A mouse has a little beating heart

Don't laugh - a mouse has a little beating heart, that little mouse I let live behind the cupboard was really 'humanly' scared, and it was being stalked by a big beast with a stick and it didn't know why it was chosen to die - it looked up, around, both ways, little paws up, on hind legs, breathing heavily, hunted -

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels


I often think of that line from Kerouac -' a mouse has a little beating heart' when I deal with mice. The episode the quotation comes from is when Kerouac is working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak.

This morning I took another mouse far from the house  to the area beyond the workshop and let it go. Every night when I set the tunnel trap in the kitchen I get at least one, or two, the first before I go to bed; then I re-set the trap.

I take heart in thinking that there must be quite a colony down there now - at least they will find other mice there. They are just small, brown mice. I don't know how they keep getting into the house. They're so small that I've weighted the end of the trap with a one dollar coin taped to the outside, in order for it to tip.

But they always go with a full belly. I lure them in with peanut butter with rolled oats stuck on top.

Rediscovering vinyl

Underground Man has been rediscovering his records, so last night I found myself listening to
Catholic Boy, the late Jim Carroll's 1980 album. I think this track 'City Drops' is about my favourite.

 And it took me back about 15 years ago, when I was speaking to a small group of senior girls at a Catholic secondary college in a rural Victorian town. I was talking about my novel The Serpentine Belt, and mentioned the influence Jack Kerouac had on the writing of it.

 'You've probably never heard of him ...' I began.

 One of the girls said, "I have. I've read Jack Kerouac.'

 A brief quiz assured me she wasn't having me on, and our conversation continued later, after the session. She asked me if I'd read Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries. I said I hadn't, but that I loved his album, Catholic Boy. 'Catholic Boy!' she exclaimed. 'You have Catholic Boy!'

 Just one of those exchanges that make going into schools surprising and delightful.

Not at all feeble

This was one of the stages that would happen, just as now she was at the stage of crawling confidently, briskly, towards cigarette butts whenever they were in the park. When she sat up it was a miracle of posture, her back beautifully erect, her big round head a weightless balloon.

Emily Perkins, The Forrests (2012)

What a lovely, exact image of a baby.

As you've probably worked out, there aren't a lot of recently published books in the attic, but I like Emily Perkins, and have read every one of her books.

To my mind, this, The Forrests, is her best. It's the story of Dorothy Forrest, from childhood to death, told in a series of stories, different parts of her life.

EM Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel (A book  I studied at university and often have recourse to) says that nearly all novels are feeble in the end. This is because the characters start being manipulated by the plot, which takes over as a book nears its denouement.

I do find this, and this is why I nearly always like the beginnings of novels more than the later stages. Characters start out acting naturally, and then 'Oh No! Here comes the plot!', rolling like a juggernaut towards them, crushing them and rendering them lifeless.

This doesn't happen in this novel; it's satisfying all the way through, and especially at the end, because the 'plot' as such is life. Dorothy and her sister and brothers and parents and husband and children - and Daniel, the stray, deprived boy who attaches himself to the family as a child, and who Dorothy loves all her life.

I do think that people are inherently interesting - I'm never bored by the stories friends and family tell me of their life. And in novels, I don't demand that exciting things happen, just that the story be told in an engaging and meaningful way. There has to be a shape to a novel, and in this way they differ from life, which appears amorphous at times. And a meaning needs to emerge as well - isn't this why we like novels? That they are 'shaped and artful'.

In portraying life as worthwhile and engrossing and difficult, there is wisdom in this book; I think this is what I look for when I read. And there is art. Perkins is a sensory writer - we experience Dorothy's life in minute detail, we are there with her, and the images are poetic and true.  The only problem is that sometimes - and only sometimes - the detail takes over.  There's a boring bit where a cup of coffee is made, and sometimes the physical movements are described so exactly that I find them hard to follow, and I imagine the characters' bodies contorted in an unnatural way as in a game of Twister.

But then there is the beautiful simplicity of sentences like this :

 "In the dim bedroom, Louisa reached for Dorothy's hand."

Coming at the end of a paragraph of description, it perfectly weights it. This is what I like - language with rhythm.

