Taking the salt cellar

Early mornings are the best time for scanning the patient. I can lie in bed and go through what needs to be written, what needs to be moved where. Does this part need to go right at the beginning, or towards the end?

This reminded me of Lily Briscoe, the painter in To The Lighthouse, and her moment of epiphany in the middle of dinner.

In a flash she saw her picture and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. That's what I shall do. That's what has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower in pattern in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree.

Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927)


More than anything else, I think this novel is about the pleasures and problems of creation. It's a book about writing a book (the one that's being written), and the way memory and time works on the imagination.

Things fall apart

My Macquarie Dictionary:

It's not my oldest book, but it's probably my most used one, and one of the most decrepit, considering its age, less than 20 years.

I really should get a new one, but I like things that are falling apart (I sit here writing this in a t shirt at least 15 years old, coming apart at the neck, full of holes, and not fit to be seen in in public  - though I have worn it shopping in Lismore recently - I didn't like it nearly as much when it was new.)

So I stick with my old Macquarie.

One of the reasons I like it is that I've put flowers and leaves between its pages, mostly at the appropriate spot. There's a violet from the garden

Magnolia leaves

and a gum leaf

which I don't think is in the right spot. Oh well...

A little flying insect has also insinuated itself between the pages somehow and somewhere (not my doing - I wouldn't kill an insect) - I come across it now and then, and it looks very pretty, but I don't know where it positioned itself, so can't take a picture.

But I love dictionaries, and the Macquarie is Australian - you'll find words like wop and hoon.

We got a Scrabble dictionary so that the Macquarie wouldn't get such a work-out - it's also falling apart, but I don't love it. The Mac still gets consulted now and then, as the Scrabble one doesn't have rude words, or much Australian slang.

My favourite word: quim. Oh, look it up, Hortensia.  A clue: the Scrabble dictionary doesn't have it. The only place I've seen it used is in a novel by John Banville.

Trying to Catch the Voice

My Wrappings is falling apart.

In the 1970s, the book Wrappings, by Vicki Viidikas was a must-have for a young feminist in the inner-west of Sydney, along with several Joni Mitchell LPs, The Dialectic of Sex, by Shulamith Firestone, and various other cultural artefacts.

But Vicki Viidikas (1948-1998) was closer to us than all the others. She was our contemporary, she lived in Sydney, and she wrote about the sorts of places and people that we were familiar with, in uncensored language and indeed, thought.

 (Did I ever meet her? I think she may have answered the door of a house I was visiting, once. The 70s was like that. )

 Viidikas wrote poetry, and things that she called 'pieces' and things that could be short stories. Or not.

I'm  not quite sure when it was, the first time I wanted to say something about myself, that I was quite definite I had to speak, and someone would listen. Whenever it was it was early, I wanted to run into the darkness and start talking to the night, standing in that black tent, a voice in dark veils, imagining an answer. Or walking about in daylight addressing myself to the sunshine, calling out as it drew me out, to be turned like a mute thing, to be cooked and gone brown. Maybe it was the trees I imagined had ears, putting my arms round their knobbly trunks, laying my face against their skin as they stood there tall messengers.

Vicki Viidikas, 'Trying to Catch the Voice', in Wrappings (Wild and Woolley, 1974)


Some of her words make me laugh. Look at the imagery and brilliant economy in this sentence:

"They made love that night like crocodiles on a rampage, and again in the morning before she went to work." (in 'It's just the Full Moon')

and others I know by heart, the way you never forget a line of poetry :

"I am not making love at the time of writing this story, in fact it's been some time since I felt any sunlight streaming through the skin." ('The Incomplete Portrait')

Her work is funny, angry, gutsy and real - and it will last. She is someone who certainly caught her own voice. She is brilliant and inimitable.

Fortunately, for those not around to get their own copy of Wrappings in the 70s, a selection of her work, some of it previously unpublished, was published last year.  Vicki Viidikas: New and Rediscovered.

There's a review here.


New and Rediscovered contains many of her poems, including her first published poem, at the age of 19, 'At East Balmain'.

I love this from it:

A hermit dog lives here, in a burnt-out boiler turning

orange. He stays inside all day - I've seen his eyes

glint in the dark, he is huge and black and solemn.

What a noticer she is, what strength of writing, and what compassion.


