by Alex Miller
Several years after I’d written the novel I revisited Exmoor for the first time since I was a boy. I was lucky I hadn’t gone back before I’d written the novel. There was nothing left. Thirty years of change had erased it all. Where Tiger’s farmhouse had been—an old stone building squatting in the groin of a lane—there was a self-service petrol station on a motorway. And they were all dead, the people I’d written about.
No one could even remember Tiger or Morris or Roly-Poly. Strangers had taken possession. There was silence and absence where I’d once ventured my little history. And while I was standing at the pump filling my hired Fiat Uno with petrol, I realised that, except for the absent pump attendant, the cartoon in the New Yorker had at last come true for me. I was in the middle of it. I could no longer get to Tiger’s place from where I was standing.
If I was so much in love with Exmoor, why did I leave? Why didn’t I stay and see out the changes? Because I fell in love with somewhere else.
First, before anything else, in the mute state, we’re a migrant species. First we set off on a journey. The journey of the story, however, is a different journey from the one we actually travel. For the story of our journey is always a fiction; it is always dealing with the past on the present’s terms. We tell the story in order to free ourselves from the past so that we can move on, not in order to recover the past, which is merely nostalgia.
Travelling, moving on, seeking the future, is what we do. The journey is our reason for living. Our storytelling is secondary to our journey. Storytelling eases the way. The journey is the thing. In other words, getting to places people believe we can’t get to from where we are. Which often makes us appear to be a bit obsessed with the transgression of boundaries.
I read a book when I was on Exmoor that began my love affair with Australia and made a migrant of me. It was a brown cloth-covered hardback with reproductions tipped into the text. The only photograph I remember clearly is of several stockmen lounging on the verandah of their quarters on a cattle station in the outback. The stockmen and the verandah are in black silhouette against the luminous sky, like a Matisse cut-out. The stockmen seem to be watching the horizon, which is an unhindered line.
The migrant’s dilemma reflects the general human dilemma: Freud’s discovery of the ambivalence of human emotions, that we can be in love with two opposing states at the same time. It’s no easier to be in love with two places than it is to be in love with two people. These things often end in pain and suffering and in love turning to hate and to permanent scars and guilt and accusations and counter-accusations, even in litigation and sometimes total disaster. Betrayal and treason are trying circumstances. We all know, in the conduct of our rational lives, that two loves are not better than one. We all know that it is easier not to be in love at all than to be in love with two people at the same time.
But what is knowing compared to loving?
Everyone on Exmoor whom I asked for directions to the Australian outback gave me the garage attendant’s advice. ‘You can’t get there from here.’ But you could. And I did.
The bus left at noon. Morris, the labourer with whom I’d been living for the past two years, and whom I loved because he was the kind of man I wanted to be when I grew up—his own man—had gone to the pub to pick up the beer for his card night. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back before the bus gets here,’ he had said.
Today his attempt to reassure me has the portentous ring of an epitaph. The bus was a couple of minutes early and Morris was a couple of minutes late.
He was coming out of the door of the pub as I sailed past in the bus. He was carrying a case of beer in both his hands, so he couldn’t wave. Our eyes met in the instant it took for the bus to go past. I know there was anguish in my gaze. I never saw him again, but I can still see the look in his eyes, a kind of guilty smile. It is unresolved. I find myself still reading that look. His anticipation of the beer and the cards later with his mates at the cottage. Was that it? Or did he really love me the way I loved him, with inexhaustible admiration?
Alex (left) and Morris Aplin, Exmoor, 1951
I’ve got two snapshots. One of him and one of me. We’re standing among the brussel sprouts in the garden at the back of his cottage. There’s a bit of snow on the ground. In the picture of me I’m wearing twill jodhpurs and leggings and boots and a tweed jacket and a cheese-cutter cap over one eye, a costume identical to the one he’s wearing in his picture. And I’ve adopted his pose. So I guess I took his photo first, then asked him to take mine. In other words, I’m not the original. But I am a near-perfect copy. Only I’m not my own man. Trying to be like him, and he was like no one but himself, had made me as unlike him as I could possibly be.
When I reached the cattle station on the Leichhardt River in the Gulf of Carpentaria, I found myself surrounded by the uneventful horizon line: the perfect line that had lured me all the way from Exmoor. The stockmen were all Maigudung clansmen, all thirty-five of them, all mounted, all with long black hair and beards and all with skin that was shining in the sun as if they had oiled themselves in preparation for my reception. They rode up to me out of a cloud of red dust and stared at me in silence; calm and relaxed and curious and arrogant in their possession of the situation, the confidence of their belonging. One of them, who later became my first Australian friend, challenged me to reveal myself. ‘If you’re really English, where’s your English saddle?’ But I wasn’t really English. It was more complicated than that.
He told me later, glancing at the horizon as he did so, that his ancestors had been living on this stretch of country forever. I’d arrived just as the end of his forever was beginning. Within a couple of years of my arrival, the equal pay judgment had given the lessees the excuse to exile Frank and the rest of the Maigudung from their land. It was the elaboration of one of those negotiated changes that strangers bring among a settled people, and which the settled people have no power to resist. Frank said nothing at the time. He only looked upon the sun and drank the morning air.