This book was a friend to me. I immersed myself in it. I remember reading the passage quoted above while sitting in the sun on the balcony off our bedroom with a cup of tea, on a day when I strongly needed to relax and breathe and have time to myself.

I think I may be a little bit classic

It's come to my attention that my 1997 novel, Loving Athena, is on a list of 11 books nominated as Australian YA classics from the last 30 years by kill your darlings.

I'm chuffed, of course, though I know the book won't win - it's up against many best-selling and loved books. Athena would only have ever sold about 2,000 copies at most, and is long out of print, but it's always had its fans.

One girl wrote and told me she'd read it 19 times.

Even I haven't read it 19 times.

About a decade ago, I got hate mail about this book, from a class of students who'd been made to read it. It was vitriolic and aggressive in its tone - they wondered how on earth the book had been published, but most of all, they said why didn't I just make Keats gay, as he so obviously was. (Well, of course he's gay - he's a gentle boy who writes poetry - what else could he be?) By the way, they weren't wanting me to write a gay novel, it was the opposite of that.

 I was very low on iron at the time, had just come home from an operation after months of feeling ill, and I didn't reply to them. I simply didn't have the energy. I dropped their letter sadly into the bin. What made me sad was the intolerance of someone who was 'different'. These were the Pauline Hanson years, when Muslims and other 'unaustralian' people were being targeted with hate. It was now, obviously, quite okay to be intolerant.

What was their teacher thinking?

Anyway, I'm amazed that this book, of all of mine, has been chosen. Mahalia and Secret Scribbled Notebooks, are far better known, have sold many more copies, and been published overseas.

So to celebrate, I'm putting a little bit of Athena into the attic.

The novel is about a young man named Keats, who writes poetry. He lives with an old man, a potter, on a commune called Elysian Farm near Lismore. There is a real Elysian Farm near Lismore; I've never been there - I just liked the name (just as there was a real Hope Springs bookshop in Lismore - I put it in Secret Scribbled Notebooks - I have been there many times (it's now defunct), and it was very as I described).

As my Keats wrote poetry, I interleaved each chapter with one of 'his' poems.

This is one that a lot of people have told me they liked:



Street Kid


I'm sick of poems
that are shy,
skittish,
ready to run
if you look at them,
that want to be wooed,
cajoled,
yearned after
and adored.

I want a poem that stands aggressively on street corners,
cigarette in mouth,
loitering with intent.

I fell to thinking

Going up a mountain track, I fell to thinking.

How can you resist a novel that begins this way?

Natsume Soseki's (1867-1916) The Three-Cornered World (or in Japanese, Kusa Makura, or 'The Grass Pillow') is a novel about a traveller, an artist. It is gentle, meandering, philosophical ... everything I like a novel to be. There is a woman in it who is possibly mad, and an artist who wants to paint her. It ends at the point where he thinks he may be able to.

Thank heaven for all those who in devious ways by their art, bring tranquility to the world, and enrich men's hearts.

Amen, says I.

And then there's this delicious bit:

... and because I am an artist I find any passage of a novel interesting even when it is out of context. I find it interesting talking to you - so much so in fact that I'd like to talk with you every day while I'm here. I'll even fall in love with you if you like; that would be particularly interesting. But however deeply I were to fall in love with you it would not mean that we would have to get married. If you think that marriage is the logical conclusion to falling in love, then it becomes necessary to read novels through from beginning to end.

So here's to not reading novels through from beginning to end. Here's to novels with little incident and rich with imagery that allow you to reflect and enjoy without rushing or reaching towards a conclusion. 

Asleep

Canty's secondhand bookstore, Fyshwick, Canberra.

Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto. Have I read this?

I ask the former potter. Is this the book? Is this the book where the girl goes to visit a sick girl living in a remote house. It's near a lake. And the girl foretells the future or something. She's taken there by a boy, the girl's brother. And there's something about their mother?

Is that a banana book? Or a Murakami?

He shakes his head. He doesn't know.

The trouble is, I have trouble remembering what I've read. And I don't retain things - just the atmosphere, and one or two things. Makes rereading an adventure.

I buy the Banana book.

The National Library, Canberra: The Life of Patrick White.

