by Black Inc.
Luc leaves Ellie standing in her underwear for five, six, seven weeks. Just when she resolves to pull her clothes and the last of her dignity back on and go home in a huff, another red, white and blue-edged envelope appears.
‘Your tongue is like an oyster, your breasts like bon bons waiting to be unwrapped,’ he writes. As if nothing is wrong.
Ellie makes him wait. The snails keep their heads held high in indignation. Finally, she relents and writes her response. One sentence. A command; an effort to regain control.
‘Take off your pants.’
Addressed, stamped, posted. The next move had better be good.
Another few weeks go by. Business peaks and Ellie finds herself rushing to fill orders. In a morning crammed with errands she shoves the mail into her handbag on her way to the car. In town she hurriedly tries to catch up with the shopping and appointments and friends she has been neglecting. Her last stop is the supermarket. She grabs a basket and heads for the fresh food section. No time for the proper market today.
Stopping for breath, Ellie reaches into her handbag, groping for her shopping list. Instead her fingers trace the outline of a familiar blue sticker. She puts down the basket and slides her fingernail under the opening.
‘Dear Ellie, I can’t help but run my hands over your delicious skin. Your breath is hot and heavy. I pull the lace away from your chest and feel the weight of your breasts in my hands.’
Ellie’s hand moves up and cups the underside of her breast. She can feel the lace of her bra through the T-shirt fabric. ‘Your bra falls away from your body and I lean down to curl my tongue around your nipple.’ Luc signs off and Ellie exhales. She looks up, realising that she is touching her breast in a supermarket. Embarrassed, she looks down, and the nectarines are blushing.
In the fruit and vegie aisle she can’t stop squeezing. She squeezes the peaches, running her finger around the tiny bumps at their bases and feeling the microscopic hairs on their skin. She squeezes the eggplant. She squeezes an orange so hard that a drop of juice leaks from its navel. She squeezes the potatoes and dirt comes off on her hands. She squeezes a zucchini knowing that it will be as firm and hard as a ripe zucchini can ever be. She squeezes her thighs together.
It’s Wednesday so everything is fresh. Some of the displays have been sprayed with water so they glisten. Ellie loads up her basket until the handle strains and bows and she wonders how she will carry it at all after she has visited the canned goods aisle.
At home she drops the shopping bags onto the kitchen table and takes out the letter. As she reads it again her mouth gets dry and she swallows. It makes a gulping sound inside her ears. Dropping the white pages to the table she takes a peach and lifts it to her face. Breathing in its scent she feels the tiny hairs against her lips. Slowly she brushes it over the skin of her cheek, down her throat and across her collarbone. Her hand snakes up the back of her top to unfasten her bra, but then she remembers the rules. She cuts up the peach with honey and yoghurt and eats it instead before putting on her gumboots.
Like chess players taking out their opponent’s pieces, one move at a time Ellie and Luc undress each other and explore. The herd of hermaphrodites at the farm practises free love. New eggs are laid and hatched regularly. Responses are written as quickly as possible as Ellie and Luc touch and grope and taste. At the farm there is a population explosion of Lilliputian proportions, and Ellie is forced to plant out the last remaining row in the growing area to avoid overcrowding.
On damp mornings, Ellie is sometimes forced to pull a hungry garden snail’s mouth from one of Luc’s love notes. One eats right through the layers of airmail-weight paper, leaving scars across his words. Her father once told her of a workmate who, upon retirement, left snails in a desk drawer as a parting joke. They ruined invoices and cheque books, but what they really seemed to love was the stamps. Something in the adhesive, which so offends human tastebuds, was, to them, a delicacy.
In the garden, Ellie crushes the common snails that try to eat the tips of her basil plants. Mashing them under her boot, she leaves their vital organs glistening and exposed to the air and sun. Technically they are the same species as her farm animals, but the love and care with which Ellie tends to her Helix aspersa is equalled by the violence turned upon the garden snails. They lack the glamour and refinement of her breeding stock – they are an underclass to be crushed beneath her mighty boot.
