When the Depression comes, the couple leaves the beauty of the harbour and moves in with Colin’s mother, Una, into a ‘big flat chequerboard suburb, predominately iron-grey.’ Whether they really need to move for financial reasons or whether Colin just wants to be closer to his grotesque and doting mother is not clear. Nora’s entrapment and misery out there is profound and lasts for years. It is the shocking poverty and dependence of a wife who must steal pennies from her husband’s or mother-in-law’s purse, taking care not to let the coins chink, and whose yearning for freedom is reduced, once again, to desperate walking. Strangely, these were the things—utterly beyond my experience in every way—that stuck fastest to the teenage flypaper mind. Why?
We read Henry James or Edith Wharton or Tolstoy not because the social conditions and mores are the same, but because the human condition of ducking and weaving around them, of conformity and rebellion—and their price—are. What is the price to be paid for straining at the socially acceptable edges of happiness? A novel—this novel—might show you.
When I was a teenager, powerless myself and trapped in a maze of strict expectations, spoken and unspoken, it was Nora’s entrapment I noticed most. But now what shocks me more is the corrosive effect of her passivity and the way, as she says, that ‘[m]uch of my long life can be apportioned into periods of waiting’ to escape. This passivity, combined with the persistent underestimating of her own talents, concocts a trope so perniciously feminine that to write of it even now feels like invoking a curse.
Nora’s marriage ends, and she goes to London. On the ship she has an affair with a genial, married American which reveals to her a reality of love, that ‘far surpassed the theory.’ She recalls, ‘At last, I thought, I knew how freedom could be reconciled with appeasement.’ But she ends that relationship at the dock. In London, she discovers she is pregnant and suffers a horrific abortion. Afterward, Nora decides to end her sex life.
Which leaves the artistic life as the one remaining to her. But whether she is consciously aware of being an artist is a major question of the novel.
Anderson described Nora to an interviewer as a woman ‘who was actually a born artist, but was in a place where artists, although they were known to exist, were supposed to exist elsewhere. She was born among that kind of people, and she herself doesn’t know that she’s an artist. She struggles through, trying to arrive at her art and never succeeding.’
When asked if the backbone of the novel were, to her, ‘the plight of the unrecognized artist,’ Anderson described a plight more fundamental:
Not an unrecognized artist, but a person who is an artist but doesn’t succeed even in being conscious of being an artist. She had a kind of buried talent, buried in herself. The sewing, the tapestries, had to be something acceptable to her society. She wasn’t a strongly original person. Not many of us are.
To be a strongly original person takes acres of secret confidence, endogenous or achieved. The vicious, kneecapping question ‘Who do you think you are?’ seems to have entered Nora’s consciousness so early and so profoundly that it was simply not possible for her to imagine herself as an artist.
How much of this is to do with being a woman of her time, place and economic circumstance and how much (if any) is particularly Australian is hard to tell. Certainly, artists and intellectuals of Nora’s generation, such as Christina Stead, felt they had to leave Australia, as would the generation after hers (among them Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes, Michael Blakemore and Jeffrey Smart). I sometimes think that the justly vaunted egalitarianism of Australia, the ‘fair go’ which had its apotheosis in the Whitlam 1970s of my childhood, had a darker flip side. Just as the fairness of Australian society goes back over a century in no small measure to an Irish Catholic tradition of social justice which set limits on (often English) power, I imagine, too, that the Irish Catholic underdog thinking came with it, as its shadow. Possibly this is best explained in an old (and not very funny) joke: An American, an Englishman and an Australian are digging a ditch. The boss drives past in a Rolls-Royce. The Englishman: ‘Lovely car, but personally I would always choose the Bentley over the Rolls.’ The American: ‘One day, folks, that’s gonna be me riding up there.’ The Australian: ‘One day that bastard’s going to be back down here in this ditch with the rest of us where he belongs.’ Or, put another way, ‘Who does he think he is?’
But escape is possible. Nora’s friend Olive Partridge, who has money, gets to London where she can express her artistic ambition. Olive says, ‘I want to be simple, utterly simple. Like water.’ Nora tells her, ‘No chance. You’ll never be simple, and neither shall I. We had to start disguising ourselves too early.’ Olive is then struck by Nora’s intelligence, which Nora laughs off, in that modest way in which women do, thereby damaging themselves. But old Nora acknowledges, ‘Of course, I underestimated Olive. If she did not arrive at simplicity in her person, she did so in her later books, whereas I never have, in anything.’ A judgement she must later, fortunately, modify.
If you are a born artist, can you survive if you cannot make anything? The making of things is necessary for artists of any medium to find their way to be in the world. If Nora is not making something, she is not really alive, much as a writer who is not writing is miserable. If you step outside your tower and stop work, you feel dead.