Born 1912. Died 1990. Exactly the same as my father. I remember noting this at the time.

 Little Paddy's letters to the fairies, and to Santa. He wants a heap of things, including 'a little mouse that runs across the floor'. He hopes Santa won't think him greedy, but he does want these things so badly. I start to laugh - I want to laugh right out loud but people would look at me. (Since when have I worried about this?)

Paddy dressed at The Mad Hatter. Side on, striding: a formal shot.

Paddy's asthma improved so much when he went to the Blue Mountains that his mother bought a house at Winmalee.

Patrick White's manuscripts, in a loose, flowing hand. Plays he wrote.

Portraits of Patrick.

Photos of Patrick and Manoly. During the war, when they met. With their dogs.

His black knitted beanie with a pom pom on top. A photo of him in the beanie.

A re-creation of his study in London. His desk with long drawers. His typewriter, though he wrote in longhand.

Typed letters from Patrick.

The letter where he de-friends Geoffrey Dutton. 'I've had enough of Duttonry.'

Patrick with actors and actresses.

First editions of his books. Happy Valley, soon to be reprinted for the first time. I want a copy of this.

Patrick and Manoly in their kitchen in Centennial Park.

Patrick's Nobel Prize medal, and the certificate.

I pick up free postcards at the exit/entrance. Paddy as Mad Hatter. I recall that Roky Erickson also fancy- dressed as the mad hatter as a child. There's a picture of him in the cd booklet and on the cd of True Love Casts Out all Evil. 

A bookmark. Patrick White's glasses. How apt.

He saw things differently. He makes us see differently. That's what a great writer does. He didn't like people much. He loved them so much he thought some were transcendent.


The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra:

More portraits of Patrick White. Nick Cave. The original of the William Dargie portrait of Elizabeth 11 that hung in every school.

The original picture for the Nimrod poster of Mo Rene by Martin Sharp. Martin Sharp by Gary Shead.

A photo of Lee Lin Chin, from SBS. Aboriginal Australians well represented.

Many of portraits of notable Australians. Princess Mary of Denmark. Just marry a Danish Prince. Or write nobel prize-winning books.

The former potter as we go out: That's a big building to house a few pictures.

We walk in mist around the lake. 11 degrees, and gloomy. It's not too bad. The carillon chimes. And now we're getting damp. Go into the National Gallery.

We walk around briskly.  Indoor walking track. In case of wet weather. We know this place like the backs of our hands, as they say.  Matisse. Waterlilies. The haystack. That sculpture by Modigliani. The Ballets Russes costumes. That collage by Picasso. The Asian art. The decorative arts.

Near the loos, photographs of early expeditions to Antarctica. Horses and dogs on board the ship. The huskies curled up, asleep. The animals suffered dreadfully on the long trip.

We head down the escalator. It comes to me what the book was. The Lake, I say. That book was The Lake, by Banana Yoshimoto. The one with the brother and sister, and the girl who knows them. The house was beside a lake.

I haven't read that one, says the former potter.

Last night, back at home, 1000 km or so to the north of Canberra, I started Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto. After a few pages, I went to sleep.

faking it

My first poems were experiments; I built them on borrowed rhythms; I was a dedicated tinkerer, putting together the shapes and ideas which I shoplifted. And images. Like people who excel at crossword puzzles, I found that I could, with a little jiggling, produce images of quite startling vividness. My first poems (pomes) were lit with a whistling blue clarity (emptiness) and they were accepted by the first magazine I sent them to. Only I knew what paste-up jobs they were, only I acknowledged my debt to a good thesaurus, a stimulating dictionary and a daily injection, administered like Vitamin B, of early Eliot.

I, who manufactured the giddy dark-edged metaphors, knew the facile secret of their creation. Like piecework I rolled them off. Never, never, never did I soar on the winds of inspiration; the lines I wrote, hunched over the card table in that grubby, poorly ventilated apartment, were painstakingly assembled, an artificial montage of poetic parts. I was a literary con-man, a quack, and the size of my early success was amazing, thrilling and frightening.

