Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Mera briefly, when we were able to talk privately.

  Being with my father once more was a wonderful thing for me, although I could see his health was precarious. With a pain at my heart I observed his big bony old frame, clothes hanging on it, hair scant and silver, eyes like bits of summer sky now turned to winter. Even his hands were different, still warm and strong, but now smooth skinned.

  ‘Not a man’s hands now, Din. A man’s hands should always have a bit of bark knocked off them.’

  But he is active in the garden, spending hours grafting fruit trees. Grafting is his great interest and hobby. Trees are the first love of the old bushman, even niminy-piminy trees like apple and plum.

  ‘I feel like a boat with the bottom out, tossed up on the sand.’

  ‘He’s got too many women around him,’ says D’Arcy. ‘A man needs men. But he’ll latch on to Rory. Teach him how to bang a nail in straight, tie a knot, never cry, handle things in a fight.’

  ‘But Rory’s only two!’

  ‘Can’t start too early.’

  My father has changed a little in that he speaks more often of his family’s history, his mother Mary Ann Dunne, born in the married quarters of the barracks at Hobart Town, in Tasmania when it was Van Diemen’s Land.

  ‘Her father was from County Clare in Ireland. He was a regular British Army man, a sergeant. He died before I was born, but Mother had a photo. One of those stone-grey Irishmen, face like a roughcast wall. Trousers tied around his shanks with leather bowyangs, a pot hat. Knock you down as soon as look at you. He ended up buried under Grafton Bridge in Auckland with other old soldiers.’

  Mera’s mother, Mary Ann Dunne, was a small dark-eyed woman who had three sons before she was twenty-one.

  ‘She was only sixteen when my father courted her. He used to swim across the Waikato with his clothes in a bundle on top of his head. Her family were glad to get her off their hands. They were like that with girls in the old days, with those huge families.’

  This story and that. He has a certain urgency. He doesn’t want his memories, his life, to be lost. ‘You’ll remember, Din, won’t you? Write it down somewhere. Tell Anne and Rory.’

  ‘Yes, I shall.’

  I watch him often. He seems a little lost, a little unfamiliar in this world of women, wife, daughters, sisters-in-law. Very few men come to the house. His surviving brothers live in distant towns. The clan is now so large, his nephews so many he hardly knows them, never sees them. Two of the aunts have already lost their husbands, good men who were his friends. My cousin Stuart, whom he loved as a son, died in the war. It is true my mother’s sisters, the aunties, are merry, loving and solicitous, but they are after all chirping, finical little creatures alien to his life as a countryman of the far ferny hills and the dusky intractable forests.

  In an effort to bring the light back to his eyes I ask him for the old stories.

  Tell me again about the bullocks, Dad. That farmer who had you yoke up his prize bull to take the devil out of him.

  Dad, tell me about the time when there was an explosion in the deep mine at Huntly and your father went missing.

  Dad, tell me about your mother left alone in a raupo hut with two little children, and being frightened to death of roving warlike Maoris, and how she heard a scratch-scratch at the wall in the dead of night, and …

  ‘Your father’s tired, lovey. Let him go off and have a rest before tea-time.’

  He goes off obediently.

  I see with terror that something has knocked on his heart. Get ready, old man, it has conveyed to him. You know not the day nor the hour.

  But he doesn’t know how to get ready. He isn’t religious, and what he knows of Catholicism from my mother’s turbulent family hasn’t persuaded him to inquire further. The idea of a Divinity or an afterlife embarrasses him. But he doesn’t want to blink out, either. He can’t speak of his unease to me or my sister, though we are his beloved little daughters. And we can’t speak of it, either, or he will jump up and go out and begin pruning the gooseberry bushes. I want very much to tell him his whole life has been a preparation. Courage, stoicism, honour towards his fellow men, all have been his yardsticks of life. I want to remind him that his own father, old Hellfire Jack, would not see a pastor on his deathbed because as he said, he and God had never squabbled. But I don’t. I could have tried, I think.

