Tirra Lirra by the River is a novel that examines in brutally, beautifully honest detail the patterns etched on a soul at this formative time. And it shows how, late in life—however well, or less well, you might think that has turned out—there may be some satisfaction to be had by recognizing these patterns, and what they have made of us. Nora Porteous is an old woman who has come home and she is looking for what it was that made her, and trying to account for what she then made of herself. These are confronting questions to unravel, and ones that the novel, in some small way, also poses for me now.
In the mid-1980s, Tirra Lirra by the River was a set text for secondary school students in Melbourne, Australia, along with Christina Stead’s masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children, and Carson McCullers’s sublime The Member of the Wedding. These books have stayed with me in a way so deep that I cannot unravel them from the writer, or the woman, I have become.
All three books are about extraordinary teenage misfits: the genius Louie and the ‘freak’ Frankie—who inhabit the extraordinary writers Stead and McCullers—and Jessica Anderson’s Nora, wry and brave. When I reread them now, I see that they are a trifecta of high art and terror and truth almost too powerful to give to teenagers, which is to say exactly what they crave and need (as opposed to ‘relevant’ books about ‘issues’ which are ‘resolved’ in candy-floss epiphanies and ‘growth and change moments’).
Still, a small part of me—perhaps the part that is now mother to preteen girls—does wonder if this stunning, toxic cocktail that formed me was not too strong. Did it feed a monster? Comfort or encourage something that should have been put in a sack and sunk? Who knows: life, especially a single life, is both the control and the experiment. What did they think would happen to us, back in a suburban girls’ school in the lost, pre-grunge, hair-gelled 1980s?
I’ve no idea what I would have been like without these books. Except more lost.
But why did this novel mean so much? After all, it was about the struggles of a woman to live a life in which she can create works of art, fully seventy years earlier. Hadn’t the world changed radically for the better by the time it was published in 1978? We’d had another wave of feminism in the Western world, and, in Australia, the extraordinary Whitlam Labor government’s social reforms: universal free health care, free university education, no-fault divorce, the single mother’s pension, the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, antidiscrimination laws, multicultural policy and so on. As a teenager I blithely considered myself a beneficiary of this new, just, well-funded world. I could get sick, educated, divorced, raise my children alone and have all my future novels (in which I could out myself without recrimination as whatever I liked) funded on the public purse. But no amount of teen dreaming or government subsidy can resolve the questions of how to find a form of life that suits you, and how to be an artist. These questions of sex and art are at the heart of Tirra Lirra by the River.
‘When my worst expectations are met,’ Nora confides in the first pages, ‘I frequently find alleviation in detaching myself from the action, as it were, the better to appreciate … the pattern of doom, or comedy, or whatever you like to call it.’
What if we liked to call ‘the pattern of doom, or comedy, or whatever’ a novel—indeed this novel? Tirra Lirra by the River is an intricate tissue of reminiscence woven by an old woman as she examines her life, pulling threads through it and tying loose ends to their long-ago beginnings. Because Nora is someone compelled to make things—beautiful, useless things, but things the making of which is absolutely necessary to her—her struggles are the struggles of an artist. There are two of them. First, to find some form of life which allows her to work and to have a personal, sexual life (not easy for anyone, especially a woman, and most especially a woman of Nora’s time and place). And then there’s the struggle involved in the act of making art—of imposing form on her material, finding ‘the pattern of doom, or comedy, or whatever’ in it.
Looked at this way, Anderson’s novel is an enactment of what it is about, as, more obviously, Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement is itself the act of atonement for its narrator. Or, perhaps, in the self-referentially startling way that an Escher drawing is a drawing of the hand that made the drawing, in the act of making it. We are in the narrator Nora’s mind as she makes her work, and we discern, or imagine we do, the Escher-like hand of Jessica Anderson enacting her own much more successful struggle, and producing this book.
