Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds from Plato to Norma Khouri is a refreshingly different look at the variety of hoaxes perpetrated throughout the annals of Australian history. Rather than recount our colourful history through the usual method of what we have deem truth, Simon Caterson takes a look at the events, publications, and cultural ephemera that were discovered to be elaborate hoaxes. As the subtitle suggests, the history of Australia has always been marked by misunderstandings and falsified accounts, and Caterson relishes in reviving these historical deceptions. A selection of quotations from everyone from Marcel Proust to Matt Damon on the art of the lie or the fallibility of truth adds an extra dimension to the work.
What I appreciated about Hoax Nation was the breadth of topics covered, however the limitations of space in Arcade’s signature small sized books meant that some foundational information was left out, leaving this particularly ignorant reader to seek out more about the Ern Malley affair and Bodyline scandal in order to better understand the hoaxed material related to them. Nonetheless, Hoax Nation works as a brilliant starting point for the reverse side of the official Australian history. Covering the famous literary hoaxes of Norma Khouri and Helen Demidenko which played to cultural perceptions and caused debate about the accountability of publishers, it seems that for every hoax that was executed for fame, fortune and glory, there were many that worked on a multitude of levels.
It certainly seems as though hoaxes originate in response to a demand, or are created to fill a perceived gap in culture (in the 1980s and 90s there’s little doubt the advent of multiculturalism coincided with a proliferation of ethnic and indigenous identity frauds in the arts, especially literature – impostors, in particular, flourish when we regard the background and identity of the singer as being as important as the song). And in the heat of the battle, whether the conflict is over politics, culture, history, science or religion, truth is often the first casualty and hoaxes can appear on any side.
While many of the hoaxes seem to have been carried out for the sheer joy of mischief, many including the curious case of George Barrington, appear to have been committed for more politically motivated reasons. A pickpocket sent to the convict colony of Australia in the late 18th century, a number of best-selling books telling of the imagined life in the new colony were published under Barrington’s name. Known as something of a celebrity criminal in England, the move to Australia saw Barrington eventually become a police superintendent, and supposedly, halt a potential mutiny on the journey over. Largely plagiarized from other sources – and yet still quoted today as legitimate historical sources! – there is little to suggest that Barrington actually wrote the stories. Nonetheless, the books not only whet the appetite for tales from Australia and narratives of convict life, but also as proof, as it were, that criminal reformation in the antipodes was a successful endeavour.
Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds from Plato to Norma Khouri features a wide array of hoaxes – from art, literature, fauna, landscape, and Australian legends – bursting with fascination and a salute to the numerous bullshit artists who have peppered our history with intrigue and humour. Not always merely for the fun of deception, many of these hoaxes force us to ask important questions about identity, about authenticity and about our preconceived cultural perceptions.
[Disclaimer: publisher supplied copy, with thanks to the team at Arcade Publications. For my reviews of other Arcade titles, please see: Madame Brussels: This Moral Pandemonium, E.W. Cole: Chasing the Rainbow and Our Girls: Aussie Pin-Ups of the 40s and 50s.]
John Green’s second novel An Abundance of Katherines again relies on the trope of feisty female as the emotional saviour of a socially awkward young male, yet manages to be an inviting, and very funny, look at teenage relationships and friendships. After being dumped by his nineteenth girlfriend named Katherine, child prodigy Colin Singleton sets of on a cross-country road trip with his best friend Hassan in order to clear his mind and work on a mathematic formula which predicts the rate of relationship failure. Colin does come up with his desired formula, but more importantly, learns along the way, with a little help from a smart and sassy young woman named Lindsey, that the unpredictably best parts of life cannot be measured. Despite An Abundance of Katherines following a very similar track as Green’s previous novel, there is enough quirky characters and genuine humour and warmth to distinguish it in its own right.
“May I be excused for a moment?” he asked.
“Is it important?”
“I think I have an eyelash in my pupillary sphincter,” replied Colin and the class erupted into laughter. Ms. Sorenstein sent him on his way, and then Colin went into the bathroom and, staring at the mirror, plucked the eyelash from his eye, where the pupillary sphincter is located.
After class, Hassan found Colin eating a peanut butter and no jelly sandwich on the wide stone staircase at the school’s back entrance.
“Look,” Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life, and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.”
“It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.”
“Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, everybody’s just wondering how the hell you got an eyelash there.”
And so they were friends.
Socially awkward and intellectually gifted, Colin Singleton is broken up over his most recent break-up with Katherine #19. (I’ve tried not to over think how such a socially inept young man has managed to charm nineteen Katherines, when he is completely and utterly devoid of social skills.) His best friend, the hilarious Hassan, takes him on a cross-country road trip to heal his wounds, landing finally in Gutshot, Tennessee via a visit to the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There they meet Lindsey Lee Wells and decide to stop in Gutshot working for her mother. Bonding with Lindsey and her friends, and working on his formula to predict the outcomes of his Katherine relationships, Colin learns a little about himself, and a lot about life.
The reading quieted his brain a little. Without Katherine and without the Theorem and without his hopes of mattering, he had very little. But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.
My main issue with Looking for Alaska [review] was the use of Alaska as a narrative device rather than a fully fleshed out character; her motivations are hidden, but only to be uncovered by our sleuthing protagonist. In An Abundance of Katherines, the female romantic lead, Lindsey, forms a more genuine connection with Colin without the manic mood swings or mysterious air, before exploring their relationship further. Though Colin does come to see the unpredictability of life as a grand pleasure through Lindsey’s influence, it seems to shift based on more a shared experience – they both overcome heartache and find each other, and happiness, despite of it.
An Abundance of Katherines is full of random trivial tidbits and a number of seemingly insignificant subplots, all of which somehow manage to strengthen a reader’s perception of the story and the characters. The friendship between Hassan and Colin is very funny, a pair of more unlikely friends you could not imagine, but their sincere affection and friendly vernacular are so endearing. Even if his use of female characters is a little problematic, John Green knows how to write about close friendships and An Abundance of Katherines is a clever and amusing look at the complexity of friendships, relationships and our own understanding of life.
In John Green’s Looking for Alaska, Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter, a fan of the last words of famous individuals, decides to act on the advice of Rabelais’ supposed last words to seek the “Great Perhaps” by transferring from his high school in Florida to the boarding school Culver Creek in Alabama. Moving from a mostly friendless school life to the constant companionship of Culver Creek, Miles learns to combine social and educational responsibilities. His immersion into a group of merry pranksters, including his roommate the Colonel, introduces him to the desirable and yet distant Alaska Young. Alaska is the teen literature equivalent of film’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl, eccentric in her behaviour and tastes, with carefully affected quirks, which exist solely in order to teach the young, male protagonist about Life. Or, as is the case in Looking for Alaska, death.
Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
The novel is divided into two distinct parts, Before and After, although until the After we can only guess what the before and after refers to. I have a soft spot for boarding school stories, stemming I think from a youthful foray into Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series, which is why the Before section of the novel was so appealing. I really loved the Before section, as the group bonded and went through requisite teenage rituals of drinking and smoking and pulling elaborate pranks, learning to deal with unrequited desires and sex. The companionable intimacy was warm, rich unlikely dialogue and a romanticized view of the banal daily realities of their lives (similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower’s “we were infinite” moments.) Although Alaska did show signs of being another fantasy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for Miles, the one who would show him about life, love and making it through the labyrinth of suffering, it never reached that stage, as the event the Before has been leading up to is Alaska’s death. On the verge of consummating his desire for her, distraught and drunk Alaska asks for the Colonel and Miles to cover for her and she drives off into the night toward her death.
I hadn’t thought of her smell since she died. But when the Colonel opened the door, I caught the edge of her scent: wet dirt and grass and cigarette smoke, and beneath that the vestiges of vanilla-scented skin lotion. She flooded into my present and only tact kept me from burying my face in the dirty laundry overfilling the hamper by her dresser. It looked as I remembered it: hundreds of books stacked against the walls, her lavender comforter crumpled at the foot of her bed, a precarious stack of books on her bedside table, her volcanic candle just peeking out from beneath the bed. It looked as I knew it would, but the smell, unmistakably her, shocked me. I stood in the centre of the room, my eyes shut, inhaling slowly through my nose, the vanilla and the uncut autumn grass, but with each slow breath, the smell faded as I became accustomed to it and soon she was gone again.
