O'BLEAK short fiction by Larry Buttrose

I look into the glass of milk. I look into it for a long time, so deeply that I begin to see it in its molecules, with the oily stuff between them, which I suppose is life. Whoever would have thought you could see life, but there it is, slimly stuff in my milk.

I drink the milk. I do not know how long it is since I poured it. I cannot recall whether it was even me who did so. Perhaps someone else poured it, someone unknown to me. Perhaps they drugged the milk, which is why I took so long to drink it, and what I thought was the oily stuff of life between the molecules was really some drug. Certainly, someone has drugged me. Someone is always doing it; I am always drugged, I live my life drugged.

I am aware of getting off a bus. It’s a big red double-decker. I’m in London, I realise, getting off in Charing Cross Road, up past the bookshops, just before Shaftesbury Ave. I step down onto the pavement and breathe in the shellgritty London smog. A man perusing newspapers on a stand outside a shop seems to sense my presence, and looks up.

‘Artie!’, he says, ‘Artie O’Bleak! Well, this is a surprise.’

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘I had no idea you were in London. Are you staying here long?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Susie will be delighted to see you. You will come to supper, won’t you. We have two children now you know.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Gemma and Louisa, the twins, eight.’

‘I see.’

‘Must be ten years since we’ve seen each other,’ he says. 
‘At least.’

 I don’t reveal to him my suspicion that I am living my life in a permanently drug-induced state at the hands of persons unknown, and fortunately he seems to give no sign of intuiting it. We sit down and have coffee in Soho and I feel almost normal, even though everything Richard tells me about himself surprises me. I realise I have never met him. Certainly my name is not Artie O’Bleak.

After we part I go down through some narrow streets, near Covent Garden perhaps, and end up in a deserted alley jammed with tables set up for lunch. The scene somehow disconcerts me, and I turn off into a Tube entrance, down a long, dirty tunnel. There is only one person inside it, a bearded old busker with a guitar. He looks at me, muttering something in a gruff voice, which I don’t like. I never like to look at people directly; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But the man keeps on staring at me and I feel myself backing away, and striding back towards the light.

When I get there I am at a window. I am in a hotel, a ramshackle old one, out in the desert by the looks. I am on the first floor, looking down on the few streets of what would appear to be a deserted old mining town, a belt of red rocky earth scything away to the horizon. It’s late afternoon, evening just coming on, the sun slanting orange through the window in front of me. I am trying to ring my wife on my mobile phone but there’s no signal and it’s useless. I need to tell her I won’t be home tonight, that I am not sure where I am, but not to worry. I think she is fairly used to this kind of thing by now.

I would like to discuss with her my suspicion that someone is drugging me, that I am living my whole life in a drugged state and never quite emerge to the surface of clarity and normalcy. I wonder what she would say were I really ever to tell her that. Perhaps she would say that she knew it, that I’d been behaving very oddly for some time. Perhaps she would say it was her giving me the drugs, for whatever reason, or that I had simply forgotten that I had been prescribed drugs for years, and took them myself every day.

I can’t tell whether I have indeed been behaving oddly, whether in fact I have ever, or have always, behaved oddly. I have lost my sense, I suppose, of what is odd. It is all a continuum of behaviour now, my existence, and I go through the motions of it because what else is one to do, and whoever it is that drugs me and keeps me drugged, in my food, in water, in a glass of milk, must have good reasons for doing so, I suppose. It is just possible that I am mad, that I am dangerous to others. I have to admit to this possibility.

Sometimes I find myself questioning how I know that I am drugged. After all, if I am drugged all the time, how could I distinguish my state from normal waking consciousness, if there is such a thing. My answer is that I cannot believe that other people live life in such a shallow-lit and fragmentary way, of half impressions gone before they fully register, of thoughts dissipated into formlessness before they are properly realised, of a general torpor of the senses. Sleep is a grey shroud, half-done, unsatisfying and dreamless. My answer to my question is I know I am drugged because I can still remember a time when my life was different, when days were properly linked one to the other, and there was a rationale to it. Now I simply live it, eyes slitted against what might come next.

My wife plays a curious role in this. One night as we sat together watching a film on television, she murmured something I didn’t quite pick up.

‘What was that you said?’ I asked. ‘You said something. What was it?’
She yawned. ‘I said sex is cheap and love costs too much.’

‘That’s what you’re getting from this film?’

‘It’s what I get from everything all the time.’

‘Does that mean you don’t love me?’

‘No. It means I do.’

In the morning I watched unnoticed as she put something in my coffee. When she kissed me before I went off to work her mouth tasted metallic, as I imagine mine did to her. Sometimes my tongue feels made of metal, my teeth and entire mouth, though that may be entirely normal.

I didn’t go to work but went to a shopping mall and walked around. I was in a cinema watching a film and when the couple kissed my wife’s words came back to me, about sex being cheap but love costing too much. She was telling me how much she had paid in life to love me of course, and it is true, she has. I recounted that to a person in a wine bar, a drunk woman sitting on the next stool to mine, and she rested her hand on my leg and laughed. It’s odd to observe the effect alcohol has on other people, when I can discern virtually no effect in myself from it, being already drugged.

‘It’s funny how you look at me,’ the woman giggled. ‘Kind of oblique, like a bird or something.’

‘Is it really?’ I asked, hoping for a reply.

She suggested we go back to her place for a little while. When we got there she took off her clothes I saw her body was heavily tattooed. This surprised me as I had picked her as some sort of newly sacked corporate executive on a bender, but then, I considered, no doubt lots of corporates have tattoos beneath their tailoring. When I looked more closely I saw that the tattoos were like a gallery of Persian miniatures, of what appeared to be erotic scenes from the Arabian Nights or somesuch. Her skin was extremely pale and served well as a canvas for the tiny works.

She asked me what I did for a living, and when I told her that I was a plainclothes police officer she giggled ‘very plain’, and started taking them off me. As she did so I said that I had been joking, that I wasn’t really a police officer, but that I was married and it might not be the right thing for me to have sex with her, to which she replied she was married too and that on the contrary it was exactly the right thing to do. I pondered aloud why she would bother having sex with me anyway, as I was hardly attractive, and began relating my concerns that someone was drugging me, at which she laughed loudly and said she had spiked my drink in the bar to get me interested. Then she got onto the bed and started taking off her underthings. I said I had to go to the toilet, and excused myself into her ensuite. It was very dark in there and I couldn’t find the light, and when I did I was in the car, switching on the interior light, looking at an address on a slip of paper. The drug thing again: sometimes it could get very tiresome, always in fact.