I was fortunate to be able to speak with Anderson’s daughter, the eminent screenwriter Laura Jones (Oscar and Lucinda, The Portrait of a Lady, An Angel at My Table). Jones told me her mother’s belief was that truly terrible subjects become bearable to us in art, because the art itself—the beauty of form—offers a kind of consolation. Form is the pattern imposed on material or, as the critic Kenneth Burke had it, ‘the satisfaction of an expectation.’
The satisfactions—or consolations—of art in Tirra Lirra by the River are profound. Possibly they are so profound that they can distract us from the story itself, a story which, on one reading at least, is a tragedy of ‘vile wastage, vile wastage’: the waste of an artist’s talent.
When I was searching for how to think of this novel, what came to mind was something small and made of material denser than we usually find—like a rock of previously unknown qualities from another planet. Or perhaps a Leonardo painting, in which behind the mysteriously smiling girl there is a landscape with a castle, in the window of which is an artist painting a smiling girl in a landscape with a castle behind her, in the window of which … and so on. There is so much surreptitiously packed into these pages. And yet, on its surface, this novel achieves the apparent simplicity its narrator recognizes as the hard-won achievement of a great artist.
Anderson was in her early sixties when Tirra Lirra by the River was published. It was rapturously received in Australia, and won the nation’s most prestigious prize for fiction, the Miles Franklin. Readers loved it, no doubt responding to all kinds of truths in it, to the point where they assumed events it described to be literally true. Laura Jones told me that, when interviewed, her mother would insist that the book could not be autobiographical, since ‘Nora was born at the turn of the century. [Pause.] I was born in 1916 …’ ‘As if,’ Jones said with a smile, ‘that settled it.’
When readers assume the literal truth of fiction, it can give a writer a double-edged feeling. In a way, it’s a compliment: they have found this art to ring true. At the same time, to assume a one-to-one correspondence to the writer’s life is to doubt the artist’s powers to invent. Worse, it is to imagine an open window, even an invitation, to climb in and rummage through the writer’s private life, looking for evidence to tie them to their fictions. Jones says her mother reacted testily, as well one might, to the assumption of literal parallels with Nora. ‘See?’ Anderson would say, lifting her hair back off her face. ‘No scars. No facelift.’ With one startling gesture she defended both her private self and the primacy of her imagination.
The book begins in the late 1970s, with Nora coming back to Brisbane. Her life, in one view, has been a series of escapes from constraints on full personhood for a woman: most notably from Australia, and from marriage. As a young woman she escaped Brisbane’s ‘rawness and weak gentility, its innocence and deep deceptions’ for marriage and Sydney. Then she escaped the latter for some forty years in London. Nora has come back only because she has run out of options.
Now she is old. As she enters her childhood home, left to her after the death of her sister Grace, she sees ‘a shape pass’ in the hallway mirror. ‘It is the shape of an old woman who began to call herself old before she really was, partly to get in first and partly out of a fastidiousness about the word “elderly”, but who is now really old. She has allowed her shoulders to slump. I press back my shoulders and make first for the living room.’
From the first pages, it is clear that we are in the hands, or the min
d, of someone of great, humorous self-consciousness, who can see herself from almost every angle, 360 degrees around: ‘I’ and ‘she’ at close quarters.
Nora enters the living room, a room of which she has strange expectations—of exaltation, mysterious bliss—that she fully expects to be dashed. ‘Things are turning out so badly,’ she thinks, ‘that I am filled again with my perverse contentment.’ This ‘perverse contentment’ I recognize in a deep way from home, from early imprinting of my own. I associate it, possibly irrationally, with the Irish-Australian heritage that Anderson and I, in part, share. It is the foretelling of misfortune as the underdog’s pale triumph. At least, the thinking goes, if the worst does come to pass, you’ll have the grim satisfaction of having been right: the universe might disappoint you, but it could not prove you wrong. I associate it with my mother and her downtrodden forebears; a mind-set bent on pulling wry, self-righteous satisfaction from oppression or mishap. (It works, in my observation, until the end really is nigh, when the fact that you predicted it turns out to be no consolation at all.)
