Leigh Swinbourne

The title, ‘Winter Journal’, for American novelist Paul Auster’s recent memoir made me think of ‘Winter Journey/Winterreise’, Franz Schubert’s great monodrama of mortal resignation. But as it turned out, Auster is a hale and hearty sixty-four and ‘Winter’, metaphoric or otherwise, seems very much in abeyance in this offbeat examination of his life to date. The book serves as a sort of long-awaited sequel to ‘The Invention of Solitude’, Auster’s fine and moving memoir of his father, which kick-started his writing career back in his thirties.

‘Winter Journal’ is dilatory and circuitous in form, and unusually, written entirely in the second person―Auster addresses himself throughout―which I expected to get on my nerves, but in fact lent the telling an unusual intimacy, as though one was listening to a rambling fireside chat. I think, also, it allows Auster a certain objectivity, enabling candor and honesty. One of the strengths of this Journal is its frankness, Auster reveals all, not that he has a great many sins to confess, just the standard ones, which prompted a reader like myself, male, a similar generation to Auster, to reflect on my own similar failings and misgivings, no doubt one of the aims of the book.

The larger aim, I believe, is an attempt to establish identity. Who am I? Am I anything more than a reactive bunch of electromagnetic waves? How can I find out? The same motive for Proust, who finding himself desperately at the prey of certain obsessions, clawed back his personal self by isolating significant experiences throughout his life that, grouped together, helped tell him who he was, by what they were.  Auster adopts a similar approach but focuses on the physical rather than the spiritual. He seeks to know himself through how the world has impacted on his body, and how he has responded, trusting the outer will provide clues to the inner.

The sins might be standard, but Auster has led an interesting life. This has nothing to do with him being a famous writer―all that part of his life is hardly touched on―except that time and again he has gone out and chanced his arm, in pursuit of his art, in pursuit of love, leading to all kinds of vicissitudes. The book spends much time on his relationship with his mother, probably to balance out the earlier work on the father, and his personal sketch of her, plus the brilliant thumbnail portraits of other relatives and associates prove one of the highlights.

The book is also full of lists, sexual adventures, sporting adventures; most notably there is a long section describing in sequence all the residences Auster has lived in. These potentially dull devices, in Auster’s hands, are wonderfully entertaining and revealing. He has always been a great story teller.

There are some clichés, lapses, bald patches, indulgences, much of the writing seems overly sketchy, but then often the rawness becomes a strength. All up, I found ‘Winter Journal’ invigorating and inspirational. By book’s end Auster had, along with his essential humanity, managed to convey to me something of the unique individual that he is, and by extension that we all are, and I felt a little the richer for it. And grateful too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The mise en scène for James Salter’s ‘A Sport and a Pastime’ is as follows: we’re in Paris with a bunch of youngish, good looking, rich, well educated, well connected, hard partying, jaded Americans. Sound familiar? Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’ is a springboard and an inspiration for Salter’s famously notorious erotic ‘classic’ of American Lit. Gertrude Stein said that Hemingway’s book described ‘the lost generation’, that is the generation that had the stuffing kicked out of it by World War One, collective P.T.S.D. if you like. Everyone’s partying and fighting and fucking so hard in the forlorn hope that sheer sensation might deflect the general loss in life of meaning and purpose. It can’t, not for long anyhow, and that reckoning gives the heft to Hemingway’s book.

Salter’s novel is set in the sixties, no-one’s fought and killed (or is aware of Vietnam), and the collective ennui seems a rich kid’s privilege. Still, it’s sufficient to propel our unnamed protagonist far from the madding crowd to a village, Autun, in the heart of France, ‘the real France’. He is living in the big empty house of American friends back in Paris and trying to be a photographer. Soon he is joined by a twentyish Phillip Dean, a brilliant Yale drop-out son-of-a-rich-man who shortly begins an affair with a pretty local French girl, Anne-Marie. Our protagonist, who remains celibate and generally unattached throughout the book, imagines this affair, conducted in various towns throughout regional France, in explicit physical detail.

