Something Old

This week’s “Something Old” is written by a guest reviewer, the distinguished Australian-resident poet Jennifer Compton, whose work has been reviewed previously on this blog [look up “Jennifer Compton” on the index at right]. When I asked Jennifer to write a “Something Old” for me, she responded by forwarding this review of the work of Australian poet Ian McBryde. The review is notable for the judicious way the reviewer balances what is admirable and what is worth criticising in McBryde’s work. This review originally appeared in Quadrant, under the heading “No Cheating Now”. Due acknowledgement is made to Quadrant.

“THE ADOPTION ORDER” by Ian McBryde  (published by Five Islands Press, 2009) Review by guest reviewer Jennifer Compton.

            I was eager to read Ian McBryde's newest book, The Adoption Order, because I liked his previous book, Slivers (Flat Chat Press 2005), so very much. Slivers is one of the few books that I re-read to check if the magic is still potent. And so far, so good. The heroic voice of the poet leads me through a Bladerunner landscape, smokey visions of epic sorrows and ironies.

''I was able to save everyone except you. And me.”

            Slivers fires up my synapses in the same way an elegantly wrought cryptic crossword does.

            And it interests me that in his previous book Domain (Five Islands Press 2004), there is a visual poem called Cryptic Crossword, which sets out on the page searing twentieth century words such as BABI-YAR, BIALYSTOK, CONCCAMP.

            But I cannot take to Domain. I quarrel with it.

            Did Lida Barova really press her forehead to the steamy glass in the train, remembering the noisy champagne promises? And at the Wannsee Conference was the laughter of chauffeurs, as they threw snowballs, audible to the black uniforms clustered inside? Surely you can only know these things if you were there.

            This captious, scrupulous stance of mine leaves very little room for the work of poetry, and its right to imagine anything and go anywhere. Perhaps I should simply blame the poet. The poet failed to convince. I intuited that he trusted the powerful words - Kristallnacht, ZyklonB – that he scattered in our faces would do their work while he drew his skirts aside.

 

            But still there are lines that resonate and evident skill. Ian McBryde is always a poet. I wouldn't quarrel with his work so much, or like it so much, if he wasn't, pre-eminently, a fine poet. He is not clumsy, and rarely strikes a bum note. But I do accuse him of with-holding.

            I venture to think that because he has a charismatic stage presence and a compelling voice, he can put a poem across to an audience, but that the poem sometimes lies on the page, without benefit of his artistry, lacking a little ...  something. What he can deliver within his performance, he sometimes with-holds from the poem.

            I ended my quarrel with Domain as I read it on a crowded bus, and a German teacher, reading over my shoulder, told me - “That German is wrong. It is not Guten Nacht. It is Gute Nacht.”

 

            There is something subtly askew with the book, and there is an end to it.

            I turned to the new book, The Adoption Order, with high hopes. I was at the launch at Collected Works bookshop here in Melbourne, and Ian read several poems with conviction and a high sense of drama, and I understood the book to have a strong narrative thread. The imagining of a mother and father who could never be identified or known. The title lead me down that path, and the appealing photo of a little boy on the end page, staring into an empty fireplace, did not persuade me I was on the wrong path. The last verse of Motherlode, the last poem on the book, fell, like a stone into a deep well, into my mind.

“Language vanishes, the days

have changed shape. I will die

with your name in my mouth.”

            I remember those lines, and the way Ian said them. They have the trick of poetry, the insinuating way of being memorable.

            And then I came to read the book as a piece, as a whole. I sat to it, looking for story. The unfolding of a journey, and some of the stations along the way.

            The epigraph, courtesy of Lola Montez, - “Courage. And shuffle the cards.” - set the book in motion. And what a wonderful opening salvo of a poem. I quote in full.

“Genealogy

Mother an empty tenement.

Father the sound makes

on metal roofs.

Sister a splintered boat

washed onto rocks.

Brother dust in cathedrals.

Wife the light

glancing off ice fields.

My children these still

and silent rooms

I wake to.”

