The Recluse

By Evelyn Juers

Giramondo Shorts, 2012
 
 
 
The Recluse opens with a brief, evocative description of student life in a share house in Queen Street, Newtown, Sydney in the early 1970s; wherein we learn that the author sometimes skips classes and goes down to read in Camperdown Cemetery. One of her favourite spots to sit is near the grave of a certain Judge Donnithorne and his daughter Eliza; one of the books she reads is Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations; there is, it turns out, a ghostly connection between these two –the grave and the book – not disparate things. For it is rumoured that Eliza Emily Donnithorne, who lived out the later part of her life in a big nineteenth century house in Newtown, was the model for the reclusive jilted bride, Miss Havisham, made famous by Dickens’ fiction.

Evelyn Juers, employing the same methodology – which might be described as the bricolage of synchronous quotation – used to such wonderful effect in House of Exile, sets out to see if this is true. Her quest takes her all over the world, and all over the World Wide Web, as she searches the records in Australia, British India, South Africa and the UK. The connections she finds set up reverberations in the echo chamber of her mind, which she transcribes with grace, economy and a hint of the mischievous absurd – she has a nice line in wry acknowledgement that there is a point past which conjecture cannot go, and yet she will always try to go that one step beyond. What she turns up – whether it strengthens the identification between fictional character and historical figure or not – is always worth knowing anyway: the book is in some respects a social history, full of luminous images – a gold scarf pin with pearls – of Newtown as it was in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Her method means that the dividing line between the speculative and the verifiable is constantly being challenged; the sheer range and number of possible connections unearthed is dizzying, the might-have-been is as fecund, as suggestive, as any incontrovertible disinterred fact. This highlights an aspect integral to search literature: the grail, whatever it might be, frequently turns out to be elusive or even delusive, the quest itself is replete with interest, insight, enlightenment and delight. The Recluse leads us seductively through the detail of forgotten lives to become a meditation upon strategies for living, amongst which is the choice to spend your time in seclusion, collecting, cooking, gardening, harp-playing, lace-making or following other solitary pursuits – of which the most solitary and hermetic of all is reading.

Reclusiveness is of course also a provocation to the social animal which, these days, we are all required to be: that mysterious point at which an individual declines to be known by others is a perpetual irritant to the convivial – how then can we tell if those solitary ecstasies are not more intense, more fulfilling, more transcendent, than any we may experience in company? And yet it does not require much reflection to understand that all of us reserve a part of ourselves, and a draft of our most intimate experiences, from the eyes and ears of others; the recluse therefore differs from the rest of us not in kind but in degree.

There is a beautifully understated point here, which the author implies rather than makes: her indefatigable inquiry into the antecedents of the Donnithorne family, their connections in Africa, India and England, the well-heeled life they lead among the upper echelons of colonial society in Sydney, Melbourne and the hinterland, must fail to reveal the essential that it seeks to uncover. Not only can we never be certain that Eliza was a model for Miss Havisham – and it seems that, if she was, she was one of several – nor will we ever know who she was, as we say, really. She remains an enigma, a shadowy figure who lives what may be a life of great felicity behind that door which is never closed but never quite open either, inscribed in a work of ‘biography as vastness, minuteness, contiguity and as a form of Wunderkammer.’

So this is a work that knows it cannot close the book on its subject. We as readers are asked questions without answers, beguiled with possibilities that may or may not have a basis in fact; most of all, perhaps, tantalised by the nature of the relationship between a literary work and the circumstances that gave rise to it. A central paradox is that, in Imperial Britain and her Empire, there was too much history, while in the nineteenth century Antipodes there wasn’t enough: hence a source for what might be called the Myth of Miss Havisham in Newtown as turn-of-the-twentieth-century newspaper speculation that arises out of that sense of there not being enough past. In so doing this creates, albeit in a specious or inauthentic sense, the very history we lack.

Varamo

by César Aira,

translated by Chris Andrews

(Giramondo Shorts, 2012)

The impoverishment of antecedents thus leads to the invention of a history that is much more complex than a fiction could ever be; and yet, like a fiction, this history exists in an imaginary space. Such territory, whether we call it history as fiction or fiction as history, is as characteristic of Latin American as it is of Antipodean writing.  Traversed in a wholly different manner is the other book from the elegant series of Giramondo Shorts under review here: one written by an Argentine and translated by an Australian.