The sexual set pieces are presented as reveries. Our narrator knows nothing and is imagining everything. He is a voyeur of his own wild fantasies, his own grand erotic visions, and at this point, as the novel takes off, another famous twenties American classic is intentionally evoked: The Great Gatsby. We have one man (older here) trying to cast another man, whom he thinks greater than himself in every way, into the realms of myth, and also tragedy. I should mention a third American writer, Henry Miller, who wrote scandalously (for the time) erotic novels set in Paris in the thirties. I have read little Miller, but I’ve no doubt he’s party to all this as well.

Despite the above literary references, ‘A Sport and a Pastime’ is one of the most original novels I have read, or more to the point, I have never read anything else quite like it. The initial impression is that of pornography rendered as art (Nabokov would have loved it), but what therefore is the purpose? There is plenty of sex in good literature, but not, to my knowledge, as an end in itself. Salter is virtually consecrating the sexual act, in all its varieties. We can blather on about the artist (photographer) necessarily living a vicarious existence in order to create, that essential distance, and so on, but we still come back the protagonist’s obsessional focus on the sex, again and again.

My take is that Salter is providing a sharp update on Mr. Joseph Conrad and writing about ‘Youth’, with all the sexual scenes combining as a sort of extended radical metaphor. Because the type of sex described in the novel can really only happen when one is young, in that it is revelatory and experimental. These two youths have suddenly unexpectedly found a brave new physical world with one another, and they are exploring it and experiencing it to the absolute maximum. There is no love or depth, just extraordinary sensation, and so obviously, it cannot last in that form. While they sport, life is knocking on the bedroom door. In due course they will move on.

The most shopworn metaphor for Youth is that of the accomplished athlete, with their moment of divine grace and greatness inevitably passing as the body ages. For Conrad’s sailor, his first voyage is a wonder and revelation, although in reality it is boring catastrophe. Youth for Conrad is a chimera, a dangerous blindness. Salter’s not so cynical; unsustainable though it may be, the experience of his lovers holds a unique value for him.

And with these lovers come all the natural corollaries of youth: freedom, lack of responsibility, life’s unfolding sensations. What deflects it from pornography (aside from the writing) is that this really is about our narrator, this is the life he has not lived (I’m assuming), and can never live, because its possibility has passed him by (only mid-thirties, but still). So here we have the pathos, the depth, and readers may or may not respond to this, see the whole exercise as a kind of extended ‘artistic’ pose, and certainly this is one novel that could easily lend itself to parody.

But I fell under its spell. The sex scenes are baldly realistic; any actual eroticism arises from the beautifully wrought set-ups, the powerful moods that Salter creates prefacing and engendering each encounter. And Salter consistently writes superbly; it’s essential that he does for this book to succeed on the level that he wants. He loves and knows his France intimately, its cities and countryside, all rendered from a new world perspective toward an exhausted beautiful rich and inevitably melancholy old world in which Americans like him are adrift and do not belong. Neither does Youth.

Back to the sex. It is evoked pretty much entirely from a male fantasy perspective―Anne-Marie is a willing participant in Phillip’s erotic desires―also there is a power differential (rich boy, poor girl), but of course relationships like this do exist (not that I’ve had any), and the acute observations and vividly detailed descriptions bring it all to credible life. Female readers may demur. But if it is seen as metaphor, the sexism is not so important.

So yes, for me, all up, ‘A Sport and a Pastime’ is not a novel about sex, but about a sense of life, a sense of engagement with life, and belief what life might deliver, that passes from us all too rapidly.

 

 

 

Tom Keneally’s ‘two old men dying’, his latest (33rd!), but surely not his last novel, despite the title, is the consecutively intertwined tales of 40,000 year old ‘Learned Man’, stand-in for Mungo Man, and veteran documentary filmmaker Shelby Apple (get it?), part stand-in for Neil Davis, who sadly didn’t reach old age.