            But then I found myself not being able to find the nub of the thing. Characters were being introduced who were not delineated for me, the reader. Meryl Leppard, Sarah Gray, Marion McBryde, Peter McBryde, Sheila McBryde, and others. Their names appeared as dedications at the tops of poems. Who are they? Are they, perhaps, an empty tenement, a splintered boat, the light glancing off icefields?

            The cast in this book is too large for me to get a grip on it. And the persona of the book has two mothers and two fathers which compounds my difficulty. I suspect the unknown biological father is the one who, in Outage, reaches for the child with dead hands, bony claws. And the unknown biological mother is the woman in Love Song Played Backwards who is walking away through a field of wheat, which is –

“ ... silent and motionless

and blank as Saskatchewan.”

            But I suppose an adopted child creates many many ideas of the original parents. There is a confusion, a tangle.

 

            I resorted to google to find out what the Wilson Code was. It was too important a pointer to the long poem – The Wilson Code – which starts out in 1772 - “We burst furiously out of a history of fists” - and ends in Melbourne in 2009, to let pass in ignorance.

“Can't sleep. What to do when the pills and the whiskey

and the smoke are no longer enough. Close your eyes

in a warm place. Know all the Irish rivers are born

from tears.”

            The poem ends by going finally to sleep, dreaming of Armagh.

            And of course, google helped me out. The Wilson Code (or the Jim Wilson Code) is American Airlines code for the shipment of coffins and cadavers. The ancestors are being delivered to me.

            I know this review is not being very generous to one of our most interesting poets, so, at this late stage, I will hastily say that The Adoption Order came very close to being the book Ian McBryde set out to write. And within it are stand alone poems that create their own world and breathe their own air. For instance, Songs for Paul, where the poet imagines how and why he was conceived, within which he summons up the father.

“Late May.

Guess she's had the kid by now.

Little bastard.”

            This poem gives me all the stepping stones I need. It is powerful, and wistful, and bravura, and it turns back in on itself and completes the circle.

“No cheating now. Spell rescue. Don't look.

Spell ruin. Spell empty well. Spell memory.”

            In Slivers Ian writes - “Come with me. This is important.” And this is his gift. I believe him. Even if I am sometimes a quarrelsome passenger, a difficult customer, I don't doubt that it is an important journey that we take together.   

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

IS DEMOCRACY ALWAYS RIGHT?

            “The sun as everyone says sets later

the longer the day persists.

‘The majority are right even when they are fools,’

the blind democrat insists.”

I’ve just been reading and reviewing Vincent O’Sullivan’s latest collection of poems Us, then, and I know this satirical little jab of O’Sullivan’s isn’t directly concerned with the political process. But that line ‘The majority are right even when they are fools,’ has a particular and sad resonance at the moment.

In Egypt, an elected government has been overthrown by the military.

Those of us who are fairly ignorant of Egyptian affairs are not sure how to react. Of course we are saddened that the promise of the “Arab spring” a year or two back has so rapidly soured. We were never so naïve as to imagine that democracy and a civil society, full-formed and functioning, would spring without difficulty from years of dictatorship. To think that, once a dictatorship is booted out, democracy comes immediately, was the mistake American policy-makers made in both Iraq and Afghanistan. So there is the sadness that another hope has been met with armed force.

But there is this complicating factor in our reaction. The government of President Morsi, which the military has seen off, was a government too close to, and indeed dominated by, the Muslim Brotherhood. This movement is no friend of pluralistic democracy, its ultimate aim being to establish a confessional state based on Sharia law. No room for Egypt’s dissident Muslims, Christians, or for that matter secularists. Granted, Morsi’s government came to power by the democratic process. But, we now ask, was the constitution of the fledgling democracy flawed? And was the electoral process loaded? How else could a group with such an agenda have gained such power?

I emphasize that I am writing as somebody who knows little more of Egypt than I see in the evening news. But I am profoundly troubled by the sight of Morsi’s supporters now taking the position that Morsi’s opponents took a few weeks back, and saying that they are the supporters of an elected democracy and that their popular will has been thwarted. Because, in one very obvious sense, they are right. Soldiers, not voters, have overthrown Morsi.

