by Brian Castro
Drift
Brian Castro
Drift
By Brian Castro
Electronically published by BookCyclone
An imprint of Typhoon Media Ltd
Copyright 2011 Brian Castro
eISBN: 978-988-15164-8-0
Typhoon Media Ltd: Signal 8 Press | BookCyclone
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Print edition: Wakefield Press © 1994
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for brief citation or review, without written permission from Typhoon Media Ltd.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Cover design: Stacey Zass
CONTENTS
I
II
III
Acknowledgments
B.S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (Hutchinson of London, 1973).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View From Afar, (Trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, Basic Books, N.Y. 1985), ‘Myth and Forgetfulness'.
N.J.B. Plomley (ed.), Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, (Tasmanian Historical Research Association 1966).
Cassandra Pybus, Community of Thieves, (William Heinemann Australia, 1991).
Heather Felton and Geoff Lennox.
This work was assisted by a writer’s fellowship from the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s arts funding and advisory body.
Brian Castro, 1993
JO
B.S. Johnson (Bryan Stanley Johnson, 1933-1973) was a little known, though important British author who dared reassess the novel form. A true descendant of Beckett, he had earned praise from Beckett himself. Anthony Burgess wrote that Johnson’s work was ‘original… in the way that Tristram Shandy and Ulysses are original', and Auberon Waugh nominated him for the Nobel Prize.
The reviewers thought differently… mainly because they couldn’t assimilate fact with fiction. For this was Johnson’s challenge:
Now anyone who wants simply to be told a story has the need satisfied by television… Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily… Telling stories really is telling lies… I am not interested in telling lies in my own novels… The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form; within that form one may write truth or fiction.
To reviewers infected with Dickensian limitations, this was like a red rag to a bull. To this extent Johnson was shabbily treated by many of his literary contemporaries. Overcome by immense depression, perhaps on account of the death of his mother ('Em’ or ‘Emily'), he took his own life on November 13, 1973, in London.
Before his death he had resolved to write a trilogy of experimental novels, entitled: See the Old Lady Decently, Buried Although, and Amongst Those Left Are You; these titles to be read as one sentence across the spines of the books. At the time of his death, he had only completed the first volume.
In that book, the first of the ‘Matrix’ trilogy, he invited his readers to complete the other two volumes, as if through a prolepsis he had already planned his suicide. His obsession with Mother, Motherland and Motherhood brought to his work a peculiar ambivalence about England and its Imperial past. In a tiny passage, he described what was unmistakably Tasmania.
This then, was a point of departure for me. It hung upon this thesis: that if Johnson declared that everything he wrote was the truth, then his obviously fictional works, his most defensively imaginative creations, would entail the complete fulfilment of his projections. This could only make for madness, but it also called into question the whole idea of commitment and responsibility:
Compared with the writers of romances, thrillers, and the bent but so-called straight novel, there are not many who are writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter.
Thomas James McGann
Arthur River, 1993.
Note: Geological drift is glacial till, debris transported by the movement of glaciers and revealed by their recession. It represents the weight of the world.
I
… and some of us still possess maps where the blanks are filled in with vague descriptions, but now we can sit and look comfortably at a photograph and know that our fellow-countrymen out there have settled down to a pleasant life under a fair sky.
Forest solitudes magnificent, glories of secluded fern-tree vales, ‘England all over', untouched beauties, patched with the most lovely flowers and the most curious and elegant orchids, rich fields hedged with sweet briar or broom, handsome country houses with five-walled gardens, conservatories, forcing-houses and lawns. Perhaps no part of the world can show relatively so many old people. There are no aborigines now left in the island.
B.S.Johnson,
See The Old Lady Decently
II
Buried Although…
1
Let me get to the point immediately: I’ve always wanted to compose my own obituary.
I don’t mean to be vain, just a bit more generous than my critics. I possess that vast flood of abstract wealth the dying will suddenly offer. After all, when suicide is thumping at the gate you know the heart is seeking final repose. Yes, the writing of this tale will literally kill me… fragmented misreadings floating out into the universe, never to return. Take your pick. Some will bend it to their own purposes. Others… well, who knows?… will keep it behind the cistern.
In the First Century B.C., just before the birth of Christ, Lucretius, (yes, he who said quite rightly that when you’re dead you’re dead, a Saviour notwithstanding), called such rough usage Clinamen, a corrective movement, a swerve from the original. Well, it’s one of the hazards of putting things down. You no longer belong to yourself. All those acolytes clamouring at the gate.
Here, a few beans nevertheless. Do with them what you will.
Life isn’t a book, take my advice.
And yet I had wanted so much to become someone, no, not a famous novelist, but one who was true to the idea. Someone who didn’t feel the need. And nowadays, at least, someone who was extinct. Words of course, still erupt like lava and I will pause just long enough for a shave. Excuse me. Ah!