Before I offer my short critique of this novel, I’d like to have a rant. On p109 we meet eye doctor Ted Castwell, stand in for Fred Hollows, who has a passion for John Keats ‘whose poems he could recite in couplets in his aggressive proletarian accent’. It’s just as well Ted’s not around on p42 to see a famous phrase ‘half in love with easeful death’ from one of Keats’ most famous poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ascribed to Shelley! But worse, in a way, to follow, for an Australian reader anyway (amongst which we can assume Keneally). On p59 one of Judith Wright’s most famous poems ‘Woman to Man’ is misquoted: from the opening line ‘eyeless labourer in the dark’ should be ‘eyeless labourer in the night’. I know it doesn’t impact on the novel, but it’s a bit damn depressing that one of our most distinguished authors and his star editors and who knows who else can miss/write such basic literary errors. These are our gate-keepers. OK, I’ll move on.

Prior to reading ‘two old men dying’ I saw two praising reviews of it in the Australian press. After finishing it, I think the critics here are giving the grand old man of Oz Lit a bit of an easy ride. Overall the writing quality is variable, good and not-so-good, and it probably wouldn’t be worth commenting on except that Keneally in the past has produced such outstanding work. Such as ‘The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith’, which in a different context covers many of the issues raised in this novel. Keneally has slighted ‘Blacksmith’ (due to the strictures of identity politics), yet to this reader it is superior in every way to this novel.

Keneally has set himself a formidable challenge here, particularly in the re-creation of ‘Learned Man’. The main story, that of Shelby Apple, chancer and charmer filming in various exotic locales, is well within his veteran professional skills. He states in his Author’s Note that ‘though some of them (the characters) were instigated by real people, the novel is not a roman a clef’. Well it seems close to one, all the major figures have doubles, even the brief sketch of Castwell’s wife describes Gabbi Hollows. Not that I think it matters. Keneally has regularly fictionalized historical figures, and I have always felt, reading the novels, that he has tried to do justice to the record, or at the very least successfully re-worked the material into convincing fictional form. So, for example, the ‘controversy’ over whether Booker-winning ‘Schindler’s Ark’ was history or fiction seemed misplaced at the time, particularly given the achievement of the writing.

So too here: Keneally does not satirise or defame but rather honours the real life great old men. If he twists their lives into his own story, he can reasonably argue it is for a higher purpose. Of course, it might also seem to some readers, given the extent of the ‘borrowing’, a little slack creatively. Regarding which, it should be noted the Vietnam episode is reminiscent of a similar scene in Chis Koch’s ‘Highways to a War’ (also ghosting Neil Davis).

No slackness is possible in Keneally’s recreation of the life and times of ancient Learned Man. He takes a few cues from Aboriginal cultural mores, but basically has to invent from scratch. The high poetic type of reconstruction he essays is very difficult to pull off, and Keneally, not a poet to my knowledge, does not seem to have the skill set for it (for a superb example see Alex Miller’s massacre description in ‘Landscape of Farewell’). Perhaps the length is partly to blame. There is the occasional noble phrase but for the most part this story stream reads like selections from an antipodean Disney Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ or a Disney Bible for unlettered pagans. Mostly I cringed reading it, plus the accompanying Aboriginal political suck-up: ‘Learned Man went out in the world to let whites learn something very big’, or ‘modern descendants of Learned Man deserved to be treated with national respect as the true owners of Australia’, and so on. We are also forced fed much supernatural goings on. Does Keneally really believe this stuff might have happened? Has he swallowed that old chestnut about primitive peoples possessing magic powers we moderns have lost through being rational and civilized? Anyway, compared to the gravity of Shelby’s story, despite the ingenuity, most of Learned’s tale comes across as cartoonish.

And what about the wise old women? Where are they hiding? All the women in this novel have supporting roles, to the men. It is a story of men overcoming, men succeeding, men holding the power and promise. All a little one sided.

