For all October and into November I’d venture out to see friends, or exhibitions, or movies, a semblance of life going on, and each time I’d return to a house cast in grief and a remorse made worse if I let myself feel the release that came creeping in with this death. So there I was reading the young and conversing with the dead, when one afternoon Robert Dessaix rang from Hobart where he lives. I told him about that last conversation with Jeremy and said to him that we should always be careful how we spoke to each other in case one of us was dead the next morning. Oh, no, he said. Think of the sentimental and pious nonsense we’d talk, none of our usual grit; it’d be as fake as those pearls you don’t like. And when I said, here I was, at this late age, still tangled in those questions I’d been asking for years, about love and writing and independence, about memoir and its limits, questions I’d thought I’d got somewhere with, but clearly hadn’t, he reminded me of Rilke. Live the question, he said. There are no answers. All we can do is live the question.
I put down the phone, went to the shelves and found Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and there it was in a letter written in 1903 from Worpswede in northern Germany – where I’d been, incidentally, with Jeremy on the trail of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker. ‘Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart,’ Rilke wrote, ‘and try to love the questions themselves … The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.’88 Now. Yes, now. Even now.
Thank you, Robert. That phone call was an act of friendship, and after it I let up on myself, and slowly remorse loosened its grasp. Looked at from another angle, the very end, the death itself, I came to see, was as good a death as one could hope for any of us. Is it so bad to say it was a release – for him, and for me? Sorrow, yes that will last, but also a sense of completion; a tentative opening out. In my tiny courtyard, the vines were sending out vigorous spring shoots.
December came, and with it the arrival in Sydney of my family: Jane and Nigel, Amy and her husband and two small boys on a summer break from wintry England, Tom for the ten brief days he could get off from work, and of course Martha. If there was any doubt where life lay, and the future, I had only to look around me. The house filled up with the sound of small boys running. For Christmas we were all in Helen’s garden: tables arranged in a large square, umbrellas to shade us, food contributed by everyone, plates and dishes carried up the hill, fish and prawns on the barbecue, cakes made by Jane. Both Helen’s sons were home, Simon from Los Angeles and Nic from London. He’d had the previous Christmas, for which Martha had flown home, in Yorkshire at Jane and Nigel’s house – another strand in the weaving of that day. Nic and Tom both work in architecture, like Stephen who, with his partner Matt, was also there at the table. And so was Max, a friend who’s known me since before I was forty, and is now also a friend of Helen’s. Even with everyone wearing those idiot paper hats that come out of crackers, for me, having left England so young and unformed, it was a powerful occasion, as if a pattern long in the making was drawing the threads of my life together in one place, at one time.
And so 2014 drew towards its close, that strange year, the now of this book, which I shall end by reeling back a few weeks to a warm December day, a house at the top of a hill above a small beach on the South Coast of New South Wales. The house is surrounded by a wall on three sides, enclosing discrete living spaces. On the fourth side it is open to the spotted gums, and through them is the shine of water. Two small boys stand looking down to the beach, they have new UV protective swimmers on, ready. We have just arrived, Amy, Gav and their boys fresh off the plane; we’ve chosen the rooms where we’ll sleep; the car is unpacked. One of the boys gives a little leap. Look, he says, pointing through the trees. The other runs to his mother. Now? he asks. Soon, she says. And soon, yes, they are running ahead of us, down the hill through the trees. The undergrowth has been cleared, there’s a carpet of eucalypt bark, no threat of snakes. The boys run across the sand, up to the water and stop. It’s a small beach, a horseshoe-shaped cove with bush and rocky cliffs on either side. Because of its protected shape, the beach is usually calm, though on this day there are small waves. There is no one on the beach but us. The small boys are excited, and they’re cautious. They haven’t seen water quite like this. Their aunt, Martha, takes off her t-shirt and dives into the water. Look at Martha! the little one says. Then Amy, who first swam at this beach when she was only a few years older than her firstborn, does the same; she dives under, comes back to the boys, puts out her hands; Martha does too. Soon they are all in, their father as well, the boys holding on, not wanting to let go, running back onto the sand. They run to one end of this short beach, then to the other; they investigate the rocks, some flat, some tilted, waiting to be climbed. They climb, they step into a rocky pool, they get caught by a wave, and the next time they run into the water they are more confident. One kicks off towards his grandfather, who is standing in the water up to his waist. The other in his floaties throws himself alongside.
I stand on the beach beside my sister Jane. Look at them, we say, and it’s not just the pleasure of seeing two London boys in the bright southern air, or that the journey has been safely made, gathering us together on this beach just over the headland from the house and the beach where we’d brought the girls and Tom when he was as small and round as the younger one. Are we in Australia? Tom would ask back then, and now it is for the next generation to marvel at the gift of travel.
