The Simplest Words E-Book

Alex Miller

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 448

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

From one of Australia's greatest novelists comes this fine collection, a storyteller's journey. These short stories and essays, written over the last forty years, comprise an insightful and intelligent meditation on the life of the novelist and the culture of contemporary Australia. Personal and intimate as many of these pieces are, this collection forms a kind of assured autobiography, of the sort that only Alex Miller could write. Alex Miller's stories are told with a rare level of wisdom and profundity, engaging the intellect and the emotions simultaneously. Stories are, after all, in his blood.

Leseprobe

First published in 2015

Copyright © Alex Miller 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone:[phone]

Email:[email protected]

Web:www.allenandunwin.com/uk

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

Hardback ISBN 978 1 74331 357 2

E-book ISBN 978 1 92557 630 6

Cover design by Lisa White

Cover photography: Diana Kakkar / www.trendbridged.com

For

Ross, Erin, Amelie and Adrienne

Kate and Mato

And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough.

Bertolt Brecht

Contents

Introduction

In the Blood

Ross and the Green Elfin

In My Mother’s Kitchen

Learning to Fly

Boys Wanted for Farms

My First Love

Excerpt from The Tivington Nott

Travels with My Green Man

Once Upon a Life

Excerpt from Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

How to Kill Wild Horses

Destiny’s Child

Living at Araluen

Excerpt from The Sitters

In the End it was Teaching Writing

The Last Sister of Charity

The Rule of the First Prelude

On Writing Landscape of Farewell

Excerpt from Landscape of Farewell

Australia Today

The Writer’s Secret

Speaking Terms

Impressions of China

Excerpt from The Ancestor Game

Chasing My Tale

The Wine Merchant of Aarhus

The Mask of Fiction

Excerpt from Conditions of Faith

The Inspiration Behind Lovesong

Excerpt from Lovesong

How I Came to Write Autumn Laing

Excerpt from Autumn Laing

Meanjin

Comrade Pawel

The Story’s Not Over Yet

Prophets of the Imagination

Excerpt from Journey to the Stone Country

Sweet Water

The Black Mirror

Excerpt from Prochownik’s Dream

A Circle of Kindred Spirits

Sophie’s Choice

The Mother of Coal Creek

Excerpt from Coal Creek

Teetering

Song of the Good Visa

Publication Details

Acknowledgements

Introduction

‘The goal of storytelling,’ Alex Miller has said, ‘is finally to account for one’s own story. It is through the poetics of my fiction that I have sought my personal truth.’ The Simplest Words, a collection of stories, excerpts, memoir, commentary and poetry, is Alex Miller’s first collection of occasional writings. His eleventh novel, Coal Creek, was published to wide critical acclaim in 2013. Alex is twice winner of Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, in 1993, for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier’s Awards. In 2011 he won this award for the second time with his novel Lovesong. In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. Following the publication of Autumn Laing he was awarded the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012. His latest novel, Coal Creek, won the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Alex is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a recipient of the Centenary Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. Alex is published internationally and his works have been widely translated.

Robert Dixon’s 2014 monograph Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time describes Alex’s novels as ‘immediately accessible . . . works of high literary seriousness—substantial, technically masterly and assured, intricately interconnected and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight’.

Stephanie Miller

Castlemaine 2015

In the Blood

My father and grandfather told stories every day of their lives, and my mother and grandmother had babies and offered a gentle resistance to the persistent story making of their men. But for my father a day without story was soup without salt, and he loved his salt lavishly. At nine years of age, when my young brother fell ill and I told him stories to save his life, I became my family’s storyteller.

As we gathered around the fire last thing in the evening, my father drew on his pipe and looked at me. ‘Have you got a story for us then, Alex?’

My mother touched his arm. ‘It’s already past their bedtime, Manny.’

My father looked into the fire and drew on his pipe. ‘Och, well, just a wee one then, boy.’

So I began my story, never knowing where it would take me or how it would end, nor how long it would be in the telling, my sisters and brother staring into the fire with my father, my mother pretending not to listen. ‘An old man was walking down a road one day when he came across a sack that had been thrown aside into the hedge …’ Who was not listening now?

When I was thirty-eight, I published a story and became a story writer as well as a storyteller. I telephoned my father to let him know.

‘You could always tell a story, lad,’ he said, neither his Glasgow accent nor his attitudes softened by the years. He was not impressed. Writing was not for him an advance on telling. For my father it was the company of the telling that cherished the spirit of story. But I’d slipped over onto the page and it was too late. I kept at it. And when I was fifty-two I published my first novel. I’m seventy-one now and still at it, closing on a draft of my ninth novel, Lovesong, and dreaming of Sophocles producing his masterpiece Oedipus at Colonus when he was eighty-nine—and loving it. It’s in the blood.

