A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  DAVID IRELAND was born in 1927 on a kitchen table in Lakemba in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer.

  Ireland started out writing poetry and drama but then turned to fiction. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future.

  David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagle.

  David Ireland lives in New South Wales.

  KATE JENNINGS is a poet, essayist, short-story writer and novelist. Her novels, Snake and Moral Hazard, were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Born in rural New South Wales, she has lived in New York since 1979. Her most recent book is Trouble: Evolution of a Radical.

  ALSO BY DAVID IRELAND

  The Chantic Bird

  The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

  The Glass Canoe

  The Flesheaters

  Burn

  City of Women

  Archimedes and the Seagle

  Bloodfather

  The Chosen

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

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  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © David Ireland 1979

  Introduction copyright © Kate Jennings 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in the US by George Braziller Inc. 1979

  First published in Australia by Allen Lane 1979

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079824

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148025

  Author: Ireland, David, 1927-

  Title: A woman of the future / by David Ireland;

  introduction by Kate Jennings.

  Series: Text classics.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Jennings, Kate.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Am I Perhaps Australia?

  by Kate Jennings

  A Woman of the Future

  ‘LITERARY sewage…A dreadful sex-ridden fantasy…doomed to oblivion.’ Harsh. But that’s how Colin Roderick, a judge of the 1979 Miles Franklin Literary Award, described David Ireland’s A Woman of the Future. The other judges demurred and gave Ireland the prize anyway. Cue the literary-world kerfuffle!

  Roderick was disturbed by the forthright sex in the book—sex that is particularly jolting because it’s from the uncensorious point of view of a child bent on discovering life’s secrets. And she begins her candid explorations with her father’s genitals. In truth, the sex is confronting, but it’s supposed to be. Discovery of sex varies, but adolescents think about it at first furtively and obsessively, and then, most likely, enthusiastically.

  The child is Alethea Hunt, one of the most singular female characters in fiction. Dorothy Hewett acknowledged Ireland’s achievement, calling it ‘extraordinary’. You won’t forget in-your-face, kiss-my-arse Alethea in a hurry: ‘I was born a person, not a limp babybag with suet brain,’ she tells us in one of her early journal entries. This fully formed brain allows her to chronicle her babyhood and childhood as well as adolescence.

  She isn’t pleasant. Too abrasive, assertive: ‘My attitudes hardened, my ambitions were forming, as vague as they might be. I would be as good as any man; as brave, as strong, as ruthless, as independent, as benevolently contemptuous of others.’ Too intent on winning, attaining greatness: ‘Even at that age I knew the Halls of Failure were full.’ Too intent on demolishing lies, constructing truths: Australians ‘have no dream, just a national sleep’.

  One of my favourite parts from her babyhood is when Alethea—a name derived from the Greek word for truth—tells the reader that her mother, who uses the excuse of writing to retreat into not just a room but a world of her own, has ‘advanced ideas’, which ‘often led to simple opposites’. Instead of dressing her baby girl in pink, she dresses her in blue: ‘Mother thought that by taking the word, which represented a thing, and twisting the word, she was twisting a thing. Throwing out pink booties and substituting blue was overturning generations of sexist child rearing. It was a new beginning. The past was abolished.’

  If only. Ireland predicted some things accurately—his characters have multicultural names, and everyone at school receives awards regardless of performance—but he could not have foretold the hordes of little missies dressed from top to toe in retrograde Disney pink that honks feminine! When I fret about this development, a friend reassures me by predicting that this generation of girls will be the next wave of radical feminists. They certainly have something to kick against: nauseating clothes as well as rights that are patently fragile. Men still run the world.

  David Ireland wrote this novel at the end of the 1970s, coming off the heyday of the women’s liberation movement. We protested customs such as pink or blue bonnets and booties on babies to designate their gender, and using the word ‘girl’ to describe a woman of any age. Small beer you might think against, say, equal pay and control over our bodies, but we believed that words use us as much as we use words. Ditto colours. Feminism might be a yawn today, but back then it was startling, table-turning.

  Ireland was thinking his way into a woman’s mind at a time when not only all these ideas were fresh but when fiction was markedly more adventurous and unafraid of offending. The result is gutting, combustive. Stopped me cold. Time and again I found myself rereading a paragraph: Oh my! Did he really write what I think he wrote? John Leonard, a highly regarded New York critic, was also bowled over by the novel. He confessed that A Woman of the Future made him feel provincial.