In the letterbox, things get steamy. Luc rolls on top of Ellie and she cries out in pleasure. Through ten, twenty letters they make passionate love. Luc’s hands move all over Ellie’s body; she pulls at his hair and bucks her hips. Ellie rips open envelopes and reads with trembling hands; she writes furiously and with an urgency that makes her cross her legs tightly. With every thrust and stroke and roll on their bed of language Ellie’s heart and breathing quickens, until finally their act begins to reach its climax. In big, hurried letters Ellie writes, ‘Luc, I’m coming. I’m coming.’ She shoves the note into an envelope and rushes to the post office, driving erratically. Then she waits, on the edge.
Ellie waits. Her anticipation turns to frustration, as day after day the letterbox yields nothing more than bills and junk mail. Weeks pass, and then months. Errant molluscs found invading the letterbox are flung over the fence to become French feasts for the birds; in particularly dark moods, Ellie pokes their eye stalks and watches with satisfaction as they shrivel back into their puckered heads. At the farm, the real snails are pining and refusing to eat. Ellie finds herself using more and more water to try and make them move. There have been no new babies for weeks even though hibernation is months away.
And then, one evening after a long day in the city, Ellie returns home to find an envelope waiting for her. Flushed with excitement she rushes into the house, dropping the letter onto the couch. She brews a proper cup of coffee and hastily removes the chessboard from the box, sending several pieces toppling. Arranging herself on the couch, Ellie rereads each letter one by one, from the beginning. With each page the pressure builds. She runs her fingers down her neck. Her skin gets hot and prickly and her heartbeat and breathing quicken. She undoes her bra and pulls it out through her sleeve, kneading her breast and imagining her French lover moving on top of her. Finally Ellie reaches the unopened envelope. She rips it apart and pulls out the pages. Her eyesight has become blurry in her excitement but soon it registers. The sight of her own handwriting brings her shuddering to a halt.
As her arousal turns to anger, Ellie flips over the envelope. Return to sender, lightly stamped in silvery tracks. With a sweep of her arm Ellie sends the chess pieces flying, gathers the letters and storms out of the house.
The wet grass soaks her feet and the cuffs of her jeans. As she marches and staggers towards the greenhouses, Ellie shreds the paper with her teeth and hands. When she arrives she brings white lids crashing from their containers, and she hurls the letters, all those delectable and divine and dirty words, into the purging bins.
A slow-motion swarm of brown spiral shells descends upon the pile of letters as the hundreds of snails begin to eat up the words and sentences carefully created by the lovers. Their gullets fill with ink and paper and envelope glue as they slide over the correspondence, dissolving it and covering it with silver lines. Ellie stands and watches her stock spoil, imagining that she can hear a munching sound coming from her minions. For hours she watches as they dutifully destroy her love affair, along with her sales.
A sliver of moon has inched its way into the black sky overhead when Ellie finally hoists her shivering body from the wet greenhouse floor. She closes the bins on her stampeding snails and trudges back up to the house. In the shower she washes dirt from her feet and elbows; a fragment of air-weight paper dislodges from her tangled hair and swirls down the drain. With hair still wet, Ellie crawls into her bed and draws the blanket tight around her like a shell. Exhausted, she slides her legs up to her chest and coils her body against the cold.
The Eunuch in the Harem
From The Sydney Review, 23 August 1999
The Grass Cadillac
By Frank Harmer
Porlock Press, 96pp, $22
Reviewed by Peter Crawley
Reading The Grass Cadillac is a unique experience. It is the first book of poems I have ever read which does not include a single line of poetry. The collection marks the literary debut of Queensland writer Frank Harmer, a name I spent a good half-hour trying to rearrange into an anagram of Ern Malley, so sure was I that some trick was being played on me. But even Ern, I suspect, would not have tried to palm these poems off to an editor, no matter how gullible. To say that the verses in this substantial volume approach mediocrity would be a compliment. Mediocrity does not figure even on the horizon of this book, though ignorance looms large. Harmer has no idea about what alliteration or onomatopoeia are, and I suspect he thinks that a metaphor is someone who fights bulls.