His thirty-third novel from fifty listed publications. Keneally is a graphophile, a compulsive writer. He loves to write, he can’t help himself. Fine, there are good precedents, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates come immediately to mind, going back we have Trollope and Dickens; quality doesn’t need be sacrificed. I have read a good number of Updike and Oates and while not all of what I have read is consistently excellent, I think it’s fair to say that each novel shows a full commitment, to whatever project. You have to doubt you can do it, despite your skills, despite your record, your prizes, it’s possibly beyond you, they’re all unique challenges, and so you put everything you have into it yet again. Keneally is coasting with this novel, leaning back on his formidable skills. But more than these were required to make this novel work in all its parts. Worth reading? Certainly. But if you have limited time, go back to the earlier works.

 

In ‘House of Names’, Irish writer Colm Tóibín has novelized the first two episodes of the Classical Greek legend of the House of Atreus, which, along with individual treatments from Sophocles and Euripides, reaches its fullest realization in Aeschylus’s magisterial dramatic trilogy, ‘The Oresteia’.

The Oresteia is more dramatic poetry than poetic drama à la Shakespeare and Marlowe. Rich, dense, contemplative, repetitive, with all the bloody action taking place offstage, it is far removed from modern tastes in story-telling. So why has Tóibín written this?

The novel as an art form can do anything, but largely maintains cultural prestige amongst all the varied competing media through doing one thing no other art form can: internal monologue or the rendering of individual consciousness. Aeschylus amplifies and deepens his mythical source material but doesn’t radically transform it. However, Tóibín must do this if he is going to write a novel. Figures must become characters, have modern psychological motivations and feelings. Just look at the oft mentioned pickle John Milton gets into with Paradise Lost, with almighty God a narcissistic control freak and Satan a subversively glamorous underdog. Myths, the Greek myths especially, are time-worn fabulous tales, and also often illustrate subliminal drives and desires, one of their key fascinations for Freud. But the collective unconsciousness is not the individual consciousness. Tóibín must bring Clytemnestra, Orestes, Electra etc. to full fictional life.

Then there’s the problem with the Gods. Basically they don’t exist which is a bind for a realistic narrative, and in fact Tóibín continually fudges the equivocal area between acting because of what the Gods have ordained or out of one’s volition. If Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter because Artemis commands it and the whole impetus of the Trojan War hangs on his anguished decision, is it fair for Clytemnestra to personally judge and damn him for a crime he desperately did not want to commit? Or, would you murder your mother if she murdered your father? Probably not. Probably you’d need something more, something like Agamemnon was facing. And so on.  Tóibín valiantly tries to flesh all this out but the cracks are evident.

However, there is much to admire, to begin with, our idea of Greece itself, which is conditioned by the Classical myths and their various interpretations, especially the Iliad and the Odyssey. In our dreamings of the Classical landscape, objects and sensations have a primary boldness: sun, sea, sky, blood, love, hate, revenge. There is a relish of life, positive and negative, that we feel we have lost in modern life. Tóibín captures this ‘relish’ superbly, transporting us right back there, sans anachronisms.

Then there’s the tightly written prose which reads like a translation, seemingly flat and affectless, but holding us close and flaring up brilliantly when it needs to. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is an especial standout. Throughout, dealing both with minor figures and with the main protagonists, Tóibín shows an empathy and identification with marginalized and powerless individuals, a psychology particularly well realized.

But of course, those main protagonists do each have their moment of Power, shown here in all its realpolitik ferocity. Also, the necessity of living with Power with the concomitant paranoia and suspicion necessary for survival, the Palace intrigues, the whispering corridors, the competing truths.

Tóibín dispenses with the Classical chorus, collapses the time period of the Trojan war, and in the central section of the novel, invents a story for Orestes in his period of exile. Clytemnestra and Electra are presented vividly in first person, but for some reason Tóibín adopts the third for Orestes tale which reads something like a cross between a boys-own-adventure and certain passages from Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps he wanted to vary the pace, but when Orestes eventually returns home Tóibín seems uncertain what to do with him. Orestes dilly-dallies before committing his crime and seems half-hearted about the whole business, as though he has been fooled into an outrageous act for others’ political purposes, to be damned by them for doing so. Here, crucially for me, Tóibín leaves out one of the most affecting passages in Aeschylus when Clytemnestra pleads with Orestes not to murder his own mother who gave him suckle etc. Orestes lacks agency as a character, we don’t know why he acts, he doesn’t know why he acts, and the consequences are left in the air.

