Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  In the next volume, A Man in Love, Knausgaard takes us through 528 pages of how such a son becomes not only a father, but the house-husband-father who does the childcare while his wife works. Early in this volume, there are pages on the humiliation of taking a toddler to a rhythm-time class, the only man, lusting after the woman playing the guitar and putting on the awful tapes for the children to bounce to – another electrifying scene of the cross-currents of desire and shame. There is page after page of domestic tedium, the scraps and irritations of a marriage, the moments of connection that seem few in comparison. He’s tough on himself, true, but he’s tough on his wife, very, when she falls short, which of course she does, how could she not? And all the while the question is simmering of how he’s ever going to get to his desk with all this going on, the difficulty that has for so long been the fate of the woman as writer, getting up at four in the morning – that ‘still dark hour before the baby’s cry’, Sylvia Plath called it. And here is Knausgaard giving us hundreds of pages on the frustrations of not getting to the books he would be writing if he weren’t in the supermarket aisle with a stroller! I read it in another hungry gulp, and all the time with a growing unease. Min Kamp, the series is called in Norwegian, a title that takes it much closer to Mein Kampf than the anodyne English title, My Struggle. The publisher was against the title, but Knausgaard prevailed, certain it captured ‘the intensity of his personal and artistic endeavour’. Okay, we all struggle, and I suppose a man should be applauded for taking on the domestic, though there’s something galling about a man becoming an international sensation for writing the fine detail of family life and its constraints on his writing. Reverse the genders and it’s not exactly new; I’ll spare you the list of the bad reviews, going back for more than a century, suffered by women for doing just that. Lily Briscoe had good reason to fear the reaction of men if she let her feminist views become known; Virginia Woolf removed the word from the final draft of To the Lighthouse.47 Knausgaard is not taken to task for being too personal, or complaining, or kicking against his nature; he’s called the Norwegian Proust. Well. In interviews he’s said that he wrote My Struggle as a way out of a writer’s block. Sickened by the surfeit of fiction, all those DVD box sets, he turned to his own life for a subject as an antidote to the hard work and poor results of his own labours with fiction. ‘My writing became more and more minimalist,’ he told the Observer. ‘In the end I didn’t write at all. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite?’ After years of paring everything down, he reversed his method to see what would happen if he put in more; more and more. And here we have it: My Struggle over six volumes and many thousands of words.

  The editor of the Paris Review, Lorin Stein, has said that by creating a narrator ‘who is a real person and is in charge of the story’, Knausgaard has ‘solved a big problem of the contemporary novel’. Has memoir pushed all the way through its formal constraints to rival fiction? Write autobiography, Virginia Woolf asked, and call it fiction? No, for her that was not the way; but the lines were clearer then, the rules, and maybe also the ethics. Read as a novel, the portrayal of Knausgaard’s wife, his children, his father, his mother-in-law, have the freedom of characters. But what if we know that they are not? Feminists have criticised Knausgaard’s portrayal of people, particularly his wife and ex-wife, who are not only alive – you can google them – but living their own struggle, which, from their perspective, doubtless makes his look rather different. His birth family no longer speaks to him, which is not surprising given that one in ten of his countrymen have bought his books – only slightly more than the proportion of Australians who bought Fifty Shades of Grey at its crazy heights. And spare a thought for Suzanne, who came from the town where tourists now go on Knausgaard tours. And what about his children?

  ‘It’s my nightmare,’ he said in an interview with the Guardian in London, ‘and one day I expect it will come true. I have documented their parents’ inner life and that could be problematic for my daughters and my son when they become teenagers. Maybe I shouldn’t have written about us but I felt I had to. I just hope there’s more to us than this.’ When it came to writing My Struggle, he said in another interview, ‘I was kind of autistic.’48

  What is the pact of love? Of family? Of friendship? Bad luck if there’s a writer in the mix. Many of us do it, and I’m in no position to speak; here I am doing it right now. ‘Don’t write about this,’ Helen and I used to say in mid-story over the table at the house on the corner. We’d laugh, make a joke of it, and meet each other’s eye; we were serious. Sometimes a detail or moment would make it onto the page, more or less disguised, and years later I breached a line that wasn’t articulated, but I knew was there, and she was angry, hurt, and it was some time before we were at ease again, our boats nudging up to each other once more. And when I’ve found myself on someone else’s page, I’ve felt the stab of betrayal, no matter how well I was disguised, even if I shouldn’t, given what I’ve done myself. In such matters we are nothing if not contradictory and inconsistent. As the years have gone by and I’ve got older, with each passing year valuing family and friends, that ground of my life, I look back on this younger self unsurprised at the upsets, the fallings out, the repair work I had to do. Friendship does not rest on a pact of intimacy; its spontaneity, its depth, its radiance depends on the unspoken as much as the agreed. We should not have to say: don’t write about it, as Helen and I did – and as two writer-characters do in a David Lodge novel before they get into bed at a conference.