Wracked with guilt, and what feels like only the slightest suggestion of grief, After shows Miles and the Colonel not only dealing with the possibility of their role in her death but attempting to resolve the circumstances of her death. Was it an accidental collision, or illustrative of suicidal behaviour? Miles and the Colonel focus their attentions – perhaps as a way of showing their grief – to playing detective. As the pieces come together, their conclusion amounts to little more than a heartfelt response to a homework essay for a religion class. They don’t come to terms with death itself, only with Alaska’s death. Her role and her death is minimized to freeing them of their own guilt – the upstanding young men learn their lesson, but the manic, troubled young girl must die for them to do so.
All problematic issues aside, Green’s writing style is lively, littered as it is with interesting references and lively dialogue. I’ve a feeling I would have loved it as a teenager, as it focuses on bookish, slightly socially outcast students who manage to navigate the weird terrain of high school with style, smarts, charm and just the right amount of awkwardness. Nonetheless, the reduction of Alaska to a totem of male fantasy and deliverance from guilt is disappointing, but I intend to read more of John Green’s young adult fiction in the future.
The Temple-Goers, journalist Aatish Taseer’s debut novel, is a novel about friendships that cross socio-economic barriers, the distinction between the rich and the poor, ambition and pride, lust, love, religious faith,bitter hatred and the struggle for cohesive national identity in contemporary, postcolonial Delhi. The divide of traditional beliefs and practices collide with the contemporary and modern beliefs and practices brought to India by student émigrés shape the difficulties of developing a cohesive cultural and national identity. In The Temple-Goers, these issues are explored through the relationships of a privileged writer named Aatish Taseer who befriends an ambitious, significantly poorer young man, Aakash. Aakash’s assimilation into Aatish’s world sets in motion a number of irreparable changes in both of their lives.
Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had – restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels – or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue and red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a white tablecloth, with white-on-white chikan-work flowers embroidered on it, and the over-strong aroma of a scented candle, that my mother gave for the writer.
After a stint in London, Aatish returns to Delhi to revise his novel, he spends his time with his devoted girlfriend, Sanyogita, and attend numerous parties and events. Recommended a gym by a family friend, he meets the enigmatic trainer Aakash. The two build a friendship which seems to be based on mutual admiration or envy of the other. Aakash, though living in a poor area of Delhi and with no entry into the privileged world that Aatish lives in, manages to integrate with Aatish’s social circle and significantly improve his social standing. Throughout the novel the writing is lushly floral and colourful, as Aatish casts a watchful and aware eye over his surroundings, both those familiar and unknown.
The light in Delhi had changed; it came now from another angle, and far from striking the surface of buildings, seemed to lose its footing on rooftops and columns. And though it was warm, you could sit in it for hours without breaking into a sweat. Hazy and scented with smoke, it rose like a glow from the city, heightening the sensory power of the Delhi winter. The bougainvillea, the occasional smell of kebabs, the wail of a garbage collector created so acute an impression that it was as if some part of an old photograph, having shed the inertia of years, had gently begun to move.
Using himself, or a fictionalized version of himself, characterized as a writer allows Taseer to subtly provide an interesting form of self-criticism, in a way preempting any criticism from the reader. It’s a clever technique, but not used to excess. Aatish receives the long awaited readers notes from the revised version of his novel; Aatish and Sanyogita discuss the merits of the work of Aatish’s writer friend and mentor; Zafar, Aatish’s Urdu teacher and renowned poet, and the writer friend provide him with writing advice – all of these incidences add a touch of self-awareness to the text. Not enough to distance the reader from the powerful narrative, but enough to give reason and evidence as to why The Temple-Goers is written as it is.
His face brightened. ‘Writing something modern, I hope,’ he said, ’something fresh and original.’ Then using the English words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in both instances to mean fiction, good and bad, he said, ‘In the way men live today, the pressures upon them – and there are great strains and injustices – you’ll find fiction. The past is all non-fiction.’
‘And write in English?’
‘In English,’ he answered firmly. ‘The Indian languages are finished; or, at least, literature in them is finished. When I began there were magazines, poetry meetings, the progressive writers were still around, poets could write for the screen, there were readers, libraries, critics – all gone, swept away in one generation. It’s a very fragile thing, you know, literature; it needs an infrastructure. You can’t spend your life writing into the dark like me.’