2008

Ross and the Green Elfin

My two sisters and I waited in the front room of our flat, crouched together by the dying embers of the coal fire, I in my pyjamas and the girls in their nightdresses. We were silent and fearful and we gazed into the embers of the fire. I have no memory of my mother crying out, but only that my father alone acted as the midwife of the occasion. It seemed to have come upon us suddenly. I had hardly known my mother to be expecting another child. I had thought we three were our entire family. My father came out of our parents’ bedroom and he stood over us and we looked up at him in great anxiety and perplexity. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows, his collarless shirt open at his neck, his bare chest gleaming with beads of sweat. As he stood looking down at us I saw a gentleness in his gaze that was mysterious and distant. I had never seen such a look in my father’s eyes before. He was like a stranger. Another man. A new man whose existence I had only dreamed of. I gazed with faint horror at the livid and disfiguring scars of his wound. He smiled and invited us softly, ‘Come and meet your wee brother.’

In the half-light of my parents’ bedroom my mother lay with the tiny baby in her arms, cradling it to her breast. Our father instructed us and in turn we each leaned over and kissed our new brother on his forehead. The magical translucence of his skin, so tender the lightest blow would surely dissolve him. Was he as yet quite with us, I wondered in astonishment, or was he the advance of himself, a promise of what the world might be, of what we humans might be before we are born, an image of unsettling perfection, his smell of that long-forgotten world from which he had come to us and from which we ourselves had come so long ago it was a distant and foreign country to us now and we had forgotten the language. Precious beyond reckoning by the ordinary values of our days, here was my brother. A gift I had not expected to receive.

I looked my questions into my mother’s beautiful dark eyes, and she smiled and looked down at him, her new son. After we had left the bedroom my father mixed a bucket of wet dross and built the smoking hummock behind the coals in the grate, then he sat in his armchair and lit his straight-stemmed pipe and filled the room with the sweet perfume of his tobacco. We three children waited for him, sitting silently on the hearthrug watching him. He said at last, ‘Your mother and I are calling him after my brother, your uncle Ross.’ We had never met our uncle Ross. He lived in Glasgow. We lived in South London.

Alex’s father, 1955

Two years later, when my brother fell ill and we thought he would die, I stayed with him in his darkened room and told him stories of the Green Elfin, a little being who struggled to meet the terrible challenges of existence. My precious brother recovered, and I was known thereafter in my family as the storyteller. It is where it began for me, this business of writing fiction. It has become my sacred country.

2008

In My Mother’s Kitchen

South London, July 1944. My mother handed me the tray with my sisters’ meals on it and picked up the tray with her own meal and mine. She stood looking around the kitchen. ‘I think we’ve got everything,’ she said. ‘I’ll go first.’ We went out the door and began making our way down the stairs. At the second landing the window was open. A black rocket with stumpy wings and a tail of bright orange fire was roaring towards us out of the grey sky. It was making a noise like a motorbike with a broken muffler. As we looked, the orange tail fire went out and there was silence. The black rocket sailed on towards me and my mother out of the grey sky for a thousand years, the whispering of the wind across its wings … My mother’s shout was a distant echo I still hear in my dreams.

We dropped the dinner and ran down the last two flights of stairs, taking them three at a time. At the bottom of the stairs we ran out through the covered way into the long lane leading to our garden and the air-raid shelter, where my older sister was looking after my little sister. Halfway along the path the earth heaved up under us as if a volcano was erupting beneath our feet. We stopped and stood on the path holding our breath. Then came the ear-splitting roar and at once the sky filled with smoke and ash and pieces of debris. The air was still alive with papery pieces of stuff floating down around us like theatrical snow or autumn leaves at the pantomime when my mother said, ‘The poor devils up the road have caught it. Go back to the kitchen, darling, and peel some more potatoes, will you? I’ll go and see how the girls are getting on.’

2012

Learning to Fly

John Aylward was my best friend. After school, in the twilight of a winter afternoon, we did not go home but walked in silence together to a bombed house in a neighbourhood more well-to-do than the neighbourhood in which we ourselves lived. We stood side by side on a hill of fallen masonry and bricks in the remains of the front room of the destroyed house. The room had been the parlour of a rich woman. We had passed her house often on our way to the woods. The filleted rooms of the upper storey hung over us, stone lintels askew and on the point of falling free from the bricks, the walls leaning, the mortar shattered; ceiling lathes stripped of plaster had become the bare ribs of the house, in silhouette above us against the purple depths of the evening sky. When the woman had been alive, before the German bomb killed her and destroyed her house, the curtains of her parlour had always remained closed, even on summer days. Now her secret room was open to the sky. Standing there together on the hillock of rubble, John Aylward and I were awed by the trespass of our errand. It was our intention to construct an aeroplane from the ruins of the dead woman’s house. Our aim embarrassed us with its grandeur, and we had not dared to speak of it to anyone for the certainty of being mocked. We were from the council estate and our caste knew nothing of flight, real or lyrical. Our silence spoke of our knowledge that if we failed there would be no appeal.

