The Feel of Steel Read online

  I put my question to an internationally known writer with recent experience of a broken heart.

  ‘Oh,’ he said at once, ‘words are absolutely the last things you need. I found them totally useless. All I could do was lie on the couch and listen to Schubert. I played that two-cello quintet ten times, one morning. Another way of looking at it, though,’ he went on, ‘is that if you do read when you’re in that state, you’ve probably got a great critical sense. A very sharp eye for anything that’s even the faintest bit phoney. There’d be some things in Tolstoy you wouldn’t be able to stand. Almost all of Dostoyevsky. But you might find Turgenev strangely attractive.’

  ‘Would Chekhov survive?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Oh yes, I think so,’ he said.

  I fumbled for my notebook to write all this down. His face froze in alarm, but then it thawed and he laughed.

  ‘Maybe it’s the age we’re at,’ he said. ‘There’s an essay of George Steiner’s which starts with the line, “Old men do not read novels.” ’

  Perhaps this is what’s behind V.S. Naipaul’s recent contention that the novel has had it – that non-fiction is where the energy is now. People have been saying for years, of course, that the novel is dead. When I was trying to write my first book, more than twenty years ago, I told a Trotskyist friend what I was up to and he said, ‘But Helen – the novel’s finished, as a form. Don’t you know that?’ I was furious. I slogged on with it just to spite him. And here I am twenty-two years later discouraging and insulting people in exactly the same way. The difference is, I think, that at least now there exists a developed awareness of something honourable to offer in its place – I mean the dangerous and exciting breakdown of the old boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, and the ethical and technical problems that are exploding out of the resulting gap.

  Years ago Michael Leunig confided in me that he had stopped liking going to Sydney. He had a funny look on his face as he said this. A small silence fell. Then he added feebly, ‘I hope it’s a passing phase.’ That’s how I feel about a lot of what I’m saying here. (I’m also aware that it probably sounds like sour grapes. Writing is so risky. Every time I write a book I lose a husband.) Last week I was mooching round a bookshop up in Bondi Junction, opening novels at random. I picked up Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and flipped it open. My eye fell on this: ‘In the carriage sat a discontented woman in a green mantle.’ I burst out laughing, and for the thousandth time my hostility to third-person narrative went up in smoke.

  When the chips are down, poetry still works. Maybe this is because I’m not a poet and thus don’t have to envy the person who wrote what I’m reading. When my third marriage broke up, though, and shortly after the phase where all I could do was sit at the dining room table ripping photos out of Who Weekly and making silly postcards, I wrote a poem myself. Not some ghastly quivering lyric but a long ferocious narrative satire in strict metre and rhyme. The struggle with form became an obsession the likes of which I have never experienced, before or since. Better than romantic love. I hardly slept for fits of maniacal laughter. Every time I turned over in the night a ridiculous rhyme would click into place and I’d have to sit up and turn on the light and write it down. Now I know why all poets are insane.

  But in my ignorance I made the mistake of starting out in tetrameters – four-foot lines. After ten pages of this I read it over and realised it was doggerel, so regular in its beat that it was completely rigid. I was overcome with gloom, pointlessness and failure. Then I thought of Alexander Pope.

  In Honours English at Melbourne University in the sixties we were supposed to read Pope. I was a gushy adolescent then and found all that eighteenth-century stuff a tremendous bore – cold and tedious and caked with classical references I didn’t understand. (I still don’t understand them but at least now I have the nous to read the footnotes). Then in the eighties, when I was a television critic for three weeks, I used to watch a show called Six Centuries of British Verse. The night they read the opening lines of ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ I was electrified.

  Shut, shut the door, good John! (fatigued, I said),

  Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead.

  The Dog Star rages! nay, ’tis past a doubt

  All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:

  Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,

  They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

  So when I bogged down poetically, I rushed to the shelf for my Norton’s anthology. My God, Pope is the goods. Those silken pentameters! They can sound as smooth and as real as somebody talking, but with that light starch of formality – I nearly died of admiration and envy. I looked at my clunking lawn-mower of a poem and saw I had to start all over again. Each line needed five beats, not a measly four. Four were closed-off and nailed down, like what had happened inside me. But five, the way Pope handled them, were free and flexible, flowing and flowing onwards, always opening out, springing surprises, forever under control, but with a light and brilliant touch.

