03 Thursday Sep 2009
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My unpublished second novel was commended in the SPCKA Young Christian Writer’s Awards last week. It’s an award for fiction or nonfiction with Christian themes by an Australian under 30. A wrap up of the shortlists and winners of SPCKA awards this year can be found here – http://spcka.org.au/2009ACBOYSouvenirRGB.pdf .
03 Thursday Sep 2009
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Novel: Possession: A Romance / A.S. Byatt (1990)
Film: Possession (2002)
The novel
I found Possession an engrossing novel. It is the story of two contemporary literary scholars – Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey – who discover a secret affair between two (fictional) nineteenth century poets – Randolph Ash and Christobel LaMotte. The scholarly world is captured with all its interesting intrigues.
At one level, the novel’s title refers to questions of ownership over history and historical figures and their traces. The theme is illuminated by Roland Mitchell’s initial act of theft of a draft of a letter from Ash to LaMotte when he discovers it in a book Ash once owned. Mitchell feels it’s his discovery and he should ‘possess’ it; a feeling intensified as he enlists Maud’s help and they find themselves on the run from other Randolph Ash scholars, including the American collector Mortimer Cropper whose massive cheque-book allows him to ‘possess’ many Ash relics.
The word ‘possession’ also sums up the exploration of romance and relationships. In both the nineteenth century affair between Ash and LaMotte and the contemporary one between Roland and Maud, the lovers struggle with the nature of love. Is it about possessing the other?
The nineteenth century narrative is created purely through documents (with the exception of the epilogue) – including letters written by the lovers, diaries by their respective partners (Ash’s wife, LaMotte’s lesbian partner), and pages and pages of their poems. The poems read just like nineteenth century poems; an incredible achievement. But they bored me and I skipped over pages of them – I wanted to read a novel, not poems!
The film
The film version of Possession takes just 98 minutes to adapt a 511 page novel. It is both a simplification and a ‘greatest hits’ collection of scenes that on its own – without knowledge of the novel – lacks emotional power and significance. Trying to develop two parallel romances in different centuries in that short amount of time is impossible, and the film makers barely even try – Maud and Roland, the present day lovers, are reduced to one awkward encounter and then discussion of it.
The thriller element of the novel, with different parties pursuing the secret of Ash and LaMotte is only lightly used in the film, a strange decision given its cinematic potential. The film-makers do use the dramatic grave robbing climax, but in a truncated and disappointing scene which doesn’t make much sense. Roland Mitchell wrestles the box from Cropper and takes it away to look at it with Maud, no more ethical than Cropper himself.
The most disconcerting aspect of the film is the casting of big jawed hunk Aaron Eckhart as the supposedly shy and bookish unemployed scholar Roland Mitchell. In the book his girlfriend calls him ‘Mole’, a name no-one would apply to Aaron Eckhart’s character. Probably to appeal to the American audience, he has also become American, when his Englishness was so central to his character in the novel.
27 Thursday Aug 2009
Yesterday I felt oppressed by the dominance of sports culture in Australia. It was a meeting and we were making introductions and we had to say something interesting about ourselves. And most people’s ‘interesting thing’ was their sporting loyalty, some comment staking their loyalty and denigrating a different sports code or a rival team. What I hated the most was the raucous laughter which accompanied it. To me, it felt so unfunny and childish.
Usually I wouldn’t care much, but the mood I was in yesterday, it felt oppressive. It was made worse when someone explained to the visiting Englishman, ‘This is just Aussie humour’. And that made me think how sporting obsession is normalised and if you don’t fit it, you’re abnormal. Common ground is established by exploring one’s football loyalties. If you don’t care about the football… what sort of person are you?
Football team loyalty seems misguided to me. The players themselves swap teams. (Do they care who they’re playing for?)
Do I want everyone to start appreciating the arts more? What if you established initial common ground by giving your opinion on James Joyce or how moved you are or not by Beethoven?
Yes and no. As much as I feel oppressed by a raucous, crass, crude, unthinking, primitive culture of sport which elevates men (and only a few women) as national heroes for their ability to kick balls or swim fast, I wouldn’t actually like to be a part of the mainstream. I guess I relish my role as outsider and my shameful feelings of cultural superiority.
How about you?
20 Thursday Aug 2009
Posted in history, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)
An Illuminated Life : Belle Costa Da Greene’s Journey From Prejudice to Privilege / Heidi Ardizzone (Norton, 2007)
Pierpont Morgan’s librarian, Belle Costa Da Greene (1879-1950) is a fascinating woman. Her parents were of mixed ancestry – black and white. Her father, Richard Greener, was the first black graduate of Harvard. After early success, he was involved in scandal while ambassador to Russia and returned to the US to live out his life in obscurity. He had become estranged from the rest of his family, who wanted to ‘pass’ as white, while he wanted to stand up for black rights.
