Yellow Notebook, page 19
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A Russian cruise liner crashes into a tanker and sinks in ‘the warm waters of the Baltic Sea’. Three hundred die. ‘Those who had retired for the night would have had little chance of escape.’
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Dreamt I cooked a meal and put those green anti-slug pellets in it. We all ate it before the terrible truth was revealed; and yet we agreed that its flavour had been delicious, with a hindsight tinge of horror.
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A spiteful review of a friend’s novel. I ask the magazine editor what the critic looks like. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘she’s one of those Australian women with thin faces and black hair who remind you of Heckle and Jeckle.’
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Primrose Gully. My sister comes down the track from the car, all in black, sunglasses, white-faced, like a refugee. Very upset and weeping. The married man she’s having an affair with, his coldness in public, his failure to turn up, she lay awake all night waiting. Disgusting memories of my own. I talked at length about humiliation, low self-esteem, self-punishment etc. I must learn to shut up. Talking loosely and inefficiently is an indulgence. We went for a walk to look at the river, and back across the gully under the big pine tree. We picked up firewood. In the morning she said, ‘I woke up once in the night and looked out the window. The sky was full of stars. I thought I must be in heaven.’
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Against Z’s back door jamb, after the Rigoletto rehearsal, leaned a small, white-faced, long-headed, warped figure. Weird, like something that had crept out of a dark hole where it had been lying for a long time in a tense and twisted position. ‘This is V,’ said Z. When the others went out of the room I felt nervous, like a schoolgirl having to entertain a grown-up. As we walked away from the house R said, ‘Just as well neither of us is married to him!’
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Later, a dream: some kind of dark, dumb attraction between V and me.
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My sister breaks it off with the guy. ‘I felt really happy for two days, and I still feel good. But sometimes I get very sad.’
‘Sadness is better than wretchedness though, isn’t it. It’s more dignified.’
I felt very proud of her. As if she’d dragged herself out of a swamp in front of my very eyes.
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We walked the dog round Princes Park and kept noticing a strong smell of animal shit. We inspected our boot soles—nothing. ‘It must be a circus,’ said A, meaning it as a joke, but then I remembered that there is a circus on the other side of the footy ground—I saw the two camels, tall and lonely away from their desert.
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A doco about Berlin after the war. Footage of a boy of eight or so picking his way across a huge pile of building rubble, cap on head, pack on back, bare knees, boots—answering the questions of a disembodied voice: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ve lost my family. I’m looking for them.’ ‘How long since you saw them?’ ‘Six weeks. Goodbye!’ He smiles, turns and walks away, a man with a mission—then a few yards further on turns again, waves, calls out ‘Goodbye!’ and goes on his way. I stood at the sink dumbly washing and stacking, despairing of ever having anything worth saying. I know nothing of what is savage and cruel in life. My work is as ignorant as I am. I don’t know anything. But maybe it’s the devil talking when we get the idea that someone who knows no savagery knows nothing—as if only evil were real and the rest weightless.
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Near us, after midnight in the piano bar, sat an old man with a carnation in his buttonhole. He clapped his square hands in time to the music in such a way as to let it be known that he was with the band. Behind us a woman knocked over a stemmed glass. It smashed. She moved off to the dance floor without a backward look. A Japanese tourist at a third table bent down, picked up the glass, stem and base from the carpet, and placed them reverently on the glass-smasher’s table. The only person who observed the Japanese woman’s act, and her low bow, was a half-drunken young man, the gooseberry left at the dropper’s table: he stared at her, loafing back in his chair, and made no sign.
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The worst moment at the funding meeting was rejecting the application of a man who wanted to write a novel about the Kampuchean bloodbath. I looked at his file and thought, This guy’s seen people suffocated in plastic bags and I’m sitting here telling him he can’t have money to tell his story. I tried to make a coherent statement but felt heavy and desperate. I wanted to say that our procedures were inadequate and frustrating, but all that came out was, in a dull voice, ‘He used to be a journalist and now he’s a labourer.’ ‘It’s a tough world,’ said the chair, and on we went.
