THE HOUSE THAT’S FOR SALE in Mercer Street in Queenscliff is Henry Handel Richardson’s old house (the Historical Society will have the details) – the house, that is, where the family stayed when her father was the Quarantine Officer here. It was built in 1864: a grey-roofed white weather board, set back on a lawn that slopes up to where the verandah was. There are old bush roses and flowering trees in front, and a set of swings. Nice, but out of my reach. I’m glad, anyway, to know which house she lived in: one more knot in the network.
Almond blossom is white, red at the heart.
The skin on my arms is becoming a fine crepe.
I think Black Genoa is a dead stump. The one green shoot at the tip has withered. The story – a death story – have I hexed the tree? And J as well? It means more to me than it should. No: where does such a ‘should’ come from?
‘Black Genoa’ is at least partly a homage to Marjorie Barnard and her persimmon tree – should I put that under the title, or would that seem to be directing how it’s to be read?
In the centuries before he could be represented by his image, a stupa stood for the Buddha, or an empty saddle or throne, a wheel, or the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Some of the sources name the Bodhi tree as a fig, others a pipal. Where have I read that the pipal is a variety of fig? That’s not, however, the source of my reverence for the fig, which goes back to the first summer in Greece, to the village, to waking up in the heat behind the shutters to secretive figs with the dew still on them, wrapped in leaves – splitting them open, dark red and sticky, eating them whole with the first coffee. The summers of Northern Greece, Macedonian summers, that harshness and abundance – no rain for months on end, and the fruits of the earth swollen, cracked, split open in the heat.
Muddy morning coffee we had with the heat seeping on the sheets through the slats, and the lotus-flower cool flesh of figs.
I am so sunk into parasitic inertia that I have no material of my own. I have no centre. Being passive, I have no power to animate a situation, a character…If I could have an aim, then everything would fall into place. I want to remain open, have a ‘negative capability’ – but Keats never meant that to extend beyond the conception of a work to nullify the act.
To begin a story, for me, always means to choose a place. I have to fix it accurately to begin with, then give it a warp, a discrepancy – that légère gauchissure Valéry wrote of (why can’t I find my old copy of Charmes?). From that warp, or several of them, the fiction can begin to grow. In ‘A Drop of Water’ it was the ripe quinces the monk saw, which were here all over the grass as I was writing – not there. In ‘Among Pigeons’, it was the pigeons, the ivy. The man who tells that is as sombre and tenacious himself as ivy (not that this is even hinted at); he sees his mother explicitly as a pigeon.
I want to take up the notes I wrote down on the plane to New York in 1980, what the man next to me told me about his fight with his son. His triumph, his relish, the silence of the boy’s mother. I know it is a story. But I still can’t hit on the place.
Instead of seeing the mother as the silent focus, it could be a sister. One who has joyfully prepared a meal to welcome her brother back, but her meal is ruined by this quarrel…She could have promised them a specialty of hers. Bread and butter custard? Yes. The meal in the foreground.
Mostly the men in my stories have nothing to give the women: they are cold, selfish, vindictive. They have turned to ice at my touch, like the lover’s warm sleeping flesh in the embrace of the mirror. A cul-de-sac. And if I were now to write about a man who can love and give? (Who can, ah yes. But will he? Does he?) A man and a woman who both can? To celebrate love, and by this means – this additional means – to heal the wound in me and be whole as I have not been since I first loved A.
Year that trembled and reeled beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?
Walt Whitman: Drum-Taps
I did learn to chant them. For all that, to have had my first experience of love in the arms of a woman was a blessing. I see it as a blessing. To have been known in my own body and to have known hers, before ever turning to encounter a man…One more year will make it thirty years ago and I can still remember and will remember for ever the look of her lying with me, her eyes closed, her breasts against mine and our thighs entwined, my hands in her hair, all that warm abundance and security. To love her (or anyone) in the desperate way I loved her, that was the mistake, not the lovemaking, which was sane and strong – at first, anyway – and has stood me in good stead.
I’ve felt embarrassed for a long time about Alone, but I need to acknowledge it as mine. Not to deny and reject my Shirley, who was at least a woman who had loved, and been loved. Though Alone, which they classify as a lesbian novel, is not about love, it’s about suicide…Loved and loving: this point of departure.
If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed.
Wittgenstein
I want to expand and be looser. I want what I write to be ample, rich and generous, full of vigour. No more stripped and dry, clamped-down sentence-by-sentence stories – giving so little, so slowly, in such a low voice, painfully, is hardly giving at all.
