Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  But I was fierce, another kind of bitch altogether, and, although a committed pacifist and one who tried sincerely to love her neighbour, would have killed anyone who laid a hand on my children.

  But children are people, and people are conundrums who never want strangers to know the answer. Children hate being dug up to have their roots examined, and I have never done that, even in my head. When I was young, children had their privacy violated almost by tradition. Where have you been? Why did you do that? Why don’t you think this? Teachers, parents, aunts, neighbours, all felt they could tramp around at will in that flighty, extravagant landscape where children keep their daydreams and yearnings. The little ones, their sensitivities ‘more tender than are the horns of cockled snails’, have those sensitivities so often bruised and defiled.

  ‘About time that youngster learned what life is all about!’ the adults used to say. And still say.

  So I don’t write about our children. Suffice it to say that they all grew up level-headed, healthy and largely gifted. They turned out to be a librarian, a physicist, two book illustrators, and a musician who also works in the healing profession.

  But at the close of the 1950s they were children, confused and frightened because their father had been ill.

  One day he said, ‘The kids bother me. Every time I look up there are blue eyes taking surreptitious peeps at me as if I’m going to drop dead or blow up.’

  ‘Well, they worry about you.’

  ‘Tell them not to.’

  ‘I think you should do that.’

  ‘Oh, God, I can’t. You do it.’

  From then on, it seemed to me, though nothing was said, he withdrew a little from the children, distancing himself. Did he have the feeling that they loved him too much, would be irreparably damaged when he died? That if he withdrew a little they wouldn’t miss him so much? I don’t know. It was the kind of Irish way of looking at things that had prompted his father, though with deep concern fortunately obvious to the boy, to jeer at his writing ambitions, because he knew that there was no chance of a superior education for his son.

  But of course it was far too late for D’Arcy to stop his children loving him.

  ‘Writing is a peaceful business, I fancy,’ remarked the doctor.

  ‘A blessing Mr Niland isn’t doing anything worrisome and stressful, like law or medicine,’ he said in his kindly way.

  I nodded civilly, thinking of the twelve-centimetre-high file relating to Call Me When the Cross Turns Over, its inexcusably bungled copyright and the solicitors’ letters to the three film companies that had seized upon it as an accessible property.

  Few things aggravate a writer more than the ivory-tower legend, except perhaps the common idea that you peck away at the word processor for a week or so and a bestselling novel shoots out the top. But there’s no use in explanations that the whole business is one of sweaty labour, endless rewriting, as day by day the strangers in your head reveal level after level of themselves. And they – your characters – are strangers, even if you have created them yourself. You have some idea of what they are going to do, but their motivation shows itself of its own accord. This is what makes a memorable character, ‘a real person’, as readers often say – motivation deeply and acutely observed by the writer. Which sometimes takes months, or even years, of intense concentration.

  The world is full of books in which the characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

  I was terrified of telling D’Arcy that there was every chance of the film, and indeed every other proprietorial right in his new novel going off to rapacious strangers. In his absence I had done what I could – put the book in the hands of the London agency, Curtis Brown Ltd, at that time not the oldest literary and dramatic agency in Great Britain but certainly the most ferocious. They had engaged a solicitor to act on the writer’s behalf.

  Of the three film companies that had seized upon the unguarded movie rights, one, inconsiderable and probably poorly funded, quickly dropped out. The second, Twentieth-Century Fox, said at once that they appreciated the extreme injustice of the situation, and were prepared to buy at normal rates as soon as the copyright was properly established. The third, the British company, I shall call Parachute, said they were going ahead with production regardless. Parachute were a fine company. They had produced several superb, indeed classic, films. Under other circumstances their interest would have been most acceptable.

  This was the confused and troubling situation I had to present to a man just recovered from a near-fatal heart attack. On my own authority I could go no further.

  Remembering his frustrated fury at the behaviour of Ealing Films, I waited for him to drop down dead. But he lit a cigarette and said calmly, ‘What else can you expect from film companies?’

  This costly and endlessly involved dispute went on for nearly three years. It was impossible to allow it to dominate our lives. D’Arcy’s novel, The Big Smoke, which had won another literary prize while he was still in hospital, was published by Angus & Robertson, neither party tactlessly reminding the other that the book had previously been rejected out of hand. The Big Smoke did very well in the States, despite the ingenuous astonishment of some reviewers that there were any large cities Down Under. This novel was optioned for film several times, though I imagine that if a movie had been made the location would have been shifted to Pittsburgh or Chicago.

  Most established writers with a track record of good or even moderately selling books derive some income from film options, the majority of which do not result in films. As a beginner, I had a romantic idea of story scouts, swivelling eager noses, reading every new book, rushing to the producers to argue the property’s desirability. When, however, I began to do treatments and plot breakdowns for a film company, I realised that most properties are bought simply to prevent any other company getting them. For a fleabite, possibly also claimable as a bad debt, the film company then has that property tied up for a year or two, or until others have lost interest. Most film companies have incredible morgues of purchased but unmade cinematic material.

