Author: Michael K Freundt

I'm an Australian writer living in Bali. I recently took the plunge to self-publish, and to blog which was liberating, to say the least. Writing has never been so immediate and so rewarding.

Ian McEwan’s The Children Act

British novelist, Ian McEwan
British novelist, Ian McEwan

Many decades ago a dear friend of mine gave me a little pile of novellas for my birthday. They were all by Ian McEwan. I had never heard of him but I devoured those little books hungrily. I liked the darkness, the little knot of evil in those novels. It’s become a trade mark of his and to this day I still think the first chapter of Enduring Love is the most thrilling opening to any novel I have ever read. I’ve read them all; well that’s not entirely true: I couldn’t read On Chesil Beach. I started it and almost got to the end of the first scene; in the hotel room, the honeymoon suite, with the two innocent newly-weds and the snickering staff bringing in their meal on a tray. I had such an overwhelming sense of foreboding and embarrassment for these two child-like people that I had to shut the book. I’ve never opened it again. That little dark nut at the heart of most of his work has faded over the years but he still has a talent for the unexpected except his use of the unexpected can sometimes be very subtle. I know a few readers who didn’t ‘get’ the twist that was behind the climax of his 1998 Booker Prize winning novel, Amsterdam.

After Atonement (2001) – his masterpiece, Saturday (2005) is the most representative of his latter work, and his latest, The Children Act, begins with a similar scene: a person alone at home contemplating their future, although Fiona in chapter one of The Children Act has just had the bombshell that will change her life, while Henry, in Saturday, has yet to meet it.

The Children Act

At the centre of The Children Act is a high court judge, her husband, and a case she has to decide: a case of life or death. A young underage man, three months before his 18th birthday, desperately needs a blood transfusion to save his life. He and his parents are Jehovah Witnesses, devout, and are refusing treatment. The hospital has taken the court action to allow them to treat the boy. The legislation, the Children Act of the title, is clear. The young man, Adam, is intelligent, articulate, and more than capable of understanding his situation. However just before this case is thrust upon her the judge, Fiona, nearing 60 and childless, is confronted by her husband who wants her permission for him to have an affair; he says he still loves her but his libido and masculinity want one last chance before they and he slide into an inevitable but comfortable twilight.

McEwan takes us through every detail of the hurried case, time is short, and Fiona decides to see the boy. The meeting is deftly handled, moving, real, and McEwan manages to keep the emotion from spilling into sentimentality, although a duet sung at a deathbed’s side is strewn with potential pitfalls. We are, however, along with all the parties in the case, made to wait for her decision from her high bench. There is a feeling of expectation and intrigue: what will she decide? It’s page-turning; but her decision is not the end of the story. Her decision has consequences that no-one could predict, and I won’t spoil it for you by revealing them.

Like all her decisions, separating conjoined twins, deciding which spouse gets the kids and/or the money, she listens to the arguments, does her research, decides, closes the book, and moves on immediately to the next case and another decision about the future of people’s lives. However the image of the dying Adam stays with her in both personal, and professional terms.

She is highly regarded by her peers but the means by which she makes decisions about other people are very different to the decisions she must make in her own life. How should she respond to her husband’s request? Is it reasonable? He’s being very open and honest with her. Professional decision-making has policies and precedents, but with personal decision-making you’re on your own. On impulse she demands he leave the apartment and she immediately changes the locks, which her legal mind tells her is NOT the thing to do.

These two strands of the personal and the professional are skilfully woven together around a third: music. Fiona is a very competent amateur pianist and every year she takes part is a concert among her legal fraternity and it’s as she is walking onto the stage, in the penultimate scene, her mind full of Mahler and Schubert, that news is unkindly whispered to her; news that in another circumstance may very well stop her in her tracks; but like every aspect of her life she has other responsibilities, and now, those responsibilities are to her fellow performers, her audience, herself, and especially to the composers she is interpreting. She gives an astounding performance but can’t bring herself to acknowledge the rousing applause: one set of responsibilities are fulfilled and extolled but another responsibility, one she thought she had executed, well and for the benefit of all, had just unravelled. It’s so like McEwan to defer a climactic revelation while the protagonist is intent on doing what is expected, and so like the character not to let a past failing interfere with her immediate duty.

The end is a soft, satisfying coda as she begins to tell the man lying next to her of her shame.

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Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and a safe 2015.
Merry Christmas and a safe 2015.

To you who love reading and writing I hope you have a happy Christmas with your family and friends and a safe and exciting 2015.
Up-coming blogs in 2015; posts on Alice Munro, Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Harrower, Christos Tsiolkas, and Veronica Streads It Around, the sequel to my dedut novel, Veronica Comes Undone. I hope to have it published on smashwords.com by the end of February 2015. Cheers!

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Introduction and Allegro

music

In the early stages of my mother’s relationship with my step-father, when she could get what she wanted – don’t think she was asking for diamonds, she wanted a good sized bathroom, a good sized laundry and a flushing toilet and those she got – she also got me a piano.

Unfortunately the means to teach me to play it were limited. There were two possibilities: I could go to the nuns or I could go to the Shefte College of Music; but being a good Lutheran family, going to the nuns was completely out of the question and therefore not a possibility at all, so the Shefte College of Music it had to be.

This turned out to be the wrong choice since the teachers at the Shefte College of Music were sloppy and extremely unmusical. They travelled up from the city to my small country town every Monday so I stayed with Auntie Ivy in town on Monday nights since the music lessons were after school and I would miss the school bus back to the farm. I liked staying with Aunty Ivy on Monday nights because my Latin teacher, Miss Linke, boarded with my Aunty Ivy and it was Miss Linke on whom I had an enormous crush.

But back to the music. The music teachers from the Shefte College of Music taught piano and piano-accordion. I actually wanted to learn to play the harp as another crush of mine at the time was on Harpo Marx. No-body had a harp but I had a piano so the piano it had to be.

