Sometimes Noah and Sunday did the swap-over themselves, leaving my place on the Friday morning, walking to Nat’s after school. They hated lugging the extra bags, though, so more often than not they would wait for me to drop them off after work. Either way, I loathed it. Even if we had been fighting – especially if we’d been fighting, because the forced separation interrupted the rolling rhythm of dispute and conciliation that propelled our daily lives – I was always sorry to see them go. Worse, to return to the flat and find it hollowed out by their absence.
A staff meeting had been cancelled, so I escaped work early. When I got home, both kids were packed and ready to go. Sunday was always organised and eager to get the transition over with, whereas home for Noah was his computer, so he would invariably be absorbed in a game when we were meant to leave, guaranteeing the departure was another form of fight. This time he was ready to roll, which meant we arrived at Munro Street ten minutes earlier than the time I'd texted through to Nat.
As usual, there were no easy parks. I missed a spot near the corner, so I drove past the house and found one further up the road. As I backed in, Noah, sitting in the front passenger seat, his head swivelled back, said, ‘There he is.’
‘Who?’
‘Mum’s new man. Finbar.’
I switched off the engine and peered through the back window.
‘Sinclair,’ Sunday said. ‘Where’d you get Finbar from? That’s an elephant!’
Closing the front gate to the house that had once been my mother’s, and her parent’s before that, was the trim figure and closely cropped head of Sinclair Hughes, my father’s would-be biographer. For a moment my mind was unable to make sense of what I was seeing.
‘You’re kidding me, right? You have got to be kidding me!’
‘Calm down, Dad. Sheesh.’ Sunday grabbed her bag from the floor and plonked it on her knees.
‘You’re telling me Nat’s going with that guy there?’ I pointed to the man stepping into the silver Audi parked directly in front of the house.
‘Yeah. Like, did you think she’d joined a convent?’
Like fangs, the facts were sinking in, their information coursing through me. ‘You know who he is, yeah? What he does?’ My voice quavered.
‘He works at the uni,’ said Noah. ‘Mum says he’s just moved down from Brisbane.’
The venom hit my brain. ‘He’s your grandfather’s bloody biographer. He’s using her to get to your grandad. He’s a bloody blood-sucking leech – that’s what he is!’
The Audi took off and Sunday stepped out onto the pavement. Noah followed. I sat in the silence and tried to make sense of it. I would have driven off there and then if their gear hadn’t been in the boot.
By the time I had got out and grabbed the bags, Nat was at the front gate waiting for me.
‘What’s happened there?’ she asked, tilting her head at the front door, through which Sunday and Noah had escaped.
I couldn’t look at her. How could she be so naive? She, the worldly one, the lawyer, taken in by someone as transparently self-serving as Sinclair Hughes? I made myself stare at her, trying not to yell. ‘What has happened is that I’ve just seen your new boyfriend, who just so happens to be my father’s would-be fucking biographer! What the hell were you thinking?’
She looked at me like I was a child chucking a tantrum.
‘Are you serious? You’d do this to Gil? To Gil, who you always defended? Hughes is using you. You know that, right?’
Keeping the fence between us, she picked at one of the bricks. When she looked back at me it was with pity. ‘I wouldn’t hurt Gil, you know that. The fact is, Sinclair and I are in love. Shit happens. And you mightn’t believe it, but Sin doesn’t want to hurt Gil either. He’s writing him a brilliant life.’
Sunday appeared on the verandah wanting to ask Nat something. More likely she was trying to avert an embarrassing scene between her parents being played out in public. Fearing I would one day regret anything else I might say, I took her cue and walked away, the voice in my head screeching.
I didn’t want to be alone that night. I thought about ringing Caroline, but things between us had gone nowhere since our night at the movies. Whenever I sat next to her at lunch in the staffroom she didn’t ignore me, but she didn’t pay me any particular attention either, making curt responses to my enquiries. Then one time when I asked if she was going to Friday night drinks, making it clear that I was, she told me she wasn’t, that she was tired. Since then our encounters had lost their earlier freedom and ease. It was as if I had disappointed her somehow. Had she, I wondered, hoped for more from our night out? What might have happened if I had accepted her offer of a lift? More likely, she correctly suspected that I wanted more and she wasn’t interested. Confused, not wanting to make matters worse, I’d retreated to the art room and taken to eating lunch at my desk.
Having driven back to the flat, I walked to the Grandview where I knew Friday-night footy would be on the big screen. I could pay for company by way of beers and pretend I wasn’t alone. Walking, the questions kept pace with me: How could she? Why would she? When did it begin? Back when she showed him the house? Is he what ended us? And what of Gil? He loved her in a way he couldn’t love me. How will he cope with her betrayal?
I drank three beers quickly to blur the edges, then sat with another and ordered a posh burger and chips and perched on a stool in front of the screen. Unfortunately, the match was between Hawthorn and Collingwood, two teams I hated, which meant I had no one to barrack for and so couldn’t lose myself in the contest. Once the Hawks started pulling away in the third quarter, a couple of Magpies supporters on the table next to me began turning on their own, yelling at Buckley, their coach. Listening to them whinge, I enjoyed an initial shot of schadenfreude, but then their moaning got to me and I decided to leave. I couldn’t stand witnessing another smug rendition of Hawthorn’s victory song.
