Leaving the attic

Of Emma Goldman I have only the slightest memory. To me, she was just a dowdy woman who did not know how to get along with children. She loved them and wanted to make friends, but like people who spook horses she had the wrong sort of aura.

Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel


(Rexroth had met Emma Goldman when he was a child.)

I bought this book in Wentworth Falls in January this year and am only just getting round to reading it.
It's enlightening, reading snippets about people from other people's books. I re-read Goldman's two volume Living My Life about a year ago, and my biggest regret is that she missed out on meeting Oscar Wilde in Paris in the final years of his life.  She went to a meeting instead!!!
It would have been nice to get her impression of him.

I'm nursing a bung ankle and packing up my house. There are no longer any books or shelves in the attic, and this book by Rexroth is one of a few left in the remaining un-packed bookshelf. You need to leave yourself something to read. I spend my time packing up crockery, lying on an unmade bed reading, and generally enjoying the squalor of a house being dismantled to go elsewhere.

The bung ankle comes, I think, (for I don't remember doing it) from stumbling on a walk around town with my friend Faye, who wanted to do the walks that Sophie did in My Candlelight Novel.

So we started at the house I called Samarkand in that book, and went down the path under the tunnel of figs and then to the bridge with Planet Music on the corner, and across the river to the Winsome and down Wotherspoon street.  It was Faye who first introduced me to Wotherspoon Street, a shabby, treed, wonderful enclave of old houses. We went to the park where Sophie slept the night, and Faye quoted me bits of the book I'd forgotten because she'd just been reading it in preparation for our walk.

After a rest at a cafe we did another of Sophie's walks, on the day she was feeling grumpy and disgruntled, and Faye saw the stone lions at the entrance to the park near the railway station, because she'd never been there before on foot, only passed it in a car.

Faye was the person who took me up the tower of the Catholic Cathedral in Lismore, which I later put into Mahalia, and when I needed to look at things  through a microscope (for A Charm of Powerful trouble) she set it all up and showed me pond water and potato starch and other ordinary extraordinary things. She's one of those people who often say things that go into one of my books.

I don't know when I'll get to the attic again. I mean this virtual attic. And in a little over two weeks I'll be leaving this attic too, where I wrote some of my books (the others written in a room overlooking the creek.) End of an era.

Moving house for the first time in 25 years is stressful. Friends keep ringing me to see how I'm doing (because Underground Man is currently 700 km or so away looking for a place for us to rent), and calming me down, telling me to drink wine in the evenings, take valium when necessary, clear my head of negative thoughts and think of the long view.

Maybe I'll be back after I move. Or maybe not.  But for the moment, the madwoman is definitely in the attic, and she is as mad as all get out, and that's the way things should be.

Travel companions

[....] Charles hated flying. He hated the whole business - the queues, the claustrophobia, the take-off, the sound of the wheels retracting, the bullying music, the seat belts, the staff's psychotic switching from servility to contemptuous indifference. It was bad enough setting off to somewhere reasonable, like Paris or New York or Los Angeles. But Baldai - no, crazy.

Margaret Drabble, A Natural Curiosity(1989)


In a fortnight I'm setting off to somewhere reasonable - Frankfurt, to the Book Fair - but I'm going much further than Charles is: Paris, New York or Los Angeles from London. Pah! And I hate flying. It's the reason I haven't been to Europe for well over 30 years. I think. Sometimes I think that I merely found staying at home writing and reading and gardening interesting enough.

My trip will involve leaving Wongavale (somewhere quite unreasonable) to arrive at the Gold Coast in time for an earlyish flight. Then after an unreasonably long wait at Sydney(due to the BA/Qantas thing) I leave for Heathrow, and from there to Frankfurt. I'm not even counting up the time.

I will need companions to comfort and distract me.  I've chosen three books:

The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac (1958), a re-read:

Once I was young and had so much more orientation and I could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do - just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do -.  It began on a war summernight - ah, she was sitting on a fender with Julien Alexander who is ... let me begin with a history of the subterraneans of San Francisco ...

