Letters

I want to start a club of letter-writers! We will bring back the beautiful art of letter-writing in the age of the txt, when there's not even enough time for vowels, let alone poetical flourishes... We will sit at desks with red wine in front of us and write long, detailed, thoughtful letters to one another. These days the only exciting things that come by post are story acceptances. The rest is administrative drivel, never touched by human hand save in the very last moment when the postie lifts it from the bag and shoves it through the slot. Imagine receiving a letter from an old friend instead of an 'add' on Facebook. That little leap of the heart when you see your name in handwriting on the envelope, when you feel the thickness of the folded letter within.

It saddens me that most people can't write. They really, really can't. I mark psychology essays sometimes, and the standard is staggeringly abysmal. I read people's funding submissions, and they can't even say what they mean in simple clear sentences. It's turgid, ghastly, weasel-word-ridden drivel. I'd like us all to be poets, delighting one another with our wit and invention and sparking ever wilder, bolder leaps of fancy and whimsy and humour and insight. I guess there never was a time when we were all poets, but at least we could spell, and we had lovely handwriting, and we could recite a few lines of Blake or Wordsworth.

I have written one love letter in my life. Apart from the adolescent tragedies which, if they still exist, are sufficient reason for me never to stand for public office. Worse than Pauline Hanson. Far worse. I have written one real love letter in my life, and I did it in Microsoft Word. Printed it out, for Christ's sake, in Times New Roman or Garamond or something, and put it in her letterbox, along with the panties she'd inadvertently left in my bed. What was I thinking? I've lived forty years and in that time I've only really written one love letter and I fucking well did it on a word processor. Which meant of course that I got to keep a copy in My Documents, in the folder named 'love', I suppose. It would have been better to scribble it in shitty red biro on the back of a torn phone bill than do it in Word. A love letter is a physical object, like a feather, a pressed flower. It is not 'information'. You cannot 'keep a copy'. There is no 'copy'. There is the love letter and the love ketter is the love letter is the love letter. I kept a copy, because I thought it was a good love letter, but I missed the point that you have to give it away. Like love itself, you can't have your cake and eat it, give it and hold onto it at the same time. It destroys the very small, almost imperceptible magic that is in the letter. 

One decent love letter in my whole life and I did it on the computer! I wonder if she kept it anyway.

Excerpt from 'Different Kinds of Heaven' (formerly 'Zoe and May')

Mayflower, he called her, for the corolla of blonde hair that haloed her face. But this was not promising, since his pot plants never did well. He tried to guess if they wanted sun or water, and always seemed to jump the wrong way. As for May, he never knew what to cook for her. He found she’d eat bolognaise, so he made her that until one day she said, I don’t like bolognaise, and that was that. So he struck on the idea of fish-fingers—he felt absurdly pleased with the inspiration—and this kept him going for a while.

 Entertainment was a bigger problem. He bought a huge box of Lego for her after the first disastrous weekend, but she was always demanding his participation. He could not understand why something as seemingly easy as playing with Lego people could be so exhausting. Fifteen minutes and he’d be unable to sit upright anymore; he’d slump to the floor beside her, utterly drained. He was in a Lego gulag. His suffering passed May by. Her Lego people cheerfully conquered the mountains of his chest, danced on the pinnacle of his nose. He let it wash over him. It was all okay so long as he didn’t have to raise a muscle. And all this killed half an hour, then she would ask him, what now Dad? and he really couldn’t think of a thing. How on earth did Cathy make the hours pass?

 He took her to the Collingwood Children’s Farm, where for a time he thought he’d failed again, until he understood that this stillness, this sombre concentration, was her expression of rapture. She held the guinea pigs like a sacred responsibility. Then afterwards they walked along the Yarra in a fine wash of sunlight, past the serrated skyline of the old factories, the embankments of yellow sour subs. She picked the fattest ones and happily chomped their squeaky stems from the nub up, a childhood delicacy he remembered well, though the taste disgusted him when he had a nibble for old time’s sake.

 Dad, how does the river know which way to go? she asked him.

 It goes downhill.

 It’s not going downhill. It’s going flat.

 It’s very slightly downhill—this outrageous statement a cause for obvious consternation.

 They walked a while longer in silence, and he could see her mind ticking over, puzzling something out. Then she said: What if I don’t like heaven Dad? I mean, when I die?

