Home Truth

by HarperCollins Publishers

  Even today—it’s still there on the same spot—St Elizabeth’s is something more akin to a grand hotel than many other institutions of its kind in India. Having resisted (if only thereby compounding) the pains of my entry to the world, I think I quickly came to relish the fuss and luxury this Taj among hospitals was able to provide. I throve there following the initial trauma, and I always feel drawn to return to the spot whenever I’m revisiting India. Planted on Malabar Hill, it has a natural, commanding, elevated position, something that I could never take in when still stuck in the womb. This gives it an edge over grander architectural specimens, such as the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona, which affords views of the city from its raised pavilions but is grounded on the flat plane of a diagonal avenue. (You can see I have a habit of ‘collecting’ and classifying such specimens—hotels, too.)

  The view from St Elizabeth’s would have been my first, awestruck glimpse of the world of possibilities outside the foetal cocoon to which I’d been so stubbornly attached; and I can’t but reflect that for me it helped to form a more general habit or pattern I’ve come to notice in my life. After long resistance to having them forced upon me, I learn very quickly to adapt to new circumstances once there’s no question of resisting any further, and I’m always pleasantly surprised, thrilled even, by the vista of opportunities opened up before me. But daunted as well as delighted, apprehensive as well as exhilarated, so that from the wide array of fresh directions before me I’ll invariably opt for one that’s not unchallenging but still somehow familiar-looking. One that offers a path forward to something as yet unknown but also the semblance of a path back to the once known securities, insulations and comforts of my original dwelling place: my mother’s womb.

  Even in my mother’s womb I got used to travelling, as she periodically ‘commuted’ between the Punjab, where my father remained posted, and the school in Bombay where she continued to teach during most of her pregnancy. It’s significant perhaps that in all my subsequent and much wider sojourning through several continents I’ve always been attracted to schools and other such dedicated ‘retreats’ for learning and intellectual work. In my capacity as a historian, schools—and particularly those sequestered nooks called ‘English public schools’—have provided a lifetime’s subject of research for me.

  With hospitals and hotels, my visits or stays for whatever purpose have been pretty fleeting up to now; but, judging by the extraordinary amount of time I’ve spent in educational institutions, and the solace as well as stimulus they have consistently offered me, I would have to say these effectively qualify as a kind of ‘second home’ for me, or a readily recognisable home-from-home. They are where I can feel most settled even on the move. This is partly because of what my domestic habitats have always had in common with any of my workplaces outside. In its most palpable form this comes down to the presence of books. There could be no more frequently encountered object in whichever of those spaces I happen to be inhabiting.

  After we came to Australia from India in my early childhood, my mother continued teaching, and my father became an academic in the field of librarianship. From as far back as I remember, bookshelves lined the walls of several of the rooms in our family home, and I always had a dedicated corner for my own personal collection. This has now grown, in step with my own academic pursuits, into a substantial library, where the boundaries between ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ are porous, and where the shelves don’t simply line but in some places form the structure of the walls. The wraparound effect might be compared to a cave’s, but it’s less austere, far more cosseting, than that suggests. Analogies with the womb are not so easy to resist.

  At all of the schools I attended, libraries provided much of my intellectual nourishment while also serving as a protective retreat, whether from sport, at which I was hopeless, or bullying, for which as a bespectacled nerd I was a prime candidate. At university, fortunately, I didn’t need to escape either sport or bullying, and felt free to spend an even longer time in libraries. This was all very well for my intellectual growth but books could also provide an all-too-easy retreat from the complications and challenges of any emotional relationships. (Clive James has remarked somewhere how they were his ‘favourite place to hide’.) Conversely, some of them—particularly novels, in my case—were as effective as movies in providing an emotional, even a sexual, education that occasionally pushed or emboldened me to explore those paths for myself.

  When I was employed as a university teacher, then a magazine editor, I occupied a series of offices outside home, but I always imported books from my home library to these spaces. In selecting these, I made sure there were a few old favourites that might cosset me, provide a retreat in times of stress, as well as books that would nourish and stimulate me in my appointed tasks. There was no greater threat to my sense of wellbeing than when, in my last job, I was confronted with the prospect of having to move into an ‘open-plan’ office. This was not the only reason I chose to quit, but it was certainly a factor in my decision. One might contemplate giving up a womb with a view (and my office had a very sweet view of a public garden) but not a womb of one’s own.

