The connection between my fish pond of 1951 and the bubbling pots on the deck of the Pequod is not only that the pond and the fireplaces were both of brick. The pond and the boiling oil are connected by the fact that the bricks on the deck were laid especially for the purpose and later removed.
Two years after my family had moved from the house with the fish pond, a tradesman left behind in the backyard of the house where we then lived a small heap of bricks and some unused wet mortar. While the mortar was still wet I decided I would build a small fish pond on the lawn. I wanted to have green water plants and chubby red fish in my backyard again. But after I had assembled the first row of bricks for my pond, my father ordered me to stop.
The boiling that took place in the fish ponds on the Pequod was for the purpose of refining the substance that the narrator of Moby Dick calls mostly sperm.
I wrote earlier that I remembered a sentence apart from the first sentence of Moby Dick. As I have remembered it for twenty years and without consulting the text, the sentence is uttered by Captain Ahab to Mr Starbuck not long before the last chase begins. An unfamiliar smell has been wafted into the noses of the two men. In my memory, Captain Ahab does a turn about the deck in the manner of Long John Silver as drawn in Classic Comics, smells the strange smell, and says, ‘They are making hay in the meadows of the Andes, Mr Starbuck.’
I happen to have been born without a sense of smell. I can form no idea of the smell of hay being made. When I remember the words that I put into Captain Ahab’s mouth just then, I merely see long grass growing in a place such as I have seen in photographs of the altiplano of Bolivia. But because I know there is something about the grassy place that I can never experience, I look at it intently, as though I might be allowed to see more in the grass than a person would see who was able to smell it.
Because I have never experienced the smelling of a thing from a distance, I suppose that a person must always be in sight of what he gets wind of. Whenever I see Ahab and Starbuck with the smell of hay in their noses I see them as in sight of land. The two men stand on the deck of their toy boat. The two are alone by now. I see no other men doing pretend-tasks or hanging idly in the rigging. The sea around the toy boat is smooth and green. I can see from end to end of the green water. The world is smaller by far than I had supposed.
Somewhere in his writings, Robert Musil reminds us of how wrong we are to think of the individual self as the one unstable item within a firm world. The opposite is the case. The unstable world drifts like an island at the heart of each of us.
When I look intently at the ocean around the Pequod, the green water is the fish pond. At the edge of my vision I see a grassy hill. The world is a small place by now; Queensland and South America are the one grassy hill above the pond.
The red cow smells the water. She goes down from the meadows of hay towards the pool that keeps her alive.
(Verandah, vol. 2, 1987)
The Cursing of Ivan Veliki
When I was fourteen years old I made some notes for an epic poem that I hoped to write. The poem was to have the title ‘Ivan Veliki’, which was also the name of its hero. The setting of the poem was to be the steppes of Central Asia. I had found the word ‘Veliki’ in a racebook. My hero’s surname was actually the name of a mare, but the word brought to my mind an image of a young man striding through tall grass.
Ivan Veliki was the son of a lesser chieftain in one of the settled districts of the steppes. In the first canto of my poem, Ivan was to lead a small band of followers in search of a better life on the virgin lands to the east. Later cantos would describe the journey of the pioneers into the virgin lands, the founding of the new settlement, and Ivan’s courting the daughter of one of his loyal advisers.
So far, the mood of the poem would have been lyrical and hopeful. But now, in the fourth and fifth canto, an ominous undertone would be heard. Unseasonal weather or idleness among some of the men or attacks of roving bands would cause hardship in the settlement. Food would become short. Young malcontents would murmur against Ivan.
My hero, having taken counsel with himself, would set out alone on a journey. When I made my notes, I had not decided on where Ivan was going. Sometimes I thought of him as searching for a Shangri-la of the steppes: a mild valley where edible mosses and lichens grew in mid-winter. Sometimes I thought he intended living as a hermit in the farthest virgin lands until his followers came begging him to return to them.
While Ivan Veliki was on his solitary journey, a delegation would arrive at the new settlement. The delegation would have been sent by Ivan’s father. The old man had resented his son’s leaving home and suspected that Ivan was not yet fit to be a leader of men.
The members of the delegation would be somewhat rash in their judgement. They would hear a child complaining of hunger; they would glance through the doorways of storage tents; they would listen to the glib malcontents (whose leader was Ivan’s rival in love); and then they would hurry back across the steppes to Veliki Senior with a report that his son had failed as a pioneer.
When he had heard this news, the father would stride to a hillock at the edge of his settlement and would look across the miles of grass towards the virgin lands. He would raise an arm towards the sky. He would then utter part of the only line that I ever composed of all the lines and stanzas and cantos of my epic poem. The father of Ivan Veliki would shout at the sky:
‘Accursed be Ivan Veliki for the shame he has brought me.’
I thought at first that these words alone would make a line of poetry, but when I recited them under my breath they seemed to lack something. And so I added a further iambic foot to the words, thereby making what seemed a satisfying metrical whole:
‘Accursed be Ivan Veliki for the shame he has brought me,’ he said.
