Yellow Notebook, page 9
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Went to work and fiddled round for half an hour, then began properly to feel it come, and got Athena and Philip into the cafe and the two girls with blood-sucking lipstick walk in, and THEN, oh joy, I swung into the first Poppy-and-Elizabeth scene, also Poppy alone with her school uniform: great, long sentences, one of them at least half a page! Delirious I ran downstairs and bought myself a pastie from the San Remo Bakery.
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A visitor passed me a joint, also I drank some wine and some pernod and some port. (Only a little of each.) I want to read Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents but I’m too stoned.
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Musician: ‘Do you ever find that you’re working on some piece of art, and all it needs is one final leap to grasp it, but that in order to do it you’re going to have to be not a nice person?’
Me: ‘Yes. Every day.’
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Each morning M comes into my room and gels her hair in front of the mirror. I love to watch her preen and skip. Her legs are long and brown in her gingham school dress—she’s grown an inch since November. At the Vic Market she took me to see a certain pair of boots: little flat black suede ones, pointy like witches’ shoes, that tied at the ankle. She obviously had no hope that I’d buy them. In a rush of generosity I said, ‘Try them on.’ She did. ‘They fit!’ she cried in a trembling voice. I bought them with a cheque. She was so excited I thought she’d burst into tears. ‘I can’t believe it!’ she kept saying.
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A big dry wind blew all night from the north. The street has been swept clean, and things have a dry sparkle. The eastern sides of chimneys are sharp and white. The air hisses along our house-side and buffets the small protuberances.
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I went to work and broke through a brick wall or went round the side of it or dug under it or something: Athena’s moral crisis and flight. The pace picked up incredibly. Present tense. A weaving and twining of many a disparate thread. All these years of note-taking, of being what Joan Didion calls ‘a lonely, anxious re-arranger of things’, are now paying off. I even got in the skier on the colour TV in the Italian cafe! That image has been dogging me for ten years at least.
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T showed me two drawings of windows, each one with a different weather outside it.
‘They’re beautiful,’ I said.
‘Should I put them in the show?’
‘I would.’
‘But they don’t sort of make any social or political comment, do they.’
‘For God’s sake, woman! They’re windows! What more do you want?’
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I admired some little dark blue lace-up leather boots K was wearing. He immediately took one off and suggested I try it on. Its slightly damp warmth.
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P invited me to come to the framer and see her big pastels: she was showing them to some distant relatives who were interested in buying. The pictures were in a pile on a table, interleaved with tissue paper, waiting to be put into the dusty gold frames she had chosen for them. The ones I saw were striking. I liked them very much. She was asking $650 and I thought that was a fair price. One of the women was so antipathetic I could hardly believe it—an abrasive manner with the subtext ‘Nobody makes a monkey out of me.’ ‘You’re selling yourself short,’ she said harshly, ‘by showing us these unframed. I know for a fact that there’s no point asking my husband to look at things flat out on a table. I know there’s no way he’d be interested when they’re not in frames.’ At least a novelist doesn’t have to provide decoration for people’s new houses.
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Will I ring up K and say, ‘I like you; I am interested in you’? Or will I do the safe, housewifely thing, that is, nothing?
I will go to work.
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And after that I went to my office and wrote, without fuss, in an hour and a half, the story the magazine asked me for. It’s short, a piece of fluff somewhere between journalism and fiction, but it’s nice, it’s clean, and I like it. And I know today why people write short stories: because they are short, because your imagination can encompass the entire thing all in one go: whereas a novel will hang and hang over you, for a year at a time, like a mountain right behind the house blocking out the sun.
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Reading Nadine Gordimer’s Selected Stories. So marvellous, sensible, confident, modest-toned, informative, decent. I can’t put it down. I read between putting on one item of clothing and the next. She knows a lot. ‘She runs a tough line, in her introduction, on writers using other people’s lives,’ I say to B at Notturno; ‘she says of course writers have to use other people’s lives.’ B gives me a wry look: ‘Does she?’ I take these remarks and glances of hers as reproaches, even warnings.