‘Epitaphios’ is in print, my Easter miscarriage poem. A copy of the magazine arrived. But they’ve printed the first line – ‘Boiling eggs in red-dyed water’ – as ‘Boiled eggs in red-dyed water’. I haven’t read past the first line. If a dance has begun with such a misstep, stop the music! Don’t go on.
If it had lived – it was three months, six to go – that child would have turned twelve this month.
Names of seaweeds: seawrack, bladderwrack, kelp, sea lettuce. Stonewort, thongweed. Cystophora. Sargassum.
Rosellas in the apple tree.
Reading Alice Munro: The Progress of Love. The stories are so good that I’ve made notes on their structure. She has a way of dislocating the natural time sequence to emphasise a climactic event hinted at: the effect is at first to halo it in a sense of mystery, then in a sudden illumination.
She has a fine story, ‘Eskimo’, which I bet originated on a plane trip, just as my ‘Bread and Butter Custard’ did. (Or will have done, if I can do it…) The foreground story is an absurd and inconclusive encounter between two women, in the course of which the subservient life of the one whose eyes we see through – the doctor’s secretary – is revealed in flashes. Only that! A marvellous skill in the telling.
During the Spoleto Festival in Melbourne this week A.S. Byatt was interviewed on stage at the creaky Atheneum: a dusty half-light, red plush, a plump, creased, private face in a puff of short dark hair. She answered quite intrusive questions forthrightly, judiciously – yes, judicious is how she struck me altogether. Deliberate, scrupulous… Her voice is heavy and congested, effortful; she said that she had been an asthmatic child, and thought her intense response to the visual might come from having had so often to be still simply in order to breathe…The answers threw light on her books and the Sugar stories. Like the landlady in ‘The July Ghost’ she had a young son who was killed in an accident. ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’ is the only thing she has ever written out of hate…(Emily, the scholarly heroine enraptured with Racine, had to fight for her soul or be engulfed by the subtle serpentine headmistress who hated her, who ‘gathered herself, inclining her silver-green coils slightly…’)
I bought the two novels in stock, The Virgin in the Garden and The Game, to bring back and read when I have time. In The Game, on a first flick through, serpents seem to figure largely.
In a radio interview she spoke of having wanted to write ‘the kind of prose that Ford Madox Ford admired in Flaubert, a prose of very fine clear statement’:
Proust said of Flaubert that he wrote brilliantly despite having not one single good metaphor. What I discovered was that my imagination is essentially metaphoric, that I don’t think unless I’m connecting one thing to another thing, that the pleasure in describing is only pleasure for me when the description immediately moves on into connecting it to another idea, that a thing lights up because it’s related to something else…
(Compare Anthony Burgess on good prose in Flame Into Being: ‘Heaven knows what good prose is. If it is, as seems likely, an organisation of words that fits the subject so closely that we have the impression of living skin rather than a glove…’)
One of the epigraphs to The Game:
The principle of the imagination resembles the emblem of the serpent, by which the ancients typified wisdom and the universe, with undulating folds, for ever varying and for ever flowing into itself – circular, and without beginning or end.
Coleridge
(If there be a serpent of secret and shameful desire in my soul, let me not beat it out of my consciousness with sticks. Let me bring it to the fire to see what it is. For a serpent is a thing created. It has its own raison d’être. In its own being it has beauty and reality…Come then, brindled abhorrent one, you have your own being and your own righteousness, yes, and your own desirable beauty…
D.H. Lawrence, from ‘The Reality of Peace’, quoted in Harry T. Moore: The Priest of Love.)
R sat late insisting the other night that none of the reviews has pointed out that his novel is a ‘collage’: compare George Steiner (After Babel) – ‘In modernism collage has been the representative device…’
Also in After Babel, fragments of a translation by Francis Steegmuller of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’: called – oh, the bliss of it! – ‘Le Hibou et la Poussiquette’:
O Minou chérie, ô Minou ma belle,
O Poussiquette, comme tu es rare,
Es rare,
Es rare!
O Poussiquette, comme tu es rare!
When the sun comes in on the Moon Chart on the wall – three hundred and sixty-five images of the moon on a dark blue sky, waxing and waning – there’s a flow like scales across belly and flanks, a strip of snakeskin or blue crocodile.