The blurb and prologue of The Temple-Goers hint at a highly televised murder which doesn’t really come to the forefront of the narrative until the last fifty pages. While I did enjoy the rest of the novel, the gradual build up of Aatish and Aakash’s relationship and the gradual decay of Aatish and Sanyogita’s relationship, the vivid imagery of an India still trying to find it’s identity and the profound schism between the country’s rich and poor – the set-up in the promotional material or the introductory chapter of the supposedly crucial murder (and, presumably, who committed the crime, and all the how and why questions that come along with it) creates an expectation which is never quite fulfilled. When the murder and its wide reaching repercussions do reach their climax, it feels all too rushed, given the languid time spent on all the other details of the narrative. This horrific event, the brutal murder of a character we have come to know not intimately, but enough to feel the shock, however predictable it is, and the ways in which the convictions play out are accelerated so much that their effects aren’t as deeply felt as other aspects of the novel. Perhaps this expedited account is to suggest the stark difference between the daily realities of Delhi and how quickly events can change our circumstances, our relationships and our friendships. Regardless, I wish it had been drawn out more, reading another two hundred pages of Taseer’s vibrant writing would have been a pleasure.
A compelling narrative about friendships and rapacious ambition, and a portrait of a modern, changing India, The Temple-Goers really surprised me. From the promotional material and vague recollections of interviews and brief mentions in articles, along with the publicist-ready catchphrase of “the Indian Bret Easton Ellis”, I expected something a lot more dry, amoral and disconnected. Instead, The Temple-Goers offers a rich insight into another culture undergoing an immense shift, while personalizing this through understandably flawed and conflicted characters.
[Disclaimer: publisher supplied advance reading copy. An extract of The Temple-Goers is available online.]
Christos Tsiolkas‘ Loaded follows Ari, a nineteen year old of Greek heritage and a sexuality he is not entirely comfortable with, in the hedonistic events of one night out in Melbourne. Although he has no problem with his desire to sleep with masculine men, he feels some discomfort in labeling himself as gay; it’s not just his sexuality that he dislikes defining, but his entire self, his racial and cultural heritage, his taste in music, he refuses the delineations of identity that society, his family and his peers want him to define himself by. He eschews work and study, and becomes frustrated and impatient when people seem to demand that he “do something.” Caught between the traditional Greek culture of his immigrant parents and his position in the contemporary Australian society, and not feeling at ease in either, Ari struggles toward finding a place where he can just be himself without outside constraints or imposed definitions.
Speed is exhilaration. Speed is colours reflecting light with greater intensity. Speed, if it’s good, can take me higher than I can ever go, higher than my natural bodily chemicals can take me. [...] On speed I feel macho, but not aggressive. I’m friendly to everyone. Speed evaporates fear. On speed I dance with my body and my soul. In this white powder they’ve distilled the essence of the Greek word kefi. Kefi is the urge to dance, to be with good friends, to open your arms to life. Straight, I can approximate kefi, but I am always conscious of fighting off boredom. Speed doesn’t let you get bored.
Ari’s voice is undeniably passionate, confused as it is. He is full of adolescent generalizations about people who aren’t like himself, and he is not afraid to voice them. Though his experience of life is troubled by numerous conflicts, he cannot seem to see the same ruptures at work in the lives of others, choosing instead to take a simplified view of any one else. Even Johnny, Ari’s openly gay friend, whose confrontations with his father have been complex doesn’t receive much sympathy from Ari. When Johnny appears as Toula, his drag alter ego, Ari refuses to acknowledge or address him as Toula, instead insisting on calling him Johnny. While there is a friendliness between them, and a closeness, but these little things make up the sum of Ari’s personality. Even Ari’s sexual partners do not receive much thought, even objects of intense desire, especially after the physical act of sex has taken place. Then, for Ari, all mystery has gone. He has known them physically, so as Ari surmises, he has known them fully. This is all he has wanted them for, true, but the dismissal is abrupt and complete.
