‘Daylight is simply a superb writer. Her prose is supple, discursive, funny, restrained and loving. On finishing The Details, I felt as I do at the end of every great book: washed clean and scoured out; unmade and remade.
‘Like all great art, The Details is about many things at once: among them birth and death, laughter and misery, mothers and children, the body and the spirit – and informing and transforming all this, of course, it is about reading and the creation of a sustaining inner life. It reminds us that in life as in writing, it’s the illuminating detail that reveals the truth of who we are.
‘If you love reading, you’ll cherish this book for showing you why.’
CHARLOTTE WOOD
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For Russell
Detail I
When I told my mother I was bored, she would start a pilgrimage around the house. She’d go from room to room, shelf to shelf, and come back with a pile of eight or ten books. She’d sit on the edge of my bed and slide the pile apart, describing each book. Some of them I knew I would never read, either because I’d already tried them and found their first few pages dull, or because the lettering on the cover or the font inside was too small, suggesting a density of thought that I would find impenetrable. But in general every pile contained two or three books I could read, and boredom would be held off for another day or two.
My mother used books as a form of communication. It wasn’t simply the exchange I’ve just described – her giving me books she’d read and loved as a child, and hoping I would love them too – but the words in the books themselves. If we drove towards the Gladesville Bridge at night, the lights of cars cascading down its curve, she would quote Hart Crane, who described headlights in ‘The Bridge’ as ‘the immaculate sigh of stars’. Hamlet formed a great deal of her spoken language – if I came home from school after a bad day, she’d sigh about the slings and arrows. If you asked her whether she was telling the truth about something, she was likely to answer, ‘ ’Tis true: ’tis true ’tis pity, / And pity ’tis ’tis true.’
Now that I talk in this way to my own children, I know what was happening for her. The words of great writers somehow enrich experience – in borrowing them to describe our own lives we’re amplifying what we’ve seen or felt or heard. In high school I had to study the poetry of Philip Larkin, which – back then – I found mostly a collection of depressing observations about a world that I was thankful had very little to do with my own. But I memorised the single poem I liked, ‘Ambulances’, and could not – and cannot – see an ambulance without hearing in my head, ‘A wild white face that overtops / Red stretcher-blankets momently / As it is carried in and stowed.’ When two friends died in a car accident a month or so before our final exams this poem haunted me, troubled me – and somehow informed my imaginings about what had happened that night.
* * *
Mum – Deborah Bennett – was born Deborah Snowden Trahair in 1941, the fourth and much the youngest child of Alice and Geoff. Alice Snowden and Geoff Trahair married against the wishes of his strictly Methodist family, after meeting at an Australian Communist Party gathering early in the 1930s. Alice was older than Geoff and wore a tennis dress to their wedding – the only white clothing she owned.
I don’t know how long into their marriage it was when Geoff’s brain tumour was diagnosed, but it was after the births of Nick, Tim and Catherine. I don’t even know what kind of brain tumour it was. There are photographs of Geoff with his head half shaved, stitches train-tracking across his skull. He endured several operations and treatment I find hard to imagine – what did they do for brain tumours in the 1940s? Deborah was born after the diagnosis, the surprise child of the marriage. Geoff’s illness was always a feature of her life. At some point he took up a course of cold showers as a kind of general health improver. What Mum remembered particularly – and most fondly – was the sound of his screams as he turned the tap on.
She also remembered reading aloud from the Bible on Sunday mornings while the strictly atheist Geoff lay patiently listening in bed. She had conceived a passion for Elsie Dinsmore, the eponymous heroine of a series of books written by American author Martha Finley in the late nineteenth century. Elsie is a little girl so pious that, despite her terror of authority, she stands up to her hot-headed, sinful father when he demands (amongst other things) that she break the Sabbath. His attempts to break her will, and her subsequent ‘brain fever’, make for compelling reading. The limp, half-dead but still virtuous Elsie became a heroine of mine, too.
Geoff committed suicide late in 1950, when Mum was nine. He had tried before, several times, but Mum didn’t know this. When he died she was not told that he had killed himself. On the night after his death the rest of the family – Alice and the four children – were taken to dinner by friends so that Alice would not have to cook. Later, Mum felt guilty about enjoying this so much.
In the year following, Mum developed headaches whose cause no-one could diagnose. Alice, who had been studying for several years in anticipation of Geoff’s decline, so that she could find a job to support the five of them, had begun work as a legal secretary. Mum was not well enough – or did not feel well enough – to go to school, and so she spent nearly a year, between the ages of nine and ten, at home on her own.
Later she’d paint pictures of this, which still hang on my father’s walls: the view from beds, from floors, the view to be had from someone small sitting next to a door and playing marbles. This is easy for me to imagine – a house empty in the long hours of the day, all its uses quiescent. Clocks tick when you are at home alone, but bedclothes, chairs, cups and saucers on the kitchen bench remain still and noiseless. The sounds of the day come in like a radio turned down in another room. In fact, the radio was Mum’s only company. She listened to serials every day. I am not sure what else she did, apart from read.
