by Helen Garner
I put out my hand to the kettle, and a hoarse gargling erupts outside the back door. My neck sprouts hackles, and my heart lurches into my skull and swells there to block my ears: yet when the radio on the table bursts into shrieks and whines, then fades to a dull buzz, I hear everything through these same ears, and I know it is the men in the ute, that they’ve joined forces with others in four-wheel drives with guns and spotlights and a CB radio which they’re using to scramble the feeble intellectual signal of my transistor, that they’re blazing down the hill to smash open my cardboard house, my pathetic little shelter. Though my hands are trembling and my head is deaf with panic I seize the radio and squeeze the button. It dies. Outside, the gargling sinks to a rattling growl, and ceases.
The frogs, unperturbed, cricket on.
Listen. Walk to the back door. Open it on to the blackness. The night consists of this blackness, and of a heavy, cold smell of eucalypts, grass and smoke. Something shifts in a tree. Pick up the axe. The tree gives a shudder: something in its central form groans and gargles. The lamplight works past my shoulder, diluting the night’s absolute, and the lump in the tree fork throws back its blunt head and lets out an appalling cry of love or challenge: it is the bear, shaken in its sapling by a terrible passion, and the answering roar from the ridge is so urgent that, ignoring me and my weapon and barely using its braking claws, the animal skids down the tree and takes off at a clumsy trot up the track and into the dark.
When I lay the axe on the table and examine the radio, I realise that its batteries, by cosmic coincidence, had chosen that moment to give up the last of their power. The kero lamp nearest the open door suddenly flares, emitting a column of fine, sooty smoke which pours straight up out of the glass chimney and folds itself, on air, into smooth crinkles like pushed cloth. I rush to turn down the wick, then to shut the door, the click of whose latch sounds only half a beat before the crack of the first shot.
Its echo bounds away—wah waah waaah—across the cold ridges.
The woman who grabs the axe is me. Its handle has already lost the shallow warmth of my earlier grip and become cold wood, yellow, shaped and weighted for a hand much bigger than mine.
I am ashamed of what it means that I have grabbed an axe at the sound of a rifle shot in the dark.
Why is it so shameful to be afraid?
I wind the wicks right down, kick the stove door shut on a fresh hunk of wood, and step out my back door with the axe in one hand and the torch in the other.
Now the night odours are overpowering, and the frogs are very loud; but since they are able to increase the volume of their lacework without any alteration to its stubborn and yet endlessly submissive tone, nothing out here is different except the cold, which finds the joins between garments and touches me there with the unpleasant intimacy of a stethoscope. I move a few steps away from the building. A night-seeing bird would spot the anxiety I am leaving like phosphorescence in every footprint. A solo frog strikes a sudden ringing note in the bottom dam, then returns modestly to the chorus. No moon, no stars, and my torch makes so little impression that it’s as if the air had drastically thickened. The totality of the dark disrupts my senses: my ears feel padded, and my skin has lost its elastic ability to report to me the whereabouts and nature of physical objects. I place the torch on the short grass: its beam clots like custard in the forest of blades. The air is thick, cold and utterly motionless. It strikes me with force that this thickness is the result of some kind of presence; that something is waiting all round me, round the house; that far from wishing me well or including me in its design and purpose, the universe is without meaning: stupid, askew, morally inert. Again my hackles tickle and stretch the skin of my neck.
The second shot comes as a relief. Its distortion, leisurely and attenuated, restores the perspective of the night: the gun must be at least a mile away, and so must the man holding it. The shot is not, after all, personal to me; and yet it was set in motion by another human creature for whose physical being, warm, muscular and engaged in purposeful activity, I experience a pang of comradely feeling, almost of gratitude. The balloon of awareness around me slowly inflates until I perceive that the sky has covered itself with clouds, that this explains the thick stillness of the air.
What was I afraid of? Was I afraid of the dark?
The house I stumble back into has no window coverings of any kind. I relight the lamps calmly, almost laughing, though my heart seems larger than it should be, and palpable in its beating.