We already had a piano-accordion player in the family. One of my step brothers learnt to play the piano-accordion from a local girl. He was so good at it that he married her. They used to play piano accordion duets in his room where my mother insisted they play with the door open. It was understood but never said that they might do things to each other that my mother disapproved of. This puzzled me because if the door was closed I couldn’t understand what they could possibly do to each other while both had piano-accordions strapped to their chests and all four hands energetically engaged in pushing and pulling, keying and buttoning piano-accordion arrangements of songs from South Pacific. If you haven’t heard a piano-accordion duet of “I’m Gunna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” then your musical upbringing is sadly lacking.

The teaching method of the Shefte College of Music was based on the belief that all young people were interested in pop songs. Therefore they taught their students to read music only in the treble clef. They completely ignored the bass clef but trained our left hand to vamp the guitar chords which were always printed in a little box above the treble bars. This worked well for songs like “Beautiful Beautiful Brown Eyes,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” and “The Impossible Dream.”  My earliest public performance was in the Glenelg Town Hall, in the big city, at the end-of-year concert where I was part of an ensemble of 10 pianos and 15 piano-accordions all bashing out “Lady of Spain” almost at the same time. The noise was … remarkable. It was my first taste of public acclaim. The audience applauded very loudly when it was finished.

When I asked could I learn the piano piece that accompanied a popular TV commercial about fabric conditioner they were a little surprised but they found the music which didn’t have guitar chords on it and that’s how I learnt to play a piece called “Fur Elise.” I only learnt the first page; it was a very short commercial.

My mother made me practice every day which I did after I came home from school. It was at this time of the day when everyone in the house was out of the house doing the evening chores. They all assured me that they could still hear me practicing and I was doing very well. I was particularly good, I thought, at “Sadie, The Cleaning Lady.”

During one Christmas holidays in another little country town I was baby-sitting my sister’s children. After the kids went to bed I decided to listen to some of my sister’s LPs. We didn’t have any music player on the farm. Music was more closely related to church, the organ, and Sundays. There was a pile of records in my sister’s very modern and very long HiFi unit, made of polished wood and glass with speakers at either end. It was a stereo system and you could stack on the central spike several records at a time and each one, and only one, would drop down after the previous record was finished. It was very mechanical and very modern and had a built in cocktail cabinet. Their record collection consisted of the James Last Band and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. That was it. But on this particular night I went right to the bottom of the pile and came across an LP that I had never seen before. It was red and written across the top were the words “The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.” The name of the motion picture was incorporated into the design; red on red, so it took me a few moments to find it. It was called “West Side Story.” I had no idea what it was so I played it. I watched as the black disc dropped down and the arm came across and lowered itself on the first track; and I listened. I was mesmerised. I had never heard anything like this before. It was so surprising. You could tell that there were a lot of musicians playing a lot of different instruments all at the same time. It sounded like there were hundreds of them; and no-one was vamping. There wasn’t even a piano. For the next hour or so, while I sipped Creme de Menthe from a very little glass I played the first song – it was called “Overture” – over and over again. It was the most exciting music I had ever heard.

Those same Christmas holidays were my last on the farm. In February I went to the big city, to boarding school, to do my matriculation year before going to university. I left home. On the first weekend I took my horde of pocket money, I’d been saving for months, and I went into the city on the bus, by myself, and found a music shop. I wanted to buy some orchestral music but I had no idea what to buy. I found a little music shop in a little lane-way that sold not only LPs but cassettes and cassette players. I bought a cassette player about the size of a small type-writer. Then I searched for music cassettes of orchestral music. I spent hours in that shop. I only had enough money for two cassettes. After much deliberation, based on nothing but the picture on the front, I bought a cassette with music by someone called Saint See-ens; a piano concerto it was called, Number 2. I searched for number 1 but couldn’t find it. It was clear to me that although the composer was a saint I was sure it wasn’t religious music. I knew I didn’t want religious music. I also bought a cassette of music by someone called De-vor-rak. It was called “From the New World” and I bought it because of the word “New”. I liked the fact that it was new.

My musical education, taste, and the pronunciation of European composers have all improved, wandered, and grown over the decades since. I played Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No 2 only yesterday which sparked my wish to write the above. It’s still one of my favourite concertos. However I cannot listen now to Dvořák’s From the New World, his Symphony No 9. I’m not sure why. It makes me cringe.

Little pieces like this have occurred to me lately, I suppose, because I have just finished reading a memoir. However the above was a little experiment on how to convey my naivety and wide-eyed wonderment at discovering orchestral music. Short and simple sentences, something that an eight year old might write, was my way of trying to achieve this; but it was also an experiment in meaning. I hope it was clear that when I wrote, “I was particularly good at “Sadie, The Cleaning Lady”” you understood that I meant the exact opposite and that despite my description of 10 pianos and 15 piano-accordions playing “Lady of Spain” you understood that it was probably the most hideous noise a pair of ears could endure. But, successful or not, I’m sure you’ll tell me.

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I was reading a memoir, and suddenly …

I don’t often read memoir, or biography, or autobiography. I have read those of, or about, Tennessee Williams, W Somerset Maugham, Jane Bowles, Maurice Ravel; heroes of mine at the time; but yesterday I was reading Nuala O’Faolain’s remarkable memoir Are You Somebody? and suddenly this popped into my head …

I put down the book and sat down at my desk.

For Mrs Paterson

My earliest proud attempt at writing, at completing something, has stuck in my mind. I have thought about it often.

We were asked to write an essay on any subject but I chose to write a short story: completely made up. It was 1969, that year at Immanuel College, my last hurdle before University, boarding school, the best year of my education, when the Americans stepped on the moon; the first thing I wrote for the wonderful and sensual Mrs Paterson.

It went something like this, not the story itself, but my recollection of it.