Aeschylus has a clear purpose in the Oresteia: to affirm the necessity of a civil court of judgment; only by mutually consented code of law can a society emerge from the barbarism of an eye for an eye. The Gods cannot provide for man; man must provide for man. By ignoring the last part of the trilogy, where Orestes is pursued by the Furies (his conscience?) and finally brought to judgment, Tóibín leaves his story dangling. Orestes is sidelined by others and there is no real conclusion to all that has occurred, just a sequence of brutal killings seemingly without proper purpose or motive.

Again, why has Tóibín written this? There is an obvious correlation between the psychic landscape of ‘House of Names’ and the anguished history of Ireland in the twentieth century. I feel that Tóibín was strongly compelled by the narrative of the House of Atreus, and perhaps thought that by developing and fictionalizing this material, he could gain some insight into his own heritage or somehow contextualize it. But he seems to have embarked upon this adventure without knowing quite where it was going to take him, or needed to take him.

So, we are left with a brilliant vivid narrative but no satisfactory wrap up, great sound and fury signifying nothing very much, which for this reader is a little bit of a letdown.

 

 

Author David Mitchell in his acclaimed novel, ‘Cloud Atlas’, is not shy at giving readers interpretive pointers as to his aims. There is the image of the matryoshka doll; scientist Isaac Sachs muses ‘each shell (the present) encased inside a nest of shells (previous presents) …the doll of now likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be…’. Publisher Timothy Cavendish wishes ‘for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable. To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds’. Finally, we have the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’ of composer Robert Frobisher ‘a sextet for overlapping soloists… each in its own language of key, scale and colour.

We have, more simply, six separate and separated narratives stretching from the 19^th century way into the future and back again. Each is interlinked formally and thematically and the whole shebang is a stunningly virtuosic display of differing storytelling presented in a highly original package. But is it anything much more? Well, once again, possibly because he’s concerned that the peacock’s tail might obscure the bird, or even that there might be just a tail and no bird, Mitchell informs us time and again how all this shows how man is on an ongoing project to wreck the world through blind greed and hubris. This is no news, and frankly, despite all the razzle-dazzle, intellectually ‘Cloud Atlas’ in toto amounts to little more than a bunch of leftie dictums linked by a recurring tattoo.

Not that this particularly matters, for Mitchell is a natural and gifted storyteller plus a whizz with words. Each of the tales are ‘types’ of narrative, presented in the appropriate language: orotund Victorian, hard-boiled detective, sci-fi, whatever. A good deal of the enjoyment of ‘Cloud Atlas’ is letting Mitchell show you what he can do, all the tricks. Inevitably, some things work better than others. Both sci-fi scenarios have big credibility gaps and the second is told in a bizarre inconsistent dialect. Generally speaking, there is a surfeit of jocular overripe prose, and although I didn’t feel this myself, I’m sure many readers will find it all just too much showy entertainment and become irritated by the relentless super-cleverness. Did I mention hubris?

For a big ambitious work there is little character development and psychological depth; Mitchell is too concerned to keep all his balls in the air. The overall abstracted view reminded me of the novels of Paul Auster, with the idea that there is a pattern in the occurrence of events, it’s just that we can’t see it, only glimpse pieces of it. Which makes us hostage not only to our own crazy instincts and drives but something bigger and unknown. Or maybe Mitchell just likes playing meta-fictional tricks as a sort of structural binding. He wouldn’t be the first there.

So, although I enjoyed ‘Cloud Atlas’ hugely and happily recommend it as holiday reading, I wouldn’t be wasting too may neurons pondering its various messages. For me, this was one in which the whole was considerably less than its undeniably brilliant parts.