It was dark by the time we left the ruin, a bundle of lathes slung between us across our shoulders.

I had never seen John’s father sober and feared him. I don’t know whether John feared his father, but I imagine he did. We had never discussed it. We walked along the lamplit streets, empty of pedestrians and without cars in those days, our bundle of lathes forming a kind of spring between us and forcing us to maintain in our step a rhythm suited to the step of the other.

2012

Boys Wanted for Farms

Along the footpath in front of him the paving stones are black and shiny with the rain. He sees something, something dark and green plastered to the footpath by the rain. When he comes up to this green square, a memorial plaque, it might be, set in the paving stone commemorating some past tragedy, he stands and looks down at it, the rain going down the back of his neck. He mouths the words as he deciphers them: BOYS WANTED FOR FARMS. He repeats the four words aloud, his voice solemn and intent, as if he is deciphering a code, a message from some exotic bard, an inhabitant of the empty road, lilac bushes over the garden fence swaying and thrashing about. Cold in his shoulders. His fingers sore from the factory. He squats and lifts a corner of the small green square of paper and slowly peels it from the surface of the stone. He has come into possession of his answer. He walks on along the quiet street, past the school gates, to the corner. It is a message from the gods. His heart is joyful. He will never return to the floor of the factory. He will never again endure the long day from dark morning till dark evening among the sound and the fury of the machines and the terrible men, and never again will he witness their torture of the hunchback and their lewd obscenities.

2012

My First Love

When I was fifteen, I left school in South London and got a job as a farm labourer on Exmoor. Which sounds easy enough. It wasn’t.

My struggle at that time brings to my mind a cartoon I once saw in the New Yorker. The driver of a car has pulled into a garage and is asking directions from the pump attendant. A grid of freeways knits its way through the sky above them. Through a gap in the flyovers there is a view of a distant church steeple. The garage attendant is explaining to the driver: ‘You can’t get there from here.’

The teachers at my secondary modern school, whom I asked for help to get to Exmoor, gave me the garage attendant’s advice. I didn’t believe them, but I did discover that nobody where I was knew anyone who had ever been to where I wanted to go. It took persistence and twelve months of failure before I found my way from the South London council estate where I’d grown up to a job as a labourer on a West Somerset farm.

The friends I left behind on the council estate when I went to Exmoor didn’t really know where I’d gone. I went off their screen. I had made my first cross-cultural journey. There was more than time and space involved. In a sense my teachers had been right when they’d advised me: ‘You can’t get there from here, Miller.’

So what was it that made me persist?

I was in love. We do crazy things when we’re in love. When we’re in love we think we’re different from other people. We get this idea that for special reasons that apply only to us we can do things that the other people around us can’t do. And we can. And we do. We don’t listen to advice from people who know the limitations better than we do, people with experience of the barriers whose opinions we would respect if we were sane.

I was obsessed. It was no good trying to tell me anything. So people were glad when I left. They were relieved to see me go. I’d already ceased to be one of them. I’d become an embarrassment to my friends and family. As if Exmoor were a married woman luring me into a dangerous liaison, my schoolteachers warned me to abandon my obsession. ‘Forget Exmoor, Miller. Get yourself a job where you belong, on a production line.’

But I was walking home from the factory in the black rain, being seduced by a vision of green fields and woodlands and pale heather stretching out beneath my feet in the sunlight. ‘What’s he smiling at?’ I was earning a reputation for being lunatic, a weirdo, an outsider. ‘Who does he think he is?’

In Australia, thirty years later, I wrote a novel based on the two years I spent working on Exmoor for Tiger Westall, the tenant farmer with a dangerous obsession for hunting wild red deer. The novel turned out to be a parable of the stranger, a meditation on the power the stranger has to negotiate a way into a settled community and to change the community forever. And the powerlessness of the community, despite its numerical superiority and assurance of belonging, to resist the changes the stranger brings. I couldn’t have written that novel if I hadn’t still been in love, with Morris and Tiger and Roly-Poly and the great black hunter Kabara and the wilderness of Exmoor and the mysterious old nott of Tivington.1 Without love I couldn’t have got to Exmoor in the fifties from Melbourne in the eighties.

Several years after I’d written the novel I revisited Exmoor for the first time since I was a boy. I was lucky I hadn’t gone back before I’d written the novel. There was nothing left. Thirty years of change had erased it all. Where Tiger’s farmhouse had been—an old stone building squatting in the groin of a lane—there was a self-service petrol station on a motorway. And they were all dead, the people I’d written about.

No one could even remember Tiger or Morris or Roly-Poly. Strangers had taken possession. There was silence and absence where I’d once ventured my little history. And while I was standing at the pump filling my hired Fiat Uno with petrol, I realised that, except for the absent pump attendant, the cartoon in the New Yorker had at last come true for me. I was in the middle of it. I could no longer get to Tiger’s place from where I was standing.

