Shabby old Viragos...

... and David Herbert

From the Lifeline op shop in South Lismore (an excellent source of books, housed in a charming little former church) :  Four old Viragos and a bloke.

From the Macquarie Dictionary:

virago  [I'll leave out the pronunciation] n., pl. -goes, gos.  1. a turbulent, violent, or ill-tempered scolding woman; a shrew. 2. a woman of masculine strength or spirit. [ME and OE, from L: manlike woman]

So now tell me feminists have no sense of humour. Good name for a publisher of (mostly) neglected classics by women.

They are:

1. Tell me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen

A new writer for me. Short stories (the title one, published in 1961, being 'one of the most famous stories in modern American fiction.)

2. Stevie Smith, The Holiday, first published 1949

Love her Novel on Yellow Paper.

Random quotation from new book:

So with these happy thoughts in my mind, I go down to our butcher, with whom my aunt has dealt for forty years, and Mr. Montgomery the butcher gives me six ounces more than the ration books says. He is a tall thin man, looking like Charles II, he smiles as he wraps the parcel. There you are, my dear. How's mother? (for he is convinced that my aunt is my mother).

My mother died when I was a child, my aunt has always lived with us, she has never wished to marry, she has 'no patience' with men (she also has 'no patience' with Hitler).  She thinks men are soppy, she says: He is a very soppy man, a most soppy individual.

Stevie Smith, The Holiday

3. Emma Goldman, An Intimate Life, by Alice Wexler

Late last year I re-read Goldman's excellent 2 volume autobiography, Living My Life (which should be brought into the attic at some stage - I've had it over 30 years, a wonderful strong old Dover publication), so I think I should let the effect of that settle before I read this. But why not have it there, just waiting to be read?

4. Such Devoted Sisters: An anthology of Stories, edited by Shena MacKay (1993)

How to resist this subject matter? One I've mined many times in my own novels.

And the bloke, not a Virago of course, but one of those lovely old orange Penguins, is Kangaroo, by D. H. Lawrence.

I hated him when I was a student - all that overblown stuff about men and women. But he lived in Australia for a time, in a cottage called 'Wywork' (a delightfully Australian sentiment) on the South Coast of NSW. Thirroul, if I'm not mistaken.

So here is is writing about Oz. Has to be worth a read.

Shelfie

Yes, there are spaces on some of my shelves (but only  this one) ... I regularly hand books on, in order to have room for more. Of course, I keep all the old, best-loved ones.

The attic has rules. Yes!

These be the rules: No post shall be without a quotation from a book. Or a song. This time (sigh) I think the quotation has to be be from a book by moi.

Now she reads (the luxury of it!) till the small hours of the morning. Books fill the shelves that line the walls of her room; she has so many they spill over into piles on the floor and over the coffee table; they are stacked up beside the sofa, so she only has to reach out her hand and it touches a book.

The books are many and various. There are new books, with clean, shiny covers and crisp pages, and there are old books, rare books, with beautiful dustjackets and intriguing inscriptions inside. Their pages are beautiful in a different way from the clean, sweet-smelling white pages of the new books - these old books have thick, cream-coloured paper, browned on the edges, some as crisp as a perfectly fried egg. They all smell different - of rich, old spices, or deep green forests, earthy and damp. They evoke long-forgotten rooms and other lives.

Joanne Horniman, Secret Scribbled Notebooks (2004)


And so we enter the season of intense reading, where it is too hot to do anything else here in Northern NSW. Wherever you are, I wish you a festive end-of-year full of books, and a new one of happy reading.

Of attics and apples

Do  the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

With Flaubert, the apocrypha cast a second shadow. If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to a brothel that doesn't come off, perhaps the sweetest moment of writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never  needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

Julian Barnes: 'Flaubert's Parrot' (1984)

The cow at the creek

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained;

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;

Not one is dissatisfied - not one is demented with the mania of owning things;

Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;

Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass




Until a day or two ago it had not rained for months. There is so little feed around that the cattle belonging to a farm up the creek are getting through fences and wandering over neighbouring properties, including ours.