In an unnamed little country town, every Sunday morning, an old widower, leaves his low-verandered cottage, a cottage with a frown, and takes a little bunch of flowers, whatever he can find in his garden, to his wife’s grave at the far end of the town; at the other end of the single street. Along the way he passes his neighbours and fellow towns-people pottering in their gardens or sitting on their porches, people he hardly ever speaks to except on Sunday mornings. He chats absent-mindedly to old Mrs So-and-so; to Mr and Mrs This-an-that. These people speak fondly of his dead wife, which is something he expects them to do; they knew her and they know where he is going and so they talk about her. They mention the time when she…; or the day they saw her ….; or even the time she told them about …; that sort of thing. They never mention much about him because he was always there and would, of course, know exactly what they are talking about. Like most people they speak in unfinished sentences where new thoughts interrupt the flow, or old thoughts occur to them again. He nods his head in recognition and chuckles when they chuckle, shakes his head at the likeness of her, at an anecdote he doesn’t remember but makes out that he does. And he shuffles on past the next house, the next garden, admiring the zinnias (he hates zinnias), getting a response or sometimes not. These little stories remarked on by the people he meets are sometimes the same as the Sunday before, and sometimes they are not; but on this particular Sunday, on this particular walk with this particular combination of familiar stories and unfamiliar stories, some he believes and some he thinks are pure humbug; on this particular Sunday morning with the clouds and the wind making these particular shapes against the blue, he gets to the little rusty gate of the little church cemetery and it dawns on him. They all hate him. They all hate him, and they loved his wife. She was the good one, he is the fool; she was the one who put up with his cantankerousness, his petty complaints about them, his way of blaming her for things he thought she had done. They talked behind his back and still do, he realises. If he looks back down the street now; if he turns his old fading body around he would see them all standing on their porches, amongst their silly zinnias, looking at him, whispering to each other about him. And that’s what they do every Sunday. It was her they loved. But he doesn’t look back because he is not brave enough to do that, not now. He shuffles on to do what he came to do. He stands on the damp earth by his wife’s neat little grave; and as he takes out the flowers from the little jam jar in its little concrete hollow his heart gives a jump because he knows his realisation is true: these are not the flowers he put there last Sunday. Other people tend her grave; these are other flowers, better than his. His old legs give way and he sinks to his knees still clutching his pathetic little posy, a daisy, a thistle, a piece of fern. As he feels the cold tears running down his cheek and feels the damp oozing through his trousers, he begs his wife to forgive him, she who was the good one, she who was loved more; and how can he get up and walk back to his little cottage when he now knows the truth: she is loved, he is not. What is he going to do? How can he possibly go on?

I was very proud of my story; god knows where it came from. I sat in my seat as Mrs Paterson gave back the stories to her students. I sat wondering how I was going to deal with the praise that I was sure would follow. Someone is always mentioned as the best. What would I say? Mrs Paterson, speaking in generalities about the stories, about her student’s work, paced up and down the aisles between our wooden desks and then she put my story down in front of me. I hesitated to look at the top of the page where the mark was sure to be, savouring the moment. Then I looked. I saw the mark, in red ink, at the top of the page and my heart stopped. Sixteen out of twenty. Is that all? I was devastated. There must be some mistake. I read the first line, “On a Sunday morning, like every other Sunday morning…” Yes, it was my story. But my story was a work of genius from one so young. Didn’t she realise? But by then Peter Fitzner was standing up receiving the praise that I was sure would be mine. Peter bloody Fitzner. Didn’t she understand? That was it. I had decided. It was as simple as that: she just did not understand. Genius can be so overlooked, you know. It had happened before, I was sure.

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Bloody Poetry!

Even fonts can get in on the act.
Even fonts can get in on the act.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with poetry: I love mine but hate everybody else’s.
In the part of my brain where poetry lies there are only four (see below) rattling around like lost beach-balls, Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover, Robert Frost’s Out Out …, William Carlos Willimas’ To a poor old woman, and Les Murray’s An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow: the first because of the lines “ … and all her hair / In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around,/And strangled her, …”; the second because it’s about the poetics of a fatally amputated limb in a milling accident; the third because of the line “a solace of plums” and its punctuation: there is only one punctuation mark, a full stop, that happens to be in the middle of a line; and the last because of the image, “There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place.” I swore once never to read any Les Murray because he described prose as poetry to the edge of the page. I thought it trite, a lazy thing to say, absolutely untrue, and completely missing the point of the question, but then maybe even he resorts to triteness when he doesn’t know the answer. Anyway, a fellow writer, Katherine Thomson, told me I should read it; I did and it stayed.
What these four poems have in common is that they are all narrative poems. They are all remnants of a poetic tradition that was once lauded and common place but we don’t value narrative poems any more. Today poetry is praised for imagery, and the more personal the better. Spring seems still to be a popular subject.
I would never write a poem about spring. I might write a poem about a murder in spring. I could very well write a poem about amputations in autumn (“limbs falling like leaves” Ha!).
I took heart when I discovered Howard Stewart’s and James McAuley’s attempt, in 1943, to debunk ‘the modern’ with the invention of Ern Malley. They won the battle but lost the war. Even George Bernard Shaw got into the act and put an end to the jape by declaring that Stewart and McAuley, by abandoning their rigid poetic rules had ‘accidently’ written good poetry. Ern Malley was taught, up until the 1970’s in American colleges and universities and in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991 ed. John Tranter and Philip Mead) Malley’s entire oeuvre is included. I would like to see the Malley poems attributed to Stewart and McAuley; they were, after all, their creators.
The lesson from The Ern Malley Affair is that everybody can write poetry; everybody should and everybody does. The four poems mentioned above were written with an audience in mind: that’s probably why they have stuck with me. Modern poetry is, generally, not. Modern poetry is written with only the poet in mind: it’s poetry as therapy, which is as good a reason as any.
So, here’s a therapeutic poem with an audience in mind; it’s called, funnily enough, Poetry.