  When I wrote Poppy, I could – and did – look back to The Golden Notebook, in which Doris Lessing broke through the ‘dilemma’ and ‘unease’ a woman felt about writing of ‘petty personal problems’, by which, of course, was meant the petty personal problems that women have. She came ‘to recognise that nothing is personal in the sense that it is uniquely your own’.49 The personal is political was the slogan when we were young, us next-wave feminists, picking up our pens in the rooms of our own. I was in an honourable tradition, I thought, and I was on the other side of the world. I didn’t forsee the consequences when I pressed ahead at my desk in this antipodean country where so many English had reinvented themselves. Not a reinvention exactly in my case, more a reimagination, a line of engagement with a private history, a zone of play, and I stepped right into it. I didn’t think about how Poppy would be read by the family in England; but news travels and so did books, even in the days before the internet. My mother’s father’s third wife, Elky, took me to task. I liked her and always visited when I was England. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, she said, you should keep quiet. She’d loved my Tory grandfather and knew he was not the stock character old-style blimp of a father I’d drawn. She was right; I hadn’t thought to talk to her about him before I wrote the book. Did I think she’d congratulate me now? I tried to explain: Doris Lessing, the history of the memoir, the importance of making the personal political, and so forth.

  ‘He was a literary device,’ I said.

  ‘Then write a novel,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it is a novel, sort of,’ I said. ‘I changed the names.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Well, it protects you.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t, not from the people who know who you are, and who knew your grandfather. They know well enough. The name isn’t even a fig leaf.’

  ‘I say in the acknowledgements that nothing should be taken literally.’

  She wasn’t having it. ‘He used to stand up for you when Patrick scolded you for the stories you told. You were a good storyteller, he’d say, you probably got it from him, like Katie.’ By Katie she meant Katie Mitchell, my cousin. She was a toddler when I left England so I barely know her, but I see her occasionally and follow her work as a theatre director, and among the many plays of hers I’ve seen was her excellent adaptation of The Waves at the National Theatre. Martha and I went together, and afterwards when we walked along the river to a small bar behind W
aterloo, we were whooping with pleasure. Martha did a little jig looking across the river towards the Embankment and the Temple where Patrick, her grandfather, had worked. Katie, being on Poppy’s side of the family, certainly didn’t get whatever it was that produced that version of The Waves from the Medds. They were very earnest, Elky said. But your grandfather could get Patrick laughing. They were marvellous, his stories.

  I don’t remember my grandfather’s stories, only the scolds, and Poppy’s word for mine: embroidery. Write memoir and call it fiction? Or write fiction and call it memoir? With Knausgaard, have the two become one? And if they have, does it matter? And if it matters, to whom? To us? To his readers? To his family? It’s a story people want to read, so maybe I have my nose too tight against the windowpane of history to see clearly. What is the bigger story? Can there be a bigger story when nothing happens outside the confines of his own thoughts? For all its fascination, My Struggle is the personal stripped of the political. There’s a narcissism at the heart of this indeed somewhat autistic, page-turning memoir that puts him at the centre of the entire six volumes, and keeps him there for three thousand pages.

  Is this the memoir for a neo-con age?

  Karl Ove Knausgaard and Walter White; are these the fathers of the neo-con age?

  When, in Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama asks his grandmother if she has anything left from his father or his grandfather, she gives him ‘a rust colored book the size of a passport, along with a few papers of different colors, stapled together and chewed at an angle along one side’. The ‘rust colored book’ was his grandfather’s domestic servant’s pocket register. The stack of letters were from his father, addressed to American universities asking for application forms and information regarding scholarships. ‘This was it,’ Obama thought to himself. ‘My inheritance.’ He was at the rural compound where his grandmother still lived, on the plot of land where both his grandfather and father are buried under the same ‘pile of rocks’. Obama weeps there, alone in the dark. Having pieced together their stories, he contemplates the inheritance of fear as each successive generation sets out into a world unknown to the last. He imagines his way into the confusion of both men as his father left the place that gave him life, yet must have seemed obsolete when the offer from Hawaii arrived. There’s no shame, he muses, ‘in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was no shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets.’50 And the paragraph segues into the ruminations of the man who will become the American president, the political being who knows how to weave complex cloth from the threads of the personal. Which might be why there was such hope across the world when he was elected, and such disappointment now.