Two years later I left. Everyone left. The thing changed. Frank’s forever had come to an end. He stood in the dust on the station runway and waved to me as the plane lifted away. His arms weren’t weighed down with beer, as Morris’s had been, not yet anyway. And I didn’t see the look in his eyes. So I can’t see it now. I just see his last wave.
I’m still reading that wave. Years ago, before I’d learned that there is something immutable about the writing of fiction that will not admit of just any kind of lie, I thought I was going to write my reading of Frank Maigudung’s last wave. It was going to be a story about the dilemma of being in love with two places at the same time. But it wasn’t my story to tell. It was Frank’s story. The story of the Maigudung exile. And I could never tell the story of the Maigudung exile the way it had to be told. The way all stories have to be told, with the passionate ambivalence of those who have made the journey. Only for them is the spirit of truth and the spirit of love the same.
1995
1 A nott is a stag without antlers.
EXCERPT FROM
The Tivington Nott
Morris and his wife aren’t awake when I slip the latch on the back door and step out into the darkness. The moon is still bright enough over the oaks in Will’s wood to cast their shadows across the close-cropped turf of Old Ley. Everything’s sodden from the storm and the air is cold and still. I stand on the crest of the ridge and look down into the valley without a name that locals call the Black Valley, and I can see across a vast sweep of sleeping countryside all the way to the silvered waters of Bridgewater Bay and the outlet of the Doniford Stream. Everything is cool and clean! I can taste the air on my palate! There’s the sound of water trickling out of a pipe under the hedge next to me. I have to go. As I turn I startle a blackbird from its roost and it flies out, flat and fast across the field.
From fifty yards away the farm could be abandoned. Dead. Deserted. A settlement left over from another era. The big dark shadows of the catt
le shed, the barn, the stable and the house all joined together, their windows and doors facing inward to the yard. Blank walls to the world. Compact against storms and trouble, and against anything else that might come along. Expecting the worst. Their weathered grey featureless stone walls and their grey slate roofs not interested in anything outside. They don’t want to know about it. Keep out! Silent in the autumn moonlight. Been standing there since who knows when? The odd bulge of the disused bread-oven poking out into the road like the bum of a giant squatting in the end wall of the house.
I’ve got a good two hours of work to get through before daylight. Finisher and his mate Ashway hear me opening the road gate and they whinny softly. This is enough to start the cows moaning, even though they know it’s too early for them yet. I light the kerosene lamp in the stable and close the door behind me. The soft light reveals the cobbled floor and the ashen stall-trees, their wood polished to a deep honey gloss by the rubbing of generations of hunters and plough horses. It’s warm in here. The air rich with the acid smells of horse dander, piss, dung and meadow hay. Kabara is stationary in the shadows. Watching me. Making no welcome. The two geldings lean out and stretch for my hands, glad to see me.
The barn, Handycross Farm, Lydiard St Laurence, 1952
1989
Travels with My Green Man
I think dire need was my initial source of inspiration. When I was twelve or thirteen my young brother, who was around five at the time, was ill and had to be kept in a darkened room for a couple of weeks. I loved my brother and had seen his arrival in the world as a great gift. The gift of brotherhood. So while he was ill I stayed home from school and sat with him day after day. He lay there in the bed bored, motionless and suffering. I soon realised if I was to be of any help to him I’d better come up with something to distract him from his situation. So I invented a character who wasn’t confined to a darkened room as he was but was free to go off on grand adventures.
For a reason I don’t now recall I named this free-roaming adventurer the Green Elfin, but I do recall a dingy and mysterious pub not far from our house called the Green Man, and maybe that kind of place seemed to me even then a likely theatre for such dreaming. After my brother was recovered, the stories I’d told during his illness became known in our family as the Green Elfin Stories, as if they had an existence somewhere beyond my telling of them. I even had requests for more stories from my brother and other members of my family from time to time, but the dire need was no longer there and the inspiration was lacking.
Winifred Millar with (clockwise) Ruth, Alex, Kathy and Ross, c. 1946
From that time on, however, I did go along believing that I had the talent to be a storyteller if I ever had cause to draw upon it in dire need. This knowledge formed a kind of reservoir of confidence for me later, when I was wandering around the world on my own, and it often supported my morale through the years during which I was painfully aware of my cultural deprivation. There were bad times, when it seemed that there was nothing left but to tell myself a Green Elfin story, and by that means I more than once made my escape to a more congenial world than the one I was actually living in.
But you don’t have to love, or even to like, the person who inspires you. Brotherly love doesn’t have to come into it. The reality of a writer’s daily life is, after all, not inspiration but hard work. And more so even for a writer as highly charged with originality of style as was Louis-Ferdinand Celine than for most of the rest of us. Though the impression of effortlessness is, of course, always the aim of the writer. Like plumbing, the hard labour of writing must be concealed from the consumer. Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘Celine was so concerned with style that he could not let a sentence rest until he had assured himself that it would impress the reader as not written but spoken … and spoken spontaneously, without reflection.’ Spoken, in other words, under the mysterious influence of inspiration. An influence which, in the popular imagination, often seems to have more to do with magic and the spiritual, the inbreathing of the animus, than with simple hard work. We love nothing more than to be mystified, and in fiction the bare truth is boring.