  Expelling myself from that womb was hard but it enabled me (as first I thought, at least) to return to another: the old domed reading room of the State Library of Victoria, to which I’d often retreated in my undergraduate years. Recent ‘restorations’ have admitted a blaze of natural light through the dome that enhances its glories for some; but even those like myself who miss the circumambient gloom of old can still find a cosy, insulating intimacy there amidst all the grandeur and sublimity. It’s classically ‘open-plan’ in a sense, but if one works there early enough, or stays late enough, it’s almost as good as a womb of one’s own, and one could go on entertaining this pleasant illusion if only everyone who fills it up during the day would observe the ‘quiet area’ notices discreetly dotted about. But they don’t, or they won’t, or they can’t: many of the younger users, it’s clear, have not so much lost as never been trained in the arts of silence and, if they are seeking any kind of refuge here from the pressures of family or school, it’s for anything but the self-sufficient studious activity traditionally associated with libraries.

  As with Eliot’s garden at the beginning of Four Quartets, this womb becomes peopled with excited children, but ones even less able to contain themselves as they brazenly giggle and gossip with their neighbours or on their mobiles. No authority figure seems inclined to deter them from their artless fun; and one’s own irritation, expressed or otherwise, just exhausts itself. In the end, their chattering and their flirting and their snacking take on an all-too-beguiling charm. Knowing that I’ll get no work done if I sit enviously gazing and eavesdropping on their nonchalant sport, I’m forced to repair to the more stable, dependably solitary, womb of my home study. It’s here I’m giving birth to this piece.

  Just down the passage from the study is my bedroom. There are no bookcases here, only a few precariously perched tomes on my bedside table. But once you start taking in the way I’ve gone about decorating and furnishing it down the years—and it’s been by slow accretion, not by any plan—you couldn’t imagine a room more womb-like. Shades of Rothko everywhere, barely relieved. Walls, ceiling, cornices, architraves and door, all in the same raspberry-parfait sort of colour: the murkiest of pinks. Trailing curtains in a faded cherry silk, rarely pulled back to admit any view because the window they cover is too near to the street outside for any privacy. Dark, heavy wardrobes and chests—womb-like receptacles in themselves, by Freud’s account—encase the bed on three sides. On one of these sits a tall oxblood vase, very like an urn. There are rugs in Chinese red, some of which have become so tatty I’ve had them cut up and converted into an oversized, overstuffed cushion that pads the walls atop another of the wardrobes. A bedhead padded in a Liberty fabric sports a design of tendrils and vines—though their colouring (blue and red) is suggestive more of veins. There’s a quilt cover in a mut
ed magenta, and a Bakelite bed-lamp in bleeding-beetroot. Presiding on the wall over the bedhead is a vast old poster from the Villa Medici gallery in Rome featuring a portrait of a primly elegant young woman by Horace Vernet, a kind of secular Madonna.

  What a mad room! I’ve often woken up thinking. It’s occasioned as much insomnia as repose, and despite—or because of—its plush embrace it’s somewhere I’m as keen to escape as to linger in. Yet I’m gratefully drawn back to it night after night, and take to imagining that Auden, if not Rothko, would have felt curiously at home in this space. That it can even spawn such fancies on my part shows that it’s not unfruitful, either. It was here that I first conceived this piece.

  NOTE: This essay has benefited greatly from the advice and suggestions of WH Chong, William Cobbett, Lisa Gorton, Christina Hill, Nicholas Jose, Brian McFarlane, Rosanna Morris-Jones, Philip Olander, John Rickard and Cynthia Troup. Though the womb is all but absent from it (as in Bachelard’s book), I also found some rewarding leads in Philippa Tristram’s study, Living Space in Fact and Fiction (1989).

  Those literary estates that have cooperated with my requests for permission to quote directly from the authors they represent are noted in the general sources pages of this book. In cases where I received no response from literary estates to repeated copyright permission requests, I’ve had to paraphrase material from the authors concerned.

  SOURCES

  Song of Exile

  Richard David, Anna Bishop. The Adventures of an Intrepid Prima Donna, Currency Press, Sydney, 1997

  Phil Eva, ‘Home Sweet Home? The “Culture of Exile” in Mid-Victorian Popular Song’, Popular Music, vol.16, 1997, pp.13–50

  Miriam Moffitt, Soupers and Jumpers: The Protestant Missions in Connemara 1848–1937, Nonsuch Publishing, Dublin, 2008

  Tim Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind, Penguin, Ireland, 2006

  New Zealand Folksongs, folksong.org.nz/te_kaianga_kupu/index.html

  The New Jerusalem

  Extract from ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ from The Poetry of Robert Frost, by Edward Connery Lathem, published by Jonathan Frost. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

  The Brilliant City Inside the Soul

  oriahmountaindreamer.com

  Distance Looks Our Way

  Charles Brasch, ‘The Islands’, A Book of Australian and New Zealand Verse, edited by Walter Murdoch and Alan Mulgan, Oxford University Press, 4th Edition, 1950. (This volume was presented to my husband at school in Christchurch, in 1952, as a Special Prize for Latin in the Upper VI, so it is part of my New Zealand narrative. Charles Brasch changed the poem in later years, and left out a verse, but it is the earlier one that I, like a lot of New Zealanders, have been familiar with.) Quoted with the permission of Alan Roddick, for the Estate of Charles Brasch.