Faces in the Water, by Janet Frame (1961):

After the doctor performed the last shock treatment of the morning he used to go with Matron Glass and Sister Honey for morning tea in Sister's office where he sat in the best chair brought in from the adjoining room called the "mess-room" where visitors were sometimes received. Dr. Howell drank from the special cup which was tied around the handle with red cotton to distinguish the staff cups from those of the patients, and thus prevent the exchange of diseases like boredom loneliness authoritarianism. Dr. Howell was young catarrhal plump pale-faced (we called him Scone) short-sighted sympathetic overworked with his fresh enthusiasm quickly perishing under concentrated stress, like a new plane that is put in a testing chamber simulating the conditions of millions of miles of flying and in a few hours suffers the metal fatigue of years.

Beat Writers at Work, Edited by George Plimpton (The Paris Review Interviews) (1999):

Ginsberg:    [...]   You have many writers who have preconceived ideas about what literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to exclude that which makes them most charming in private conversations. Their faggishness, or their campiness, or their neurasthenia, or their solitude, or their goofiness, or their - even- masculinity, at times.  Because they think that they're gonna write something that sounds like something else that they've read before, instead of sounds like them. Or comes from their own life. In other words, there's no distinction, there should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know, to begin with. As we know it every day, with each other. And the hypocrisy of literature has been - you know like there's supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different from ... in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives.

It's also like in Whitman, "I find no fat sweeter than that which sticks to my own bones," that is to say the self-confidence of someone who knows that he's really alive, and that his existence is just as good as any other subject matter.

I could make no better description of the books of Jack Kerouac and Janet Frame than Ginsberg's words, as quoted above.

With companions like these, I think I'll travel well.

Power in the Darkness

Searching for The Radiant Way

Sometimes I cull my books too enthusiastically, throwing away ones that I later want to read.

So it was with Margaret Drabble's 1980s trilogy, The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity and The Gates  of Ivory.

The last two I found easy to replace, thanks to our local Lifeline op shop, which contains the best bookshop in town.

Not so The Radiant Way, the first book, without which I did not want to start re-reading the trilogy.  Looking online, it seemed to be out of print, but I found it recently in Canberra, in the industrial suburb of Fyshwick, in an enormous second-hand bookshop that had previously never been open whenever I was there. There, an Aladdin's cave of delight, the books were two deep on the shelves, and the very tall Underground Man unearthed a copy of Radiant Way on a high shelf, hidden in a back row in the Ds.

I've just finished reading it, and found it almost obscenely entertaining. But I can see why I threw it out. My younger self (and I'm talking almost 30 years ago) would have found the lives of these three friends who met at Cambridge rather too drearily middle-class and a bit pretentious, especially Liz, a Harley Street psychotherapist. Alix I remember identifying with - she and her husband get by on piecemeal teaching work, subject to budget cuts and change of government policy.  Esther, an art historian who also manages to survive on scraps of work is recognisable to me now.

Now, I am older than these characters, then, I was at least 15 years younger. I imagined that I would never want to read it again, but I can see that some books, like some clothes, if you keep them long enough, regain relevance and desirability.

Radiant Way begins before a New Year's Eve party held by Liz and Charles Headleand, at the beginning of the 1980s. Liz is in her room getting ready. One of her teenage daughters is in her room listening to the Tom Robinson Band: 'The Winter of '79'.

(There is a photograph of me that has hung on our wall for well over 30 years. I am dressed in dyed bright yellow men's overalls, with a pale pink t-shirt. My feet are bare. It is 1978, I am 26, and have just had a baby, and I have a mild, soft, diffident expression on my face.  I lean against the back of an old 1960- something Holden, a car we bought for $200 in Sydney before moving to the north coast . We called this the Tom Robinson car, because we stencilled the boot with a clenched fist and the words 'Tom Robinson Band' curved around it - the stencil came with their album 'Power in the Darkness' which we listened to relentlessly - he was angry and left-wing and gay - what was not to like?)