‘Although,’ remarks Varamo’s narrator, ‘this book takes the form of a novel, it is a work of literary history, not a fiction, because the protagonist existed and he was the author of a famous poem.’ The narrator thereby makes a statement that is incorrect in every particular save one: Varamo does indeed take the form, albeit unusual, of a novel. It is not however a work of literary history, save for the sense that it is the history of a fiction; there is no warrant, apart from Varamo itself, for the prior existence of its hero, Varamo, and none whatever for the existence of his poem. Even though the circumstances of the composition of that work, called The Song of the Virgin Child, are exhaustively detailed, not a single line of the poem is given to us. We have no alternative but to disbelieve in the actual existence of ‘that celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American Poetry.’

The prolific Aira’s novella was completed in the dying days of 1999 and published in Spanish in 2002; it is one of a very few, perhaps only nine, of his more than fifty books to have appeared thus far in English. This publication, in a translation by Chris Andrews, is notable for its clarity, its transparency and its preternatural ability to reproduce the voice of Aira’s narrator, with his deadpan style, his preposterous inventions and his propensity to jump from narration to commentary then back to narration again. Varamo is an absurdist account of twenty-four hours in the life of an obscure clerk working for the Panamanian government in the city of Colon in 1923 – the year, (perhaps) coincidentally, that Kafka ceased to write in his diary. It begins with the hero’s receipt of his month’s wages in counterfeit notes and ends with the sale of his poem; the events of the book, by turns bizarre, comic, grotesque, humdrum, theatrical, are told in a manner that the narrator reminds the reader is known as ‘free indirect style,’ defined as ‘the view from inside the character expressed in the third person [which] creates an impression of naturalness and allows us to forget we are reading fiction.’

Of course, as soon as we are reminded of the manner in which an illusion is created, that illusion is likely to fade, but one of the many strange things about Varamo is the way in which the illusion of the reality of the unsung clerk persists even as we are shown the mechanics of its construction. It is in fact a book of strangenesses: a stuffed fish playing a miniature piano is one, two spinster sisters who smuggle golf clubs singly into Colon another, a car rally that isn’t a race but an attempt to arrive at a uniform average speed over distance, a third. Aira is known for his propensity to make things up as he goes along and that is, indeed, one of the pleasures of Varamo – what on earth is he going to come up with next? There’s an implied comment here on the magic realism of Marquez and other Latin American writers antecedent to Aira, who might be said to be ploughing a furrow of his own ‘diabolic realism.’

But this kind of story-telling cannot work unless there is internal consistency to the tale and in this sense Varamo is a triumph: the story, while outlandish, is composed so that all of its elements contribute to a whole which has the coherence of a shaggy dog story or something written in verse by Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. And the voice of the book is so compelling we believe, not so much the events, as the characters that the events manifest. Even if nothing we are told could possibly have happened in just that way or indeed any other way, Varamo himself is real, the chauffeur Cigarro is real, so are the Góngoras sisters . . . and so too, finally, is the poem that Varamo is about. For Aira’s most majestic and audacious sleight of hand is that he creates The Song of the Virgin Child in absentia, as it were, without needing to quote a line of it: his fiction becomes the poem it writes about.

This is made crystal clear in the last few sentences of the book, which can be read, inter alia, as a succinct commentary on the making of The Recluse; and also excuses the reviewer from having to recommend these two excellent books in his own words:

If a work is dazzlingly innovative and opens up unexplored paths, the merit is not to be found in the work itself, but in its transformative effect on the historical moment that engendered it. Novelty makes its causes new, giving birth to them retrospectively. If historical time makes us live in the new, a story that attempts to account for the origin of a work of art, that is, a work of innovation, ceases to be a story: it’s a new reality, and yet a part of reality as it has always been for everyone. Those who don’t believe me can go and see for themselves.

Alien Shores

Ed. Sharon Rundle, Meenakshi Bharat

Brass Monkey Press

ISBN 9780980863932

219 pages, RRP $24.95

Reviewed by SUNIL BADAMI

Exile is a powerful undercurrent in the Indian imagination. One of its defining myths, the Ramayana, tells the story of a noble prince banished from his home and spending much of his exile rescuing his wife from the clutches of the tyrannical ruler of the island of Lanka.

Despite Rama crossing a still extant land bridge to reach her – and the Ramayana spreading throughout South East Asia – Hindus were forbidden from crossing the kala pani, or black water, for fear of losing their caste. It was only starvation and desperation caused by the imposition of imperial cash crops such as cotton, jute and opium that forced many to become indentured coolies in far-flung plantations in South America, the Caribbean, Africa, South East Asia and the South Pacific, making Indians one of the world’s most widespread diasporas.

Exile and alienation also figure deeply in Australian mythology, the ‘tyranny of distance’ weighing heavily, our backs turned from the alien, hostile landscape of Frederick McCubbin’s lost white children and picnics at Hanging Rock to the sea, over the sea, overseas, to ‘old England, the beautiful’ and more recently, ‘the land of the free.’

