Underline Issue 6

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ISSUE SIX: AUTUMN 2018

For the love of reading

Ceridwen Dovey Unravelling the strands of a shared history, Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives examines the inescapable power our pasts hold over the present.

IN THIS ISSUE: PETER CAREY | 200 YEARS OF FRANKENSTEIN | JULIAN BARNES | TAYARI JONES

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In This Issue Eavesdropping on Inner Voices Ceridwen Dovey reflects on ‘draining the swamplands’ of her soul

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In the Garden of the Fugitives An extract from Ceridwen Dovey’s addictive and unsettling new novel

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Grasping the Thistle A guide to four of Peter Carey’s most remarkable Australian stories

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A Long Way from Home 10 An extract from Peter Carey’s interrogation of 1950s Australia The Long Unspoken Armistead Maupin joins the dots between two profound writing experiences, decades apart

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The Only Story An extract from Julian Barnes’ latest map of the human heart

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Forever Frankensteined 20 To celebrate 200 years of Frankenstein, we offer an extract of, and rate five horror books against, Mary Shelley’s masterpiece An Introduction to Everything In Autumn, Karl Ove Knausgaard details the intricacies of the world

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An American Marriage An extract from Tayari Jones’ investigation of injustice, betrayal and hope

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End Notes Collected autumn reading

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ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY | IMAGES USED UNDER LICENCE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Underline Issue Six: Autumn 2018

underline For the love of reading

Every quarter, Underline brings together extracts, interviews, articles, short stories, reflections and much more to celebrate brilliant writing in its many forms.

Designed to be dog-eared and devoured at your leisure, this is a chance to pause and delve a little further into some of the world’s finest literature, and the minds behind it.

We hope you enjoy leafing through these pages as much as we did compiling them.

BOOKS FEATURED IN UNDERLINE ARE AVAILABLE AT ALL GOOD BOOKSTORES

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REFLECTION CERIDWEN DOVEY

Eavesdropping on Inner Voices ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY | IMAGES USED UNDER LICENCE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK.COM | AUTHOR PHOTO: SHANNON SMITH

By Ceridwen Dovey In the Garden of the Fugitives is Ceridwen Dovey’s powerful examination of obsession, guilt, the dangerous morphing of desire into control, and the influence of the past over the present. Here she offers some insights into the novel’s creation, and the delicate interlacing of its themes.

A few years ago, I published an essay in the Monthly in which I called out authors who write thinly veiled autobiographical fiction for their ‘ruthlessness’ in betraying those closest to them. I quoted Colm Tóibín’s warning, ‘You have to be a terrible monster to write.’

A few people, on reading my new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives, have teased me, ‘So, you’ve embraced being a monster, have you?’ But the insight I arrived at by the end of that essay, while contemplating Helen Garner’s brilliant ‘auto fiction’, is that what I’d thought of as my self-righteous refusal to write what I know because it could hurt somebody was in fact a very different kind of fear, one I suspect many women artists share: I won’t write what I know because it might bore somebody.

As the character Nicola in Garner’s novel The Spare Room admits, ‘But you see, all my life I’ve never wanted to bore people with the way I feel.’ I was apparently not

afraid of being a monster, but of being a boring monster – and could there be anything worse?

I may have come a little closer to draining the swamplands of my soul in this novel, but I prefer to think of it as writing towards what I want to know, as Colum McCann has characterised his approach. In setting out to write this book, what I wanted to know was, what is the form that might hold some of my experiences together, and in the process, transform them into something foreign to me?

I was inspired in this by Elena Ferrante’s Paris Review interview from 2015, where she says: ‘The most urgent question for a writer may seem to be, “What experiences do I have as my material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate?” But that’s not right.

The more pressing question is, “What is the word, what is the rhythm of the sentence, what tone best suits the things I know?”’

