Baby bites book

Perhaps you would fancy an 'Ode to an Eider-Duck' 

Telling his praises with never a pause:

How he was born a duck, lived - yes, and died a duck,

Hampered by nature's inscrutable laws.

(AA Milne, written when he was a schoolboy, from a poem quoted in his autobiography, It's Too Late Now.)




One of the highlights of my day, most days, is going down to the creek to feed the ducks. Often I think how ducky they are, how happy to simply be ducks - and just as well, as they will never be anything else.

My turning up is greeted with such excitement (it's the food I bring - poultry grain mix). Little Duck honks, and Pierre, her paramour, often get out of the water and waddles around with his friends, one or two wild ducks (Pacific Black Ducks), so happy are they to see me.

Just recently I remembered this verse on the destiny of simply being a duck. It's part of a longer poem quoted in AA Milne's autobiography, It's Too Late Now (1939).

 'The title,' he said,  'means that heredity and environment make the child, and the child makes the man, and the man makes the writer; so it's too late now ... for me to be a different writer.'

You are what you are (just like the ducks).

I bought my old copy (not a first edition, but a third, still printed in the year of first publication, 1939) almost 30 years ago, at the height of my interest in children's literature, from an antiquarian bookseller.

Here it is, photographed just now on the window-sill of the attic in bright dappled winter sunlight. Almost half way down the spine there is a small piece  out of the dust-jacket, where my baby bit into the book. I kept the piece stuck in with tape, but that has aged and fallen off over time. My baby turned 28 last month.

I think now that the reason I like this book so much is because it has the imprint of my baby's infant teeth. Some people save the first pair of booties - I have a book with baby teeth marks.

Nasty old ladies and eccentric young girls

Reading Elizabeth Bowen


I had a Rip Van Winkle moment last week. Influenza (or something remarkably like it) having kept me at home for a month, I was on my way to Brisbane. Stopping in the town of Murwillumbah (where I grew up) I got out to take money from an ATM. It was a new-fangled model I'd not seen before. After trying to put my card into the receipt slot, I took out my glasses to look at the machine properly, studying it closely, looking at every part, averting my eyes all the time from a horrible transparent green perspex bubble, which flashed, continuously. This, of course, turned out to be the slot for the card. At a newsagent upstairs, where I went to buy a paper, a woman was buying instant lottery tickets, all with peculiar names. 'I'll have three Shazams and two Pookie Ookies." Or something like that.

Then, at a service station, while observing a very resigned-looking woman fill her car (it was an ugly place, on the highway, with no pleasing thing in sight), it struck me that the rest of the world wasn't working their way through the works of Elizabeth Bowen. (Though there are some women, as I write this, doing exactly that, you may be sure, Mildred.)


When you spend a lot of time with an author over a short time you begin to see patterns in their work. A comment in one book becomes a major thread in another. When I mentioned this to Underground Man, who is going through a bit of an Elizabeth Bowen blitz as well, he said at once, 'Nasty old ladies and young girls.'

Well, yes.

Her young girls, and by this I mean teenagers, are particularly appealing. And though Bowen's books are set roughly from the 1920s to the 1960s, the period she wrote in, they are very like girls you meet today.  Portia, in The Death of the Heart (1938), is heartbreaking in her belief in the importance of real feeling against the cynicism, neglect and betrayal of her elders. Her friend, Lilian, is a hoot (and let's not forget the importance of humour in Bowen's work - I laugh, often).  When Portia asks Lilian what she is doing tomorrow, Lilian replies:

'Confidentially, Portia, I don't know what may happen.'

(And then there is the dear, lolloping, spotty, eager-to-please Pauline in To The North - and her friend Daphne. And the dreadful Theodora in Friends and Relations: 'She was spectacled, large-boned and awkwardly anxious to make an impression.' Theodora forces herself on people and is forbidding and opinionated. She will make a dreadful old lady.)

Portia, Bowen's most intricate and sympathetic portrait of a young girl, doesn't understand the world at all.

Lilian had all those mysterious tomorrows: yesterdays made her sigh, but were never accounted for. She belonged to a junior branch of emotional society, in which there is always a crisis due. Preoccupation with life was not, clearly, peculiar to Lilian: Portia could see it going on everywhere. She had watched life, since she came to London, with a kind of despair - motivated and busy always, always progressing: even people pausing on bridges seemed to pause with a purpose; no bird seemed to pursue a quite aimless flight. The spring of the works seemed unfound only by her: she could not doubt people knew what they were doing - everywhere she met alert cognisant eyes. She could not believe there was not a plan for the whole set-up in every head but her own.