  We had scarcely unpacked before Beres airmailed us the announcement of the Sydney Morning Herald’s first literary competition, the largest and most impressive ever held south of the equator. And our freelance writers’ blood boiled.

  ‘Get off your tails, you two!’ wrote Beres, ringing the fantastic £100 prize for a short story. He didn’t bother pointing out that a novel might win £2000, because he knew our meagre circumstances dictated that we write only short material which was quickly paid for. Novels were things we never thought of - so much work, dependent on royalties which might or might not come in. How could we waste time on insubstantial enterprises?

  But I looked again and again at that announcement. Obviously it didn’t apply to me; I was largely a children’s writer and preferred, given the choice, to continue as one. But D’Arcy could write a novel. With his gift of vivid characterisation, his ability to tell an unusual and substantial story, he could produce a novel.

  ‘Ah, come on!’ I urged. ‘Have a go! The Great Australian Novel!’

  ‘Great Australian Horseshit.’

  ‘Semi-great Australian Novel?’

  ‘Now, knock it off. I’m going to enter for the short story and maybe the poem. I have this idea, see …’

  ‘What about all three sections, then?’ I argued. ‘If you don’t want to write a rural novel you could write about Surry Hills. Goodness knows there’s enough drama there for six novels.’

  ‘That’s boring old stuff to me. You write about it.’

  ‘I’m not a novelist.’

  ‘Who knows? Anyway, you know I don’t like the novel form. I never read a novel if I can help it.’

  This was true. He never was to read any of mine.

  I pestered and pestered. It seemed to me that these competitions offered a marvellous opportunity. At last he said, ‘Shut up now, or I’ll put you in the wardrobe.’

  Nothing moved him. He was, anyway, going off to spend a month exploring Niland’s Islands, mostly on foot, hitching rides, making friends everywhere in his usual style.

  My mother was querulous about his leaving me to cope with the little children, but I could see that D’Arcy might never be able to return to New Zealand, whereas in time of family emergency, somehow I would always manage it. She had no idea we were as close to the breadline as we were most of the time. To her, as to other people, I found it impossible to explain the complicated financial side of a freelance writer’s life - the long waits for payment, the failed and aborted ideas, the manner in which magazines flourished for seven issues and then dropped dead, owing the writers and artists considerable sums. Our lifestyle was based on total insecurity, and as insecurity was the thing my mother feared above all, I certainly wasn’t going to tell her about mine.

  ‘Blow him anyway. I’ll have a shot at it. I can work on a novel in the evenings, in the kitchen.’

  ‘I expect you’ll be able to get on with it more easily, with him away,’ agreed my mother paradoxically. She believed that men always got under your feet one way or another, though this was an inconsiderable fault in a good decent man.

  Upon reflection, I felt that I knew very little about anything, especially nothing that would stretch to eighty thousand words. Dismally I asked my mother, ‘Could I write about the Auckland Star - really dramatic backbiting, backslapping and favouritism went on there?’

  ‘They’d sue you.’

  ‘I don’t want to write about the sawmill.’

  She shuddered, for her prison term in dark, freezing Tanekaha Valley had been much longer and harder than mine.

  ‘Don’t ever write
about that place. Readers don’t deserve it.’

  There was nothing left but Surry Hills. My life there had been like a visit to some antique island where the nineteenth century still prevailed. As I pondered its idiosyncratic nature, I began to remember things - lanes with no gutters, just a line of inclined setts in the middle to carry away the rain. The smoke from kitchen fires, rubbish heaps. Most memorable of all was the pink-lit smoke spilling over the lip of the smallgoods factory chimney, white as milk it was, heavy too, flowing straight down amongst the cottages. How that smoke had smelled, a stench of acrid chemical, strong enough to taste, pervasive enough to taint one’s hair and clothes!

  ‘Don’t ever touch them frankfurters,’ said an old woman with no teeth. ‘You can’t trust nothing but eggs, honest.’