Our alienation from our own ‘terra nullius’ have created a history full of, as Mark Twain quipped, ‘the most beautiful of lies.’ As the narrator of Michelle Cahill’s  ‘A Wall of Water’ observes, ‘The past is a territory. So much of it has been excised.’ (68)

Both Australia and India – at once cradles of civilisation and new, multicultural nations – were founded not so much on inclusion as exclusion. India was born out of the trauma of Partition. The Federal Australian Parliament’s first Act was the White Australia Policy. And both countries have, by way of so-called ‘post-colonial literature,’ explored both the agony of exile and the mythology of history.

As the critic Pierre Ryckmans observed in his essay, Lies that Tell the Truth (quoting C. S. Lewis): ‘Myth is the oldest and richest form of fiction. It performs an essential function: “what myth communicates is not truth but reality; truth is always about something—reality is what truth is about.”’[i]

As Ryckmans points out, ‘truth is grasped by an imaginative leap.’ What makes us human isn’t language – animals, from bees to whales, can communicate; apes can be taught to sign. What makes us human is our imagination: to see and believe that which is not seen. When imagination succeeds, it can reveal the truth. Yet myth often arises when memory fails.

Myths abound about refugees and asylum seekers: they’re opportunists, economic migrants, queue jumpers, potential terrorists, they want to change the country, throw their children overboard, carry contagious diseases.

As Ross Gittens observed, the fear those myths engender is ‘so deeply ingrained, so visceral, that it’s not susceptible to rational argument. It would be nice if a greater effort by the media to expose the many myths surrounding attitudes towards asylum seekers could dispel the fear and resentment, but it would make little difference,’[ii] especially when neither side of politics cannot imagine any other ‘solution’ than the Pacific one, and facts and faces are lost amidst the lies, damn lies and statistics.

It seems ironic, then, to combat such rampant dishonesty and fearful mythology with fiction. But as Rosie Scott notes in her excellent foreword to this collection of  ‘Tales of Refugees and Asylum Seekers from Australia and the Indian Subcontinent’:

It is the writer’s act of imagination which is the basis of all good fiction, the kind of fiction that opens new worlds
to the reader.
(3)

Asylum seekers and refugees have impacted on the popular imagination as much as they have the political debate, with the decade since the Tampa producing books and films such as Eva Sallis’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-shortlisted The Marsh Birds, Michael James Rowland’s moving film Lucky Miles, John Doyle’s acclaimed Marking Time, Nam Le’s award-winning short story collection The Boat, Anh Do’s best-selling Australian Book of the Year, The Happiest Refugee, and SBS’s successful Go Back to Where You Came From.

In all of these, refugees were not just presented as faceless statistics, but as real people with moving stories: even those opposed to ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘illegals’ and instrumental in formulating the Pacific Solution, such as Peter Reith, could not help but be moved when faced with real people and their often heart-breaking stories.

One hopes, too, that the stories found in Alien Shores will do the same. Many of its stories are devastating – not only for the horrific and tragic events that precipitated flight – but for the sorrow, regret and guilt that remain once immediate fear has receded: the father forced to leave his six year old daughter behind in Abdul Karim Hekmat’s sweet and sad Life Hanging in the Balance; the social worker who must live with her refusal to help in Amitav Ghosh’s eviscerating Morichjãpi; the little girl who cannot help ‘the kind man, someone else’s father from a strange land, being taken away’ in Anu Kumar’s delicate and haunting Big Fish.

Much less the guilt of the well-meaning ‘middle-class do-gooder’ like me, who, for all their ‘sense of shame at the cruel and opportunistic Liberal government’s inhumane treatment of refugees’ knows no amount of ‘waving placards’ – much less cc’ing internet petitions – will ever do much for ‘those desperate, innocent people locked up indefinitely in disgusting concentration camps in the middle of the desert.’ (Page reference)

Over the course of an entire book, this guilt could lead to the very thing Alien Shores must be seeking to avoid, if not change: compassion fatigue. As Go Back to Where You Came From showed, there is as much a limit to imagination as there is to compassion, watching those unsympathetic to refugees relating to them on a human or personal level, but continuing to justify their opposition to more humane treatment.

As the narrator of Linda Jaivin’s tender and hopeful Karim says, ‘I haven’t been able to cope with other people’s misery. It’s like I’m full up, there’s not room for one drop more. It’s also like I’ve become porous: it’s as if I let down my defences and opened myself up even a bit, all the sorrow in the world would come flowing in. I got good at fortifying my boundaries.’