If I was so much in love with Exmoor, why did I leave? Why didn’t I stay and see out the changes? Because I fell in love with somewhere else.

First, before anything else, in the mute state, we’re a migrant species. First we set off on a journey. The journey of the story, however, is a different journey from the one we actually travel. For the story of our journey is always a fiction; it is always dealing with the past on the present’s terms. We tell the story in order to free ourselves from the past so that we can move on, not in order to recover the past, which is merely nostalgia.

Travelling, moving on, seeking the future, is what we do. The journey is our reason for living. Our storytelling is secondary to our journey. Storytelling eases the way. The journey is the thing. In other words, getting to places people believe we can’t get to from where we are. Which often makes us appear to be a bit obsessed with the transgression of boundaries.

I read a book when I was on Exmoor that began my love affair with Australia and made a migrant of me. It was a brown cloth-covered hardback with reproductions tipped into the text. The only photograph I remember clearly is of several stockmen lounging on the verandah of their quarters on a cattle station in the outback. The stockmen and the verandah are in black silhouette against the luminous sky, like a Matisse cut-out. The stockmen seem to be watching the horizon, which is an unhindered line.

The migrant’s dilemma reflects the general human dilemma: Freud’s discovery of the ambivalence of human emotions, that we can be in love with two opposing states at the same time. It’s no easier to be in love with two places than it is to be in love with two people. These things often end in pain and suffering and in love turning to hate and to permanent scars and guilt and accusations and counter-accusations, even in litigation and sometimes total disaster. Betrayal and treason are trying circumstances. We all know, in the conduct of our rational lives, that two loves are not better than one. We all know that it is easier not to be in love at all than to be in love with two people at the same time.

But what is knowing compared to loving?

Everyone on Exmoor whom I asked for directions to the Australian outback gave me the garage attendant’s advice. ‘You can’t get there from here.’ But you could. And I did.

The bus left at noon. Morris, the labourer with whom I’d been living for the past two years, and whom I loved because he was the kind of man I wanted to be when I grew up—his own man—had gone to the pub to pick up the beer for his card night. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back before the bus gets here,’ he had said.

Today his attempt to reassure me has the portentous ring of an epitaph. The bus was a couple of minutes early and Morris was a couple of minutes late.

He was coming out of the door of the pub as I sailed past in the bus. He was carrying a case of beer in both his hands, so he couldn’t wave. Our eyes met in the instant it took for the bus to go past. I know there was anguish in my gaze. I never saw him again, but I can still see the look in his eyes, a kind of guilty smile. It is unresolved. I find myself still reading that look. His anticipation of the beer and the cards later with his mates at the cottage. Was that it? Or did he really love me the way I loved him, with inexhaustible admiration?

Alex (left) and Morris Aplin, Exmoor, 1951

I’ve got two snapshots. One of him and one of me. We’re standing among the brussel sprouts in the garden at the back of his cottage. There’s a bit of snow on the ground. In the picture of me I’m wearing twill jodhpurs and leggings and boots and a tweed jacket and a cheese-cutter cap over one eye, a costume identical to the one he’s wearing in his picture. And I’ve adopted his pose. So I guess I took his photo first, then asked him to take mine. In other words, I’m not the original. But I am a near-perfect copy. Only I’m not my own man. Trying to be like him, and he was like no one but himself, had made me as unlike him as I could possibly be.

When I reached the cattle station on the Leichhardt River in the Gulf of Carpentaria, I found myself surrounded by the uneventful horizon line: the perfect line that had lured me all the way from Exmoor. The stockmen were all Maigudung clansmen, all thirty-five of them, all mounted, all with long black hair and beards and all with skin that was shining in the sun as if they had oiled themselves in preparation for my reception. They rode up to me out of a cloud of red dust and stared at me in silence; calm and relaxed and curious and arrogant in their possession of the situation, the confidence of their belonging. One of them, who later became my first Australian friend, challenged me to reveal myself. ‘If you’re really English, where’s your English saddle?’ But I wasn’t really English. It was more complicated than that.

He told me later, glancing at the horizon as he did so, that his ancestors had been living on this stretch of country forever. I’d arrived just as the end of his forever was beginning. Within a couple of years of my arrival, the equal pay judgment had given the lessees the excuse to exile Frank and the rest of the Maigudung from their land. It was the elaboration of one of those negotiated changes that strangers bring among a settled people, and which the settled people have no power to resist. Frank said nothing at the time. He only looked upon the sun and drank the morning air.

Two years later I left. Everyone left. The thing changed. Frank’s forever had come to an end. He stood in the dust on the station runway and waved to me as the plane lifted away. His arms weren’t weighed down with beer, as Morris’s had been, not yet anyway. And I didn’t see the look in his eyes. So I can’t see it now. I just see his last wave.