So here is our problem. Let’s assume that Morsi won his election fair and square. Let’s go further and assume that supporters and allies of the Muslim Brotherhood were indeed the majority of voters. (I know these assumptions are both highly contentious, but I’m just being hypothetical here.) Do we say therefore that no force has the right to oppose them? Or would this make us “blind democrats” who think ‘The majority are right even when they are fools,’?

Yet, I suspect, most of us non-Muslim, non-Egyptian observers are quite happy to see the back of Morsi’s government. We tell ourselves that in this case, the military have acted in support of the greater good; that they have headed off an Islamist initiative and helped make the emergence of a truly pluralistic democracy more possible. This sentiment can take the form of the rather reductionist and puerile statement I saw on Facebook that “religion has no place in government”.

But if we take this view, how much are we in fact saying that an ideology of which we approve can override the popular will by force?

And, on a more pragmatic level, how can we be sure of the military’s intentions?

Generals have often overthrown governments in the name of the greater good, but their track record isn’t all that great when it comes to delivering on democratic hopes. Generals or military juntas who see themselves as saviours of the nation too easily turn into dictators. We are wearily familiar with the scenario of putschists promising democratic elections – and then indefinitely postponing them. Indeed, the only example I can think of in which military force in a revolutionary situation helped to secure democracy was Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” nearly 40 years ago (in 1974) – and that was essentially a case of conservative military leaders standing back and letting a popular movement have its way when they could have adopted the more brutal course of trying to stamp it out.

So is democracy always right? Apparently not. And certainly not when it comes to moral, religious, ethical or aesthetic matters. (You do not prove how great a work of art is, or how true a moral proposition is, by voting on it.) Yet, as a form of government it is still the best we have.

The situation will probably have changed by the time you read this; but as of this writing, all we can hope is that the Egyptian military keep their word.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books 

“TOUGH” by Amy Head  (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)

Was the West Coast of the South Island, in the nineteenth century, New Zealand’s Wild West? Does it have the right credentials to become a site of Pakeha mythology? It would seem that some of our historians and writers of fiction think so. At least, that is the impression I get from books that I was glad to have sent to me for review over the last few years. There was Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s loose but comprehensive history of the New Zealand gold rushes, with ample chapters on the West Coast, Diggers, Hatters and Whores, in 2008. There was Charlotte Randall’s courageous, and badly under-rated, Hokitika Town in 2011. And at the moment I am diligently reading an advance copy of Eleanor Catton’s capacious forthcoming novel The Luminaries. The 19^th century South Island West Coast setting of each introduces us to shady criminals, fortune-hunters, whores, dodgy financiers and charlatans, Pakeha, Maori and Chinese characters, a certain lawlessness and the rawness of a frontier society. No, there are no gunfights in the streets, but there is the capacity for violence and at least the possibility of the mythologization of adventurers.

A modest but welcome addition to this theme is Amy Head’s Tough. This collection of twelve short-stories is Head’s first publication, but she approaches her West Coast theme in a satisfyingly novel way.

Her opening story “West Coast Road” has a very strange structure. It begins as a conversation, in the 1860s, between Julius von Haast, Canterbury’s Provincial Engineer, and the family of one of his subordinates, as they discuss plans for a road through from the plains to the West Coast. But after presenting the domestic scene convincingly, it turns into a series of documentary statements about how road and rail were eventually pushed west and through the alps. The point of the brief (8 pages) story seems to be to contrast idealistic dream with structured historical reality – and perhaps to warn us how much we take for granted the things that people once laboured hard to achieve.

At any rate, this opening story at once sets up a dialogue between past and present, and that is how the rest of the volume plays out. Throughout, stories set in the present alternate with stories set in the nineteenth century.

The contemporary story “Pluck Duck” contrasts modern notions of social misbehaviour (games in a pub; a subdued American woman visitor who might possibly be involved in the porn industry) with nineteenth century notions of social misbehaviour in the story “The Sinner” which follows.

“The Adman” presents a sexually-frustrated modern young man. The nineteenth century story which follows it, “Flood”, is the stolid tale of a respectably married policeman escorting a young actress back from a camp to a township, with expressions of his feelings implied only.