  Alethea isn’t just exploring sex and a corollary, what makes the opposite sex tick, but also the shape of society. Men: Stupid and undeserving users of women. Society: Unfair. Social structure is a preoccupation of Ireland’s, as it was in the decade when he wrote this novel. We brimmed with ideologies, the rosy and the rancid. In this novel’s future, society culls itself, the best and brightest becoming the Serving Class and the rest, the Frees. By calling themselves servants, the upper class can lord it over the masses, a clever sleight of hand borrowed from Dostoyevsky. More importantly, they have work with which to occupy themselves; the underclass have to spend their time with ‘the trivialities of freedom’. This was before computers came along to disenfranchise unskilled workers and reality television plumbed new depths of trivia.

  Alethea doesn’t dismiss all men: her mother is drifting jellyfish-like in her writing, so her father is her mother, and she loves both of them. Comically, he’s an actor, dying early in a recurring piece of theatre in which his body is then ‘investigated’. Alethea’s subsequent conduct is not without pr
ecedent. The play lasts all day and has given him a bad back. Touches like this are typical of Ireland’s humour. When Alethea first surreptitiously examines her father’s genitals, while he is sleeping, she frightens herself and runs back to her room to read Jane Austen: ‘Oh, cried Elizabeth, I am excessively diverted. But it is so strange.’ In her next attempt, less inhibited, she has the thought that she was ‘sorry to be getting near the end of Jane Austen’. Never was Austen put to such wicked use.

  A Woman of the Future is an impossible book to summarise. And Alethea’s pushy, dissecting mind doesn’t make for easy reading. The novel is all threepenny bits, no plum pudding. That is, despite succulent sentences, no comfort. It’s wild, an amalgam of reality and flights of fancy. A cabinet of curiosities and, like any such cabinets, best examined slowly. Some objects will charm, others disgust. Indeed, one way to be designated a Free is to become a grotesque worthy of being preserved in formaldehyde. These folk grow appendages such as coffins and cannons or sprout coins on their faces and vulvas under their arms. One takes root if he stands still. Another attaches herself to anyone she touches.

  Ever more intense and irrepressible, Alethea progresses from seeing no reason why she shouldn’t be generous with her body to being gang-raped to falling in love, which she calls her ‘first sickness’ because it drains her of will and energy. At which point she doesn’t become a grotesque; she changes completely. Earlier she had wished that she were ‘a long, fierce snake living a private life on the edge between bush and desert, and my world plain to me and not puzzling at all’. She goes one better in her evolution, and the story heads inland, to the misunderstood middle of Australia, to vast red-dirt country. Her high-school certificate results are a final barb in a novel full of them.

  Colin Roderick was right about one thing. A Woman of the Future might have won the Miles Franklin, the third awarded to Ireland, but after a blaze of sales it slipped into oblivion, as did Ireland’s career, with publishers turning down his recent books. Arguably, the novel would never see the light of day were it submitted for publication now. Partly because of the queasy-making sex and partly because of its hybrid form; it’s a platypus of a novel, a curiosity in itself.

  And then there is the matter of Alethea’s likeability, not a small one for publishers who are forced to judge writers only by the sales of their last book. I can report being asked by editors to make thorny characters nicer, give them more soul, be less intense, so as not to alienate potential readers. Check out what happens to books ‘without visible means of support’ in Ireland’s imagined future. A belly laugh if it weren’t true. Critical acclaim, poor commercial success: bonfire.

  Still, I was surprised—given his impressive if knotty body of work—to find that David Ireland had been written out of Australian literary history and omitted from the mammoth PEN Macquarie anthology published in 2009. (I have the same distinction. An exclusive club.) Vogues come and go, times change, posterity is fickle. Listened to any Dory Previn lately?

  All the same, no wonder Alethea was never seen again, not in the empty interior nor at the crowded edges of the continent. Given the treatment handed out to her creator, she probably left the country.

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  These notebooks, diaries and papers were found among the effects of Alethea Hunt, and are reproduced by kind permission of her father. We publish them without alteration. Many of the pages contain no hint of the date of writing, but we believe, from the handwriting, that those dealing with her childhood and infancy, and some of the explanatory and reflective pages, were written after she began to find evidence of her change.

  Some papers had the year of her age on them and were arranged in chronological order. Where she left headings we have shown them; where not, we have used the first phrase or so of her notes. We have no idea of where she wanted to insert her various general remarks, so we have placed them throughout in the order in which she left them.

  Something I Can Never Know

  Mother’s stomach bellied out like a sail. Young, she was unable to say no to anyone who asked her to make love. Her reasons for her behavior were all her own; never, after she’d had me did she allow another man to enter her: my birth was her real marriage. And when I was six, she shut herself away entirely.