Picking heavy pink plumes of blossom at twilight I disturbed dark moths. What attracts them to this tree whose name I don’t know? (It has some old-fashioned name. I’ve looked up likely names and picked a sprig to give a friend as she was leaving, in case she could find out for me. Is it a laburnum? No. Verbena? Tamarisk? In summer its fronds are green, cypressy, and then tawny before they fall.) Like a single giant bird, moths flapped over me and the waving boughs.
Every wall in the house has helpless moths clinging. The first of them I collected in cupped hands and tossed out in the garden. Now with so many everywhere, I’ve given up. With the lamp on inside and the curtains open in the half-dark, dense shadows of them gather, flittering up and down the panes.
Instead of Bread and Butter Custard, does she cook Stuffed Baked Apples? Like the ones we had tonight, awash in gold sugar-butter, singed dates on top, leathery loose brown skin which were waxy green balls before they went into the oven, each with a grainy crown, a cockade of cinnamon and a leaf of lemon-rind. She spoons ice-cream on and the sauce stiffens under it to a sugary crust. Yes, and the story to be called ‘Baked Apples’.
The quarrel has to happen off-centre: the focus is on the girl cooking. If I were Olga Masters I could do it like the meal in ‘The Snake and Poor Tom’. That father – yes, he reminded me. If I had her insouciance! No one is like her: sly, garrulous, fussy, with that glow of sensuality, and an alertness. Carving a family life to the bare bone like a Sunday joint.
A moth flapped into the oil I was frying fish in, sizzled briefly and was impossible to find…I ate the crisp fish, and the moth no doubt. If these are Bogong moths – I think they are – the blacks ate them in millions in their season. All summer great hanks of them cling in crevices and caves all over the Alps (Bogong, Buffalo, Buller), having flown there from hundreds of miles away – from here, even – to take refuge in the cool dark.
H has lent me a new book of poems by Amy Clampitt (she has a quaint name): Archaic Figure, a beautiful Knopf book with the archaic figure herself on the cover, a girl named Ornithe, found in Samos, in fluted robes: no head – her braided hair only, down over her breasts. Ornithe, bird. This is a bold title, this echo of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ (You must change your life). The epigraph is this from Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader: ‘The ancient consciousness of women, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems, in them, to have brimmed and overflowed…’ (On George Eliot’s heroines.) If it looks like a clarion manifesto, it is: this book lays claim to womanhood. The poems I’ve read so far – the ones about travelling in Greece, the Wordsworth and George Eliot ones – are marvellous, very charged and intense, elegant, rich pieces of work. She works together a summer visit and the winter harvest in ‘The Olive Groves of Thasos’, celebrating the trees ‘this time-gnarled / community of elders’ – in verses of four short lines, one rhyme: ABCB. A tumble of hyphenated words one on top of the other makes a lovely flow and cross-flow of speech rhythms with no thump of feet. This is the last line: ‘the oil-steeped, black, half-bitter fruit…’ Half-bitter.
‘The Waterfall’ is marvellous too, the lines plunging down: in the foreground, the web of an orb-spider fixed among redwoods.
Four years ago in October I picked an olive off a dusty little tree and ate it in the ancient Agora of Athens. The unripe olives had a milky bloom on them like black grapes; the ripe ones were wrinkled and fell at a touch of the branch. Rich oil flowed when I bit this one, half-sweet; the slick stayed on my lips all day. The olive tree is female: i elia. All fruit trees are, in Greek. (But masculine in French and German! And sykia, fig tree, is slang in Greek for the passive male homosexual – how come?) Grey loose old-women’s hair, sun-tossing.
Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh.
Matthew 24: 32
H has a silvery young olive in his garden of trees. Silvery: I love that word. Somewhere I read that Colette wrote of an old man’s body as being ‘silvery all over, like a vanilla bean’: a remark startling and beautiful enough at first just on the surface, the visual plane; and then still more so underneath, in that a warm and wise sensual appreciation is comprehended in it. I wonder what her ‘silvery’ was in the French – argenté?
Then in the Agora Museum – cool, dark, full of shadows reflecting each other on glass cases – the two dark-faced girls in charge were exchanging recipes. One of the exhibits in there was a young girl’s grave, intact, her thin bones still clamped in earth along with jars of her cosmetics; the long pins over her shoulder-blades were, the girls said, the pins that had held up her robe. The robe and flesh eaten away, the translucent bone is left. (What was her name?) Glass cases of gold and terracotta rings, cooking ovens, pots and jars – a pair of earrings, three hanging pomegranates of pure gold; and the girls’ chatter about cooking, the only sound: the spirit there is female. A dry tomb, a female underworld. Eurydice and Kore…One step outside and you are dazed: out in the spinning sun, the wind.
