Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop

by Amy Witting

  AMY WITTING was the pen name of Joan Austral Fraser, born on 26 January 1918 in the inner-Sydney suburb of Annandale. After attending Fort Street Girls’ High School she studied arts at the University of Sydney.

  She married Les Levick, a teacher, in 1948 and they had a son. Witting spent her working life teaching, but began writing seriously while recovering from tuberculosis in the 1950s.

  Two stories appeared in the New Yorker in the mid-1960s, leading to The Visit (1977), an acclaimed novel about small-town life in New South Wales. Two years later Witting completed her masterpiece, I for Isobel, which was rejected by publishers troubled by its depiction of a mother tormenting her child.

  When I for Isobel was eventually published, in 1989, it became a bestseller. Witting was lauded for the power and acuity of her portrait of the artist as a young woman. In 1993 she won the Patrick White Award.

  Witting published prolifically in her final decade. After two more novels, her Collected Poems appeared in 1998 and her collected stories, Faces and Voices, in 2000.

  Between these volumes came Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, the sequel to I for Isobel. Both Isobel novels were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award; the latter was the 2000 Age Book of the Year.

  Amy Witting died in 2001, weeks before her novel After Cynthia was published and while she was in the early stages of writing the third Isobel book. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia and a street in Canberra bears her name.

  MARIA TAKOLANDER is the author of a collection of short stories, The Double, as well as three books of poetry and a work of literary criticism. Her poems have appeared in annual best-of anthologies since 2005. Maria is a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Geelong and is currently working on a novel, Transit.

  ALSO BY AMY WITTING

  The Visit

  I for Isobel

  Marriages (stories)

  A Change in the Lighting

  In and Out the Window (stories)

  Maria’s War

  Faces and Voices (stories)

  After Cynthia

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Amy Witting 1999

  Introduction copyright © Maria Takolander 2015

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Penguin Books Australia 1999

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2015

  Extracts from John Donne’s ‘A Feaver’ appear on pages 163 and 211, extracts from Gerald Manley Hopkins’ ‘Heaven-Haven’ (Poems, 1918) appear on pages 171 and 173, and an extract from Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Juliet’ (Complete Verse, 1954) appears on page 212.

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922182715

  Ebook ISBN: 9781925095647

  Author: Witting, Amy, 1918–2001.

  Title: Isobel on the way to the corner shop / by Amy Witting ; introduced by Maria Takolander.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Walking Wounded

  by Maria Takolander

  Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop

  Prologue

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  The Walking Wounded

  by Maria Takolander

  ‘THE world is full of walking wounded.’ This is how Amy Witting accounted for the breakthrough success of her bestselling 1989 novel, I for Isobel. That book—republished as a Text Classic in 2014—introduces us to Isobel Callaghan, the victim of an abusive mother. It begins with the child Isobel masochistically anticipating her birthday, knowing that her mother will once again withhold gifts. It ends with Isobel as a young adult, resolving to forge an independent life for herself as a writer.

  I for Isobel, as Witting recognised, resonated with readers familiar with the wounds of childhood, wounds that often endure unseen into adulthood, wounds that can be secretly undressed—and redressed—in the private infirmary of reading. I was one of those readers. When I first encountered the novel, as a young adult, I was stunned by Witting’s insight. As is often the case with great books, I felt as if the writer had discovered my secrets, though I also knew that she was securely on my side.

  If I initially avoided Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, the sequel to I for Isobel published in 1999, it was because I felt a cowardly—and misplaced—sense of trepidation. While Witting’s insights are fierce, her writing is always humane. Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop is as devastating and as enriching as its predecessor.

  In the second Isobel novel our protagonist still finds refuge in reading and has achieved some success as a writer. Yet she is troubled by poverty, hunger, isolation and, moreover, what she describes as the ‘dead country’ in her heart: ‘not a matter to brood on.’ Upon trying to write a romantic scene and confronting writer’s block, she must admit her tragic inexperience in love. Her identity has been defined by her mother’s hatred.

  Among a group of writers in the pub, Isobel comes close to losing her cultivated façade of invulnerability and self-sufficiency.

  ‘If you knew what it was like to be mad,’ said a loud, angry voice that brought sudden silence. ‘If you knew what it was like, not being able to say, “I am I.” Being taken over, that’s it. The other, the secret thing using your mouth to speak through.’

  ‘I say, calm down,’ said a voice beside her.

  She knew then that it was herself speaking but she didn’t care. Let them find out. What joy, what marvellous relief it was to say the words.

  ‘It’s no help to set your teeth and fight it. It’s smarter than you. Bigger and stronger. And it’s everything you hate. But you’re there. That’s what they don’t see, that you’re there. You’re watching and you can’t do anything. A fly on the wall, that’s what you are.’