Belle lied constantly about her life story; she told people she had Portugese ancestry, and this is what gave her such ‘exotic’ features. Her biographer Heidi Ardizzone writes:
The tactic she would take, whether regarding her ancestry or her affair with Bernard, would be one of misleading openness. Consciously or not, Belle dealt with suspicious about first her ethnicity and now her sexual behaviour by acknowledging, even drawing attention to the rumours and the questions…. This tactic of hiding in the light flirted with true exposure, but it also allowed her the appearance of frankness, which veiled her growing collection of secrets. (207)
Belle was working with Pierpont Morgan’s nephew Junius when he recommended her in 1905 for the post of librarian for Morgan’s library. Morgan had devoted himself to building up a collection of rare books and manuscripts for several years now and his basement was overflowing; he was building a library next to his house to hold his collection.
Perhaps it was Belle’s charisma that persuaded Pierpont to take her on, even though she was a woman in a very masculine world and had no formal qualifications. She proved to be the best librarian one could imagine, building the library into an incredible collection. She was, we are told, brilliant at negotiating prices on rare items, a formidable and lively personality in society both in New York and Europe. She is marked by caprice and unpredictability; at time sounding feminist and yet joining the anti-suffragette movement; shifting from pacifist to vehemently pro-war over the course of the Great War.
It would seem she didn’t want her story told. Ardizzone writes- “But in her generation Belle was not alone in scorning personal history as irrelevant, in destroying personal papers, and in maintaining very different public and private personas.” (9) In her final illness in 1950, she burned all her papers, an act that means many of her secrets will never be revealed. Indeed, it was not until 2007 that a full length biography – this one – was finally published. The biography is built on the letters Belle wrote to her lover and friend of over forty years, Bernard Berenson. He lamented that in burning the letters he sent her, she had destroyed his autobiography; he could not bring himself to do the same to hers, in spite of her request.
Bernard, then, plays a massive role in the biography. It made me think about the difficult task of reconstructing a life, and the way sources skew any portrait. Was Bernard as significant in her life as the biography suggests? We’ll never know, but I would say he probably wasn’t, that he becomes significant as the source behind the biography. He is almost like the narrator of a novel.. and yet not; the letters Ardizzone is working from them are Belle addressing herself to him. Belle is the narrator, but Bernard is the audience.
Her love affair with Bernard has its tragedy. At first, it was a chaste exchange of passionate letters; he was in Europe, she in New York. She was constrained by the shadow of the other man in her life: Pierpont Morgan himself. Morgan was jealous and possessive of her as a twisted sort of father figure in her life; he didn’t want her having affairs with any man and especially not Bernard. Indeed, he didn’t even want her marrying.
But the affair was finally consumated on a trip to Venice in 1910. Ardizzone’s narration of this is unimaginative and anticlimatic after chapters leading up to it. Belle fell pregnant and was sent to London for an abortion. ‘In 1921 she remembered the “really innocent… utter and world-excluding worship I once gave you.” She commented that her ability to have that kind of feeling for anyone ceased to exist “when I left you to go to London,” although she did not realise it at the time.’ (199)
When she returned to New York from London, she was a different woman. While once chastely flirting, she had no inhibitions any longer and, Ardizzone documents, affairs with many men.
One thing I have loved in reading this biography is the strange intersections with famous and unlikely lives. Belle’s lover Bernard Berenson was married to the daughter of the still popular evangelical devotional writer, Hannah Whitall Smith. Hannah’s daughter, Mary, did not share her mother’s morality; she instituted an open marriage with Bernard, only to regret it later when he began his long love affair with Belle. Then there was Belle’s good friend Cardinal Ratti – former head of Vatican library – who became Pope Pius XI in the 1920s. She had friends in high places.
Biographies are a strange narrative. Without the simpler narrative arc of a conventional novel, they draw toward the only ending they can : the deathbed, the funeral, the legacy. The middle of this biography feels as boring as life itself can be: the seemingly endless twists and turns of a love affair between Bernard and Belle, none of them decisive. But then things do change; her endless youth and energy desert her. She grows old, the death of her nephew in World War Two – an unacknowledged suicide – breaks her; she dies.
It was, finally, for me a fascinating story, impressively researched, a remarkable feat, to bring this woman to life in a book. Albeit truncated, distorted, with gaps we would like to fill.
13 Thursday Aug 2009
Posted in history, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)
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Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) is a fascinating figure. My interest in him stems from his library of treasures, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. But the library, his legacy, is only the last phase in the life of a preposterous man, the king of his milieu.