And then Jane says, or maybe I do, She could have been here. We mean Poppy, our mother, who had she not died at fifty-nine would have been just ninety, the same age as Patrick’s sister Betty, still going strong in England. The day will come when we will stop saying this, maybe this is the last year, for there will come a time when even Poppy would have been too old to make the journey. As we stand there watching the children, two generations of them absorbed in their moment, we are filled with memory and present both, as if the generations going back are there with us, and Jeremy too, who’d loved this beach, and Patrick who’d brought his watercolours here; all of them gathered in with us, on this day, in December 2014.
That evening Sam, the elder boy, draws a map of where we are. He draws the path winding down to the beach; he draws the trees, and the rocks. He draws the table where we sit when the day loses its lustre, the ocean a gleam of silver through dark trees. He draws the stars above our heads. There, he says. This is where we are.
How young it starts, that need to know where we are, and where we are going. And how long it lasts.
Notes
1 The book I was writing, commissioned by a small publisher, never eventuated. A version of the essay was published as part of the catalogue for Janet Laurence, After Eden, at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2012. The quotation can be found on p. 45. A copy of it can be found on my website: www.drusillamodjeska.com/downloads/DrusillaModjeska-TheGreenInGlass.pdf
2 Sophie Watson, Inner Cities (ed. Drusilla Modjeska), Penguin, Melbourne, 1989, p. 280.
3 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, first published 1933, Virago, London, 2004, p. 344. The gangrenous wound appears on p. 187; the dress on p. 206.
4 Testament of Youth, p. 413.
5 Testament of Youth, p. 585.
6 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, first published 1927, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p. 94.
7 Virginia Woolf, Diary, Vol. 3, 5 September 1925 (ed. Anne Oliver Bell), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, London, 1980, p. 39.
8 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996, p. 477, fn 13.
9 Virginia Woolf’s dates are 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941; Poppy’s were 13 November 1924 – 16 January 1984.
10 Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier, first published 1918, Virago, London, 1980, p. 187.
11 Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1987, p. 88.
12 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, p. 628; Vera Brittain’s introduction, p. xxv.
13 Alison Clark, ‘Unconscious Ch
oice: Why writers and therapists do what they do’, paper given to Sydney psychoanalytic interest group POPIG on 1 October 2014.
14 Portrait of Louise Bourgeois with Fillette, 1968, by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982. www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/the-heroic-louise-bourgeois6-4-10_detail.asp?picnum=1
15 Interview with Cecilia Blomberg, 16 October 1998. Quoted in Frances Morris and Marie-Laure Bernadec (eds), Louise Bourgeois, Tate Publishing, London, 2007.
16 First published in 1938. I read the subsequent revised and expanded edition, which was published as Primitivism in Modern Art, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1986.
17 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, first published 1962, Harper Perennial, New York, 1999, p. xiv.
18 Hazel Rowley, Tête-à-Tête, Vintage, Sydney, 2007, p. xiii.
19 Christina Stead, The Beauties and Furies, first published 1936, Virago Press, London, 1982, p. 159; Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead, Heinemann, Sydney, 1993, pp. vii-ix.
20 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, pp. 111−2.
21 Sophie Watson, ‘Social Spatial Connections’, Inner Cities, pp. 9−10.
22 Hazel Rowley, Tête-à-Tête, p. 156.
23 Tête-à-Tête, p. 249. Hazel explains Sartre’s temporary moral code on p. 246. Man is not responsible for the ‘situation’ in which he finds himself, though he is free in the response he makes. The problem comes when the other sticks to him and won’t accept his views of freedom. ‘What do you do if you are Sartre and you find yourself persecuted by the Other? You resort to a temporary moral code! That way, you wriggle out of the situation, and the huge moral edifice you have constructed remains intact.’ She footnotes this (in a chapter called, incidentally, Exiles at Home, the title I gave to my book published in 1980, a circularity I like) to a memoir, Croquis de Mémoire by Jean Cau.
24 Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead, p. ix.
25 There is a portrait of him in the National Portrait Gallery, and Amy’s son Sam is named for him.
26 Virginia Woolf, Diary, Vol. 3, p. 273; December 1929.
27 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Mothers’, London Review of Books, 19 June 2014.
28 Adrienne Rich, ‘Vesuvius at Home,’ Parnassus, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1976.
29 Lee has an excellent chapter on Virginia Woolf’s ‘madness’ which was a good deal more complicated than the point I make here about the conditions women suffered as psychiatric patients. Anyone interested in this aspect of Woolf would be well advised to start with this chapter of Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, pp. 175−200.
30 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 91.
31 Frances Morris and Marie-Laure Bernadec (eds), Louise Bourgeois, p. 295.
32 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, first published 1995, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2008, p. 320.
33 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 56.
34 Virginia Woolf, p. 68.
35 Statements from an interview with Donald Kuspit, 1988. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Louise Bourgeois: Deconstruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998, p. 157.
