* * *
In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville writes: ‘Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.’
It took me a long time to come to Moby-Dick. I’d thought it would be a heavy tale of adventure, of men with fierce brows ploughing through wild seas. I thought the whole book would be this, just the ceaseless, male pursuit of a lumbering metaphor. There are plenty of fierce brows, as it turns out, and some wild seas, but there is also this:
Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attach of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws swam sluggishly through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip.
As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy means; even so these monsters swam, making strange, grassy, cutting sounds; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.
Herman Melville was reading the works of Shakespeare for the first time when he wrote Moby-Dick, and these passages demonstrate that. My mother used to say that what she loved best about Shakespeare was that he didn’t care about mixing his metaphors; he took arms against a sea of troubles. In Moby-Dick Melville was the same. He piled idea on idea, image on image; he reached into himself and threw out loop after loop of a seemingly never-ending rope of thought. It is distracting, sometimes – that venetian blind makes me forget the central image in these paragraphs: the mowers. Whales passing, mouths open, through paddocks of brit, or krill, cutting it down, mowing it. One is also distracted by the alliteration: the fringing fibres, side by side, slowly and seethingly, the marshy means. But what riches of language dwell here.
James Wood says we should not pity Melville, even though his masterpiece was initially met with almost total silence, ‘for in writing Moby-Dick, Melville wrote the novel that is every writer’s dream of freedom. It is as though he painted a patch of sky for the imprisoned.’ In using words – so many of them – Melville scorned temperance. He spent it all, lost it all, right away. We should not think of what it must have been to write what he surely knew was his greatest book and to hear almost nothing back.
Born Sandy Devotional was widely praised, although the critical success of The Triffids never did translate into significant international fame or serious money. But McComb, too, was painting his patch of sky. Any artist lucky enough to be doing their best work will tell you that the work is enough.
* * *
Patrick once told me that autumn awakened in him a feeling of ‘satisfied melancholy’. As I write, it is February in Katoomba, February following an intolerable January, the hottest Australia has ever had. When I came out into the living room this morning I noticed that the angle of the light had changed. The cat sat in its pour, eyes happily closed. The days now have that thread of cool in them, a call, a reminder, of what soon will be. Having moved, the light will begin to age, yellowing like leaves. The leaves themselves will begin to turn. Satisfied melancholy approaches.
I made friends with Patrick for several reasons. First, he was just so beautiful. Tall, with unruly, curling golden hair and pale blue eyes. Unshaven, regular-featured. Russell and I have often remarked that a surprising number of famous people look like Patrick: most of all Michael Hutchence, but also, oddly, Prince and, well, David McComb. I was not the only young woman to swim into the disintegrating net of Patrick’s heterosexuality.
I liked him also because he made me laugh. When a friend and I wrote a series of comic poems about an imaginary Beat poet for our university radio show, we asked him to perform them. He threw himself into that performance with such abandon that I laughed until I was shrieking, had to slam out of the sound booth and fall on my knees, crying, howling. But we first made friends by talking about reading. Patrick read like a girl, and like a very particular kind of girl; he had read books that I thought only I had read. Committed outsiders, we used to walk around the headland near my North Bondi share house and talk and talk about books. A lyric from one of the songs Patrick and Russell wrote together: ‘I like you, you remind me of me.’
* * *
If Moby-Dick is anything, it is the book or books that Melville could not help writing on his way to writing it. The trunk of plot grows branches, and then twigs, in profusion. Chapters of adventure are interrupted for other chapters – an ocean of chapters – of digression. The digression sometimes takes the form of disquisition on some part or another of the whale – a chapter for his whiteness, more chapters for the weapons used to catch and kill him, a chapter on the spout, a chapter on the tail. To wit: ‘Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.’
Sometimes Moby-Dick’s narrator, Ishmael, leaves his narrator’s body altogether and becomes omniscient, entering (in an impossible third person) into the captain’s cabin, or disporting with the second mate, Stubb, or his superior, Starbuck, on the bulwarks. Some chapters race through the waters alongside a whale about to be caught and killed. Sometimes the reader has water dashed full in their face. Some chapters come to a complete halt while they comb through other writings, other texts on the Leviathan. But my favourite chapters of all, the reason I was finally able to read the book, are the chapters about friendship – about the meeting of Ishmael and Queequeg, a South Sea harpooneer, at the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford.
The inn is full, and Ishmael can only stay if he shares not just a room but a bed with Queequeg, a stranger. Ishmael is first to bed, where he lies watching Queequeg prepare to turn in next to him. He is angry, suspicious of Queequeg as he performs a little ritual of prayer with a small wooden idol, and believes he will not sleep a wink. Queequeg climbs into bed and there begin the most delightful physical negotiations, opening in disgust and repulsion, and ending in amity, the two sleeping as soundly as they have ever slept. ‘Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.’ Here is Moby-Dick’s most intimate relationship, a tender, affectionate friendship which endures until – well, perhaps you have to read the book. But it is Ishmael and Queequeg who keep the story alive and warm. It takes some time for Ishmael to rouse Queequeg sufficiently, to remove the arm that is holding him so lovingly to the bed. The long meditation of Ishmael on that arm teaches us to pay attention, teaches us to love Queequeg as Ishmael does. Teaches us to love life, as Melville does. To pay attention to its beautiful multiplicity.