I wondered—just as I did watching Go Back to Where You Came From—what reading Alien Shores will do to change closed minds and move hard hearts, when it’s unlikely the people who really need to read this book will? After all, although Go Back to Where You Came From’s viewing figures were the highest in SBS history, the X Factor had double the audience on the same nights.

And that indifference and resistance is as exacerbated by depictions of refugees as pitifully passive tragic victims as the demonization of them by right wing politicians and shock jocks. One wonders if Anh Do’s success is because the ‘happiest refugee’ leavens his suffering with hope and gratitude, as much as infusing his story with greater agency than flight.

Indeed, where Alien Shores especially succeeds is in offering, through often rich, evocative and sometimes visceral writing—as in Deepa Agarwal’s gripping The Path (which at first could describe any flight from danger, only small but telling details revealing that refugees have existed as long as war has), or Joginder Paul’s horrifying Dera Baba Nanak—not just new perspectives beyond those stereotypes, but within us.

Many stories from both countries feature middle-class protagonists or narrators, which work effectively at shaking the very middle class complacency many of us are guilty of, including Sujata Sankrati’s involving and moving No Name, No Address, Meenakshi Bharat’s The Lost Kingdom, Tabish Khair’s A State of Niceness, and especially Ali Alizadeh’s confronting and shattering The Ogre.  

In this regard, the collection’s stand out story is co-editor Sharon Rundle’s excellent Ariel’s Song, which makes refugees of ordinary Australians, giving them the same hopelessness and impossible choices. The story offers, in the way only good fiction can, the imaginative empathy that comes with connection and compassion: of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes and feeling what it must really be like for them, especially when the ‘they’ are us.

The queue grows longer every morning. By the time our water container is filled I’ve at least sweated away half that much fluid. Somewhere down the line Bill repeats the same story he tells every day: I had a ute and a boat and a business—a big house—all gone—gone—all gone. (107)

The subtitle suggests a thematic connection between Australia and India, featuring subcontinental asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma. Unfortunately this makes the very good stories from China, Indochina and East Timor seem incongruous, and made me wonder: what about African refugee stories, such as Majok Tulba’s? Or South American? Or Balkan?

Still, what they do reveal is the way the lines between one region and another are continually blurred, the way countries are connected by tides of movement in a globalised age in which multinational corporations and transnational terrorists have rendered borders obsolete as much as hybridised identities like mine have dissolved national ones – a point made violently in Jamil Ahmad’s The Sins of the Mother, in which nomads are caught between ancient traditions and modern laws, ‘the lines of demarcation… confusing to all.’ Much like the increasingly bleeding boundaries between personal and political, truth and fiction, history and myth.

The waves of suffering crashing upon our shores, the tide of sorrow set adrift on excised territories, the razor wire rolled out around ‘unAustralians’ are disheartening, but for all the noise of political ‘debate’ and media commentary, the power of literature, as Scott points out, ‘to move people [and] allow us to see into one another’s hearts, to foster compassion and understanding and inspire political action works in a way that almost nothing else does,’ remains long after everything else has been washed away.

Collected

by Rosemary Dobson

UQP, 2012

ISBN 978 0 7022 3911 3

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

Reading Rosemary Dobson’s Collected in those few short (and now poignant) weeks between its delayed appearance and her death at 92, I was particularly struck by how little these poems, beginning in the mid-1940s, have aged.

Most of the crucial ones, I was familiar with from having read her earlier collections and hearing the poet read them quite often over the four decades she lived in Canberra. It’s always a particular pleasure for a reviewer to be able to have in his or her auditory memory the sound of the poet presenting and interpreting her own work.

In Dobson’s case it was invariably a quiet, unassertive voice, almost shy but with an underlying confidence in the material — which she felt no need to “tart up” with histrionics of any kind. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature called this being “restrained and decorous” but this is to sell her way too short. Some others were inclined to mutter at poetry readings about “poets not reading their own works well” (not as well as Shakespearean actors, for instance) but in Dobson’s case this criticism was misapplied. She read quietly because (unlike much of, say, Dorothy Hewett’s oeuvre) Dobson’s are quiet poems. Quiet — and thoughtful. Quiet — and often wryly witty.

It is probably this decibel deficiency that caused her to be somewhat overlooked at times among that remarkable generation of Australian poets who emerged just after World War II — and who proceeded to dominate our poetry scene until the late 1960s (and beyond, in some cases). Many of them, such as David Campbell, Judith Wright, Francis Webb and Douglas Stewart were Dobson’s close friends. Others included James McAuley and A.D. Hope. Still others, such as Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Hewett (also born in the early-1920s and delayed by housewifery and politics respectively) were to emerge later — in the early 1960s.