 The Radiant Way trilogy is set in the Thatcher years - it is personal and political, rambling, sometimes rather incredible (there is someone in Harrow beheading young women, and rather coincidentally he turns out to be the quiet young man living upstairs from Esther; and he kills one of the young female offenders Alix used to teach,  and leaves the head on the front seat of Alix's car which she had to leave overnight because the tyres were slashed.) Sorry for the bad syntax.

There is a strong sense of the travails of life, the importance of family, for good or ill (largely ill), the turns that individual lives take, the effect of politics on one's life (or not), and the way the past is never really past. I found it this time very life-like, though I don't think I have any murdering beheaders in my vicinity. 

It rather reminds me of my own friendships, many of which cover many decades even though none of us are English and don't include a Harley Street psychoanalyst.

It reminds me that we in Australia are entering our own Thatcher-like years, with a ridiculously right-wing government, punitive to young people, pensioners, and anyone else they deem not to be 'lifting' heavily enough, and very willing to take us off to war again (and here I remember Robert Wyatt's heartbreaking version of 'Shipbuilding', a song also of the early 80s.)

Time to get out Tom Robinson. Power in the darkness, indeed.

And now, Jean Louis

How many cats are named after Jack Kerouac?

Two, at least. After finding the kitten that became known as Jack in New Zealand it was only a matter of time before another cat found me.

It was a Facebook romance. I first saw him on the page of the Animal Rights and Rescue group and gasped with recognition. That's my cat, I said.

Which was odd, as he wasn't really my kind of cat at all. He was a tiny kitten, mostly white, with black blotches.  The cats I really love are often striped, and older.

But love is strange (as I'm discovering through reading The Sorrows of Young Werther).

I read on Facebook that the kitten (called 'Bubba', presumably because he was so tiny) was to travel from the town of Grafton to Lismore so that he could be adopted by someone. And I happened to be at the Animal Rights and Rescue no-kill shelter in Lismore the day he arrived, transported from Grafton by a lovely volunteer named Lynda, who was also bringing  a dog named Jazz to meet her prospective owners.

'That little kitten's eyes are popping out of his head', she said, and uncovered the towel from his cage, still on the front seat of her car. I saw a tiny, enormous-eyed kitten cowering there. He was taken into the cat area and put into a roomy pen, tall enough for people to go in and pat him, and fed and watered. He was too stressed to eat, but found his way into a hammock hanging at human chest height.

I was at the shelter to research a 'day in the life of' story about it. This well-run no-kill shelter is run entirely by donations and volunteers. I had volunteered to do a story free for a local free paper, so that the people of Lismore would know what a great resource they had. It's an impressive set-up. Most of the animals are fostered out, but there are dog and cat pens for needy animals and new arrivals. The group were trying to get the local council to give them money to continue operating (they take all the unclaimed dogs and cats from the Council pound, and the council hasn't had to kill an animal for years.) But frustratingly, it was a no from the council, and the group is  now facing such pressure that they can't take any more animals at present, they are so desperately short of funds. Head over to their home page and make a donation - every few dollars will help.



 Anyway, that day I kept going back to visit the kitten, who would stand up in the hammock and nuzzle  my face. He was only about 5 weeks old, found wandering by himself in the streets of Grafton.

I was dizzy with love. I'd go out to the office to observe what was going on (Jazz meeting her new family and wandering from person to person with a puzzled look on her face), and then head back to 'my' kitten. It was a no-brainer, really. I needed a cat and he needed a home.

I called him Jean Louis, which were Jack Kerouac's given names, as a link to the other kitten Jack, who would become Louis' cousin.

They let me take him home at the end of the day, saying I could foster him for a fortnight and then decide. But I knew I wouldn't be giving him back.


Since then, he has grown fast.

He's a weird, tall kitten, who sucks his tail for comfort and is woefully unsocialised, as he was separated from mother and siblings so early he thinks it's okay to attack my feet.

We're working on that.

Jean Louis gets called Louis, or Lou-Lou, or Looby (as in 'Here we go looby loo').

Here he is demonstrating how nicely he can wrap his black tail around his white feet, in a rare, still moment.

And the quiet cat
  sitting by the post
Perceives the moon


Jack Kerouac, a haiku

...holding a cat

I see I have fallen into the trap.

