Little ten cent scourer

Hello attic! Where did you get to? Or rather, where did I go? (I think I may have wandered away somewhere.) But now that you're here, I feel I must bring a book (toil, toil, up the ladder) that I've been meaning to put in the attic for some time.

Nice, eh.

Provenance: bought at Robin Downs Bookshop, Murwillumbah (now defunct, I imagine) in the 1970s for 90 cents. Previously at Higgs Bookshop Sydney for 50 cents.

A year or so ago I bought another second-hand copy at the famous (to me) Canty's bookshop in Fyshwick, Canberra ($7.50), and the words are just the same, the cover even  more tasteless:

Which is the remarkable thing about books. I mean that the words are the same ... I thought I would only ever be able to read my wonderful old copy, and it was falling apart (as books do), and then where would I be? But this new copy is just as good, words wise, though I am less attached to it as artefact.

Now, Kerouac is always being lambasted for being sexist etc etc and who am I to argue otherwise?

But I present to you this:

(Kerouac is at Ferlinghetti's cabin at Bixby Canyon, though he says it's as Big Sur: Jean Louis always made laughable attempts to fictionalise his books ...)

___ So once again I'm Ti Jean the Child, playing, sewing patches, cooking suppers, washing dishes (always kept the kettle boiling on the fire and anytime dishes needed to be washed I just pour hot water into the pan with Tide soap and soak them good and then wipe them clean after scouring with a little 5- &-10 wire scourer) --- Long nights simply thinking about the usefulness of that little wire scourer, those little yellow copper things you buy in supermarkets for 10 cents, all to me infinitely more interesting than the stupid and senseless 'Steppenwolf' novel in the shack which I read with a shrug [...]

Kerouac, Big Sur, Chapter 7



I rest my case. The poetry of kitchens, written by a man.


(And I often think of the infinite pleasure I've had from this little falling-apart book, bought for 90 cents over 30 years ago.)

Moss-haired girl

Found at the Lifeline op shop in South Lismore: a copy of Michael and me and the Sun, by Barbara Hanrahan. (This shop has a marvellous book collection - huge - and most books are 3 for $2. It's possible to find many old and out-of-print books there. A real treasure house.)

Barbara Hanrahan (1939 - 1991) was an Australian print-maker and novelist, born in Adelaide, and living and working there and in London till her death at the age of 52 after a long battle with sarcoma.

Michael and Me and the Sun was written in the last year of her life, much of it while she was in hospital (the book itself makes no mention of this; I discovered it later). It's a memoir of her time in London when she first went there in the early 1960s to continue her study of printmaking.

She was so eager to get there that she went long before the term began, and worked for a while as a teacher by day, while taking classes in etching, wood-engraving, and lithography four nights a week.

I felt too shy to ask any questions, I just wanted to learn by watching what other people did. And to make myself feel safer still, I drew one of the moss-haired girls I'd drawn in Adelaide, in a flower-sprigged dress like the girls wore in my grandmother's Girl's Own Annual of 1911. She ran stilly in her buttoned boots on my piece of zinc, a leafy bough in her hand. On the next plate she was bigger - she floated among the branches of a tree with peck-beaked birds all around her. I put my head down and pressed my finger hard on the etching needle, and drew in the shivery lines of her hair, the lacing of her bodice, her billowing skirt. I lost myself in detail: dots and swirls and zig-zags. The old atmosphere lapped around me again. At the art school on the Terrace in Adelaide I'd escaped the pinprick worries of everyday as I'd worked at my prints. It happened here, too. I forgot the school and the flat in the surety of ritual - the escape from an everyday world as you went through the crazy ceremony of inking up your plate, then wiping the ink away from your hand till all that was left just filled the line of your drawing. The room was full of bustle, yet full of the stillness of concentration. For those few hours I was surrounded by my own kind of people. It didn't matter that the bearded boys in black aped Jackson Pollock, that the old ladies did their kittens and puppy-dogs, that I did my moss-haired girls - we were all part of something bigger than ourselves. Surrounded by the familiar smells - printing ink and stopping-out varnish and damp paper and turps and methylated spirits - I was content.

From Michael and Me and the Sun (UQP, 1992)

I love this moss-haired girl. And I do not think she runs 'stilly' as Hanrahan said.  There is so much strength in her, as she grasps those branches. Look at her sturdy legs in their buttoned boots - she is the very essence of defiant and independent young woman, for all her 1911 clothing - she is almost jumping into the air.

And what I love about the passage above is the description of the absorption in ones work, which surely must be the most satisfying and happy-making aspect of doing anything, whether it be print-making or gardening or baking or writing.

Aliteracy

Dear Mr Blue,

I have been a voracious reader since childhood, devouring fiction, history, science, philosophy, like a vacuum cleaner. I'm the only person I know who's read everything by Sartre, Simeon, Dickens, Trollope, Patrick O'Brien, and Jean M. Auel.  I've read the Koran, the Buddhist canon, the C. H. Mackintosh commentaries on the Bible, Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas. And now, at the age of 48, I seem to have crashed. I have not opened a book in the past two years. It doesn't interest me. I look at the books on my coffee table and they're like bricks to me. Any ideas?