Today when I went down to the creek to feed the ducks, there was a large old black cow, with huge horns. As I approached, she did not run away as they always do, but looked at me wearily.

I stopped. Leisurely, she put her mouth to the water and drank and drank. It was then that I noticed she was heavily pregnant. Slowly and laboriously, she climbed the steep bank opposite and went on her way.

I liked her, so dignified and long-suffering. She wasn't young.

The people who own these cattle over-stock them.  A neighbour reckons they are animal hoarders, hoarding also dogs and cats in their dozens.

People do sicken me at times, but never animals.  There's a bit in a Alice Munro story where a woman has on her tombstone, 'She was kind to her chickens.'

I can't think of a better epitaph for me.

SHE WAS KIND TO HER CHICKENS

At Kylie's

Diamond Head has its own special illusion. Anyone who comes there is filled with a wild resolution to stay for ever. No man but is possessed  with the urge to bend Diamond Head to his secret longings, to make it his own. Diamond Head deals with them. It outlasts. Its great lump of basalt was doing just this a few hundred years ago when captain Cook and his crew of constipated heros swept past, claiming the continent in a distant and gentlemanly manner. They heard the roar of the cliffs as so many cheers for their passing, a bombardment of welcome salutes. And Diamond Head will give a belch and a roar for the passing of all who come after him.

Kylie Tennant, The Man on the Headland (1971)


We came to Diamond Head (Dimandead) in the late afternoon of a hot, dry and windy day a couple of weeks ago, having left Canberra about 8 am. We did not know it, but the state was burning to the south in our beloved Blue Mountains.


It was a day of complete fire ban; we knew that, so cold baked beans for dinner. We called in at Diamond Head camp ground to register and pay our camp fees. The ranger was away till a quarter to 5, so we waited, wandering down to the beach. A storm was brewing.

Back at the Ranger's office, it began to rain, fat drops making us take shelter under the overhang of the roof. Nearby kangaroos, used to people, hopped over at once to also take shelter under the roof, though around the corner of the building from where we were.

The Diamond Head camp ground is the most popular, full of motor homes and caravans. Simple campers, we prefer the seclusion and privacy of the Kylie's Hut area, a kilometre or two away, at Indian Head.

In the 1940s, the writer Kylie Tennant moved to nearby Laurieton where her husband got a job as school principal.  They stayed many years; both their children were born there.

And it was there that Kylie met Ernie Metcalfe, the 'mad hermit' of Diamond Head, whose family had a farm there (very little farming seemed to be actually done). Later, in 1971, she published a memoir of their time there, naming it The Man on the Headland as a tribute to Ernie, whose story this also is.

Ernie was neither mad nor a hermit; Kylie described him as the 'most sociable of men'. He loved beer, but because he couldn't afford to shout (buy a round of drinks for others), he did not go to the pub.  He was the archetypal bushman, happy to rough it as long as he had his freedom.

Kylie and her husband Roddy befriended him. He'd come around and play chess with Roddy, and borrow books. He read all Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac, as well as stories of Polar and African explorers.

And Kylie would go to stay out at Ernie's because she loved the bush; it gave her time to think and write, and was a good place to take her first baby, Benison, to give her plenty of sun and air.  She wanted to build a hut to stay in and insisted on paying a fair price for the land Ernie wanted to give her. He was astounded that it was worth sixty five pounds.


In 1976, she gave the land and hut to the National Parks, and the whole headland is now national park.

We first went there over 30 years ago, and then not till earlier this year. The hut has been moved, and fixed up somewhat, so it's not quite as it was described in the book, or what it was like when we first went there.

There are now large swathes of grassed area (there are about 80 camp sites, though both times we've been there this year there were only three lots of campers. From the hut, which may be used in an emergency to sleep in, it is only a short walk down to the beach.