I hold it against my breast

but not on the side of my heart. If you observe closely

you will see my fingers pressed into the fur

of my liable cat my escape-cat who would much rather be stalking

in the great elsewhere at ground or sky level, seldom in between

        where people's heads are.

There is a tenderness in the way I balance its back paws on my palm.

I have shaped my arm to fit its body.

It's all quite by chance.

I am frowning hard. I too would much rather be

at my own level where I seldom meet a soul

except perhaps a travelling word or two, hordes of memories,

and because there is a tomorrow, a few meditative dreams

that will accompany me in my pleasurable inward world

my secret mirror of your great here and my great elsewhere.

'A Photograph of Me Holding a Cat', from The Goose bath: Poems, by Janet Frame (Edited by Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold and Bill Manhire)



The author photograph: most of us would rather not be there. It's the conundrum of being a writer. The work comes from an intense inner world, your natural, preferred place.  But then people want to see what you look like, they want you to 'perform', and talk about the work, which should by all rights stand up for itself.

And so both cat and Frame want to escape. Perhaps neither of them are really 'there' - writers and cats are difficult to pin down.

Frame described her inner world as a 'mirror city', and the imagination as the envoy from there, linking the two (hence the title of the third volume of her autobiography, The Envoy from Mirror City). Or as the place 'two inches behind the eyes', as the painter Malfred Signal thought of it in Frame's novel A State of Siege.

Janet Frame's cats: I went looking for pictures on the net. I knew from Michael King's Biography that she had at least two: Neg (or Negative - she was a white cat) whom Frame had for 15 years, and then Penny. And then there were numerous cats and kittens from her childhood and adolescence.

But Janet Frame later. Here are some of my other favourite writers, holding a cat.

Jack Kerouac

From the cover of The Portable Jack Kerouac, edited by Ann Charters.

Name of cat unknown. Jack loved his little kitties. And look at the expression on both their faces. I think it's the gentlest, most humble picture I've ever seen of him.


VS Naipaul

Old VS and I go back a long way - well over 30 years. At first, all I knew about him was his writing - the style he said he wanted to be so limpid that no one would notice it. And then, the more I read about him, I found that he was grumpy, monstrously egotistic, sexist ...

But then there's this photo on the cover of one of his later books. Almost forgiven, VS. You look almost human -  a little uncertain of yourself. Playing second fiddle to a cat, that's why. You know that everyone will ignore you and go Awwww - what a beautiful cat.  I bet that cat could write better than Jane Austen, too. If it's a boy.


Haruki Murakami

I read somewhere that he said it was a happy day for him when he met a cat. And it was cats that drew me to his work - a black cat on the cover of Kafka on the Shore, and in the blurb it mentioned an old man who talked to cats.  I know a lot of people talk to cats (I for one), but this man really did - and they talked back.

Take your pick: There's a picture of Murakami with a black cat:

Or white cat:

That kitten looks like it wants to escape.




And at last, Janet Frame


I went searching the net for pictures of Janet Frame with cats and found this, at the blog of Pamela Gordon, who is Frame's niece and literary executor.


Thank you to Pamela for permission to use this photo she took of her aunt towards the end of her life, with her cat Chilli, who outlived her.

This is a really lovely photo of a writer with her cat. Unposed, they are both completely themselves, unaware of the camera, comfortably in their own worlds.

Read Owls Do Cry

With You

(To Janet Frame)

Can you hear me Whangaparaoa?


Listen to your seas, listen to your tides,
To the moon pulling the deep.

I am there, under the waters,
In the winds, in the leaf that sighs.

I am there, sleeping in the rocks,
Under the houses, below the promontories.

I am the sea, I am the wind,
Everything and nothing, with you.



Charles Brasch, from Wrestling With the Angel, a life of Janet Frame, by Michael King, (2000)


 Charles Brasch wrote this poem virtually on his death bed to Janet Frame, who was at that time living in Whangaparaoa.  I've just finished reading, for the second time, Michael King's biography of her, written and published while she was still alive (she died in 2004, at the age of 80).

