I took my writing to the publisher who told me my writing would be published if I would shorten it by half. I took my writing home and shortened it by a third. The publisher published my writing as a book with my true name on the cover. I was no longer a secret writer.
I have not been a secret writer for nearly twenty years, but I would like to go back to being a secret writer again. I think I enjoyed secret writing better than my later sort of writing. As a secret writer, I was more free to write what pleased me. During the years of my secret writing, nobody ever asked me to look at their own writing and to comment on it. During those years, no editor of a magazine ever approached me at a party and asked me to write a piece for her magazine.
I would like my next book to be published with a pseudonym on the cover. Better still, I would like the book to be published with no author’s name on it. But I would like more than that. I would like all books of fiction to be published without their authors’ names. I would like all writers to be secret writers. Then, readers would read books with more discernment. I believe many readers are too much influenced by the names on the fronts of books.
A few years ago, at a seminar for a group of editors, I handed around photocopies of a typed page of prose fiction. I asked the editors to correct any error of punctuation or of sentence structure that they might find on the page. The editors found many errors – as I had expected they would. After the editors had corrected the many errors on the page, they were surprised to learn from me where I had found the page. I told the editors that I had changed the names of the persons and the places mentioned on the page but that the page was otherwise just as it appeared in a recent prize-winning novel by one of Australia’s best-known writers of fiction.
(Tirra Lirra, vol. 3, no. 1, Spring 1992)
The Breathing Author
I cannot conceive of myself reading a text and being unmindful that the object before my eyes is a product of human effort.
Much of my engagement with a text consists of me speculating about the methods used by the writer in the putting together of the text, or about the feeling and beliefs that drove the writer to write the text, or even about the life story of the writer.
What I am about to tell you today is the sort of detail that I would have been eager to know if it had been my fate to be a person who was drawn to read these books (points to the stack of his books nearby) rather than the person who was drawn to write them.
I have for long believed that a person reveals at least as much when he reports what he cannot do or has never done as when he reports what he has done or wants to do.
I have never been in an aeroplane.
I have been as far north from my birthplace as Murwillumbah in New South Wales and as far south as Kettering in Tasmania; as far east as Bemm River in Victoria and as far west as Streaky Bay in South Australia. The distance between Murwillumbah in the north and Kettering in the south is about 1,500 km. It so happens that the distance between Streaky Bay in the west and Orbost in the east is about the same. Until I calculated these distances a few days ago, I was quite unaware that my travels had been confined to an area comprising almost a square, but my learning this was no surprise to me.
I become confused, or even distressed, whenever I find myself among streets or roads that are not arranged in a rectangular grid or are so arranged but not so that the streets or roads run approximately north-south and east-west. Whenever I find myself in such a place, I feel compelled to withdraw from social intercourse and all activities other than what I call finding my bearings. These I try to find by reference to the sun or to roads or streets the alignments of which are known to me. I know I have found my bearings when I can visualise myself and my surroundings as details of a map that includes the northern suburbs of Melbourne and such prominent east-west or north-south thoroughfares of those suburbs as Bell Street or Sydney Road.
My trying to find my bearings takes much mental effort, and I fail more often than I succeed. I often believe I have succeeded but later refer to maps and find that my visualised map was wrong. When I discover this, I feel compelled to attempt a complicated exercise that I have probably never succeeded at. I am compelled first to recall the scene where I tried to find my bearings, then to recall the visualised map that proved to be wrong, and last to try to correct my remembered self, as it were: to relive the earlier experience but with the difference that I get my correct bearings. I sometimes feel this compulsion many years after the original event. While writing these notes, for example, I was compelled to recall the evening in November 1956 when I visited for the first time the suburb of Brighton, on Port Phillip Bay. It was my last day of secondary school, and my class had to meet at the home of the school captain and later to take a train into Melbourne to see a film. I arrived in Brighton by bus, in the company of boys who knew their way around that quarter of Melbourne. Later, when our class arrived on foot at Brighton Beach railway station, I stood with them on the platform where they had gathered, but I was convinced that we were waiting for the train from Melbourne. After the train had arrived and we had boarded, I remained convinced for some time that we were travelling away from Melbourne, and my peace of mind was continually disturbed during the rest of the evening by my wondering how I had so utterly lost my bearings at the railway station. Just now, as I said, I was compelled to relive that experience of more than forty years ago, but I failed yet again to understand how the map of Melbourne in my mind had been stood on its head.
I cannot understand the workings of the International Date Line.
I cannot understand how the values of the currencies of different nations can change in relation to one another – much less how anyone can profit from this phenomenon. I can talk glibly as though I do understand these and many other such matters, but in truth I do not.