In her book, Kylie talks of the rutile sand miners coming in next door. (Sand mining disrupted the dunes and bush all the way along the coast and left the curse of the weed bitou bush, which they used to revegetate.  She hated having them there, for the the damage they did to the beach and bush, and the noise of the machinery, but Ernie was phlegmatic. 'You'll never know in fifty years,' he said.

Bitou bush is a noxious weed, but the bush has fairly well recovered, sixty years later. maybe Ernie was right.


I met Kylie Tennant in the early 1970s. She came in to the magazine where I was an editorial assistant to see the two women I worked with, notable children's writers both. I had tea with her a few times, and found her warm, generous, and good-humoured.

As are all her books, and especially The Man on the Headland. It has the kind of humour that speaks of a particular brand of Australian resilience.

When I camp at Kylie's I feel that she and Ernie are there with me, that I am entirely welcome. It's a good feeling, rather like coming home.


Tennant and her family later moved away to Sydney, but they kept the hut, and went to visit. Ernie also visited them in Sydney.

After he died:

A year later, my son coming back from Dimandead said, "You were right about Ernie. He's still there." Somehow the memory of his old army hat has left him. He is always bareheaded in the sunlight. If I did not turn round Ernie could be heard talking of the weather and the birds. Dimandead shines now with more splendid light. It is not every day that a headland takes to itself the soul of a man.

The Man on the Headland 

Bed

What is wrong with Cryan and most people, said Byrne, is that they do not spend sufficient time in bed. When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

I agree, I said.

We must invert our conception of repose and activity, he continued. We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders. This might be done quickly - a five-mile race at full tilt around the town and then back to bed and the kingdom of the shadows.

You're a terrible man for the blankets, said Kerrigan.

Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)


At Swim-Two-Birds is about a young, frequently drunk, lazy student who lives with his uncle and spends much of his time in bed. He is writing a book about a character named Desmond Trellis, the publican of the Red Swan, who is also writing a book.



Personal reminiscence, part the first:   One thing my maternal grandmother strongly disapproved of was lying on the bed during the day. Once the bed was made, first thing, that was it, and any tell-tale creases could tell what people had been doing.

Trouble was, her daughter married into a family, part English, part Irish ( I claim Miss Hayes, from Ireland, who married my French convict great-great (and maybe another great) grandfather), for whom lying on the bed  was considered no great sin, and spawned daughters who elevated lying on the bed during the day reading books to an art form. And my mother wasn't averse to a bit of a lie-down during the day with a book either.

This makes my grandmother sound rather joyless, but she wasn't. Staying with her was a glorious time of making toast in front of a wood fire, eating heaps of home-made biscuits with cups of tea, and home-made ice-cream made with Sunshine full-cream powdered milk, sugar and gelatine.  She liked cats, and dogs, and girls, so that was lucky for me. She accepted me for the odd, bookish creature that I was. I would go to stay with her in her cottage in a little coastal town, and go walking on the beach and help her around the house.

She looked very like this; I can only ever remember her old with her long hair in a bun, small and round, forever doing what she called 'jobs' around the house, gardening, and boiling up clothes in her copper (even after her children bought her a washing machine).
Conclusion of the foregoing.


The major part of the narrative of At Swim-Two-Birds is comprised of the novel the unnamed narrator is writing, which is mostly comprised of the novel his character, Trellis, is in turn writing, and then later the novel Trellis's son (by one of his characters) is writing to get back at his father, which is in turn hijacked by the other characters to really give Trellis his comeuppance.

With me?

Anyway, it's hilarious, and many of the characters aren't even 'real', but creatures of Irish myth and legend. But what is real anyway? And remember that N, the narrator is also made up. So there's another book there, the one O'Brien is writing.

But do characters really feel so vindictive towards their authors (even fictional ones?) For these characters start taking over the narrative, drugging Trellis so they can do whatever they like.

Biographical reminiscence, part the second:  About a decade ago I got very ill and spend months of enforced bed-lying, which wasn't much fun. I can remember throwing The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene away in disgust, it was so depressing. Not a good choice when you're not on top of things.

