Yellow Notebook, page 7
‘Shut your face.’
He went upstairs and turned the TV on full blast. I swept up the mess. I bawled a lot as I swept, and then as I washed my plain, spotty, forty-year-old face and looked at it in the mirror and thought that I couldn’t bear having to go through another bout of this BATTLING. I also thought, I am about to get my period. It absolutely shits me that this should explain anything. I objectively do most of the housework and it’s NOT FAIR. After I’d washed my face I took off my pants and they were stained black with blood.
——
This flaming book is jammed again. I feel my ignorance and fear like a vast black hole.
——
Heading for Griffith University in the Kombi. At nightfall I walked down the main street of Gundagai eating hot chips out of newspaper. The lumpy little hill straight ahead of me was dead black, its silhouette fringed with the odd gum. The fading light behind it, airy, mauve and pure, seemed to be projected upwards towards two horizontal streaks of grey cloud. In my motel room the double bed sank in the middle before I even got into it. A deep sleep. Dreams of Paris: climbing flights of stairs. I peeped out at dawn and saw darkness, and thick frost on the Kombi’s windscreen. How comforting it is to write in this notebook, in an awful room so far from home. I write, and become lord of all I survey.
——
She kissed me goodbye. Her firm cool cheek: still a child’s slight plumpness. Poppy’s will be like that, to Elizabeth. I thought a lot on the Hume highway about how to make Elizabeth an unlikeable character but still interesting.
——
Woman in the hippie gift shop. About fifty, blonde, a weather-beaten, upper-class face with piercing blue eyes. ‘I’m asexual,’ she announced. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about this. I don’t have a relationship with a man, and I love my life.’
——
ABC radio is a wonderful institution for travellers and other solitary people: those soothing talk programs full of information about echidnas. Apparently the echidna, the hedgehog and the porcupine each evolved quite separately.
——
In the restaurant it was ‘go to the counter and get it yourself’. I was out of place, the only solitary among the families and the groups of young people hardly out of childhood, smoking desperately between mouthfuls. Perched on bar stools four women in their late twenties were sipping wine and smiling, smiling, smiling at each other as their conversation went. I wondered whether my loneliness made me want to take notes, or vice versa: how is a writer made?
——
R says that in reading she is always looking for the moral voice of the writer. She says she never feels better after having committed violence—not even after smashing a plate.
‘I do,’ I said defiantly.
‘I don’t,’ she repeated. A pause.
‘I’m not sure if I do or not,’ I said. ‘I feel humiliated when I have to sweep up the pieces.’
——
The seven-year-old is a jolly, endearing boy. He described someone as ‘greedy and boastful’. I said, ‘Is it boastful to tell about one’s successes? I remember you boasting once that you were the second-best runner in your school.’
‘Second-best long distance runner! And that wasn’t boasting! That was a success!’
——
I dreamt that my publisher told me my novel was bad. ‘Bad? Why?’ ‘Oh yes. It’s terrible.’ Through my waking mind ran escape clauses: I’ll do short stories instead; she mustn’t have liked the trimmed-back style; I’ll take out the old man’s hairy hands. I was panicking, but deep down I was not surprised.
——
D, who I’m billeted with, seems to believe, as do many people who are fully-fledged examples of their type, that she is ‘not like’ the others: ‘I can’t stand academics,’ she says. ‘I was born not standing academics.’ And yet she has their brittle manner, their tendency to monologue, their habit of irony, of picking up words in tweezers. I’d better look out. No one’s safe, once they’ve been inside a university.
——
Awfully homesick. I walked for miles along a beach. On my way back I saw a foreign man who had found an orange fish floundering in the shallows, and was trying to flip it into deeper water with his thong. I ran forward and picked it up by the tail, but it flipped strongly—I’d never picked up a live fish before and was astonished by its muscle—I had to seize it in two hands and fling it out to sea. ‘Sank you, sank you,’ cried the man and his two female companions.