On the high shelves the books I have chosen at a distance from the moment and mood of wanting to read look sober, selected according to criteria more severe than those of every day, as if I imagined taking myself very seriously here, freeing my mind for the bouts of extended concentration required to follow famous arguments. Instead, however, when I settle myself to read by the soft light of the lamps, though I force myself to continue for a good hour, I can barely concentrate at all. The dark outside turns every window into a black mirror, and me into a bad actor. I am Reading Goethe; I am a Reading Woman; I am self-conscious, exaggeratedly casual, and every movement of head, hand or torso, every clearing of the throat or rubbing of the forehead, every raising of the eyes from the page or pursing of the lips in thought rings false, a charade of nonchalance performed against the hostility of countless imaginary witnesses, all of them, naturally, men: for what woman would go out at night, with or without firearms, to trespass, to broach private property despite locked gates, to loiter outside lit windows, to confound the thoughts of those observed by entangling them in aggressive, scornful eyebeams? She’s reading Goethe! She thinks she understands it! She believes it means something! Here! Each time I catch my own reflection my face is an inhuman white dish, without marks of experience or age, expressionless, a drowned girl’s, surfacing in one or another of the treacherous panes.
In this public cube of light and warmth even breathing takes on a flamboyant quality. There is no point in prolonging the agony. I close the book and push it away, then I turn down the wicks, blow into the glass chimneys, and sit still.
I acknowledge the dark.
In one stroke the windows lose their power. The house lays down its weapons and surrenders. Its box of defiance collapses, gently and with relief, and darkness passes through it again and perfects itself on the other side. No longer held at bay by the lamps’ hiss, and having known forever the pointlessness of argument, the folly of persuasion, the frogs flood the night with their patient, stupid cricketing, their endless embroidery round the borders of the black pool.
If I sit still, I feel the irregularity of my heartbeat, very close inside my ribs. I wonder what it is that powers the heart, what force drives it, and what for.
In this darkness it is possible to undress without modesty, to drag off my clothes and throw them on to a dark chair and fumble under the pillow for my thick nightie, to crawl into the blankets and lie there shivering with stiffening eyelids and feet solidifying in the cold. The frogs work: they labour without looking for any reward; the shooting continues, sporadic cracks and splinterings that echo till they disintegrate between the ridges; and just as a rat begins to delve among the dirty dishes outside the back door, sleep comes suddenly to me in the form of an inversion of logic: rain flies upwards into maternal clouds, flowers shrink into soil and are swallowed up by their own roots.
When I wake, with a full bladder, it is still deep night and the frogs are stitching tirelessly. The guns are silent. A wild scampering outside the back door when I open it sends me back for my boots, in which I tramp with feet apart to avoid the dragging laces. On the first gulp of cold breath I know that something has changed. The lid has been lifted off everything while I slept: the clouds have slid away and now there arches over me and my house a tremendous emptiness which can only be called firmament, in which hang vast, tilting constellations. Squatting with my nightie up round my haunches, my mouth agape and my head craning backward, I feel the curve of the planet. I am aware of earth’s
roundness against this immense powdered screen of starlight whose patterns, nameless to me except ‘Southern Cross’ and ‘saucepan’, crackle with meaning: the starry sky is throbbing with form.
I squat here, unimaginably tiny, breathing out slow clouds, protected, forgiven, forgotten. I am no longer waiting for anything—or rather, waiting now for things so large and leisurely that they are beyond ordinary waiting: for my parents to die as they must, for my daughter to have children, for a god to come to me and bless me. The small heat off my stream of piss rises to touch the skin of my thigh, then disperses in cold.
The warmth hiding in the blanket folds is of my own making, even if I do not understand what for, and the dream I have is one that patiently unpicks all the knots in me and leaves without demanding to be remembered.
There may be no ocean here, nor even a river worthy of the name, and this morning the gully holds its mist veil over the surface of the bottom dam; but the sky turns a deep and secret pink, wrens spring about under the bare lilac bushes, and down in the hollow of the top dam, pushing my jumper sleeves back off my red knuckles, I yank and yank at the cord of the pump. It turns over, dies, turns, flares again, takes, and begins to chug.