  My novel, Serpent’s Delight (marketed as The Good Looking Women in Australia), was a Catholic Book Club Choice in America, and attracted five film options in ten years, helping to keep our family going during the difficult and stressful decade of the 1960s. During those bad years, when I had so little time all I could write were a few children’s books - by no means easier but so much shorter - and my ABC scripts, everything seemed to go wrong, beginning with the trouble over The Cross.

  For Parachute were adamant. The Cross file shows many civil and well-reasoned letters from both the writer of the novel and the solicitor his agent had retained. Answers are either abrupt and rude or do not appear at all.

  Suddenly, representatives of Parachute appeared in Sydney on a reconnaissance trip. Horrified, D’Arcy came out of his workroom and told me, ‘You’re not going to believe this. Those two bastards actually expect me to help them find good locations. The man who just phoned said he wants to pick my brains. Would you believe such brazen cheek?’

  ‘Ignore them,’ I urged, not liking the look of him, short-breathed and pallid.

  ‘No fear I won’t. I’m going in to front them.’

  ‘Please, please, think again. You’re not really fit enough for a blazing row.’

  ‘Back off, Tiger.’

  No argument on my part prevailed. I was permitted to go with him, but only to North Sydney, where it was his custom to leave the car, rather than stravage around trying to find a parking station on the metropolitan side of the Harbour Bridge.

  ‘You stay here. Don’t worry. Aside from breaking both their noses, I shall be as quiet as a lamb.’

  ‘Oh, God, don’t.’

  But he had jumped on a bus and was gone. I prowled around the old green Holden, knowing a brutal argument could be fatal for him. Let him break their noses, dear God, I implo
red, but don’t let him have another coronary.

  The quietest of men, D’Arcy rarely lost his temper. He was, however, immensely strong. I once saw him take by the nose a noted bisexual writer, much heavier and taller than himself, who had been regaling a dinner party with scurrilous remarks about Beatrice Davis. Without a word he led that clown down three flights of stairs, out into the street, and put him into a taxi. He then returned without comment and sat down to finish his dinner.

  After I had spent two wretched, terrified hours, he turned up looking grim.

  ‘What happened, what happened?’

  ‘Later.’

  He started the car and my head almost snapped off. That ride was more like a television police chase than anything I have seen in real life. We came out of North Sydney like an enraged wasp, narrowly missing several cars and a bus, side swiping so closely at parked vehicles that we must have blown the dust off their duco. Never had I so longed to see a police car on the Holden’s tail. Twice my forehead hit the windscreen - it was before the days of seatbelts - and my chin came a bruising crack on the glovebox.

  ‘You’re going to kill us both!’

  No answer. I had never seen my husband in a rage so blind, so heedless, and never did again. If I had had the chance I might have looked at his knuckles to see if they were skinned, thus giving some clue to the fate of the Parachute representatives, but I had no chance. Down the Spit Hill like a drag-race contestant, across the bridge, up the winding road on the northern side, dangerous at the best of times, into Seaforth, the car’s tyres squealing.

  ‘Please stop and let me out! The kids have to keep at least one parent!’

  He overshot the turn into Woodland Street where we lived, swore, and braked at the lights at Condamine Street. I whisked open the door and shot out across the road, heedless of honking horns and shouts of indignation. At that stage I didn’t care if he did kill himself. All I wanted was to get home alive.

  Halfway down Woodland Street the Holden gently drew up beside me.

  ‘Get in, you melodramatic rat.’

  ‘You can talk about melodrama!’

  ‘Ah, but I have reason.’

  The tidal wave of passion seemed to have passed, for he was grinning.

  Just the same, he had another heart attack that night, not a coronary, what the doctor called a cardiac episode, but enough to put him into hospital for a few days.

  ‘I can’t stand much more of this,’ I thought late at night, sitting up writing Muddleheaded Wombats, waiting for someone to call from the hospital. ‘I’m going to go to pieces.’

  By the same token I knew I would stand it until the strain of apprehension and incessant vigilance terminated in the only way it could, with my husband setting out for the Styx. And at the very thought of that I stopped being young, often seeing my mother looking out of my face, with the expression she had had as she watched Mera dwindle, grow silent, and turn away from life.

  I never had the full story of D’Arcy Niland’s meeting with the men representing the company that had grabbed his novel. I knew they were patronising in the extreme, implying that he should be gratified and flattered that a famous film company thought his work worth stealing.

  ‘Only they didn’t say stealing, of course, they said using, developing, promoting. Promoting, mind you. One of them, the podgy one, even said that if I stopped kicking up a fuss Parachute might even throw me a few thousand quid.’

  ‘A bone to keep the dog quiet?’

  ‘They were so dumb, so full of themselves, I don’t think they even knew they were insulting me. That’s when I got so mad.’

  ‘You didn’t … Not noses? Teeth?’