* * *
Amongst the books Mum brought me to read when I was a child were The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, as well as their author Frances Hodgson Burnett’s smash hit, Little Lord Fauntleroy. I haven’t met an adult my age who has read this book but I did so several times. It’s a sticky book, guided by that strange Victorian obsession with ‘the little mother’ – the same obsession that Virginia Woolf, a child of Victorian parents, grappled with in her diaries and her fiction. Somehow, though, I learned to overlook the archaic, to be open to the oddnesses of different eras, and to read for something else. That something else was what I describe to my students as ‘sensory detail’; the minutiae of life that is the real stuff that makes up a book.
I’ve been teaching writing and literature for a long time, and I hear myself talking about sensory detail a lot. So many of my students write stories bristling with intent, a row of archers, arrows aimed at their ‘topic’. They forget that there are such things as weather or food, or ‘wild white faces’, or headlights on their slow decline over the arch of a bridge in darkness. When I want to explain sensory detail to my students I find myself talking about the Harry Potter series, which I’ll confess I don’t like much, but they do. I ask them to consider whether it’s the lists of richly imagined foods, the all-flavour jellybeans, the butter beer, the pumpkin juice, and the feasts in the Great Hall that are the books’ real attraction. It depresses me to think that the appeal might lie in their saccharine hero and his invented difficulties. (His quickly solved proble
ms always remind me of the Flight of the Conchords’ song that satirises Lord of the Rings: ‘We’ll never make it – there’s thousands of them and only nine of us [pause]. We made it!’) Too many of my students tell me that Harry’s adventures teach them that however hard things are, they can always overcome their problems – to which I want to say, ‘Tell that to Anne Frank’ – but just enough of them seem to wake up when I mention the food in Harry Potter. Like Edmund’s Turkish delight or Mr and Mrs Beaver’s freshly caught and cooked fish in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the butter beer and the all-you-can-eat-of-whatever-you-want feasts speak directly to something very simple in humans. Sensory detail: food as comfort, as reward, as enchantment; a sled riding crisply over white snow; the smell of earth in a garden that has just been weeded.
For me, detail yields metaphor, the most useful tool of the writing teacher. I think of The Secret Garden almost every time I teach. I hear myself saying to students, ‘Let that word breathe – take all the other words out from around it.’ And when I’m saying it, I’m thinking of Mary using a stick to dig between the green shoots in the walled garden in her freezing, unfriendly new home. When I teach writing or literature I feel as though I am the owner of a storehouse or a granary that floats in the air behind me. All those books, all of that detail, just waiting to be called on. And when I say ‘granary’ and ‘floats’ in the same sentence, I know I am somehow referring to, or calling up, Keats’ spirit of autumn, sitting ‘careless on a granary floor, / … hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind’. I turn to look into my storehouse and there is Mary kneeling in the earth, making space between the newly shot bulbs, and I know straight away that this is an image about writing; that Frances Hodgson Burnett, whether she knew it or not, was writing about writing, and waiting for me to call her back into being.
* * *
When Mum was dying we three grown children spent as much time with her as we could, taking turns to drive to Sydney from the Blue Mountains. She liked having us on the bed with her. Any of us – my sister knitting, my brother reading aloud. One of her six grandchildren, legs under the covers, reading a book or sharing the crossword with her. Mum spent three weeks in hospital, just a few months before she died, and I would come and squeeze onto the single bed with her and read to her. In that season of painless dying, when her suffering was suspended in a sort of autumnal kindness, mediated by the soft movement of nurses around her and the knowledge that any crisis, big or small, would be somehow managed by others, we reread Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals.
My Family and Other Animals has more sensory detail than any other book I have read. Without having a copy near me I can call up Lugaretzia, the moaning maid with bowel problems, whose physician, as Larry Durrell says, will need ‘a pick and a miner’s lamp’. I can remember ripe grapes held to the mouth and squeezed for their contents, their leathery skins discarded. I can remember the battle, on Gerry’s walls and ceiling, between Cicely the giant praying mantis and Geronimo the gecko, and the bloodied scratches on Geronimo’s skin after he has defeated her. I can remember Theo running up the stairs, followed by the whole family, to watch the seaplane landing, its wake arrowed behind it on a bright blue Aegean.
Mum turned to her own storehouse of detail to speak about what was happening. She was worried about dying. I can’t put it more clearly than that. She didn’t really believe in an afterlife but she was troubled by the thought of not returning. Back at home, in the weeks when we were trying to set up the second bedroom as a comfortable place to die, we talked about it, and she used Hamlet’s words to describe what might lie ahead: ‘the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns’. I don’t think she believed that she would never return. I don’t think I believed it either. I was busy being very capable, and critical of others who wept at my mother’s bedside, because part of me thought that I would have my chance to cry later. When all this was over. When I could speak to Mum alone. When I could tell her that it felt as though she was alive in me, and that if she died it might do some grievous damage to who I was.