  Soon after, Isobel attempts a journey from her writer’s garret, a shabby attic in a Sydney boarding house, to the corner shop. On the way she experiences a breakdown and is transported to hospital, where she is diagnosed with tuberculosis and institutionalised for treatment.

  Far from being alarmed, Isobel is relieved to ‘have all horrors assembled under the name of an illness, represented by a baby’s hand-print on her lung’. As the infant metaphor suggests, she remains afflicted by more than tuberculosis. Among the eccentric staff and patients of the sanatorium, Isobel finds treatment for both disease and childhood injury.

  It is impossible to believe that Amy Witting could write so powerfully about such matters without firsthand knowledge of them. She once said that she would rather ‘dive stark naked into a barrel of rattlesnakes’ than write her autobiography. However, we know that Witting spent five months in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Blue Mountains. And her literary obsessions suggest that she survived a traumatic childhood. In fact, she confessed that the Isobel novels w
ere autobiographical, that it was the ‘terrible truth of fiction’ which helped her ‘to conquer the truth of that situation’.

  Witting was fifty-nine when her first novel appeared, and most of her life’s work—which includes other novels, and short stories and poetry—was published when she was in her seventies. Before that, Witting worked as a teacher; she married and had a son. She may well have spent these years coping with the demands of the present and overcoming the damage of the past. ‘I really was a very disturbed person,’ she said late in her life. ‘I don’t like to look back on it.’

  Witting’s habit of using pseudonyms for her writing similarly communicates a desire to hide, although it also reveals an Isobel-like rebellious intelligence. Born Joan Austral Fraser in 1918, Witting published her first poem as a teenager under a pen name. As a student at the University of Sydney she hoaxed James McAuley with a mock avant-garde poem allegedly written by Sun-Setna—and this was before McAuley and Harold Stewart invented the infamous poet Ern Malley to hoax Max Harris.

  Witting also published a parodic work of short fiction that exposed the sexism of a pair of stories by Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding about the rape of an unconscious woman. ‘A Piece of the Puzzle Is Missing’, attributed to the androgynously named Chris Willoughby, gives that unconscious woman a voice.

  Her final pseudonym announces a commitment to policing the unconscious ideologies and behaviours not only of others, but also of herself. As a junior teacher in rural New South Wales, Witting worked for a sadistic headmistress named Amy Wicht, whom Witting surmised was inflicting suffering on others because of her own unacknowledged pain. Witting resolved that she would never be ‘unwitting’ in that way. This resolve is shared by Isobel, who learns in the sanatorium to self-consciously guard against her cruel past when interacting with fellow patients.

  Witting’s choice of pen name thus attests to her concern with morality—not in an abstract sense, but as it is enacted in our day-to-day behaviour. Morality is not a sentimental concept for Witting; neither is it given by religion. It is hard won.

  Individuality is another concern of Witting’s. I for Isobel highlights that interest in its very title. Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop continues the author’s exploration of social conformity, of how unconventionality is often feared and attacked. In an interview Witting referred to ‘the cage where you can neither sit nor stand nor lie’. Isobel rattles that cage by reading, despite others around her feeling threatened by this transgressively intellectual and individualistic activity.

  Kafka famously wrote that ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.’ It is unsurprising that Isobel reads The Metamorphosis in the sanatorium, for Witting is Kafkaesque in her savage commitment to shattering our illusions and exposing our vulnerabilities, in provoking us to question our complacent understanding of ourselves and our relationships.

  Despite its comparable tale of claustrophobic personal distress, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop is less like The Metamorphosis and more like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In that novel, Jane finds refuge in a mansion where she is haunted by the madness of the past, before finding peace. Witting’s novel, in which Isobel recovers from her terrible past in a grand sanatorium, is similarly uplifting in its conclusion. Witting does not want to destroy; like Brontë, she wants to recreate. The impetus for both women’s resurrection is love. It is a love stripped of romance and religion; it is love restored to the simple fact of its necessity and therefore its true potency.

  Ultimately Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop speaks even more urgently than its predecessor. The novel is compelling—a true page-turner—while maintaining the complexity we expect of great literature. It is a tragedy that Witting, whose writing has been acclaimed internationally yet remains undervalued in Australia, died before she completed the third and final Isobel book.

  An unconventional obituary in the Guardian described Witting as a ‘freak’, remarking on her ‘strange juxtaposition of a raw history with a playful, merciless, fastidious mind’. The same can be said of her unforgettable doppelgänger, Isobel Callaghan. ‘Freak’ is a term that Amy Witting might have embraced, given her empathy for the walking wounded, those individuals who are often given such labels and to whom Isobel so unforgettably speaks.

  Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop

  PROLOGUE

  CONCERNING LOVE

  AND PARANOIA

  ‘How can I write about love,’ Isobel asked herself, ‘when I don’t know the first thing about it?’

