Dark Night Walking With McCahon

by Martin Edmond

Auckland University Press

Reviewed by MICHELLE DICINOSKI

On April 11, 1984, the major New Zealand artist Colin McCahon disappeared unaccountably in the Sydney Botanic Gardens.  McCahon and his wife Anne were visiting Sydney as guests of the Sydney Biennale when McCahon, then aged 64, disappeared during a walk through the gardens. He was found five or six kilometres away, disoriented and suffering memory loss, in a routine patrol of Centennial Park in the early hours of April 12. He carried no identification with him, and could not say who he was.  When he was taken to hospital, he was diagnosed as suffering cerebral atrophy, probably the result of his long-term alcoholism.

What happened to McCahon during those lost hours? Where did he go, whom might he have met along the way, and what did he see on this “dark night”? These are the questions that provoked Martin Edmond to write Dark Night: Walking With McCahon, a creative non-fiction account of Edmond’s attempt to imagine, through walking the same part of Sydney, McCahon’s lost hours. Edmond explains:

I thought and thought about it, and at some point conceived the idea of replicating that lost journey—not in search of authenticity, nor documentary truth, nor even simple verisimilitude, since all of these were by definition impossible. Rather I wondered if I could arbitrarily choose a route and along it find equivalents for the fourteen Stations of the Cross?
(21)

The Stations of the Cross is a representation, in fourteen parts or ‘stations,’ of Christ’s last hours, beginning with his being condemned to death, and concluding with his death and entombment. In churches, visual depictions of the Stations of the Cross become stations through which worshippers pass on a circuit of devotion. Edmond’s decision to try to encounter McCahon and map equivalents for the Stations of the Cross through this ‘arbitrary’ route is not itself an arbitrary choice: McCahon’s work engaged with matters of faith, though he himself was not religious—“not anything”, as he strikingly put it.

Dark Night is structured in four parts. The first, “Testimony,” describes how Edmond’s life has briefly connected with McCahon’s in a few instances. Most importantly, Edmond spent his childhood in a bedroom in which a McCahon painting hung on the wall. The painting fascinated Edmond even as a small child; his curiosity with the artist and his art has been lifelong. The second, and longest, section, “Psychogeography,” describes Edmond’s journey through what might have the route that McCahon took in his lost hours, a route which is structured around the Stations of the Cross and ends in Centennial Park. The third section, “Dark Night,” describes a night spent in Centennial Park itself, and the fourth, “Beatitude,” takes Edmond back to New Zealand in a kind of coda.  

As perhaps may be evident from this structure, Dark Night is ambitious, but it also meanders, in the sense that it is willing to follow and linger along the routes of a curious mind, however non-linear those routes may be. Initially, it seems that Edmond is setting out in pursuit of something, though what it may be is unclear. What the book becomes, however, is something else. Edmond produces a kind of meticulous account of a small stretch of a city, a detailed and sharply observed portrait of Sydney a decade into the 21^st century. It is a city of convenience stores and pubs, of homeless men sleeping in doorways, “each with his hands tucked between his thighs the way little children sometimes sleep,” of midnight parks in which the author claims to see the trees breathing.
 As he walks, Edmond also muses on a remarkable range of topics: his own father’s alcoholism, methods of crucifixion, how Torahs are constructed, the sex trade at the Wall, the development of Christian Science. When we roam with Edmond, we roam not only across the physical spaces of Sydney, but also more extensively through Edmond’s mind and the connections that he makes across time and space, between an older and a newer Sydney, and between his own life and McCahon’s, between the city and its people. He wonders about meaning, and connection, and creativity, and about faith and its absence, and how they affect lives generally, and McCahon’s life and work in particular. 