It's one of the best biographies I've read, along with David Marr's biography of Patrick White. For me, the biography of a writer should answer this question: Where did the writing come from?

Recently, I've also read the three book volume of Frame's autobiographies, comprising To The Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, and Envoy From Mirror City, which only take her life up to her return to NZ from 'overseas' (Britain, Europe, the US) in 1964.

I'm now reading Living in the Maniototo, which must be one of the most enjoyable, funny, clever and revealing books about writing that there is. (And in fact, if you look here, there is an interesting discussion of this book, which says everything I should have said if I wasn't suffering from kitten brain*.)

In February, just before I went to New Zealand for the first time I read Owls Do Cry, her first novel. I have read it before, over 30 years ago. Both were library copies, but I now have my own.  Text Publishing have just issued it in the Classics series (with an introduction by Margaret Drabble: double delight!).

I'm not going to say anything about it, just echo what a friend of mine, a poet, said to me urgently in the 1970s.

'Read Owls Do Cry, by Janet Frame,' was all he said, without explanation. I can still see him saying it.

It stuck in my mind.

And you do need no explanation to read Janet Frame. Just do it, and it's self-evident.



* kitten brain: similar to having had a baby. The floor is littered with toys, the house is in disarray and the small one won't leave you a moment alone to think, let alone type. 

In which we achieve victory (for now)

Sometimes a hermit has to leave the attic, and I have been absent for some time.

The attic (and it is real, with a ladder to it, and dormer windows, and all) lies in a valley in northern NSW. And just one valley over, as the crow flies, lies Bentley, the site for several months now of a protest camp (Camp Liberty), to stop exploratory drilling for coal seam gas.

This dirty, unwelcome industry would pollute our land and water, and the people of the northern rivers have gathered together in an overwhelming show of support against it.

Go to the Facebook page, and see what's been going on.

Everyone was bracing for an 800-strong contingent from the NSW Riot Squad due next Monday or Tuesday. Now, with the gas company Metgasco's application to drill suspended, and an investigation by the Independent Commission against Corruption into the granting of their licence, we can all breathe easy for a while. The basis of the suspension is that Metgasgo did not adequately and effectively consult with the community.

The camp is something to be experienced. Everyone coming on site has to sign up to the principles of non-violence, and acknowledge the fact that we are with permission on someone's land and will not hold them responsible for any injury we might incur. And there are people coming and going all the time, visiting, volunteering, donating (and now celebrating!). There are rosters to be on vigil at one of the various gates and lookout places, or to volunteer for the many other tasks that keep the camp running. There is such a spirit of purpose, and cooperation and friendship. And fun.

In truth, being an introvert, I did not do anywhere near as much as many of my friends did, or camp out at the site. But I did donate and volunteer to be on watch for anything untoward, and met and talked with people till I was exhausted. Spirits were high, and those on vigil were constantly plied with people coming with gifts of vegan cookies, chocolate, fruit ...

There are many beautiful and committed young people giving their all to the cause, the Simmos (people who might be in an arrestable situation) camping at the gates and ready to lock themselves in or climb the poles when the drilling rig or police arrived. And then the oldies, like my 70 plus years old friend George (who, I admit, is only a few years older than I am), who spends double shifts at the gates three times a week, and the knitting nannas ('The knitting nannas are cool' : Tiana (Ti), almost 16, environmentalist and future Sea Shepherd volunteer), and the farmers who went to Sydney to try to speak to the state Premier and many others. There is also, most importantly, a strong representation of the indigenous community. It is their land, after all, that we are all on.

Valuable lessons have been learned. The governments we presently have in Australia would have us believe that we live in an 'economy'. But we know that we live in a community - a strong, cooperative community.

Gas companies and governments who think that money rules are wrong. People who have a connection with and love and knowledge of the land, who have family and friends and an environment to protect, have the power to join together and make their voices heard.

I have been meaning to bring my old friend Emma Goldman into the attic for some time, ever since last year when I re-read my 35 year-old 2 volume Dover Edition of Living My Life.

She has something say about everything. Here's a quote for Camp Liberty:

"People will only have as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take."