36 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Mothers’, p. 22. This is an excellent article, reviewing several books and bringing together recent research and thinking about ‘mothers’. I have drawn from it in thinking about this chapter.
37 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 207.
38 Quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 482.
39 Philip Roth, Patrimony, Vintage, New York, 1991, pp. 162; 217−8.
40 Fathers, Granta, The Magazine of New Writing, 104, London, 2008; my essay, ‘The Death of the Good Father’ was published in The Monthly, September 2009. www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/september/1274335721/drusilla-modjeska/death-good-father
41 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, p. 539.
42 Quoted in Hermione Lee, ‘Father and Son: Philip and Edmund Gosse’, Body Parts, Essays in Life-Writing, Chatto & Windus, London, 2005, p. 100.
43 Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, (ed. and introduction James Hepburn), first published 1907, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974. The quotations are all taken from Chapter 5.
44 Siri Hustvedt, ‘My Father/Myself’, Living, Thinking, Looking, Picador, New York, 2012.
45 Sharon Olds, ‘His Terror’, The Father: Poems, Knopf, New York, 1992, p. 12.
46 Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? Hamish Hamilton, New York, 2014, pp. 210, 211.
47 The line removed from the draft of To the Lighthouse includes these words: ‘she could not bear to be called, as she might have been called, had she come out with her views as a feminist’. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 479.
48 Knausgaard has, of course, done many interviews; the quotations in this paragraph are taken from the Observer, 2 March 2014, the New York Times, 21 May 2014, Independent, London, 7 July 2014. The comment by Lorin Stein appears in the New York Times profile listed here.
49 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, p. xviii.
50 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, pp. 427, 429.
51 Zadie Smith, ‘Speaking in Tongues,’ New York Public Library, December 2008; New York Review of Books, 26 February 2009.
52 Paul Ham begins Kokoda, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2004 with this story.
53 Public Motor Vehicle.
54 Should anyone be interested in how the cloth and the dyes are made, there is a photo essay, mostly of shots taken on that visit in 2004, in The Wisdom of the Mountain, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009.
55 Judith Ryan, ‘Ömie nioge: Skin of Now’, catalogue essay, The Wisdom of the Mountain. Nicholas Thomas, the Director of Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, calls the women of Ömie ‘the most brilliant living exponents’ of a great world art that once stretched across the Pacific from New Guinea to Hawaii. See www.seamfund.org
56 Quoted in Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand, Wiley, Sydney, 2009, p. 82.
57 ‘The Fabric of Wisdom’, The Wisdom of the Mountain, Also available at www.drusillamodjeska.com/other-writing/
58 A Century of Women Artists: 1840s–1940s, Deutscher Fine Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1993. The self-portrait is now held in the Art Gallery of South Australia, a gift from Stella Bowen’s niece, Mrs Suzanne Brookman.
59 Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky’s Lunch, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1999, p. 111.
60 The Sock Knitter can be seen at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/OA18.1960/
61 This seminal text was first given as a lecture in Hawaii in 1993. It was published in expanded form in the essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’ along with responses in Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, 1993.
62 The diaries of Mike Monsell-Davis are now held in the ANU archive.
63 Tok Pisin is the name given to the language once called Pidgin.
64 Martin Luther King Jr., ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’. It can be found at www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm
65 Bob Connolly, Making Black Harvest, ABC Books, Sydney, 2005, p. 279. Black Harvest is the third in a trilogy of films shot in the Highlands. First Contact is the story of the Leahy brothers gold prospecting into regions of the Highlands not previously contacted. Joe Leahy’s Neighbours traces this next-generation Leahy and his relations with the Gangia people with whom he goes into a coffee plantation business that doesn’t live up to expectations. Black Harvest traces the story into the war that erupts with the collapse of the coffee price.
66 This challenge is well articulated in all its complexity by, for instance, Regis Stella in ‘PNG in the New Millennium: Some Troubled Homecomings’, in David Kavanamur, Charles Yala and Quinton Clements, Building a Nation in Papua New Guinea: Views of the Post-Independence Generation, Pandanus Books, Canberra, 2003. For an Australian perspective, see, for instance, Ben Scott, Reimagining PNG: Culture, Democracy and Australia’s Role, Lowy Institute, Sy
dney, 2005.
67 Jo Chandler, ‘Manus in the Balance’, The Monthly, February 2015, pp 34–39. Written after visiting Manus, this is a very good introduction to the island, its history and the impact of the detention centre.
68 You can see some of this footage at www.ngv.vic.gov.au/multimedia/wisdom-of-the-mountain-songs-1/
69 Regis Tove Stella, Imagining the Other, Pacific Islands Monograph Series 20, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2007. Highly recommended to anyone interested in a critical analysis by a fine PNG critic of outsider fiction of the Pacific.
70 Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life, first published 1941, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1999, p. 104.
71 ‘Childless by Choice’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 December 2012, www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/childless-by-choice-20121130-2a25u
Second Half First Page 29