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‘He became a Roman Catholic after his son died of a drug overdose,’ said the journalist. ‘Course, being a Catholic in the right wing of the Labor Party isn’t exactly a disadvantage…’
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L, an unfairly handsome guy who was at the festival. I like him more than I’d expected to. Rather soft, talkative, an enthusiast, the sort of person who gives your forearm a little push as he approaches the punch-line of his story. I suspect a series of terrific emotional crashes in his past. Why does a man like this attract me? Don’t be silly. Because he’s gorgeous.
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The student asked me if I thought love could connect people across boundaries of class. ‘Of course.’ He said he’d been convinced by Communism, then felt its rigidity: ‘It dropped off me like a shell.’
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At lunchtime I sat in the gallery beside a large, flat, shallow body of water in a pebble-bottomed bed. It quivered like the water in my best dream: trembled with inner life. A girl beside me on the couch, wearing modern clothes, was deep in a serious paperback novel. I sat there and thought, I am happy. —
Fay Zwicky on the effect of Les Murray’s work: ‘Why then, after wrestling long and hard with many poems in this book, have I come away feeling excluded, mystified and defeated?’ Excluded is the word I had been using.
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My sister got some freebies to Mondo Rock. In the hour of waiting she took us to a new place called the Hyatt on Collins. A noisy palace in pink marble. A very amateurish singer and pianist, both boys, murdered certain innocent classics. ‘Tsk,’ she said, tossing back a glass of terrible Australian champagne. ‘That’s a very pedestrian
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L shows me a list he’s typed up, of adjectives and epithets used by reviewers about his novel. An A4 page and a half. He read it out to me and we laughed and laughed. The whole range, from ‘meaningless and pretentious’ to ‘brilliant’, was covered.
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Woken pleasantly from a nap by Bach on the piano downstairs, those powerful patterns flexing their muscles through the afternoon when no one’s home but me and my daughter.
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‘I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us…This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them.’ From a letter by one of Jung’s patients. —Peter O’Connor in Understanding Jung
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Girls pass in the street, clapping a fast rhythm and singing a vigorous song.
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In the pub after Carlton lost the Grand Final, the table of roaring, bellowing brothers. ‘This is going to be one of those nights,’ I muttered to one of their young wives, ‘and I’m fucked if I’m going to put up with it.’ She laughed in a comradely way and said, ‘Aren’t they terrible!’ How come these yobs all end up with fabulous women?
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V wrote, ‘I wanted to see you again straight away.’ So I was not imagining it. A gong of terror sounded in the bottom of my stomach. Something chilling in him. His intellect.
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While I was asleep the Japanese girl got stranded in North Melbourne at 2.30 am and called our place for help. The Sydney visitor answered, told her he couldn’t do anything for her and she should call a taxi—leaves her to her fate in the dark. She gives up and sleeps at the Youth Hostel. I know nothing of this till eight in the morning when she calls me. Furious and ashamed I drive over and collect her. When the law student hears that she had thought the rude visitor was him, he is strangled with distress: ‘If it’d been me I’d’ve run to North Melbourne. I’d’ve piggybacked her.’ ‘I know you would, you darling,’ I say fondly. ‘Oh yuck,’ says M with a grimace.
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I walk down the street in bright lipstick and light-coloured clothes. People look into my face and smile. I’ve got seven-league boots on. I’m alive again.
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Bulletin review of our movie. So splenetic it’s embarrassing: apparently all my characters, in everything I ever write, are ‘renowned for their unlikeableness’, and the director has taken cinema back to a primitive stage before cameras could move. ‘If Ms Campion is to be hailed as the new empress of Australian film…’ Wonder what made him so crabby.
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‘Your daughter’s terrifically striking-looking, isn’t she,’ says L. ‘Boys must be swarming round her, I suppose.’