Poetry
Poetry poetry
What is it you are
A house made of cards
A heart in a jar

Poetry poetry
Get out of my hair
I’d rather play golf
Give birth to a chair

Poetry poetry
Leave me alone
There’s dishes to do
And people to phone

Poetry poetry
Get out of my sight
It’s not about you
I’ve novels to write

Poetry poetry
You’re a pain in the neck
A stacked deck of hopes
But wait just a sec

Poetry poetry
You’re dead as din Laden
Dead as a coffin
Dead as a rhyme

Porphyria’s Lover: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175584
To a poor old woman: http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/william_carlos_williams_2004_9.pdf
Out Out …: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238122
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow: http://www.lesmurray.org/pm_aor.htm

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Reading is like travelling

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I indulge in Google alerts. I have one email alert for Cólm Tóibín. Every time his name is mentioned, anywhere, I receive an email and a link to the article. In this way I have read every English language review of his latest book, Nora Webster. I had one for Virginia Woolf but all I got were picky reviews of Albee’s play so I deleted it; and I have a Google news alert for ‘literature’ (as well as Books and Writing).

Because of this I received recently in my ‘personalised Australian Edition of Google News’ an item called “What makes the Russian Literature of the 19th Century So Distinctive?” It came from a New York Times column called Bookends where two writers ‘take on questions about the world of books’. It was in this article that I encountered for the first time, Francine Prose. I had never heard of her. I hadn’t heard of the other writer either, Benjamin Moser, but it was the name ‘Francine Prose’ that caught my attention. It sounded pretentious. Is there a poet called ‘Phoebe Poetry’? I could google it and find out but instead I googled Francine Prose. That is how I came to know the book “Reading Like a Writer” which, since my blog is ‘writing about reading and writing’ I thought I should have so I downloaded it as an ebook; it took less than a minute and I didn’t have to leave my desk. The fact that it was billed as a ‘New York Times Bestseller’ may have also had something to do with it. When on a wet and warm Ubudian Friday afternoon I delved into it I came upon a chapter on Chekov and in particular her line “as my bus pulled out of New Rochelle, I began Chekhov’s “The Two Volodyas.” I immediately went to ebooks.adelaide.edu.au (click the link and you can go there too) where everything out of copyright – i.e., all the classics – is available for free, and read “The Two Volodyas” and so I was prepared for whatever she was going to relate about the writing of Chekhov and in particular this story. Ms Prose is, or was, also a creative writing teacher and the point of this chapter in her book was to explain that Chekhov undermines every creative writing rule she had confidently confided to her students. “Don’t listen to me,” she shouted, “read Chekhov”.

From a Google alert on my screen in Ubud, Bali, I travelled to a sleazy bus station in New Rochelle, New York, to a scatty young 19th century Russian bride in love with two men, but never at the same time, and back to you, my friends, with a message – although one of Chekhov’s lessons is that you don’t need one – that modern technology has never been so supportive of our creative and entertaining lives.

If you take nothing from this little rant take this: set up Google alerts for whatever tickles your fancy; armchair travelling has never been so easy, so informative, and so entertaining.
If you would like to know more about Google alerts you can email me at michaelkfreundt@gmail.com or ask Google.

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There was no reason for me.

I know how he feels.
I know how he feels.

“I took it for granted that like most of the billions of people who are born and die on this planet I was just an accident. There was no reason for me.”
Are You Somebody?
– Nuala O’Faolain.

I often find books on my shelves that I have never seen before. Where do they come from? They pile up, literally, and having lost an entire life’s library of books and music CDs when we moved overseas four years ago I am not as attached to them now as I once was. Occasionally I pick out some of these volumes that I know we will never read and swap them at a bookshop in my new hometown for ones that we might. I did this recently with five and came back with two: Barbara Klingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? The first I chose because a very good friend recommended it and the second because the author was Irish and my literary hero at the moment is that other quintessential Irish writer, and very much alive as O’Faolain is not, Colm Toibin.

This morning, a writing morning, has not begun well. An attack of mild stomach-ache, and the resulting consequences have not inspired any creative juices; until I read O’Faolain’s introduction to her memoir and the above quote jumped out at me.
I thought immediately of my mother.
I have a favorite photo of my late parents taken about the time I was born. They were at a party although they were by no means party-people. My father liked a drink but not insurance so when he died suddenly when I was six the family suffered greatly. The party may have been at Christmas time or New Year’s Eve; I was born in late September. You do the maths. This family joke has been bandied about all my life and I am quite willing to believe it is true. The combination of the word ‘accident’ and the phrase ‘no reason’ sent me scurrying to my laptop; it is after all a writing day and if I cannot make headway with my current project (Veronica II) I must write something.

This is it.

From my early adulthood, but, really, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always had the feeling that I wasn’t born by accident, but raised by accident. There didn’t seem to be a plan, a policy, of what to do with me. I wasn’t particularly upset by this; all kids, I think, just accept their life as their life. What could possibly be the alternative?

I was the last of four children and all my siblings were in their teens when I came along.

Parental decisions seemed to be made on the spot, depending how they felt at the time. When I received good marks, which was usual – I was the teacher’s pet kind of child – my mother’s reaction was usually stern and her parental guidance went along the lines of ‘be careful not to get too big for your boots’; ‘the higher you climb, the harder you fall.’ This was normal I thought. Years later I understood this fear of being noticed came from her German background and that both sides of my family did not have a nice time during the two world wars when Germany was the enemy. She would like report card phrases like, ‘fits in well’, ‘never a nuisance in class:’ don’t stand out and all will be well.

My mother remarried when I was nine. My step-father never spoke to me. Nobody thought to tell me what I was to call him so I didn’t speak to him either, which was easy; he was deaf. I had four very much older step brothers, the youngest two were still at home, working the farm. Then the transition from teens into adulthood (late 60s South Australian wheat belt) followed a predictable path. You left school and there was a party. You got your driver’s license and there was a party. You had all your teeth out and there was a party. You got engaged and there was a party. You got married and there was a really big party.

Dentures were considered necessary and modern. The four adults on the farm went to bed each night with their teeth in a Vegemite jar full of murky Steradent water. We were a ‘with it’ family. When I came home from school one day having been subjected to a dental examination, courtesy of the government, I told my mother I had to have 4 teeth removed and 16 fillings in order to save them. She thought this unnecessary and uneconomical. ‘Get them all out while you’re at it; I’ve got plenty of empty Vegemite jars in the cupboard’ was her thinking.

