She felt cool and fulfilled as if now she could sing ‘Greensleeves’: but the moment had passed. She should have sung it when she had the chance. And that young unmarried spectacled girl who worked in the Civil Service was sleeping in the seat directly in front of her. Oh the aboriginal brilliance of this land, its shining bone-like moon, the bone of our common existence, the boomerang moon curved like a horn.
And they all dozed and the bus was silent. Soon they would be back in Canberra and Geoffrey would be waiting for her with the car, and the others would take buses or taxis. And Geoffrey would say
‘Everything all right?’ And she would be able to say to him that everything was all right except that . . .
Suddenly she said out of the silence to the four, ‘You must really come and visit. I mean it. We must make a date.’ But they didn’t believe her. So she must make them believe her, she must set a specific date. And into the world of the generals’ wives she must bring the harelipped Miss Cowan, the Wilsons from Glasgow, Miss Casey who had once taught pupils in Sydney, and also played the gambling machines. She must bring the wildness into the tame, the lame towards the healthy. She must not let Geoffrey overwhelm her. Nor the generals’ wives. She must not be stifled.
‘Let’s make it June the 5th,’ she said consulting her diary, in the dimness, by the light of that unutterably strange moon. ‘You must come then.’
And they didn’t believe her. And they didn’t answer.
‘June the 5th then,’ she said as she took her case from the rack. And the others were still in the bus gathering their possessions together as she ran out to meet Geoffrey who was waiting for her, stiff and military and young, holding Shirley by the hand.
‘How are you, old girl?’ he said. But she watched for a while till the other four got out and joined the queue for the taxis, and she waved to them and they waved back. And then she was in the car and still waving.
‘Your friends?’ said Geoffrey sarcastically as he steered the car away from the bus station. And she said in a very distinct voice,
‘Yes. They’re coming to see me on June the 5th. I hope you have nothing fixed that evening.’ Clutching her koala bear Shirley looked from her mother to her father.
‘I must be military too,’ thought Daphne. ‘I must fight with stiffness in order to allow the flowing to enter.’
And later that night as she lay gazing up into the imperialistic face of her husband she thought, ‘June the 5th it must be, will be.’ And it seemed to her that she must be like a Ned Kelly and fight it out and this time win, peering out from behind the green slim tree trunks. And on that day perhaps Miss Cowan would learn to speak.
The Travelling Poet
One autumn day he stopped at my door. He said he was on a sponsored walk to raise money for a boy who needed medical treatment in America. He was also a poet and as he travelled, he read his poems in pubs, halls. He sold copies of them to pay for his lodgings.
He sat in the living-room and took out a bag with some of the booklets that he had published at his own expense. There were also letters from prominent people: ‘Lord X thanks you for letting him see the enclosed but is sorry that he is not able to contribute to your appeal.’ ‘As you will understand Lady X has many demands on her resources and is sorry that she can only send two pounds at this time.’
His poems were bad. There was also a children’s story about a fox which was not much better. He found out that I was a poet and asked for my opinion. I was hypocritical as usual.
It turned out that he had been in prison and that was where he had begun to write. His father had been a crane driver; his mother had been an alcoholic. He himself had been a heavy drinker but had according to himself stopped.
‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘we were very poor. We used to beg for clothes. I have seen myself wearing girls’ clothes.’
Imagine that, I thought, girls’ clothes.
His wife had left him and gone to America.
‘I used to be quite violent when I was young but not any more. I was in prison a few times.’ This long journey to raise funds for the boy was in a way a rehabilitation for him.
He had cuttings and photographs from various local papers, with headlines such as the following: ‘Ex-Convict Raises Money for Charity Mission’. And so on. He was very proud of these cuttings, and of his letters on headed notepaper, from the aristocracy, from Members of Parliament. He had even sent a copy of his booklet to Ronald Reagan, to Mrs Thatcher. I thought he had an adamant vanity.
He left me a story about the fox to read at my leisure so that I could give him an opinion on it when he returned.
As he travelled northwards he phoned me every night.
‘I feel,’ he said, ‘as if you are interested, as if I’m in touch with home.’ He discovered the luminousness of landscapes (he himself had been brought up in the city). One night he slept in a barn and when he had asked for a clock to get him up in the morning the farmer had told him, ‘You have a clock. You wait.’ The clock turned out to be a cockerel. ‘Imagine that,’ he said. He was happy as a sandboy. Another time he saw a fawn crossing the road.
‘Tonight,’ he phoned, ‘I’m booked into the Caledonian Hotel. I shall pay for my room with some booklets of my poems.’ He had already raised the almost unbelievable sum of £2,000. ‘I ask for cheques so that I won’t be tempted to drink the money.’
He also said to me, ‘I mentioned your name to the landlady but she had never heard of you.’
Actually it bothered me a little that she had never heard of me. It also seemed to me that my visitor had become more dismissive of me, more sure of himself. After all he was not a very good poet, indeed not a poet at all.
Let me also say that I wished he had not come to the door. I had my own routine. I started writing at nine in the morning and finished at four. He had interrupted my routine and also put me in the position of being hypocritical about his poems. I had met people like him before. For instance, here is a story.