  I spent the summer slaving over my so-called poem. In the end I abandoned it, with relief. It’s still crap, and I’ll never even show it to anyone, let alone try to publish it – but I came out of the attempt filled with the deepest respect for poets. They’re crazy and mean, always squabbling and forming cliques and putting shit on each other, but what they’re doing when they’re working is radiantly worth the trouble.

  Back in the sixties at Melbourne University I encountered plenty of poems which I was too young to understand. Now I’m old enough to know what William Butler Yeats, in a poem called ‘Friends’, is talking about. He’s a man remembering three women who shaped his life; but anyone, male or female, who’s had a life at all will be grateful, I think, that someone has managed to get into words this complex night-haunting, this sudden flood of gratitude, in thirty very short lines.

  Now must I these three praise –

  Three women that have wrought

  What joy is in my days:

  One because no thought,

  Nor those unpassing cares,

  No, not in these fifteen

  Many-times-troubled years,

  Could ever come between

  Mind and delighted mind;

  And one because her hand

  Had strength that could unbind

  What none can understand,

  What none can have and thrive,

  Youth’s dreamy load, till she

  So changed me that I live

  Labouring in ecstasy.

  And what of her that took

  All till my youth was gone

  With scarce a pitying look?

  How could I praise that one?

  When day begins to break

  I count my good and bad,

  Being wakeful for her sake,

  Remembering what she had,

  What eagle look still shows,

  While up from my heart’s root

  So great a sweetness flows

  I shake from head to foot.

  Tower Diary

  Bellevue Hill. A sunny flat five floors up, in a building that looks eastward from the crest of a hill. Another marriage wrecked. Three times I’ve failed.

  It’s very still. Voices, faint and far off. Someone’s hammering, someone’s using a saw. Someone plants his foot and an engine surges. The sea from my bedroom window, miles over there beyond Bondi, is a blue-grey line, ruled with authority. Leaves, way below me, move gently. Two white butterflies flit by, as fine and as tiny as scraps of tissue paper, but driven just the same to pair, copulate and die.

  Whole days pass without sight or sound of another human. My voice gets rusty. I never want to go anywhere, but occasionally I force myself – and when I do, I soon find myself obsessively thinking about my new mattress. White sheets and pillow cases and doona cloud my mind. A soft, weak, sinking tiredness overwhelms me. I go home and lie on the bed, whether it’s night or day, and fall asleep. I dream great twisted sagas of abandonment,
jealousy, savage revenge. I wake from them dully. I eat a small thing. I’m like a razor blade: turn it sideways and it disappears.

  Disappointment in my famous view. I look at it, expecting my spirits to rise, but they stay low, and the prospect is empty of meaning. Sometimes, through the windows smeared by salt from the sea wind, it even looks . . . ugly. Ungiving. Unforgiving. No use to me at all. It’s a drain on me – one more thing at which I fail.

  I take a bus and a train to Global Gossip in Kings Cross to pick up my email. Macleay Street is swarming with people whose suffering is unconcealed. People who are scarred and scabby, ugly, mad, bleeding, desperate, and they can’t hide it. They don’t even try.

  But I like keeping a diary. For the quiet pleasure of it. A few words each day. No longer a driven, raging, blow-by-blow account of betrayal.

  A quiet, soft, grey morning. Slender lines of streetlamps wander up the valley slopes to Dover Heights. When they flick on in the evening, or when their frail light still shows at sunrise, they seem an image of gentle order and civic care.

  In the city I pick up my new multifocal glasses. I put them on and walk into the surging mass of Friday lunchtime on George Street. The shock of sharp focus: pores of skin, hair texture, lines, and expressions – naked emotion and experience on every face. The faces drive themselves through the air, urgently going somewhere, carrying their wounded, anxious psyches on the surface with which they most intimately greet the world. Marks of weakness, marks of woe – but also of effort, purpose, even hope. How dull my vision had grown, without my realising it.

