by Alex Miller
ALSO BY ALEX MILLER
Coal Creek
Autumn Laing
Lovesong
Landscape of Farewell
Prochownik’s Dream
Journey to the Stone Country
Conditions of Faith
The Sitters
The Ancestor Game
The Tivington Nott
Watching the Climbers on the Mountain
First published in 2015
Copyright © Alex Miller 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board.
Allen & Unwin
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Australia
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Email: [email protected]
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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
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ISBN 978 1 74331 357 2
eISBN 978 1 92526 854 6
Cover design by Lisa White
Cover photography: Diana Kakkar / www.trendbridged.com
For
Ross, Erin, Amelie and Adrienne
Kate and Mato
And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough.
Bertolt Brecht
Contents
Introduction
In the Blood
Ross and the Green Elfin
In My Mother’s Kitchen
Learning to Fly
Boys Wanted for Farms
My First Love
Excerpt from The Tivington Nott
Travels with My Green Man
Once Upon a Life
Excerpt from Watching the Climbers on the Mountain
How to Kill Wild Horses
Destiny’s Child
Living at Araluen
Excerpt from The Sitters
In the End it was Teaching Writing
The Last Sister of Charity
The Rule of the First Prelude
On Writing Landscape of Farewell
Excerpt from Landscape of Farewell
Australia Today
The Writer’s Secret
Speaking Terms
Impressions of China
Excerpt from The Ancestor Game
Chasing My Tale
The Wine Merchant of Aarhus
The Mask of Fiction
Excerpt from Conditions of Faith
The Inspiration Behind Lovesong
Excerpt from Lovesong
How I Came to Write Autumn Laing
Excerpt from Autumn Laing
Meanjin
Comrade Pawel
The Story’s Not Over Yet
Prophets of the Imagination
Excerpt from Journey to the Stone Country
Sweet Water
The Black Mirror
Excerpt from Prochownik’s Dream
A Circle of Kindred Spirits
Sophie’s Choice
The Mother of Coal Creek
Excerpt from Coal Creek
Teetering
Song of the Good Visa
Publication Details
Acknowledgements
Introduction
‘The goal of storytelling,’ Alex Miller has said, ‘is finally to account for one’s own story. It is through the poetics of my fiction that I have sought my personal truth.’ The Simplest Words, a collection of stories, excerpts, memoir, commentary and poetry, is Alex Miller’s first collection of occasional writings. His eleventh novel, Coal Creek, was published to wide critical acclaim in 2013. Alex is twice winner of Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, in 1993, for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier’s Awards. In 2011 he won this award for the second time with his novel Lovesong. In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. Following the publication of Autumn Laing he was awarded the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012. His latest novel, Coal Creek, won the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Alex is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a recipient of the Centenary Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. Alex is published internationally and his works have been widely translated.
Robert Dixon’s 2014 monograph Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time describes Alex’s novels as ‘immediately accessible . . . works of high literary seriousness—substantial, technically masterly and assured, intricately interconnected and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight’.
Stephanie Miller
Castlemaine 2015
In the Blood
My father and grandfather told stories every day of their lives, and my mother and grandmother had babies and offered a gentle resistance to the persistent story making of their men. But for my father a day without story was soup without salt, and he loved his salt lavishly. At nine years of age, when my young brother fell ill and I told him stories to save his life, I became my family’s storyteller.
As we gathered around the fire last thing in the evening, my father drew on his pipe and looked at me. ‘Have you got a story for us then, Alex?’
My mother touched his arm. ‘It’s already past their bedtime, Manny.’
My father looked into the fire and drew on his pipe. ‘Och, well, just a wee one then, boy.’
So I began my story, never knowing where it would take me or how it would end, nor how long it would be in the telling, my sisters and brother staring into the fire with my father, my mother pretending not to listen. ‘An old man was walking down a road one day when he came across a sack that had been thrown aside into the hedge …’ Who was not listening now?
When I was thirty-eight, I published a story and became a story writer as well as a storyteller. I telephoned my father to let him know.
‘You could always tell a story, lad,’ he said, neither his Glasgow accent nor his attitudes softened by the years. He was not impressed. Writing was not for him an advance on telling. For my father it was the company of the telling that cherished the spirit of story. But I’d slipped over onto the page and it was too late. I kept at it. And when I was fifty-two I published my first novel. I’m seventy-one now and still at it, closing on a draft of my ninth novel, Lovesong, and dreaming of Sophocles producing his masterpiece Oedipus at Colonus when he was eighty-nine—and loving it. It’s in the blood.