Eva Trout, (in Eva Trout (1969) -  one of those books with the heroine's name as the title - Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina - they all meet sticky ends, as does poor Eva) is one of the most appealing characters I've ever met. She is large, handsome and about to become very rich, at 24, when the book starts. Eva is like a large child and remains so throughout. But a very likeable one, strange and vulnerable.

 Like Portia, she is betrayed by those who are charged with looking after her. Like Portia, she is an orphan who doesn't understand how the world works. Her mother died while running away from the family when Portia was small. Her father, an industrialist, whom we gather had an affair with the man later made her guardian, was always absent anyway. So who was she to learn from? No one has ever loved Eva properly (though some people are obsessed with her and think they do) until a child, who was 12 when she was 24, grows up. One longs for Eva to be happy...  But you know what they say about the gun on the mantlepiece in chapter one (though in this book it appears much later). Eva dies in the last sentence. It is all very fitting. I think this might be my favourite Bowen - it is a very strange book. Few people seem to write strange books anymore, and we are all the poorer.

Emmeline, in ToThe North (1932) is also on the verge of an unavoidable, accidental death right in the last sentence. This pattern made me fear for the fate of Jane in A World of Love (1955), who in the last chapter is a passenger in a car going to an airport. The trip is described in such detail that I become sure that Bowen is about to kill her. But she arrives at the airport, and the passenger she is meeting, unknown to her, alights.

But she doesn't die. In the last sentence, she only falls in love at first sight.

Bowen is one of the major novelists of last century. Heir to both Virginia Woolf (whom she knew), and  Jane Austen (to whom she has been compared), the density of her books makes almost every other writer seem superficial. And you need to concentrate.

I liken it to driving along a winding cliff road at the dead of night, rain pouring down, windscreen wipers thrashing. White-knuckled, you keep your eyes on the road. Miss something - a phrase, a nuance - and you're lost.

Re-reading is essential.

And if that makes it all seem a bit difficult, there is also (and here I adopt a Nigella Lawson persona, glancing flirtatiously at the camera before she devours a slice of deep-fried chocolate cheesecake) deep, deep, pleasure.

P.S.  Nasty old ladies? Mostly they are middle-aged and manipulative. But one ( the dying Mme Fisher in The House in Paris is almost pure evil).

Heart on a shelf

....anyway, so the girl found her way to Germany, and got herself translated, and a new dress:

The small matter of the tatt:




She don't call, she don't write, and I haven't yet been sent an author copy, so I have to find out what my girl is doing from the net.

She's as sweet as sugar on top, but several readers have undressed her and found that under that pretty dust jacket are tea stains from two cups, (see - readers undress books just as mothers undress their baby first chance they get after birth to get a proper look). Nice!

(And thanks to a blogger whose link I can't find again for the pictures here at the side.)

And so to my dear readers:


It's gratifying that so many of you have taken my girl to your hearts.

Thanks to the vagaries of Google Translate, I have been able to read early responses to this translation. It makes me realise how lucky I am to have appreciative readers - and I mean by this of all my books in the many languages they've been translated into.

One of my favourite reader's comment from this latest edition (and there are many quotable comments) is this one from Butterblume89:

 She says, "A book which is my new heart on a shelf ..." (thanks again, Google translate, it's beautiful)


Note that she says: my new heart. She will find new book loves, but this is hers, for now. We readers are constantly falling in love - I'm happy that my girl is yours at the moment, butterblume.

Down the toilet

Can that be Franz Kafka poking his head out?

How can you resist a book that ends with a rendition of 'The Internationale'?

Well, that's a rhetorical question, which I will immediately answer: Not at all.






Danika laughed. 'I don't want to be rich, Dad. I'm going to be a socialist!'

And she sang the lyrics, taught to her by Mandy, of 'The Internationale', anthem of socialists all around and under the world.

Rise, people, from your sleep,

Rise, people, from your misery,

The earth is ours again.

We'll break the chains,

We'll change the rules,

We are poor and weak no more.

Now everybody sing!

From Danika in the Underworld, by Ranulfo  (2003)



This is a book that makes me laugh out loud every time (it's damn health-inducing!), a book that makes me want to pick it up and quote bits to people. It's a book whose heart is absolutely in the right place, a right-on, kick-ass (sorry, kick-bottom) read for people of all ages.



Portals


Forget about going through the backs of wardrobes, or down rabbit holes. The entrance to the other world (um, underworld) in this book, is down the toilet.