He was born knowing that he would be ‘great’. His hero was Napoleon and his father was a wealthy industrialist, anticipating his own career.
In her 1999 biography, Morgan, Jean Strouse writes:
He began to keep diaries in 1850 – small “Line-a-day” books. Like most masculine journal writers of his time and social class, he was far more interested in registering what happened than in exploring subjective responses or ideas. “Sleighing, skating; beat father in backgammon,” he wrote in early January 1850. The next day, “wound 7 skeins of cotton for mother A man fell off one of the towers of the new depot & killed.” He rarely mentions his siblings. Over the following months he recorded: “Dancing school. Ladies to tea.” “Father did not come home.” “Mother ill.”… “Finished 3rd Book of Virgil. Picked some cherries.” Not even death evoked a comment: “Mr S.B. Paddock [with whom he was living] died at 10 o’clock aged 56. In evening staid home and read.”
What the diaries chiefly portray is a young mind intent on order and control. Next to the day and date printed on each page, Pierpont entered the number of days gone by and remaining for the year – on October first, for instance: ‘Days past, 274.” “To come, 91.” At the end of 1851 he tabulated “Places resided” between January and July – there were seventeen – and the diary pages convering each place. He kept lists of his income, expenses, the initials of girls he liked, and all the letters he sent and received, including postage paid. (38)
I am amazed by the detail of Morgan’s life that Strouse can give us. Most lives do not leave this many traces – childhood diaries, folders and folders of correspondence. There is barely a week of his life that Strouse cannot tell us something about. I compare it to my own family. I know almost nothing of Joseph Hobby, my great-grandfather born in the 1870s, let alone his father, a contemporary of Morgan’s. Not one letter, let alone the detail of a life, the happenings of the days, weeks and months which make it up.
Morgan was involved in some suspicious arms deals during the Civil War, financing the refurbishing of old guns bought cheaply off the army and selling them back at a large profit.
He built up an empire; he had so much money it attracted more money. He came to singlehandedly influence the stockmarket and control investment confidence.
Rhinophyma disfigured his face, a condition in which the nose spreads out red and bulbous. He didn’t want it fixed, superstitiously thinking it would lead to other conditions. He dared people not to stare at it; but he also avoided the public gaze and photographs.
He also lived in the shadow of his father, and it was only when his father died that he embarked with vigour acquiring valuable manuscripts from around the world. He treated with the spirit of competition and acquisitiveness with which he had amassed his empire and soon the basement of his mansion was overflowing with Gutenberg Bibles and rare manuscripts.
In 1906, a library was built next to his house to keep all his treasures. A tunnel connected it to his house. He hired a feisty young librarian who lied about her age and racial background, Belle Costa da Greene, who set about expanding his collection even further.
Hearings into his undue influence over the economy hastened his demise in 1913. He went travelling in Egypt afterwards and slipped into a delusional depression, convinced of conspiracies against him: ‘On the Nile in early February he slid into a delusional depression. He could not eat, had ‘horrid’ dreams, asked constantly about conspiracies, subpoenas, and citations for contempt of court, and felt, reported Louisa, that ‘the country was going to ruin, that his race was run, and his whole life work was for naught!’ (Strouse: 14) His death made headlines around the world. But who has heard of him today?
In his brilliant novel of this milleiu, Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow depicts a fascinating fictional J.P. Morgan. In Doctorow’s account, Pierpont believes himself to be the reincarnation of a special higher class of human, and tries to convince Henry Ford that he is one too. When Ford only partly joins this exclusive club of elites, Pierpont travels to Egypt alone to spend a night in a pyramid. In his absence, the finale of the novel occurs in his library.
06 Thursday Aug 2009
Posted in death, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), writing
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Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. it proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
– E.L. Doctorow Ragtime, p. 63
30 Thursday Jul 2009
On Tuesday night, when I should have been doing something productive or relaxing, I created a graph showing how many novels (and other narratives) I had read by country since 1996. The results were predictably homogenous, but even more weighted toward the USA than I imagined.
There you have it – 220 from the USA, 101 from Britain, 68 from Australia, 14 from Canada for the top four places. I don’t have records from 98-00; maybe I was much more cosmpolitan in those years. The figures are also skewed toward the USA because in 96 and 97 when I was a science fiction addict, just about everything I read came from there.
I was thinking of resolving to read more Australian, European, Asian and African texts to broaden my horizons. And maybe I will. But I’m not going to worry too much. There’s too many things in this world to feel guilty about.