‘Well, not really. She knocks around with a rather blue-stocking crowd. They repel boys with contemptuous stares.’
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At the party a clean and bright young man in a striped shirt and little round tortoiseshell spectacles, with a flamboyantly Hungarian name, told me he’d read only one of my books and thought I ought to ‘broaden my range’ and ‘write about the proletariat’. I was a bit drunk and said, ‘What bullshit. Why?’
‘Because the middle class is boring. It’s narrow, small, confined, a minority.’
His wife or girlfriend, a striking dark woman, said, ‘I’m from “the proletariat”. He’s got a thing about it.’ She looked at me in a friendly way and laughed. I wandered off, shaken by his challenge.
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Rain is falling softly and steadily. This is comforting. What do I need comfort for? Being a member of the middle class. Not writing. Being forty-three and three-quarters. Being a solitary woman. Only no. 2 is a painful thing. All the rest often give me extreme pleasure.
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Constant struggle between money and time: will I waste an hour going into town to Bell’s Discounts to get the skin cream cheap, or will I waste a couple of extra dollars at the corner chemist and save the hour?
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L hasn’t answered my letter. The sense of having lost something, that his silence provokes. Remember that always, when a horror balloons in my memory around something I’ve written, a calm re-examination of the thing itself reveals a lightness of tone that saves it from being the crusher I have let myself imagine. Do my duties, try to get more sleep, drink less, try to keep this feeling of worth alive.
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The American poet at the festival dinner meets my eye from the opposite corner of the long table and holds it, almost aggressively, with a small smile on his very wide, very smooth face. He holds my gaze for such a long time, smiling like a little brown Buddha, that I laugh out loud in a spasm of embarrassment. Later, I move to his end of the table, where a woman is declaring that feminism has caused an increase in male homosexuality. The poet says he thinks most people are sexually ‘much more timid’ than our society allows them to be. A bunch of us talk for a long time about sex and love. The young editor says he has never slept with anyone he hasn’t ‘got to know really well first’. The poet says he’s always felt he was ‘just as eager for love as women are supposed to be’; that he has ‘never been interested in sex without love’. I opine that people organise their emotions to accord with their sexual interests, ‘so that what you get is emotional rather than sexual promiscuity’. ‘Love,’ says the young editor, ‘just comes.’ ‘Does that mean,’ I ask, ‘that you can’t seek it, then?’
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I am the only person in the world who carries round an inventory of my crimes. Everyone else is busy with their own.
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The poet comes up to me in the lobby and says, ‘I get consolation from seeing your face.’
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Today I’ll get up, have a shower, see how my period’s going; make my bed; wear something clean and comfortable; go to the last day of the festival; maybe walk across the river and look at the water; and come home.
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Mum comes to stay a night. I’m so tired. I ask her if she’ll ‘look after me’.
‘Is there anything in the kitchen?’ she asks. ‘Any…eggs?’
‘The trouble is, Mum, I haven’t been here for days. There’s no food.’
‘I’ll go to the shop.’
‘Do you know what I’d really like? Chicken noodle soup out of a packet, and a boiled egg, and some fingers of toast.’
She laughs and looks pleased. The law student is playing ‘My Funny Valentine’ on the piano. My sister calls to tell me she’s met Cyndi Lauper at a party: ‘She’s just a regular woman. She’s great.’ I go upstairs and lie down.
Mum returns. She brings my meal upstairs, sits on my bed and chats to me. I lie here bathing in her wandering tales. Sometimes my eyes close, but I don’t have any trouble staying awake. I feel loving and thankful towards her. She kisses me goodnight at nine o’clock and goes downstairs with my tray. On my way to the bathroom I glance into the mirror. My face is young and smooth, exactly as it was after my crack-up two years ago when I dropped my bundle and slept for twenty-four hours.
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One of these days I’ll meet a man to whom I’ll be circumstantially free to say, ‘Do you want to get in the car with me and drive to Darwin?’ and he’ll say, ‘Yes,’ and we’ll do it.