                                                                                                                -Scorched

Dear Scorched, No sin to be aliterate. There's a whole world out there that writers write about that you can discover for yourself. Cooking, travel, clinical depression, exile, self-destructive behaviour, the accumulation of vast wealth, inappropriate romance, just to name seven. I'm on the other side of the canyon from you, a writer who is staring at a blank page and trying to figure out how to make a brick out of it. Someday, somebody should  bring nonwriters together with nonreaders to see what they have to say to each other.

From Love Me, by Garrison Keillor


My friend Sue blew in from Brisbane on the weekend, bearing mangoes and other gifts.
'You know I'm not a reader,' she said cheerfully, giving me a copy of Love Me, 'but I loved this.'

It's true, Sue doesn't read. Though years ago she gave me a copy of John Updike's Rabbit, Run and said fervently, 'If you read only one sentence...'

I read the whole book and saw what she meant. Updike's sentences are superb.  What a stylist.

But Garrison Keillor ... I've heard excerpts from his radio show and didn't like him. And this book ... would I be able to read it?

I was (and am) in the middle of Yukio Mishima's Forbidden Colours, about a famous nasty old Japanese writer who, to take his revenge on womankind, bribes a beautiful young homosexual man to break their hearts ...  a pretty amazing book to have been written in the early 1950s, since there is a great deal in it about homosexual beats and bars in Japan. But I find it hard to 'get' at times, the people are so strange, and well, horrible.

So I needed a 'light read' and dipped into Love Me at once. This is also about a writer, a man who had one best-selling book and then went to write for the New Yorker. His wife, a social worker, was happy living in the same old house and run-down suburb in St Paul, Minnesota, and didn't want to go with him, chasing fame and glamour in New York; she is a person for whom things are 'good enough' (you can see where this is heading at once).

And then he finds he can't write a thing, and takes on a part-time job doing an advice column for a small regional paper.

There is so much lovely bitchy stuff about writers and writing in this book. Real writers are mentioned here, and I would hazard a guess that some of the stuff about them is real and some made up. Writers like A. B. White and Updike and Salinger drift through the corridors of the New Yorker, and you want to say to them all, get a life!

But it was the concept of aliteracy that struck me. It's the first time I've heard the term used.

We all know people who are aliterate. People who can read, but just don't want to. Many of these people have tertiary qualifications. They don't see the point of the exercise.

Sometimes I read myself to a standstill, so I understand what Scorched was getting at.  Enough reading! I say, and go out and garden, or cook ... but so far, after a break, I always come back to books. They don't remain bricks to me for long.

And after Love Me, I'm itching to get back to something meatier. Like that dreadful Forbidden Colours, which makes me see what the point of reading and writing is.

Writing under the influence

The young Patrick White apparently admitted that 'he was very much under the influence of Gertrude'; also that he had been 'drunk with the technique of writing' and said that he 'had gone up that cul de sac the stream of consciousness' when he wrote his first novel Happy Valley at the age of 26.

Well, so have we all been much under the influence of Gertrude or perhaps I should only speak for myself. I was so much under the influence of Gertrude while writing About a Girl that, seeing the error of my ways, I rewrote those parts, telling my publisher about the first draft, 'Ignore that; I was under the influence of Gertrude'.

Stein is very influential. To read her makes you think that all other writing is  dull and predictable. You automatically begin writing like Stein - it's infectious. I think the best thing about Gertrude is that she makes writing look like an adventure. Words only mean what you want them to mean and sentences are emotional or is that paragraphs.

"Think of a sentence not however or with a mound but just as pointed and polite and shortly." (Stein: How To Write)

Happy Valley has recently been republished by Text Publishing for the first time since 1939. White never allowed it to be reissued in his lifetime, perhaps because he thought it a juvenile and inferior work, or perhaps because he feared prosecution by the Chinese family he used as a basis for the Quongs of Happy Valley.

It's a novel of small town life. Nearly everyone wants to get out of there. With such a large cast of characters it's inevitable that some will be more appealing than others. I love the piano teacher, 27 year old Alys Browne, who lives alone:

She read too. She had started some of the Russians, Anna Karenina, and Turgeniev, but Tennyson sounded funny now, she could not read him any more. She liked to sit down at tea, and take off her shoes, and read a chapter of Anna Karenina, though sometimes she found it a bit of an effort and lapsed to the Windsor Magazine. Tolstoi was interesting though. She had spilt some tea on the seventy-second page. It gave the book a comfortable, intimate appearance, and she liked it better after that, as if she had always had it with her and had read it several times.

White, Happy Valley, page 46

This is White under the influence of no one but his own brilliant self. There is a chapter in a schoolroom where White has gone up the cul de sac and we get the consciousness of many of the people in the room - it would be heavy-going if the whole of the book was like that, but a schoolroom is the perfect place to explore that technique - all those consciousnesses wanting to be other than where they are - all that lack of focus and wandering thoughts. The very essence of schoolroom.