 You will. Everyone likes heaven.

 Are there different kinds of heaven for different people? 

I don’t know sweetie. Maybe you get what you want. Maybe your heaven would be a garden with the hugest sour subs.

 She walked silently for a while, studying the river, the people quietly whirring by on their bicycles. Then she said, cheerfully, definitively: My heaven would just be a normal life!

 He knew what she meant: that this was enough, right here, right now, and she could foresee not a single shadow. Her innocence exposed the true love he had for her, a love that was almost an oppression. His own heart was armoured and weary, and protected because he considered himself disposable, not really so important. But loving her made a break in his defences through which pain could get in again, along with the light. Against this weakness there was no possible protection. 

Excerpt from 'Zoe and May' - new and unpublished

And then every Saturday, his ex brought around May, his five-year-old daughter. He was getting to know her still, after two years when he and Cathy hadn’t spoken, and the only times he’d seen May were through a parked car window, coming out of Cathy’s place on a blustery winter afternoon in a duffle-coat that made her look like Paddingon Bear, or going into the supermarket and emerging again half an hour later, skipping beside her plastic bag-laden mother. He’d watch the house for hours, nothing changing whatsoever except dark drawing in—this was so unhealthy—while inside, his daughter’s childhood was taking place.

Now at last he had her, and didn’t know what to do with her at all, he’d never felt such an oaf. The car door would slam in the street, and there she’d be at the end of the drive, with her overnight case in one hand and Puss-puss, her stuffed toy, dangling from the other. He’d open his arms, and while she ran to him, his eye would be drawn to the dark head in the car, turned his way. The long pause before she turned the ignition and the car slid off.

This mistrust made him defiant, but still he had no idea. When he lifted her up and spun her round he half expected his big dumb hands to be seared by contact with such loveliness. Mayflower, he said, kissing her cheeks. According to the scales she weighed fourteen kilograms, but he could not believe it. She felt light as a kite, only the pulsing imbalance of her kicking legs indicating she had any weight to her at all. What do you do when a butterfly lands on your shoulder? You hold your breath and wait and try not to move so you won’t damage it.

But holding still, he knew, would not save him from harming her, this serious child whose eyes took in everything, like she was swallowing the world whole. If he was not to damage her he would need to act, to decide, to care and nurture, he knew this, but—fathering? He simply didn’t have a clue. He remembered the first day she came, standing in his empty living room—he’d cleaned and vacuumed for the occasion, thinking he was preparing for her, making an effort, but now as she stood there on the bare carpet, like a sad but polite traveller, he understood he’d got it all wrong again.

Furthering the theme of successive approximations from my last post, I heard someone on the Book Show today talking about the idea of working and working a poem until it stands up and says, "You have found me." The same idea, from a less mathematical perspective! I used to write poetry, was never all that good at it, but I think in my short stories I'm still driven by the poet's yearning for precision and highest refinement. Poetry is apprehended by all the senses: image and cadence of course, but to me the ultimate poetic sense is olfactory. You breathe in a poem, like the subtlest perfume, like a vapour arising between the lines. You could say that, literarily speaking, a novel offers meat: something to fill the belly, whereas a poem offers fragrance only, a very Buddhist sort of pleasure. I am not a poet because I am still too hungry, and then not quite a novelist, because I am too ascetic. So I keep on writing these damn short stories.

I have also reflected recently, like many writers before, on the failure of the realised to attain the perfection of the ideal. So those attracted to perfection, like myself, tend to cut back, to pare away the explicit in favour of the suggested. It truly is an ascetic's impusle, as if the cutting away, the negating of the material, somehow leaves a space in which the ideal can be reflected, can breathe. But the ultimate end of such an impulse, if left unchecked, is the negation of form entirely. It's J.D. Salinger's rumoured room full 0f stories too precious to ever be published, or John Cage's 4'33''. It's silence and anorexia. Poetic writing - by which I mean not just poetry, but all writing with a poetic sensibility, must play its music on a string drawn tight by the tension between the material and the formless, between sound and silence, being and emptiness.

And anyway - final thought - novels can have fragrance too. Some ideas, some images, some thoughts can only breathe in the space given by a whole novel. You have to build a cathedral if you want to make organ music. And yes, I'm mixing my sensory metaphors awfully, but you'll get the gist of the riff...