  ‘Of course not. Violence is foreign to me, as you know. No, I just picked up the podgy one in the Italian suit, and deposited him on top of the bar, and wouldn’t let him get down. Nothing really.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Well, the bar was full, and the patrons pretty full too. They were most helpful. So he slithered around a bit, smashing glasses, the barman yelling. You know. I shook hands with the other bloke, though. He was the scriptwriter, a fairly decent fellow. He felt bad about doing down another writer, I think. And then I left.’

  ‘A pleasant afternoon, in fact.’

  But a meeting which provoked the fury demonstrated by that hazardous drive had not been pleasant or even tolerable. For a long time he looked grey and wrung-out, so that I cursed films and everyone connected with them.

  Cables must have flown out of Sydney, because a day or so afterwards Parachute cabled an offer of £5,000 for purchase of film rights.

  ‘No,’ ruled the post office at Balgowlah, ‘you cannot send a cable saying “Sod you.” ’

  God help me, I almost wished he had taken the offer, contemptible as it was. I wanted the fight to be over, the risks to his health minimised, our family life closer and warmer, himself to be free sometimes to help with the tetchy problems of the children, two of whom were adolescent and the other three itching to be adolescent. Overworked, unable to sleep more than three or four hours, and never at a stretch, it was no marvel that I dreamed of mountains and reedy lakes, beautiful enough, except that the mountains were to fall off and the lakes to drown in. I was no longer a warrior woman, indeed had I ever been one? I was a person worn to shreds.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I’m anxious. I’m frightened.’

  ‘Well, you needn’t be,’ he said. ‘We’ll get Parachute in the end, you’ll see.’

  ‘Don’t dodge the issue, damn it. Why can’t I talk about the way I feel?’

  ‘Because I’m scared. I need you calm and matter-of-fact. Otherwise I’m afraid I might not be able to hang on.’

  I saw then, or thought I saw, that his serenity and good humour might not be as wellfounded as it looked. Certainly the encounter with the men from Parachute had stressed him beyond bearing. But I should not have gone away determined to keep my torment to myself, to endure silently. Every person is owed his own sorrow, and the expression of it, too.

  After all the problems centred on Call Me When the Cross Turns Over the dènouement of the affair came suddenly and quietly. Curtis Brown Ltd and the American publisher, William Morrow, between them contrived to have the copyright correctly registered and backdated. Parachute was caught on the simple issue of literary plagiarism, for their script was written after registration.

  They settled out of court, the damages not great, but sufficient to discharge the legal and other debts incurred in this affair, with a reasonable sum remaining.

  The British Society of Authors were valuable consultants in this dispute, not the first of this kind brought to their notice. Subsequently they and their United States counterpart more vigorously pursued the issue of inherent copyright, which is that a literary work does not require to be legally registered, as copyright inalienably resides in the work itself. Nevertheless, it would be a reckless writer or publisher who did not register correct copyright. This registration, or patent, creates definitude. It establishes the existence of the work at a specific date, and the name of the person claiming authorship.

  Copyright law, and the International Copyright Covention not withstanding, there are still many countries, even signatories to the Convention, which permit their own entrepreneurs to ignore the copyright of foreign authors, publish books without permission or acknowledgement, exploit subsidiary rights, and pay nothing. There is, effectively, no redress for the writer.

  However, no injustice to writers in the field of copyright equals the ongoing, iniquitous law of public domain which decrees that copyright becomes void fifty years after the author’s death. When this happens the work is up for grabs by anyone and for any purpose. The time of lapse differs according to the country; in the United States it is very much briefer.

  Here we have the extraordinary situation of specific and personally created material, thus sui generis, never to be exactly replicated, thrown to the commercial world fifty years after the death of the creator,
without whom it would not have existed at all. This happens to nothing else on earth except artistic creations. From real estate down to the most trifling personal bibelot, what is legally owned is owned. It remains the inalienable possession of the owner, and through him, his heirs or assigns.

  The egregious argument is that Art (beware when the capital letter enters discussions of this nature) belongs to humankind, and that allowing a writer’s family to enjoy any fruits of his work for as long as fifty years is, if anything, a concession. This I shall believe when I read that one of the publishers standing on the edge of the grave of some famous writer, waiting for the starting pistol’s report, publishes his public-domain edition for free, just as a donation to humankind.

  ‘See this money left over? We’ll take an overseas trip with it. England, Ireland, Rome. You know you’ve always longed to travel. Don’t argue. Shut up. That’s it.’

  I went to our family doctor, a kind, commonsensible man, to ask if this would mean increased risk.

  ‘Yes, but there’s always risk. Your husband’s decision must be, does he want the risk here or there?’

  • 6 •

  ‘You’re sure, now?’ I asked. ‘You wouldn’t rather go to Memphis in the States to do that research on Les Darcy you’ve always wanted to do?’

  I knew he was torn between Ireland, which he hankered to see, and Tennessee. Every writer has something which he wishes to write most of all, and for D’Arcy Niland it was the biography of one of Australia’s heroes – the young boxer whose brief but blazingly successful life ended in Memphis in 1917. His was a character of astonishing integrity, yet his main interest for me as a closet historian was that he had been the centre of a violent political upheaval, crucial to the future of his country as a nation.