But I am curious about why I’m so drawn to American fiction. I have an aversion to consumerism, patriotism, fundamentalism and unchecked capitalism, all those things America is famous for. But I am also fascinated by America, and even to prod and gawk at those things I hate. Many of my favourite authors are American – Auster, DeLillo, Franzen, Moody, McCullers, Updike. I’d like to visit the USA some day; I’ll just have a hard time convincing my wife. (I think I would like to travel by train across its heartland; keep meaning to read Don Watson’s account of this.)
I think its easier to read in tune with our own culture, rather than cross cultural boundaries; and interestingly I don’t feel like I have to cross much of a boundary to read American fiction – or British fiction, I suppose, but I’ve found less authors there whom I love.
Interestingly just about every European novel I have read has been brilliant. This is merely a reflection of how selective I’ve been, but there’s an untapped continent there. In fact, there’s at least four of them.
What are your reading habits like? Regale and shame me with the stories of how you spend your leisure time reading Afghani novels in the original or 13th century Chinese epics. Go on, show me up. 🙂
23 Thursday Jul 2009
Posted in quotes, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), writing
Good writing, surely, occurs when we somehow make ourselves as open as possible to intense, half-conscious impulses, even though the expression of them will make us uncomfortable because they matter so much. Revision is learning to read our work as if someone else had written it, paying attention to our confusions, lapses of interest, our disbelief or failure to care.
– Mattison, A. (2004). “Coincidence in Stories : An Essay Against Craft.” Writer’s Chronicle 36(6): 10.
16 Thursday Jul 2009
W. – Oliver Stone’s latest film has just come out on DVD. It’s a biopic of George W. Bush, focusing on the family dynamics that – in this story at least – pushed him into wanting to be president and into invading Iraq. Stone’s take is that Bush was haunted by his early mess-ups, his drunkenness and occupational failures, and wanted to prove himself to his disproving father, who always preferred older brother Jeb. I found it interesting for its attempt to dramatise such recent history and the uncanny moments of resemblance to their real life counterparts in the different actors’ performances. But it lacks bite; it never touches the profound and never seems to resolve just what tone it is capturing or what it is trying to say. A good, watchable film, when I half expected something brilliant. 3/5
Last Ride – an Australian film currently showing in arthouse cinemas, it tells the story of a man on the run with his son somewhere between Port Augusta and Adelaide. The narrative tension is strong even as things move slowly, as pieces of their past are unfurled and the police close in. It is a visually interesting – at times beautiful – film with a good script and great performances. But it made me think that I like best films with articulate heroes and transcendence, not the inarticulate hero and bleak, full sun realism. 3.5/5
09 Thursday Jul 2009
I’m researching James Sykes Battye (1871-1954) for my novel. He was the first state librarian in Western Australia, establishing what was then called the Victoria Public Libary, now the State Library of Western Australia.
He was only 23 when he was appointed state librarian in 1894, and incredibly he was appointed for life. He stayed on in this role – also in control of the museum and art gallery – for more than half a century, dying on the job in 1954 at age 82.
At the time of his death, the state cabinet was trying to negotiate his retirement; he apparently wanted to stay on. In her thesis on him, Celia Chesney mentions intriguingly that the cabinet was prepared to let him live on in the house attached to the library after his retirement. I am fascinated by this image of an octogenarian librarian clinging to his position, living in the library itself, having ruled the library and the cultural life of the state for the first half of the century, through two world wars and a depression.
Born into a working class Victorian family, he worked his way up the ladder of society. He was heavily involved in the freemasons, an intriguing and disturbing – though commonplace – link for men in high places in Australian society in the early twentieth century. He is best remembered today because the collection of Westraliana in the state library is named after him and because of the cyclopedia of Western Australia he compiled. (I am fascinated by the polymathic nature of prominent people in the early twentieth century; this man having his finger in so many pies is something that’s going to inform one of my characters.)
The picture I’ve got of him from my reading is an ambitious man who started the library well, building an impressive collection and engaging the interest of the public. But a long decay set in as funding dropped during the Depression and the library atrophied. He came to obstinately cling to his position, unable to relinquish the role, unable to admit to himself that his time had passed.
There are two significant sources of information on him. Firstly, the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, written by historian Fred Alexander. Alexander and Battye were not, apparently, always on good terms and one can see evidence of conflict in Alexander’s assessment of Battye’s contribution to UWA:
he rarely revealed constructive imagination and, despite a certain skill and finesse in negotiation, was no match for the subtler academic minds. Partly because of his relatively low public service standing, his achievements as ambassador for the university were limited.
Secondly, an unpublished thesis of 15000 words written for a diploma of history at UWA by Celia Chesney. Called “A man of progress : Dr James Sykes Battye”, it includes a helpful annotated bibliography and is available, of course, in the Battye Library.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 