——
I went to a lecture on realism. A lot of detached, ironic descriptions were offered, in a tone that seemed to assume that realism is historically discredited now and rather dull. I don’t know if I’m a realist or not. I don’t think it’s a good idea to sit around in a university trying to categorise myself. The lecturer said twice that words signify reality but don’t represent it. I’d quite like to find out what this means, but I’m not breaking my neck.
——
I worked all morning, slipping myself slowly back into the world of the book. I love Athena. She is rather stern. I’m dying to make her meet Philip. They will have dry kisses that lead nowhere.
——
In the campus bookshop I accidentally stole something. The woman at the register was cold and rude to me, quite unnecessarily, and I left the shop in irritable confusion. Halfway back to the Humanities building I realised I was still carrying Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. Fuck you, I thought, and kept walking.
——
In this town the rubbish man comes right into the backyard, finds your bin wherever it may stand, and heaves its contents into another bin that he carries on his shoulders.
——
An Englishman invited me to a class about technique. ‘You’re a writer. You might be interested.’ He gave me the course outline and said to come at four. I read it and was alarmed to see that it had nothing whatsoever to do with any sense of the word technique that I’d ever heard of. I had no idea what he was getting at. I went, miserably, to his class. He talked for an hour and I still had very little clue. It all seemed so cloudy, so full of terms I did not know. My spirits sank and sank. Later I tried to explain my response to two academics I met at dinner. They were amused and encouraging. I said, ‘I feel inadequate, and as though I’m under attack.’ ‘You probably are,’ said the man. ‘Not in a personal way, but your assumptions are being challenged.’ I suppose it’s good for me, but I still don’t see any link between the lecturer’s ‘technique’ and what I do in my notebook.
——
Another Englishman (the place is swarming with them) lent me some Roland Barthes: ‘to show you he’s weally about w’iting’. I read a little piece called La Lumière du Sud-Ouest. It was beautiful. Hills ‘toutes proches et violettes’.
——
The Italian academic said she hated this town and had not gone to any other places in Australia, although she’s been here nearly four years.
HG: (shocked) ‘But why?’
Woman: (with an eloquent grimace and a sideways flicking gesture) ‘Every time I had holidays I just couldn’t stand it here, so I’d go back to Rome.’
I found this so mortifying I almost burst into tears. I was the only Australian at the table and I was terribly offended.
——
On many mornings in this house a radio alarm clicks on in the kitchen at 6.30. No one ever gets up in response to it. I feel guilty, as if I had set it myself. I get up and stand on the cold floor, unable to decide whether I should switch it off or not.
——
F calls me from his parents’ house, where he’s taken M on a visit. ‘I suddenly understand,’ he says, ‘why I get so mad with you when you’re bossy. It’s very bossy here.’
——
A long interview-documentary with Billy Wilder, a charming and likeable old rogue who, in the final ten minutes, turned on the interviewer, a humourless French film buff with the appropriate name of Michel Ciment, and made gentle mockery of him: ‘The only thing worse than not being taken seriously, Michel, is being taken too seriously. As long as I can make movies, I don’t give a shit.’
——
My sister told me that a young man had come off his motorbike last night outside her holiday apartment at Surfers. In the paper this morning his death was reported. ‘I heard the crash,’ she said, ‘and I ran out to see if it was the girls. He was lying with his helmet near him, it had flown off, and his head was right up against the gutter. There was quite a bit of blood. As soon as I saw it wasn’t the girls I thought, There’s plenty of people looking after him, and I went inside and got back into bed.’
——
Up here I’m little more than a machine that records horrors and small dismays.
——
‘The best thing you can do as a Creative Writing teacher,’ said a man who had been one for four years, ‘is to put tight fences around them. I used to tell them I was absolutely not interested in their outpourings. It’s worth it. At the end you say, Well, X came in here a verbal cripple, and he’s walking out the door without crutches.’