I drove to the address and found I was home. When I walked in my wife had dinner ready, roast beef with baked potatoes and pumpkin. We watched television and went to bed. I confessed to her at last my fear that I was drugged all the time, but she only shrugged. I realised I may indeed have mentioned it before to her, quite often perhaps. I asked her about it some more and she said it was better that way. ‘You wouldn’t want to try being you without it,’ she said, turning out the light.

In the darkness I mulled over her words, and realised again how deeply she cared for me, and how much I loved her. What else matters, in the end, I thought, and settled my head to sleep, troubled intermittently though in wondering how a magnet spinning in an iron collar can possibly create electric power.

Previously published in Wet Ink magazine, issue 16, September 2009

THE BOOT POLISH MESSIAH by Larry Buttrose

For a show that purports to concern itself with intimate relationships between people of different races and creeds, John Safran’s Race Relations seems instead to be a freewheeling cultural bulldozer hurtling out of control across the globe.

One can only sit cringing, amazed, often hardly able to watch, as the weedy Aussie suburbanite blacks up and pops in on some fairly committed black issues blokes in the US - who from his bizarre appearance almost sniff him out straight off as a white rat - but wins them over and even sings them a rap song about a Melbourne tram. Not to undersell his own chutzpah, next he is onstage at a rap venue apparently wowing the crowd with his tram rap, engineering a near race riot at a Chicago restaurant, speed-dating black women and setting up a possibly more lingering assignation with one, and preaching to a black congregation, climaxing with the impassioned “I am John Safran, and I am a proud black man”.

The previous week’s stunts had seen him secretly nicking soiled panties from Jewish and Eurasian women for a "smell test" to see which ethnic type he preferred - episodes about as real as any “reality television” - and pulling off a sperm bank donation quinella to taint notions of race in both Israel and Palestine.

But is Safran anything more than a jerk-off, albeit a smart one? What is he trying to pull beyond a splash in the great cotton wool void of tele-suburbia? He’s shown us that he’s willing to be crucified to get followers: mind you, he might say it worked for Jesus Christ, so why not?

Back when Safran’s career ignited on Race Around the World, and in his TV incarnations since, the method has hardly varied. There is the faux-naif interest in some religious, racial or cultural taboo or bugaboo, followed by a suitably tangential, bizarre and often confronting stunt for the camera, pulled in a feigned earnest search for truth by a man we all know is far more clever by half. Or at least, so say his nods and winks.

Thus may he sniff the filched panties of ten women, and go out among African Americans as one of them in the worst black face since Al Jolson, looking nothing more closely than a demented Trekkie.

It’s all very naughty and lots of fun; it’s a little bit denigrating and more than a little bit patronising to the people whose confidence he betrays, but who gives a bugger because they’re far away now and would never spring for the fare to come here and get him back. Oh, and it makes for terrific television.

But is there any deeper purpose to Safran’s shows, or is he merely yet another carpetbagger, hawking his own brand of snakeoil from an open-topped wagon? One might suggest this question that is constantly present in the viewer's mind is the abiding appeal of Safran, and that it is why he fascinates and tantalises us, and as such fills a sorely needed religious-cultural transgressive niche in our media and society. Or such.

But the answer, really, is no. He is the jester in the court of our cultural correctness, indeed, the clown in the cathedral, the fool we crave and the gifted child trying to shock his parents with dress-ups by going just that much further - all that he is, yes. But in the end he is the huckster of one and one thing only pertaining to the spirit: one hundred percent proof John Safran. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, as another Jewish funnyman was wont to say.

 

FAIRLIE KINGSTON: FIRING UP THE AUSSIE VERNACULAR by Larry Buttrose

"Iluka", Bendalong, NSW

Some years ago I had the good fortune to hear a talk by author Craig McGregor in which he enthused about Australian vernacular architecture. I apologise if I do him any disservice now, but I took from his talk that vernacular architecture is a building style which reflects aspects of our perceived national character rather than being merely formal or functional, and as such is an essential and valuable part of our Australian identity.

The slides of buildings he showed at night, to a gathering in a private home on the far north coast of NSW, were mainly of small buildings of iron and timber, older and contemporary structures which appeared to be part of a national tradition of simple liveable houses, but each with a loveable kink or two, like a jaunty tilt of a hat.

Put plainly, our vernacular architecture is one with an Aussie accent. We might all argue about what that vernacular exactly is - and you could say to do that is itself an aspect of our national character - but there is little doubt about what it means when you see it, as in Fairlie Kingston’s marvellous ceramic miniatures of classic seaside homes.

"Greetings from Tewantin", Sunshine Coast, Qld

These are the places most of us went to on summer holidays away from the city, the charming little places by the sea, slightly eccentric and always fun, which often we came to enjoy more than then rather less charming places in the suburbs where we lived our lives for the rest of the year.

Kingston’s re-evocation of these post-war vernacular homes is a major element of her near sellout new show of recent ceramics at Australian Galleries in Sydney.

“Whenever I'm travelling I always devote a portion of time to stalking old coastal furniture such as fibro cottages, old caravans and picnic shelters. With the relentless coastal development, these relics from bygone holidays are on the endangered species list,” Kingston says. “What I'm really trying to do is to create a nostalgic empathy for what we've once shared and perhaps forgotten about.”

To the eye, every detail is authentic, down to the gardens and the old armchair on the porch, and the amber glow emanating from within. Each has the warm colours of a hazy summer’s day by the sea in the 1950s or 60s. Even the price-tag is authentic to the bygone times, your own little home for $3950.

"Neat 'n Tidy", Nowra, NSW

  
Asked about the process of making such complex ceramic works, Kingston replies: “Firstly I draw up a rudimentary plan from a photograph. The clay is then rolled out into slabs to make the walls and then I cut out the windows and doors. Next I assemble the walls and put on the roof. Finally, my favourite part of the building process is putting in the finer details and landscaping the garden. The piece then has to survive two firings, the second of which is for the glaze.”