She dreamed, in those last months, that she was on a beach and three figures rose out of the water and walked up the shore towards her. They were her father, her mother, and her sister Catherine, who had died more than fifteen years earlier. She didn’t describe the beach to me.
* * *
I didn’t read the Australian classic Pioneer Shack by Dora Birtles, although I’ve still got Mum’s copy – it was the book she read most in childhood, the book she inhabited. A few years ago I was on stage at a writers’ festival with the Australian author Joan London. Imagine a shyer, more softly spoken Chrissy Amphlett, and you have Joan: slender, with dyed black hair and an ageing and beautiful face, she dresses like a rock star and speaks hesitantly, with a refined Australian accent and much ducking of her head to look embarrassedly into her lap. I asked her if she could remember the books that had haunted her childhood, and she looked startled, as she had at most questions. She said, ‘There was a book, a book about children who built their own house. But I can’t remember what it was called. I loved it. I read it over and over.’
I said, also hesitantly, ‘Pioneer Shack?’
‘That’s it!’
Mum had been dead more than a year by this time. But as Joan was talking about Pioneer Shack, there it was, that conversation with Mum, which had been so continuous, so constant in my life that the book was just below the surface of my conscious mind. It was easy to retrieve.
It wasn’t only the sensory detail in books that caught Mum’s magpie attention. She was what the critic James Wood might call ‘a serious noticer’. Before she died, I hadn’t known that she’d taught me to notice, because she hadn’t exactly taught me. She’d just noticed, but done it out loud; she was always pointing things out to us. Young currawongs, the feathers on their rumps still fluffy and grey, as though they wore nappies. A dog in Wentworth Falls who had an expression just like James Dean’s. I didn’t believe this until I saw it. The dog – a border collie – had a kind of set to its jaw and narrowed eyes. It lay with its paws crossed on the nature strip outside its house and watched you insolently as you walked by. Just like James Dean.
* * *
In the days after Mum’s death all this became apparent to me. I felt as though I could suddenly recognise the parts of myself, as though I was being put together, made, like a toy you had to assemble. Parts of me clicking into place. I knew then, without having ever considered it, that somehow my mother had communicated her vivid vision of life to me. That I had learned to see by seeing alongside her. I also began to realise that the perfect parent for a writer is the almost-writer, the person or persons trembling on the brink of self-expression. Someone as full of words as my mother – and indeed my father – must inevitably spill them into their offspring.
* * *
Of course I now collect piles of books for my own children when they say they are bored. I keep trying them with my old copy of Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages, a nineteenth-century novel drawing on the author’s Canadian childhood – his cruel, critical and exacting father, and the boy’s longing for an escape into nature. The character based on Thompson Seton, Yan, is shyly passionate about the natural world and wishes most of all to be Native American, to let the woods be his only source of shelter and food. Yan becomes sick – from lack of love, the book seems to imply – and is sent to live on a farm. There the father is just as exacting but kinder. Yan forms a real friendship with Sam Raften, the oldest son of the family, and together they venture further and further into the woods. Finally Mr Raften gives them permission to spend a month there, alone. They build a wigwam. They make arrows and quivers. They shoot birds and catch fish, they make fires, they try to dance, and make themselves sick smoking pipes.
I suppose Two Little Savages is my Pioneer Shack – the story of children who somehow strike out on their own, make their own dwelling, find their own food. It was the most attractive story
you could have told a child like me, a child whose life was like a dinghy always tied to the jetty. We three children read Frances Hodgson Burnett, Swallows and Amazons, the Narnia books, all of Tintin and much of the Famous Five. All those deserted, orphaned or fortuitously parentless children of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction feeding themselves, building shelters, in a way their readers never had to. And all that detail – all that food and weather, water and light.
How strange it is to be one of the carriers of my mother’s detail: the silent hours alone in the house in Gladesville, the sound of her father shrieking in the shower, the three familiar figures rising to greet her on the beach. When I read, I am still in conversation with her. All that detail sings in the air, living still.
Vagina
1.
Every ten years or so in a reading life, a book comes along that makes us think, Oh! This can be said! And, if we are writers, or interested in the art of writing, Oh! This can be done! I probably first had this experience with Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip. Later, with Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Later still, with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Most latterly, with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’ series. I couldn’t believe a writer could simply pile up experience the way Knausgaard did, and make it interesting. He seemed to leave nothing out.
But literature always leaves things out; it can’t ever tell the whole story, or even half of it. When you write you find yourself inventing characters without friends, or with families who are dead or just far away; you exclude neighbourhoods, fashions, technology; or, like Jane Austen, you ignore wars and slavery and work. You can’t contain the multitudes of life. Even Knausgaard can’t record every piss or shit, every phone call, every exchange with a friend. Literature looks for significances; it yearns towards composition – order – and in so doing has sometimes to pretend that people, bodily functions, political movements, injustices simply aren’t there.
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