As an example, let us turn for a moment (though this is being overgenerous with our time) to the first poem in the book, ‘The Melting Clock.’ The title is apparently an allusion to Dali, and the poem an elegy to a dead dog, or a love letter to a married woman, I can’t decide which. But then, neither could Harmer. The first line is ‘Th’e ni’g’’ht cas’’cades wh’’en she’s aw’’ay / cuck’old, empo’wer ti’ll da’y’s da’wn.’
This reads like a poem generated by computer, though surely a computer would do a better job. For some reason most of the poems are punctuated in the above manner, with swarms of apostrophes hovering like flies over the dead verse.
Whilst there is nothing that resembles anything so coherent as a ‘theme’ in The Grass Cadillac, the ‘poet’ himself appears regularly, every two or three pages, like a dog marking its territory. Sometimes he is in the first person, sometimes the second, and sometimes in the third, as ‘Harmer.’ Unfortunately these three people together do not add up to half a writer.
If the reader can progress past the first twelve poems there is some respite to be had in ‘To My Coy Wife,’ at thirteen pages the longest poem in the book, and thankfully free of apostrophes. The 608 lines of this epic begin, ‘I am comforted by your sock / that I carry into the twilight of luckbeams / held next to my philtrums’ and grinds on in the same way, with little rhyme and no reason, reaching its zenith with ‘I am filled with hope / that I may dry your tears of semen / so that we may grind as one / labia to labia / in search of the magnificent rainbow of love.’
I will not weary the reader with any more of Harmer’s work, though it is tempting to offer a line or two from the accurately titled ‘Shitlines’ or a particularly rancid image from ‘The Belly of the Dead Baby.’ After I had finished reading the collection, I considered not writing a review at all, in order to spare a new poet embarrassment. But Harmer is obviously proud of his work and eager to show it off, in the same way a newly toilet-trained child is proud and eager to show off the contents of its potty.
A great writer once said that criticising a poem was like attacking a butterfly with a bazooka. That may be so, but when the poem is not a butterfly, but a cockroach, then I believe that the critic is justified in the attack. If, as scientists believe, cockroaches can survive a nuclear bomb, then Mr Harmer’s poems will survive the winter of this review. I can only hope that they may be driven into the dark, under the floorboards, where they belong.
The most attractive image in The Grass Cadillac is the photograph which adorns the front cover. The caption on the dust jacket informs me that the bookish-looking man is Frank Harmer himself, and the beautiful woman beside him his wife. If that is so, then I can only congratulate Mr Harmer on his luck and advise him that he would be better to concentrate on creating the patter of tiny feet, instead of iambic ones.
*
From The Sydney Review, 6 November 2001
The Dog and the Lamp-post
By Frank Harmer
Joseph Grand Publishing, 204pp, $35
Reviewed by Peter Crawley
[The following review was written one month ago, two weeks prior to the events which occurred at the Newcastle Literary Festival, at a reading of Emma Harmer’s poetry. I would like to thank the many readers who sent me get-well cards, and a number of my colleagues who came to visit me in the hospital to sign the cast on my leg. I would also like to thank Emma Harmer for her many visits whilst I was convalescing, and her apologising to me on her husband’s behalf. I will not comment upon the night in question here, as the police are currently preparing a number of charges against Frank Harmer. My only regret is that the debut of a most promising poet was all but ruined by drunken, thuggish behaviour. Regarding the below review – which, I would like to stress, predates the vicious assault upon me – not one word has been changed or added.]
I am one of those readers who like to write my name and the date on the inside of books. I underline striking passages and jot comments in the margins. As a critic, such notes often form the backbone of a review. After finishing Frank Harmer’s collection of twelve stories, I idly flipped through the pages to see what I had written, and could find only one comment, on page forty-five. ‘No tree should have died for this.’ This review is an appendix to that note.
Readers may remember Harmer from a collection of poetry published two years ago, which was reviewed in these pages. Harmer is evidently one of those pathetic species of writers who read their notices. The title of his collection, and the longest story therein, The Dog and the Lamp-post, is taken from a comment by Christopher Hampton. ‘Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.’ It will come as no surprise to all four of the people who endured The Grass Cadillac that this image of Hampton’s is the only memorable one on the book. Philosophers have long been telling us that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite length of time will eventually reproduce Shakespeare’s plays. This I am prepared to concede. However, I cannot accept that an infinite number of Frank Harmers in the same situation would ever come up with an original line.