Self-taught, Kingston cut her artistic teeth back in the 1970s in Sydney’s famous Yellow House, along with other artists such as her brother Peter Kingston, and Martin Sharp.

“I chose ceramics as a means to an end to express my ideas. I treat the clay as a canvas on which to do my landscapes and have tried to adapt the medium as best I can. I have learnt the hard way over the years that clay and ceramic glazes can be wilful and recalcitrant in co-operating with my vision!”

Her exhibition also includes vases, which in the past have been favourably compared to Margaret Preston, and more than two dozen painted ceramic reliefs, or tiles, which she needle-etches and underglazes in black and then rubs away, applies colours and glazes.

Bronte Pool, Sydney

Many of the tile reliefs depict iconic Sydney locations such as Bronte Pool, Camp Cove and Wylie’s Baths, and Parsley Bay. Kingston has lived most of her life at addresses within a stone’s throw of Sydney Harbour, and much of her work has reflected on its unique beauty. Like her brother Peter, who combines an affectionate view of Sydney with a pop sensibility, the tiles depict the beauty of the often almost preternaturally lush natural as well the built environment of Sydney, with a loving eye.

Wylie's Baths, Sydney

“Sydney's beautiful environment makes it easy to choose my subjects, but sadly many of the things I hold dear are under threat. Ironically, the beauty of the Harbour which makes Sydney so special also contributes to its architectural demise. The value of a water view has a fatal attraction for the ‘knock-down crowd’ and sadly, many of my ceramic reliefs have become historic as their subjects no longer exist,” she says.

Camp Cove, Sydney

“Like Peter, who has been a tireless protector of endangered buildings and says he is weary of being photographed in front of doomed buildings, I am ever saddened by loss of so much of our unique architectural heritage.”

It is part of the joy of this show that even as the wrecker’s ball demolishes ever more of the seaside homes our grandparents and parents built, for the barren new terrain of concrete “Tuscan” villas that now line our esplanades, the vernacular lives on at least in spirit, in the ceramic homes that Fairlie built.


The exhibition runs until 3 October at at Australian Galleries in Glenmore Road Paddington.

MAD MEN: MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION

by Larry Buttrose

Watching television, as we all are only too well aware, is a waste of time. Beyond news, current affairs and some documentaries, it is junk media content. If it’s not game shows it’s talent quests and “reality” shows about Americans marooned on a desert island without as much as a banana daiquiri. Then there are are the crimes against humanity, such as Big Brother and the leadfoot trogs of Top Gear.

This sort of guff is offensive enough, but television drama is a scarred moonscape, unless that is you find crime and cold-blooded murder entertaining, or are enthralled by the near-mystical insights of the teenagers from forensics. So it is approaching a miracle when a drama series worth watching happens along, as it did with Mad Men, the first series of which recently finished screening on SBS.

Why, some might ask, watch a show about the Madison Avenue ad-men of the 1960s? What is special about it, beyond the much remarked upon period art direction, and the trademark cool of the acting? What does it have beyond that?

The answer is good writing. In this show it is as if all these decades of creative writing courses at universities across the US have paid off all at once, and a generation of writers hitherto condemned to knocking together sitcoms or movies starring Drew Barrymore suddenly have a receptacle in which to pour all the precious insights they have learned from the likes of Robert McKee.

But beyond that, it has the most important ingredient of all, which is a little bit of magic. Any co-operative dramatic project - be it stage, film or TV - might perhaps possess all the necessary elements of script, cast, direction, design - and still fail, all too readily. To succeed it must work a little magic. It must constantly fascinate, beguile, intrigue, charm, surprise and challenge the audience, and more. Mad Men certainly does all that: it has its magic, in spades.

Like any good drama, more than anything else, it genuinely surprises. For instance, the Mad Men are horrible, male sociopaths who will do whatever it takes to get to the top. Virtually to a man they are chauvinist to a degree that never fails to surprise the contemporary viewer in its many manifestations, especially as these men belong to the educated professional elite of one of the leading cities on earth.

They are patronising, controlling and abusive to women. None of them seems to have any idea of how to love a woman, only possibly how to screw one. At least three of the agency’s married executives are conducting affairs, yet this is Eisenhower’s America, even more stridently “family values” than the Australia of John Howard, and about as authentic.

One also senses a chasm of emptiness inside these men, as though they have no idea whatever what they are looking for, beyond climbing over the next man to seek it. These Mad Men are indeed The Hollow Men.

The central character, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), has already taken most of his steps up the ladder, but retains a cold ruthlessness that extends from his business dealings into his home and marriage. Don is a hard case. He sees every business encounter as a war between men, and every pretty woman as a bedmate in waiting. There is actually little to redeem him as a character, and his back-story of a troubled childhood looks like a network instigated attempt to make him more conventionally sympathetic. But it is his emotional brutality and the degree to which he is lost as a man and a human being that make him compellingly all too real.

As Harvard academic and critic James Wood noted in a New Yorker last year (15 Dec 2008) in an article on Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, in which he also reflects upon Mad Men: ‘...mid-century American suburban man is so maddening because he is both a rank escapist and a conservative pragmatist: he has arrogated to himself twin rights that ought to be incompatible’.

Wood’s view would almost constitute a character assessment of Don Draper. As Yates himself is quoted by Wood: “... during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity over this country, by no means only in the suburbs - a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the McCarthy witch-hunts”.

The female characters are variously intelligent and clever, scheming and sly. But in the manner of Fifties conformity, they are almost unfailingly deferential to men, as if the only American women able to speak their minds before the 1960s were Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Parker.

Don’s wife Betty (January Jones) is a bird in a gilded cage, struggling to personify a picture-perfect suburban Jackie Kennedy at home with the kids out on Long Island, while Don stays in town in Manhattan week nights to see clients - but usually his downtown bohemian artist girlfriend.

Betty is aptly named. She could have been a subject for Betty Friedan’s landmark feminist text The Feminine Mystique, which saw the burgeoning burbs of the late 1950s and early 1960s as simmering with the bottled up angst and frustration of women denied freedom and opportunity. Friedan believed their sense of being trapped in the marital home was sapping their emotional and psychological wellbeing. Certainly this seems the case with Betty, who shows increasing signs of mental instability as the series proceeds - and as she secretly intuits that Don is having an affair.