I composed this line while I was walking north-west along Haughton Road towards the railway station then named East Oakleigh but now named Huntingdale. The time was early afternoon, the season was spring, and the year was 1953. For the rest of that afternoon and for a few days afterwards I thought I had achieved what was my chief ambition at that time: I thought I had become a poet.
I thought at that time and for ten years afterwards that a poet was someone who saw in his or her mind strange sights and who then found words to describe those sights. The strange sights were of value because they brought on strange feelings – first in the poet and later in the persons reading the poem. The faculty that enabled the poet to see strange sights was the imagination. Ordinary persons – non-poets – lacked imagination and saw only what their eyes showed them. Poets saw beyond ordinary things. Poets saw the virgin lands beyond the settled districts.
A few days after I had composed the first line of my epic poem, I began to tire of it and to doubt whether I was a poet after all. This process began when I looked hard at the grass to the east of the hillock where Ivan’s father stood and shouted his curse. I saw that the grass of the steppes was the same grass that I had often seen on the vacant blocks of land along Haughton Road, East Oakleigh. I might have accepted this if I could have believed that the grass far away to the east of Veliki Senior – the grass of the virgin lands – was a strange sort of grass such as I had never seen with my eyes: a grass that I had imagined with my poet’s imagination. But when I looked hard at the grass of the virgin lands I saw that it was the same grass that I had often seen in the paddocks of the dairy farm belonging to my father’s father at The Cove, near Allansford, in south-western Victoria.
I wrote about thirty poems during the next ten years, but all of my poems irritated me when I read them. No line of my poetry brought to my mind anything but what I had already seen. At the age of twenty-three I began to write a novel. I regarded novels as inferior to poems. I thought of myself as a failed poet who had turned to prose because it was easier to write.
When I began my novel I still hoped to write about part of the strange territory that seemed to be lying all around me and just
out of my view. I was more confident, now that I no longer had to worry about rhymes and metre. I wrote for three hours every night for three months. Each night before I wrote, I drank beer for two hours. While I wrote, I sipped whisky and ice-water. I hoped that the alcohol would blind me to the places that I did not want to write about and would allow my other organ of sight – my imagination – to operate.
I had hoped to write a novel about a young man growing up in a large bluestone house on a grazing property on a place resembling the pampas of Argentina. The young man would spend much of his time in the library of his house, looking out from between walls of books at the immense grasslands. In time, the young man would quarrel with his father and would leave the bluestone house and would set out for the capital city, where he hoped to become a poet.
I had hoped to write about what I thought was an imaginary house set among imaginary grasslands, but in the first scene that the beer and whisky induced me to write, a boy hardly different from my memory of myself stood on a patch of lawn behind the sandstone farmhouse belonging to my father’s father. The time was the morning in 1949 when I learned that my father’s father had just died. A few weeks before, my father had told me that my grandfather would soon die, after which my grandmother would probably leave the sandstone house. In that case, my father and my mother and my brothers and I would probably live in the house. The sandstone house among the paddocks of my grandfather’s dairy farm had always interested me. Every day after my father had told me what he told me, I wished that my grandfather would hurry up and die.
I gave up writing my novel. During the next five years I began other novels and short stories, but a day would always come when I would seem not to be using my imagination but to be writing about what I had seen, and on that day I would give up the piece that I was writing.
I did not change overnight from ditherer to purposeful writer of fiction. During the last years before I finally wrote a novel, I stopped thinking about my imagination. I stopped thinking of myself as surrounded by a narrow zone of experience while the boundless countries of my imagination lay on its other side. I began to think of a world shaped somewhat as I would read it described twenty years later in a passage from Rilke: a world floating like an island in the ocean of the self. I began to see that I was already well qualified to write about a young man who looked for strangeness beyond what seemed ordinary.
(Brave New Word, no. 10, December 1988)
Birds of the Puszta
The boy Clement Killeaton, the main character in Tamarisk Row, my first book of fiction, stares at photographs of hairy sheep and bony cattle and barefoot gipsies accompanying the article ‘By Iron Steed to the Black Sea: An American Girl Cycles Across Romania’ in a National Geographic magazine. The boy suspects that the subjects of the photograph are not real. After questioning his father, the boy understands that his suspicions are correct.
I used to look at those same photographs in the years soon after the Second World War. After I had talked to my own father about Europe, I understood what Clement understood. Europe was in every respect inferior to Australia: its farms were smaller; its farm animals yielded less; its people were less healthy and less free. I believe today that my father also believed that the people of Europe were sexually immoral and perverted, in contrast to the majority of Australians. My father sometimes reminded his sons that their forbears had left England and Ireland as early as the 1830s. Our blood was almost certainly free, my father would say, from the taints of old Europe.
