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."

Jack

[in San Francisco] ... after a night of perfect sleep in an old skid row hotel room I go to see Monsanto at his City Lights bookstore and he's smiling and glad to see me, says "We were coming out to see you next weekend you should have waited," but there's something else in his expression --- When we're alone he says "Your mother wrote and said that your cat is dead."

Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother --- I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down, or just purring, for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting --- He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him round my wrist, or drape him, and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he'd just purr, he had complete confidence in me --- and when I left new York to come to my retreat in the woods I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me, "attends pour mue kitiginoo" ---

Jack Kerouac, Big Sur ((1962)


On March 3rd (a month ago) it was a year since my own cat Bob died. The next day I left for New Zealand, and the day after we picked up a camper van and left Christchurch in pouring rain (the most torrential they'd pretty well ever had). After about two hours we pulled off the road just before the town of Geraldine for a rest, and  found a kitten. Or he found us. He came towards us in a determined fashion, meowing.

He was about 8 to 10 weeks old, black with a white bow-tie and very friendly. The place was deserted with no houses about and he was obviously abandoned. I insisted we take him with us. He was damp from rain, and sat quietly on my lap and shivered while I tried to warm him with my body heat. We picked up some pouches of kitten food in Geraldine and were on our way.

There was a cat-shaped hole in me which he filled exactly. In my adult years I have never had a kitten - all my cats came to me as adults, strays of course. I always thought that kittens were a bit too unformed and uninteresting.

But this little guy had such character, determined and practical, so sensible for a cat so young; there was no chance of him running away. Whenever we stopped (at safe cat-friendly places), he'd go off exploring, but came back when called. Or he followed us like a dog. And when we were ready to set off on the road again, I'd say, "Come on mister! We're going!' And he'd jump in the door and settle down to travel.

Well, not always. He often wanted to sit on the driver's lap, which annoyed Underground Man no end.
But if I tried to keep him still on my lap, he'd fight me. My hands were covered with scratches. I learned that I had to let him be where he wanted to be. Sometimes that was standing up on the edge of the driver's seat with front paws on the side window sill, looking out at the world rushing by. (A dangerous way to drive, I know.) Sometimes it was staggering up through the moving van and jumping up to look through the windows at the side. Thankfully he was sometimes so exhausted he'd fall asleep draped over my lap, me with one hand lightly on him so he'd know I wasn't restraining him.

What to do with a cat found in a country other than your own? Underground Man favoured dropping him off at a vet's; we discussed the possibility of there being a cat shelter in one of the bigger towns. But by the time we came to Oamaru, one such possible town, I was so attached to him I could not bear to try and off-load him. He travelled with us for three days and two nights, sleeping at the end of the bed in the van.

I had a secret hope. We were heading slowly for my sister-in-law's place. And her much-loved cat Kevin had died at the end of last year. We had talked on the phone at christmas about what a gap that leaves in your life. But would she be ready for another cat just yet?

The closer we got to her place, the more I saw how presumptuous it was to turn up with a kitten. And by the time we pulled up at her studio gallery in the small town of Lawrence, I was feeling positively guilty. She saw how strange I was at once, till I blurted out my secret, telling her that I didn't expect her to take him; she might be able to find a home for him with someone she knows, or if not, take him to a shelter in Dunedin next time she goes there.

But she and her partner fell in love with him almost at once, as I had.  What to call him? They once had a cat named Cassady, after Jack Kerouac's companion Neal Cassady in On The Road, Mark's favourite book (And just about mine as well, though I think I prefer Big Sur).

So I suggested the name Jack. After all, he hitched a ride with us, and was a great little traveller. I so enjoyed being on the road with him.

So now there is a cat named Jack living in rural Otago, New Zealand. He's found a home for life.


Jack is a month older now, and growing quickly.

And he still likes looking out of windows, only not moving ones

Letty Fox: Her Luck

It happened that I went out once or twice in the following week to studio parties, and fat-chewing political groups where I exhibited a foul bad temper, and hardly recognised myself; I really seemed to have Luke's spirit in me. I said what I thought he would say when tired or bored. I would come out into the streets, into the new June night, still floating with bud scales, once more bitterly unhappy, my anger raging like a fire. Is not his seed like a fire? All about him, his word, his smile, his hypocrisy, his darkness, was like a fire, and I burned because I could not tell people, I have Luke. I came home once in the morning and saw two street lovers getting together on the steps of a church; the little cigarette ends jigged in the dark and described, in arcs, their weavings and embraces. Another time, a man groaned in an areaway. I did not care. I could have passed murderers, not only men with the blue devils. I was possessed with this man. One night, about two, I walked over to the slum he lived in and, taking a hand mirror out of my purse, threw it into the window of their room on the second floor. The window was open; they were in bed inside; I heard it tinkle on the floor. There were voices. I looked up. He came to the window and looked down. He saw a woman. But what woman? He had so many women. He only knew it was one of his women because of the smashed mirror from a lady's handbag, and so did she, of course. I went back home and cried in fresh agony, thinking of the scene, the conjugal bed, the open window on the summer night, the jag of glass flying through the air, smashing on the floor, the delicate tinkle, and him leaping from bed. If only it could have planted itself in her eye, her cheek, her breast! But it just sang a little note like a mosquito and lay there on the floor of their room.

Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946)




While reading Letty Fox for the first time recently (and I have still not finished it), I keep wondering what I'd have thought of this novel when I was 24, the same age Letty is when she narrates her story. And I do wish I had read it then. It was certainly (just) available, having been reissued in 1974 by Angus and Robertson in their Australian Classics, with an introduction by Meaghan Morris. I was certainly aware that it was available - but what was I doing? Huddling in a shabby room in Sydney's Glebe reading Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing and Shulamith Firestone, attempting a few scribbles of my own and finding them sadly lacking, and avoiding reading all the (patriarchal, to my mind) set texts for university.

In her introduction, Morris says:

'Letty Fox had offended because it presented a woman's account of her sexual and emotional life without following the prescribed formula for females of modesty, passivity, and simple contentment. It described the way women do live, not the way they are supposed to live. It is likely to be equally disturbing now when Letty's notions of self-respect in marriage are being discarded by more and more women.'


Yes! That's what I love about Letty Fox now. It is so frank and real. I recognise myself, and women I know, in her. Yet at the age of 24, I fear I may have dismissed her because, while she had many sexual adventures (and she is very much an adventurer), she believed in love and longed to be married. It might have done me good to see that the free and easy ways of libertarian young women in the 1970s (I'm sure most of us thought we were different from women in the past) had already been charted by women in the 1930s, as this book portrays (and no doubt before then, too!)

Stead herself (born 1902) was scared of being 'left on the shelf', and to her delight wasn't, because soon after she arrived in England from Australia in her 20s, met William Blech (he later became Bill Blake), a communist businessman who had been born in America.  They lived together a long time but weren't to marry till Christina was in her 50s, because his wife wouldn't give him a divorce (and I don't think he pressed her too much for one). It was complicated.  Letty's father, Solander Fox, was based on Blake, and his partner, Persia, on Stead herself.

A review of Letty Fox in the New York Times was to bring Christina to the attention of the FBI because it 'indicated the author had an extensive knowledge of Communist matters'.

Stead, who lived almost all her life away from Australia, much of it America, was also not awarded an Australian literary grant in the 50s because of her communist connections. She and Bill were both Stalinists. (Even the intelligent were obviously deluded, even though Emma Goldman tried to tell communists what Russia was like after she'd been there soon after the Revolution.)

As well as wishing I'd read this in my 20s, I wish that newly adult women would read it now. Is Letty Fox a Young Adult Novel?

Certainly, it could be. If publishers today were brave and bold enough.

But there is certainly nothing there that would shock many young women from their late teens on, and much in it to delight them, from the frank portrayal of sex and love, to the stunningly brilliant writing.  

Readingalia

- what's that? asked Underground Man, as he came across the dead, spiky banksia leaf in our bed (our bed in a rented holiday cottage in Blackheath, which turned out not to be as good as the reviews on the cottages' own website (well, der!) made out. For a start, the unappealing-looking kitchen smelt odd, and its only window opened onto a very dodgy 'sunroom' extension at the back, so no fresh air. At the back of the kitchen a door led to a decrepit, mouldy laundry. To be fair, the washer and dryer looked decent enough, from my fleeting glimpse of them, but who would dare enter?

- It's my bookmark, I said, retrieving the banksia leaf. I had jauntily thrown Stevie Smith's novel The Holiday into the top of my basket as I went away on holiday, and began reading it the first afternoon, lying on a tarpaulin on the ground at Mayall Lakes, where we camped the first night. Hence the banksia leaf bookmark, which I'll keep as a memento. It will forever belong to Stevie Smith.

And then when we arrived home, UG man was thinking of reading Kangaroo, by DHL, and flicking through found an old bookmark (see above, next to the iconically Australian banksia leaf). This one opens up to reveal that it is from a book chain called Van Gelderen, in Amsterdam, Holland, and I'd guess that it's at least 30 years old, if not more.

He didn't read Kangaroo, choosing instead to read An Autobiographical Novel, by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth, and the bookmark ended up marking his place in that.  This is a book I'd just  brought home from Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, from a rather wonderful second-hand bookshop. (We stayed at another cottage there first, which was indeed all it was cracked up to be, a lovely clean, sunny, well-furnished late 1950s place with a beautiful garden. Crabapple Cottage. Do go there, and it's 'dog-friendly'. We stayed with our son and his partner and their two large dogs.)