  All day I cry at the slightest thing – a person who bumps me in the street, a cloudy sky, an empty letterbox. But in the evening I go with Ann and Angelo to the Rocks to hear a Cretan band – three stiff-faced boys in black-bobbled head scarves. Two lutes at first, the playing a little tentative, then Platyrrahos lays down his lute, picks up the lyra and draws his bow across the strings. A sound almost human soars out of the little instrument – a cry of pain and beauty. The young man’s singing voice warms, strengthens, gains a harsh power. And then half a dozen young hipsters jump to their feet and dance – unsmiling boys, splendid girls with profiles off coins. One man, in a black T-shirt and black jeans, has huge, gym-muscled, tattooed arms. He trips and leaps, master of the complicated steppings. The line moves smoothly, pauses for its complex footwork, then surges on again, always rippling and flowing. The leader of the dance leaps and bounds, slaps ankle and thigh, twists his torso one way and his legs the other – an explosion of life – then drops to a standstill, lets go the person next in line who’s been supporting his gyrations, and strolls away, examining his fingernails, to take a modest place further down the row.

  ‘Yes,’ says A.G. later, ‘but I’ve seen women doing the supporting. You see them –’ (she mimics a small person, teeth gritted, eyes squinting, shoulders bent sideways under a weight) ‘– while the bloke –’ (mimes a carefree, vain, casual frolicking and leaping). ‘It’s an image of the whole man/woman thing, in Greece.’

  Not only in Greece.

  I am invisible, in this apartment building. I enter through the front door. Coming out across the carpeted, panelled lobby are three young women, dressed for the office in heels, tight skirts and little sleeveless tops. My neighbours! I want to be greeted and to greet. The first two pass me with heads down, expressionless. The third makes as if to do the same but I force the issue. I say in a quiet, firm tone, ‘Good morning.’ ‘Good morning,’ she replies mechanically, without even glancing up. Her toneless voice. The duty she must feel – all the people she will have to greet when she gets to work – how laborious it must seem to her, older people wanting something from her, demanding she acknowledge their presence, their existence.

  A warm day. I walk to Bondi Junction to bank my royalty cheque and to pick up some photos. Then I take the escalator down to David Jones’ furniture department, arranged in a series of tranquil, dimly lit domestic spaces. On the most luxurious sofa I open the folder of photos, which have lain undeveloped in the camera for over six months. His sadness, and mine: haggard, exhausted, unable to smile, looking into the lens with worn-out faces and desolate eyes. I sit there quietly, and I carefully look at the pictures. Time seems to pass me very quietly and carefully, I don’t know how long; and it occurs to me that here in the furniture department of David Jones I am quietly and carefully mourning the end of our marriage.

  Curtains of rain move across the valley. A rainbow flares, dropping one foot into a clump of young eucalypts in the next-door garden. The wind dashing through the gum-trees makes their wet leaves sparkle wildly. The beauty of it makes me gasp. More tears pour out. A bottomless reservoir of tears. I’ll never be able to cry them all.

  Martin at Braidwood has been thrown by his horse. I take the train to visit him in Wollongong Hospital. His pain and fatigue: last night a man died in the ward; others groan and snore. His smashed leg sprouts metal spikes. He flexes his foot and a bright rill of blood oozes from one of the spike-holes. Clumsily he tries to stroke the swollen, punctured surface of his foot and ankle: it relieves the pain, he says. I offer to do it for him and he lets me. I keep on stroking for a long time. People who live alone forget what touch is.

  Bright morning. A very early walk. A fistful of flowers snatched from the edges and overhangs of neighbouring gardens. The houses are still closed up and sleeping.

  Reading Ibsen, A Doll’s House. The husband’s question, when he realises at last that his wife is serious about leaving him: ‘Can you tell me how I lost your love?’ Seeing the play again last winter, I cried at that question, its sudden weary humility. It would make a good line in a song.

