The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  After a year or two of Mrs Bulpit’s increasingly distracted foster care, during which news arrives that Eirene’s mother has died in a bombing raid, there is a revolution in the children’s lives. Mrs Bulpit succumbs to cancer, and they are farmed out, Gilbert to a prosperous accountant, Eirene to the home of her mother’s sister Mrs Lockhart, where she has to fend off the groping hands of Mr Lockhart and fight for some vestige of privacy from the loutish Lockhart boys. From Gilbert she receives a single letter, in which he hopes wistfully that he and she can stay in touch. Though she broods on memories of their time together in the garden overhanging the sea, they have no further contact. The fragment ends in mid-1945, with victory in Europe and the prospect that the two children will be returned to their native countries.

  Greece and Australia constitute the opposing poles between which Eirene moves. Having just begun to get a feel for Greek politics and her parents’ position in Greek society (her father seems to have been a romantic leftist from an ‘old’, antimonarchist family), she must now navigate the very different Australian system, where she will be looked down on as a ‘reffo’ (refugee) and suspected, because of her dark skin, of being a ‘black’. At school, her precocious acquaintance with Racine and Goethe will count against her (anti-egalitarian, un-Australian).

  White has a fascination much like Gustave Flaubert’s with the horrors of bad taste, instances of which he records meticulously. ‘I love plastic flowers, don’t you?’ remarks the mother of one of Eirene’s classmates. ‘I think they’re more artistic than the real.’ Mrs Bulpit, with her racial animosities and her nostalgia for ‘the Old Country’, her secret drinking and her stomach-turning cooking, is a social type White pins down with Dickensian precision. Another type to come under scrutiny is the headmistress of an upmarket girls’ school, her spectacles ‘radiat[ing] the superior virtues of the pure-bred Anglo-Saxon upper class’, who interviews Eirene as a prospective student. Surprisingly, she accepts the little foreigner. Her motive becomes clearer when, later, she begins to caress the child suggestively.

  Other minor characters are brought to life in a quick phrase or two: a teacher whose laugh ‘sounds rubbery, sticky, like a tyre on a bumpy road’; a girl who, according to schoolyard gossip, ‘laid down with a GI in the scrub … and he gave her a packet of cigarettes. She said it was immense.’

  But the spiritual meanness of Australian society that White had anatomised in such earlier novels as Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Solid Mandala (1966) is not the real focus of his concern in The Hanging Garden. Even the grotesque Mrs Bulpit is allowed her relaxed moments. ‘I’m not all that gone on foreigners, but she’s a human being, isn’t she?’ she says of Eirene; generally she does her best for the two children under her care without understanding either one in the least.

  Several motifs that are sounded in the fragment hang in the air with little indication about how White meant to use them. One of these is the garden of the title, which seems destined to bear some symbolic weight but in the fragment is simply a place where the children go to get away from their keeper. Another is the shrunken head brought back from the Amazon by the father of a school friend of Eirene’s, which immediately enters her private world as a sacred talisman. But the most intriguing motif is the pneuma that Eirene remembers being spoken of on the island in the Cyclades where she spent a year with her father’s family. Pneuma, she tells Gilbert, cannot be explained in English. The truth is, she has only the vaguest of ideas herself. Pneuma is in fact one of the more mysterious forces in both ancient Greek and early Christian religion. Pneuma, issuing from deep in the earth, is what the oracle at Delphi inhales to give her the power of prophecy. In the New Testament pneuma is the wind that is also the breath of God:

  The wind [pneuma] blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit [pneuma].

  Similarly, Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit [pneuma].’

  Like the Panageia, the all-powerful mother goddess whom Eirene also recalls from her time on the island, pneuma belongs to the syncretic popular religion of rural Greece, fast vanishing in our day, a religion in which archaic elements survive embedded in Orthodox Christianity. White clearly intends pneuma to be more than a mere marker of Eirene’s Greek origins. Pneuma, Eirene obscurely feels, watches over Gilbert and her; White may well have intended it to foreshadow the breath or spirit that takes over the artist and speaks through him or her, and thereby hinted at what the future would hold for his two characters.