Its note attracts me, there is a sweetness in it, and unexpected affection surges out of me to meet it: for the first time in my life I feel the charm of an engine. The dam surface trembles among its weeds, and the pipe gives a series of jerks as water begins to travel through it, heading for the tank on the high stand fifty yards away, near the back gate. I clump up the shaly yellow dam wall alongside the water-carrying pipe, panting and laughing, trying to sense the speed of the water and to keep pace with it. I start to shout, and as I top the rise and my boots strike grass, the sun sails out of a reef of grey and pink clouds, then scatters them in horizontal streaks a mile wide. I am striding towards the tank along the very edge of my land, parallel with the top road, singing and yelling out loud, dancing in my heavy boots to give the water time to catch up with me, when last night’s ute comes flying by, scattering orange gravel. The driver, thickly rugged-up and laughing, bangs his flat hand against its door, and beside him two little boys in peaked caps scramble for a look and wave wildly till they are out of sight.
I scamper up the wooden ladder of the tank stand, forgetting the stiffness of my boots, and wait there, clinging to the tank rim and making my voice boom in its cavern, till through the view-slit in its lid I see the reflection of my own head start to shudder and break apart on the churning water surface: the stream from the dam bursts in, invisible and powerful.
I could get down and eat my breakfast while it fills, or saw wood or wash dishes or hunt rats, but instead I cut across the dew-flattened grass to the olive tree, spread my jacket, and take my place on the bench for sitting still.
It takes real discipline to close my eyes, but the frogs are helpful, pedalling away down there, eternally patient, eternally replaceable; and now the magpies, their virtuosos’ minds distracted by something higher, let loose their blissful warblings, their variations so casual, so endlessly fresh, their insouciant scrolls and flourishes; while in the house, where I am not, where no fire has been lit, no disorder tidied, no great book read, the little round mirror beside the open door is hung so high that it carries on its cheap and perfect lustre the image of nothing but sky.
1990
PART TWO
Sing for Your Supper
Patrick White:
The Artist as Holy Monster
LET ME SAY that David Marr’s biography of Patrick White is a grand and gorgeous book.* I hated having to maintain a reviewer’s posture to it, reminding myself to take notes when I longed for the freedom to accept without reserve the biographer’s seductive invitation to plunge into the river of somebody else’s life. I read the book on planes, in buses, at meal tables: I became deaf, I laughed, I cried. Marr displays none of the modern biographer’s anxiety about theory. He is not self-consciously watching himself perform the act of biography. He takes the gloves off and wades right in. It’s a marvellous piece of work: the large sweep of it, how it rolls along, the subtle shape of its narrative, its poised breaths, its stabs and sparks of detail, its graceful syntax and richness of imagery: could a better match of subject and biographer be imagined?
To my warless generation, White’s story seems extraordinarily manifold, as if he had lived half a dozen lives: the privileged childhood, broken by what he perceived as his mother’s betrayal in consigning him to an English boarding school; the oddly domesticated, timid student years at Cambridge; a poofy, pommy, polo-necked, prewar period around the theatres and artists’ studios of London; then the wide, light-filled rush of travelling, sexually freed, in America. The war completed, perhaps, this process of shoehorning him out of his comfy privilege. In the Middle East he learnt to muck in with the world at random. He discovered Greece, always the country of his heart; he met Manoly Lascaris, who was to be his life-long companion, and returned in 1946 to Australia, a ‘familiar and at the same time hostile land’, where he was to work out his fate as a man and as an artist.
So powerful and unflinching is Marr’s creation that three-quarters of the way through the book my heart began to ache, I became foul-tempered, I snapped at people and said sharp things. I looked with horror and fear at portraits of White: that ‘mineral stare’, the shrinking, fastidious mouth. Memories of my own slight contact with White hurt me again: I recalled his gentle kindness to me at our first meeting, when he took me aside, sat me down with him, and questioned me on my reading, matching my tastes (especially in Australian work) against his, and sweetly, as if to establish common ground; but all this was exploded by the dismay of our second meeting when, hunched at a dinner table with his wooden holding-cross swinging round his neck, he excoriated certain people dear to me, savaging their moral characters, and I sat there, silent and trembling with shock, too cowardly (because of his tremendous presence and, I confess, his fame) to stand up for my friends. I cried with shame all the way home, and never saw him again.