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They lowered her coffin into the grave. The rabbi took out a little manila envelope full of fine dirt and sprinkled it over her. Across the heap of clayey soil that had been dug out of the hole lay four or five long-handled shovels and a rake. People (only men) from the watchers approached and took it in turns to scoop up spadefuls of the dirt and throw them in on top of her. When each had done his share he passed on the shovel to the next man, wiped his hands on his trouser thighs and stepped neatly out of the way. One man’s pencil fell out of his shirt pocket on to the clay when he bent over to dig. He picked it up quickly, without looking round. They filled the grave right up to the top: they buried her. Put her to sleep. Tucked her into bed and drew the covers up over her—not leaving this last job to strangers. When it was done the rabbi said, ‘If you would like to wash your hands, there are several taps over near the gate. Please be careful not to walk on the—please be careful not to walk on the—’ He pointed to the sheets of corrugated iron that covered the nearby, freshly dug, empty graves.
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At dawn I looked out my bedroom window and saw the dog trotting down the street towards the back gate with a huge knobby bone between her jaws: its knuckle shone white.
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I didn’t go to work today. But I did work. I wrote the account of the Jewish funeral. In other words, I practised. I took notes. I practised. I did not perform.
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‘He can’t stand me when I sob and become abject,’ says U. ‘I repel him as Jews and homosexuals repel one.’ Seeing my jaw drop she adds suavely, ‘I know some people would think I was being antiSemitic, but I’m not.’
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The young tram conductor wore an earring that represented a Marmite jar, and several cheap silver rings, one a writhing snake. He did small dead-pan performances from time to time. ‘Keep your legs apart,’ he said to a woman who was standing near the door, holding a shopping bag between her ankles. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Keep your legs apart and you’ll be able to balance better.’ All the women within earshot glanced at each other and laughed. ‘I thought for a minute he was going to say something else,’ murmured the gap-toothed one beside me. ‘Okay, gang, come on,’ he called to a group of passengers in a corner. ‘I used to say, “Fares please”,’ he said to his colleague out of the corner of his mouth, ‘but that was bloody ridiculous.’
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On the Overland to Adelaide I read on in The Way of All Flesh. It’s quite leisurely, but full of the most shrivelling hatred and bitterness. Dawn. We stopped for a few minutes at Tailem Bend. Now the day is clear, the sky pale blue. The hills are bald and rounded. A triangular dam is so still that I can see the ripples on its floor. The line swings south and sun bursts into my ‘roomette’.
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Elizabeth Jolley, in her dutiful way, tried to inform me of the literary status of a woman in an ugly flowered dress and thick pancake make-up to whom she was introducing me. The woman cut across her: ‘I’ve published two novels,’ she said, ‘and countless stories in the US.’ Countless was the word she used.
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Elizabeth read shyly from a prepared speech full of enjoyable quotations from Tolstoy and Kleist. I love her careful old-fashioned manners. She paused at one point and said into the microphone, ‘I’ll just have a drink of…this delicious…’ She sipped from a plastic glass of mineral water. ‘Ah, yes. Lovely.’ I wanted to rush up and cast myself at her sandalled feet.
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I was astonished when O said to me yesterday in the street, ‘I’ve changed my mind about clothes. I used to think they weren’t important and had no meaning, but now I see they’re a way of making statements about yourself—even, if I can say it, an attempt to communicate.’ This is a huge concession, from a man who once said to me irritably, ‘You make judgments about people based on what shoes they’re wearing.’ (Which is true.)
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The married couple argue in their bedroom. Even with the door closed I hear her shout in a rough, angry voice, ‘Look! I didn’t put any bloody Milo in your coffee!’ A moment later she passes my room with a histrionic sigh.
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When I listen to other writers reading from their work, I sometimes try for a moment to examine, before I give in to it, the way my mind is developing its visual response to the tale. And I realise with a joyful feeling that the same miraculous thing might happen to people who hear me reading from my book.