Or you feel like killing someone. Nora’s childhood friend and fellow walker Dorothy Rainbow, née Irey, is a creative soul trapped in a life of marriage and babies. Dorothy meets an end of almost unspeakable violence and tragedy. (One of the most moving things in the novel is the magnificent restraint of Nora’s interactions with Gordon Rainbow, Dorothy’s only surviving child.) At a very low point of her own, Nora remembers her old acquaintance: ‘I ask myself why Dorothy Rainbow did not hang on, provisionally, and why nothing was offered to appease the remnants of that need that once drove her to walk.’
But Nora must know why. Dorothy, trapped in Brisbane within the confines of what she could ‘reasonably want,’ had no chance. Whereas Nora, in London, had found solace among a second community of creative people, making costumes for the theatre. ‘Before a week was out,’ she remembers, ‘it was clear that I had fallen among people who would accept me for what I was, whatever I was.’ Even though being among them has saved her life, the curse of ‘Who do you think you are?’ is so strong that Nora persists in not daring to name herself as an artist of any kind.
And yet, when the older Nora is presented on three separate occasions with embroideries she made all those years ago, her tone changes radically. Gone is the diffident underdog. In its stead is the confident voice of an artist with a gimlet eye, critically evaluating her work. Each time she examines one of the works, the tone shift is so radical that the fabric of the novel seems to tear a little, revealing, Escher-like, the hand of the artist behind it.
When shown the first embroidery, Nora is ‘so astonished by the excellence of the design and the beauty of the colour’ she cannot speak. It is of an orange tree with eight little birds, ‘all fabulous yet touchingly domestic’ which ‘strut or peck beneath it.’ She declares to herself, ‘They are in danger of giving it a spotty effect, and yet they don’t, and that risk, taken and surmounted, is its merit and distinction.’ The second embroidery is of a magpie thrusting its head through the leaves of a jacaranda tree. It is a disappointment so Nora immediately suspects the brilliant orange tree was a fluke. Her carer, Betty Cust, offers words of comfort: ‘You would think that maggie was real.’ Nora’s next thought gets a paragraph of its own:
‘The criteria of even the most trivial art are not those of virtue.’
When Betty brings in the third work, a design of swirling suns, moon and stars, Nora is floored by it. Its excellence ‘disturbs as well as amazes’ her and prompts her to ask aloud in Betty’s presence what she was running from all those years.
‘I wonder what would have happened if I had never left this place.’
‘Haven’t you ever wondered
before?’
‘Never. Never once. I always believed it was imperative. But this shows I had begun to do something here after all. I have never done anything of this quality since. Who knows what else I may have drawn …’
I stop myself in time. The words in my mind were ‘drawn out of the compression of a secret life’.
The possibility of regret for an artistic life unlived is unspoken and terrible. It is so hard for any artist to know how much they need the constraints of their tower, and how much they need the freedom—at the risk of lostness, or lost focus—outside it. But at the same time this is Nora’s victory: she sees that she made something out of what looked like nothing, like entrapment, like waiting. Though, in typical fashion, hers is a silent victory. Nora cannot utter the words even to kind, perceptive Betty Cust, because to do so would be to admit to having had an ambition, like the Lady of Shalott’s, to be both in the world and in the artist’s tower, using the world as material. Then, as now, this is to court psychological and financial danger, and it may also still be to bring a curse down on your head. Whether you are cursed or not will probably depend on what you find yourself able, in your own time and place, to draw out of ‘the compression of a secret life.’
I didn’t consciously think about this book for thirty years. But, as Nora says, ‘I did not know that such infections can enter the blood, and that a tertiary stage is possible’. I wrote a novel with a wry old narrator who deals with her Australian carer in the present tense, while reexamining and reassembling the puzzle of her past. There are words, scenes and a whole tone of caustic hope-hedging that I can see now are shocking echoes of the pattern this novel imprinted on me.
Which leaves me experiencing an impulse like an alcoholic at AA who must go back through all their acquaintances, hunt them down on Facebook or in life and apologize for what they did when they were drinking, even if they can’t remember what it was. Is it even possible to go back through all your reading and acknowledge what you took, though you didn’t know you took it? If I am honest, I should add that I have also secretly long considered myself at the same time a skinny misfit Frankie Addams, fallen off the known world, and a great fat lugubrious Louie Pollitt, plotting her escape from it.
My old-woman narrator, Ruth, possibly puts it better than I can: ‘Some memories may not even be my own. I heard the stories so often I took them into me, burnished and smothered them as an oyster a piece of grit, and now, mine or not, they are my shiniest self.’
The oyster no more chooses the grit that gets into its shell than we choose which books get under our skin. Nor, I suppose, can I be any more accountable than a bicuspid for the shape and colour of what I might, years later, cough up. And it is in this way, in the end, that I feel that though I did not steal anything and I cannot give it back, what I can do is acknowledge, in gratitude and awe, what I owe. Or, as Nora puts it, ‘Imagination is only memory at one, or two, or twenty, removes’—and to know that is to repudiate those moves.
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