Which is where Danika goes, to rescue her brother,  Branwell (19th century literary allusion alert in children's book).

There, along with her left-leaning doll Mandy, she faces all kinds of trials, such as being taken to a children farm where they are being fattened up to be turned into burgers for cows. Though resisting the soft, easy life at first, full of fattening food and mind-numbing entertainment, Danika succumbs, and Mandy rescues her.

'I want my TV. I want my TV,' she droned.

Mandy jumped on her shoulder and slapped her hard on the face. 'Danika! Snap out of it!' She slapped her again and again.

'Playstation. Playstation. Playstation.'

'Listen to me, you adolescent imbecile!'

"Pokemon. Pokemon. I must collect them all.'

'Talk stimulatingly to me!'

'Boohoohoo,' cried Danika.

'Why are you crying?'

'I'm not cool. I don't have Nike.'

'Who's Nike? Is he your friend?'

'Mummy, let's go to Mc Donald's. Mummy, let's go to McDonald's. Mummy, let's go to McDonald's.'

'You're beyond my reach, you Zombiegirl.'

Eventually, Mandy 'tied Danika up hand and foot and read Shakespeare to her while feeding her a low fat, sugar-free, nutritious diet.'


It's a book that pokes fun at itself, or at people like me, who love it. But it is also, at heart, deadly serious. Or so I think.

 Ranulfo, I won't ask if you're experienced. But are you serious?

So who is this Ranulfo?


He of only one name (like Prince, or Madonna). His bio at the front of the book is helpful:

"Ranulfo was born on an island called Bohol in the Philippines. He lived in a coconut tree with his monkey friends. Against his will, he was taken to Australia to be civilised. This proved to be a failure so he was sent to a lunatic asylum. He spends his time staring at the wall and writing novels. he is currently working on his third novel made of bricks."

The judging ordeal

I had read Ranulfo's earlier  young adult novel, Nirvana's Children, but Danika would have
passed under my radar if I hadn't been judging the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2003-4. I had no trouble convincing my fellow inmates (an independent bookshop owner and a former school principal) to nominate it as one of six short-listed for the Patricia Wrightson Award, but I knew they wouldn't be adventurous enough to let it win. Awards are often compromises on what everyone can agree on (but you probably knew that).


And so to the man himself

He was at the awards ceremony, a gala event full of politicians and literary luminaries (sorry, breaking into cliche here) held that year at the NSW State Parliament House. Former Labour Prime Minister  Gough (Whitlam) walked by as I was in the lobby sipping a bubbly wine. And, gosh, is that Janette Turner-Hospital brushing  past me on her way to the toilet?

No wonder I found Ranulfo lurking after the dinner in the darkened area outside the dining room, solitary with a glass of wine. I don't remember what I said, or he said, except that he seemed shy (horrid judge-lady gushing at him), so I went and gushed at his publisher instead, and she  kindly sent me a copy of Danika's sequel, which wasn't quite as good. (I ended up sending it on its way via Bookcrossing. It started out at Caddie's Coffee shop in Lismore and ended up with someone's kid sister in Melbourne.)



Nirvana's Children



I read a library copy, and now the library doesn't have it any more. And you know me - I forget the content of what I read, but I remember that I found it an extraordinary YA book by anyone's standards. Extraordinary book.

His writing is like Murakami crossed with Dostoyevsky, with overtones of John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces.

I mean it's colloquial, and dark, and fun, and intelligent, and precise, and never dull.

I do wish he'd write more. I haven't seen a new book by him in years.

Ranulfo, where art thou?

A tree falls in a forest

They didn't hear it fall - though perhaps something did - a yellow robin, or a white-cheeked honey eater, or a wallaby.

It's a huge old sally wattle - not long-lived anyway, and with its fall it takes a couple of other trees with it, trees they had planted. They decide not to cut up the trunk, or clear it away from the path. In fact, it's now the nicest part of the rainforest they'd spent almost 25 years working on - a focal point. Its trunk has scores of tiny birds-nest ferns growing on it, and fungi, and in time it will rot away and enrich the soil. The gap in the canopy will allow other trees to flourish. This is as it should be.

It's like a child leaving home. The rainforest is grown-up at last. It's first natural felling.



God-like


God-like, and rather presumptuously, we sometimes think we created this little rainforest, but really all we did was work around what was there - a foam bark, some kamalas ... though we did plant hundreds of trees we either propagated ourselves, or bought. Seed collected from the foam bark that grew here, and black bean seed from trees found along the creek. In time, they seeded themselves, thickening everything up nicely.