While all these poets had distinctive and personal voices (that was a part of their greatness) they also shared some important values and preoccupations. Most had a metaphysical dimension to their poetry (even the atheists); many were concerned with art in its broadest sense — and with Australian history (particularly the role of voyagers and explorers). Dobson’s interest in art was perhaps more intense than that of the others since she, unlike them for the most part, wrote ekphrastically about particular paintings — often from the Renaissance period. Indeed, A.D. Hope, as a critic, was initially inclined to undervalue Dobson’s work for precisely this reason.

Looking back now with almost seventy years’ hindsight, we can see that it was only in her first book, In a Convex Mirror, that Dobson’s work appears at all dated. Here, at the age of 24 in the last two years of World War II, she was very much part of the zeitgeist and one can fairly readily imagine a number of the poems in In a Convex Mirror being written by someone else in the group.

Dobson, in this book, consistently uses the strict forms characteristic of Australian poetry at the time (though not necessarily of American poetry). There are phrases, even in highly successful poems like the title one, that could almost as well be attributed to, say, Judith Wright or A.D. Hope (“The hidden spaces of the heart”, for instance, or “Time’s still waters deeply flow”). There are inversions of word order — not intrinsically objectionable but much more popular then than now (“And words to wiser silence pass”).

On the other hand, in this same poem, we also have an example of Dobson’s evocative compression when she writes of how angels “Inflame a Dutch interior”. Such images already foreshadow the mature Dobson who was to appear so convincingly in her next book, The Ship of Ice (1948). Although the title poem can seem melodramatic in parts (“a bride of ice in a ship set southwards”) it is in Dobson’s second collection that we encounter the poet who will present through to her last full collection, Untold Lives and Later Poems — with which she won, at the age of eighty, The Age Book of the Year award. It is in The Ship of Ice too where we first see Dobson’s best-known, though somewhat atypical, poem, “Country Press” — which, fittingly, was read at her funeral.

Reading Dobson’s Collected from that second volume onwards, one is struck by the sheer consistency of its artistry, its author’s personal qualities and preoccupations. There is a tone of voice (quiet, meditative, wry at times) which is effortlessly maintained. There is an unstrained range of cultural reference. And there is her constant feel for narrative (even within the lyric) — culminating in  Untold Lives and Later Poems (2001), arguably her best book (though not as technically formal as her earlier ones).

It was in this last full collection that Dobson’s empathy for others became most apparent. It comprises a persuasive set of observations of, or vignettes about, a considerable range of people. They are not types but individuals whose often low-key lives (and fates)  have something important to tell us. Written in a flexible blank verse and in relatively plain diction, enlivened occasionally by a more colourful image or turn of phrase, these poems are very different from, and much  more relaxed than, the ones with which Dobson began her career back in 1944.

In this context we can see that David McCooey is correct, in his Introduction to Collected, in stressing  Dobson’s concern with the “the half-seen, the ghostly, and the half-understood”. Dobson, despite her insistence on the “simple” was never one for the trite. It is likewise appropriate for McCooey to quote from an interview he conducted some years back with Dobson where she insisted: “Simplicity, clarity and austerity are qualities I hold to.” She had no desire to complicate or extend poems unnecessarily — or to set up false barriers for readers. Communication was important to her but so was the complexity and elusiveness of what was to be communicated.

In Collected’s final poem, “Divining Colander”, Dobson says: “And here, in Age, I feel the need / Of some Divining Colander / To hold the best of all since done / And let the rest slip through.” In some ways, despite her  characteristic modesty, this was a false problem. The divining had already been done in compiling the individual collections. Inevitably, there is some small variation in quality throughout the book but it is moving to see that, at the end, Dobson had so much that was worth retaining, that met the two criteria mentioned in “Divining Colander”, namely “style and worth”. It’s gratifying, too, that a small but indicative sample of the translations she did (in tandem) from the Russian of Mandelstam and Akhmatova and others during the 1970s has been added at the end.

Even if In a Convex Mirror is less remarkable than its successors, it is probably the right decision to have included it — not just to make a contrast with the more authentically personal poems to follow but to emphasise with what assurance Dobson began her career (even if some of that first collection’s techniques and concerns were borrowed or shared).

At 358 pages, Rosemary Dobson’s Collected is a book to be savoured over several weeks; then shelved for ready and repeated reference. With the (now often unavailable) “Collecteds” of her other eminent friends and contemporaries, this comprehensive and well-designed book, issued just a few weeks before its author’s death, will remain an important part of our literary heritage. Indeed, in the first few weeks after Dobson’s passing her Collected was on a best-seller list or two.