The structure of the book is shaped by its author’s range of interests, by his musings, and also, inevitably, by the impossibility of resolving his questions about McCahon. As Edmond himself remarks, quoting from a Pasternak poem: “To live a life is not to cross a field.” Edmond has worked as a cab driver, and his range of knowledge and his way of telling stories—picking up here and dropping off there—in some ways reflects the episodic nature of that work. But this is a book that is walking paced, and seen from the footpath rather than the street. Edmond is a flâneur, a stroller of the city, a walker who seeks to know the mind of another man by walking, and by spending a long night on a park bench.
One of the book’s greatest achievements is its depiction of Sydney now, in a now that has inevitably already passed. Edmond records highly specific details: how much change he has ($27.75) after paying his train fare ($3.80) to the city, the schooner he buys (Reschs, $5) at a pub (The East Sydney Hotel), and the discussion about the tenth Doctor Who, David Tennant, that takes place as he orders, the prints on the pub’s walls (Magritte, van Gogh, Cartier-Bresson). He describes churches, homeless shelters, excavation work, convict graffiti, contemporary graffiti, prostitutes, taxi drivers, revellers emerging from a gay club at dawn. His depiction of himself can be just as precise: he carries with him on one of his journeys “a thermos of black coffee laced with St Agnes brandy; a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich; a banana; a tin or Café Cremes, ten small cigars of the vanilla-flavoured variety called Oriental”—along with warmer clothing and two different translations of St John of the Cross’s poem “Dark Night of the Soul.”

Dark Night is a serious book with extensive research behind it, as can be expected of a work that is, at least in part, a biography. Edmond has written across a range of genres, including screenplays and poetry, and his exacting care for language is quite delightful. His descriptions of places are particularly striking, as when he writes of visiting a friend in an art deco building, Mont Clair, on Liverpool Street in Darlinghurst in the 1990s:

the air inside Mont Clair was cool and smelled strange, like embalming fluid or formaldehyde; a wan yellow light fell across the dark varnished wood from deco lamps high up on the walls and the vacant concierge’s booth always felt inhabited by some phantom interlocutor. The lift clanked and sighed in protest as it hauled me upwards and my reflection in the mirrors with which it was lined always looked vaguely corrupt if not actually demonic. The other residents in the building were rarely seen and, when spotted, seemed pale and affrighted …
(75-76)

And so Edmond takes us there, through Sydney past and present, and all its ghosts, in search of another kind of ghost. It is what we can see—a remarkable city, a fascinated and fascinating writer—that makes the lasting impression. McCahon, the brilliant artist, is a fugitive here, as perhaps he was in life. But what Edmond finds in his pursuit makes for a memorable portrait of a city and a man —not the man who came to Sydney in 1984 and was lost, but the man who came a quarter of a century later and tried to understand. 

 
MICHELLE DICINOSKI’s memoir Ghost Wife will be published by Black Inc. in 2013. Her poetry collection Electricity for Beginners was highly commended in the Anne Elder Award 2011, and she was awarded a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (Poetry) in 2012-2013. She lives in Brisbane.

Coda For Shirley

by Geoff Page

Interactive Press

ISBN 9781921869303

Reviewed by LYN HATHERLY

What a shame that light verse is currently not the most popular genre. For Geoff Page’s new book Coda for Shirley is playful, intriguing and beautifully constructed. This verse novel makes you wish that other poets might ‘Bring Back Scansion! Bring Back Rhyme’ as it does its best to persuade readers and other poets to share Geoff Page’s love of formed verse and the music that accompanies it. Geoff himself it seems has much in common with the gentle and ironic tutor who taught Shirley:

to master my tetrameters,
avoiding, with more stringent pen,
the doggerel of amateurs.                               (p.8)

Since these verses never lapse into doggerel, or waste words, they are both stringent and nicely astringent. Perhaps Geoff Page, like Whitman has found:

that free verse wafted off a little;
rhyme stayed closer to the ground.                (p.5)

This verse novel follows on from Geoff Page’s 2006 verse novel, Lawrie & Shirley: The Final Cadenza, and like that book it’s amusing to listen to as well as to read. It must have taken Geoff some time to get the metre and rhymes right, and I’m sure there were times he was tempted to give up the struggle. Finally, I think the effort is well worth it since these satirical tetrameters managed to fix themselves in my mind as mnemonics and stay there echoing through my dreams and days, entertaining me long after I’d put the book down. Geoff Page might be modest but this book is an immodest celebration, of love and poetry and joy, as well as a further addition to the definition of Aussie culture. As an example, his view of life in a nursing home is as darkly irreverent as it is comic:

Each day comes and each day goes,
the next exactly like the last
with all the shipwrecked sprawled in chairs,
thinking only of the past,

a small Titanic, if you will,
with one great iceberg up ahead,
our buoyancy half-gone already,
the lookout, in a deck-chair, dead.                 (p.29)

His older readers may not be reassured but they are amused. This latest verse novel also confirms the fact that this award winning writer is ever prolific, since he has now published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann.

