Yellow Notebook, page 13
——
I made some curtains for my room and they are a disaster.
——
The women talked about ‘spiritual’ things and how sad it is that our husbands are afraid of them, or scornful, and cannot share them.
——
The prisoners in the film about Uruguay, when guards were present, were obliged to stand with their heads bowed. Lined up against the cyclone wire fence they looked, from a distance, like a row of hanged men.
——
I watched Q, the dressmaker, waiting at the cash register to buy a big slice of watermelon. I saw the graceful angle of her leg and I thought, She’s beautiful and full of grace; she likes me; she does not defer to me, nor does she need to undermine me; she has a private mind and a private life; we are not in competition; her areas of competence are so different from mine that we never clash. I envy—or rather intend to be, one day—a woman like her. Or those older women writers I’ve met, who at sixty live alone in a lovely flat, work calmly and with recognition, have friends.
——
Bumped my head hard on the window frame. Wanted to cry; gave a few sobs and gasps, sitting at my table; but realised, as I heard myself beginning, that I must not; because I have a day of social duty ahead and must hold it together. I was also shocked and alarmed, even as I controlled myself, by the immensity of sadness that I need to cry about: like glimpsing a grey ocean. I quickly closed my eyes. I sat there with my hands over my face and my elbows on the table and thought, I am desperate. At the same time I thought, And I must write this down. Virginia Woolf and Guy de Maupassant on this subject. What sort of a creature am I?
——
Damp sand. Flat water, pale silky grey with tints of mauve and pink if one looked very carefully. Hundreds of seagulls circled above the beach. I noticed many moth-like insects in the air and tried to see if they were being hunted by the birds. The life of a wild animal: the basic element must be HUNGER. How many small moths would it take to fill a seagull’s stomach?
——
F says we are ‘like adolescents’. He tilts back his head and howls like a dog at the moon: ‘Ooooooooooooooo.’ I can’t help laughing.
——
Days of bitter fighting. Sometimes we seem to get somewhere, and emerge sobered, chastened. Then we treat each other with quiet respect. At these times I feel like a human being again, instead of a very bad and wrong person, a sack of different sadnesses being hauled around by a skeleton.
——
In Emma Jung’s essays, Animus and Anima, I find that the animus presents itself in many guises, and that one of these is ‘a pseudo-hero who fascinates by a mixture of intellectual brilliance and moral irresponsibility’. Surely this is a description of the character called Philip who keeps turning up in everything I write.
——
F’s workmate brought his girlfriend to dinner and we had a wonderful time. She is a young woman who manifests the opposite of what is meant by the phrase ‘full of shit’. She was wearing a little green hat in a wartime style, soft material made into a turban. I watched her dancing with him to a Billie Holiday record: that clear blankness of concentration that comes over a dancing woman’s face, the readiness to respond in a formal way to whatever might be asked of her legs and torso. The hem of her green crepe dress was down and I sewed it up for her. She kissed my cheek by way of thanks.
——
The teenage girls, going out to Johnny’s Green Room in their clever, bright, improvised clothes: scarves artfully tied, an orange suit from the sixties, a battered golden bag. So fresh and pretty. Full of hope. Their eyes were shining. Not children any more, but only just starting to be adults.
——
At the dinner we drank tequila and exchanged tales of weak people enabled by fury to stand up against tough ones. A man had made three big teenagers clean up a kids’ playground he had come upon them smashing. A woman saw a kid walking down the street carrying an axe. ‘Every time he passed a tree he chopped a big chunk out of it. So I went up to him and shouted, “You do that once more and you’ll get that axe in your head.”’ ‘What did he do?’ She shrugged. ‘Ran home.’
——
A woman in Brisbane reviews The Children’s Bach: apparently it is ‘written with great cynicism towards human nature—a more unlovable bunch of characters would be hard to find’.
——
I see that compared with Doris Lessing I am lazy and a spendthrift.
——
The sick woman, in her retirement village, talked without stopping for hours. I made myself stay three, then four. I thought, Go the extra mile. You are healthy and young. She is lonely and sick, and she needs you. The cancer management man, she said, had asked her if she could remember any shock in her life, any grief or anger. She told him she’d always been angry about ‘what men do to women’; and then she remembered to mention that twenty years ago her daughter had been murdered.
——
In the cafe this morning a grey-haired old man came in, wearing a fawn safari jacket and shirt, polished brown shoes and socks, and no trousers. As he walked you could see his red underpants flash in the vent of his jacket. The Italian waiters accepted this strange fellow with an impressive nonchalance. He went to the toilet and back, sat at his table, and was brought his coffee just like everyone else.
——
I feel great relief that I did not conduct my side of the thing secretly. I did my cleaning-up and straightening as I went along, like a brutal sort of housework; but on his side K let the dirt accumulate, and now the rotting things and dried chop bones are being found behind the piano. ‘It was always easier for me than it was for you,’ he said. Yes, because he lied. But the law of karma is reasserting itself. ‘Want some advice?’ I said. ‘Stay off the piss. You won’t want to be handling this kind of thing with a hangover. And drunk people say things they regret later.’
