ANNA MACDONALD
A BODY OF WATER signals a change of season in Beverley Farmer’s career. Chronicling one year from February 1987 to February 1988, this book emerged from the fallow period that followed the publication of her first novel, Alone (1980) and two collections of short stories, Milk (1983) and Home Time (1985). Writing against the ‘isolation’ and ‘sterility’ which threatened to overwhelm her after their completion, Farmer divined her distinctive voice in A Body of Water as a writer of poetic, fragmented, personal essays. I read this book, published in 1990, as a kind of homecoming.
Farmer’s voice in A Body of Water is reminiscent of her fiction. The curious blend of poetry and prose, and her interweaving of short stories within the chronicle’s narrative arc, recall Alone. Her preoccupation with writers such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, with the sea, with light and shadow, with mirrors and other reflective surfaces, with art in all its forms, inflect her early as well as her later fiction – The Seal Woman (1992), The House in the Light (1995), This Water: Five Tales (2017) – and the essays collected within The Bone House (2005). All of her writing retains the quality of technique that Seamus Heaney described in his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, and which Farmer transcribed into the notebook that would later become A Body of Water, as ‘the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines’.
Farmer’s watermark is immediately recognisable to readers of her work. But despite the similarities that can be drawn between this book and her others, there remains something about A Body of Water that distinguishes it; something that sets it strangely apart. Here, Farmer offers the reader something more than the watermarking of her patterns of perception. She plumbs the depths of that perception, the touch and texture of her world, and she unpicks its pattern in order to examine it more closely. Reading A Body of Water, it is as if Farmer is showing us at once a smooth fabric – the short stories interspersed throughout – and its tangled underside – the experiences, memories and associations from which those stories are woven.
We begin in February, the hottest month of an Australian summer, with stagnant water turned to ice. ‘Not one story’, Farmer writes, ‘has achieved its being in my hands for nearly two years now.’ For this reason, and others to which she alludes without further detail, ‘I’m a holed ship stuck in the pack ice: what is there to do but, somehow, repair the hole before the thaw? And then sail free. Where? How?’
Farmer emphasises how, but where comes first for her. ‘To begin a story, for me,’ she writes in the chapter ‘September’, ‘always means to choose a place’. The where of A Body of Water, this account of repair and a year in thaw, is a house at Point Lonsdale, a small Victorian coastal town near the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. More specifically, this is a house with a garden, within sight of the sea, within sound of the lighthouse foghorn that resonates across the water (across ‘my bed, my body’) as ships pass through the treacherous Rip at night. There are other places in this book: some of memory, like Greece, where Farmer lived for many years and which colours so much of her work; some (at least superficially) outside the spacetime of this chronicled year, like the gompa at a Buddhist retreat; some more apparently mundane, like the attic room in the Carlton house outside the window of which cranes roar, cats sun themselves, a lemon-scented gum stretches its limbs. These places are different, separate to the central place of the house by the sea, but because they are all lived by Farmer, and because we live them through her, they read as satellites of the same geography: awash in the same honeyed light, haunted by the same shadows, rendered according to Farmer’s distinctive, painterly vision which captures, somehow and all at once, the place, what it feels like to live there, and how it is embodied on the page.
How Farmer embodies the world is also how she might repair her hull and sail free after the thaw. In the pages of A Body of Water, Farmer lives and works according to a particular idea of practice indebted to the thought of writers like Gary Snyder and Octavio Paz, both of whom she reads repeatedly over the course of the year. In ‘April’, Farmer writes: ‘The Path is the Practice. Not theory. Practice.’ Then, in one of those painterly strokes with which she reveals her process – her practice of weaving personal observation with unadorned quotation, with memory, with reflection, with an idea for a story, with a poem that captures the original observation, with a completed short story that is itself a web (or a watery reflection) of observation, quotation, memory and so on – she steps straight from this Path to cite Snyder, thus:
Practice simply is one intensification of what is natural and around us all the time. Practice is to life as poetry is to spoken language. So as poetry is the practice of language, ‘practice’ is the practice of life. But from the enlightened standpoint, all of language is poetry, all of life is practice.
Farmer is fully attentive to the life around her: to the house by the sea and the reverberations of the foghorn; to the words of Snyder and Paz, as well as (among others) Maria Tsvetaeva, D.H. Lawrence, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marjorie Barnard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Katherine Mansfield, John Berger, Sylvia Plath and the many echoes between them; to the creation of her own stories, which resonate in their turn with Barnard’s persimmon tree (and the Black Genoa fig Farmer plants in her garden, in memoriam), with Farmer’s low-tide walks (and the cuttlefish bones, the drowned penguin she encounters along the way), with the lighthouse foghorn and the fig tree. This is Farmer’s process: all her poetry (by which I also mean all her poetic prose) is the intensification of life via the practice of observing, reading and writing. Observing, reading and writing are all ways of fully attending to the world.
Farmer is a brilliantly attentive reader and reading for her is a potentially transformative encounter between one person and another, between a person and the world. In the best fiction, she writes in ‘October’,
a transcendental moment of fusion…takes place, between one person and another, or a person and an object…and a surge of emotion knocks the reader off his or her feet…Perhaps the only factor that makes ‘real’ life different is the absence in it of a reader: there being no observer, no focus of attention, no witness.
But in ‘real’ life, of course, it is the writer who observes, who focuses her attention, who reads the world and bears witness.
Farmer’s acts of witnessing – her daily observations and reflections, her reading, her sacramental planting of a fig tree, her stories and poems – are composed of fragments from which she and her attentive readers weave a pattern. These fragments are the ‘severed parts’ to which Virginia Woolf refers in Moments of Being, and which Farmer notes down in ‘March’. ‘I make it real by putting it into words,’ Woolf writes. ‘It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole…it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.’ Fragments, put into the words of, for instance, Farmer’s short story ‘Vase with Red Fishes’ – which is untangled over the course of the chronicled year and inserted, smooth, freshly watermarked, between ‘June’ and ‘July’ – subdue the pain and compose ‘a sufficient self ’.
In ‘March’, Farmer writes that ‘[a] poem is a fountain, a novel a river – a story a pool, lake, billabong?’. Fountains gush, rivers run, billabongs – left behind by a change of course in a riverbed or creek – flood and then run dry according to season. Now I wonder, what body of water is this book with its fluid movement between sensual observations of the everyday, reflections upon reading and writing and living in place, and its inclusion alongside these of the short stories and poems into which they flow?
In A Body of Water, Farmer writes herself out of isolation and two years’ creative sterility. She is a holed ship. She is a fig tree, barerooted and dormant. She is the pack ice and the withered shoot. But, by putting these fragments into words, she is also, the branches ‘laden with leaves now and…in bud’. Farmer cannot conceive a severed or stunted part without also giving it life. In ‘May’, she wrote: ‘An ear of wheat, or corn. (And the silk of hair.) A hand of bananas. A tooth (in Greek, not a clove – ena donti skordo) of garlic…(Plant some?)’ Plant some, water it in with the ice melt, and from the severed tooth, from the hand and the silky hair will grow a whole. This body of water is life-giving. Fed by it, stories like ‘Vase with Red Fishes’ take root and other novels, stories and essays begin to grow.
ANNA MACDONALD is a writer and bookseller based in Melbourne. She is the author of a collection of essays, Between the Word and the World, and a novel, A Jealous Tide.