I was still at school and I was already breaking the party line.

During my high school years when my step-siblings had successfully followed the party line and left the farm my music lessons by lazy teachers, spurred on by a belief that young people wanted to play pop songs, were scheduled for a Monday night which meant staying with a relative in town as I would miss the school bus back to the farm. I wouldn’t understand until I was much older that for my parents, having the house to themselves, at least for one night a week, had its own rewards.

Childhood memories can be strong but usually rest on shaky ground. I would not be surprised if science one day unequivocally discovers that childhood memories are a complete adult fabrication. However these are my memories, my fabrications, and what I have just done, it seems, is delve, briefly, for the first time into memoir.

I have plans for an autobiographical work, covering much of the above material, but written as fiction. Fiction is a great way to tell the truth, but in order to make it clear you have to lie about it a little. Not the truth of plot but of behaviour, feelings, and the reasons for things.
It would be interesting to write the above ‘report card’ scene or the ‘dental’ scene from the mother’s point of view. That would explain a lot: close writing (free indirect discourse – see previous blogs about this) would do more to colour the inner life of the mother that simple reportage would not permit. Fiction allows such literary devices, memoir does not.

So, I passed, what I thought was going to be, a fruitless day, literarily speaking, by writing a piece of memoir; and inspired by a piece of reading. There’s a lesson in that.

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What I’ve learnt from writing a novel

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 This is my desk; and yes, that’s a peacock on the right, made out of sprite cans. I stare at it a lot.

What I’ve learnt from writing a novel
There is always a starting point but you don’t have to have an ending. The idea for Alex Miller’s Autumn Laing came from the sound of a voice in his head; a strong, determined, female voice. He had no idea where this would lead. The idea for Colm Toibin’s widow-novel, Nora Webster, came from the visit of a recent widow to his house and he married this idea to an autobiographical one; his father had died when he was twelve. In the first chapter of Nora Webster there is the seed that leads to his novel Brooklyn; he abandoned the widow idea for the immigrant idea, so strong it must have been. He didn’t come back to the widow idea for twelve years. However there has to be an idea, something, a seed, even though you may not know what it will grow into.

Next: try it. If the idea came from an overheard conversation then try to write the conversation; it might take you somewhere unexpected and stimulating. If it is a place, write about what makes the place so significant; how does the place feel? How does the place make your protagonist feel? No matter how you begin, at some point you must make it clear where you are, even if the location is nowhere; you know as a reader that you like to know where the narrator is, where the story is happening, or has happened.

There are many ways to tell a story, many points of view. Choose one. You could write it from the outside using the all-seeing, all-knowing god-like narrator; a narrator that knows everyone’s inner-most thoughts, actions, and desires, past, present, and future. (Anything by Jane Austen) You could write it from the outside using a narrator that ‘sits’ on the shoulder of one character so the story is told from that person’s point of view and no-one else’s. (My ebook Veronica Comes Undone) You could write it from the inside where the narrator is one of the characters in the story (F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby) There are many variations on these POVs. Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel, Barracuda, uses two narratives: one in the recent past written in the first person; and one in the further past, written in the third person. Sometimes you don’t need to decide, sometimes one particular way just feels right. Trust what feels right and so write what feels right.

Next: just start. If you only have time to write 700 words a day, so be it. By the end of the week you’ll have 4,900 words; by the end of the month you’ll have 19,600. I wrote Veronica Comes Undone in a year and a half of Mondays.

What you write first may not be chapter one. You’ll work it out later. Write first what interests you first. Every idea you have while you’re writing something may not be suitable for that project, but it might. If you’re not sure, put it in. This is only draft number one, decide later if it is appropriate or not. Wait until you step back and look at it from afar. You can cut and add whatever and whenever you like. You’re god here. You’re creating worlds, lives, actions, and consequences. You are all-powerful.

Just spew it out. Whether you write in longhand in a note book (like Toibin does)or tap it out onto a screen, just blurt it out. Even grammar, spelling and appropriateness can be amended later. Everything and anything can be amended later. Draft 1 can be an utter mess; draft 1 should be an utter mess. No-one sees it but you.

You don’t have to be a slave to narrative time. The journey from one plot point to the next can be instantaneous even if months of story time have passed. If an important plot point is that your protagonist starts a business, or renovates a house, you don’t need to go into great detail writing about choosing tiles. Boring! Cut to the opening, the moving in. Time is your slave.

Of all the tools available to a writer the best one for developing a character is dialogue. Some writers eschew dialogue. I don’t understand this. People, and even nationalities, have conversational idiosyncrasies. Americans says things like “You like pizza, right?” Australians usually use the negative, “You like pizza, don’t you?” Once at a writer’s festival I heard an American writer read from his latest work. His book was set in Rome and one of his main characters was Mexican. The novel, of course, was written in English. He spent many pages vividly describing these people but when they spoke, all the time and ink expended on these characters went for naught: they all sounded the same, like the writer. I don’t know how a Mexican living in Italy might speak English but the writer should’ve thought about this and worked it out. Dickens, especially Dickens, James, Winton, Rowling, Doyle, Tsiolkas, Joyce, and St Aubyn, all paint life-like characters with the way they talk, or think. We all make grammatical mistakes, or different pronunciations but different characters can make different grammatical mistakes; and when we talk we rarely speak in compete sentences, and we rarely speak the same incomplete sentences as the next person.

Don’t underestimate the contribution of the reader. Let the reader do some of the work. Cólm Tóibín in Nora Webster lets the reader do a lot of work, all the work! Characters and places are never described. See my review of Nora Webster About grief: good grief on my blog posted November 2 for more about reader theory. However a succinct descriptive passage can spark the reader to paint his own version of the character. Describing a man as “oval with buttons fit to burst” is all that may be needed. The reader knows he is chubby, greedy, selfish; and uses his own experiences of like-looking people to complete the characterisation that the writer has only, but skilfully, hinted at.