——
TV interview with the Aboriginal girl who is Penthouse Pet of the Year.
‘You must be very excited. Did you get much sleep last night?’
‘No. I was awake half the night looking at my diamond watch!’ She holds it out to the camera. ‘It cost four and a half thousand dollars!’
Her eagerness, her naïve pleasure in the $80,000 worth of prizes and rewards, cuts no ice with the disapproving woman interviewer, who proceeds to guilt-trip her about feminism and her Aboriginal blood and responsibilities.
——
The surrogate mother was asked on TV how she had arrived at the price she charged her couple. ‘Well, I asked myself how much I could earn if I was fully employed for nine months, and I worked it out at $6000.’ The paltriness of this sum was not remarked upon. ‘And if you did it again, how much would you charge?’ She thinks, then gives a daring little smile and a sideways glance. ‘Ooh…I’d charge…ten thousand?’
‘What about labour?’ said T crossly. ‘Surely that’d be overtime?’
——
Sunset last night was like a swap card I once had of a pirate ship: torn clouds, dramatic perspective, orange, gold and green. And now a dawn sky of delicate purity, and a smell of eucalypts. Maybe a marriage can get up again and walk, after a terrible beating.
——
‘What’ve you been up to?’
‘Nothing I wouldn’t talk about if the right person asked me in the right tone of voice.’
——
‘It is when one’s talent has been recognised that the great misery of the creator begins.’ —Camus
——
I met Raymond Carver in Sydney and he signed a copy of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and gave it to me. I wanted to tell him how much his work has meant to me but there was only time to shake hands.
——
In the street, noticing that as usual B was dragging two paces behind me and to one side, I slowed down, again and again, to see if it was me doing it; but no, each time she slowed down as well, so I was always in front, no matter how I tried to walk beside her.
‘You mean,’ said the Jungian, ‘that if you put down the reins she doesn’t pick them up—they just lie there?’
——
Someone got into the Adelaide zoo and slaughtered sixty animals. Stabbed them, cut their throats, sliced out their entrails.
——
Went to Die Walküre last night. I loved the way a character would sing a very long story.
——
The French tutor said she had been very anxious before the surgery; that it was hard to submit to the fact that she was obliged to put total faith in the anaesthetist (she could not pronounce the word, and made a gesture of poking something into the back of her hand). ‘But,’ she said, ‘when I thought that otherwise I might die, I found it easier to…get more philosophical.’ At these three words, so characteristic of my serious, thoughtful teacher, I was moved, and grabbed her hand. She said that since the operation she has been less bothered by the small anxieties of ordinary life.
——
The dreams: so dense.
——
For twenty-four hours I had nausea and diarrhea. It was a hot autumn day with a dry wind pouring in through the window. M looked after me nobly, without signs of revulsion, even when she came in and found me on my hands and knees over a bowl on the bedroom floor, spewing bile. It was Palm Sunday. They say there were 120,000 people at the anti-nuclear rally. I read some Jung, some of The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi, bits of A Passage to India and stories from David Malouf’s Antipodes.
——
Dreamt that in a house on stilts, above water, I was laid up and then found I was ill and soon to die. I looked at objects with regret and longing. I was lifted by people not quite strong enough and dumped on to a stretcher.
I wish I could get this tone, and pace, in fiction.
——
A ‘bloodless coup’ in the Sudan. The president goes to Washington, and as soon as his back’s turned nine army officers take over. He ends up stranded in Cairo.
‘Imagine,’ says F. ‘He can’t go back. All his things…’
——
Last night, Greek Good Friday, a thousand people passed under my bedroom window in the almost-dark, each one holding a burning candle. I leaned out to watch them. Our street was packed to the gutters with slowly stepping, murmuring Greeks, whole families, a bearded patriarch. A mass of flowers, like a huge cake, was borne along by a group of four. A brass band quietly played a hymn I remembered from school. No one was singing but as I watched the stream flow by, the words of the hymn came back to me: ‘casting down their golden crowns around a glassy sea’.
——
In the Fitzroy Gardens I made it clear to K. ‘It’s like carrying a wardrobe. We have to put it down and walk away.’ We stood in the middle of the huge lawn with our arms round each other. He stepped back. I saw that his glasses were fogged up. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
——
‘Why don’t you like me?’
‘What is this question? Why do you ask this question?’
‘What do I do, that makes you not like me?’
‘You’re there. That’s all.’
On my way home I bought a ‘couple self-help’ book at Readings and ripped through it greedily. It suggests very practical ways of breaking destructive patterns of behaviour. I cried over it because its examples were so petty, so familiar, and so utterly convincing.
——
‘My husband and I have agreed to part,’ said the woman in the post office to her friend. ‘My presence is inhibiting his creative development.’
She said this without irony or apparent animus.
——
I held their Airedale puppy in my lap. I tickled it and it groaned.
——
A young girl was found dead, naked except for a pair of underpants, in a St Kilda gutter. Dumped there after she had overdosed. What savagery. To leave your friend in a cold gutter without even covering her—not a sheet, a rug, an old coat.