There's a bunya nut pine or two, grown from a cone from a tree further up the road at Cawongla, whose enormous seeds were brought back a century ago, at least, by Aboriginal tribes who journeyed to the Bunya Mountains in Queensland for the bunya nut feasts, coming back as fat as butter.

There's a blue quandong, and a Moreton Bay fig, and callicoma, and walking-stick palms, and crows ash ... and ...and ...and


A labour of love

That's what it was. Purely and simply. Because we love trees, and the land I only ever considered we were looking after. Because we wanted to put it back to a semblance of how it once was. Hours spent clearing lantana, and digging up and pulling down and brush-cutting madeira vine, but mainly crouching down with a couple of buckets pulling the weeds up out of the ground - hours at a time, meditatively. The zen of clearing madeira vine.


Madeira vine

You have your own heading. I should say,    !!!!MADEIRA VINE !!!!

This weed is truly a curse. Without it, and its friend balloon vine, regenerating a rainforest would be a doddle. Madeira vine smothers and kills; each plant produces hundreds - thousands!- of  tubers that fall to the ground and stay viable for years, each of which send up its own little innocent shoot that grows into a raging growth, cutting out the light from trees. The tubers are so indestructible they must be burnt.

Success

And yet we've managed to rescue trees from it. We found one tree, many metres tall, that had but one little branch and a single leaf clinging to it. That tree (whose name we don't know) is now flourishing and healthy.


The Nicholsons

Remember that the attic is a bookish one. I want to bring into it a series of brilliant books that were our Bible when we did our planting. They are called Australian Rainforest Plants, and there are 6 of them,  published by the authors Hugh and Nan Nicholson.

They're such simple, beautiful little books, and have done so much in making people aware, appreciative and educated about rainforest plants. With a beautiful photograph of each plants, there is a graceful and informative description, and how it may be used in the garden.

Mallotus philippensis

Red Kamala

In India a golden-red dye for silk is made from the powder covering these fruits. Red Kamala is widespread through Asia and New Guinea and from north Queensland south to the Hunter River in New South Wales. It is a very common tree growing to about 10m and is most useful for regenerating abused ex-rainforest land, often unfortunately in competition with the introduced Camphor Laurel. Brilliant red and blue bugs often inhabit the foliage but do little harm to the tree.

In the garden: It is not a remarkably handsome tree and is rarely seen in cultivation. However it could be grown more often for reforestation purposes as it is very tough in full sun and in depleted soil. For a pioneer tree its seed is remarkably short-lived and it is difficult to find trees with good seed. It should be sown when very fresh.

Family: Euphorbiaceae

Australian Rainforest Plants, Nan and Hugh Nicholson

We have countless Red Kamalas growing all over our place - all naturally there, all self-sown. They aren't very attractive, but their red seeds are decorative - and I've seen huge clusters of the little red and blue bugs!


Sleepless nights


Sometimes I wonder what will happen to our rainforest when we leave here (and we have decided to move on to new adventures). Although it's all grown-up it's not really able to look after itself. If not kept in check, weeds like lantana and balloon vine, but especially madeira vine (hello again!) could smother and choke it.

I don't know if people will come who value it as we do - or even notice it. (If no one's noticing it, will it still exist?) When people buy houses these days, even houses in the country, they seem obsessed with bathrooms and kitchens, but not a beautiful little rainforest pocket.

Ah, I know you will say that I should be optimistic. But if you don't know a rainforest and understand it, and know what it is you're looking at, can you be expected to value it and care for it?


As a writer once said,

A forest is so intricate it takes intimacy with it to know how to look at the maze of plants entwined like serpents: twisted, coiled, sinuous, insinuating. A rainforest is artful and curled and wild. It is the wildness I love most of all. It takes time to know it and love it, to see properly what it is.

Joanne Horniman, A Charm of Powerful Trouble, 2002

So I am with them, in London

We castigate ourselves when we forget things. It must be some failing in us, or worse, a premonition of dementia.

But imagine if we were to remember every single thing in our lives. That way madness lies. We were meant to forget. Some things drop out of our minds to make room for others - even though sometimes we remember trivial things and forget stuff that seems more important.

Our memories are different from those of our friends. One of mine swears I went with him to THE big, famous, anti-aparteid demonstration at Coogee oval during the 1971 Springbok tour.  But I don't think I was there, though I can't be sure. I've seen footage of it - and sometimes I think I remember it - but they may be false memories. But why would I block out such a big thing?  - it looked violent and scary.  Maybe I've blocked it out because of that. Maybe my friend is mistaken, and he was there with someone else ...