  She sat at the typewriter staring at the blank page where George should hours ago have made his delicate, sensitive approach to Anna.

  Since she had rolled that sheet into the machine, she had played a dozen games of patience, stared out from her attic window at the view of the houses across the street, eaten a baked bean sandwich, chewed a fingernail painfully down to the quick, keeping at bay the thought that the whole enterprise had been a mistake, that perhaps she couldn’t write at all.

  Two successful stories and a rave note from an editor and she was off. Living in an attic, how childish. Had she really supposed that three and a half flights of stairs would take her halfway up Parnassus?

  She would not get up from the typewriter. She could not give up, she must not fail. She had burnt her boats, thrown up her job…

  Now, don’t dodge.

  You told Mr Richard to fuck off.

  She had screamed at Mr Richard to fuck off. She had screamed in a rage, a flash of red lightning frightening to remember.

  I’m not mad, no, not mad. Frank always said that one day I would explode, and so I did. Told him to go and find something useful to do, instead of peering over my shoulder clucking like a bloody half-witted hen. Get the fuck off and let me get on with my work in peace, will you?

  He had fucked off, all right, and after a moment of shock and horror, so had she, cleared her desk in a frantic hurry and run, run all the way back to Glebe, bawling. Too ashamed to go back, ever. Run through the front door of the rooming house and up the stairs to her room without for the first time pausing to look for mail in her letter box, where Fenwick’s letter had been waiting to change her life.

  Fenwick’s praise had been warming, but it was no help to her now.

  ‘Oh, come on, George. There you are, in front of Anna, and you have to indicate a certain special interest. The thing exists, doesn’t it? At the least it’s a kind of pairing device. Not very reliable, in my opinion. But that’s beside the point.’

  It was not at all beside the point.

  This was the final resort. She would not budge from her chair until George had declared himself to Anna.

  ‘Oh, do come on, George. Spit it out. You can blush and stammer all you like, but get it said. You have plenty to say on other subjects. On politics, I can’t shut you up.’

  Nervous, articulate, vain, dyspeptic George was in trouble at the school where he taught History, suspect because of his regrettably left-wing opinions. A parent had complained to the headmaster about his indoctrination of his pupils.

  George had had plenty to say to the headmaster. Why couldn’t he speak his heart to Anna?

  What was love anyhow?

  Her own researches into the matter had been disastrous. One didn’t learn about love in one night stands.

  It puzzled her still that an activity which had such a long, extensively documented connection with human love, was regarded indeed as its expression, could be performed with such indifference to the partner and even with dislike and contempt.

  ‘You can just piss off now.’

  That had been an extreme example but not, she understood, an exception. At least the young man’s frankness had given her an opening also.

  ‘I thought I was doing you a favour. Is this how you react when someone does you a favour?’

  ‘You were ready enough.’

  ‘Well, yes. That’s the favour I was speaking of.’

  ‘Oh, thank you very much. Now
piss off.’

  She had dressed in silence. Sitting on the edge of the bed to pull on her stockings, she had expressed the idea she had been considering as she had stepped into pants and skirt.

  ‘Look at it this way. There’s a general tradition that sex is connected with…well, with friendly feelings. You seem to see it differently. I was just wondering why.’

  He had groaned, seized a clump of his hair in each fist and tugged.

  ‘A clever bitch. Just what I was needing!’

  ‘But that’s the point. What do you need? Apart, that is, from the physical thing?’

  ‘Nothing you’ve got.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about meeting your needs. I just wanted to know what they were. Matter of interest.’

  This polite inquiry had seemed to be a very satisfactory reprisal for his insults, though she had not meant it so. She had stooped to put on her shoes; she looked up to find him staring at her white-faced, in baffled fury.

  ‘Oh, get out!’

  She had gone taking with her the honours of war, but why had it been war in the first place?

  She could cope with the difficulties of promiscuous women—after all, she was one, had been one. The difficulties of promiscuous men were beyond her.

  One thing was established: one didn’t go looking for love in strange beds. She hadn’t found much physical pleasure there either. The whole procedure had been much overrated.

  So what was love?

  A truce? A temporary suspension of the normal state of hostility between the sexes? That was a bit savage. Shared personal fiction. She knew about that. She had been essential to Mr Richard’s personal fiction, which was that he was gainfully employed at Lingard Brothers, where it was Isobel’s duty to translate the German mail. Mr Richard’s share in the task was to select a letter, probably at random, since he knew no German, to commend it to Isobel’s attention as urgent, to disappear for five minutes or so into his cubbyhole, to dash out and ask her if she hadn’t finished it yet, then to stand behind her clucking, twitching and sighing, until the letter was finished and he could perform the important task of carrying it to Mr Walter, his elder brother and boss.