Happy Valley is said to be set around Adaminaby, in the desperately cold-in-winter and hot-in-summer country to the south of Canberra. I drove through it once and stopped at a park (there is a large concrete trout there: a tourist drawcard?). We saw not one soul in the place, apart from a golden labrador who seemed very interested in our sandwiches. I gave him a raw egg as we departed, cracking it onto the ground, and he lapped it up.

A luminous halo

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little a mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not merely pleading for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

Virginia Woolf, 'Modern Fiction', in The Common Reader 


This is a good description what the Modernists (Woolf, Joyce, and Australia's own Patrick White) were attempting to achieve.

It happens this way sometimes...

... you reach out for a book on your shelf that you've never read but have been meaning to for some time. What has put you off? You love reading Patrick White. Perhaps it is the oldness and the unattractive nature of a book bought at a book sale years ago for one dollar. It has actual dirt on the cover, and things have been nibbling at the edges. Well, a lot of old books end this way and old age is seldom pretty. And many books by Patrick White are only to be found in this condition - my copy of Riders in the Chariot fell apart as I read. Or was I put off this book by the cover drawing by Sidney Nolan, of an old bush shack and water tank and bare tree, which makes you think that this book The Tree of Man  is sparse and dull and dry.

It isn't. It is wonderful, full of life and people and surprises. And brilliant language.

It made me think that no one writes like this now. What I mean is that the 20th century experiment called Modernism has petered out without leaving much effect on any writers that followed apart from perhaps John Banville. I could probably think of more, but the coffee hasn't kicked in. No, even Banville doesn't quite use language with that hallucinatory effect.

Why take LSD is what I think, when you have White, and James Joyce? (Not that I've resorted to this since my early 20s in the 1970s - but at least I know what I mean by hallucinatory).

Random par from Tree of Man (1956):

Then she went back to the house; from which she had swept most of the dust blown there by the droughty winds, and which was now clean but fragile. Her circulation was not very good this morning, her bones were brittle, and she walked about nervously amongst the bright furniture. She longed for some event of immense importance to fill the house's emptiness, but it was most improbable that it would. Glittering, dusty light spilled from the mirrors. That was all.

And other modernists:

Random bit from Kerouac, On the Road (The original Scroll) (around 1951):

He wanted to test something in himself and he wanted to see what Louanne was like with another man. We were sitting on Ross Bar on Eighth Avenue when he proposed the idea; we'd spent an hour walking Times Square looking for Hunkey.

From James Joyce, Ulysses (1922):

Smells of men. His gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale of ferment.

From Gertrude Stein, How to Write(1931):

Thank you very much. What is the difference between a verb and their altering it.

From V Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927):

As usual, Lily thought. There was always something that had to be done at that precise moment, something that Mrs Ramsay had decided for reasons of her own to do instantly.

None of that rests my case (which is?). I only know that when I read the scene in the bar from Ulysses that I was there, and it was the language that did it.  It was the same with The Tree of Man. I don't  think that many writers care for language any more. But isn't that what literature is about? Not so much what you say as the way that you say it.

White was continuing the work begun by Joyce and Woolf, by not simply recording experience, but allowing the reader to come close to what that lived experience felt like. I've been away with White for most of the week.

 On other matters, Patrick White was rather gorgeous in his youth (or middle age, as these pictures are from) - which seems young to me.

I always like a man with a cat ...

While in this 1939 portrait by Roy de Maistre he looks positively dishy.


All these rather different images than the ones we often see of White as a grumpy old man.

Anyway, I think I'll go off now and write something other than this. 

Library

... but he sometimes remembered having told one or another class that the writer Flaubert had claimed, or was reported as having claimed, that he could hear the rhythms of his still unwritten sentences for pages ahead. Whenever the man had told this to a class, he had hoped to cause his students to reflect on the power of the sentence over the mind of a certain sort of writer; but he, the man, had often supposed that the claim, or the reported claim, by Flaubert was much exaggerated.

  From 'The Boy's Name was David', by Gerald Murnane, in The Best Australian Stories 2002


I found this book in the Lismore City Library last week. I went there because I was in town and I was feeling anxious. It was an almost an overwhelming compulsion to go in there, and I gave in to it.   I like the way libraries make me feel. I do like the feel of books around me; books that might be borrowed rather than bought, the surprise of what I might find.  Things are relatively calm and ordered there, as well as familiar. One library is very much like another, I've found. I've taught a lot of writing classes in libraries. On the whole, I prefer to conduct a writing class in a library - even a school library - than in a classroom. And I've spent time in libraries waiting for librarians to take me somewhere - to my motel room, or to another town, or to an airport home. I've never minded waiting like that.


I think maybe I went in there so that I would discover this particular paragraph, which reminded me that I need to get the rhythm of my sentences going - otherwise it's like getting onto a bicycle and going too slowly - you tend to wobble and fall off.