Allow cooking time. Step away from your project for a week or two and write something else; read a novel, re-design the garden, re-organise the second drawer. When you come back to it you will read it with a reader’s eyes and as you’re reading if you ‘jump’ or feel a ‘jolt’ (That doesn’t sound right; How does he know that? Wasn’t she wearing jeans a moment ago? He wouldn’t say that…) then there is something wrong. Don’t let it pass. Fix it.

Ah, the pay-offs. The most exciting time is when you are deep in a scene and the creative juices are flowing, ideas tumble over each other, you can’t tap, or write, fast enough; time is irrelevant, and all your senses are honed in on the scene that you are creating, manipulating, describing, being a part of. That’s such a buzz! But of course, that you know, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

The next good bit is draft 2; when you have all this stuff and you shape it, cut and add, link and re-arrange, mould into the story that only months before was just an idea you had as you sat on the bus on the way home from work.

However the most liberating, the most powerful, and the most stimulating change in the writer’s landscape in recent years is the ability to self-publish digitally. I could paper walls with the number of rejection slips I’ve received over the years from agents and publishers, had I kept them; and the most usual reason for abandoning a work is the feeling of ‘why bother?’ The agent/publisher wall is too high, too thick, too impenetrable, but with digital publishing and the liberation it gives you there comes more responsibility. To self-publish digitally you must make sure the text is ready, edited, corrected, error-free, ‘jolt’ free and something you are proud of. You’re not only the writer, you’re the editor, mentor, agent, publisher, and marketer; and the last in that list is the most time-consuming and, at times, the most frustrating. But all this hard work is worth it when you get your first sale; and this happened to me within 30 minutes of pressing ‘publish’ on August 24th. (See my blog-post Veronica Comes Undone. How did this happen dated August 29). Now that’s the best buzz of all. Access to readers is now at our fingertips and although book-sellers are chiming about the survival of the paper-book and the plateauing of ebook sales, digital self-publishing is a reality no matter what portion of the market it’s claiming. It’s there; use it.

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Veronicability II: a teaser, Undressing Mr Pyne

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For those of you who have read Veronica Comes Undone, and for those who haven’t, here is a little teaser from the sequel, Veronica Spreads it Around.

Note: Any resemblance to a politician alive or dead is purely coincidental.