  Down on the golf course, this dry morning, the hoses suddenly come on. Bridal veils blossom in the long halls of sunlight.

  In Dymock’s I pick up a book called Get Over It! and skim it with sickened recognition. My state is fundamentally no different from that of a girl of twenty. Shame, rage, sorrow. The longing to have the last word.

  An expensive couple in a Bondi cafe. She’s in her twenties, glossy, slim, grittily determined. He’s pushing sixty and his grey hair is receding, but money is oozing from his pores and she is soaking it up – on her terms. He stares blankly out to sea while she bores on in a mechanical tone, handing him an ultimatum: ‘You’re not the problem. I’m the problem. They all love you. They don’t want me to come. I’d rather be alone than get into trouble with people who are so stupid. If you don’t understand me, I’ll find someone who does. It might be a man – it doesn’t matter. Do you understand me?’

  There’s a wife in this story and I’m on her side.

  In a review of a novel about the current situation in Russia: ‘Far worse than not being able to trust anyone is not knowing where to place your mistrust . . . Nothing offers any purchase or guidance . . . The paranoia stretches back in time as well as forwards: everything you knew about the past is probably disastrously mistaken or fabricated, but what you are replacing it with is probably an invention.’

  ‘I protest I never was more surprized than when I awoke and beheld the light of dawn.’ (W.M. Thackeray)

  Before sunrise the low scoop of land between here and Dover Heights still holds a fine moisture for which the word mist would be too brutal. Out to sea a tiny point of pink appears on a band of grey cloud. I glance away for a second, then back, and boom! the flushed rim has become a blinding orange spot. It frees its shoulders, its muscled arms. Up it comes into the world again.

  Life goes on.

  Two men at the bus stop, Bondi Junction, politely ask me how to get to Bondi Beach. Smallish, tough men in jeans and runners, with mullets and the reddish tan of outdoor workers. Their eyes are bright and wary.

  ‘And how much is a ticket?’ asks the older one. ‘’Bout a dollar, or . . . ?’

  I advise. They back into the pub doorway to wait, trying to conceal their eagerness. Westies? Country blokes? Suddenly I think, They’ve been in gaol. Some low-security country joint
. The 380 is packed. We stand shoulder to shoulder, gripping the vertical chrome rails. The bus charges off down Bondi Road. As it swings, the men swing with it, looking out, always looking out, with a bright, shy curiosity. When I get off at the post office, they say goodbye to me. All day I keep thinking about them, how they’ll swoop down the hill and round the corner, and that spectacular beach will open out before their eyes. How grand it is, how broad and free! Their breath will catch, their hearts kick over and expand.

  Raining. Sick in bed with a cold. News from Melbourne: today our mother, demented and with her hip newly pinned, was moved out of the Epworth Hospital to a nursing home. She had to go in an ambulance on her own, because Dad had woken up with a useless left hand. He thought he’d had a stroke and phoned Marie, who rushed in and took him to the Epworth – so while he was being assessed in Emergency, Mum was being shipped out of Orthopedic. Sally calls me, sobbing and incoherent, after a three-hour visit with Mum who didn’t know who she was. Meanwhile I live here. I need to tell someone all this. I haven’t got ‘a person to tell’.

  To Bondi for a walk before breakfast. Charcoal clouds, a harsh silver streak along the horizon. Two old women pace towards me on the promenade, talking hard.

  ‘Anyway,’ says one, ‘she remarried.’

  ‘Oh!’ gasps the other. ‘I thought you were going to say she died!’

  The loneliness of never being free to wallow with either of my first two husbands in the memories of our marriages, of our years together. I have to carry these memories on my own, as, presumably, does each of them. Couldn’t there be a room somewhere, where ex-couples might briefly meet from time to time, just to sit at a table and laugh together, or cry – to tell the small stories and the big, to remind each other of things they learnt together – without anyone’s needing to be bored or jealous? I’m a writer. I can save these things from oblivion. But I’m still alone with them – alone, alone, alone.