* * *
When my mother died, various odd, almost physical changes took place in me. One was a very distinct feeling that my life was like a photograph album, and that someone was going back to its beginning and removing all the images of my mother and me. This felt as real in my body as though it was actually happening, sections of my life dematerialising as I walked around, as I worked, as I looked out of the kitchen window at night.
I’ve just understood where this sensation came from, why its seed lay dormant in my body. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the fifth book in the Narnia series, Lucy must read a magician’s book to undo a spell. As she reads the spell aloud, alone in a dark room in an apparently empty house,
the colours came into the capital letters at the top of the page and the pictures began appearing in the margins. It was like when you hold to the fire something written in Invisible Ink and the writing gradually shows up…
This, in reverse. All the images of my mother – standing beside me, holding me, drawing with me,
reading with me – disappearing from the page. Strange, to think that a death might make one feel robbed of the one real thing that is left, besides ashes or a body: memory.
Then, after a year, two years, the photograph album began to fill up again, as though invisible ink had been held to the fire. This happened at the same time as I began to feel that I could read books once more. My mother gave me a copy of Moby-Dick when I was fifteen or sixteen: every year, she gave us each a pile of books and then greedily waited for the conversation that would arise once we had read them. I didn’t read it then, but I have read it now, and here she is. I hear her voice.
Patrick and I were flatmates when he fell in love with his partner Yianni; months later I fell in love with Patrick’s friend Russell. Patrick and Russell and Yianni and I send each other old photographs, along with the lists. Autumn it most certainly is: we are all, now, in our fifties. One of us will die first. For a while, that person will disappear. But with the passing of time, under the spell of art, we are restored. The songs still played, the books still read, the pictures visible once more. Look: it’s 1996 and there we are, the four of us, posing for the camera, drunk on sex and new love and friendship. Our eyes alight. Our limbs entwined.
Photographs
page viii. The author, Huskisson, circa 1980.
page 10. Deborah Bennett, Hunters Hill, circa 1974.
page 94. Deborah Trahair and Kerry Bennett, Coogee, 1963.
page 175. Patrick McIntyre and the author, Chippendale, 1990.
page 181. Patrick McIntyre, Russell Daylight, the author, Yianni Faros, Newtown, 1996.
Permissions
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce material as relevant. The publisher welcomes any information or enquiry in this regard.
The publishers wish to acknowledge the following copyright holders for kind permission to reproduce material in this book:
Collins, Suzanne, extract from The Hunger Games, Scholastic, New York, 2008. Reproduced by kind permission of Scholastic, Inc.
Dillard, Annie, extract from The Writing Life, Harper and Row, New York, 1989. Reproduced by kind permission of Russell and Volkening.
Garner, Helen, extracts from Monkey Grip, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1977, and The Children’s Bach, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1984. Reproduced by kind permission of the author.
Hogan, Ron, extract from interview with George Saunders, 2000, http://www.beatrice.com/wordpress/. Reproduced by kind permission of Ron Hogan.
McComb, David, extract from Tour Diaries 1989, and note on Born Sandy Devotional, http://www.thetriffids.com. Reproduced by kind permission of Graham Lee.
Murray, Les, extract from Dog Fox Field, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1991. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Les Murray c/o Margaret Connolly & Associates Pty Ltd.
Stow, Randolph, extract from The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, Macdonald, London, 1965. Reproduced by kind permission of Sheil Land Associates.
The Paris Review, extracts from interviews with Truman Capote (The Art of Fiction No. 17) and S.J. Perelman (The Art of Fiction No. 31). Reproduced by kind permission of the Wylie Agency.
Acknowledgements
To Vicki Hastrich, Lucinda Holdforth and Charlotte Wood.
To Russell Daylight, Alice Daylight, Patrick Daylight.
Thanks also to Ben Ball, Joss Bennett, Kerry Bennett, Pippita Bennett, Jemma Birrell, Siobhán Cantrill, Jenny Darling, Clara Finlay, Ashley Hay, James Ley, Patrick McIntyre, Catriona Menzies-Pike, John O’Carroll, Stephen Romei, Meredith Rose, Geordie Williamson, Vikki Willmott-Sharp, Tim Winton, and my students, every one of them.
Some of the essays in this collection were previously published as follows: ‘Detail I’ (as ‘Learning to See’ in Island magazine (ed. Geordie Williamson); ‘Vagina’ in Best Australian Essays 2016 (Black Inc., ed. Geordie Williamson); ‘The Difficulty is the Point’ in The Guardian; ‘Just Anguish’ as a talk called ‘S.J. Perelman: The Writer Who Changed Me’ for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, 2016; ‘The Worst that Could Happen’ in Sydney Review of Books (ed. James Ley); versions of ‘Georgia Blain’ in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and on the Stella Prize website; ‘A Mole, a Viper, a Toad’ in Sydney Review of Books (ed. Catriona Menzies-Pike); and ‘Inventing the Teenager’ (as ‘Keeping Faith with Words’) in Griffith Review (ed. Ashley Hay).
The writing of this book was generously supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
About the author
Author photograph: Russell Daylight
Tegan Bennett Daylight is a writer, teacher and critic. Her books include the Stella Award shortlisted Six Bedrooms and the novels Safety and Bombora. She lives in the Blue Mountains with her husband and two children.
www.simonandschuster.com.au
www.SimonandSchuster.com.au/Authors/Tegan-Bennett-Daylight
Also by Tegan Bennett Daylight
Six Bedrooms
Bombora
What Falls Away
Safety
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