Diametrically different is Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), Don’s personal secretary, a girl from hicksville who from the first moment she enters quietly shows that she is not willing to accept “woman’s role”, and when given a break chips away at the stereotype to rise to copywriter. As a whole, the women seem to be trembling on the verge of something immense: the second wave of feminism is rising - the times they are a’changing.

There is also Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), the voluptuous office siren, who questions our contemporary notions of beauty and sexiness. She is undeniably sexy, with a come-hither sensuality, but by the standards of our own times she would be considered by many, both men and women, to be plump with a big arse. How much have we gained, the show asks searchingly and often, but also how much have we lost. Joan uses her curves to gain influence and power in the old-fashioned way, through sexual allure to men.

The America of 1960 is on the cusp of generational change. The ageing patrician army commander in the White House is about to be replaced a young, handsome war hero with an intimate connection to showbiz: the Sixties are about to swing. And while the company’s portfolio might encompass accounts from traditional sources such as steel and tobacco, now there are travel destinations, weight-loss gadgets and cosmetics to peddle too. Any lingering postwar shadow is about to be swept into oblivion in a wave of consumerism.

This generational change is exemplified in the rise of Don and the decline of Roger Sterling (John Slattery) the sterling silver haired partner in the Sterling Cooper agency.

Don and Roger’s modus operandi is subtle competition, but in one memorable episode it bursts out into the open when Roger, sensing the threat from the younger Don, attempts a pre-emptive pass at Don’s wife Betty. Betty resists huffily, needless to say, but even her resistance is not enough for Don, who sniffs trouble.

The joust moves to a Manhattan restaurant. Roger orders oysters and martinis: Don, who claims he hasn’t eaten oysters before, orders another dozen, and more martinis. It is only when the competitive boozing and gorging is over that we realise they are not out to dinner, but lunch, and have to dash back to the office - for of all things a make or break meeting with Richard Nixon’s handlers to gain the Republican account for the forthcoming election campaign against Kennedy.

The lift is out of order, and they must climb long and hard up the stairs to get up to the office. Two decades Don’s senior, Roger can’t keep up, and almost passes out. In almost any Australian drama series, a heart attack would be de rigeur at this point. But it doesn’t happen then. Don goes on ahead, and is shaking hands with the Republicans in the foyer when Roger finally arrives. He smiles, but abruptly turns green around the gills, and without as much as a howdyado deposits his two dozen oysters and a pint of martini onto the agency axminster, right in front of the boots of the boys from the Grand Old Party.

It is a definitively brilliant scene, superbly set up and the drama of the pay-off calibrated impeccably. It will go down as a TV classic - as will the first season finale, the double ending when Don comes home to Thanksgiving with Betty and the children, followed by the same sequence with the house empty and them all gone, lost to him.

Another episode likely to be remembered is the one in which Betty and Peggy have sexual experiences, both without men. Betty’s involves a suitably out of balance washing machine, against which she fantasises about a salesman who tried to sell her an air conditioner. Peggy’s is with a pair of electric “slimming underpants” she is meant to try to strategise a campaign for, and which she finds stimulates her in ways she wasn’t expecting. It is emblematic of the storytelling of Mad Men that Betty’s pleasure comes from imagining herself with a man not unlike her husband, a salesman, while Peggy’s comes from trying on something that will further her career in the exclusively male world she has entered: a pair of pants.

At the end of season one we are left asking will she wear them or leave the job she has fought to get, that of copywriter, to mother her new baby? In 1960, the Mad Men still rule the roost and the world - but their cages are about to be rattled. And in the process, they might just become more human. After all, the alternative is MAD: mutually assured destruction.

GROUP 2 POETS

YOU HAVE REACHED THE POETS' CORNER OF THE WWW!



THE world wide web and new technology present all kinds of opportunities for those practising the most venerable of the literary dark arts, poetry.



KOMNINOS Zervos considers the brave new cyberworld of poetry in a short essay - and opens the door on an Aladdin’s digicave of digigems.

http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue2/kom/komintro.html
http://www.komninos.com.au/underground/flafiles/museumpiece.html




CAROL Novack ponders the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end and all major stops in between in this terrific music video of her poem In The Beginning.

http://www.drunkenboat.com/db10/10vis/novack/beginning.html





WHEN is a sheep not asleep? When it’s a fast-mouton cyberpoem by Peter Kenneally.

http://www.impactisnotaverb.com/mouton.html






RAE Desmond Jones is the Grange Hermitage of poetry - always good and only ever gets better.

http://raedeejay.blogspot.com/2009/07/for-larry-buttrose.html








JILL Jones takes us for a stroll down Ruby Street, peering in each lit poetic window on the way.

http://rubystreet.blogspot.com/2009/04/its-that-simple.html
http://rubystreet.blogspot.com/2009/01/koru.html
http://rubystreet.blogspot.com/2009/01/break-in-weather.htmlhttp://rubystreet.blogspot.com/2008/12/ego-reclothing.html





LES Wicks joins other poets in celebration in word and image of Sydney's greatest asset, its coastline.
http://sydneybeaches.tripod.com/guide.htm





"He’s not Jesus, but he’s a gentleman." What better reference could a bloke ask for? This and more in poems by Carly-Jay Metcalfe from the Stylus vault.

http://www.styluspoetryjournal.com/main/master.asp?id=915




"Sleek black/my cat lies against me/placed just right/for caresses" What would Tweety Pie tweet to a tweet like that? Rosemary Nissen-Wade twitters her verses to the cosmos.

http://passionatecrone.blogspot.com/2009/08/tweet-poems-for-july-2009.html

http://passionatecrone.blogspot.com/2009/07/tweet-poems-for-may-june-2009.html




DEB Matthews-Zott writes about the migrant experience of a young boy arriving from Germany to Australia, a place that he found “something like Egypt” in these three poems from her verse novel in progress, An Adelaide Boy.

http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2328/3411/1/Adelaide%20Boy.pdf

MEMOIR: MEETING ROBERT GRAVES

Larry Buttrose with Robert Graves, Deya, Mallorca, July 1976





MEMOIR: MEETING ROBERT GRAVES

by Larry Buttrose




1976

I stepped out onto the steep cobbled street outside the Villa Verde. I had arrived at the hostal’s door in the wilting afternoon heat of the day before, after having taken the overnight ferry from Barcelona, and the bus up from Palma, along with the locals in breeches and headscarves carrying bound clucking chickens on their laps.