Another poet of approximately the same calibre as my visitor had accosted me once in Glasgow. He was unemployed, his wife had left him, he had smashed his car, his father was dying of a stroke, and his mother of cancer; he had been cut by a razor when he was a bouncer in a night club; he had been charged with sexual assault; he had fallen out of the window of a second storey flat after taking drugs. Now it might be considered that such a person might turn out to be a good poet but in fact his poems were very sentimental and didn’t reflect his life at all. Such is the unfairness of literature. What can you do for such people who have experienced the intransigence and randomness of the world and cannot make use of it?
My visitor disturbed me. I imagined him as I have said learning the luminousness of the world, coming across pheasants, foxes, deer; rising on frosty mornings among farm steadings; setting out in the dews of autumn; writing his poems (‘I have no difficulty at all: I can write four poems a day easy’); meeting people.
One night he phoned me and said that he was going to have an interview with the Duke of – . The local paper had asked to take a photograph of the two of them together.
Alcoholism is a terrible thing. I know a talented man who is in the entertainment world and who often does not turn up at concerts etc. because he has been inveigled into taking a drink. It was really quite noble that this ‘poet’ was taking his money in cheques so that he would not be tempted into using it to buy drink. Drily he toiled on, changing his poems and booklets into cheques, having as far as I could see nothing much of his own at all.
I can’t write. Isn’t that odd? Most days when I sit down at my desk I have no difficulty at all in writing something. But from the time that this poet called on me, I have written nothing, I have dried up. I think of him plodding along a dusty road, stopping at a hotel or a boarding house, negotiating with the sharp-eyed owner, paying for his keep with pamphlets, poems. What a quite extraordinary thing. Nevertheless I should have had nothing to do with him. And I am paying for it now.
This is the first time I’ve ever had writer’s block. What does it mean?
Maybe he won’t come back. He hasn’t phoned so often recently and when he does he sounds more independent, as if the two of us were equals.
Last night he phoned. He had run into another writer in a pub. This writer decorated the wall of his room with rejection slips. He didn’t think he was getting fair treatment because he was a Socialist. He dressed in a Wild West outfit. He was ‘quite a character’. ‘Listen,’ I nearly said to my visitor, ‘don’t be deceived by him. He is a bad writer. I can smell his amateurism a mile away. People like that always dress in an outré manner, they always say that they are not understood. Avoid him. Listen to me instead.’
I started writing when I was about eleven. I believe that routine, hard work is the most important thing in any art. I sit down at my desk every morning at nine. Without a routine all writers and artists are doomed. I have never been an alcoholic. Writing is my life: that must be the case with all artists.
I should have asked him how he had got involved in his walk to raise money for a boy who is dying and is to be sent to America where the ‘poet’s’ wife is. Maybe she left him because he didn’t make any money, because he insisted on taking part in such outlandish projects. On the other hand she might have left him when he was in prison. ‘They were very good to me in prison. It was there I met the man who illustrated my booklet. I had five hundred printed. Who is your publisher? Do you think you could interest him in my poems, my story about the fox?’
A startling statement he had made was, ‘This is all that I have left, my writing.’
When I was younger I actually used to taste the excitement of art. I remember days when myself and my current girlfriend would travel on a green tram in Aberdeen. Mornings were glorious. I used to shout out lines from Shakespearean plays in cemeteries, among the granite. ‘The great poet,’ I used to say, ‘is always on the frontier.’
Later I went back to Aberdeen and had the following fantasy. My earlier self met me on the street wearing a student’s cloak. He was with a group of his friends. They passed me in the hard yellow light laughing, and probably never even noticed me. Perhaps they thought of me as a prosperous fat bourgeois. My earlier self didn’t recognise me but I knew him. He was as cutting and supercilious as ever.
I don’t think my visitor will visit me on his way south. He hasn’t phoned for a week now. He is probably lost in admiration for his genuine artistic friend who is so daring. I feel sorry for him. Really he’s so innocent with all his talk of cockerels, barns, deer. I am sure he will have another copy of the story of the fox and not ask me for my opinion. Perhaps his companion has heard of me, dismisses me.
Once before my wife left me I saw a small knot of weasels, a mother weasel with her tiny family, crossing the road. They looked like notes in music.
Another thing I have discovered about myself, I hate the cold. And the rain.
Autumn is passing and he hasn’t come. I have heard nothing more of him. Perhaps he did after all use some of his money for drinking. Perhaps he has returned to prison. Perhaps he went berserk one night, was arrested. It is not easy to travel alone, and one’s wife to be in America. There is no such thing as goodness: aggression must out. The greater the creativity the greater the aggression if thwarted.
It is winter. There is snow on the ground, he certainly won’t come now. And I have not written anything for two months. I begin to write and I fail to continue. The reason my wife left me was that she said I didn’t speak enough to her, about ordinary things. As a matter of fact I found that I couldn’t speak about ordinary things: I would try to think of something to say but couldn’t.