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The poet Rosa Cappiello. Her terrifying sadness. Her clumsy questions: ‘Helen, are you happy?’ and statements: ‘I want someone who is clean inside.’ She asks me to read out her paper, for the panel ‘Why I Write’. It’s full of her awkward passion. Her poems terrify me too—I read the translations for her, trying to be only a vessel or a conduit for the rage and disgust that’s in them: ‘Lie down, man’—wanting to ravish, to ‘breathe into his lap’ a sexual fury that would set the world of gender right—but I felt very Presbyterian—restrained, small, neat, quiet. One of the poems was simply too much for me and I didn’t even attempt it. But the American poet took her aside and spoke to her urgently in a low voice. I heard him as I passed: ‘You are really, really good. You must practise and practise.’ She seems to have no friends, or very few, and to spend her time alone, waiting for her dole cheque. When she received her pay for the festival session she was staggered. I said, ‘You must apply for a fellowship—$25,000.’ She gave a strange laugh: ‘I can’t ask for so much money.’ She is lost between Italy and here, stuck in her terrible English. She seemed a member of another species, wild, in pain, knowing things I could barely dream of—humiliations, violence, disgust, loneliness, fear. She’s got a wild animal’s face—although she’s my age she has smooth skin, her eyes narrow and lying on high cheekbones, mouth that is generous like all Italian mouths, with a pretty top lip that doesn’t move much when she speaks. Her legs are slim. Beautiful hands, small, narrow and slender; very small feet in distorting, ugly, very high-heeled sandals—her toes pinched lumps, curved in and under as if trying to hold themselves back off the pavement—squirming back to stay on the inadequate leather. ‘I’ve suffered too much,’ she said to me. ‘I can’t change now.’ Her weak, reedy voice. When she read her poems in Italian it was barely audible. I could see her skirt quivering as she stood whispering and gabbling at the lectern.
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On my way out of the Athenaeum, so tired I could hardly speak, I was approached by a young woman.
‘I heard you read that story about the friend. The painter. It made me very angry. I thought it was a cruel story,’ she said, clenching her hands. ‘You took all the little illusions that people use to make life bearable, and you stripped and stripped and stripped them away. I’m trying to be a painter, and I—’
Exhausted, looking at her smooth pale skin, her items of silver jewellery here and there, I thought, Come back in twenty years, sweetheart, and tell me about your little illusions then.
I walk away, get into my car, drive home, and go straight to bed, at five in the afternoon. What I could have said to her was, ‘Listen. There is no comfort. And if you think there is, then maybe you’re not really an artist.’
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Walking with C in the Botanic Gardens. Rain. Our shoulders were damp. We talked about our lives, our loneliness; how we are tempted to invite unwanted men back into our lives just in order to feel less alone.
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The reason, says T, why house-hunting is so tiring: because you have to move, in fantasy, in and out of every house you look at—shift all your furniture and arrange it, and cook and eat several meals; and carry out the rubbish. Yes, and you have to part from your daughter, and leave your piano behind. Half of me will be with her always, longing to care for her and make a life for her.
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Dinner at Toki with T’s son. At sixteen, the pure lines of his face, those marvellous bones, the strain of youth in a face. His lively company, tales of bashings, school wars, ‘rumbles’ etc. On the way home we stop for a coffee at Notturno. A hulk with a five o’clock shadow enters, runs him through the soul handshake, and engages him in urgent conversation about someone called Eddy who is going to bash him. ‘Eddy? Oh, man.’ The hulk wears a jumper with the sleeves rolled right up past his biceps. He leaves, upon being summoned by his scrawny mate outside.
‘Who was that?’
‘Hassan. He’s so cool.’
‘He sure is. How do you know him?’
‘From school.’
‘But he must be twenty-five!’
‘He’s the same age as me.’
‘Sixteen? Him?’