And so to books. I forget most of what I read. The only books I remember really well are ones I've read many times - such as Jack Kerouac, or the early novels of Margaret Drabble.

I even forget the books I've written. I'd be hard-pressed to name the minor characters in some. It all flows away.

What I do remember of what I read is a) whether I liked the book and b) why I liked it, in a broad sense - for the style, or the atmosphere, or a memorable character. Plots I'm hopeless at, either reading or writing 'em.

There's a book by Elizabeth Bowen I must have read about 20 years ago. I went through a real binge of reading her, and owned most of her novels at some time - still own most. But not this one, until now.

I read it as a library copy, and all I remember of it is a few sentences. What I thought might be it turned up as a second hand copy yesterday, and I wondered, Is this the one?

I looked at the back blurb:


...  when sixteen-year-old Portia comes to live with her wealthy half-brother and his wife, Anna, in London during the thirties ...

This was the one!

I found the bit I remembered, a few pages in, just where I thought I'd find it.

 Portia keeps a diary, and Anna has found it and read it. She talks to a friend, who is a writer, about it:

'Tell me, [he says] do you remember the first sentence of all?'

'Indeed I do,' Anna said. '"So I am with them, in London".'

'With a comma after the "them"? ... The comma is good; that's style ... I should have liked to have seen it, I must say.'

Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart



A sixteen-year-old girl with a diary. A girl who can write with style, who knows where to put a comma, for effect.

I am thankful for my forgetfulness. I am going to read this book all over again, with great enjoyment.

Mad men and women who want it all

This month I've been reading Dostoyevsky (The Devils, or if you prefer, 'The Possessed') and watching seasons One to Four of Mad Men.

The mad men, you will probably know, are the advertising execs on Madison Avenue in the 1960s.
The Devils has quite a few mad men of its own. The characters have conversations that go like this:

....' I love beauty. I am a nihilist, but I love beauty. Don't nihilists love beauty? The only thing they do not love is idols, but I love an idol. You are my idol! You don't insult anyone, and everyone hates you; you look on everyone as your equal, and everyone is afraid of you. That's good. No one will ever come up to you to slap you on the shoulder. You're an awful aristocrat. An aristocrat who goes in for democracy is irresistible. To sacrifice life - yours and another man's - is nothing to you. You're just the sort of man we need. I - I especially, need a man like you. I don't know of anyone but you. You're my leader, you're my sun, and I am your worm.'

He suddenly kissed his hand. A shiver ran down Stavrogin's spine and he snatched his hand away in dismay. They stopped.

'Mad!' Stavrogin whispered.

People in Dostoyevsky make mad, impassioned speeches. The samovar is always boiling. Oddly, I find them rather like people I have known. I could walk into a Dostoyevsky novel and feel right at home. Reading him is addictive.

Addictive, too, is Mad Men, though I don't think I have met people quite like this. Scheming, mad revolutionaries, yes, ad men, no. (No, I did meet one once at a posh Sydney wedding in the 70s. He was all for cigarette advertising.)

As they are in Mad Men. There, it's the 1960s - 50 years ago! - and everything is seething away under the surface. Don and Betty Draper look like the perfect young middle class couple, but it's all a facade. At the end of season three, Roger Stirling says to young copywriter Peggy Olson, 'Go get me some coffee,' and she looks up from her work and says, 'No,' firmly but without rancour.

There will be a lot of anniversaries of the 60s this decade. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was published in 1963. So was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

At the beginning of the episode titled 'Maidenform', set in a hot New York summer, someone at a party murmurs, 'This reminds me of the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs.'

Literary allusions in Mad Men!

'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I don't know what I was doing in New York' is the opening sentence of The Bell Jar.

My 40 year old copy is full of underlinings. Back then, as an eager young feminist, I always underlined sections of books pertaining to the role of women, but in this book, I can tell by what I was underlining it wasn't only that. I underlined sentences that I liked for the way they were written. I liked many of the one line sentences, what they suggested, admiring their brevity and nuance. I liked the poetry of it.

I think Sylvia Plath was teaching me how to write.

I've been thinking a lot about the 60s lately. Now, all these years later, sexism is still on the agenda. Last weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald,  Anne Summers writes about how people don't have the concept of 'men who want it all' - that impossibility is reserved for women.

Which makes Mad Men and The Bell Jar (set in 1953, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs) seem oddly relevant today. Lets not get too cocky about how far we've come.