As I write these sentences I am trying to think and feel what I thought and felt on days of bright sunlight in Bendigo forty years ago when I looked at grey photographs of Romania and pitied the whole continent of Europe on account of its crumbling castles and skinny animals and starving peoples, and when I suspected that my father’s calling Europeans dirty meant more than that they washed irregularly. I do not believe that my thinking and feeling forty years ago was superior to my thinking and feeling today. Yet many lines in my networks of meaning lead back to the same few photographs of Romania. After forty years of reading and looking at photographs and talking to travellers, I have learned the geography of an imaginary Europe but I have somewhat neglected its history.
When I first looked at the photographs I was aware that the people and animals represented there, the houses and farms, and even the trees and grass might have been destroyed during the war. The American girl had mounted her iron steed a few years before my birth in 1939. The people I had pitied at first sight might have been dead before I saw their photographs. Whenever I thought of this possibility, I was driven to imagine the people as casting about them for a place to hide. Perhaps they had foreseen the war, or perhaps they wanted only a hiding place for indulging their strange sexual urges, but the costumed peasants and the ragged gipsies waited anxiously to hear about some secure refuge out of sight of thatched villages and walled towns.
Even if they had found some rural refuge after the iron steed had passed on its way towards the Black Sea, my Europeans might still have been killed before I had first become aware of them. In that case I was the more obliged to stare at the images that had survived them and to speculate about the last years of their lives. As a child of eight or nine years I had no way of knowing how many other people still looked at their ten-year-old copies of the National Geographic. There were surely days when I was the only person in Australia or any other country trying to keep alive the inhabitants of my ghost-country.
I never doubted that some of the lost Romanians had deserved their fate, and I saw in all the photographs no man or woman or child that I wanted to mourn as an individual. But I felt for the Romanians collectively what I felt for the species of birds described in my books of Australian birds as probably extinct. The men in their broad black hats and embroidered jackets and white trousers had been lost to the world as the night parrot, Geopsittacus occidentalis, and the noisy scrub bird, Atrichornis clamosus, had probably been lost. (No sighting of the noisy scrub bird had been reported since the nineteenth century. However, an amateur bird-observer exploring a gully near Albany, Western Australia, in 1961, heard a strangely loud bird-call, remembered what he had read in his bird books and discovered a small colony of the missing species. I did not read about this event until 1971, which was the year of the publication of the English translation of People of the Puszta, mentioned below.)
I had been interested in birds since long before I became interested in Europeans. I was no admirer of the flight of birds. I never gaped at soaring larks or gliding falcons. I was interested in the birds that I rarely saw – the birds that stayed hidden all day in scrub and foliage. Above all, I was fascinated by ground-dwelling birds – by plovers and quail and bustards. In the summer holidays in one of the years when I was still only beginning my study of Europe, I saw the nest and the eggs of a pipit, Anthus australis. The nest was neatly made of grass and lined with down, and the four eggs were grey-white and faintly spotted. It was the sort of nest that ought to have been hidden among thick leaves high overhead, I thought. But the pipit is a ground-dwelling bird. One of the parent-birds had flown up from the grass while I was walking with my father across a paddock in the part of Victoria known as the Western District. My father had then searched for a nest and had found it.
The finding of that nest was one of the chief events of my childhood. I no longer remember in sharp detail the nest itself or the eggs, or even the cunning placement of the nest under an overarching tussock, but I still recall my feeling when I stood looking down at the nest that something remarkable had been revealed to me.
I had read in books descriptions of the nests and eggs of every species of bird said to occupy the territory of which Bendigo was a part. I had peered up at the branches of trees every day in spring and summer in the streets of Bendigo but had seen no sign of any nest. By the time when I saw the nest in the grass I had begun to think of the nests of birds as one more of the secrets kept from the eyes of chil
dren. Sometimes, in my childish frustration, I murmured – in the sense of that word as it is used of the people of Israel in the Old Testament. Those people murmured against their God. I murmured against books. I murmured in particular against my bird books but I murmured also against books in general. I had loved books; I had believed in books; but now I murmured, and I hoped (and also feared a little) that the books would hear me.
Looking at the nest and the eggs of the pipit, I seemed to have seen something from a body of secret knowledge: I seemed to have learned something from a layer beneath the surface of the knowable. I was awed at having stumbled on something that I seemed not meant to have seen. If I had dared to touch the nest I would have seemed to myself to be offering an insult not just to the parent-birds but to something that I can only call the quality of plains.
Plains looked simple but were not so. The grass leaning in the wind was all that could be seen of plains, but under the grass were insects and spiders and frogs and snakes – and ground-dwelling birds. I thought of plains whenever I wanted to think of something unremarkable at first sight but concealing much of meaning. And yet plains deserved, perhaps, not to be inspected closely. A pipit, crouched over its eggs in the shadow of a tussock, was the colour of dull grass. I was a boy who delighted in finding what was meant to remain hidden, but I was also a boy who liked to think of lost kingdoms.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs Page 4