  In Greece, Eirene reflects, memories are ‘burnt into you’. Not so in Australia. In Australia there is no sense of mortality: ‘Australians are only born to live.’ At moments like these, Eirene becomes a mouthpiece for insights that do not realistically belong to an adolescent girl, however much possessed by pneuma. Whereas Eirene’s younger sensibility is represented in a mix of narrative modes, with interior monologue predominating, the narrative of her adolescence seems to confront White with troublesome technical difficulties. He makes her keep a diary, but then seems to be unsure whether her narration is identical with what she writes in the diary or whether it is some later, more mature elaboration of what she wrote there, or whether keeping a diary is simply girlish activity that has nothing to do with how her story is told. Of course we should not forget that what we are reading in The Hanging Garden is only a draft (according to Marr a second draft). But failure to find a plausible voice for the maturing Eirene may well be a sign that White was losing interest in the project as a whole.

  White had a deep attachment to Greece, principally through Manoly Lascaris, whom he met and fell in love with in Alexandria during the war, and with whom he came to share the rest of his life. White’s 1981 memoir Flaws in the Glass contains a lengthy record of their travels together in Greece. For a period, he writes, he was ‘in the grip of a passionate love affair, not so much with Greece as the idea of it’. At one time he and Lascaris thought of buying a house on Patmos. ‘Greece is one long despairing rage in those who understand her, worse for Manoly because she is his, as Australia is worse for me because of my responsibility.’ It is possible that through Gilbert (standing in for himself) and Eirene (standing in for Lascaris) he hoped, in The Hanging Garden, to explore more deeply feelings of despairing rage at a beloved country that has fallen into the hands of a brash, greedy, nouveau-riche class.

  White explores sexual feeling between the two refugee children without false delicacy. Gilbert fights against giving in to his feelings for ‘this dark snake of a girl’, yet as he masturbates her image comes unsummoned, ‘standing over him looking down, prissy lips pressed together … haunting him’. He is baffled by Eirene’s power over him. ‘She was nothing to him, another kid, a girl, a Greek …’ Yet when, years later, he writes his first letter to her, he calls the letter ‘a line from your fellow reffo’, as if to concede he has accepted their common destiny.

  Eirene’s feelings for Gilbert are more complex, and indeed constitute the heart of the fragment. While she is still prepubertal, sexual interest in him is at war with fastidious distaste for his clumsy boy self. She has a dream in which he tears off her clothes in the school toilet and discloses not a ‘flower ringed with fur’ but a ‘baby’s wrinkle’, to the jeers of the watching children. In other dreams, fragmentary memories crop up of witnessing her parents in a sexual embrace, of her mother’s flirtations with other men. In these dreams she figures as the excluded other, angry, helpless, the one who wants but is unwanted.

  Then as she reaches sexual maturity her feelings grow less confused. On their last night before they are separated, the two go to bed together and are intimate without having sex in the usual sense of the term. Eirene is able to feel quite motherly toward the sleeping boy. She will look back on him as ‘almost part of myself, the one I have shared secrets with, the pneuma [which] I could not explain, but which he must understand’.

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sp; At her new school Eirene is adopted by a fashionable classmate named Trish. Trish confides that what engage her most are money and social success. What of Eirene? ‘Love I think is what I’m most interested in,’ Eirene replies. Trish shrieks with laughter. ‘That’s not very ambitious Ireen you can have it any night of the week.’ Eirene is mortified; yet even so, she is sure she is on the right track. Love, but more specifically ‘transcendence’, is what she is ultimately after. Whatever transcendence stands for, it seems to have no grip in the Australian landscape; yet

  [I know] about it from experience almost in my cradle, anyway from stubbing my toes on Greek stones, from my face whipped by pine branches, from the smell of drying wax candles in old mouldy hill-side chapels … Mountain snow stained with Greek blood. And the pneuma floating above, like a blue cloud in a blue sky.