Eroticising the landscape, and the method of successive approximations

The method of successive approximations is the way to go, I decided last night, as I tried to beat my latest story into shape. Sometimes I think I'm just too much of a scientist to be a writer - always looking for some theory or clever trick to capture or explain the creative process. Well anyway, it's my latest way of thinking about writing. Start with a broad idea, write it out, however it comes out, and then gradually shape it closer and closer to the 'ideal' in one's mind. It's kind of obvious in a way, but I find it a more helpful way of thinking about writing than a linear write-it-from-beginning-to-end type of model, which tends to lead to me obsessively reworking paragraph one to the brink of perfection or extinction.

The other day, I came up with this:

In the clog of the river, the slow sick froth and stagnation she’s lain for three days, face down and slowly swelling with the stench of the crime. Gone the girl, the beautiful girl, she’s long fled among the reeds, the cicada song, the thrips and the swooping kingfishers, she’s rushed out like a gasp into the starry chill. That is her in the long, elegant step of the heron, her in the silky fall of dusk, her in the crushed breath of eucalypt, the sigh of night breeze.

The thing down there in the river bend is not her, is nothing, only the carcass, the bag: a corrupted sac of virescent meat. The river stings and itches with flies, and plops with gases, and gathers the scum of decay in its teeth of rotted trunks and boughs. The thing-that-was-once-a-girl goes to collect there too, to slowly bloat and stink and simulate life with its sighing and popping and subsiding, as if restless with sad thoughts. It forgets itself and farts and belches and lets itself go completely, gets fat with death, does not even care that the rats tear flakes from its soft, white edges, that the maggots swarm on the water line and fill its skin like a piñata. It embraces decay unreservedly, loses unity and becomes a multitude, a human-shaped colony of crawling and microscopic things, her once fine, splendid flesh softening, loosening, dissolving away, so that soon all that once clothed her in loveliness will break up like suds and the bones will rise out, a reminder that a life cannot so easily be unmade. The bones will rise out, white as stones, severe and fragile, to sing in the twilight of lost and forgotten things, of love unmade and deeds undone.

Somehow it seems unlikely to become a short story, more likely the novel I write while I'm not writing the novel I'm supposed to be writing. Am I really considering some Wolf-Creek-Ivan-Milat-Joanne-Lees suspense thriller here? Hmm, we shall see...

I think I mentioned that I convened a writers' group last year, beginning with writers who have all been published in the Sleepers Almanac, but now expanded beyond that somewhat. I call us the Almaniacs in my mind, but I'm not sure anybody else knows that. Anyway, we are privileged to have some fine writers in our small tribe, and none finer than Jessica Au, whose story 'Leopards' is probably my favourite from last year's Almanac and who, at the age of twenty-very-little, writes absolutely Winton-esque prose. She's been presenting chapters from her novel in development for our delectation in recent meetings. I wish I could post some of the lines here, but that would be presumptuous. I can't however resist the one quote, something about "girls with salt in their hair and bodies struck with sunlight". "Bodies struck with sunlight" - how simple and gorgeous. I read this chapter with a feeling of sick excitement and jealousy. Trust me, you read it here first: this book will win prizes, and if it doesn't sell as well, then you're all crazy you hear me?

I heard David Malouf on the Book Show on Radio National talking about "eroticising the landscape" when he writes, and that is exactly what Jess does so beautifully: she manages to scoop some of the essential and the sensual out of whatever she describes, so that what comes off the page is somehow more vivid and sublime than the real thing.

I went back to my own half-finished offering after the group finished feeling curiously dispirited and inspired (impossible, I know, but true). I just had to get some of that same vividness into it. Writing about erotic love, I realised I was sentimentalising, vaselining my lens. I was missing the irregularity and uniqueness of my subject. Everything was getting emulsified, and in the process actually losing its eroticism. So - the method of successive approximations - I started trying to write in these unexpected, even jarring elements. My perfectionism can be a killer, but it also means I get better, I hope. I'm always seeing the David (Malouf?) in the marble and trying to chip him out.

Update

For the legions reading this blog (hey Luke, did you find it?), at last an update. I finally finished the story that wasn't working back on my 'bad writing day' in July (July! Can't believe it!), and it was just accepted for publication in Meanjin in September next year. Also, my story 'Salt' was just published in New Australian Stories, by Scribe. It didn't, however, get anywhere in the Boroondara Awards. Nothing. Nix. Boo hoo.

