for convalescence. A new place and a new, altered Judy, hopeful of being discharged some day, but perhaps at peace wishing for the Sacred Heart to be place above her bed again.

 

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.

Baroness Madeleine Deslandes

WE SAW some elephants, monkeys and seals in the morning, then a soldier or two wandering along St Kilda Road in the afternoon (being Anzac Day), and went screaming down dark and winding water tunnels at the pool in Albert Park. But the highlight of the day was seeing this beautiful picture for the first time in the flesh. Baroness Madeleine Deslandes was a French aristocrat who admired Burne-Jones and visited him at his home called the 'Grange' in Fulham, London in late 1895.  She was a writer of romantic fiction who established a Parisian artistic and literary salon. The portrait was the result of a rare and important commission, coming at a time late in Burne-Jones' life in which he was gaining many admirers from the Continent.

The wealthy Frenchwoman is wearing a dress of a beautiful deep blue and the inky black background compliments it well. She looks vague, distant and cerebral, as well as cool and sophisticated. She cradles a crystal ball in her lap which adds a mysterious dimension of something akin to clairvoyancy. I found the little reflective squares on the ball beautiful as well as her buttoned sleeves and the simple bows on her dress. Her fingers are smooth and slender. I imagine she would have appreciated the dreamy, mysterious quality of the painting which Burne-Jones achieved after several sittings. It's fabulous to see beautiful pictures in the flesh like this.

Cold Chisel - Cheap Wine (1980)

THE GUARDIAN, in its music section, had a really nice tribute to Cold Chisel recently, including an original clip of 'Cheap Wine.' I always liked the band, and the song, when I was growing up, but I wasn't crazy about it like some people, and even then I preferred to listen to The Doors and The Beatles, etc. But seeing the film clip again I found it quite charming and a little bit mesmerizing, appreciating it more this time. The article talks about how Cold Chisel were more than just a pub band- articulate songs and songs that were about meaningful things. So I played the clip a few times the other day, not remembering having seen it before. And then, today, I heard it on the bus, drifting in and out, battling with the bus chatter and the sounds of the gears. And it's been in my head all morning. And, appearing in The Guardian, I wonder if it is revolving around in the mind of some English chap or English gal as they cross busy Piccadilly Circus or even David Cameron as he is driven down Whitehall on his way to 10 Downing Street, or the Queen, tinkering with her jewellery, inside Buckingham Palace, Nick Cave sitting in his studio at his piano in Hove near Brighton, Mike Leigh planning and plotting in his favorite cafe in Soho, the proprietor of the fabulous Ulysses bookshop thumbing his way through a first edition of Mrs Dalloway in Museum Street in London, a dancer flexing her muscles inside the Royal Ballet school in Covent Garden, etc, I could go on doing this forever.

The Guardian, April 6, by Russell Cunningham (edited):

Cold Chisel started out as pub rockers, but that workaday sobriquet sells them short – they're no small beer. Formidable and, at least as younger men, volatile on stage, their reputation was also forged with articulate songs touching on charged issues such as abortion and civil strife, and delivered with whip snare, searing guitar and soaring voice. They've filled arenas, not just bars, so by all means call them rockers, hard rockers even, but "pub rockers" plays them down.
They were formed in Adelaide in 1973 but by 1977 their stomping ground was Sydney. The city's streets, particularly Kings Cross and the inner east, bled into the lyrics of laureate keyboardist Don Walker and portrayed a band not so much of the land as the asphalt. This sense of place in their songs made Cold Chisel seem knowable and worth knowing. To the suburban youth who revered them they were like mates, hitting the town with you on a Saturday night and knowing where to lose the hangover on Sunday morning, and in their strident fashion showed many a disaffected teenager it was OK to rail at the world so long as you could laugh at it, too.


I remember buying Chisel albums with uncool glee. I remember cradling home their third, East, in 1980 and unleashing its bonfire blues on my parents' sitting-room stereo. It's a compelling album, raw but deceptively well reined, with Cheap Wine the toast of 12 fizzing tracks. East spent a year in the Australian charts and was the only Chisel album to enter the US Billboard 200, even though a superior studio effort followed with Circus Animals two years later.



   The cover of EAST, June 1980
.