I’m still reading that wave. Years ago, before I’d learned that there is something immutable about the writing of fiction that will not admit of just any kind of lie, I thought I was going to write my reading of Frank Maigudung’s last wave. It was going to be a story about the dilemma of being in love with two places at the same time. But it wasn’t my story to tell. It was Frank’s story. The story of the Maigudung exile. And I could never tell the story of the Maigudung exile the way it had to be told. The way all stories have to be told, with the passionate ambivalence of those who have made the journey. Only for them is the spirit of truth and the spirit of love the same.

1995

1 A nott is a stag without antlers.

EXCERPT FROM

The Tivington Nott

Morris and his wife aren’t awake when I slip the latch on the back door and step out into the darkness. The moon is still bright enough over the oaks in Will’s wood to cast their shadows across the close-cropped turf of Old Ley. Everything’s sodden from the storm and the air is cold and still. I stand on the crest of the ridge and look down into the valley without a name that locals call the Black Valley, and I can see across a vast sweep of sleeping countryside all the way to the silvered waters of Bridgewater Bay and the outlet of the Doniford Stream. Everything is cool and clean! I can taste the air on my palate! There’s the sound of water trickling out of a pipe under the hedge next to me. I have to go. As I turn I startle a blackbird from its roost and it flies out, flat and fast across the field.

From fifty yards away the farm could be abandoned. Dead. Deserted. A settlement left over from another era. The big dark shadows of the cattle shed, the barn, the stable and the house all joined together, their windows and doors facing inward to the yard. Blank walls to the world. Compact against storms and trouble, and against anything else that might come along. Expecting the worst. Their weathered grey featureless stone walls and their grey slate roofs not interested in anything outside. They don’t want to know about it. Keep out! Silent in the autumn moonlight. Been standing there since who knows when? The odd bulge of the disused bread-oven poking out into the road like the bum of a giant squatting in the end wall of the house.

I’ve got a good two hours of work to get through before daylight. Finisher and his mate Ashway hear me opening the road gate and they whinny softly. This is enough to start the cows moaning, even though they know it’s too early for them yet. I light the kerosene lamp in the stable and close the door behind me. The soft light reveals the cobbled floor and the ashen stall-trees, their wood polished to a deep honey gloss by the rubbing of generations of hunters and plough horses. It’s warm in here. The air rich with the acid smells of horse dander, piss, dung and meadow hay. Kabara is stationary in the shadows. Watching me. Making no welcome. The two geldings lean out and stretch for my hands, glad to see me.

The barn, Handycross Farm, Lydiard St Laurence, 1952

1989

Travels with My Green Man

I think dire need was my initial source of inspiration. When I was twelve or thirteen my young brother, who was around five at the time, was ill and had to be kept in a darkened room for a couple of weeks. I loved my brother and had seen his arrival in the world as a great gift. The gift of brotherhood. So while he was ill I stayed home from school and sat with him day after day. He lay there in the bed bored, motionless and suffering. I soon realised if I was to be of any help to him I’d better come up with something to distract him from his situation. So I invented a character who wasn’t confined to a darkened room as he was but was free to go off on grand adventures.

For a reason I don’t now recall I named this free-roaming adventurer the Green Elfin, but I do recall a dingy and mysterious pub not far from our house called the Green Man, and maybe that kind of place seemed to me even then a likely theatre for such dreaming. After my brother was recovered, the stories I’d told during his illness became known in our family as the Green Elfin Stories, as if they had an existence somewhere beyond my telling of them. I even had requests for more stories from my brother and other members of my family from time to time, but the dire need was no longer there and the inspiration was lacking.

Winifred Millar with (clockwise) Ruth, Alex, Kathy and Ross, c. 1946

From that time on, however, I did go along believing that I had the talent to be a storyteller if I ever had cause to draw upon it in dire need. This knowledge formed a kind of reservoir of confidence for me later, when I was wandering around the world on my own, and it often supported my morale through the years during which I was painfully aware of my cultural deprivation. There were bad times, when it seemed that there was nothing left but to tell myself a Green Elfin story, and by that means I more than once made my escape to a more congenial world than the one I was actually living in.

But you don’t have to love, or even to like, the person who inspires you. Brotherly love doesn’t have to come into it. The reality of a writer’s daily life is, after all, not inspiration but hard work. And more so even for a writer as highly charged with originality of style as was Louis-Ferdinand Celine than for most of the rest of us. Though the impression of effortlessness is, of course, always the aim of the writer. Like plumbing, the hard labour of writing must be concealed from the consumer. Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘Celine was so concerned with style that he could not let a sentence rest until he had assured himself that it would impress the reader as not written but spoken … and spoken spontaneously, without reflection.’ Spoken, in other words, under the mysterious influence of inspiration. An influence which, in the popular imagination, often seems to have more to do with magic and the spiritual, the inbreathing of the animus, than with simple hard work. We love nothing more than to be mystified, and in fiction the bare truth is boring.