Harmer, admittedly, is better suited to the bludgeon of prose than the rapier of poetry, even if the only wounds he inflicts are on himself. His stories follow loners and losers, men often burdened with literary ambition, but without the talent to pursue it. In ‘The Reader of Books,’ for example, a man reads a novel aloud to his dying father. In what should be an interesting twist, it turns out that the father has Alzheimer’s, and the same two pages of the book are read every night. In the hands of another, this might have been a moving piece. But Harmer could rob even a suicide note of its pathos. His characters obliterate the distinction E.M. Forster made between flat and round. Harmer’s characters are square: little boxes half full of dull adjectives.
In ‘The Papercut,’ one of the less boring stories, a man (Harmer’s main characters are always men) cuts himself with his wife’s Dear John letter. Again, an interesting premise is utterly squandered with uninvolving characters and flat prose. Harmer does not understand that the short story is a glancing form. His stories stare and writers who stare give us the same sense of discomfort as people who stare. Of the three stories ‘The Last Night on Earth,’ ‘Rusty’s Funeral’ and ‘What ... What ... What Do You Mean? Exactly?’ very little needs to be said. They are a mixture of carved-up Carver and hemmed-in Hemingway.
The longest story, ‘The Dog and the Lamp-post,’ is a thinly disguised diatribe against literary critics, and one critic in particular. The main character, Paul Rawley, is a reviewer for a Sydney newspaper. He is described as having thick, square glasses, a sparse grey beard, and a round face ‘like a bulldog chewing a wasp.’ (Here I would direct the reader’s attention to my photograph at the top of the page.) Rawley, an impotent drunk ‘who looked like he enjoyed the smell of his own farts,’ is tormented by the fact that he is merely a critic, and not a ‘true writer.’ It is this jealousy that causes him to attempt to ruin the career of a flowering literary g
enius, Ray Charmer. Eventually (C)Harmer confronts (C)Rawley with a gun, and forces the critic to feed on the review, literally eating his own words. To say this disturbing fantasy is the best story in the collection is not to say much. At least Harmer’s obvious hatred of critics (and myself in particular) brings the characters lurching to some kind of half-life, and I must admit it was entertaining to see myself caricatured, in the same way it is entertaining, for a moment, to see a child’s drawing of oneself. But just as a child’s drawing is disposable, so is Harmer’s story.
The last three stories in the collection, ‘I’m Not Alone,’ ‘The Web of Blood’ and ‘With the Dead,’ see the writer take a turn into horror. This is a genre that all too easily descends into the juvenile, and the stories here are no exception, though perhaps juvenile is the wrong word for such violent, misogynistic tales. The sadistic climax of ‘I’m Not Alone’ does not invoke uneasiness or chills, as the best ghost story does, but mere disgust. By the close of ‘With the Dead’ one begins to worry about Frank Harmer. His writing has by then begun to resemble that of a mental patient, scrawling his sordid fantasies in excrement on the walls of his padded cell.
It may be some consolation to Harmer that the very few copies of his book that are sold will undoubtedly remain in mint condition. I cannot imagine them ever becoming dog-eared. Once the reader loses his place, there is no desire to get it back. Many of my fellow critics say the novel is dead. If Frank Harmer ever writes one, then it surely will be.
*
From The Sydney Review, 29 December 2002
Ariel’s Daughter
By Emma Harmer
McGonnigal-Marzials, 16pp, $15
Reviewed by Peter Crawley
Books of the Year #4
The announcement of this year’s shortlist for the Alexander Poetry Prize caused something of a stir among the Sydney literati when, beside worthy works by David Malouf and Les Murray, there appeared the little-known name of Emma Harmer and her slim volume, Ariel’s Daughter. I was one of three judges of the award and can recall clearly the moment I read her first poem. It struck me like a revelation. Though she eventually lost the prize to Murray, I find that it is Harmer’s poems that I enjoy more on re-reading, and wonder if we judges made the right decision after all.