I strolled down towards the centre of the village and the Cafe Del Monde. The hostal keeper had told me everyone in Deya spends at least an hour or so there every day, and thought it would be as good a place as any to begin my quest. After all the hitches and delays of my time back in Barcelona waiting for the letter from Graves’s secretary that hadn’t come, I sensed now the final obstacle might just be overcome.

I had only walked some twenty metres down from the Villa Verde when I saw a pale, pink-faced man staring absent-mindedly out his front window onto the laneway, drying teacups with a white tea-towel. I greeted him and he responded with a smile. He turned out to be English, quite. I explained that I was visiting Deya hoping to meet the poet Robert Graves. He replied that Robert would be calling for tea in less than half an hour, and would I be so kind as to join them.

Martin embodied Robert Morley in the role of Oscar Wilde. Affable and arch in strictly equal amounts, his vocation was writing musical comedies for children, the scores of which were scattered throughout his stone cottage. The front room was dominated by an enormous oak table, which I saw was set for tea: bread, butter, tea cups, saucers and plates, and jam, Martin confided, made by Robert's wife Beryl.

He prepared a pot of tea, taking his in staccato sips. This was, he informed me, probably the finest tea in the entire world, a vestige of contacts between his family and Asian traders going back quite some time. As he spoke, over his shoulder I saw a huge bank of cloud, entirely black, swirl in across the escarpment that soared behind the village and blot out the sky in a moment.

Regulars at his long-running daily tea party, Martin continued on, included Colin Wilson, Robert of course, and a miscellany of Huxleys. He stopped speaking just then and turned to the glass-panelled front door, where an old man stood outside, smiling. He was rigged out in the style almost of an actor, in white suit, black Spanish felt hat, and a blue-striped vest with silver buttons. The facial features were as he once himself related: nose bent, lips full but ascetic, eyes blue, wide and clear.

‘I think it will rain. Do you think it will rain?’ His words came in a lilting rush, trilled like a child’s, with a similar earnestness.

‘I don't know Robert,’ Martin sighed, ‘but do come in.’

Over tea Graves spoke at length of the weather, of what it had been like the day before, what might eventuate today, and predictions for tomorrow. There seemed a fitting sense of propriety to it though: a poet, a great poet, at the end of his life, quietly obsessing about the weather over tea.

After taking our leave from Martin we walked through the village out to his house, about a kilometre away. The storm clouds vanished from the peak as suddenly as they had come, and the afternoon sun was hot. We toiled up a long slow rise past olive groves, until he bounded on ahead of me, instantly playful.He regarded it as a wonderful joke that he could easily outdistance this visitor more than half a century his junior. He was a very fit man, particularly for one reported dead from war wounds sixty years previously.

The house was in the local style, double-storey sandstone with green shutters. Gardens flourished about it and a cool neatness within. I met his wife Beryl, a charming no-nonsense woman, who politely requested I not to tire him with too much talk. He had only returned from London that day, where he had been attending the shooting of the BBC’s television adaptation of I Claudius.

I enquired about his secretary, with whom I had made the initial arrangements for my visit. I had first written, entirely out of the blue, from Adelaide, with my request, enclosing half a dozen of my poems, and had been astonished when a reply had soon come that Mr Graves would see me. But after arriving in Spain I had received no further word, and crucially nothing awaited me at Poste-Restante in Barcelona, as had been agreed, regarding the timing of my visit. I had come somewhat to enjoy the waiting though, it had to be admitted, immersing myself in the piquantly perilous demi-monde of Barcelona.

Beryl answered that the secretary had left them some weeks previously. I realised that my letters, addressed to her by name, would have followed her all the way to her new post, somewhere in Switzerland.

I went into the living room where Graves was seated in an armchair. He pointed out a book on a shelf, and I brought it to him. It was his Five Pens In Hand, a collection of criticism and essays I had read. He pointed with a craggy forefinger to a page and I read selections out loud as he requested: On Pope: ‘A sedulous ape’. On Shelley: ‘Voice is too shrill’. On Wordsworth: ‘He disowned and betrayed his Muse.’ On Pound: ‘Cloacal ranting, snoot-cocking, pseudo-professorial jargon.’ On Dylan Thomas: ‘He gave his radio audiences what they wanted.’ On Eliot: ‘His poetic heart has died and has been given a separate funeral, but he continues to visit the grave wistfully and lay flowers on it.’ And on Auden: ‘The prescribed style of the 50s - compounded of all the personal styles available.’

I looked up at him, and saw he was watching me closely. The smile of a cheeky child was upon his lips. His eyes were cloudless skies. The rough old skin around his mouth bunched as he let out a laugh. The forefinger left the book, and pointed to his own forehead with its wisps of white hair on end. ‘Poets these days,’ he said, ‘not much knowledge.’

I wished to defend Shelley and his voice, debate Eliot's mournful wreaths and Pound’s ranting and Auden’s style, but he had passed on. His eyes were on the window now, fixed on the distant escarpment, where again storm clouds jostled. The range was dark as the slopes of Harlech he had once climbed: I imagined him back there now, a young man alone up where the vapours swirled.

Beryl came in with tea on a tray and sat with us, but Robert’s attention remained fixed on the window. Then apparently tuning back in to the room, he turned and asked where I was travelling next. I said I intended going to Ireland, that I had ancestors from there. He looked at me, entirely lucid now, with real concern on his features: ‘You're not Catholic are you?’

‘Certainly not,’ I replied, feigning shock. He laughed at this, as did Beryl. Nonetheless they seemed genuinely relieved, for my sake. ‘Anything but,’ I added. He gave me a slight nod, and another childlike smile.

‘I came here to request your Poet's Blessing,’ I said. The words sounded too loud to me as I spoke them, and hung in the air.

Graves looked at me once more. This time it was a stare, of scrutiny, one which assessed me utterly - my youth, my doubts and faults, my all-too obvious naiveté. Yet, he nodded.

‘You have it,’ he said.

Not long after, I walked back out through the gardens and out gate, and started the walk back to the village. It was hot again. For the second time in the afternoon the clouds had vanished from the mountain and the sun was strong. Perhaps there was something to the weather worth his attention after all.