I have no sense of smell and only a rudimentary sense of taste. When I hear or read of a thing as possessing a smell or an aroma, I feel no sense of deprivation but imagine at once a barely visible emanation from the thing: a mist or a cloud of droplets, always distinctively coloured: delicate colours for aromas said to be faint or subtle, and rich colours for strong smells.
I tend to think of words as written things rather than spoken things. While I speak, I often visualise my words as being written somewhere at the same time.
I am often able to remember the appearance on the page of a passage that has interested me. If I try to learn by heart any poetry or prose, I do so by visualising the printed page and reading it in my mind. When, in 1995, I began to learn the Hungarian language, I used both textbooks and cassettes and I conversed with native speakers. Even so, I always see written in the air, as it were, the words of my conversations nowadays in Hungarian; and whenever I recite from memory the Hungarian poems that I know, I always see the poems printed on the pages that I learned them from.
I have been told that when I mention some person or thing out of sight I often point in the direction in which I suppose the person or thing to be while I speak. I seem to do this just as readily for persons or things on the other side of the world as for persons or things in an adjoining room. I have often been observed pointing towards the presumed dwelling place or site of some person or event from the past.
I have never owned a television set.
I have watched few films during my lifetime and hardly any in recent years. Throughout my life, I have had much trouble in following the story-lines of films and making the necessary connections between the rapidly changing images. I have watched no more than a half-dozen live theatrical performances during my lifetime and none during the past twenty-five years. I recall little of what I watched. I have never watched an opera.
On almost every occasion when I have watched a film or a theatrical performance, I have been made to feel embarrassed and uncomfortable by the exaggerated facial expressions, the excessive gestures, and the frank speech of the characters, and I have been relieved afterwards to resume my life among persons
who seem to use facial expressions and gestures and speech as much as I use them: in order to conceal true thoughts and feelings.
I cannot recall having gone voluntarily into any art gallery or museum or building said to be of historic interest.
I have never worn sunglasses.
I have never learned to swim. I have never voluntarily immersed myself in any sea or stream. I have sometimes stared at running water in small rivers or in creeks inland, but I have never felt any urge to contemplate any part of any sea. I was told only five years ago by my mother that I was taken to the seaside for the first time at the age of six months, that I began to scream as soon as I saw and heard the sea, and that I went on screaming until I was taken out of sight and hearing of it.
I have been described by my wife and by several friends as the most organised person they have ever known, and I admit to a love of order and of devising systems for storing and retrieving things. My library is meticulously ordered, as are the many filing cabinets full of my letters and journals and manuscripts and typescripts and private papers. I have sometimes thought of the whole enterprise of my fiction-writing as an effort to bring to light an underlying order – a vast pattern of connected images – beneath everything that I am able to call to mind.
And yet I seem to have a fear of the systems devised by other people, or if not a fear, then an unwillingness to engage with those systems or to try to understand them. I have never touched any button or switch or working part of any computer or fax machine or mobile telephone. I have never learned how to operate any sort of camera. (I am able, however, to operate several kinds of photocopier, and I do so often.) In 1979 I taught myself to type using the index finger of my right hand alone. Since then, I have composed all my fiction and other writing using the finger just mentioned and one or another of my three manual typewriters.
I have a rough understanding of the Dewey Decimal System, but I have never learned how to use a library catalogue. Until about 1980, I sometimes went into one or another library and looked along the shelves labelled, so I recall, from 800 to 899 and sometimes took from those shelves one or another book and looked into it. In about the year 1980, electronic devices began to be common in libraries. As from about the year 1980, I have sometimes gone into one or another library to attend a book launch or a similar function but never to look for any book or other item or to try to use any catalogue or similar aid or to approach any employee for advice. The years when I have followed this policy include thirteen years when I was a lecturer in one or another institute of tertiary education and three years when I was a senior lecturer in a university.
I studied English One, English Two, and English Three in successive years as part of my course for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the University of Melbourne. (I followed this course from 1965 to the end of 1968 when I was aged from twenty-six to twenty-nine years.) I came close to failing several of my examinations and essays during my three years as an English student, but in several other examinations and essays in English I earned high marks. All through those years, I had the utmost difficulty in understanding what exactly I was supposed to do as a student of English and what exactly I was supposed to report of my doings in my examinations and essays. At the same time, I suspected that the teaching staff in the Department of English had equal difficulty in understanding what they were supposed to be doing when they lectured or conducted tutorials or marked essays or examination papers.
I have read hurriedly Terry Eagleton’s book Literary Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell 1983. I have read much less hurriedly Wayne C. Booth’s book The Rhetoric of Fiction, University of Chicago Press. (I have read both the 1961 edition and the revised 1983 edition.) I do not recall having read any other book on literary theory or related subjects.