But for me Celine’s sleight of hand of the seemingly effortless worked its magic. When I read his last novel, that astonishing blast of energy that is Rigadoon—completed in 1961 on the day of his death—I closed the book with the feeling that I’d just read something written at a single sitting under the influence of one enormous rush of inspiration. It was one of the best Green Elfin stories I’d ever read. It was also the impression of effortlessness, not the truth of the hard labour Vonnegut was to speak of, that convinced me I’d found a way to write my first novel, The Tivington Nott. The Tivington Nott was a story that required the galloping blood race of a hunt for a wild red stag on Exmoor. When I tried to write the book, however, energised and permissioned, as it were, by the example of Celine’s Rigadoon, I found the effect of a spontaneous and breathless advance could only be achieved by an almost infinite number of assiduous rewritings at the specific level of word and punctuation.
During that arduous period of writing and rewriting I learned that rhythm—the most complex of all our literary effects—held the key to my problem. I learned that in the rhythm of prose, as in music, every black mark on the page is critical to the effect of the trick you’re trying to pull. I learned that rhythm is the heartbeat of prose just as it is of music and poetry. Celine had achieved exactly the effect of spontaneity I needed, and in the heartbreaking effort to achieve that effect for myself I learned to write.
But each book demands its own solutions and the rhythm of one story will not do for all stories. We move on. And the new territory poses new challenges. It took me five years and numerous drafts to find how to write Conditions of Faith because I couldn’t see the key to writing about the intellectual and emotional development of a sensitive young woman during a period of little over a year without making the story introspective and stationary. The problem for me was that Conditions of Faith was inspired by my reading of my mother’s Paris journal for 1923, a time when my mother was a free-spirited young woman dreaming of her own future, long before she met my father or had any thoughts of having to look after me and my brother and two sisters.
My mother’s journal—which my brother sent me from England after my mother’s death—provided me with a magic keyhole view into her youthful interior life, but it didn’t give me any sense of a narrative. I had lived in Paris in the early seventies myself, and in the weeks and months after reading her journal I often found myself picturing my mother as a young woman occupying the sixth-floor flat I’d rented in rue Saint-Dominique back in the seventies. Inspiration in this case was not a sudden flash of understanding but was a gradual realisation over a period of a year or more that I had a character and a setting and that I wanted to write about them. What interested me about the situation was the interior life of the young woman, her passionate dreaming of an independent life for herself. A dream that I knew was not to be. Kurt Vonnegut (here he is again!) has said his own writing life was an attempt to realise his mother’s unrealised dreams for her after she was dead. So maybe Conditions of Faith was even more deeply a story about my mother than I realised. For my hero in that book, the young Australian woman Emily Stanton, finds a way to avoid the kind of stifling wifehood that locked my own mother into a destiny she had not dreamed for herself, and Emily reaches that free-spirited life my mother only dreamed of.
Although she was grief-stricken at the death of my father, after fifty years as his companion, my mother confided to me, ‘I feel a little guilty saying this, but now he’s gone I feel free.’ And maybe in that guilty confession of the old lady there was the whisper still of the voice of the young girl dreaming her dream of freedom in Paris. For I am beginning to see these days that as we get older we come to understand that we have not travelled as far from our early years as we thought we had. We think we buried certain things long ago and forever, including one or two of our youthful dreams, until time begin
s to dig them up again and presents us in old age with the consequences of our abandonment of them.
At such moments of grim realisation I take cover in Vonnegut’s favourite piece of advice to himself: ‘Don’t take it all so seriously.’ And so maybe it’s Kurt Vonnegut Jr, after all, who I have to thank for the inspiration to persist with the writing life, for certainly I do love the spirit of that man. But how to lay bare the threads of such a fine elusive thing as that without parting them? And if it is true, and Vonnegut has greatly inspired me, you won’t find it in my work. For inspiration has nothing to do with mimicry, but is a thing entirely of the spirit.
2003
Once Upon a Life
As a youth I went to work as a farm labourer on the edge of Exmoor in the wilds of West Somerset. I fell in love with the life of the country at once, getting up before dawn and working until the evening seven days a week. And when the hunt was meeting I rode second horse for my boss with the Devon and Somerset staghounds. The life was all magic to me.
A year later, when the magic had become my routine, a fine-looking horseman rode into the wintry field where I was digging turnip shells for the sheep. He stopped beside me, his beautiful horse excited and uneasy with my closeness, and he said hello. This was unusual. But he was an Australian, my first. He told me he had come to England with the dream of retiring to the life of an English hunting gentleman but had soon discovered he was out of place. This wasn’t the open society, he said, of the kind he’d left behind him in Australia, where anybody could decide to be whatever they fancied. On Exmoor the locals viewed him with distrust as an oddity and an outsider. I knew what he meant. I was an outsider there myself, and possibly his last resort for someone to chat to.