The cold wind and the walking sobered me up, though not enough to counteract the large whisky I poured as soon as I got in the door – or to stop me writing a late-night email to Nat. Unable to put my anger to bed, and not wanting to stay awake all night with my questions, I decided in my inebriated wisdom to give expression to both in the hope of exhausting them.
The first part of the email interrogated Nat on the timing of her relationship with Sinclair Hughes. Do I have him to thank for my marriage ending? It’s not enough he’s stealing my father’s life, he feels the need to back up over mine as well? The rest was a disjointed rant about my long-held pledge to honour Gil’s request for silence when questioned by would-be biographical interlopers, grave robbers who steal their subjects’ souls even before they’ve left the body. Re-reading this the morning after, I realised it made no sense outside of beer logic. But I had then gone to town questioning how she could betray a man she’d always loved – Gil, not me. Especially when he had taken her into his confidence and indulged her desire to correspond with him.
Switching back from his grievances to mine, I’d said that I couldn’t see why my father writing novels gave people the right to perve into my private life, to think of my abandonment as a price paid for artistic freedom. Don’t I have a right to refuse to become a character in someone else’s imagining? I was thinking of my grandfather, the way Gil had turned him into Harry Balfour: a distorted shadow permanently cast on the page.
I ended by letting Gil speak for himself, quoting his long response to a question about biographies in his 2009 interview in The Paris Review.
I wrote about this in The New Yorker some years back. I argued then that literary biographies leach imagination from the creative process as they attempt to return a work of art to the quotidian experience that inspired it. That just seems dumb to me.
But the more general problem is that there’s nothing left to be said about the lives of writers. More than most, we live uneventful existences. Like everyone, we are born, grow up, fall in and out of love, fuck and fuck up, grow old and die. The only di
fference is that while others do real jobs, carting bricks or sitting at desks to balance books, we sit at desks and write them.
That’s it.
We spend our working days sitting in rooms making up stories. What does it matter if the desk we sit at is made of oak or chipboard, if the room has a view, or that the words are written in pen or tapped out like lines of ants marching across a computer screen? Does it make any difference, add a scintilla of artistic value to In Daniel’s Den for the reader to know who I was sleeping with at the time it was written? That I preferred eggs for breakfast, soft-boiled, sometimes scrambled?
The trouble begins when people mistake a writer’s wit and wisdom on the page for how he actually talks and conducts himself in life. They think the truths he tells are precepts gleaned from the lessons of a life well lived, or one poorly lived but redeemed by the insights only hardship can accord. But a writer’s truths are those of art, of beauty; limited truths gained from creating smaller, more manageable worlds which our imaginations happily inhabit free from the uglier truths that injure us and those we love.
Writers are time lords. Give us hours and we make days, even years, throwing our readers back through the past, catapulting them into the future. We order things through story and thereby seem to master time’s mystery.
We don’t, of course. We merely make sea baths at the edge of the ocean.
As for our lives … The boring truth is, we dip and swell on the same tides as all the other swimmers in the sea. To chronicle them is to miss the point entirely.
Nat didn’t respond immediately. Sunday, though, sent a chatty text, which was by then unusual. Recently our exchanges on the phone had become strictly business: the business of her organising me to facilitate her social life. Beyond that, she remained a sweet kid, capable of genuine concern. Standing on the verandah, she had seen how upset I’d been, confronting Nat about Hughes. No doubt she had been carrying that bomb around for months, not sure if it was me or her mother she was protecting by strapping it tightly to her chest. Now that it had exploded, she was doing a body count, checking what of her old life had survived. We swapped some texting banter, which I hoped would reassure her I was okay. Even if I wasn’t.
Nat wrote late the next day. From the tone of the email I think she had been waiting for her fury to subside before returning fire.
Hi Mick,
Your email implied that through my relationship with Sinclair I had betrayed both you and your father. Both accusations are utterly false and I am deeply hurt and disappointed that you think me capable of either. Firstly, despite numerous amorous opportunities and a few Christmas party close shaves, I was faithful to you throughout our marriage. I can on oath assure you that after showing Sinclair through the house that time, I did not see him again until two months after you and I separated.
I do not, however, deny my attraction to him on that first encounter. After years of your negativity towards Gil and his work (understandable, perhaps), I found Sinclair’s energy and enthusiasm enlivening. It reawakened my own passion; the optimism we had lost, or never known. So, did that contribute to the myriad factors leading to our demise? Probably.
Secondly, the only statement of unambiguous truth in your email was that I have always loved Gil. Do you really think I would betray him, or that I am gormless enough to be tricked into doing so? Really? In trying to protect you your father has again caused you pain.