  In my mind I could see that smoke, poisonous and enigmatic, like so many things in Surry Hills. It recalled my loneliness and unhappiness, and I thought suddenly, ‘Why, if I write about that place it might exorcise the bad memories.’

  So I began writing every night after the children were in bed, for two hours only, for there was a nine o’clock curfew on typing. Some evenings I could achieve only a page. I missed D’Arcy’s constant interest and encouragement, though he wrote almost daily letters.

  Those letters, often marked KEEP THIS, TIGER, were paradoxical, for he wrote about my country as seen through a fresh and amazed eye, while I was writing about Surry Hills, which he knew so well, and with almost total recall.

  Still travelling like a traveller, not a tourist or sightseer, he booked in only occasionally to a hotel for a bath, a good meal and a long night’s sleep. Wherever he could he hitched rides, not to save money but for the conversation, and truckies and long-haul delivery drivers on the road were not loath to invite him aboard.

  He left me at the Thirty Mile and I took the turnoff, walking. It was a mongrel road, clay covered with metal for a few miles, then clay itself, each side sopping flats reaching away from it, and cascades bolting down the hills to flood them. Watch out for MacPherson’s gate, he said. I found it. Far away there was a light like a fuzzy yellow ball.

  I splashed up the rutted drive, chained dogs shrieking somewhere behind the invisible house. When I reached the verandah a man was waiting for me with a hurricane lamp, the blue tongue flapping and swooping at its moorings. How would a warm bed and a feed go, he said.

  This letter appeared in extract in his short story ‘A Cargo for Topacki’, one of the first he sold in America.

  He also reproved me briskly for my grumbles.

  ‘Don’t give up. What does it matter if this book gets nowhere? Later on you’ll be able to rewrite it. You’ve got the skeleton of something good there, I’m confident. Get cracking, will you?’

  The novel took the natural form of a chronology. Early on I asked myself: ‘What am I writing about?’ And the answer was clear. ‘This story is about no particular protagonist, but about a group of people, a family and their friends and neighbours. They are all descended from Irish immigrants except two, Irish born – one from Northern Ireland and one from the Republic.’

  With such a group of characters there certainly could be a plot, but I did not want a plot, I just wanted to tell about these people as if they were real human beings. Plots rarely occur in life, and life, as far as I was capable of depicting it, was what I wanted.

  I was already enough of an experienced writer not to find writing easy. Those people who find the craft facile and enjoyable are nearly always beginners, or people who don’t really understand what writing is about. You do not find Flaubert saying, ‘I just pour out the words’, as I have heard innumerable apprentice writers say. This is what he says: ‘When I find I haven’t written a single sentence of worth after scribbling dozens of pages I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself. O, if you knew the torture I suffer!’

  And Vladimir Nabokov – ‘I am a snail carrying its house at a rate of two hundred final pages a year.’

  When I wrote that first book I was not an experienced novelist, but I was experienced in the creation of character, the enlistment of humour, and the use of dialogue rather than talk. What literary strength the novel had came from these things.

  In later years D’Arcy Niland was to say, ‘After I finished writing The Shiralee I felt as if some kind person had lifted a heavy suitcase off me. No one had told me extended creative action battered the body.’

  I felt much the same at the conclusion of my first novel, and determined that I would never write another one. Radio plays, and little tales for kids were my destiny, I told my husband.

  ‘I’m calling it The Harp in the South,’ I added.

  He was by then in Stewart Island, the third large island of New Zealand, which also encompasses more than a thousand small ones.

  ‘Good title, and tells exactly what the book is about. The harp representing Ireland and the Irish, and the south for Australia. The Irish in Australia. Excellent. You’re getting near to closing date. You know I sent my poem and short story months ago now. Don’t miss out.’

  It seemed to me that typing a clean copy of the book was probably a fruitless exercise. With despair I rifled through the wad of much-corrected manuscript kept for safety in an old Esquire magazine. By ripping out a Hemingway story, The Old Man and the Sea, I had provided room for mine. I felt it wasn’t worth the labour. But there, nothing attempted, nothing done, you fool; so I whacked out a presentable copy of the novel, a short story or two, and a long poem which I thought rather good. All were airmailed to the Herald with a few days to spare.