1997

Twenty one years later I went back to Deya to research a novel based on my experiences and discovered that now it was called Deia. The Villa Verde hadn’t changed though, and even the old hostal keeper was still there. She even said she recognised me; I doubted it, but felt flattered nonetheless.

At breakfast on the hostal terrace I met two middle-aged women from Berlin. Heidi was a strong blonde fifty-year-old, fit and travelled, ringed and jewelled, with a husband back in Germany. Greta was a few years younger, dark and demure: getting over a divorce, Heidi mentioned.

In the early evening I encountered Greta on the main street. She was looking for Heidi because they had planned to go to an art gallery opening at La Residencia, the village’s swish hotel. ‘Owned by Richard Branson,’ Greta said. ‘Lady Di stays there.’ She thought Heidi might have gone shopping in Palma, and asked me if I would accompany her to the exhibition. As I had no other plans beyond a drink in the town’s only remaining cheap bar, I happily agreed.

The gate of La Residencia opened into an enclave of serene courtyards and shady nooks, of massive flagstones and tumbled blossom. The buildings were solid, beautifully dressed stone, and fronted by a line of dining tables that overlooked a lush garden and croquet lawn. One could not help but wonder how much of the village water supply went into keeping it that green.

The exhibition was in a side-room off a courtyard, and by the time we arrived a small crowd was milling about. They were nearly all arty Deia locals, many of them in their sixties and seventies, with short-cropped steel grey or white hair, dressed in linen. Most had deep suntans, especially the women, their skin purple-brown from years of baking in the sun.

Greta and I went inside to look at the work, which appeared mainly to be paintings of iridescent-coloured goldfish in iridescent-coloured water. The tones reminded me of the “Young Artists” of Bali, and I wondered if the artist had spent time there.When I asked Greta what she thought of the work, she seemed nervous about responding.

‘I don’t really know,’ she stuttered.

‘What, you don’t know if you like it?’

‘No. I would need to discuss it with Heidi I think. What do you think of it?’

‘Well, it’s not really to my taste.’

‘You mean you don’t like?’

‘It’s a bit too decorative for me.’

‘Oh,’ she said, then looked at me. ‘What does that mean, too decorative?’

I opened my mouth to reply, but realising the scale of what would need to be said, shrugged instead. ‘Perhaps we’d better have a drink,’ I said, moving towards the trestle table bar with its brimming vat of sangria.

‘Do you think they will let us drink?’

‘Why wouldn’t they? It’s a gallery opening.’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps they won’t.’

I asked the barman for two sangrias, but then Greta was afraid to take it. ‘It might get me drunk.’

‘I don’t think one sangria will get you drunk. It’s not strong. It’s mainly fruit pieces. Look.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said, ‘and that is where all the alcohol hides.’

‘Have a soft drink then.’

‘I’ll take a Pepsi please,’ she told the barman, and he poured it for her and placed it on the white tablecloth next to the sangria already there for her.

‘You mean, you’d rather have a Pepsi than a sangria?’

‘Yes. Why not?’

‘But, it’s horrible, Pepsi.’

‘Well, you know I do prefer Coke, yes, but they do not appear to have it.’

She went to take the Pepsi, but her hand stopped. ‘You say the sangria is not strong.’

‘No, it is not strong.’

‘Perhaps then I have the sangria.’

‘I think that’s a good decision.’

‘But perhaps not.’

The barman and I both watched quietly fascinated as for the next few moments her hand went from glass to glass, touching, almost taking each. The tiny drama was punctured by the sudden arrival of Heidi. Greta was so glad to see her that she threw her arms around her, and it seemed for a moment she would cry.

‘Where have you been!!’

‘Palma. Only to Palma. Have you got a drink?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Greta said, snatching up the sangria and sipping. ‘It’s very nice.’

‘Yes it’s a good drink sangria.’

Heidi and I kissed cheeks, and the pair of them drifted off, and I asked the barman for a refill.

The crowd was building up, and the vat of sangria was already visibly drained. The locals caught up, hugged, gossiped. One woman told me she had come from England twenty years ago for a holiday and never gone back.

‘Never, not even to visit family, friends?’

‘No!’ she declared. ‘And do you know, when I came I was going to paint, I was going to write, I was going to do so much! And do you know what I’ve done here these last twenty years? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! And it’s wonderful!’

Later I found myself speaking with a woman originally from Segovia. She had lived many years on Mallorca, and introduced me to her daughter, a wispy blond angel.

‘Ah, and here is my husband too,’ she said, ‘Tomas.’

We shook hands. Tomas was a tall man in a bone-grey linen suit. He had a long face and a thick, straight grey hair, full lips and blue eyes. I would have recognised him anywhere.

‘Is your surname Graves, by any chance?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re Robert’s son.’

‘One of them, yes. The youngest.’

He had a trilling, amused voice and a charming yet almost shy manner. I told him how I had come to the village two decades before to meet his father, and asked him if he wrote too.

‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘I have just written a book, although it’s not literature.’ He went on to describe the book, which advised people on how to maintain houses on Mallorca when they buy them as absentee landlords. ‘It’s a problem here. You see, so many people, from Germany, England, mainland Spain, buy old houses. But they don’t know how to maintain them, and they go to ruin.’

I asked him if he had read his father’s work very much.

‘Yes, the novels. And the poetry.’

‘What about The White Goddess?’

‘A rather difficult book really,’ he said. ‘I think a lot of people have trouble with it. Do you know it’s only recently been discovered that when the second edition came out in the early 1950s, a whole paragraph got transposed. It’s been in the wrong place ever since, but the mistake has only just come to light.’

‘You mean a whole generation of readers didn’t realise there was anything wrong?’

‘That’s right!’

‘Well I‘ve read it a couple of times, and I didn’t realise it.’

He laughed. ‘Well there you are then. Did you enjoy it?’

‘Yes. A remarkable book.’

He nodded politely.

‘I’ve visited your father’s grave up at the churchyard,’ I said. ‘I was surprised it wasn’t crowded with literary pilgrims.’

‘Sometimes there are quite a few people up there. People like to leave him things too. We find poems they’ve left. The other week someone left a kilo of peaches.’