Except for Lawrie Wellcome who appears in Coda for Shirley only in memory, the characters from that previous verse novel carry on in this new narrative, one that is again unique in theme and narrative style. Each member of the cast is memorable and sharply drawn and the situations and antics in which Geoff Page involves his characters are fun to read or hear (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmsniQUuDKw ). His stars may not be young, but I appreciate the way they remind us that uproarious life and love and sex do go on after 60 or 70 or even 80. The memory of Shirley’s affair with Lawrie and his caresses wafts musically throughout this book:

that sweet cadenza to his life
a duet only love can sing –                 (p.4)

Geoff treats his characters tenderly and with affection so they charm or intrigue their readers. No euphemism here; the characters are all too honest, human and multi-dimensional.  Shirley, ten years on from the first verse novel, is still witty, passionate and insightful in regard to herself and those people she loves. The action in Coda for Shirley revolves around her final will or coda and the way, in life and after death, she is determined to enforce her wishes on her daughters, Sarah and Jane. It was these errant progeny who tried to undermine her relationship with Lawrie, her great love, while Sarah’s children, Shirley’s grandsons, supported that relationship. There’s irony in the way she settles her possessions and those who inherit them. The book begins with Shirley’s voice, idiosyncratic and always amusing. She sets the scene, reminds us of past events, and introduces the other characters. While she may concur with Geoff Page about matters such as rhyme and metre, she’s very much her own woman.

Coda for Shirley has three sections and three sets of voices and each tells one version of the story and gives a response to Shirley’s coda. The book begins affectionately and directly and with some mystery:

Dearest daughters, Jane and Sarah,
You’ll read this only when I’m dead.
I’ll leave it with my cheerful lawyer
who, with her very well-trained head,

has seen how things might be arranged
when I am truly ‘done and dusted’,
about what goes to whom and who
might, at the end, be truly trusted.

The language seems clear and unambiguous but there are layers and certainly a hint of what’s gone on before. ‘Trusted’ gives a firm ending to the stanza but it’s also quite suggestive. And I like the collusion of ‘cheerful’ with ‘when I’m dead’. It does set a tone for the book and its author’s attitudes to life and death. The poetic lines of the first section reverberate through the second as Shirley’s dearest but unsympathetic daughters, Jane and Sarah, come to grips with their loss and their mother’s wishes:

The funeral was bad enough;
their mother’s poetry is worse,
reciting all their ‘failures’ via
the rigours of accented verse.

There’s some resolution in the moment when they finally accept that perhaps Shirley’s affair with Lawrie Wellcome may have been more positive that they previously wanted to believe. I like the way Geoff Page takes time for transformations and affirmations in this verse novel:

They stop a moment; both are smiling,
There’s not a smidgeon of chagrin,
They strike their glasses once together.
‘Here’s to Shirley’s “year of sin!”’

The characters from the third section who take the novel into the future are Shirley’s grandsons Giles and Jack. In the previous verse novel, Lawrie & Shirley,  they were sent by Sarah as shock troops to remind Shirley of her grandmotherly duties. Even as teenagers they were smart enough to see that love is not only more important, it had made Shirley happy and more beautiful. Now, having retreated from their parents expectations of ‘law and med’ they are working, each in their own ways, to improve the world. They seem to be as clear-sighted as Shirley and to have been blessed by the terms of the coda that so annoyed their aunt and mother:

‘Correct,’ says Giles, ‘but in proportion
it’s mainly down to Grandma Shirley.
She left her money straight to us,
not worrying about how surly

such a move would leave her daughters.
She knew how it would leave them numb,
those two up-market girls of hers –
one of whom is still our mum.                       (p.74)

So the book begins with mystery then sings and plays through three generations before it ends with joy and hope for the future. There is whimsy and rhyme and rhythm but also irony. There is death here but it not tragic and comedy overcomes any negative moments. Geoff Page’s character studies are, as Peter Goldsworthy remarks, ‘scalpel-sharp’ and his characters are always entertaining. They made me want to go back and read the first and connecting verse novel: Lawrie & Shirley. Geoff’s second verse novel is satirical and can, at times, show us life’s shadows. But it is such fun to read. Coda for Shirley is a celebration of life, love and a distinctly Australian way of speaking and thinking.