  Competition entries had to be submitted under noms de plume. Mine was Hesperus because I felt a wreck. I cannot remember D’Arcy’s, but it was probably something joke Irish like Barney Rafferty.

  In early December we returned to Sydney, leaving behind Anne and Rory for three months, at my mother’s behest. It was good for them, not only because of a close association with an extended family of grandparents and amusing and doting aunts, at that stage lacking grandchildren, but because at last they could play as freely as little children should. The tiny backyard behind the Petersham flat was not only bare and constricted, but to my mind always menaced by the fertile criminality of Gilles de Rais. Who knew what he would think of next; maybe a fire bomb?

  ‘Look for a house with a garden, a big garden,’ my mother urged. We promised, knowing that the extent of the housing famine in huge Sydney was still incomprehensible to her.

  It was a wrenching parting, especially from the little girl, a pale fragile child, whose fading cry, ‘I want to tiss you again, my Mum!’ long echoed in my memory.

  We resolved grimly that somehow we would find a house with a safe garden.

  ‘And we won’t rent. We’ll buy it.’

  ‘My family hasn’t ever owned anything,’ said D’Arcy definitively, as though this fact was inscribed in the book of Fate.

  ‘This is where we begin.’

  Beres had looked after the flat in our absence, and he and D’Arcy now made plans for a lightning trip to the opalfields of Andamooka and the grape country of South Australia. D’Arcy had some idea in his head about a woman with hair the colour of poured beer, ‘like yours’.

  ‘She hasn’t a mother. The country is her mother.’

  I was used to his talking to himself, or to me, it didn’t seem to matter which.

  He was one of those writers able to use selected people as sounding boards. It is not a happy situation for the sounding board, especially when that person is trying to work, and when that person is herself darkly secretive, never speaking of any work until it is completed,

  ‘But what shall I call this girl?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you shut up? All right, then. What about Barbie?’

  ‘Barbie what?’

  ‘Get the hell out of here, I have to finish this script by the afternoon’s post.’

  ‘You’re huffy with me because I’m going walkabout
again,’ he said, narrowing his eyes at his own perspicacity.

  ‘No, I’m not. At least I’ll be able to work without you jabbering.’

  He went away, hurt, but walking on the sides of his feet like a parrot. What could I do with such a man? My eye fell upon the ABC Weekly, which published the radio programmes for the week. On the cover was the name of a popular actor. I yelled after him, ‘Barbie Casabon!’

  First he wrote a short story about Barbie. It was called ‘Away to Moonlight’, Moonlight being the name of one of the abandoned gold settlements he had visited during his New Zealand walkabout. The woman, strong and solitary, appealed to him. She was in many ways, I think, a feminine projection of his own character. At last, in 1959, she lived again as the protagonist of the glorious novel of the opalfields, Call Me When the Cross Turns Over.

  In bed that night he asked, ‘Do I really jabber?’

  ‘Often. Get on with what you’re doing.’

  The boys decided to leave in March, when the inland weather was less than furnace hot. I noticed that Beres, though he was delighted to be going on an expedition with his brother, spoke no more about getting grist for his acting career. Slowly he had realised that the road was too hard, too precarious.

  All this time we had almost forgotten about the Sydney Morning Herald competition. There was too much other work to do. When, just before Christmas that year, I had a telegram from the newspaper I had my characteristic fit of panic - anyone who had lived through the war ever after identified telegrams and cables with bad news - and then ran to show D’Arcy.

  ‘They want me to ring for an appointment!’

  ‘Your poem, betcha!’

  The boys were more excited than I was.

  ‘My elbow itches,’ said Beres, flushed with exhilaration. ‘And that’s an infallible Kilkenny sign that something wonderful is going to happen to us.’

  I was touched that he included himself in this possibly upbeat event, as he had always done in our hard times.