Finally, I'll let the page speak for itself, as it always does.

'The page should fuck back': from 'The Incomplete Portrait'

Gathering

 ....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?

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

Reading:

Flaubert's Parrot
The Idiot
Vicki Viidikas, New and Rediscovered 


Gathering:

the first french beans
rocket
lettuce
a few yellow baby tomatoes
images and connotations for my novel


thinking:

about making a christmas cake

Simone and Virginia

The time-obsessed Virginia has been joined by her stylish friend Simone.

Did they ever meet in life? It is possible: Virginia (1882-1941) and Simone (1908-1986) lived partly contemporaneously (is that the word?).

Virginia was hopeless with clothes, never knew what looked good on her, and nervous about buying new ones.

Simone was more interested in clothes than Virginia. Of her early working life as a teacher:

We were also very concerned about our dress and make-up. Colette's usual garb consisted of Lacoste shirtwaists and daringly but successfully contrasted scarfs. She also owned a very attractive jacket (we thought it magnificent) of black leather, with white revers. Simone  [Labourdin] had a girl friend who bought her clothes in the grandes maisons, and who occasionally made her a present of some studiedly simple ensemble. My own single concession to elegance lay in my sweaters, which my mother knitted for me from very carefully chosen patterns, and which were often copied by my pupils. Our make-up and hair styling  gave the lie to that odd ideal which a parent had once enthusiastically suggested to Colette Audry, that we should pursue a 'secular nun' effect.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life


Though she wasn't much interested in clothes, in A Room of One's Own, Virginia stood up for women's interests:

Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'. And these values are transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room ...

... everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

 And whom do I prefer? Though both these women are well-represented on my shelves, I'm a Virginia woman myself.

"There were a lot of snakes in our lives...

... at this time. At our mother's house enormous carpet pythons wound themselves around the rafters of the verandahs.    [...]

Snakes curled up in dark corners of Emma's studio; they stretched along the noggins of the unlined walls, still and milky-eyed, and shed their skins. Her studio was the perfect place for snakes, dim and cool and surrounded by sheltering trees."

Joanne Horniman, A Charm of Powerful Trouble, 2002


What's the world coming to, Hortensia? I have put my own book in the attic!

It's just that I've had a visitor at the blue room (that's just a skin, by the way, not a live snake)

and it put me in mind of something I've written. In fact, it was the snakiness of this room while I was writing that charming book that led to the snakes going into it. Art imitating life. Or something.

" - he hates to have me write a word."

"If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency - what is one to do?"


Since we were talking about attics and madness, Hortensia (by the way, your name means 'gardener' - one I wouldn't mind having myself, as I like cultivating things - tomatoes, lettuce, imaginary characters), there's a story that I'm putting in the attic as it ticks all the boxes: madness, women, attics, and writing.

You probably know The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) ... not one of my favourites stories, but one I read from time to time, as its a great feminist classic and example of female Gothic.

There's something about the gothic that suits women's anger at their lot: think Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and my own Charm of Powerful Trouble (though I'm not in their league), which I call Mullumbimby Gothic, a little known and represented genre.

A young wife and mother and her husband lease what amounts to a haunted house, and it is here she becomes unstuck. She has an unfortunate tendency to want to write, and her husband thinks she should be shut up alone in a top floor room to rest ... well, we know where that kind of thing leads. The wallpaper starts getting to you, for starters.

There is also evidence that some other mad person has been locked up there - though the woman naively thinks it may have been used as a gymnasium (the rings on the walls) or a children's room (the bars on the windows) ...

And that wallpaper, which someone has started peeling away from the wall:

"The colour is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

There comes John, and I must put this away - he hates to have me write a word."

But the prisoner scribbles away secretly - she needs to write, it helps her. From the start, she is writing her story.

Then, in about the middle, the text changes, and no further reference is made to writing. Things become extremely strange, and the story becomes a stream of consciousness from her mind, rather than a written text.

At the end, she is completely mad.

We all know how writing keeps us sane (as well as judicious doses of fish oil, exercise, and so on). Being shut up with hideous wallpaper in a room that's clearly haunted is not prescribed these days.

I'm changing the colour of the wallpaper in the attic in honour of this story, but only until the next post. I think you'll agree, Hortensia, that we couldn't live with this hideous, sulphurous yellow.