But after Watson left us, after he walked out on Seth and me, poetry became the means by which I saved my life. I stopped assembling; I discovered that I could bury in my writing the greater part of my pain and humiliation. The usefulness of poetry was revealed to me; all those poets had been telling the truth after all; anguish could be scooped up and dealt with. My loneliness could, by my secret gift of alchemy, be shaped into a less frightening form. I was going to survive - I soon saw that - and my survival was hooked into my quirky, accidental ability to put words into agreeable arrangements. I could even remake my childhood, that great void in which nothing had happened but years and years of shrivelling dependence. I wrote constantly, and I wrote, as one critic said, "from the floor of a bitter heart."

And the irony, the treachery really, was that those who wrote critical articles on my books of poetry never- not one of them- distinguished between those poems I had written earlier and those that came later.

Carol Shields, The Box Garden, 1977


This is a book I return to again and again (bit of a theme in the attic, really) and it's this passage that I remember the most, that I turn to because of what it says about writing, the beauty and the pity of it. I love the narrator of this book, Charleen Forrest, dignified, poverty-stricken poet and brilliant mother, with her unruly dark hair and twisted toe, and the certainty that she will never be brave. I love her gentle, accommodating son Seth.

(An aside: Sister Book


There is a companion book to this, Small Ceremonies, where the narrator is Charleen's sister Judith Gill, successful biographer and failed novelist. This book is also about writing, a comedy of errors and cross-purposes, about the deviousness and desperation of writers, the stealing of plots (or perhaps not), the using of other people's lives as material.)


"Soaring on the wings of inspiration"




I have soared (I have also struggled - more on that later) - and it's an exhilarating feeling, page after page rolling out effortlessly under your fingers. "Don't stop to think of words" advised Jack Kerouac, and it's true, when you know what you're writing, there is no need to stop, and the words come, unbidden almost, not separate to your thoughts, but part of them.

Mathematicians say that they know when an equation is right because of the beauty of it, and writing is the same: there's a rightness to the expression - it flows, therefore it is.

I remember soaring when I wrote parts of Little Wing - the episode where Emmy leaves Matt and the baby behind, and goes on a bus to Sydney. Also the part where on Christmas day she finds herself in a park alone and a creepy man sits down near her, and follows her - she comes to a Catholic church, and imagines going inside. But then she thinks, Enough! and tells him to stop following her, and leaves.

When these parts of the book were edited I remember page after page without an editor's mark on them, they were so sure of themselves.

(Interestingly, Little Wing is the only one of my books not nominated for a single award, when all the others have had several.)  So do people notice when you soar?


1952 Vincent Black Lightning




I can also remember trudging, one painful word after another, unable to get going, unable to think what I want to say.

At times like these I resort to games. I came to a part of My Candlelight Novel where I couldn't move it forward, however I tried. It was like taking a horse to a jump, and it refusing.

There was a song I was listening to at the time: Richard Thompson's '1952 Vincent Black Lightning', a song about a man, a woman, and a motorbike.

James says to Red Molly:

"... and I've seen you in the cafes and on corners, it seems/ Red hair and black leather, my favourite colour scheme."

I took some of these words and started sentences with them, or used them in some way.

This resulted:

She came in barefoot, and padded softly around the room with her hands in the back pockets of her trousers. Finally, she perched on the windowsill. Black sky stood out behind her. Hair as red as hers was a perfect foil for the black. And the short cut suited her, even if she had done it herself. Red walls, red hair, black sky. Perfect.

"Marjorie in leather pants," I said. "Who'd have thought it?"

Waste not, want not 


A novel is such a voracious beast. It can swallow everything your imagination can come up with and then demand more; I sometimes find myself asking people about their lives and writing it down in an effort of get material. I'm shameless about this.

And sometimes you write something that goes nowhere. Seems such a waste. A whole novel, abandoned. Nice bits in it though.

So a part of it - just a part - might be good material for something you're working on now. It's like taking an old, outmoded dress with fabric you like, unpicking it, and making it into something else.

Waste not, want not.

Carol Shields is right. Writers can be devious and desperate. They'll use anything they can get their hands on. They soar on the wings of inspiration, and they shoplift and cobble things together. Some work is written from experience and emotion that mean something essential to the writer (even if they don't know why they are writing it), some is manufactured as product.

And critics can never (rarely?) tell the difference.