But Nora is looking for something important, something close to the beginning of it all—and she finds it. It is the picture made by the distortion in the ‘cheap thick glass,’ in the living room window, ‘a miniature landscape of mountains and valleys with a tiny castle, weird and ruined, set on one slope.’ In her childhood she had been ‘deeply engrossed by those miniature landscapes, green, wet, romantic, with silver serpentine rivulets, and flashing lakes, and castles moulded out of any old stick or stone. I believe they enchanted me.’ Later, in her teen years, when she reads The Lady of Shalott, she discovers that her fantasy place already had a name: Camelot.
I no longer looked through the glass. I no longer needed to. In fact, to do so would have broken rather than sustained the spell, because that landscape had become a region of my mind, where infinite expansion was possible, and where no obtrusion, such as the discomfort of knees imprinted by the cane of a chair, or a magpie alighting on the grass and shattering the miniature scale, could prevent the emergence of Sir Lancelot.
And then he comes:
From underneath his helmet flowed
His coal-black curls as on he rode,
As he rode down to Camelot.
From the bank and from the river
He flashed into the crystal mirror,
‘Tirra lirra,’ by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.
The book was one of my father’s.
Tennyson’s poem is a romance in which longing for a man causes a woman artist to abandon her work, which brings down a curse upon her and she dies. When we meet her, the Lady sits in her tower. Like Nora, she makes weavings, and like Nora, she is under some kind of spell that keeps her apart from life. Though she ‘knows not what the curse may be,’ the Lady must stay put, looking only in the mirror ‘that hangs before her all the year’ in which the ‘shadows of the world appear.’ So she sits out her life, making her work. The Lady must not break the spell by leaving her tower to try to get to Camelot.
But isolation, even if it is necessary for artistic work, cannot be sustained against the longing for love and the real world.
Came two young lovers lately wed;
‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said
The Lady of Shalott.
If the verse Nora remembers reflects her desire for Lancelot—as lover, or father—it is the next verse of Tennyson’s poem, not in the novel, which seems to encompass its action:
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me!’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
The Lady is cursed when she dares go after life and love. She gets in a boat and quietly expires, floating down to Camelot. The curse is twofold. It is the specific curse of the artist, who must remain apart from the world in order to represent it. And it is the general one, hoary and old and unfathomable as patriarchy, in which a woman passively submits to parameters she cannot choose, and so a tragedy—operatic or poetic or novelistic—can be made of her exquisite, fated succumbing. (If it were Lancelot who left the tower, lay down in a boat and died, there would be no poem, because there would simply be no action. For some—again hoary and old and unfathomable—reason, as we know, large tracts of Western art are founded on women’s fantasized tragic passivity.)
Nora is cursed with wanting life and art—desires that in Brisbane in the early twentieth century could not speak their name, and that are probably pretty difficult to reconcile, without a lot of collateral damage, in any life. Indeed as I write this, in time bought from a babysitter, bargained from my husband and stolen from my children, the risk of collateral damage feels closer than I’d like. And yet, though I have read my Anderson and my Tennyson and know the risks, what I find myself most wanting—at least from time to time—is a nice, high tower all of my own.
As a girl, Nora inhabits a world of women who are either chafing at or enforcing the limits of that world. Nora’s father died when she was six, and she lives with her sister and her mother, who, as she says with admirable, now anachronistic lack of self-pity, ‘didn’t like me much.’ (‘Our natures were antipathetic. It happens more often than is admitted.’) A brother dies in World War I. Nora suffers from the longing to be elsewhere, somewhere she imagines real life is possible.
Nora’s foils—those examples of alternative fates—are two other young women. Olive Partridge is a literary girl. She will have three hundred pounds a year when she turns twenty-five, and, as she says, ‘that very minute I’m off.’ Dorothy Irey is beautiful and quiet and seems too aesthetic for this place. As she and Nora cross paths on their obsessive, frustrated, ‘lonely walking’ of the streets and paths of Brisbane, Nora notices Dorothy’s fingers ‘nibbling together.’ At home, Nora wonders to her sister, ‘Why does Dorothy Irey stay here?’ But Grace turns on her ‘in a fury’ saying, ‘We don’t all think we’re too good for this place, Lady Muck.’ Like Nora’s mother and, later, her hideous mother-in-law, Una Porteous, Grace is a self-appointed policewoman of other women’s legitimate desires.