——
‘I love you,’ said G on the phone, vaguely, as if wanting to register a small fact while the occasion presented itself. I knew that already. It’s part of what I know about the world, but it’s never steady, it flickers and disappears, and I would only feel this as painful if I’d been steering myself by its unreliable light. This metaphor will stand, if I don’t try to develop it any further.
——
The Vogel judging in Sydney was pure pleasure. We were put in an office high above bits of harbour, with windows that didn’t open. It seemed that I hadn’t laughed out loud in the company of others since I left Melbourne. (Frank Moorhouse: ‘Beware of committees that laugh too much.’)
——
In the pub, as the priest waited for me to finish with the public phone, he took a few steps back into the lounge where a jukebox was playing some loud rocking thing. He turned his back to me, unaware that I was watching him through the glass door, and took three big steps in time to the music, swinging out his arms in a large, free gesture, embracing the world. I like men. I just like them. (But not Norman Mailer.)
——
If I lived in Sydney perhaps these people, and the women they know, would be my friends. Perhaps this is just a provincial fantasy. Perhaps their lives are as closed as mine sometimes seems to be, in Melbourne.
——
I wiped myself and saw blood. Days early. Cynicism says: a disease. Romance says: weeping.
——
I wondered, seeing the state G was in, whether I did agree after all with his remark about the attractiveness of other people’s unhappiness. I wanted to sweep out his head with a straw broom, wash out his mouth with soap, put him across my knee and spank him with a rolled-up newspaper, and then fuck him silly, just to cheer him up. Instead we walked along a path in a park, looked at the Opera House gleaming in the sunshine, and felt extremely patriotic.
——
Frank O’Hara is a ratbag, so likeable, and what a voice. ‘Love’s life-giving vulgarity,’ he says in his ridiculous Manifesto.
——
A house! The sun comes in/ Through small surprising windows./ The occupants left for the coast/ early this morning in an old car./ ‘Sleep in our bed,’ they said,/ and I will: I’ve made it up already/ with thin blankets out of a cupboard./ I’ve turned back the top corner/ And placed the pillow;/ But that’s for later. Now/ I cut my fingernails to the quick/ And sit down at the piano, giddy,/ The child all secret left alone/ With bare board and kitchen jars,/ Doors that don’t lock, And ragged bleached towels/ Which have drunk water off those/ Travelling bodies that I love.
It took me an hour and a half to write that. The whole time I was reworking it I was thinking I should be doing something else. I’ll never be a poet! But it’s more fun than prose, that’s for sure.
——
Opposite the bedroom window stands a church. The morning light brightens its sandstone steeple. Pigeons swagger along its edges.
——
‘Want to come with us to see Flashdance?’
‘Love to! Only one problem—if it’s tomorrow I might be going to the Opera House to see The Cherry Orchard.’
‘It’s fabulous! You’ll cry! No, you won’t cry…’
‘Yes I will. You should’ve seen me at Three Sisters.’
——
‘I saw she had been writing you a postcard,’ wrote B, ‘and I was full of jealousy. I thought, Well, if everyone else is going to write to her, I’m not. These feelings must be hounded out and whipped like a thieving servant boy.’
——
The young girl’s confident vocabulary: ‘If you look at her hands fleetingly you don’t even notice; but if you examine them properly…’
——
Been drinking again. But all I had was three margaritas and one very watered-down scotch. So I am all right.
——
Missed the plane. Do not care. Walk with slow steps in my pink high-heeled sandals. The muzak in the airport sounds as if it’s being boiled, or percolated. One is not sure what tune it is, though it causes a familiar feeling.
——
A student brought me a poem she had written. She asked me to correct her punctuation. The first line: ‘A, TV reporter came up to him.’