2008
Ross and the Green Elfin
My two sisters and I waited in the front room of our flat, crouched together by the dying embers of the coal fire, I in my pyjamas and the girls in their nightdresses. We were silent and fearful and we gazed into the embers of the fire. I have no memory of my mother c
rying out, but only that my father alone acted as the midwife of the occasion. It seemed to have come upon us suddenly. I had hardly known my mother to be expecting another child. I had thought we three were our entire family. My father came out of our parents’ bedroom and he stood over us and we looked up at him in great anxiety and perplexity. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows, his collarless shirt open at his neck, his bare chest gleaming with beads of sweat. As he stood looking down at us I saw a gentleness in his gaze that was mysterious and distant. I had never seen such a look in my father’s eyes before. He was like a stranger. Another man. A new man whose existence I had only dreamed of. I gazed with faint horror at the livid and disfiguring scars of his wound. He smiled and invited us softly, ‘Come and meet your wee brother.’
In the half-light of my parents’ bedroom my mother lay with the tiny baby in her arms, cradling it to her breast. Our father instructed us and in turn we each leaned over and kissed our new brother on his forehead. The magical translucence of his skin, so tender the lightest blow would surely dissolve him. Was he as yet quite with us, I wondered in astonishment, or was he the advance of himself, a promise of what the world might be, of what we humans might be before we are born, an image of unsettling perfection, his smell of that long-forgotten world from which he had come to us and from which we ourselves had come so long ago it was a distant and foreign country to us now and we had forgotten the language. Precious beyond reckoning by the ordinary values of our days, here was my brother. A gift I had not expected to receive.
I looked my questions into my mother’s beautiful dark eyes, and she smiled and looked down at him, her new son. After we had left the bedroom my father mixed a bucket of wet dross and built the smoking hummock behind the coals in the grate, then he sat in his armchair and lit his straight-stemmed pipe and filled the room with the sweet perfume of his tobacco. We three children waited for him, sitting silently on the hearthrug watching him. He said at last, ‘Your mother and I are calling him after my brother, your uncle Ross.’ We had never met our uncle Ross. He lived in Glasgow. We lived in South London.
Alex’s father, 1955
Two years later, when my brother fell ill and we thought he would die, I stayed with him in his darkened room and told him stories of the Green Elfin, a little being who struggled to meet the terrible challenges of existence. My precious brother recovered, and I was known thereafter in my family as the storyteller. It is where it began for me, this business of writing fiction. It has become my sacred country.
2008
In My Mother’s Kitchen
South London, July 1944. My mother handed me the tray with my sisters’ meals on it and picked up the tray with her own meal and mine. She stood looking around the kitchen. ‘I think we’ve got everything,’ she said. ‘I’ll go first.’ We went out the door and began making our way down the stairs. At the second landing the window was open. A black rocket with stumpy wings and a tail of bright orange fire was roaring towards us out of the grey sky. It was making a noise like a motorbike with a broken muffler. As we looked, the orange tail fire went out and there was silence. The black rocket sailed on towards me and my mother out of the grey sky for a thousand years, the whispering of the wind across its wings … My mother’s shout was a distant echo I still hear in my dreams.
We dropped the dinner and ran down the last two flights of stairs, taking them three at a time. At the bottom of the stairs we ran out through the covered way into the long lane leading to our garden and the air-raid shelter, where my older sister was looking after my little sister. Halfway along the path the earth heaved up under us as if a volcano was erupting beneath our feet. We stopped and stood on the path holding our breath. Then came the ear-splitting roar and at once the sky filled with smoke and ash and pieces of debris. The air was still alive with papery pieces of stuff floating down around us like theatrical snow or autumn leaves at the pantomime when my mother said, ‘The poor devils up the road have caught it. Go back to the kitchen, darling, and peel some more potatoes, will you? I’ll go and see how the girls are getting on.’
2012
Learning to Fly
John Aylward was my best friend. After school, in the twilight of a winter afternoon, we did not go home but walked in silence together to a bombed house in a neighbourhood more well-to-do than the neighbourhood in which we ourselves lived. We stood side by side on a hill of fallen masonry and bricks in the remains of the front room of the destroyed house. The room had been the parlour of a rich woman. We had passed her house often on our way to the woods. The filleted rooms of the upper storey hung over us, stone lintels askew and on the point of falling free from the bricks, the walls leaning, the mortar shattered; ceiling lathes stripped of plaster had become the bare ribs of the house, in silhouette above us against the purple depths of the evening sky. When the woman had been alive, before the German bomb killed her and destroyed her house, the curtains of her parlour had always remained closed, even on summer days. Now her secret room was open to the sky. Standing there together on the hillock of rubble, John Aylward and I were awed by the trespass of our errand. It was our intention to construct an aeroplane from the ruins of the dead woman’s house. Our aim embarrassed us with its grandeur, and we had not dared to speak of it to anyone for the certainty of being mocked. We were from the council estate and our caste knew nothing of flight, real or lyrical. Our silence spoke of our knowledge that if we failed there would be no appeal.