——
In the bookshop I picked up the new Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature, a book whose existence was unknown to me. I knew I could not be represented in it because they would have had to ask my permission. I examined its index. No, I wasn’t there. I felt the world seesaw. I walked to the tram stop wretched. I am full of shit. I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at forty-two I can’t even get into the Oxford book.
——
He seems to be full of anger towards me. The slightest misstep on my part brings out a jet of it.
——
A couple passed us on the beach. We guessed they had met through a dating agency. I said the man couldn’t find a woman because he talked all the time and expected her to listen. F said the woman couldn’t find a man because she listened all the time with her head on one side and made attention-murmurs, and was ‘limp’.
——
‘The deeper you go,’ said the Jungian, ‘the more sceptical you must become.’
——
B was so sick of me that when she saw my writing on the envelope she tore it up unopened and threw it away. Later, she learned it had contained a publisher’s cheque for several hundred dollars, for a job we did together. She had to call me and eat crow.
——
I’m so tired, even after all that sleep. My head and body are full of lead.
——
In the Exhibition Gardens I saw a man walking with a bitch and her pup at his heels. The bitch ran smoothly, smiling, but the pup kept stumbling and tumbling in his eagerness to keep up. He rolled right on to his back in the dry plane leaves, scrambled to his feet and galloped on.
——
J and I walked in the cemetery with the dog. A grey afternoon. He felt the cold. Sometimes we walked with our arms around each other. He said I was skinny. He said he had lost a stone. I think he was still in shock from the media attention he got in Sydney for the big prize. He spoke rapidly, almost gasping. I saw that my job was to give him my full attention, to ask questions and listen to the answers. I asked him if his ego was swollen. No, he said, the opposite: he felt he was small, he was nothing. He told me about his church, how it ‘goes back to the time before there was a pope’.
——
The way M answers the phone: with a rising intonation, a little breathless—‘Hello?’—as if to say, ‘I’m ready for whatever this is and I think it’s going to be good.’ How will I live without her, when she grows up and moves away?
——
The AA meeting at the health farm. I said the truth at the door, which was that I had an alcoholic friend and wanted to know how to be useful, but they looked at me with crooked smiles of scepticism and said, ‘Come in.’
‘The wife was home by herself, wonderin’ where I was. I was down the river drinkin’ and doin’ wheelies with my brother’s apprentices. They were the only blokes who’d drink the way I wanted to drink. I was thirty.’
‘I didn’t know what love was. I got married for the convenience. To have someone to wash my clothes and cook a meal and be there. I can remember the first time I ever sat on the couch with my wife and held her hand. We already had three kids.’
The way they talked frankly about disgusting things: ‘spewin’ blood, piddlin’ in the bed’.
‘Once they go to Al-Anon they start kickin’ the props out from under you. Before my wife went, if I was sick in the bed she used to clean it up and wash the sheets. But after she started goin’, if I was sick she’d pick up me head and drop me face in it.’
At the end of the meeting they all sprang to their feet and recited the prayer.
——
On French TV at F’s parents’ place we saw an old man who had invented an alarm clock that didn’t bother to go off if it was raining (he produced a large plastic bottle with a spray top and squirted it) and a hammer that dispensed bandaids. Another man had devised a toilet seat that weighed you if you sat on it and raised your feet off the ground.
——
Siena, the trattoria, the rain, the free glass of grappa, the cherry red suede shoes I bought him.
——
In the guest room of the Tuscan house where I lay reading, a small bat clung to the ceiling. Every time I turned a page its ears stood up.
——
Very early evening. Fifteen or so people in the grassy courtyard outside the Romanesque church. A mild little wind. People’s faces softened by the singing of four young monks (three of them wearing glasses). The long grass full of wildflowers, the valley behind, the thin rows of cypresses, some as thin and pointed as sharpened pencils; poppies in a wandering line that followed a broken fence. Sometimes we would turn a corner and see a whole field of them, tilted, casual, like a red dress thrown out to dry. A German boy passed, looked at us with open face, smiled, we said good evening in our various languages, his girlfriend came behind, a sweet and pretty face. Later a full moon. Fireflies. Our host knows the names of flowers.
——
I am getting better at playing pétanque and even quite enjoy it. I never can care about winning but I like the effort of getting the boule up to the bouchon. I must be a boring opponent. Glenn Gould says that competition rather than money is the root of all evil.
——
He said that since his first short story had been accepted by a magazine he didn’t need to go on writing: he had proved that he was capable of having his work published.
‘Proved to whom?’ said his friend, looking shocked. ‘To yourself, or to the world?’
‘It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’
——
When I got home the house was dirty and disorderly. I went straight out and bought four nice towels, soap, toothpaste, and a new rubbish bin to replace the green one, which had been stolen without anyone noticing. I also called a mechanic and had the leaking washing machine fixed. Today’s great achievement: I scrubbed the kitchen walls. They look wonderful, all cream and smooth.
——
He sent me a postcard from Amsterdam: a Daumier drawing from a series called Moeurs Conjugales, a man and a woman in two armchairs, their faces distorted by huge, ugly yawns.