But for me Celine’s sleight of hand of the seemingly effortless worked its magic. When I read his last novel, that astonishing blast of energy that is Rigadoon—completed in 1961 on the day of his death—I closed the book with the feeling that I’d just read something written at a single sitting under the influence of one enormous rush of inspiration. It was one of the best Green Elfin stories I’d ever read. It was also the impression of effortlessness, not the truth of the hard labour Vonnegut was to speak of, that convinced me I’d found a way to write my first novel, The Tivington Nott. The Tivington Nott was a story that required the galloping blood race of a hunt for a wild red stag on Exmoor. When I tried to write the book, however, energised and permissioned, as it were, by the example of Celine’s Rigadoon, I found the effect of a spontaneous and breathless advance could only be achieved by an almost infinite number of assiduous rewritings at the specific level of word and punctuation.

During that arduous period of writing and rewriting I learned that rhythm—the most complex of all our literary effects—held the key to my problem. I learned that in the rhythm of prose, as in music, every black mark on the page is critical to the effect of the trick you’re trying to pull. I learned that rhythm is the heartbeat of prose just as it is of music and poetry. Celine had achieved exactly the effect of spontaneity I needed, and in the heartbreaking effort to achieve that effect for myself I learned to write.

But each book demands its own solutions and the rhythm of one story will not do for all stories. We move on. And the new territory poses new challenges. It took me five years and numerous drafts to find how to write Conditions of Faith because I couldn’t see the key to writing about the intellectual and emotional development of a sensitive young woman during a period of little over a year without making the story introspective and stationary. The problem for me was that Conditions of Faith was inspired by my reading of my mother’s Paris journal for 1923, a time when my mother was a free-spirited young woman dreaming of her own future, long before she met my father or had any thoughts of having to look after me and my brother and two sisters.

My mother’s journal—which my brother sent me from England after my mother’s death—provided me with a magic keyhole view into her youthful interior life, but it didn’t give me any sense of a narrative. I had lived in Paris in the early seventies myself, and in the weeks and months after reading her journal I often found myself picturing my mother as a young woman occupying the sixth-floor flat I’d rented in rue Saint-Dominique back in the seventies. Inspiration in this case was not a sudden flash of understanding but was a gradual realisation over a period of a year or more that I had a character and a setting and that I wanted to write about them. What interested me about the situation was the interior life of the young woman, her passionate dreaming of an independent life for herself. A dream that I knew was not to be. Kurt Vonnegut (here he is again!) has said his own writing life was an attempt to realise his mother’s unrealised dreams for her after she was dead. So maybe Conditions of Faith was even more deeply a story about my mother than I realised. For my hero in that book, the young Australian woman Emily Stanton, finds a way to avoid the kind of stifling wifehood that locked my own mother into a destiny she had not dreamed for herself, and Emily reaches that free-spirited life my mother only dreamed of.

Although she was grief-stricken at the death of my father, after fifty years as his companion, my mother confided to me, ‘I feel a little guilty saying this, but now he’s gone I feel free.’ And maybe in that guilty confession of the old lady there was the whisper still of the voice of the young girl dreaming her dream of freedom in Paris. For I am beginning to see these days that as we get older we come to understand that we have not travelled as far from our early years as we thought we had. We think we buried certain things long ago and forever, including one or two of our youthful dreams, until time begins to dig them up again and presents us in old age with the consequences of our abandonment of them.

At such moments of grim realisation I take cover in Vonnegut’s favourite piece of advice to himself: ‘Don’t take it all so seriously.’ And so maybe it’s Kurt Vonnegut Jr, after all, who I have to thank for the inspiration to persist with the writing life, for certainly I do love the spirit of that man. But how to lay bare the threads of such a fine elusive thing as that without parting them? And if it is true, and Vonnegut has greatly inspired me, you won’t find it in my work. For inspiration has nothing to do with mimicry, but is a thing entirely of the spirit.

2003

Once Upon a Life

As a youth I went to work as a farm labourer on the edge of Exmoor in the wilds of West Somerset. I fell in love with the life of the country at once, getting up before dawn and working until the evening seven days a week. And when the hunt was meeting I rode second horse for my boss with the Devon and Somerset staghounds. The life was all magic to me.

A year later, when the magic had become my routine, a fine-looking horseman rode into the wintry field where I was digging turnip shells for the sheep. He stopped beside me, his beautiful horse excited and uneasy with my closeness, and he said hello. This was unusual. But he was an Australian, my first. He told me he had come to England with the dream of retiring to the life of an English hunting gentleman but had soon discovered he was out of place. This wasn’t the open society, he said, of the kind he’d left behind him in Australia, where anybody could decide to be whatever they fancied. On Exmoor the locals viewed him with distrust as an oddity and an outsider. I knew what he meant. I was an outsider there myself, and possibly his last resort for someone to chat to.