While she waits for her life to take shape, Nora makes embroidered wall hangings with her energies and time. Dorothy Irey gets married and stops walking. She is busy, Nora presumes, with a house and babies.
Grace answered my enquiries by saying with the old anger that of course she was happy.
‘Why wouldn’t she be? She has all any reasonable person could want.’
The question of what one might reasonably want, the tailoring of desire to social limits, runs through the book as it runs through all our lives. And those limits are policed with a question: ‘Who does she think she is?’ This is a question of multipurpose violence, which can be applied with equal ease to shrivel artistic ambition as well as sexual desire. This question is, one might say, how the curse of female passivity is kept alive. It is how the tower is patrolled.
This is how it works with sex. When Nora is in her teens, a group of boys—polite when alone, rapacious as a group—try to grope the girls, who are varying degrees of willing.
If they could entice or trick one of us away from the others, they would grab us and throw us to the ground. They would try to pull down our pants one minute and abjectly beg the next. As we made our escape they would villify us horribly.
Nobody was raped. Escape was optional, and for me, in spite of my sexual excitement, imperative. I hated being pulled about and roughly handled. It made me bored and grieved and angry.
‘What did you come for then?’
I saw sense in the question, and stopped going. Those girls who continued to go began to treat me with enmity, and for the first time I took note of an ominous growled-out question.<
br />
‘Who does she think she is?’
I’m disturbed by the extent to which Nora’s girlhood seventy years earlier resonated with us as we grew up in 1980s Australia. We are led to believe that sex had been ‘liberated’ fully a generation earlier in the 1960s, but like all regime change, the results of the sexual revolution were more uneven than advertised. In the 1930s, Nora’s husband at first calls her ‘frigid’ and then, when she starts to get pleasure from sex, a ‘whore’. I remember similar kinds of sexual shunning applied to girls, when the slippery slope from ‘frigid’ to ‘cocktease’ to ‘slut’ was vertiginous and absolute, and you could be shunted from one category to another without, for your trouble, having had any fun at all. And I remember the policing question, too, muttered most often by other girls, not directly to you but deliberately within your hearing: ‘Who does she think she is?’ In fact, the question was so brutal and basic that it could be asked without any words at all, just by a look.
At Olive Partridge’s going-away party, Nora stumbles upon her Lancelot. He is a dark, thin man, not young, ‘the look in his eyes like a caught breath.’ She runs into a room to catch her own breath. When she comes back to find him, he’s gone, replaced by a pale imitation, his nephew, Colin Porteous.
‘I knew it was him you came back to find,’ said Colin Porteous. ‘I could tell by the way you looked at him.’
‘How do you know how I looked at him?’ I asked furiously.
‘Because I was standing here beside him.’
The man she wanted is gone. ‘I couldn’t speak. [Colin] came a step nearer and looked closely into my face. “Well, well, well. My, oh, my.” ’ The stand-in is able to humiliate her, simply because he witnessed her desire.
Nevertheless, Nora marries this substitute Lancelot, and so makes her escape to Sydney, which, with ‘what little common sense I had,’ had become a stand-in for Camelot. The couple lives in a flat in Bomera, a dilapidated mansion right on Sydney Harbour at Potts Point (still gloriously there, and worth a Google). And it is at Bomera where, for the first time, Nora makes friends with other artists. As the horror of her marriage unfolds, she realizes she is more comfortable in their company than her husband’s. They are people who understand implicitly the need to make something, to create. ‘All I wanted in the world was to be left alone in my beautiful room, close to people who never asked, audibly or otherwise, who I thought I was, but who nevertheless were interested in the answer to that question.’
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