Category Archives: Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

[Thursday 3pm #26] The Book of Life

24 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in death, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), writing

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An extract from The Library of Babel

I was on the bus after work to visit Grandad when my mobile started vibrating in my pocket. Its urgency disturbed me: phones were always for bad news in my mind. This time I was right – it was Dad and he was calling to say Grandad had died a few minutes ago.

My voice turned to a whisper. I didn’t want these strangers on the bus knowing my business. I asked Dad if he was coping okay, a stupid question, but I didn’t know what else to say. He said he was okay. I told him I was nearly at the hospice.

The book I’d been reading sat forgotten on my lap. I felt cheated that I’d nearly got there, that I could have seen him one last time and I hadn’t. I looked all around me on the bus, and then I couldn’t get my eyes off the stupid advertisements on the inside walls. There was nowhere I could go without people trying to sell me stuff.

I wanted someone with me but I couldn’t bear to ring Anita. I didn’t want to say Grandad was dead. Spreading the news would make it seem more real. The best thing would be to tell no-one, and then, as far as the world was concerned, he would go on living.

I suddenly realised I had no grandparents left, then I reproached myself. I was being so selfish. The person I should be thinking about was Grandad. I wanted to think precisely of what had just happened to him, to get past the words to the event itself. His consciousness had been extinguished. As far as his body was concerned, he no longer existed.

Everyone always said how sad it was for the people left behind, but I was thinking how the real tragedy was for dead person. How could it be possible to die? For your mind to be thinking thoughts one moment, and then not thinking thoughts the next? How could it be possible to have a final thought?

He had a final thought, and no-one will ever even know what it was. Let alone what came next for him. I wondered if he had last words. No-one even cared about last words these days. People used to care about last words; they probably used to rehearse them, to make sure they had them right. Your last words were the culmination of your life.

I went a few stops past the hospice. It wasn’t like I was thinking very straight. Stepping off the bus into the dusk, I had to walk back along the highway. Bus shelter ads, fast food litter on the uneven slabs of the footpath and all the cars rushing past with such violence. The sun was gone and chill of the night was setting in. I needed to ring Anita, I still couldn’t bear to. This could be an ordinary Tuesday night, I could be going to a pub – not that I ever did, but wouldn’t it be such a comforting, ordinary thing to do tonight? – or going to see a cheap movie at the cinema. But these weren’t options tonight.

An innocuous blue sign pointed down a sidestreet to the hospice. It was a residential street, lined with trees. None of these people in their houses knew that a long had just ended in their street. It happened daily, people’s long life stories coming to an end in beds inside a building on their streets. Did they know how much was being lost around them?

Dad, Uncle Graham, Aunty Pat were gathered in the room where he had died. His body had already been taken away. The bed was empty and unmade. I gave everyone subdued hugs.

Dad asked in a low voice if I wanted to see his body. I said no. Even seeing the empty bed was too much. I hadn’t seen a dead body this far in my life and I didn’t want to start today.

On the beside table was an old paperback. I picked it up; a bookmark from his local library was stuck between pages 190 and 191. He only had a few chapters to go. While everyone was talking, I slipped the book into my bag.

That night, I sat in the lounge room until one a.m. reading the old paperback. It was A.J. Cronin’s autobiography, Adventure in Two Worlds. Uncle Graham had probably grabbed it from Grandad’s shelf. I wondered if Grandad had read it before, or if it had been one of those books he had bought at a garage sale and been meaning to get to for the last twenty years.

It was a cheap paperback edition from the 1960s, the cover declaring it an international bestseller. I disliked bestsellers, but I had sympathy for the forgotten bestsellers of the past. Their obsolescence was touching, as was their misplaced self-confidence. They encapsulated their time and its passing.

Grandad liked to read old paperbacks. Whether it was chosen for him or he chose it, it was a fitting book for his last read. It was a life story imbued with the same old-fashioned notion of common sense that Grandad lived by, and the same refusal to be subversive, crude or despairing. It starts out in typical autobiographical fashion, full of the young doctor’s struggles to succeed in the world. But as the doctor becomes a best-selling writer, the narrative becomes more and more choked with anecdotes until it seizes up altogether in sermons.

I got to Grandad’s bookmark and powered on past it, reading what he had never got to read and thinking how he would have loved the end of the book, as Cronin at the height of his powers looks back on a successful life in a self-congratulatory tone I found difficult.

I got to the last word and shut the book. The book was finished, Cronin was at the height of his powers and Grandad was dead. But Cronin wasn’t really at the height of his powers. I got onto the internet and looked him up. He’d died in 1981, twenty-nine years after he wrote the story of his life. The year I was born. His narrative had started in 1917 when he was 18, the year Grandad was born. The coincidences didn’t lead anywhere, were all vague, but they gave me a sense of appropriateness. The book was finished, the book was out of print, Grandad was dead but Cronin was dead too.