Listen, let me tell you a story which I read in some book or other. There was a mathematician in Cambridge who knew that being over forty he could no longer do original work in his field. So he spent his time making up cricket teams to play against each other. One cricket team would have names beginning with B such as Beethoven, Brahms, Balzac. Another one would have names beginning with A such as Joan of Arc, Aristotle, Archimedes. One day he received a letter from India which contained a number of incomprehensible equations, and he threw the letter into the wastepaper basket. However in the afternoon he usually went for a walk with a friend of his (also a mathematician) and he told him about the letter and the equations. The result was that they retrieved them from the wastepaper basket. It turned out that they had been created by a young Indian genius who had never been taught orthodox mathematics. He was taken over to Cambridge and died young. It is said that his last words were, Did you notice that the number plate on the ambulance was a perfect cube?
Now I’m sure that man had no small talk.
Who in fact is the boy and what disease is he dying of? Maybe my visitor faked the whole business in order to make money. But no, I don’t think so: the story is true. He showed me a newspaper cutting which described the boy but I didn’t read it very carefully. I have difficulty with detail and especially with people’s names.
He must by now have collected £3,000 with his bad poetry. What an extraordinary thing.
Actually up until the very last moment I didn’t believe that my wife would leave me. I used to say to her, ‘You won’t find anyone else as interesting as me.’ She picked up her case and took a bus. And never said another word to me. I waited and waited but she never phoned. I tried to trace her but was unsuccessful. She was quite beautiful: she will find someone.
Actually she used to weep over stories on the TV. She would dab at her eyes or run to the bathroom. At first I didn’t realise what was happening.
Every night I gaze up the road before I lock the door. I am waiting for my poet but he never comes. He has become a mythological figure in my mind like the Wandering Jew. His bag is full of undrinkable cheques. His mouth is dry. He cannot afford the money for the phone. All the money that he collects he puts in his bag which swells out like a balloon. Maybe that’s it, he can’t afford to phone.
Or he has gone home.
Or his wife has come back to him.
Or he has shacked up with his Wild West friend.
Or he has become so stunned by the beauty of the Highlands that he will never leave them again.
And here I am making money out of his wanderings. By means of this story. Whereas he . . . I imagine the boy in a hospital in America. He is being watched over by doctors, surgeons. They are all looking at a clock. ‘Soon he will come with the money,’ they are saying to the boy. ‘You must trust him. Till then we can’t treat you.’ And he swims across the Atlantic with his bag of cheques. He fights waves, he pacifies the ocean with his bad poems. Out of the green water he coins green dollars. And the boy’s breathing becomes worse and worse and the doctor says, ‘He won’t be long now.’
It has begun to snow. He is perhaps out in the snow in the Highlands, perhaps at John O’Groats with his bag. The snow is a white prison round him: he can’t even take a nip of whisky. I feel sorry for him. He should come in out of the cold, he has done enough. He has had more courage than me. With his bad poems he has done more than I have with my good ones. I can see that. And he was just as poor as me.
My writer’s block has persisted. I think I am finished as a writer.
The snow is falling very gently. A ghost tree clasps the real tree like a bridegroom with a bride. They have had the worst winter in Florida in living memory.
What a sky of stars. And yet I see them as if I was a spectator. I’d better shut the door, he’ll never come, my muse in her girl’s dress will never come again. I shall have to take account of that.
I heard a story today about a villager. He has run away with a woman much younger than himself and left his wife. It is said that he was the last person anyone would have expected to have done anything like that. What does he hope to gain?
What energy, what a strange leap. Will there not come a time when he will make a third spring and then a fourth one? As if Romeo and Juliet were still alive . . .
The phone rang but it was a wrong number.
Imagine first of all surviving in girl’s clothes and then in bad poems.
I am sure that when the spring comes he will be happier. I can almost hear the ice breaking, the sound of running waters, the cry of the cockerel. The fox shakes itself out of its prison of snow. Meagre and thin. It laps at the fresh water. All around it is the snow with its white undamaged pages.
The Scream
The play lasted about an hour and took place in a small theatre off the High St in Edinburgh. The story of the play was not complicated. A prison had been burnt down in the night and there was an enquiry as to who had done it. The cast was as follows:
The Governor – an idealist who hated brutality.
The Governor’s wife – who supported her husband as an honourable man but was also sex-starved.
Two brutal guards – one tall and one small. They had ill-treated the prisoners, made them bend down and eat their own excrement. In the presence of the Governor, however, they always appeared reasonable and respectful, having only the welfare of the prisoners at heart!
There was a cleaner who appeared at times dim-witted but at other times could discuss Marx: a homosexual prisoner who was beaten up by the guards in a scene of great cruelty: the man who headed the enquiry who was an ex-communist, drank a great deal and was in love with his secretary, a not particularly good-looking girl of great idealism: and finally a boy who had left Cambridge and who found himself plunged into ‘real life’.
The audience liked the play. It started slowly and then built up to a claustrophobic denouement. But the enquiry didn’t discover who had burnt the prison down. The part of the homosexual was acted by Jeff Coates, a young actor from Cambridge. In the pivotal scene he was fitted up with electrodes while the two guards tortured him.
The Black Halo Page 52