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After the panel session J and I went, shivering as the day grew cooler, to the piano bar and had some bad coffee and an extraordinary conversation. It went on for at least an hour, and involved what I suppose was me questioning him closely about the way he lives his religion. He had already, in answer to questions by mail, written me an enormous letter, setting it out and also making apologies (as if I’d think he was proselytising) for ‘boring’ me ‘with this stuff’. He talked about wanting to live like Christ, a life of ‘submission and humility’. (I’m striking a false note, somehow—like many very important conversations it exists in my memory as a particular kind of mood or emotional state and not as precise dialogue.) He talked a great deal about his father, whom he loves and admires, but also in answer to my awkward questioning about their use of the Bible etc: ‘How do you…sort of…organise your approach to it?’ ‘I go to it for…enlightenment, or information on a particular point, or for entertainment. And I write with a Bible beside me and on top of that a bloody great Concordance.’ He told me about the book he’s writing, and how it comes from his own childhood. It sounds beautiful, and I think very good, and daring—a cloud stands over the house, and at the end it comes down and fills the house as the boy goes for oil to anoint his father. I was very moved by this story. And I thought again, I want to write like that—to have people doing huge things of symbolic meaning.
By the time we left the bar we were blue with cold and shivering. I took his arm and said, feeling shy but that it was necessary, ‘I’m really glad we’re becoming friends.’ ‘Oh, so am I!’ he said, and tried to put his arm around my shoulders. We were laughing and embarrassed, almost tearful, handicapped by our heavy bags of books, making clumsy movements of affection. He said that when I’d started asking him about Christianity he’d been afraid it would be the end of the friendship: he said he was used to this happening, to being teased and laughed at.
‘In the bar,’ I said, ‘I kept thinking I was going to keel over. I don’t know if it’s the cold, or if it’s a spiritual crisis!’
‘Oh, I’m used to it,’ he said, making a two-fisted pounding gesture. ‘Working out what I think about things.’
As we approached the other writers at the tent we walked more and more slowly.
I said, ‘I think there’s something huge, and one day it’s going to roll over me.’
I don’t even know what I meant by that. But I’ve known it in some secret part of myself for years. As if I have a puny, tenacious little ego, which is straining at holding back a mighty force.
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I was awake most of the night. At nine in the morning I finally passed out and slept till noon. When I saw J at the tents I felt shy. I didn’t know how to follow up the shocking intimacy of the conversation. But he greeted me simply and asked how I was. We sat on the rim of the grassy slope and watched the world go by. An academic I had met once or twice came scrambling up the rise towards us. She said hello to me, and then, while her smile faded, she stared right into J’s face and up and down his body, in the most blatantly curious and speculative fashion. It was as if she were raking him with her nails and could not wait to get away and examine them for clues. She moved on and he turned to me. Under the freckles his face had gone white: ‘Did you see that?’ ‘Yep. They’ll all be saying we’re having an affair. That’s how they think.’ He dropped his forehead against my shoulder: ‘I think that’s rude. I think that’s really rude.’
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Why do I write down this stuff? Partly for the pleasure of seeing the golden nib roll over the paper as it did when I was ten.
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Home. My lovely bed. My bright room.
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I wrote, straight after the scene in the topless bar, a scene between Athena and Dexter in the lobby of a hotel. It made my skin stand up, the cruelty and honour that emerged between them in about a hundred and fifty words.
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Yesterday F and I went to a lecture by a man who worked with Einstein and is renowned for his ability to explain his theories to laypeople. But it had been advertised in the paper and by the time we got there, five minutes before it was to start, it was so packed that crowds were shoving at each door and people who looked faint were stumbling out gasping, ‘I can’t stand it in there.’ Disappointed, we drove to a swanky bar in Fitzroy and had a cocktail. We were happy. I thought, How lucky I am to be married to this lovely guy!