Undressing Mr Pyne.
Among Veronica’s clients, mainly female, Veronica had one male client of many years, Mr Pyne. His problem was simple, he could not be physically touched, but its legacy was complex and debilitating. He lived alone, he worked alone, online; he had no friends, no family, well none that Veronica knew about, and he rarely went out of his small apartment. After many years of regular sessions, all of which were about finding ways of touching him, Veronica focused diligently on making it seem that she was doing something completely different: not touching him. On this day a hurdle was about to be jumped, or so Veronica hoped. She understood that it all had to do with his mother, who, although she had died three years ago, had a powerful hold over him; a hold Veronica was hoping to break.
She let herself into her small city bedsit, her office, dumped her bag on the bed, and logged on to her computer. She kicked off her shoes, took off her jacket, t-shirt and jeans and laid them on the bed. She went into the bathroom and removed what little make-up she had on. She washed and dried her face and applied a very thin layer of face powder giving her face a matt mask-like look, pale and wan. She checked her computer schedule, times, address, and further appointments for the week. She was pleased there were no surprises. From the small closet she chose a bluish plaid skirt, well below the knee, and a white long-sleeved blouse with a high lace buttoned-up collar which, for the moment, she left undone. The skirt was tight and for a brief moment she thought about a vanilla slice. She slicked back her hair and pinned it tight to the back of her head. From one of the antique wooden wig stands on the top shelf she chose a short mouse-coloured wig, boyish and unkempt. She put this on, tugged and pulled it into place. Without stockings or socks she put on a pair of brown lace-up walking shoes. She inspected herself in a full-length mirror, buttoned up her lace collar, and considered herself ready. From the bottom of the closet she took out a small, ready packed, suitcase, looked at herself one last time and left the apartment.
Two hours later she parked her car outside a small block of flats all well hidden behind a wall of neglected greenery on a quiet street in an obscure suburb called Pemulwuy. Mr Pyne’s flat was upstairs at the back, at the far end of the common balcony.
She sat in the car and rehearsed her voice. “It’s Susan, Mr Pyne. It’s awful outside. You’re lucky to be home.” Her voice was high, clipped, and expressionless. “It’s Susan, Mr Pyne. It’s awful outside. You’re lucky to be home. It’s Susan, Mr Pyne. It’s awful outside. You’re lucky to be home.”
Moments later, with the suitcase at her feet, she knocked quietly on the door, “It’s Susan, Mr Pyne,” she said. “It’s awful outside. You’re lucky to be home.” She waited. She always had to wait because Mr Pyne took a long time to gather the courage needed to open the door even to someone he knew and was expecting. He also had a series of manoeuvres to perform, one tour of the room, three full-circled pirouettes, and one wide-armed open -palmed stretch: an appeal to the heavens where he knew his mother was. It was only then could he feel able to open his front door.
“Hello, Mr Pyne. It’s nice to see you again,” she says passing him as if nothing is unusual. Mr Pyne is wearing a red and blue turban, a long silk kaftan in bright blue and gold over dark blue Turkish pants and a stick-on moustache. He lets her pass, furtively checks the common balcony for prying eyes, closes the door firmly and reattaches three chain latches.
Mr Pyne’s apartment is small but incredibly neat. Veronica, Susan, had put the little suitcase on a small table and is now undoing the multiple zips as Mr Pyne sheds his middle eastern disguise and emerges in a white shirt, school tie, duff-grey school shorts, long white socks and no shoes.
“Well, that was close. Did you see all the slightly open doors along the balcony? Bloody cheek! They won’t let up you know.”
“Mr Pyne what could they possibly want with you and what could you possibly want with them?”
“Exactly.”
She opens the suitcase and takes a step towards him. He takes a step back. Susan ignores this. “Now, Mr Pyne, are you ready for your fitting?”
“No. Absolutely not.” He stands rigidly with his eyes closed and fists clenched.
“Oh! OK, you’re the boss.” Susan returns to her suitcase, closes the lid and multiple zips, picks up the suitcase and heads for the door.
“OK, OK, OK!”
“Oh! Alright then.” Susan returns to the little table, puts the suitcase on it, opens all the zips, and then the lid. “Now, Mr Pyne, are you ready for your fitting?”
“…yes,” he says in a voice that sounds like it’s coming from somewhere a long way away.
“Good,” says Susan. “Now first let’s get you out of your day clothes.” Susan starts undoing the buttons on his shirt, being very careful not to touch his flesh. Mr Pyne is rigid and holding his breath. “Breathing out, two three four, breathing in two three four.” Susan stops and looks.”My Pyne?”
“mm.” The noise is high and squeaky like air escaping a balloon.
“Breathing out two three four, breathing in two three four. Breathing out two three four, breathing in two three …”
Mr Pyne, now with a red face, explodes the air out of his body, “A-a-a-h! Twothreefour!”
“Very good, Mr Pyne. Breathing in two three four, breathing out two three four,” continues Susan casually undoing all his shirt buttons as Mr Pyne accustoms himself to, and imitates Susan’s breathing rhythm.
“Breathing in two three four, breathing out two three four,” repeats Mr Pyne.
Susan peels the shirt off him revealing a white singlet underneath, folds it neatly, and lays it on the sofa. With two fingers of each hand she takes hold carefully of a little fold of singlet at Mr Pyne’s waist and continues her chant, “Breathing in two three four, arms up two three four,” and Mr Pyne obeys like a good little boy and Susan whips the singlet over his head and lays it neatly next to his shirt.
“And now Mr Pyne .. Oh, did I tell you that in just a little while I’m going to touch you? Just a little bit…. you’re going to have to help me a bit here.” Susan puts her hands almost on his pale chest. “Open your eyes. Open! Open!” He opens his eyes and she slowly takes her hands away.
Mr Pyne says in panic and dismay, “She said she wouldn’t put up with another hand upon me!”
“But I just did.”
“What?” He is stunned.
“I just touched you. You saw.”
“What?”
“Like I did before. Like all those times before.”
“But I didn’t feel anything.”
“See how unimportant it is.”
“Does she know?” he asks in a hushed whisper.
“No. Nothing’s happened; so no. See.” And Susan holds up her unfettered palms so Mr Pyne can see them. “And see? This is now the second time today,” she says as she lays her hands gently on his cool chest.
Mr Pyne gasps and holds his breath.
“So now we can get to work.” And so with efficient speed and while chatting about nothing in particular, Susan unbuttons his shorts and takes them off, “Now this leg, now this leg,” and she removes his long white socks, “Now this leg, now this leg,” with Mr Pyne’s total co-operation. He seems to be amazed that the roof has not caved in and that the walls are still standing. He stands there in his white baggy briefs. Susan hasn’t gone past this stage before but without hesitation she thumbs his briefs on each of his hips and whips them down, “This leg, now this leg,” and Mr Pyne stands there naked; and Susan says “Oh the traffic today! You’re really very lucky to work from home. I sometimes wish I could do that as I said to my gardener, Neville, just the other day how nice it would be to work from home; and now Mr Pyne I’ve got some wonderful new clothes for you. Look at these,” and she holds up a pair of stylish white and blue Aussie Bum briefs. “So let’s see how they fit. This leg now this leg,” and she hoists them up to his knees. “Now look, Mr Pyne, look here. These have a little pouch and the salesman told me that they are very comfortable, see? So let’s just put your testicles in here,” and she gently lifts his testicles and slips the edge of the pouch under them, “Now how does that feel, OK? Now do you dress to the left or the right?” she says with his penis in her hand, “Like this?” as she tries the right.
“No.”
“Oh, so to the left then,” and she replaces it, “or do you want it down,” and she places it again.
“I can’t believe nothing’s happening.”
“Is that OK?”
“No.”
“Then back to the left then.”
“Oh no! Something’s happening!” and he looks down at his penis in Susan’s hand as they both can see it growing slowly and gaining momentum and weight; she can feel it, like something waking up. My Pyne’s eyes grow in direct proportion to his penis; Susan looks up at him looking down and she looks just as amazed as he is at what is happening, and when his eyes are as big as big can be his pelvis starts rocking. This is virgin territory for Susan but she goes along with it, increasing her grip. His lack of violence or revulsion she takes as encouragement. Mr Pyne seems unaware of what his body is doing and why it is doing this; it’s as if he has never seen it do this before; as if some foreign force is at play.
She places one hand on his buttock to give her leverage and holds his penis firmly as his body moves it in and out along her fist. His face and body begin to react as if something more is about to happen; something bigger but unknown, something he is sure is not far away. Susan mimics his look of astonishment and expectation; she wants him to believe that she is with him in this: she’s his corroborator here, his testifier is this astonishing event.
Susan knows, of course, what is coming and has to do something. A mess on the rug will send him into apoplexy and may undo what this experience may finally achieve; but Mr Pyne unknowingly comes to her aide. As he feels whatever-it-is-that-is-going-to-happen getting closer, his body tenses, his arms spread wide and his head slowly falls back as he faces heaven again, all agog. Susan hands are full but she must get the discarded singlet lying on the sofa. She judges his rhythmic thrusts and as skilfully as a timpani player lets go of his buttock, grabs the singlet from behind, lets it fall at his feet, and grabs his arse again. Too close! If this is his first orgasm, which it just might be, the singlet may be too close. She times her grab again and gets the singlet where she wants it.
By now his body is rigid with his hips thrusting widely, arms and eyes wide in some sweet agony he does not understand. He gasps! He shudders! Susan doesn’t release either hand but keeps an eye on him. He gasps again. Shudders again and she almost immediately feels his body relaxing. She thinks he is going to fall forward as his knees give way, but she manages to angle him as he gives out a piercing cry of wonder and release, and she lets him fall backwards into an armchair. She grabs at the soiled singlet, so superbly placed, rolls it, and shoves it under the sofa. He lays there panting, staring at nothing. What must he be thinking Susan wonders.
He slowly pulls his head forward and looks around the room, looking at everything just as it was before; the furniture, the doilies on the back of the sofa, the coloured glasses in the cabinet, the boomerangs on the wall, all the same. Susan sits on the sofa, hands in her lap gently smiling at him. He is incredulous, wide-eyed and says quietly as if he only has the energy for a whisper, “And nothing happened. It seems impossible, but nothing happened.”
Susan chats away as if what has just happened is the most natural thing in the world. She helps him into his new clothes, a pair of cotton, cream-coloured trousers, tan deck shoes, and a dark blue polo shirt. He seems distracted, uneasy but calm.
Once she has washed her hands, packed her bag and neatly folded all his discarded clothes she says holding out her bag to him, “You can carry this to the car for me.” This little walk to the car has only been a recent addition to the routine but today, now, he offers no hesitation, no reluctance. He takes the proffered bag and follows her out of the flat and along the balcony past several closed doors. She stops at the stairs, turns and waits for him, noticing that he has left his front door open. She decides to say nothing. They walk silently down the stairs and through the garden to her car on the street. She opens the back door of her car, takes the bag from him, says “Thank you Mr Pyne,” puts it on the back seat, closes the door and stands and smiles at him.
He gazes around the incredibly normal suburban street and then looks at her. He seems incredibly sad. “Shall I expect a message from you, Mr Pyne?”
“Yes, Susan,” and then, “Ah!” He suddenly looks behind him as if he has just heard something fearful. A dove has just landed on the garden fence. It sits there coo-ing and doesn’t fly away. “Is everything like this?” he asks, looking around and back to the dove, and then back at her, “so, so … unconcerned?”
“It’s just the same as before.”
“No, look again. Look all around you again.”
Susan does as she is asked and says, “No, just the same. Normal.”
“Normal?”
“Yes. Normal, common, same as before, the everyday. ”
“The every day,” he repeats slowly; and then, “What do you think happened?”
“I brought you your new set of clothes for you to try, and you look very smart; very smart indeed.”
“Of course. Thank you Susan.” They shake hands. His is soft, warm, but before he lets go of hers he squeezes it gently. She watches him walk back through the overgrown garden until he disappears. She gets into her car and drives away.
Had she waited a little longer she would’ve realised that when he entered his flat he left his front door wide open.