  Intimations such as these, hinting that she is in the world to transcend the world, mark Eirene as one of White’s elect, along with Voss and the four Riders in the Chariot and Waldo Brown in The Solid Mandala and Hurtle Duffield in The Vivisector: outsiders mocked by society yet doggedly occupied in their private quests for transcendence, or, as White more often calls it, the truth.

  New York Review of Books

  The Agony and the Ecstasy

  Nicolas Rothwell

  Franz Kafka woke abruptly at four a.m. on 11 August 1917. Something was wrong with his throat. There was saliva in his mouth: he couldn’t swallow it, it kept welling back up. He got out of bed and lit a lamp – then he realised it was blood, clotted blood. It filled his mouth, it was thick and salty on his tongue. He rushed over to the washstand: out it poured, deep red into the white bowl, for minutes on end. He looked up from where he stood. He stared out at the street, he saw the looming silhouette of the Prague Castle in the gleam of dawn. At last the flow faltered, then stopped. He lay back down on his bed, and slept. Some while later, his housekeeper, Ruzenka, came in to wake him and make breakfast. She saw the bloodied washstand at once. ‘Pane Doktore,’ she said, in Czech. ‘You don’t have long to go.’

  In a letter describing this episode, one of his life’s fulcrum events, Kafka runs through his reactions with great precision and great calm, as if those moments had marked a kind of liberation for him – and that morning serves as the hinge-point of a remarkable new biographic study by Reiner Stach, devoted not only to the author but to the surrounding circumstances of his life: a work that is at once complete and fragmentary, definitive and tentative, allusive and revelatory – in short, sublimely Kafkaesque, almost as if it had been dreamed into being by the benign ghost of the writer himself.

  From the day of his first pulmonary haemorrhage, Kafka’s fate was fixed. He viewed the tuberculosis that had made its home inside his lungs as a special presence, ‘an illness bestowed on me’. His thought swerved more and more towards the bare bones of things. He had already written the book for which he is best known today, that punishment fantasy The Trial – it lay in his desk in manuscript, unknown. In September, he made a decision to travel to the tiny village of Zurau in the Bohemian countryside to convalesce. While there, he wrote a letter to his long-suffering fiancee, Felice Bauer: its words were dark as night. There were two combatants at war inside him, he declared, and their confused war raged incessantly. The blood was not coming from his lung but from a stab delivered by one of these combatants:

  And now I am going to tell you a secret that I don’t even believe myself at the moment (although the darkness that falls about me in the distance at each attempt to work, or think, might possibly convince me), but really must be true: I will never be well again precisely because it is not the kind of tuberculosis that can be laid in a lounge chair and nursed back to health, but a weapon that continues to be of supreme necessity as long as I remain alive. And both cannot remain alive.

  It is thought and writing of this kind that dominates the movement of Stach’s narrative. Stach aims to write at Kafka’s level, to push through to his subject, to be worthy of him. The upshot is two volumes that have already been widely praised as definitive, as triumphs of the biographic art – a third, dealing with Kafka’s youth, was delayed in the vain hope that key archival sources would be released: it is due to be published at last, out of sequence, this year.

  By chance, Stach’s long, fine-grained, hyper-detailed account of Kafka’s last decade appeared in the same month as a very different portrait of the writer’s life: a slender sketch of his social and cultural background and the role that background plays in his best-known texts. It is the work of the distinguished Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, who was himself brought up in prewar Prague and has always felt a special closeness to Kafka and his words. The two books complement each other: they do much more than merely advance our appreciation of Kafka and his milieu. Previous biographies have presented him as inert, passive; these versions provide motives for his actions and his inaction, they make him flesh and blood. Stach provides us with the texture of Kafka’s experiences and the events surrounding him; Friedlander reads the writings with eagle eyes, attuned to the nuances and lurking clues in every phrase. Yet both biographers, inevitably, fall short in their attempts to catch and clarify Kafka’s elusive art. It is the sheer stuff of it that escapes them, the sudden jumps of insight and the transformations within it that stay concealed and veiled. Stach describes in detail the raw magma of Kafka’s mid-period writing – the so-called ‘octavo notebooks’ of 1916–17, each about eighty pages in length – a compact size, suitable for carrying around town in his breast pocket:

  A startling and confusing sight: long, short, and very brief entries, prose and dialogue, a couple of lines of poetry, dated and undated texts, normal handwriting randomly alternating with shorthand, a scattering of headings, entire pages crossed out, word-for-word repetitions, disjointed statements, fluid transitions and long dividing lines punctuated by doodles, mysterious names, an address, drafts of letters, a checklist of errands, torn out and mixed-up pages, a random slip of paper … everything looking as though he had spread his papers out all over the floor while writing.

  It is a jungle: drafts, feints and explorations – yet wherever the words of a tale or story emerge, they are clear, and set: ‘Precisely where the perfection is beyond any doubt, the creator of these texts seems quite sure of himself. The author as creator ex nihilo.’

  But those words set down, if studied closely, do at least lead back towards the life: and the life provides their fitting frame. With the deftest of touches, Stach succeeds in establishing a context for his hero – and he goes beyond the familial and professional worlds that previous biographers have seen as the sole key to Kafka’s work.

  His subject is a man recognisably under the influence of politics and world events: they filter into the novels and the shorter fictions in telling ways. Thus the darkest of Kafka’s published stories, In the Penal Colony, gains new resonance when seen in the atmospherics of its time and against the backdrop of the trench warfare under way on the eastern front. In much the same way, the death of Emperor Franz Josef and the impending demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire stand behind An Imperial Message, one of Kafka’s shortest and most haunting tales. Chapter by chapter, detail by detail, The Years of Insight binds the writer and the writing together – works that had seemed beyond life, inexplicable, take on a different kind of depth.

  Some preliminary conclusions can be drawn: a reassessment shimmers into view. For us, readers of these studies, the idea we have of Kafka changes: he can no longer be quite what he was made into by his first associates or by the coterie of admirers who saw the condition of modernity mirrored in his work, and paused to see little else.

  The course of Kafka’s literary career is well known thanks almost entirely to his closest friend and constant advocate, the ambitious Prague man of letters Max Brod. The two met while Kafka was still a student at the Charles University. He cut a striking figure: he was tall, elegantly dressed and handsome; he was also thin, reserved and pale. He was the only s
on of an inner-city Jewish family, assimilated, prosperous, without strong intellectual or literary leanings. At that point Brod was already on the road to making his own career in books and journalism: he drew Kafka out, encouraging him, promoting his fledgling efforts. It was Brod who placed Kafka’s first stories and introduced him to the editors who would publish him; Brod who was the chief confidant and first listener to Kafka’s readings of his painstakingly redrafted manuscripts; Brod, too, who eventually became Kafka’s literary executor and had responsibility for presenting the posthumous work.

  In this capacity, when sifting through Kafka’s papers after his death, Brod came across the following lapidary note, written on the cusp of his final illness:

  Dearest Max, my final request: Everything I leave behind in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters, from others and my own, sketches, and so forth, to be burned completely and unread, as well as all writings and sketches you or others may have, and ask for them in my name. If people choose not to give you letters, they should at least pledge to burn them themselves.

  Comprehensive instructions! Brod ignored them: that decision preserved The Trial and The Castle for the world, as well as the diaries and letters that seem increasingly to contain the molten core of Kafka’s genius.

  But inevitably, given Brod’s position, the Kafka that was offered to the world was his version: he edited the manuscripts and tidied them up, he made himself the canonical interpreter. Brod had fled from Nazi Europe to Palestine, and the account of Kafka he perfected had a romantic tonality about it. Kafka the unknown genius tormented by the demons of the twentieth century, overwhelmed by the horrors of regimented, bureaucratic life, shadowed by anti-Semitism, alienated, haunted. Such is the Kafka Brod opted to highlight – with much justification.