The crowd divided in front of us, and I saw a man in a long black raincoat with orange face-paint and a fish mask on the top of his head come towards us sucking water from a plastic bottle and squirting it up in the air through a plastic straw.

‘Oh, I think the performance is starting,’ Tomas said.

The artist made his way to a small podium where he stood up with a handwritten sheet held with arm outstretched, and declaimed a poem about water. Before each mention of“water” he would take a mouthful from the bottle and then gargle the word. It went on for about five minutes. As it ended, a big man with a steel grey crewcut elbowed me and muttered “Christ”. I wondered what Robert would have said.

Through a contact I made in the village I got a telephone number for Beryl and dialled it in the booth on the main street. She answered, and I explained that I had met her briefly twenty years before when I had come and met Robert. I wondered if it would be possible to drop by briefly. She was very welcoming, and suggested I come by at four o’clock that afternoon.

Robert and Beryl married during World War II, after he and the American poet Laura Riding ended their more than decade long relationship. He had met Laura in 1926, and soon afterwards his first marriage broke down. He and Laura moved to Spain, to Deya - which Gertrude Stein had told them was “paradise, if you can stand it” - and they had lived there until 1939, when Laura returned to the US. Robert and Beryl moved back to Deya soon after the end of World War II.

I bought a fruit flan at the village bakery and set out in warm afternoon sun for the walk to Canellun. After a few minutes I saw it up ahead, double storeyed with its green shutters.

I opened the iron gate and stepped inside the walled garden, passed a grove of orange trees and a shed, and walked up to the back door, which I remembered from my time here before gave entry to the kitchen. I knocked once, and two small dogs rushed up barking. Behind them was Beryl, kindly-looking, smiling warmly, grey hair still as thick as that of her son Tomas.

We shook hands and she showed me into the kitchen. I gave her the fruit flans I had bought.

‘Ah, from the bakery. They look very nice. I think we’ll need spoons to eat these.’

We sat on the sofa with tea and talked. She had now lived for fifty years in Canellun. When she and Robert first came here together, just after World War II, they had to fetch wood to chop for heating. They had no car, she said, and the bus only went into Palma once a day, at 7.30 in the morning. Electricity came on in the mornings and went off late at night, after the mayor and owner of the little hydro turbine closed up the sluice gate.

‘You were always working, just trying to keep up with the necessities in those days,’ she said. ‘These days it’s easier, but now there are so many cars on the road. Back then you could walk down the road and not see a single one.’

She mentioned she had been working with a collaborator, putting together Robert’s complete poems, and showed me the first volume of it, a very handsome edition.

‘There will two more. I have galleys for the second, and the third will have some poems previously uncollected.’

I mentioned the anecdote Tomas had told me - that an entire paragraph had been misplaced in one of the early editions of The White Goddess, and somehow no-one had noticed ever since. She elaborated on it, saying a poet working for the publisher had found the mistake in painstakingly picking through the text. He had been working on it because a new edition was being published soon to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its publication.

She showed me the typescript introduction written for the anniversary edition and indicated the passage that had long been misplaced, now put right.I marvelled that I had not realised it when I read it, nor had anyone else for that matter: but then, I supposed, it was that kind of book.

‘T.S. Eliot at Faber accepted the original manuscript you know, after it had been rejected by other publishers. Even The Greek Myths was rejected at first. It was hard for us when it happened, because we had no money at the time. But then Penguin picked it up, and it’s been in print ever since.’

As she topped up our cups, I looked around me. There was a screen print of Graves in his familiar Spanish hat on the wall, and a magazine of the Robert Graves Society on the coffee table, and a few other pieces of memorabilia, but I sensed little of him lingering here. It felt as if it had slipped the knot of life cleanly, and gone wherever spirits go.

I mentioned to Beryl that when I had first visited, I had come in with Robert and she had been standing in the kitchen, and asked me not to tire him out with too much talk. We had gone in and had our talk, and I had asked him to give me his poet’s blessing, and he done so. 'As he had been blessed,bySwinburne,’ I said.

‘Yes, pity it was Swinburne,’ Beryl replied. ‘I suppose he was all there was about. And you know he was blessed by someone, Tennyson...? and someone blessed him... Wordsworth was it...? anyway it goes back quite a way.’

I said I suspected Robert might not be very proud of me, because even with his blessing I hadn’t done much as a poet, my works barely known in my own country, much less beyond it. I didn't even write poetry as much as I would like, and dwelt more in the realm of prose writers nowadays.

She regarded me closely. ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ll get back to it. You’ve got plenty of time.’

‘I would like to place some flowers on Robert’s grave,’ I said, ‘and was wondering if you could suggest what kind of flower he would like the most.’

‘Oh, any will do,’ Beryl smiled. ‘Robert didn’t care about things like that very much. You know, before he died, people asked where he wanted to buried - the Deia churchyard or Westminster Abbey. And he said, I don’t care, once I’m dead what does it matter? He was always like that. He is buried in the churchyard of course, but funnily enough he is also in Westminster, in Poets’ Corner with the War Poets, because when they did the War Poets he was still living, but they wanted him to be part of it, so he is there too.’

That is a kind of fate only a poet might know, I couldn’t help but think, to be buried in more than one place.

After our tea Beryl took me up to Robert’s writing room, at the far end of the house: ‘he went up there every morning after breakfast and shut the door - and no-one could enter until he came out.’ There she also showed me annotated first editions of their own poems that he and Laura Riding had printed on their Seizin Press.

I asked her about Laura Riding.

‘She was a nice person, very lively,’ Beryl said. ‘But she often caused breaks between Robert and other people. But I liked her. There is a biography being written now, you know. Several all of a sudden, I think. You know how it is with publishing.’

Something more came then that I wanted to ask her, about how she had felt about his muses - the various other women he had found as sources of poetic inspiration - whether she and Robert had worked it out between them, and how honest he had been about his feelings.

But I didn’t ask. Instead I said: ‘With biographies it’s of course usually the things left out that are the most interesting,’and she nodded agreement.

Beryl walked me back down the path, and farewelled me at the gate with a handshake and a smile.

As I walked away, back towards the village, in sunshine as hot as it had been those 21 years before, I realised that she was right, that it didn’t matter what flowers you took to Robert’s grave. He was never sentimental, but was as tough-minded yet alive to every breeze and bud as every poet should be.