  I was in Papua New Guinea in November 2008, the month of Obama’s election. When I arrived at the village in the fjords of Cape Nelson, where I had been going for several years and still go now, there was a larger than usual crowd waiting to greet the dinghy. They were calling out, I thought, for me, a ripple of pride at receiving such a welcome – but no, it was Obama! Obama! they were calling. Had I brought Time magazine, they asked, as I usually did – the only time I buy it – and fortunately I had, several copies. Though I was indeed welcomed, it was Obama they wanted to know about and talk about. He is president for us, for us here in PNG, one of the elders said, as the old women clucked over the photos of Michelle and the children. I had Dreams from My Father for the school teacher, who read from it to the men of the village over the coming evenings. I felt rather the same, the sweep of hope that was surely more than political, an impossible projection, a magnifying glass beyond all others. He offered us the hope, the glimmer of possibility, a new form of authority, a moral compass to serve our crazy, upside-down lives. He was the one who said to us, Yes, maybe there is a way we can move forward together, find a new form of authority. ‘The new president … doesn’t just speak for his people,’ Zadie Smith said at the New York Public Library in December that year. ‘He can speak them. It is a disorienting talent in a president, we’re so unused to it.’51 How could he not disappoint? What does it say about our world that in his memoir he could see so clearly the role of ‘men’, of ‘governments’, of ‘western ideology’ and interests on the poverty and inequality he knew from Chicago and from Kenya, and yet in power he could do so little to counter exactly those forces, their ‘messy histories’? Now when I go to the village there is no mention of him. The loggers are still nearby in Collingwood Bay, the government is still corrupt, high-school education is still beyond the reach of their children.

  A Dangerous Road

  10

  On the morning of 1 March 2004, I was on a plane from Brisbane to Port Moresby. A window seat on the right-hand side as we flew north over the reef and ocean – turquoise, green, blue on blue – New Guinea coming into view, a shape against the skyline slowly revealing its mountains. The plane turned left, as it had all those years ago, and tracked along the coast towards Moresby. There it was, the dream landscape, known and also not. Were the mountains steeper? More jagged? Or was the angle of the sun lighting the ridges? Cliffs dropping into the water, small curving bays, tracks and villages, rusty tin roofs under the palms, occasional water tanks. The plane turned again, coming down to the runway in a valley with round hills. Yes, the hills of memory, and behind them the mountains.

  Green. In memory it is burned dry, earth colours, a landscape of heat.

  ‘Green,’ I said to David in the seat beside me. ‘I don’t remember it green.’

  ‘It’s the end of the wet,’ David said.

  Ah. A memory from thirty years ago, the sudden thump of rain, the crash of it on the tin roof, and afterwards the ditches beside the roads running with water. But green? No, no memory of green. Steamy heat, yes, the air, the edge of lime and sweat and smoke, tattooed faces, tall hair, babies on hips, the crowded street outside the terminal.

  Yes, we were there.

  I was travelling with two Australian men I barely knew. The one who’d invited me was David Baker, an imposing man with a moustache from another century. He was the then director of the no-longer-existing New Guinea Gallery in Sydney’s Surry Hills. He’d made his money in advertising; he’d been a co-founder of the company Schofield Sherbon Baker, which had among its credits the ‘It’s Time’ campaign that had swept Whitlam into power. I was newly arrived in Australia in 1972, and it was only later, in retrospect, that I understood the roars from the election party at the ANU college where I was living, a bystander out of place in a college where most of the students were fresh from school, while I, alone, was fresh from marriage and four years in Papua New Guinea.

  Thirty-one years later, sometime towards the end of 2003, I had a phone call from Murray. Do you still want to go back to PNG? he asked. Want, I said. I must. I had a research grant to write about that place, that time leading into Independence; I’d been in the libraries, I’d spoken to people who’d been there then; I’d been lent manuscripts, diaries, copies of the student newspaper; the room where I worked had become my own small research library. It told me a lot, but it didn’t take me back. I’d met Papua New Guinean writers and historians in Sydney for their research, and occasionally seen old friends from the university when they were down on government or diplomatic business. I was well ready to return. But how? And to do what, exactly? Did I need to go? I was asked – a form of concern from people who knew of PNG only through bad stories in the press. I wasn’t fool enough to think there were no dangers, but for me it was a point of principle. Hadn’t R. H. Tawney said that a historian – and by extension a writer like me – needs strong boots? That was a more empirical age, and though the idea of walking in the footsteps
fell from fashion in the theorised 1980s and 1990s, I hold to it still, even as I concede that the boots we wear and the roads we must walk can be of the imagination as much as, possibly even more than, of tarmac and mud. It’s not as if I thought there was some sort of unvarnished reality waiting to be seen, I wasn’t that naïve – the fresh flower plucked from the vase of artificial; these days is it not more likely that the artificial is taken for the real? Even so, not going back to PNG was emphatically not an option.

  But how to go, and with whom, and where? The bad stories were all too real: car-jackings, hold-ups, rapes; guns and raskol gangs. I met a woman whose biologist husband had been killed at a roadblock; she’d been a young woman at the time, a new wife. She went back some years later to do postgraduate research in criminology. She found her way into the gang that had killed her husband, and lived with them in the settlements of Port Moresby; she adopted a child orphaned in another killing. He was about eight when I met him, with her, here in Sydney. And nothing happened? I asked. No rape, no violence? She shook her head. How did you manage that? She stared them down, she said. Melanesian men, like men everywhere, can turn nasty when alienated and angry. True, she had a protector, but there’s a softness too, she said, especially in those who were raised in a village; an empathy remains somewhere, underneath. She found it. The danger will become greater, she said, when the anger and the poverty becomes entrenched, generation by generation, with no subsoil of the village.