And so bookmarks move from book to book. I especially like bookmarks that were never intended for that use. I have variously used bus tickets, airline boarding passes, the little brown pleated paper cups from chocolates, flattened out (and you can smell the chocolate on them for a long time afterwards), the paper strips surrounding a certain type of soap I buy from our heath-food shop (ditto for the smell), post-it notes, corners torn from newspapers, and the wrappers from 'feminine hygiene' products.

In used books I have bought, I've found among other things a Tokyo subway ticket (fittingly in a book by Haruki Murakami, in English but priced in yen), a business card for a Paris atelier, and what was once a perfume-sample impregnated piece of card, now with only a musty smell, in an ancient, falling-apart copy of Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.  I don't know where any of these have ended up - in one of our books, somewhere, or lost. Bookmarks are ephemera, to be used, discarded or left behind, or kept for their associations and memories.  They remind me of the vast networks of readers, sharing books, recommending them (or not), discarding them, handing them on.

They remind me that reading a book is more than about just the book. They are about where you read them, what you were doing, and how you were feeling. And so books enter your life and become part of it.

Shabby old Viragos...

... and David Herbert

From the Lifeline op shop in South Lismore (an excellent source of books, housed in a charming little former church) :  Four old Viragos and a bloke.

From the Macquarie Dictionary:

virago  [I'll leave out the pronunciation] n., pl. -goes, gos.  1. a turbulent, violent, or ill-tempered scolding woman; a shrew. 2. a woman of masculine strength or spirit. [ME and OE, from L: manlike woman]

So now tell me feminists have no sense of humour. Good name for a publisher of (mostly) neglected classics by women.

They are:

1. Tell me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen

A new writer for me. Short stories (the title one, published in 1961, being 'one of the most famous stories in modern American fiction.)

2. Stevie Smith, The Holiday, first published 1949

Love her Novel on Yellow Paper.

Random quotation from new book:

So with these happy thoughts in my mind, I go down to our butcher, with whom my aunt has dealt for forty years, and Mr. Montgomery the butcher gives me six ounces more than the ration books says. He is a tall thin man, looking like Charles II, he smiles as he wraps the parcel. There you are, my dear. How's mother? (for he is convinced that my aunt is my mother).

My mother died when I was a child, my aunt has always lived with us, she has never wished to marry, she has 'no patience' with men (she also has 'no patience' with Hitler).  She thinks men are soppy, she says: He is a very soppy man, a most soppy individual.

Stevie Smith, The Holiday

3. Emma Goldman, An Intimate Life, by Alice Wexler

Late last year I re-read Goldman's excellent 2 volume autobiography, Living My Life (which should be brought into the attic at some stage - I've had it over 30 years, a wonderful strong old Dover publication), so I think I should let the effect of that settle before I read this. But why not have it there, just waiting to be read?

4. Such Devoted Sisters: An anthology of Stories, edited by Shena MacKay (1993)

How to resist this subject matter? One I've mined many times in my own novels.

And the bloke, not a Virago of course, but one of those lovely old orange Penguins, is Kangaroo, by D. H. Lawrence.

I hated him when I was a student - all that overblown stuff about men and women. But he lived in Australia for a time, in a cottage called 'Wywork' (a delightfully Australian sentiment) on the South Coast of NSW. Thirroul, if I'm not mistaken.

So here is is writing about Oz. Has to be worth a read.

Shelfie

Yes, there are spaces on some of my shelves (but only  this one) ... I regularly hand books on, in order to have room for more. Of course, I keep all the old, best-loved ones.

The attic has rules. Yes!

These be the rules: No post shall be without a quotation from a book. Or a song. This time (sigh) I think the quotation has to be be from a book by moi.

Now she reads (the luxury of it!) till the small hours of the morning. Books fill the shelves that line the walls of her room; she has so many they spill over into piles on the floor and over the coffee table; they are stacked up beside the sofa, so she only has to reach out her hand and it touches a book.

The books are many and various. There are new books, with clean, shiny covers and crisp pages, and there are old books, rare books, with beautiful dustjackets and intriguing inscriptions inside. Their pages are beautiful in a different way from the clean, sweet-smelling white pages of the new books - these old books have thick, cream-coloured paper, browned on the edges, some as crisp as a perfectly fried egg. They all smell different - of rich, old spices, or deep green forests, earthy and damp. They evoke long-forgotten rooms and other lives.

Joanne Horniman, Secret Scribbled Notebooks (2004)


And so we enter the season of intense reading, where it is too hot to do anything else here in Northern NSW. Wherever you are, I wish you a festive end-of-year full of books, and a new one of happy reading.

Of attics and apples

Do  the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, 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?

With Flaubert, the apocrypha cast a second shadow. If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to a brothel that doesn't come off, perhaps the sweetest moment of writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never  needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

Julian Barnes: 'Flaubert's Parrot' (1984)