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Two people driving at night. On the radio comes a song by Mondo Rock: ‘Come, Said the Boy’. One person thinks, ‘That song was on last time we drove somewhere together. But I won’t mention it, for fear of appearing sentimental.’ The other person says, ‘This song came on last time.’
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The day I realised my novel was going to be a short one, and that its domestic subject and setting were quite proper, I walked home from work and passed a print shop, in the window of which stood a copy of that van Gogh painting of the inside of his bedroom: floorboards, a bed, two cane-bottomed chairs, a window. I thought, That’s a beautiful painting. And it’s only the inside of a room.
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Was bound, but now am free.
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Two good rousing hymns were sung at the wedding. But why was she marrying this man, who is plainly unworthy of her?
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To Paul Crossley’s piano masterclass at the Con. After three hours of intense concentration I was completely exhausted. His teaching was very challenging. He was not a giver of praise or even of encouragement, except to one girl who played Ravel; everyone else played Debussy. I loved the language he used: not only because it was clever and striking but because it showed me that the way I have been trying to write about music is not, as I had feared, hopelessly romantic or amateurish. ‘A furtive texture,’ he said . ‘A harmonic wash in the left hand. Then he clears the texture. Let the harmony settle again, before we take off. Hover above what you’re going to do.’ The concept of phrasing began to have meaning for me, not to mention texture. And now I know what the pedal is for: to ‘avoid breaking the sound’.
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Paul Fussell, in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars, quotes Evelyn Waugh: ‘Conversation seriously pursued…consists of narrative alternating with “comment”.’
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A tremendous wind, cold, gritty and in powerful, frightening gusts, blew all day from the north. Then, late in the afternoon a heavy, soaking rain fell. I went to the gym. B was there. She said, ‘I’m lonely.’ Her face seemed to quiver. I didn’t know what to say.
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As I approach the end of the novel I can feel it pulling itself into shape, as if I were only a secretary. Never had this experience before—the characters getting the bit between their teeth.
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B and I saw Robert Meldrum and the magician Doug Tremlett in The Tempest. They brought such delicacy, humour and wonder to Prospero and Ariel that I was on the verge of tears. Tremlett, it having been established from the start that Ariel was in bondage to Prospero through gratitude, fear and love, seemed to be holding himself back from evaporating. No chiffon, no light-footedness—he was a solid presence in well-filled white overalls, a turquoise T-shirt and clean runners, his hair cut short with one tiny curved lock on his forehead. He did it all by the extreme slowness of his movements, his density, his powerful focus. His magician’s tricks were graceful, breath-taking, yet anything he picked up—a hat, a cane, a scarf—he imbued with a vital importance. What a play! Virginia Woolf’s right—Shakespeare is ‘incandescent’.
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And this morning, Sire, I, your handmaiden, l’umile ancella, wrote eight pages, and was content.
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G came in with his pockets sprouting contracts. We talked about good deals; how to be paid what one is worth.
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The prostitutes are small-mouthed girls who call to a man, ‘Wanna girl?’ ‘No.’ ‘Sure?’ Not many of them about in the morning. I saw a man of twenty-five or so standing at a rubbish bin. His movements, even as he stood still, drew my attention, and when I glanced at him I saw something dreadful in his face: a thuggish thickness in the mouth and jaw, eyes oppressed by a great, dense knot of anguish between the brows. He continually clasped his hands and flicked up his elbows like a boxer loosening up before a fight. He uttered wordless sounds, strangled grunts, as if he were trying to speak but, like Caliban, were only earth.
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T wanted to come with B and me to aerobics. From the lobby we could see a man inside the gym doing those repetitive jumps where you keep both hands on the floor. ‘Seems a bit funny,’ said T, ‘doing that kind of thing on the carpet. Wearing it out.’ I shudder with secret pleasure at her criticisms. On our way out afterwards the dopy girl at the desk called to her, ‘How’d you go?’ ‘Oh,’ she said grimly, ‘okay. I suppose. But I thought it was a bit masochistic.’ ‘Good!’ cries the girl, beaming.