  Janet Frame, Living in the Maniototo, Vintage Books, Australia, 2008

  Janet Frame, Towards Another Summer, Vintage Books, Australia, 2007

  Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Autobiographie’, Lettre à Verlaine, hibouc.net, translated by the essayist

  Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, with parallel French text, Oxford University Press, 2006

  Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Divagations’, translated by Barbara Johnson, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007

  No Poet’s Song

  The Brisbane Centenary Official Historical Souvenir, Watson, Ferguson & Co, Brisbane, 1924

  JG Steele, The Explorers of the Moreton Bay District 1770–1830, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1972

  TC Truman, ‘Rewriting the History of the Birth of Brisbane’, Courier-Mail, April/May 1950

  Helen Gregory, The Brisbane River Story, Australian Maritime Conservation Society Inc, 1996

  David Malouf, ‘A First Place: A Mapping of the World’, delivered as the fourteenth Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture on 26 September, 1984, and published in Southerly 45, 1985

  And the original manuscripts of John Oxley’s Field Books are held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney.

  Home Triptych

  Daniel Barenboim, A Life in Music, Arcade Publishing, New York, 2003

  Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of, Jonathan Cape, London, 2008

  Bruce Beaver, Charmed Lives, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1988

  Judith Beveridge, Wolf Notes, Giramondo, Sydney, 2003

  Steven Carroll, The Lost Life, 4th Estate, Sydney, 2009

  Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, Knopf, New York, 2005

  Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces, Vintage, London, 2006; Engleby, Vintage, London, 2007

  Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1998

  CS Lewis, A Grief Observed, Faber, London, 1961

  David Malouf, Ransom, Knopf, Sydney, 2009

  Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, Everyman’s Library, New York, 1994

  Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky’s Lunch, Picador, Sydney, 1999

  Dorothy Porter, Little Hoodlum, Prism, Sydney, 1975; Akhenaten, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1992; Crete, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1996; The Bee Hut, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2009

  David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008

  RM Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International, New York, 1989

  Alfred Tennyson, The Poetical Works of Lord Tennyson, Collins Clear-type Press, London (no date on my edition) Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008

  Who Trespass Against Us

  Josephine Hook, Coming Home: A History of the Corpus Christi Community, Greenvale, The Institute for Public History, Monash University, Melbourne, 2007

  Bede Nairn, ‘McGirr, John Joseph Gregory’ in Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (eds) Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol 10, Melbourne University Press, 1986

  Start With the Tulip

  Hans Christian Andersen, ‘Thumbelina’, Fairy Tales and Legends, The Bodley Head, London, 1959

  Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Gordon Classic Library, Thomas Nelson and Sons, Edinburgh, 1954

  Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, Complete Works of Charles Dickens, Heron Books, London, 1967

  HA Guerber, Myths and Legends of the Norsemen, George Harrap and Company Ltd, London, 1910

  Kathleen and Michael Hague, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Harcour Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York, 1980

  AE Housman, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, William Brendon and Son Ltd, The Mayflower Press, Plymouth, England, 1932

  John Masefield, ‘Reynard the Fox’. Extract reproduced with the kind permission of the Society of Authors, Literary Representatives of the Estate of John Masefield. Taken from a journal kept by the essayist in the 1950s, transcribed from Other Men’s Flowers, compiled by AP Wavell, Jonathan Cape, London, 1946

  Anna Pavord, The Tulip, Bloomsbury, New York and London, 1999

  Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust, Penguin Books, London, 1971

  Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, 1929; You Can’t Go Home Again, Signet Book, New York, 1966

  Steven Spielberg (dir), ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, screenplay by Melissa Mathison, 1982

  Victor Fleming (dir), The Wizard of Oz, screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, adapted from the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum, 1939

  Chris Columbus (dir), Home Alone, screenplay by John Hughes, 1990

  This Plush Embrace

  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994

  Philippa Tristram, Living Space in Fact and Fiction, Routledge, London and New York, 1989

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Carmel Bird’s most recent novel is Child of the Twilight. Her other novels include Cape Grimm, Red Shoes, The White Garden, The Bluebird Café, Crisis, Unholy Writ, Open For Inspection and Cherry Ripe. She
has written five collections of short fiction, and has edited five anthologies, including The Penguin Century of Australian Stories and The Stolen Children—Their Stories. She has also written children’s books. Her most recent manual on writing is Writing the Story of Your Life, her third book in a series which includes Not Now Jack—I’m Writing a Novel and Dear Writer. Several of her stories have been interpreted in dance by Tasdance, and her story ‘A Telephone Call For Genevieve Snow’ was made into a short film by Peter Long in 2000 and won the Silver Lion award in Venice. Her website is www.carmelbird.com.