Inherently Melbournian, Loaded is divided into four sections – East, North, South and West – each representing time spent in the suburbs in the corresponding parts of Melbourne. As Ari articulates his frustration and rage, he manages to also pin down the divisions between different parts of the city – from the standards of living, the types of people who congregate there, what that represents and how it relates to his own experiences of life. Here is where the novel had so much power for me, though Ari’s outlook is much more cynical and pessimistic than mine, like the divides that ravage his search for identity, he sees the divides that separate the city:
The West at night, as you drive over the Westgate Bridge, is a shimmering valley of lights. In the day, under the harsh glare of the sun, the valley reveals itself as an industrial quilt of wharfs, factories, warehouses, silos and power plants. And the endless stretch of suburban housing estates. The West is a dumping ground; a sewer of refugees, the migrants, the poor, the insane, the unskilled and the uneducated. There is a point in my city, underneath the Swanston Street Bridge where you can sit by the Yarra River and contemplate the chasm that separates this town. Look down the river towards the East and there are green parks rolling down to the river, beautiful Victorian bridges sparkle against the blue sky. Face West and there is the smoke scarred embankment leading towards the wharfs. The beauty and the beast. All cities, all cities depend on this chasm.
Rife with a drug fueled frenetic energy that doesn’t let up, Loaded kept me up to the early hours of the morning. The complex issues of immigrant identity, second generation immigrant children, sexuality, racial tension, desire and family are all explored in a youthful, vivacious, unrelenting prose that hums with the energy of late nights, pills and booze.
Characterized in the blurb as the antithesis of the hedonistic exploits of the young rich of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis‘ fiction, Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up explores life at the other end of the scale, the destitute, the equally lost and the seemingly hopeless with the same amoral tone. A brief word about the cover design, you can probably imagine how the back cover looks from the front, and so when the reader is reading it the title forms a sort of caption which invites comparison. I can’t decide if it is appealingly minimalist design or self-consciously humiliating.
In The Fuck-Up, the unnamed narrator navigates the underworld of 1980s New York, getting by on lies and just enough luck. Having been dumped by both his girlfriend and his near-mistress, and being fired from his job at a movie theatre for asking for and receiving a raise which caused an upset among the other employees, the narrator moves in with a slightly older intellectual friend, Helmsley, and finds another low paying job in a gay porn theatre. Overhearing a conversation on a train, he goes for the job opportunity and lies to his neo-hippie businessman boss Miguel about his sexuality in order to secure his position. As he wanders the streets and contemplates his life, he accidentally finds himself the victim of a number of brutally violent incidents which propel him into further complicated arrangements, including an affair with an unstable older woman, taking up a sublet of a famous film director’s apartment, and shady business arrangements with Miguel, each destroying his life in their own way.
By the end of the second week, I stopped getting up before noon, and by the middle of the third week I stopped shaving altogether. I’d lie around in bed watching daytime TV, which is the first sign of nervous breakdown in an enlightened culture. First, I watched the noon news and talk shows, then the game shows, onto the late-afternoon talk shows, and finally I was glued to the soaps. After that TV-mangled period, I stopped watching and just slept a lot.
The narrator is far from stupid or clueless, but he manages to continually implicate himself in awful situations until, releasing himself from hospital after a vicious beating, Helmsley’s suicide, jobless after the scam is revealed, and homeless after the film director discovers he has been sleeping with his girlfriend, he finds himself made anonymous by complete destitution. Unlike most novels that let their characters sink to this level of physical desperation, of constant hunger and no glimmer of hope, there is never the sense that everything will be made okay by the last pages, which allows the physical and psychological abasement to be strongly felt. While things do eventually begin to look up for our nameless hero, it comes without any moralizing and from the most unlikely source, broadening our understanding of two of the characters.
Drifting up Broadway, past the youth industry, complete with all the latest fashion outposts, I was a ghost. I tried to look into eyes, but if anyone cast a fearful glance at me it was only so that they’d be sure they were avoiding me. I was no longer a member of the human club. But I had to get back in. I kept reassuring myself that if I thought hard enough I could find a solution. But I was working under a ruptured brain. Thoughts braced against the incomprehensible, straining to pick up a weight just an ounce too heavy for my thought muscles.
Engaging and darkly funny, like Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction of hyper self-aware characters without the explicit grotesqueries, The Fuck-Up isn’t afraid to delve into the lives and aspects of society we too often shy away from. The Fuck-Up takes hipster slackerdom and pushes it to its most extreme, and it is not pretty.