  It happened in the Chalet, on a ski holiday. Perhaps the cold weather. She knew she had probably made a mistake with her contraceptive, but went ahead, alive to the risk. They did it quickly, against a wall. She had known him years before; it hadn’t been a grand passion, more like a baby grand.

  I think she half wanted to have a baby.

  My mother thought standing up could make it all right, less likely to be productive; gravity might prevent the little wrigglers from getting at her egg.

  I may not have been Boyce Hart’s little swimmer: I may have been father’s. After all, they were married; they’d been having intercourse regularly and often, including one before breakfast that day, and one after Boyce—that is, after lunch.

  The upshot is, I don’t know who I am. Of course I know I’m me, I mean I don’t know the exact name of my father. Having narrowed the field to two is something, I suppose.

  It only took a minute or two, nine months before I was born. Two stolen minutes against the wall of the gear room! I know lust means never having to say I love you, but my mother said he seemed uneasy, on edge, playing his role as if he expected someone to trump it.

  He came quickly, and released her. She took his handkerchief, wiped herself down there and gave it back to Boyce.

  She walked back along the corridor with the polished timber and stood in the door of the lounge and smiled into the room, radiating a look that would have gone well as dessert after a magnificent meal. A trickle started between her legs.

  Boyce folded the handkerchief with the leaked semen, pocketed it and went down the back stairs and out into the cold air and stood looking down the snow-covered valley. Once he shivered, suddenly lonely. His past was before him like a beacon; he would keep going in that direction and call it the future.

  And then it was father’s turn. That radiant smile decided him. He jumped to his feet proudly, turned her round in the doorway and hurried her off to their room where he laid her down with love. She used her panties for another surreptitious wipe.

  She confirmed her mistake with the contraceptive when she checked, late at night. All this was common knowledge in my family: mother told him later, and me much later; she didn’t know I was listening: common knowledge, that is, until the censorship clamped down and they wouldn’t talk.

  I daresay happiness is possible, with a little shutting of the eyes. Anyway, it was two chances to one in father’s favor.

  FATHER’S WEDDING SONG

  Here I am, standing in the aisle

  Waiting for her to stand by me.

  From a long way she comes,

  On her face is the swelling that shows

  The face of her child-to-be.

  I see its features: it is not like me.

  Will I wait and let myself

  Be married, or will I –

  Will I run now?

  Will it be

  Just a little like me?

  My father didn’t write that: I did.

  I imagined the act of love between them their first time; before ever I saw them doing it; the first time after I was born; and always the other picture, indistinct and alternating, of two people present at my conception, and my mother the constant one.

  I’d like her to have had time to look forward—at the marriage ceremony—to her baby. Perhaps she did, as she looked in at the church to check that father was there, ready to be joined in holy padlock.

  I showed the verse to him when I was sixteen. He congratulated me. He always congratulates me, no matter what I do.

  “Did you feel that at the time?” I asked. (If only I could go back, now, and have him refather me.)

  “A little. Maybe. I don’t remember.” And later, as he was putting the dri
ed dishes away up into the cupboards with the cobalt blue doors and the pretty shelves, “I did realize, standing there, that there was still time.”

  My father wasn’t the sort of man to exaggerate his love.

  “But you were brought up not to run away?” We all had the idea our parents were “brought up,” instead of, like us, being allowed to do as we liked, and that this was why they were different.

  “No. That was my own idea,” he answered splendidly, and I kissed him below the ear on the edge of his jaw, where he liked me to. He got impatient if you tried to kiss him more on the round, plump part of his cheek, and waggled his head as if he had been a pilot trying to see ahead, steering his vehicle in a blinding storm and plagued by females shaped like large insects.

  Things I Remember from the Womb

  Several smells. Including one that, ever since, I have not been able to find repugnant.

  Intestinal solos, melodies you sometimes hear with your head on a stomach. And in the distance sometimes when I move, the music humans made with their technology of wood, metal, air, precise measurements and stretched things.

  Kicking to push myself round. And using my elbows to turn slightly when I got bored with being where I was. It was pleasant to be anchored, and to find there was a limit to how far I could turn in any direction. It felt safe.

  Sometimes a push in the back and my head being knocked. Softly, of course. Cushioned. I think the lack of this occasional push toward the end had something to do with my stirring to get out.

  A lovely jogging feeling; up and down, side to side. All my life it’s been such a temptation to let myself be carried.

  The difference between daylight and dark. Perhaps I was helped in this by the inert posture of my host’s sleep. I observed no hours, woke any time I pleased. I got a smug pleasure from getting a response to frenzied activity I put on after we had both been still for a long time. I jumped and flailed about, and she sat up and called and I felt her alarm.