A couple of weeks after he came into the turnip field I was drinking a cup of tea with my new Australian friend and his wife in the kitchen of the small manor house they’d bought. He got up from the table and fetched a book. ‘If it’s the wild frontiers of this world you want to see,’ he said, ‘you should read this.’

The year was 1953 and the name Nolan meant nothing to me, but the fine black-and-white silver gelatin photographs captivated me. One in particular I still recall today with the smell and feel of those times, catching in its grainy image myself being that boy again. Three stockmen stand in deep shadow in various attitudes of ease on the verandah of a hut, the broad brims of their hats and the picked-out points of their spurs. They are gazing out into an empty landscape and seem to be waiting for something, the horizon an uneventful line dividing earth and sky, the only feature the wretched limbs of a dead tree in the middle distance. I read the caption, You can ride for a month out here and never strike a fence, and was gripped by the dream of finding Sidney Nolan’s outback for myself. To ride with those nameless stockmen out into the emptiness of their landscape and over that mysterious horizon …

Almost a year later, on a grey November afternoon, my family stood in a close group on the platform at Liverpool Street Station, watching my train pulling out, waving me off for Tilbury and the other side of the world. I was not to see them again for ten years. In this last remembered image of my family gathered together in the one place, my little brother is standing between my father and mother holding my father’s hand. My older sister and my younger sister are holding each other’s hands and are standing up close against the skirts of my mother’s coat. It is as if they fear that separation might prove to be a contagion. Forty years later, when my brother came out to Australia to visit me, I asked him if he remembered seeing me off at Liverpool Street. He said, ‘Of course I remember it. We were all crying.’ My brother’s words surprised me. For although I was leaving a country and a family that I loved that day, I was too excited by the adventure ahead of me to fear that I would miss my country, or to notice that my leaving had brought great distress to my family. I was going to Nolan’s outback to join the stockmen. The train was moving. The Australian’s book was in my suitcase. I had acquired a new reality.

When I got off the boat in Sydney six weeks later I was still underage and was supposed to report my arrival in Australia to the authorities. But I was too impatient to reach the outback to bother with this formality and I set off at once with my suitcase. Walking north along the highway I thumbed down a truck. The driver was friendly. My story did not surprise him. ‘You’re doing the right thing, old mate,’ he said. ‘I should have done it when I was your age.’ He drove me all the way to the southern Queensland coastal town of Gympie and got me a job on a dairy farm where he knew the farmer and his wife. The truck driver and I had become friends of the road and he had led me into the way of being Australian. It wasn’t difficult for me. My mother’s people were Irish and my father was from Glasgow, my parents’ cultures the very ones from which the majority of white Australians had their origins in those days. Being Australian felt more natural to me than trying to be English ever had. With an intuitive certainty that is only available to us when we are young, I knew that my arrival on the other side of the world had been a homecoming. I had found the place where the outsiders had gone long ago and knew myself to be among them.

Gympie was hot, the vegetation subtropical, fierce taipans lurked among the flowering lantana, and death adders sunned themselves along the riverbank when we went for a swim. It was all new and exotic and it fascinated me, but it was only a stop along the way. A dairy farm in Gympie was not Nolan’s outback. After a couple of months I showed my book to the farmer and his wife and told them my dream. They understood and offered to help me with the next stage of the journey. They had never been to the outback themselves, they said. ‘Will you write and tell us what it’s like?’ Their curiosity was sincere and I promised I would write. But I never did. With that leave-taking I was beginning to accumulate my grown-up store of small regrets. There would be occasions for larger ones later.

He was gentlemanly and had about him an interesting air of melancholy, which I thought at once had something to do with a solitariness in himself. He liked to drink Pedro Ximenez black sherry in front of the fire in the evening—or even during the afternoon—and he loved to read. He preferred a beret to a broad-brimmed hat and was inclined to stay indoors. He was the owner of a sixty-four-thousand-acre cattle station in the open ironbark forests of the Central Highlands of Queensland, his domain set deep among the wild granite escarpments of the Carnarvon Range, his pastures watered by the abundant stream of Coona Creek. He was my new boss. I was shy with his youthful wife and addressed her respectfully as Mrs Wells, while I dreamed of being her lover. He insisted I call him Reg. There was little to be done on the station just then, he said, and he gazed out from the front verandah at the silver grass of the plain and the dark ironbark forests beyond and the rim of fortress hills, as if he dreamed of being somewhere else. I could spend my days reading if I wished, he said, and smiled and left us.