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The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt

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David Leavitt (b. 1961) is an American writer, currently part of the Creative Writing faculty of the University of Florida. He first came to my attention with his second novel The Lost Language of Cranes (1986) which was filmed in 1991 and is basically a ‘coming out’ story. Sexuality often looms large in his work which hit a peak with While English Sleeps(1993). However the English poet, Stephen Spender (Barry Humphries’ father-in-law) sued him for copyright infringement alleging that Leavitt used material from Spender’s memoir, World Within World; and in particular, Spender’s relationship with Jimmy Younger, the character based on an early lover of Spender, as the pivotal relationship in Leavitt’s book. The case was settled out of court; the publishers, Penguin-Vintage, withdrew the book, and it was revised and re-issued in 1995.

Leavitt’s latest, The Two Hotel Francforts (or should it be The Two Hotels Francfort?) published last year is nowhere near his best.

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My main objection is Leavitt’s use of the first person; well, to be more precise, his wasteful use of the first person. Choosing the right point of view (see my blog post “Close Writing” on October 12 2014 for more about point of view) for your story is a powerful novelistic tool and once you choose one (or many) it seems sensible to use it (or them) to the fullest.

Let me explain.

The Two Hotel Francforts is set in the neutral port of Lisbon in the summer of 1940 where many exiles, refugees, and shady characters have gathered, fearing war in Europe, and hoping for a safe passage to America. Here we find two couples: Julia and Pete Winter, sedate and middle-class; and Edward and Iris Freleng, elegant, bohemian, and wealthy. Each couple is staying in a hotel called the Hotel Francfort; yes, there are two.

The story is told in the first person with the sedate and conservative Pete Winter as the narrator and all that he describes for us, the readers, is the action, what he sees. Here is an example of what I mean.

“Edward!” I called.

A few seconds later another wave hurled him back onto the sand. “That was glorious!” he said, pushing his hair back. “Come on!”

I didn’t hesitate. I pulled off my clothes as he had, without ceremony. I took off my glasses. The patch of darkness towards which I swam might have been a rock or a sea monster. All I had to navigate by was Edward’s voice. “Warmer,” he said. “Colder … Warmer…” Suddenly we collided.

Behind us a wave was building. I tried to draw away, but Edward wouldn’t let me go. “The thing to do is to go under it,” he said. “Hold on to me.”

Then he pulled me down until we were sitting on the sandy bottom. The wave broke over us. I felt it as the faintest trembling.

We rose again. I was laughing. He took my head in his hands, and now he did kiss me. Another wave broke, pulling us apart from each other, sending us tumbling.

And, yes, that is when their love affair begins.

It’s like watching a movie, which is great if it’s a movie you’re watching; but this is prose, and prose allows you to do so much more. A first person narrative puts you inside the narrator’s head, with all the thoughts, memories, hopes, desires, fears, and expectations; to report on simply what he sees, and not on what he feels, thinks, remembers and wants, seems to me a waste of the first person.

There is metaphor and skill, “The patch of darkness towards which I swam might have been a rock or a sea monster … I felt it as the faintest trembling” but  it’s like picking up a multi-coloured palette to paint a portrait and only using one colour; or composing a symphony and only using one chord. It can be done and as an exercise it might be worthwhile for the creator, but the audience is let down; I know I was.

There is no internal life in this story, and, consequently, we know nothing of the internal life of the characters. It is the opposite of what makes Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster shine (see my post dated November 2); where the external plot is minimal, all the action, drama, and interest is internal.

Leavitt is an experienced and accomplished writer but his novelistic choices in the composition of The Two Hotel Francforts just don’t do justice to the material.

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