Not a shave after all.
Open the window.
All around I can hear hasty, muddled writers beating the backs of their imaginations, poor groaning beasts… Here! Do us a favour and take the revolver, Fyodor.
I once said to my father, during a rare moment of youthful communication with him, that I had intentions of becoming a journalist. A journalist seemed to me to be always somebody. Someone in work, at least.
I want to be in the newspaper business, I said.
Perhaps the word ‘business’ had been so alien to his working class roots I involuntarily muffled it, contracted it, elided it.
I want to be in the newspapers.
My father turned abruptly and clouted me on the ear.
Now, don’t you go doing anything stupid, you understand?
Well, I may still rate a brief column in the end. The magazine of which I’m presently the editor will at least make some appropriate noise, postmodern perhaps, having believed I was really dead all these years anyway. The life of an author is not an easy one. Biography is paradox; writing and life…possibly oxymor
onic. Their obituary, like my editorials, would weld itself together with contradiction. To have
Disappeared with a slight trace.
Antiseptic; devoid of resonance, you can see. The first sign of the end of mankind. Everything dies with me. It’s really a matter of how much of myself I’m willing to put on the line… the aura, corona, persona, fide bona…
Enough of this posturing. I still write nothing but the truth.
Come to the moment… the blow-torch… maybe an explosion.
Well, her name was Emma McGann. Not a really exotic name… didn’t signal deep resonances, languid looks, sultry Italianate poutings, humid thighs. Signed without a flourish. A childish hand, really, though accomplished, and that attracts. She wrote telling me she liked my books. We exchanged pleasantries… difficult for me, though I can vouch for extreme discipline in the formalities of writing… deteriorating of course with age. A few cards whistling back and forth, hers cast in the native adornment of the Antipodes… you know the kind of thing… manic pointillism and pithy runes all carrying some ancient, impenetrable secret; (at least we managed to extinguish our dreamtime and invent psychoanalysis.) She was Aboriginal. She had a twin brother. The difference between them, she wrote, was in colouring. They were descended from mixed parentage. Well, we wrote, and pretty soon I was falling in love. I fall in and out of love easily. Let me get one of her letters. Ah! Here she is. Imagine. It reads like a prophecy. Not yet. Too much reading and it goes stale.
And so…
Whatever happened at Cape Grim?
Ah! Here you are, Emma.
I can see the soft plateau and the sheep tracks, the dung and the muttonbird burrows, the tussocky slope leading without warning to the precipitous cliffs and the sheer drop into the sea. I can see the Bass Strait winds blowing so fiercely you hang on for dear life to the long grass and pray the sea wouldn’t heave and swallow you up, you, growing dizzy lying on your back holding down your dress, watching the albatross glide in place, wings perfectly shaped to scoop up the wind which is scooping up your dress… yes, how I can see that!
Gravity had drawn me to you. The gravity in your letters. I became tired of lies, of jokes, although you could have said I was defeated by honesty. That just about summed up my life: honesty was the boulder I pushed uphill. I refused to imagine. I was through with Grand Hotels, Kathedernihilismus, the abyss. The Latins, of course, derided gravity and invented angels, cherubic heads on wings which whirred out of grass trees and whittled the air. I can see you snapping their necks and carrying them home to the pot.
It’s no good imagining, for it brings no comfort. Just creates another hole into which we fall, a temporary amnesia. The disease of mankind, imagining. It takes the place of forgetting, guilt, repression. Why have history otherwise, if not to celebrate the continuity served by ritual? Facts, not imagination, the latter all self-obsession. Think of the other. Her. Smell. She comes back. Your letters bordered with flowers. There, the press of your hand. Quink. You wear no perfume, have an ancient hand, your phrases ornamented with the bouquets of the past.
I was in a state. Even without the imagination, coincidence dogged me to the extent my life had become a nightmare. Everywhere I turned I found the paradigm of a beginning, a middle and an end. Fabrication. False-consciousness, living-for-others. I couldn’t breathe. My doctors said it was a kind of narcolepsy, hypnopompic states; a procession of words without sleep. Meaning swelled and heaved. It gave me headaches. In bed, my girlfriends used to tell me to do it myself: Byron, if you think your life is this bloody important, you’ve got your hand on the wrong bloomin’ thing.
I suppose your letters were a kind of morphine, a narcotic with a reminder of underwritten pain, always accompanied by the shadow of an angel. They say when you feel wingbeats the end is nigh. Most though, feel nothing. Vacancy is the price of self-importance. I’ve seen great minds in nursing homes extracting trivia from final moments, with everyone taking notes. Reading your letters, a giddiness took hold. Prithee, draw me back a while.
2
New Year’s Eve. Sometime in the 1820s.