“The Kitchen Pig Smokes the Mouseketeers” illustrates a disjunction in perception. It is the monologue of an addle-headed waitress, with all manner of made-up slang, who is jocular to the point of silliness about everything – but underlying her chatter we perceive a genuinely sad tale going on as one of her colleagues goes through a break-up. “Tough”, the nineteenth century tale that follows, is also about a disjunction of perception. Without inserting “spoilers” into my review, I can say it is about the difference between admiring hardy adventurous criminals from a distance, and actually having to suffer their actions – fiction hitting the rock face of reality. It is interesting that it has been chosen as the eponymous piece.

It is possible that I am over-emphasizing these thematic pairings. It is possible that the author did not intend such neat comparisons as I am making – but the alternating arrangement does constantly force us to compare past and present. First person account of present-day woman on West Coast camping holiday (“Camping”) followed by first-person nineteenth century woman’s account of her travails in the West Coast land she has just reached (“A Strange Tale”). Pot-smoking modern-day outsider (“Home Grown”) followed by nineteenth-century Irish woman outsider (“Maggie Quinn”). And to bring the collection full-circle, the final story “Visitors” has an injured man whisked from the West Coast to a Christchurch hospital by helicopter, a far cry from the dreams of building a road west in the opening story.

As a general judgement, I found the stories with present-day settings more allusive, more likely to take their social setting for granted, more prone to inconclusive endings that allow readers to join the dots – in a word, more postmodern. Certainly their emphasis is on presentation of character rather than on neat conclusions. Things are left hanging in the air, so that one goes checking back through the text to ensure that one hasn’t missed something, not quite sure that the moments narrated amount to an epiphany.

It is often considered bad form to pick out favourites when reviewing collections of short stories, but there are two stories here that really stand out for me, and they are both nineteenth century ones. The first is “A Strange Story”, which has not one, but two first-person narrators, and which does convey the strangeness of the West Coast to a newly-arrived immigrant. Her observations on the new country include this viewing of early Pakeha pretensions:

            “From Westport we kept on north to the new diggings, where I first encountered stands selling spirits or spades or Hunter’s Tonic while floorboards were being nailed down behind them. This combination of otherworldly scenery and a kind of stage-prop architecture was especially disorientating. We stopped outside a makeshift inn on one such stretch where travelling diggers were spread out, resting, some of them in their cups. Foam flew up from the beach. Drunkenness was a good sign, Reuben told me – good for business….” (“A Strange Story” p.99)

            “Stage-prop architecture” really does conjure up the right mental image of all those wooden store-fronts we see in decaying black-and-white photographs, with their impressive facades masking disappointing back-quarters. Drunkenness is a reality inseparable from the old coast. “A Strange Story” works the woman’s disorientation into her account of sinking into trouble, will-less-ly. If it isn’t quite on a par with the volume’s best story, it is simply because the ending seems bitten off too hastily.

For me, the very best story in this collection is “The Sinner”. It is a very careful and precise reconstruction of how a boy, at the time of the West Coast gold-rushes, runs away in the hope of making himself a frontier legend – and the rather dispiriting reality of the diggers’ life that he encounters. The quality of the story is in the detail – the elusiveness of the much-sought gold; the boy’s naivete and initiation into manly ways that quite clearly have a sexual undercurrent; the sense of loss. The incidents of “The Sinner” suggest a story that could have been reworked as a novel. But in this case the abrupt ending is part of its meaning. That we don’t know what became of the boy makes him a more universal and representative figure. It is like the wail of a sad old folk-song.

The sinner has the framing device of a slightly crazy street orator, who observes the boy’s town-life and later notes his disappearance. In presenting him, Amy Head gives us a good historical social panorama of the place:

            “Diggers threw him coins out of superstition, to ward off his soothsaying. He sat in a funk of bad air and bad humour, amid rumours of crime, desertion and love. Badly healed blisters mottled the skin across the ridge of his cheeks. Past him, back and forth, speculators would walk and talk mining stock. They disappeared into the Empire Hotel to seal their sales with whisky. They passed in and out of the broker’s office and the warden’s court. Before they had the machinery to crush the gold from quartz, before a church had been built of even a bank, they were trading.” (“The Sinner” p.35)

            The solid representation of place is one of the best things about the collection. And of course there are many references to rain, to dripping bush and to flooding. It wouldn’t really be a book about the West Coast if this were not the case. 