Seeing Helen Garner talk last week at the Wheeler Centre (some video footage from the event is now available online) has given me reason to return to her work, even though I was not wholly convinced by Monkey Grip. (Although, I think because at the time I was still recovering from removing myself from a similarly vicious and cyclic relationship, that may have been the cause of my vehement reaction to Nora’s actions. I do intend to return to it when my feelings about that situation aren’t so volatile. I suppose my point being that personal circumstances always effect how you read a book, but it isn’t the only way.) I had started The Spare Room in the lead up to seeing Garner’s discussion, but hearing her talk so eloquently about her craft has inspired me to further explore her writing.
I heard her moving about not long after midnight, and came out to check. Her shoulder and neck were hurting. Again she was wet, but not with piss. It was sweat: the bed-clothes were soaked, almost through to the mattress, and even the pillow was sodden. Three times that night I tackled the bed: stripped and changed, stripped and changed. This was the part I liked, straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease. We didn’t bother to put ourselves through hoops of apology and pardon.
In The Spare Room, Garner has fictionalized her own experiences; Nicola, a friend dying of cancer seeks refuge at Helen’s house in Melbourne while undergoing experimental alternative treatment. The conflict arises not from Nicola’s visitation, but rather her refusal to accept her fate and her endless hope in what Helen sees as disreputable. As the battery of the treatments take effect and require more and more of Helen’s physical assistance, the emotional impact begins to take its toll. Confrontations with the practitioner amount to vague threats and uncontrollably (and understandably) emotional outbursts of anger, the support of Nicola’s family members offers some respite but is all too brief.
We sat on the bench doubled over. Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her. She would not admit it, but her house was unreachable now. Unless someone carried her there on his back, she would never go home again.
The emotional impact on the reader doesn’t come solely from the question of the morality of shady alternatives that falsely encourage hope in terminally ill patients, but rather the strength of the relationship between Nicola and Helen, even at its darkest and when all hope appears to be lost. As an unashamedly selfish twenty-something, it made me ask myself the question of how far would I be willing to go for someone I care about? What responsibilities to our loved ones do we hold in our relationship with them? To what extent are we willing to accept responsibility of their well being? In The Spare Room, Helen is happy to take on the draining routines of care even though she wasn’t asked, but she also recognizes her own inability to fully deal with the situation.
Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches our virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.
The Spare Room is moving, but not in an abrasive or showy manner. By outlining the daily routines associated with caring for the terminally ill loved one in clear-eyed and honest prose it presents it as a quiet reality. Littering it with references to iconic Melbourne landmarks, events and streets adds to this sense of everyday reality, but again, it’s not the sense of location that is the focus of the novel – it is in the relationships and the question of responsibility within them.
Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers‘ final novel, is permeated by a sense of illness, death and social disease. Set in a small town in the South of the United States, circling the lives of four very different men, two young, two old, their lives collide in the present and in the past in a series of violent, unsettling confrontations. Bleak and despondent as it is, McCullers imbues this darkness with an understanding of the fragility of the human heart, the futile rage against death and the necessity of the fight against social injustice.
The novel opens with J.T. Malone, the local pharmacist, discovering that he is suffering from leukemia and only has a few months to live. A mostly virtuous man, he begins to question and lash out at the world which offers him no hope, no cure and no redemption. He considers his life differently knowing that he has not much time left to live it. He maintains a somewhat close friendship with the larger than life figure of Judge Fox Clane. Excessive in opinion, body and stature, but with his mind succumbing to the senility of old age and having suffered a stroke which paralyzed half his body and dealing with diabetes, the Judge continually denies any evidence of illness to all outsiders. His wife’s death left a considerable gap in his life, and he tries to fill it with other women, women with similar habits or looks, only to find them all unsatisfactory. Having lost his only son to suicide, the Judge’s only relation is the idealistic and sensitive Jester Clane.
Several months ago he had read in these bylines the words: ‘How can the dead truly be dead when they are still walking in my heart?’ It was from an old Indian legend and the Judge could not forget it.
Jester’s relationship with his grandfather is bristling with their conflicting opinions over the issue of race. While the Judge longs for the old days of the South, Jester antagonizes him with his desire for full integration. Despite the Judge’s racist attitudes, his closest relationship is with his amanuensis, the blue-eyed black boy Sherman Pew. An orphan who is constantly searching for his unknown mother, and desperately seeking her in musical stars, Sherman is prickly to everyone that is around him. Nonetheless, he and Jester share a friendly competitiveness and antagonism which often becomes humiliating to both. Jester, it is suggested, harbours deeper feelings for Sherman.