Off the larboard bow they paid out the rode and launched the whaleboat. A creak here and there. Tonight they were going to bring back women. Aye, every man rum-drunk and erratic as muttonbirds. All imagining. Some in black-and-white, some in colour. Some only through smelling or touching. Pretty poor samples after spending years in sundry cages awash on deck or in mouldy holds, brains porous from poor diets of salt-pork and worm-eaten biscuits. They see women in conjunction with leg-irons, rum bottles, oakum, canvas and blubber. They stink in their slops, salt-chafing seams of their monkey jackets and flushing trowsers, greasy Scotch caps. They pull on the ash oars, the cold spray in their faces which all but whalers find healthy.
At the steering oar, Sperm McGann, who feels moved to issue a warning: Remember that these are cunning creatures we are capturing.
The two long-haired Aboriginal guides apparently not understanding long sentences.
3
I have always celebrated the intermittent, appended indiscretion and forgetfulness. That’s how stories are formed. Ask the anthropologists. They mostly go backwards, as I once intimated, as honestly as possible, but I guess we’ll never know the truth, which lies in contradictory fragments. Put them together one way, like a jigsaw. Make a story. Put them together differently. Make another. As for you and me, I remember that summer when we fought honesty. I remember how we tried to rid ourselves of the stench of death by saying there would have been no funeral rites at Cape Grim, no morbid odour of coffinwood, just blood and bone leached back into the sea and the odour of dogs on heat. We invested the place with views, health, fresh-air monitoring stations, and cleaned up the stains of the past. It was that kind of summer. A summer of solitary beauty, enchantment, and ultimately, terror. Well, if you let it get to you.
But wait. I must have known that in time, a huge tide would erase everything. There was a sea-log which I’d marked with your letters. Damned if I know where I put it. Have to go below. Destroy it. Excuse me. Otherwise the police will come aboard with their sniffer-dogs and apprentice butchers, thirsting for post-mortems.
Here it is, damp, expanding pages like a doughy concertina, edges lacy, fried with eggwhite. Open.
You were a blank page then. (Don’t be upset. I’m not an engineer. I waited until you allowed me to describe you, until I knew that you knew. Perhaps this too, was a violation).
It’s a result of my inheritance. And yours too. The pen: the repository of so much weakness. The pen: a reminder of apprenticeship, failure to live, yet allowing only death to remain alive. Always too late. See this finger. This cold bunion of lost passions. Good only for ledger entries and classroom lesson plans and the filing away of faces. Unfolding now, this snake, this line which has become the relief of guilt, sounds like the scratching of genitalia, the rasping of graphite pubes. There’s a vague hope there, without anyone else seeing. A peephole. A Judas-hole. Nothing more. Which you helped me fill in.
Let me illustrate: I’m on a coach journey and the bus passes in and out of heavy rainforest and when it is dark outside, I see reflected in the glass the woman in the seat in front of me. I watch her legs, her short skirt, the way she puts her hands on her knees. I see her turn her hand to examine her fingernails. I watch her open her handbag, take out a receipt, add it up. I can count her money, which is loose in her bag, not folded away in her purse. There isn’t much. She takes out a couple of smooth pebbles, rolls them around in her palm. I can study her rings. She has one on every finger of her left hand except on her thumb. Only a certain kind of woman wears a ring on every finger. I decide she is a woman of experience. I notice the black roots of her hair sprouting up from underneath the part that is dyed. A sweet profile, soft skin, eyes enigmatic, fluttering indecision. Then the bus comes out of the forest and light floods through the windows and the woman in front of me has disappeared. I long for her but am relieved at the same time. When the dark
ness returns, so does she, and when we both alight, we carry an intimacy so intense it was as if I had made love to her. But all she has done is add up receipts and count her money. Seeing without searching. Glancing without examining. That is how we love. It all depends on the dark… on what we left out. And that was how I saw you, my dear Emma.
My name is Johnson. Full name? Byron Johnson. [Honestly though, it is Byron Shelley Johnson, (Romanticism ran deep in my mother, but what’s in a name? At school I yearned for the embedded midnomer to be drowned out, to no avail; it sounded silly). ‘B.S.’ is what my friends call me now, but it’s a bit soon to take that liberty]. I change my name often, to protect the innocent. I mostly write under the name of Johnson. Although someone is trying to start up the rumour that I write thrillers and detective novels and mutilation sagas under well-known pseudonyms, something like Kellerman, or Harris, or the more praenominal Leonard. Leonard Johnson. Whoever it is, he or she is steering clear of Ben and Sam. I let it ride but it’s normally against my nature. I’m obsessed by truth. But the truth is, nobody cares. Not one sleuth has tried to discover if we are all one and the same. Which does prove in a way, that the author doesn’t really matter too much.
In real life of course, I’m a bit of a bum. I try to be a good bum. No Porsches hidden in a lockup. My royalty statements littered with minus signs. Even my minuscule advances retarded me.