There should be a book for people to read on their deathbed which explains everything. So that you’ve got something to look forward to. The last book you read should be the one which makes sense of life. But what if you lived on too long, finished that book, and then had to start something else? What were the odds of dying at the right time, when you’ve just finished a book? It wasn’t good to leave a book unfinished when you died. Poor Grandad. At least I’d read it for him, that had to count for something.

I had thought that when I finished the book I would want to sleep, but I still felt dissatisfied. I wished I could write in my diary and capture the feelings and thoughts of the day, but I didn’t feel able to. I wanted to listen to the radio, but there was never anything good on that late and it would wake up Anita. She stirred as I came to bed and asked me if I was okay. I told her I was probably more okay than Dad and I was definitely more okay than Grandad.

[Thursday 3pm #25] Endpoint and other poems : a dispatch from the afterlife

17 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in book review, death, poetry, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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endpointReading John Updike’s final book, a collection of poems, is like receiving a dispatch from the afterlife.  The poems take us nearly up to the point of his death from lung cancer in January this year. He sent the manuscript off and then he died.

The cover photo has a poignancy to it, with its spontaneous, snapshot quality, the sombre ordinariness of it in its black and whiteness, and the sense that John is about to head off down a path we can’t follow him down, not yet.

The collection starts with the ‘Endpoint’ sequence that takes us through each of his last birthdays, starting with his seventieth in 2002, and then into his diagnosis and swift death. His thoughts range across his life, from childhood to old age, as he reflects on mortality, aging, memory. In 2005 he writes

A life poured into words – apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable future
when I am dead, will read? (p.8)

In hospital, having learnt of his death he writes:

Must I do this, uphold the social lie
that binds us all together in blind faith
that nothing ends, not youth nor age nor strength,
as in a motion picture which, once seen,
can be rebought on DVD? My tongue
says yes; within, I lamely drown. (p. 23)

His final reflections are baldly honest.  His poetry is less ornate than his prose, and it makes him seem more vulnerable, frail. He has let me in on the final secret journey he took, which I only learned he had taken when his death was announced that hot, hot January day.

After the ‘Endpoint’ sequence, are pages and pages of other poems, as if to say John is not really dead, as if to say he’s still alive like he should be, like I thought he would be.

[Thursday 3pm #24] The cartoons of my childhood: nostalgia and disappointment

10 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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voltron

Have you ever tried going back to the cartoons of your childhood? I have, and it’s been a mix of nostalgia and disappointment. I can watch the same episodes again, but I can’t watch them with the same eyes.

I watched some episodes of He-Man and Voltron for the first time in twenty years this year. I was shocked how bad they were. They both offered incoherent, ludicrous story lines, combining visual elements likely to appeal to six year olds with no thought for consistency. He-Man features bare chested warriors with swords next to cyborgs all living in a castle and each episode fighting off a simplistic baddie called Skeletor who is a skeleton in a cloak. The castle is an important element: Voltron has it too, as five astronauts find hidden robot lions to save a princess from an evil alien king.

The backstory of Voltron is that the mighty Voltron robot was so powerful that a space-goddess (!) cast a spell on it, splitting it into five different coloured parts, which became robot lions as they fell to the ground, each one falling to an environment relevant to its colour – the green lion to the forest, the blue lion into the water, etc. It takes some keys buried in the king’s sarcophagus (and one stolen by ‘space-mice’) to reactivate the lions. But of course, the team learns that it has to join together into one big robot if it wants to win. It sounds remarkably well designed to sell toys. And it worked – we all wanted all the lions; my brother got the yellow one, and I the green one.

It’s no wonder children wrote terrible stories at school. The cartoons they watched were setting a terrible example. Although not all of them – I also rewatched a number of episodes from The Mysterious Cities of Gold, and it stood up much better. It used to be on at 5pm on ABC in the late 80s. It’s an epic story of lost orphans who are taken to South America to find the Mysterious Cities of Gold. It has a lot of moral ambiguity and complexity to some of its characters and it still managed to fill me with some sense of wonder.

I hate to think what will happen when I try to re-read the Famous Five. The only childhood book that has stayed with me into adulthood is John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy.

[Thursday 3pm #23] Possession: the novel and the film

03 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in book review, film review, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (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.

[Thursday 3pm #22] Sports culture is oppressive

27 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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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?

[Thursday 3pm #21] Belle Costa Da Greene : ‘Girl Librarian’

20 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in history, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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bellegreeneAn 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.

[Thursday 3pm #20] The Book Collector With the Big Nose: Pierpont Morgan

13 Thursday Aug 2009

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JohnPierpontMorganPierpont 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.

[Thursday 3pm # 19] Journal writing : a quote

06 Thursday Aug 2009

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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

[Thursday 3pm #18] American Habits

30 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, lists, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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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.

Novelsbycountry

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. 🙂

[Thursday 3pm #17] Good writing : a quote

23 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in quotes, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), writing

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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.