It was dark by the time we left the ruin, a bundle of lathes slung between us across our shoulders.
I had never seen John’s father sober and feared him. I don’t know whether John feared his father, but I imagine he did. We had never discussed it. We walked along the lamplit streets, empty of pedestrians and without cars in those days, our bundle of lathes forming a kind of spring between us and forcing us to maintain in our step a rhythm suited to the step of the other.
2012
Boys Wanted for Farms
Along the footpath in front of him the paving stones are black and shiny with the rain. He sees something, something dark and green plastered to the footpath by the rain. When he comes up to this green square, a memorial plaque, it might be, set in the paving stone commemorating some past tragedy, he stands and looks down at it, the rain going down the back of his neck. He mouths the words as he deciphers them: BOYS WANTED FOR FARMS. He repeats the four words aloud, his voice solemn and intent, as if he is deciphering a code, a message from some exotic bard, an inhabitant of the empty road, lilac bushes over the garden fence swaying and thrashing about. Cold in his shoulders. His fingers sore from the factory. He squats and lifts a corner of the small green square of paper and slowly peels it from the surface of the stone. He has come into possession of his answer. He walks on along the quiet street, past the school gates, to the corner. It is a message from the gods. His heart is joyful. He will never return to the floor of the factory. He will never again endure the long day from dark morning till dark evening among the sound and the fury of the machines and the terrible men, and never again will he witness their torture of the hunchback and their lewd obscenities.
2012
My First Love
When I was fifteen, I left school in South London and got a job as a farm labourer on Exmoor. Which sounds easy enough. It wasn’t.
My struggle at that time brings to my mind a cartoon I once saw in the New Yorker. The driver of a car has pulled into a garage and is asking directions from the pump attendant. A grid of freeways knits its way through the sky above them. Through a gap in the flyovers there is a view of a distant church steeple. The garage attendant is explaining to the driver: ‘You can’t get there from here.’
The teachers at my secondary modern school, whom I asked for help to get to Exmoor, gave me the garage attendant’s advice. I didn’t believe them, but I did discover that nobody where I was knew anyone who had ever been to where I wanted to go. It took persistence and twelve months of failure before I found my way fro
m the South London council estate where I’d grown up to a job as a labourer on a West Somerset farm.
The friends I left behind on the council estate when I went to Exmoor didn’t really know where I’d gone. I went off their screen. I had made my first cross-cultural journey. There was more than time and space involved. In a sense my teachers had been right when they’d advised me: ‘You can’t get there from here, Miller.’
So what was it that made me persist?
I was in love. We do crazy things when we’re in love. When we’re in love we think we’re different from other people. We get this idea that for special reasons that apply only to us we can do things that the other people around us can’t do. And we can. And we do. We don’t listen to advice from people who know the limitations better than we do, people with experience of the barriers whose opinions we would respect if we were sane.
I was obsessed. It was no good trying to tell me anything. So people were glad when I left. They were relieved to see me go. I’d already ceased to be one of them. I’d become an embarrassment to my friends and family. As if Exmoor were a married woman luring me into a dangerous liaison, my schoolteachers warned me to abandon my obsession. ‘Forget Exmoor, Miller. Get yourself a job where you belong, on a production line.’
But I was walking home from the factory in the black rain, being seduced by a vision of green fields and woodlands and pale heather stretching out beneath my feet in the sunlight. ‘What’s he smiling at?’ I was earning a reputation for being lunatic, a weirdo, an outsider. ‘Who does he think he is?’
In Australia, thirty years later, I wrote a novel based on the two years I spent working on Exmoor for Tiger Westall, the tenant farmer with a dangerous obsession for hunting wild red deer. The novel turned out to be a parable of the stranger, a meditation on the power the stranger has to negotiate a way into a settled community and to change the community forever. And the powerlessness of the community, despite its numerical superiority and assurance of belonging, to resist the changes the stranger brings. I couldn’t have written that novel if I hadn’t still been in love, with Morris and Tiger and Roly-Poly and the great black hunter Kabara and the wilderness of Exmoor and the mysterious old nott of Tivington.1 Without love I couldn’t have got to Exmoor in the fifties from Melbourne in the eighties.