In a stoa of sculptures I found one torso that glowed in subtle shapes of light as if it had formed naturally of some living or once-alive substance like bone, or cheese (cheese is ‘dead milk’, a French poet said), rather than been cut from marble. Something in the stance must have reminded me, because the proportions were not the same – anyway, out of longing for a touch of the beautiful man, I dared to reach my hand out to his breast (bone-cold he was, under my wrinkled brown hand): until a screech from the guardian Fury whipped it away.
Scaffolding and rubble obscured the Parthenon, that bone-cage hung over the fumes of the city. Narrow steps and streets in the Plaka burned through sun and shadows alive with cats. In Odos Adrianou I bought a paper bag of hard reddening green pears (Mount Pelion pears, I’d know them anywhere after our autumn under Mount Pelion) from a white-haired barrow man who, unsmiling, called me paidi mou: my child. The archaic courtesies.
I sat among lantanas! In full flower and with black beads of fruit, at the Odeon of Agrippa; black and white butterflies, harlequin bugs, a line of ants. A taverna near the Tower of the Winds still had empty bottles and stacked plates on its shady tables, dusty cats and kittens wreathing the legs, low wasps humming. At sunset at Agion Taxiarchon on the corner of Odos Epaminonda – whistles of birds in the yellow fig tree opposite, a black cat pouncing into the creepers on the iron fence – the Byzantine liturgy began (but I was wearing jeans). The candles were lit. Every column of the ruin had a dark cat on top.
The oil at the shabby elaiourgeion outside Patras, where I photographed the little girl proud of her red coat, was the deep green of water under bridges.
A Sydney artist I don’t know, who once spent a year with her husband and children on the island of Syros, painting, has sometimes sent me proof sheets of etchings over the years, with a friendly message. A couple of years ago she sent a photograph of a white torso of hers, posed alone on ribs of sand, against clouds. Its shape is that of a vase or urn, waisted, lightly engraved with lines – austere, in the archaic manner, except that for breasts it has two spiralled shells, fluted and frilly, pearly in that cloud-light; for a navel, a dented shell or stone; and at the base, a pointed whelk-shell with a rough ruffled edge, open into its rosy depths. Impossible to tell if they are real shells, or if the torso is life-size – it looks monumental – or what its substance might be…
Copying out ‘The Olive Groves of Thasos’. Copying a poem I can take it in at the right pace, more than reading it, even aloud. The copy won’t go to waste: I’ll send it to Gillian in Kalamata, in time for the olive harvest.
At the Eden, the vegetarian restaurant in the Plaka (the background music was the Rolling Stones), a shy young man with a bearded smile brought me water and a retsina. When I laid Memoirs of Hadrian face-down, and was looking on as the lights moved through wine and through water over the marble, he asked in English if I minded if we talked. His mother, he said, was Australian, his father Greek, his estranged wife and their small daughter, French. The next winter he was going to Australia, his ambition was to drive across the Simpson Desert…This is Taki or any one of Gillian’s boys, I thought – in ten or fifteen years’ time.
The old vine-hung tavernas on the paths and staircases of the Plaka are spoilt now: the waiters stand outside them wheedling and touting for customers like butchers at the markets; they even grab at passing elbows. Some of the foreign tourists go along with it.
SUNDAY (lunch time) – Chris’s brother’s third son is being baptised in Geelong’s only Greek Orthodox church. Taki and I have said we’ll be there. Not the old people, Kyria Domna and Barba Stratos: they flew back to Greece in the autumn. Three summers now they’ve come and gone, minding babies. To be free to come, they sold the cows; they even sold black Marko, the old horse they had had since he was a colt. He used, in his youth, in his salad days, to slip his rope and ravage the neighbours’ crops. He bucked. Through frost and dust he hauled the dung cart along the ruts from the stable to the river-field and the tobacco baskets from the Gyrizi to the front door.
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares…
We fed Marko wizened apples on my first morning in the village, in April 1969. He curled his lip back. Feeding the last apples to a horse? Kyria Domna said. What do you feed to people? It was Lent, for lunch that day she cooked us spring dandelions, nettles and docks…She gathered them on the hill with dew on them and stewed them in rice, hortorizo, tender and rich, with lemon juice. Ach, Marko, they were delicious.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
W.B. Yeats: ‘A Prayer For My Daughter’