I was pleased to find in Wayne C. Booth’s book a persuasive theoretical account or several matters that I had felt convinced of for many years but had been unable to articulate. I am thinking in particular of the extraordinary chart in the Afterword to the second edition. (I have always liked charts and diagrams and graphs; I have sometimes tried to use such means to clarify for myself matters rarely quantified or charted.) Booth’s chart has two long columns. In one column are listed the variety of authors and in the other column the variety of readers that may be said to exist while a work of fiction is being written or read. Most of the authors exist in the minds of readers, and most of the readers in the minds of authors. The first of the variety of authors in the chart is called by Booth the Flesh-and-Blood Author or, elsewhere, the Breathing Author. This worthy is described as ‘immeasurably complex and largely unknown, even to those who are most intimate’.
I hardly need to add that Booth compiled his chart from a consideration only of the acts of reading and writing. His chart would have been vastly more complicated if he had tried to take account of our situation today: of a breathing author’s meeting in person with some of his varieties of reader. (The chart includes a so-called career-reader, which term might apply to some of you. Check Booth for yourselves.)
I tried to use charts and diagrams to help me plan most of my book-length pieces of fiction, but as I went on writing I was always obliged to abandon the planned format. I was uneasy whenever I first found that I could not make my fiction conform to the shape that I had planned for it, and sometimes afraid that what I was writing might be aimless or shapeless. Long before I finished each book, however, I was reassured that it was a unified whole. I even believed that I might have been able to represent the finished book by a complicated chart or diagram, although I never tried to do so. I still sometimes think of one or another of my pieces of fiction – whether book-length or short – as being not page after page of text but a many-coloured array of interconnected images. Some of these images are as simple as the green stone surrounded by the bluish haze in ‘Emerald Blue’, while others are as complex as the race for the Gold Cup in Tamarisk Row. When I think of my fiction in this way, I am somewhat of a mind with the narrator of ‘In Far Fields’, who saw his fiction as resembling a map of a country district in which the small towns were images and the roads connecting the towns were feelings. I am also not unlike the young man in the early pages of The Plains who won over the great landowners by using coloured pencils and graph paper to illustrate the history of culture on the plains.
I acknowledge that my liking for charts and diagrams may be a primitive, even a childish habit of thought. In my understanding of history, or time past, for example, I rely on the simple diagram that I found nearly fifty years ago in a secondary-school history textbook: the time line. I cannot think of the history of this planet in any other way than as having taken place on a seemingly endless series of oblong cross sections of earth and sea, each a hundred years long, so to speak. Each oblong ends abruptly at the end of the century that it denotes. The following oblong begins far away to the left (as I see it) of this point, the oblongs or centuries being parallel to one another in the darkness of no-space and no-time. If I think of the life of Marcel Proust, for example, I have no trouble in seeing the writer and all his surroundings come to an end on the last day of 1900 and then reappear far away at the very beginning of the twentieth century. The narrator of my story ‘First Love’ might have seen exactly thus.
During the sixteen years from 1980 to the end of 1995, I was a full-time teacher of fiction-writing. I taught always in the same tertiary institution, but the place had three different names and three different modes of administration during those sixteen years. In its third guise, the place was known as Deakin University and the mode of administration was such that I retired early, at the age of fifty-five, thereby reducing my income by five-sixths, rather than endure another year in the place.
For as long as I was a teacher of fiction-writing, I looked out for and collected statements made by writers and others on the vast subject of how fiction might be written or understood. I did not collect only statements that I myself could agree with. I collected a range of stateme
nts so that I could usually offer my students not only my own views on fiction-writing but also an opposing view. While preparing this text, I decided not to look through my collection of writerly statements but to cite the two or three that are still often in my mind more than five years after I last stood in front of a class. I have chosen two.
I offer the first statement without any comment. I found about twenty years ago in a book review in the New York Times the statement by the poet Robert Bly that the writer should learn to trust his obsessions.
I found perhaps even longer ago in the Introduction to Great Short Works of Herman Melville, published by Harper and Row in their Perennial Classics Series in 1969, the following statement by a man otherwise unknown to me, Warner Berthoff. ‘A story well told, so that it has the power to enter permanently into the imagination… always tells us two things. It says “here is what happened” and it will say further “this is what it is like to have knowledge of such happenings… and to undertake the task of opening such knowledge to others”.’ I found this statement when I had already written much of the fiction of mine that has been published. I do not say that the statement by Warner Berthoff, whoever he is or was, taught me anything I had not previously known. However, that statement had been for me ever since I found it my preferred means of explaining why much of my fiction is as it is; why the narrator of much of my fiction looms, as it were, larger than any character in the fiction. Berthoff’s statement also happens to explain in a few words many of the arguments of Wayne C. Booth.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs Page 12