I explored the wilderness on horseback, camping on my own for days high in the escarpments, where the dingoes were so wild they had no fear of me. At Christmas Reg said I should fight in the boxing tournament in Springsure to raise money for the Red Cross, and I reluctantly obeyed him. With more enthusiasm I rode in the bareback and saddle bronc events in the rodeo, as all the other young stockmen of the district did. When autumn came we mustered the half-wild cattle, then together drove the steers to the market, riding behind the mob at an easy walk, making our eight-mile stage along the stock route each day. And in the sandhill country I smelled the heady perfume of the wattle scrubs in bloom for the first time. Reg and I camped under the stars at night, lying in our swags beside our fire, I talking of my dreams and he of his disenchantments.

‘Here’s a book to suit you,’ he said one day, and handed me Sir Richard Burton’s two-volume Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah. Burton’s journey inspired me with a new resolve to persist in my own journey. I knew by then that the Central Highlands of Queensland was not the outback, but I loved it on Goathlands Station with Reg and his family, so stayed longer than I intended. He and I often sat by the fire till late on winter evenings, reading, sipping sherry and smoking. He had been delighted to discover that I could shoe horses and ride, but it was not station work that was his first love. Before anything else I learned from Reg Wells the pleasure of reading, and something of its art. After two years I told him, ‘It’s only that you’ve been so kind to me that I’ve stayed this long.’ He smiled; he had known he would lose me one day. He radioed his old friend, the manager of a vast cattle station in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria, a tract of country bigger than Wales.

I shook hands with Reg for the last time at the Springsure railway station, the family gathered to see me off. I was leaving behind me a scene that recalled to my mind my other, earlier farewell at Liverpool Street. This time I was more emotional. This time I had doubts. This time I wondered if what I was leaving behind might not be the very thing I had set out in search of. I left the Nolan book with Reg. It would sit nicely on his bookshelves among his accounts of travels.

Three days out of Springsure on slow trains took me to the far western cattle town of Cloncurry, a huddle of pubs and stores in those days, stained with the monochrome dust of the landscape. Not the famous red of the western deserts but a less distinct tone, somewhere between grey and brown. I picked up the mail coach, an old army blitz wagon loaded with drums of fuel and stores for the stations along the Leichhardt River, and rode it the three hundred miles north to Augustus Downs Station. There was no road, just wheel tracks through the savannah. Where these crossed the waterless bed of the river the mailman picked his own way among the rocks and treacherous sands.

Alex (left) with Reg Wells at Goathlands, near Springsure, Queensland

The manager of Augustus Downs drove his jeep at high speed across the plain for sixty miles. We did not need to stop to open gates. There were no fences. This was Nolan’s outback. The cattle camp was a tent fly and a smoking fire among the timber on the bank of the Leichhardt River. Under the fly a man was kneading dough on a board. When I greeted him he went on kneading his dough, mumbling to himself, ignoring me. Towards evening a group of about thirty horsemen rode into the camp, raising a cloud of dust. They formed a half-circle around me, not smiling nor offering a greeting. Two of them were white, the others were black, their hair and beards long and unkempt, their broad-brimmed hats and mounts covered with the same grey-brown dust that had clothed the buildings of the town. They were the legendary ringers of the great plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria, tribal Aborigines on their own country. We became friends. When I left the Gulf, I knew I would never belong in that country. Not as the Aboriginal stockmen belonged in it. No matter how welcome they made me, I would always be passing through on my way to somewhere else. And passing through on my way to somewhere else wasn’t the life I wanted.

Goathlands homestead

After I left the Gulf I did not know where to go. For some years I was lost. Nolan’s outback had not answered something for me but had presented me with my biggest question: how was I to make sense of my life? In a boarding house for single men in the southern city of Melbourne I began to write of my uncertainties. Writing seemed my only way forward out of the despair into which I had sunk. Reg Wells made a reader of me, but it was Nolan’s outback that made me a writer.

2010

EXCERPT FROM

Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

As the stockman squatted in the shade against the darkness of the beefwood, so still he would have been invisible to anyone passing, an afternoon cicada chorus began to scream suddenly, without warning, as if triggered by some mysterious alarm. The tide of noise rose and swept the hot and silent bush with oscillating waves of shrill intensity, passing back and forth and rising in layers upon itself until the sound reverberated inside the stockman’s skull. The invisible insects flooded the enthralled afternoon.

A few minutes later the cicadas ceased their signalling as abruptly as they had begun it. In the deep shadows of the beefwood the stockman shifted his weight. Fragments of high-spirited shouts and laughter began to reach him from the direction of the creek. He rose slowly to his feet and moved back in the direction of the cattle track. There was a look of unhappy resignation on his face as he made his way towards the swimming party, and just before going down the creek bank he glanced back once over his shoulder at the dry level country spread out behind him. A trace of intense emotion resonated within him, but it was rapidly being overlaid by anxieties about the fight tomorrow evening—there was a dumb regret in him that he had not, after all, found a way to avoid that.

1988

How to Kill Wild Horses