 

Looking back, Australian author Robert Drewe’s first novel, ‘The Savage Crows’, seems somewhat of an odd debut for a writer whose subsequent career has been largely that of a contemporary social satirist or commentator (‘Our Sunshine’ notably aside). Half this book is contemporary social satire, that is, of the 1970s, and for those who can remember, these mordantly observed scenes are sharp and funny, if inevitably somewhat dated (particularly the portraits of women). The specificity of the detail, much of which would be lost on present readers, makes them feel autobiographical, and since our protagonist, Stephen Crisp, shadows Drewe’s own adolescence and early manhood, one assumes for the most part they are.

What is odd is how Crisp’s story is interspersed, presumably for contrast and comparison, with a freely bowdlerised version of the 1830s journals of George Augustus Robinson, the so-called ‘protector’ of the Tasmanian Aborigines, who with Governor Arthur’s warrant, roamed the State rounding up tribes and individuals prior to them being shipped off to Flinders Island where almost all perished through neglect. The two worlds portrayed here are worlds apart, to put it mildly. Is that the point, or part of it? Are there connections to be made and conclusions to be drawn?

We’ll start with the Journals. What initially strikes a reader in 2018, or this reader, is that how the way Drewe has treated this material would hardly be possible were he writing the novel today, or more accurately, he would not think to approach his material in this way. Drewe states in his preliminary author’s note: ‘I have allowed myself great freedom of imagination in reconstructing some 19^th century events’. He has; not that anything seems falsified, on the contrary, but in fictionally animating such presently revered historical Aboriginal figures such as Manna-largenner (here Drewe steers close to caricature), and others such as Truganini and Wooraddy (Drewe’s spelling for these), as a middle-class white writer, Drewe is out of line. Even the great Thomas Keneally has recently commented on ‘The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith’ that today he would not write Jimmy’s character ‘from within a black consciousness’. Personally, I find it regrettable that he might look askance, if that’s what he is doing, at such fine work.

But then perhaps we shouldn’t beat our breasts too much about all this, particularly when we recall that throughout history writers have rarely been free to write what they fancy and are usually able to invent creative solutions circumventing various censors. Directly defying the strictures of identity politics might at most incite a social media damning, which would not be pleasant (would future loss of funding be offset by sales?), but it would not send a writer to prison.

Anyway, Drewe’s historical pastiche is done with great skill, and despite much of the grim subject matter, considerable humour. One occasionally knows when reading Robinson and when reading Drewe, but the transitions are seamless. Drewe is presenting these ‘historical’ journals, I believe, with the (now disputed) contention that Australian colonists committed a successful genocide in Tasmania. He wants us to realise this and think on it…

…while we, two centuries later, are living in a materially rich, opportunity ripe, sunny egalitarian democracy. Are we? Maybe we are not, or maybe we are but there is a dark underbelly to it all. Which brings us to the story of Stephen Crisp.

Stephen is not in a good space. First his wife has left him, then his girlfriend, and also he has thrown in a promising career. Why? Because he has become obsessed with Robinson’s Journals and feels the overriding need to write some magnum opus either about the Journals or deriving from them. But his writing is stalled, like his life. The Journals are only inspiring a premature mid-life crisis, but what exactly is this crisis, and what can he do about it? Well, while Stephen never really seems to get to the bottom of his crisis, he does eventually do something about it, providing a catharsis of sorts for himself and some kind of denouement to the novel, which I will leave to readers to pass their own judgements on.

Nevertheless, the oddity persists. Terrible crimes of all stripes were committed in the early years of British settlement; now good ship Australia is sailing breezily on. Again, what is the connection? Is Drewe telling us all to get a conscience, or that Australian life is even more morally vacuous than it appears? Drewe convincingly shows we are modern amnesiacs, materially pre-occupied, and yes of course, few would disagree we should know more about the sins of our past, if only to do some justice for people still affected by them. But the two narrative strands here seem too disparate to make some kind of coherent whole of the novel. We need more guidance from the author, or some kind of bridge.  ‘The Savage Crows’, despite its many qualities, feels incomplete, and Drewe’s overall project here, remains somewhat enigmatic.