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE KING OF A RAINY COUNTRY” by Brigid Brophy (first published 1956)

            Have you ever had the experience of forming a strong impression of a book before you have read it; reading it, and discovering it is quite different from what you imagined it would be; and then reading what the critics have to say and discovering that apparently you are quite in the wrong?

            To illustrate my own experience in this field, allow me to give you my account of reading a novel of which you have probably never heard. The King of a Rainy Country was first published in 1956 and was one of the early works of the cranky and sometimes cantankerous Brigid Brophy (1929-1995), then in her mid twenties.

            I will divide my experience into three world-shattering parts.

            Part A: The Book I Thought I Was Going To Read

            A hardback copy of The King of a Rainy Country (presumably a first edition) sat on my father’s bookshelves when I was a child. I can remember its green-white-reddish dust-jacket and I remember once taking it off the shelf and reading the blurb, which was something about a woman setting off to find a childhood friend whose naked photo she had found. Only years later, but still before I’d read the novel, did I discover that its title was a quotation from Baudelaire (“Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux…”). For some reason I had the idea that it would be a highly intellectual comedy. I don’t know why.

            Part B: The Book I Actually Read

            Years later I found a paperback reprint of the novel, with a hideous green cover, in a second-hand bookshop, so I snapped it up and decided to see if it was what I had thought it was.

Published in the mid-1950s, but apparently set just a few years before that, The King of a Rainy Country is indeed a brisk but regrettably twittery comedy. It is told in the first person by Susan, who is living with Neale, who likes to quote Baudelaire’s poetry. Susan and Neale sometimes talk in a vaguely romantic way about getting married, but they do not sleep together. In fact their relationship is oddly ambiguous. Neale seems to be a layabout who sleeps most of the day. He once invites a young Frenchman home. The Frenchman apologizes to Susan for not making a pass at her, because he is “queer”. The implication is that Neale really is too.

Susan gets a job with a rather dodgy bookseller. Being somewhat gormless, it takes her a few weeks to realize that his real trade is under-the-counter pornography (the books that are described sound like fairly harmless 1950s cheesecake, nude girlie magazines etc.). In one of her employer’s books Susan finds a photograph of her old school friend Cynthia, nude.

What has brought Cynthia into this trade? Susan is intrigued enough to set out with Neale to find Cynthia. After a few false leads (and some farcical stuff as her smut-merchant boss flees with the police in pursuit), Susan and Neale discover that Cynthia is probably in Italy at the Venice Film Festival. The central third of the novel is really a detachable story of its own – Susan and Neale get to Venice and get a job as tour guides to a bunch of silly and loud American tourists. Susan has to fend off the advances of some of the males. In this detachable third of the novel, Brigid Brophy gives the predictable and rather superior British attitude to vulgar Yank trippers.

Finally in Venice they catch up with Cynthia but (big and deliberate surprise), what we were led to expect would be the novel’s grand climax turns out not to be. Quizzed about her nude modelling, Cynthia shrugs it off as just one of those things she did to get work. No big deal. And there that matter rests.

But in coming to Venice, Susan has met the opera singer Helena Buchan. Helena is considerably older than Susan – in her forties and with her singing career coming to an end. Cue a few arch references to opera plots that parallel the plot of this novel. Susan goes off on a journey with Helena, who is having publicity photos taken. With none-too-subtle irony the novel suggests that Helena’s publicity photos are really just the same as Cynthia’s nude photos – a means of building a career.

When she returns from this side-trip, Susan discovers that Neale has slept with Cynthia, who was disconsolate at not getting a part in a film. The two of them are talking about getting married.