Gil is a pragmatist, you know that. Yes, he thinks literary biographies are an abomination and that their authors should crawl back into the slime. Yet he reads them. Always has. After my initial meeting with Sinclair I wrote to Gil to put in a good word for him and made a case for tacit cooperation. Predictably, Gil summarily dismissed it. Then, early last year, after the complications with his knee operation, he asked me to contact Sinclair and to help him any way I could – intimations of his own life ending suddenly making the existence of a written one more appealing. Obviously he couldn’t publicly go back on his anti-biography stance and cooperate with Sinclair himself, so he deputised me, thinking I was distant enough to save his dignity, yet informed enough to give the portrait substance. When I looked back over our correspondence, I wondered if he hadn’t been grooming me for a go-between role all along, as his letters are full of reminiscences and private opinions not otherwise on record.
He asked me not to tell you about his change of heart, fearing you would resent all the times you had dutifully honoured his wishes and refused interviews to journalists, academics and would-be biographers; that you would think it just another example of his hypocrisy. (BTW, you should know that he is incredibly grateful for your loyalty, which he fully realises is thoroughly undeserved.) For my own reasons – namely, so you wouldn’t think me meddling in your affairs behind your back – I had planned to disobey his dictate and let you know what was happening. But then when things developed between Sinclair and me it all became too complicated and I failed to find a time when we could talk on that level.
For that, though nothing else, I apologise.
Nat
(A scanned copy of the relevant section of Gil’s letter is attached.)
Everything in Gil’s letter was as Nat suggested, though, interestingly, she failed to convey his desire for candour, at least in his textual life. Yes, please spare Mick the disappointment of my backflip. You must not, however, spare Hughes the details of my atrocious record as a father. That is not at all my motivation for cooperating. If I must have a biographical imposter, he should at least resemble me in my failings as much as my achievements.
By the time he was in his late seventies, Madigan had dropped all pretence of writing. When the Australian journalist Joy Hawdon approached him in 2013 about publishing a profile piece in the Fairfax press’s Good Weekend magazine to ‘jolt our readers from their cultural amnesia’, he declined the offer and, striking a particularly melancholic note, confessed:
The terrible truth is, I feel I do belong in the past. From the vantage point of genuine old age, I now look back on those reams of words spooling behind me, reaching into decades past, and feel totally unfurled. I have not only written myself out – exhausted my experiences and imaginings – I have written myself inside out, the books being the better part of me. And now I have run out of future. Even if I hadn’t, my body could not endure the rigours of writing another novel, all those hunched hours at the desk. I have done all I can, and if that’s not enough to make me present in the minds of your readers, then I’m afraid my only consolation is that in death I won’t know they have forgotten me.
No one, then, was more surprised than Madigan himself when, a year later, three months after his eightieth birthday, he found himself working furiously on the manuscript that became his celebrated final work, Taxiing. To his youngest son, now agent, Reuben, he wrote:
Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: I have something for you – manuscript-wise. Merry Christmas! Or is this for all the birthdays missed? I blame you and Rosalia. You for constantly pumping my flaccid ego, trying to reinflate my ambition, and Rosalia for refusing to learn to drive and thereby condemning me in my dotage to the joys of taxi travel. And for terrifying me with her stories of El Salvador. I apologise for not telling you of it earlier; I feared talking it away. Now, though, it is done. Despite my decrepitude, I wrote it quicker than anything I’ve ever written. As you might expect, it’s short – 130 pages. Think Old Man and the Sea: small book, big fish!
To others he described the writing process as a form of possession, the muse mocking him in her energetic frenzy. To Kessler he compared the words gushing out of him in sudden spurts to the spasms of a creative death throe, though, ‘More la petite mort than the big one waiting for me round the bend.’ Words, he said, had not come so easily, so unbidden, since his early adulthood; it was ‘like being teasingly revisited by the potency of youth’. For seven weeks, feeling forced to the desk, he worked long hours and in that time completed a first draft, which barely differed from the
final version rushed into print eight months later.º
Narrated in the first person by the elderly author Walter Castell, Taxiing takes Madigan’s creative exhaustion as its premise to create a Marquez-style parable. With no stories left to tell, Castell nonetheless feels compelled to write. This, he realises, is not merely what he does; it is who he is. His search for stories becomes comically desperate when he begins catching cabs all over London to talk to the drivers, paying more for their life histories than their driving services. The pen sketches of this parade of wonderful, largely immigrant characters, with their mix of humour and pathos, reveal a master working in miniature. But it isn’t until Castell is driven round town by Jorge Romero, a Salvadorian refugee, that he finally finds the story he’s been looking for – the one for his book. On their second encounter, the reserved, quietly spoken Romero tells Castell of his torture at the hands of the Treasury Police during the civil war, how he escaped certain death and hid for five weeks in the jungle. As he lay in a clearing on the brink of starvation, lost and no longer possessing the energy to hunt, a bird flew down from the trees. Mysteriously, as if in some act of self-sacrifice, the bird died and Romero’s life was saved. As Castell listens, looking out the window at the trees of Regent’s Park flickering by, he feels his own life ebb away and realises the taxi has become a hearse, the Salvadorian driver an undertaker, an angel, chauffeuring him to the beyond.
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