Yet I learnt from this. Whatever his intention (and probably he had none: they were random, bitchy swipes) he showed me that although I have been vain about my ‘honesty’, I am in fact a coward; that under pressure I will kowtow to someone with a name and will slink away leaving my friends betrayed. This is something worth knowing.
To bear with, to bear a man like Patrick White one needs a steady belief in the idea—so out of favour in the universities— of the artist as holy monster. As a small child, White overheard a lady wondering whether the Victor Whites’ strange little boy was ‘a changeling’. This remark stuck in his mind, as comfort, all his life. ‘He saw writing as a cruel business,’ says Marr, ‘but the changeling/artist is free of those loyalties and obligations of kindness that make difficult truths hard to tell…He is sans famille.’
White’s periodic cullings of even his closest friends, using tiny slights or hesitations as pretexts for a ferocious slashing away of their links with him, make dreadful reading. Marr does not spare White in his accounts of these episodes, but clearly he can only countenance them because he believes them justified, when the chips are down, by the quality of White’s work, and the urgency of his needs as an artist. One is astonished, repeatedly, by the generosity that some discarded friends have displayed in their reports of the breaks. Others, like the painter Sidney Nolan, responded in kind and thus lifelong feuds came about.
Couple White’s desire to be ‘free of loyalties and obligations’ with his terrible fear of loneliness, his belief (based on his own wretched adolescence and early manhood) that anything is better than loneliness, and the stage is set for a partner, a wife, someone with superhuman powers of endurance.
The personality of Manoly Lascaris, White’s companion or (as Thomas Bernhard would say) life-person, lies subtly at the core of the biography. Lascaris is the marrow in its bones. Quietly present, quietly stable behind the monstrous foreground performances of White, he glows, and grows in statur
e, in sweetness and dignity as the story unfolds. In his modesty he is able to make reverberating statements which are innocent of the posturing they might, from someone less highly evolved, imply: ‘it is the pleasure of the disciple,’ he says to Jim Sharman, ‘to serve Christ.’
He is not, of course, meaning to liken White to Christ— how could he, on the evidence this book provides?—but is making a statement about the dignity and the satisfaction of service, about an acceptance he has made of the proposition that some people have the nature to serve, while others, particularly those with a driven sense of mission, demand and desperately need to be served.
It’s a measure of Marr’s seriousness, and of Lascaris’s depth and beauty of personality, that one does not brush aside the proposition here with a feminist’s or a leftist’s curse, but stashes it for further consideration. Which would we, in the end, rather have? Good manners, or great art? Are the two mutually exclusive? Women and men who serve the creators, as Lascaris did, gamble their whole lives on their instincts about their partners’ abilities: a tremendous, dizzying bet.
The matter of religion—or faith is a better word, since White, though he was a great fan of nuns and took Anglican communion for many years, never settled into an established niche, and remarked that ‘churches destroy the mystery of God’—is a strong strand of the biography. Marr points out that the most reliable love White experienced, as a child of the landed and socially ambitious rich, was that offered by devoted servants, and this equation of love with service deeply marks Marr’s story, as it does White’s work.
But whom did White himself serve, we might justifiably ask? It could be said, despite current fashions of thought, that he served art, as did the famous actress in Cilea’s opera who sings ‘Io son’ l’umil’ ancella’ (I am the humble serving maid)—if one believes in art as a duty laid down. White certainly found art a hard master, and experienced the duty as an anguished (and sometimes exhilarating) slog. He returned after the war, with mixed emotions, to a culture which was not ready for what he had to offer it: but he shouldered the job, and dragged it some way out of its provincial bog, lashing and reviling as he laboured, fuelled by contempt for its fearful small-mindedness. Marr notes astutely that Martin Boyd was the kind of writer White might have become, had he chosen a life of exile in Europe.