——
One of the Englishmen grumbles fiercely to me at lunch about the ‘theory’ people in the department. He’s furious because they make their students read theory of literary criticism without reading the novels first. ‘I was interested when they said they were going to teach Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the trial. I thought, They’ll have to read the novel. But they didn’t. They studied the transcript of the trial.’ I’m listening, agog, but just as what he’s shouting becomes really interesting, he breaks off mid-sentence. ‘Why did you stop talking?’ ‘I’ve got high blood pressure.’ ‘What? Don’t be silly.’ ‘No, it’s true. And there are better things to get worked up about.’
——
While the GP was writing out my prescription, she was breastfeeding her baby.
——
We lay on the couches in his living room, gossiping about musicians.
‘She’s got no studio manners,’ said G.
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Okay. We’re in this very small room. She’s holding a guitar, I’m not. I’m in there trying to tell her how to do it. The guitar is connected. The slightest flutter she makes on the strings makes a tremendous noise. I say, “How about trying it like this?” She goes chucka-chucka-chucka—gets it wrong—and in her frustration she whacks the strings, really hard. The noise it makes is like being punched in the head! I nearly have to cover my ears! It hurts! And she does this ten, fifteen times!’
——
The evening comes down. A postcard I’d left on the bed in the morning was bent in a curve. Crickets make their soothing, reliable rhythm. A visible mistiness fills the valley. The house is like a ship: riding high in damp air.
——
On TV, riot police in Santiago, Chile charge a peaceful sit-in against the military regime: they savagely attack students with their nightsticks. A witness says, ‘They fell to the ground, blood gushed from their heads, the man was screaming in agony, his head was dented like a ping pong ball.’ People all over the city toot their car horns in protest, and people inside their houses, when night falls, begin to beat spoons against saucepans. The whole city is in uproar.
——
I’m worried about art, what it’s for, whether what I do is any use to anyone, whether I’ve been kidding myself all these years that I’m any good at it, that I’ve got anything at all to offer the human race, whether I should just chuck it in and look for a job.
——
I was astonished at the violence of the short story. The control the writer thinks he has of it is the control that a furiously angry driver has of a car, a person who ought to be kept from the wheel until he recovers his temper: the narrative voice makes grinding changes, throws itself into sickening halts and turns. The last few sentences are a head hitting the windscreen.
——
When the Englishman washes the dishes he splashes water all down his front in great slops that soak his shirt and trousers. He is perfectly oblivious, for he is singing to me, in a sweet and cultivated light tenor, a song to illustrate why he loves Berlioz. We show each other photos of our children, whom we painfully miss. ‘She looks wise,’ he says, looking at M, and she does: thin arms folded over the sinewy torso, the straight line of the mouth, the eyes with their reserved, humorous expression.
——
The student and I sat together at the kitchen table, sewing. She was taking in a pair of trousers; I was mending the sleeve of a dress.
‘This is nice, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Reminds me of that scene in Gone With the Wind where the women sit sewing while the men are out getting into trouble.’
‘And,’ she said, ‘one of them is reading out loud from David Copperfield. “Chaptah One. Ah am bawn.”’
——
At the hippies’ house for dinner, I find in my slice of quiche two foreign items: a dead match and a pubic hair. I hide them under a lettuce leaf and we go on talking.
——
At the prize-giving I stretch out my legs and rest my feet on a kind of wooden pew. A journalist from Sydney called K introduces himself, sits on my feet and tells me several gaudy tales of his emotional life: various insane behaviours. I feel like taking the cheeky-faced fellow by the hand, leading him into a dark hallway, and saying, ‘Let’s kiss.’ I discipline myself by planning a Schnitzler-style short story about the waxing and waning of a flirtation. By the time I get home I have forgotten it.
——
A Christian student came to see me and talked at length about her decision to leave university. ‘I’d been praying about it for a long time. In church last Sunday I got an answer. I knew that I had to leave. The Lord spoke to me. He said, “Well, are you going to serve me, or aren’t you?”’ I was interested in what she said. I did not think it was silly. I imagine that if one became a Christian one could not do otherwise than to proselytise. Anything else would be inconsistent.