#

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSvBC1C-6DA&feature=channel_page

ODE ON A MALLEY URN

The Resurrection of Ern Malley, 2004, Garry Shead



The longest-lived - and it would seem, best loved - in Australia’s tradition of literary frauds however remains that of Ern Malley. The hoax was perpetrated upon the doyen of literary modernism of the 1940s, the dandy Max Harris, by a couple of enlisted poets who reckoned poetry without your traditional rhyme and meter to be fit for little but the settees of poseurs and show ponies.

James McAuley and Harold Stewart concocted the poems as “a serious literary experiment” to see if the modernist push could discern “the real product from consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense”. But really it was a joke Joyce, intended to humiliate men in cravats.

Purporting to be the sister of the now-deceased Malley, they sent Harris a group of poems under the title The Darkening Ecliptic. He took the bait down the gullet, splashing news of the new poet Ern Malley across the Nolan-painted cover of his avant-garde journal Angry Penguins.

The gleeful exposure of the hoax detonated a depth-charge in the literary arts of the 1940s so powerful that ripples from it are still being felt today. Peter Carey revisited it in his novel My Life as a Hoax, and last year Griffith Review published six poems by John Stephenson written as new and previously undiscovered Malleys, as a humorous homage.

Artist Garry Shead has long meditated upon the hoax and the poems themselves - and as did Sidney Nolan with the Ned Kelly legend, and later Malley too - and produced a series of paintings from 2000-2006 just published in a book titled The Apotheosis of Ern Malley. (The book was first issued last year, but Shead was disappointed with the standard of reproduction, and it has now been re-released in a new edition.)

Shead - perhaps best known to the literary world for his 1993 Archibald Prize-winning portrait of publisher Tom Thompson as a quizzical Richard III - interleaves the original poems with paintings reflecting on their themes, and upon the act of concocting them by the uniformed servicemen McAuley and Stewart.

His works meld a poignantly passionate lyricism with wry wit and accomplished painterly panache. They are works too of a high romanticism, in which poetic endeavour triumphs over the meanness of the mundane world.

Shead depicts Ern Malley as a poet who in Poem, 2006, sits enraptured in a poetic trance before his typewriter while a magpie flutters in with his laurel wreath in its beak, and a naked young woman lingers on his bed - an image of Keatsean romanticism down to the screwed up pages tossed onto the floor.

Meanwhile, in The Darkening Ecliptic, 2006, we have seen the uniformed soldier schemers McAuley and Stewart concocting their Malley verses while a woman (the Muse?) stands turned away at the window.

Depicted as a Christ-like figure, Ern Malley with his laurel wreath for a crown of thorns rises from death (and failure) in The Resurrection of Ern Malley, 2004, while the soldiers scarper from the room, and his verses are reassembled on the floor under the gaze of the seeming Muse.

As such, Shead has wrought from the Malley legend a figure of a poet who is mocked by the world, but who in the end triumphs from beyond death (and life) through his works. Bizarrely enough, McAuley and Stewart even presaged this in their own lines, “Now I find that once more I have shrunk/ To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,/ I had read in books that art is not easy/ But no-one warned that the mind repeats/ In its ignorance the vision of others.”




To some people, the abiding appeal of the Ern Malley affair is something of a mystery itself, but at its core is a debate which for decades was hotly pursued in Australian artistic circles and has echoes today in various arguments about postmodernism: the entire modernist enterprise. McAuley and Stewart were poets who resented the rush and gush of modernism coming our way from Britain, Europe and US, in all its too-clever allusiveness, and, in the case of some works, its seemingly purposeful obscurantism.

The irony though is that in sending it up and humiliating modernism’s champions here, McAuley and Stewart created poems that transcended their own petty designs. Put bluntly, to many readers the Ern Malley poems are more resonant than any of the “serious” works of McAuley and Stewart. After all, Ern is still being read and discussed: they are not.

Indeed, the poems unwittingly question of the origin of creativity, and it would seem a fair hypothesis that in allowing themselves the liberty to “play”, and bypassing their own stylistic and conventional bonds, McAuley and Stewart penned works of lasting note despite themselves.

As Barry Pearce puts it in his Preface to The Apotheosis of Ern Malley, after quoting one of the poems, “Who cannot be startled by the electric edge of such lines? These pithy, cobbled together phrases plucked randomly from dictionaries, science journals and even throwaway lines by Shakespeare, are as intriguing as fragments of the unconscious aesthetic of nature laid out on a laboratory table and arranged with a fresh, free-associating eye. Something new was made.”

In his Introduction, Sasha Grishin, the Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History at ANU, reflects on the issue of authorship raised through the Ern Malley episode, remarking “What does it mean to be an author? Does it matter that there may be uncertainty as to the exact identity of the bard from Stratford-upon-Avon? Does it matter that none of Shakespeare's original dramatic manuscripts has survived in an autograph copy?” And here of course we come full circle back to postmodernism, to Barthes and his “death of the author” and his “tissue of quotations”.

Thus we have the irony of two “bored Sydney poets” who wrote all sixteen of the Malley poems “on a lazy Saturday afternoon in October 1943”. How could they have known that in spite of their actual intentions they were creating poems which Professor Grishin remarks “are some of the most famous and controversial poems to have ever been published in Australia, and have received widespread recognition internationally.”

The irony is that the larrikins who created Ern Malley were conservatives, not radicals; that they were trying to resist change, instead of creating it. The irony is too that without them exposing their hoax, the poems would have subsided into the pages of an obscure literary journal of 1940s Australia, and, like nearly all poetry ever published, lie forgotten amid its brittled pages.

In engineering the hoax, and then in exposing it, they created Ern Malley, and they made us look at “his” poems. Yet he does not exist - he never did. Who was he then but them, McAuley and Stewart, aspects of themselves they were afraid of, or discounted, even despised; their creative selves who despite themselves conjured the ghost of a “deceased” nonentity, and through his voice uttered their most enduring verses.

What better figure, then, for an artist to invoke in paint, a literary phantom whose works came to dwarf their puny creation? No wonder Shead draws upon religious iconography in some of the works of this book - and little wonder too in its title. No wonder either that some of the most arresting works depicted are Shead's beautifully decorated ceramic urns. 



First published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 13-14 June 2009