In more evidence that mine own worst enemy is mine self, I met up with Louise Swinn of Sleepers fame the other day (hey Lou, did you find it?), and gloomily recited to her the plot outline of my novel-to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-question. She seemed to think that I knew what I was doing and what's more, that it might even sell! (I felt a bit bad about this possibility. If it's likely to sell, doesn't that mean that it's kind of crap? :) ) Well anyway, I left this meeting with a spring in my step. Maybe I really do know what I'm doing! I still feel unready to really get stuck into the writing of it, but it has been congealing in my mind since then...

I'm not giving the game away here, but the book is based on my grandfather Osmar White, who wrote Green Armour, a classic first hand account of the war in New Guinea in 1942. I have about 100,000 words of letters he wrote to my grandmother over the course of WWII, a veritable gold-mine. The difficulties are numerous - not least is the problem of fictionalisation: too much, too little? I can't rewrite Green Armour, his own marvellous account of the experiences that left him scarred, transformed and deepened. But I am starting to see a way forward...

Years ago, before I was a writer, I dreamed he gave me a manuscript to complete. Perhaps it was just about continuing the line of writers, writing on the unfinished family story as it were, but I had the sense there was something he regretted having left unsaid. So I choose to take the dream more literally, to try to finish something he failed to complete. As I have no idea what that is, I can only trust that something will lead me to get it right in the end. Perhaps that sense of an imposed mission is the only thing that will give me the confidence to actually write a damn book.

Well, it's been a while. Guess I'm not so good at the daily blog thing. Last week my story 'This Old Man' was published in Award Winning Australian Writing and I spoke at the launch. I talked about the autobiographical nature of the story, or at least its autobiographical basis, and I suggested rather sweepingly that all stories are autobiographical, even if they are in costume, so to speak. Perhaps it was a statement that needed more explanation, since subsequent contributors got up to talk about how their stories had nothing to do with their own lives. Perhaps my original statement was a little extreme, a little provocatively put. But I think there's a defensible point there. All stories must come from our own inner life, whether or not they follow the factual details of our life story. Perhaps it might have been better to say that autobiography is the richest source of stories we have available, and that even the stories we tell that have no superficial relation to our own lives are informed at a hidden level by the experiences that have shaped us into who we are. Enough said.

Thanks owing to my writing group - a little band of former contributors to the Sleepers Almanac who have taken to meeting monthly to workshop our stuff. They gave me some incredibly valuable help with the story that eventually became 'Salt' and which I have now submitted to the Boroondara Literary Awards. I'm not expecting first prize again, but it might rate a commendation or something, who knows?

I've made something of a discovery this weekend - writing freehand is a far better way for me to develop a first draft that writing on a computer. It has something to do with the messy imperfection of my handwriting - mine more than most, let me tell you! - and the fact that there is no capacity to cut and paste, or go back to obsessively 'refine' what I just wrote. My notebooks are turning out to be a far richer source of ore for stories than the innumerable fragments I have in the 'abandoned' and 'in progress' folders on my hard drive. I often love the stuff I stumble on in my notebooks, but frequently find the computer stuff to be lifeless.

Something else I have learned is that meditation helps my writing. It is not only the ability to focus in on the core of one's experience tat meditation teaches, but the discipline of staying with. I find there is a moment (well, in fact, many moments) in writing at which there is an impulse to spring away, to make a cup of tea, tidy my room, check my emails, whatever - anything to escape the discipline of staying with the work. This occurs even when I am on a roll. There is a part that kicks in saying, 'Okay, well done, that's enough for now.' The precise same impulse occurs in meditation - a restless desire to jump up, or at least to escape from the discipline of concentration into some line of fantasy or meandering thought. Meditation is teaching me the importance of pushing through these impulses, going deeper, staying inside the discipline of writing.

Yesterday was a good writing day - I riffed on the theme of a lost lover and found myself moving into a state of poetic intensity, a sort of rhapsodic, hypnotic lyricism. I stand by my statement about autobiography - our personal experiences of loss and love must be the well from which such creative outpourings come. Our writing always reflects the state of mind it was written in. We cannot write with life and passion and originality about things that we cannot experience from the inside.