Not only are their current lives and situations delicately intertwined, but as the novel moves along and revelations are made, their pasts are just as connected. Jester’s discovery of his father’s personality and circumstances before his suicide through the late night hysterics of the Judge answers the vital questions of identity for him, whereas Sherman’s own acknowledgment of his parentage only leads to more questions and his sense of self utterly destroyed. It is these questions and uncertainty that lead him to take action against the racist implications of the town, which in turn leads to the horrifically violent confrontation that ends in his death. Meanwhile, Malone, gradually closer to his death, stands up to his townsfolk and refuses their intense appetite for destruction in the name of morality, making his final grasp at heroism. Though he doesn’t achieve it in the eyes of the betrayed, hurt townspeople, he comes closer to peace with himself and the world around him.
As he sat holding the pestle there was in him enough composure to wonder at those alien emotions that had veered so violently in his once mild heart. He was split between love and hatred – but what he loved and what he hated was unclear. For the first time he knew that death was near him. But the terror that choked him was not caused by the knowledge of his own death. The terror concerned some mysterious drama that was going on – although what the drama was about Malone did not know. The terror questioned what would happen in those months – how long? – that glared upon his numbered days. He was a man watching a clock without hands.
The most somber detail of the novel is the profound sense of the failure of traditional spiritual or religious modes to explain death or to offer comfort to the dying. The Judge freely moves from church to church, mainly hoping to find someone who can mimic his dead wife than to find solace in religion; Malone too looks for comfort in the church but fails to find it, and yet refuses to commit the act of violence because he doesn’t want to endanger his soul. Redemption is made on earth, in humane actions, but Malone seeks justification for it in the sacred.
Yes, the earth had revolved its seasons and spring had come again. but there was no longer a revulsion against nature, against things. A strange lightness had come upon his soul and he exalted. He looked at nature now and it was part of himself. He was no longer a man watching a clock without hands. He was not alone, he did not rebel, he did not suffer. He did not even think of death these days. He was not a man dying – nobody died, everybody died.
As in all of McCullers’ novels, Clock Without Hands seeks to explore the injustices of society, spiritual isolation and confusion, the confounding nature of human love and affection, our own battles with ourselves prying us apart from those around us. Yet, as bleak as the issues it deals with are, one doesn’t leave the vivid world of Clock Without Hands feeling weighed down by the impotence of our struggle against death, but rather with the intimation that hope is always available at all junctures of life, even on the very cusp of death.
Written in the months of 1967 leading up to her death, Illumination & Night Glare (edited by Carlos L. Dews and published in 1999) was Carson McCullers’ final attempt to shape the mythology of her own persona, to create the legacy of herself she wished to leave to the world and to record her own perception of herself. Rather than taking the structure of a typical biographical account, McCullers’ narrative of her own life is fluid, shifting between the stages of her life in a sweetly sentimental ramble. Perhaps it is the unfinished nature of the manuscript, but Illumination & Night Glare feels like sitting in the same room as Carson McCullers and listening to her tell all the interesting little tales that make up her life story.
The illuminations of the title are the flashes and bursts of inspiration and creativity that defined her direction with her work when she least expected it. The inspirations were strange and unpredictable to her, but she appreciated it them coming as they did after months of struggle. The night glares are the periods of debilitating illness and harrowing setbacks and life circumstances. She never bemoans the fact of her illnesses, in fact she points to other creative individuals who also overcame physical impediment to achieve great works, taking instead great pride in the ability to overcome.
My life has been almost completely filled with work and love, thank goodness. Work has not always been easy, nor has love, may I add.
McCullers is surprisingly open about the disappointing sexual dimension of her relationship with Reeves, yet rather coyly ambiguous when it comes to her other affections, especially Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, although it appears their relationship was just as fraught. As she approaches her remarriage to Reeves, she becomes shyly reticent, claiming often that she didn’t know why she went back to him, a sentiment which is betrayed by her tender letters to him during the war. Carson’s portrayal of Reeves is much kinder than any to be found in other biographical accounts, or from comments from people who were close to the pair. She creates a more sympathetic image of a deeply troubled man.