Susan goes back to London on her own. She thinks about joining Helena in Vienna, but Helena dies. Helena had been married for a brief two years before divorcing. Before her death, she sends Susan her old wedding dress. In the very last words of the novel, Susan is looking at a bride caught in a shower of rain and “running to the temporary shelter of the bridal car”.

Now why do I call all this twittery? Partly because so much of the dialogue reads like sitcom – snappy exchanges of smart whimsicalities between Susan and Neale. The actual experience of reading the novel is frothy, light and speedy, especially as young Brophy writes in machine-gun-fire-like declarative sentences.

I think I can see how it would have been read in the 1950s – the daringness of having characters shacked up; the louche-ness of the porn seller; the romantic talk in Italy; but in the end a sort of innocence (no explicit sex scenes of course – this is the 1950s). I guess it would have been seen as bright comedy for intelligent, romantic bohemians. There are, of course, puzzling lacunae. How come Susan and Neale can both speak fluent French and Italian? What exactly is Neale’s background anyway? But, as I surmise it would have been read back then, it comes across as an amusing anti-romantic story. The big quest (for the meaning of Cynthia’ life) ends in bathos. After all their initial romantic talk, Susan ends up without Neale.

But even in the 1950s, more alert readers might have picked up the subtext. Once she’s seen Cynthia’s picture, Susan is more anxious to find Cynthia than to relate to Neale. She has a number of flashbacks to schooldays, where she had a romantic crush on Cynthia (holding hands in the dark; kissing during the school play etc.). The lesbian element is probably as explicit as it could have been in a mainstream novel in 1956, and there is the oddness of Neale living with, but not sleeping with, Susan. Helena Buchan is a sort-of maternal figure to Susan, but there is a scene where Neale says he imagines her to be (as the novel prints it) “bi-sexual” and at one point Helena comes close to making a pass at Susan. Helena’s sending her wedding dress to Susan might be a maternal gesture (an older woman giving a younger woman something she might use); but it could also be read as a symbolic marriage of the two women. Finally those last words of the novel, about “the temporary shelter of the bridal car”, seem designed to point out that marriage (to somebody of the opposite sex, of course) is not a permanent answer for Susan.

But would all this have been taken in by the average intelligent reader of 1956? I’m still not sure. The title refers to a poem about lassitude and boredom with sensuality. That could have been the way it was read – as a novel wittily saying that romantic love is a bit of a bore.

Part C: The Book That, Apparently, I Was Meant To Be Reading

Only after reading The King of a Rainy Country, and forming the above impressions, did I venture to see what other people thought of it. I looked up both the author and the novel on various internet websites. And I discovered that it’s now regarded in homosexual circles as a pioneer work of gender-bending. The author’s biography feeds into this impression. Brigid Brophy was married and had a daughter, but was basically lesbian and spent most of her adult life with her female lover (although it was her husband who looked after her in her terminal decline via multiple sclerosis). Hence, especially by enlarging on the type of details I’ve already covered, the novel can be seen as coded advocacy for bisexuality. All this may well be true, with the added spice that, as a student, Brophy was sent down from Oxford for unspecified sexual activities; and she later found work as secretary to a pornographer. But it doesn’t alter the fact that the novel belongs to, and stylistically is tied to, its age.

Is it a pioneer postmodernist work? This is another claim that is now being made for it because of its allusiveness (to literature and opera), its elusiveness (the backstories of characters not being explained) and its playful style.

But I don’t really buy this. To me, analysing this frothy novel in these terms is akin to film historians searching hard for sexual subtexts in Hollywood comedies of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Of course such subtexts are sometimes there, but they never provide the dominant tone of those films, and never constituted their dominant impact upon audiences. The King of a Rainy Country is a dated 1950s comedy with a few knowing nudges and winks for the sophisticates and a dominantly sitcom tone. Anyone looking for full-on sexual subversion will be as disappointed as the film students who sit all the way through a Howard Hawks comedy for the sake of a few lines of double entendre snuck past the Production Code censors by the scriptwriters.

Of course it could be argued that the 26-year-old Brigid Brophy couldn’t have written it any other way in 1955-56, but that is a whole new argument and doesn’t alter the fact of the novel’s datedness.