And then when I was on my feet again, I put aside all the notes I'd been taking for a book while I was ill (it made me feel that I was still working), and while I was lying on the day-bed in the living-room with my notebooks around me, I came up with a completely new idea.

Two sisters who lie around on a bed reading books!

And so I came to write Secret Scribbled Notebooks. Whenever someone asked what I was writing I said, a book about two girls who lie about on beds reading Great Books. I knew it sounded uneventful (and was, in a way), but I had the most fun writing a book that I'd ever had.

But did those girls resent me? Did they get up to things while I was asleep that I never knew about? I'll never know.

 I do know this strange thing. By writing about them, I brought those two girls to life. It's a bit mad, I know, but I feel that they really exist.
Conclusion of the foregoing.

It's said that At Swim-Two-Birds was an enormously influential book, and I can see why. In fact, when I first started to read it, it finally clicked, that of course John Kennedy Toole had read the book. How could he not have? A brilliant, well-read young man with literary ambitions like him ...

Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces is a lazy, ex-college student who lies about on his bed scribbling into his Big Chief writing pads, and he has all kind of wild adventures. I'm not accusing Toole of stealing, or of not being original, because Confederacy is a brilliant, absolutely original piece of work.

But At Swim is there in the background, influencing away. And writers would be mad not to read as widely as possible, to gather in influences and use them in their own inimitable way. Because that is what writers do.

Laughed till I cried

Books don't often bring me to tearful laughter, but while I was reading Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman I found myself weeping with the hilarity of it.

I won't quote the passage; I think you need to read it in context, but it has to do with atom exchange and bicycles, and the solemn way the policeman pronounces on the connection.

I read the hilarious bit in bed just before I went to sleep. Waking at dawn the next morning I thought of it again, and this time bypassed the laughter. I sobbed silently, remembering it.

We all know how closely conflicting emotions are linked: love and hatred - who hasn't experienced this at one and the same time? But perhaps, after all, there is only one emotion, and we experience different aspects of it. (Reading The Third Policeman may lead to you speculating on matters like this, as it offers strange explanations of almost every science possible)

Indeed, De Selby, the writer often quoted in this book (and whose whacko theories are detailed at length in extensive footnotes) puts forward the proposition that east and west, and north and south, are not four directions but two, because, for example, if you go far enough east you'll come to the same point as if you went west. He extrapolates further to say that in fact there is only one direction, because from any given point you can get to anywhere else.

Fittingly, I have conflicting emotions about this book. At the beginning I loved it so much I wanted to read as slowly as possible to savour every bit of it. By the next afternoon (due largely to the effects of de Selby) I read wearily on through the greatest headache and dizzy feeling I've experienced for some time, due either to the effects of the mad illogical logic of The Third Policeman, or the onset of a flu. I had the slight feeling that I might be going mad.

(A sucker for punishment, the next book I read will be O'Brien's At-Swim-Two Birds, of which there is one copy in our local library system, at Byron Bay, and is available, no doubt winging (or swimming) its way towards my local library at Lismore as I write.)

But what I really like about O'Brien (not his real name) is the language. I've decided that what I value most in writing is surprise, which is another way of saying originality, I think.


Take this passage:

...  a house stood attended by three trees and surrounded by the happiness of a coterie of fowls, all of them picking and rooting and disputating loudly in the unrelenting manufacture of their eggs. The house was quiet in itself and silent but a canopy of lazy smoke had been erected over the chimney to indicate that people were within engaged on tasks. Ahead of us went the road, running swiftly across the flat land and pausing slightly to climb slowly up a hill that was waiting for it in a place where there was tall grass, grey boulders and rare stunted trees. The whole overhead was occupied by the sky, serene, impenetrable, ineffable and incomparable, with a fine island of clouds anchored in the calm two yards to the right of Mr Jarvis's outhouse.

The world of this book is not our world; it is both like and unlike it. It is, in effect, akin to madness, but it is a book that will make you both think, and see things differently.