It was a shock, the shock of pure beauty, when I first saw him; he was the best looking man I had ever seen. he also talked of Marx and Engels, and I knew he was a liberal, which was important, to my mind, in a backward Southern community. Edwin, Reeves and I spent whole days together, and one night when Reeves and I were walking alone, looking up at the stars, I did not realize how time had passed, and when Reeves brought me home, my parents were distressed, as it was two o’clock in the morning. However, my mother was also charmed by Reeves, and he would bring her beautiful records. [...] I was eighteen years old, and this was my first love.
The manuscript ends on a wistful recollection of happier times, and the important, if complex, position Reeves held in her emotional life.
“But you must [have] had happy times,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “I remember one night we climbed up on the mansard roof of our house just to see the moon. We had good times, and that’s what made it so difficult. If he had been all bad, it would have been such a relief because I would have been able to leave him without so much struggle. And don’t forget, he was of enormous value to me at the time I wrote [The Heart is a Lonely Hunter] and [Reflections in a Golden Eye.] I was completely absorbed in my work, and if the food burned up he never chided me. More important, he read and criticized each chapter as it was being done. Once I asked him if he thought [Heart] was any good. He reflected for a long time, and then he said, ‘No, it’s not good, it’s great.’”
While providing an honest account of Reeves McCullers, it also shows Carson as she wanted to be seen – not the victim of a number of physical ailments or damaged relationships, but first and foremost as a writer. From her nurtured childhood – revealing that the moment her mother thought she was a genius, young Lula Carson sat at the piano and played a song she’d heard only hours before, was actually premeditated and practiced beforehand – to her stunted musical career, success in her early twenties, her complex relationships and friendships, and the disappointments of her later works. She writes enthusiastically of her own literary inspirations – Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Wolfe, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and E.M. Forster. The lively days of 7 Middagh Street – the house in which she lived with W.H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, George Davis and Richard Wright among others – seems an idyllic creative atmosphere, although it resulted more in partying than being conducive to a positive writing environment.
Buffered by the truly touching and often desperate letters between Reeves and Carson during the time between their marriages while Reeves was serving his country in World War Two, and McCullers’ original outline for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Illumination & Night Glare is a amicable recollection of a tumultuous life told with the requisite hope and understanding one has come to expect from McCullers.
Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, much like her other writing of the same era, captures the turbulence of a culture in upheaval. The rapid social and cultural changes of the 1960s are unflinchingly reported by Didion, and she manages to write about her own experience of these events, with these people, in these places, without coming across as narcissistic or overbearing. The presence of her strong journalistic persona gives the issues a sense of urgency and realism.
The strongest pieces in Slouching Towards Bethlehem are the exclusively personal essays, “On Keeping a Notebook” and “On Self-Respect” were both resonant. “On Keeping a Notebook” ruminates on the notebooks of our lives, the snippets of conversations, places and times we choose to report and remember representing a definition of the self created from personal memories; basically that we create our own histories with what we record. Perhaps, removing the romantic notion associated with the writer’s notebook, can we use this way of thinking to look how we use twitter, tumblr, and so on as similar records of self? “On Self-Respect” is a call to reinstate the importance of a sense of self; it sounds trite as I write it, but Didion makes the possession of a sense of self, and the self-respect that comes along with that, as something exciting and powerful. I’m going to quote it at length here, because I found it inspiring:
In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. [...] Nonetheless, character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
[...] To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. [...] At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
Even typing that out now instills me with the strength to hold my head up high, as well as realize past mistakes as being exemplary of what she is talking about. Reading “On Self-Respect” will encourage you to stand a little taller, demand what you deserve and refuse to settle for less than you are worth, I think it is an essay which I will be returning to time and time again.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Other essays, while not as powerfully effective on me as this one, are just as clearly elucidated. From masculine camaraderie on a John Wayne film set, to Joan Baez’s peace and non-violence school, to the title essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in which Didion captures the hippie movement in San Francisco with an unforgiving eye. Refusing to wholly buy into the peace, love, tune in drop out mentality, Didion instead shows us another side of the hippies without condemning them. Slouching Towards Bethlehem at once captures the 1960s cultural zeitgeist without the retrospective nostalgia, encourages a sense of place and feels, at times, like an intensely personal insight into the life and thoughts of a young Joan Didion.