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So I could only begin to write this book once I’d found the right tone, the right structure: in this case, an adversarial, duelling wordplay between two antagonists, mimicking the dialogic form of psychotherapy and how it awakens countervoices within the self. The contesting voices of the characters Royce and Vita in the book also mimic and anticipate the experience of reading itself, that sense of any book meeting the reader halfway, not only welcoming but challenging them. Virginia Woolf, in a draft of a lecture she gave in 1926 titled ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, advised readers to ‘Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play at.’

One of my book’s core themes is the often twisted relationship between talented women and powerful men, something that has been a topic of much public

of one of J.M. Coetzee’s characters, ‘whose fault I am’.

The artistic block she suffers from is linked to her sense that people like her should now remain silent, that she is on the wrong side of history for autobiography.

What is the wrong side of history, if you take the long view? To address that question, Pompeii as an archaeological site figures strongly in the book. I visited Pompeii twenty years ago, when I was eighteen, and always remembered how oppressive it felt to be in a place so dense with history I couldn’t comprehend. My mind kept trying to make false connections between that ancient, alien past and the present. I find it intriguing that we often resist letting the past remain respectfully strange, opaque.

Of course, no writer really knows or understands what we’re doing in our own books. If you decide to read it,

‘I may have come a little closer to draining the swamplands of my soul in this novel, but I prefer to think of it as writing towards what I want to know.’

discussion and outrage in recent years. When the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in 2017, I was blown away

by Jia Tolentino’s commentary in the New Yorker on what Weinstein’s particular predations reveal about this dynamic. Her words echo something I explore in the novel, the effects of the bait-and-switch between interest in a woman’s work and interest in her body: ‘A powerful man sees you, a woman who is young and who thinks she might be talented, a person who conveniently exists in a female body, and he understands that he can tie your potential to your female body, and threaten the latter, and you will never be quite as sure of the former again.’

But another of the novel’s themes muddies these ethical waters, and makes assuming that position of female victimhood more complicated – the idea from trauma theory that literature, like psychoanalysis, can explore the unfinished business of the past. Vita is obsessed with tracing her own accountability for wrongdoing at a historical, political level; of finding out, in the words 4

I hope you can, as Woolf once described her pleasures in reading, read yourself into ‘the middle of a world’, like ‘shutting the doors of a Cathedral’. And if nothing else, may my book give you, as the character Royce says in the novel, a break from that voice in your head, by letting you eavesdrop on other people’s inner voices for a little while – the greatest gift of reading fiction.

EXTRACT

In the Garden of the Fugitives

BY CERIDWEN DOVEY

Given our history, Vita, I’m aware you may decide not to read this. I turned seventy this past May, though I don’t expect you to care. For me this long-anticipated leap year (MMXX, as the Romans would have written it) has brought unwelcome news. The rest of humankind advances bravely toward its future while I stew in sickness, and in my own nostalgia, as everybody warned would happen at this time of life. It’s the craven need for absolution that has taken me by surprise. My thoughts are tuned ever more to Kitty, and to you. I am not a religious man, yet here I am, stuck in religious mode, coming to you as a supplicant.

I have something to propose, but I need to know you’re still there, that you might be prepared to hear me out.

Yours, Royce

Since I broke off contact, I’ve thought about you often.

Mostly unkindly. But there – I have thought about you.

You’ve timed your latest entreaty well, which I’m sure is no coincidence. I’m crawling towards the abyss of early middle age myself. In a few months I will turn forty, as you would know. I read your email and was reminded that you’re one of the strangest, most significant things that ever happened to me. I don’t just mean the money. It was the quality of your attention. The generous yet questionable nature of it. Nobody has ever been so invested in me making good on whatever raw talent I once possessed – not even my parents, for their love was always unconditional. Yours came with strings attached.

Vita

My dear, your reply is more than I deserve. It made me light-headed, poised somewhere between apprehension and happiness.

I’ll be clear about my proposal. Lately, I have begun excavating my memories of Kitty, a process that has been more than cathartic: it has been purgative, purifying.

It has taken me a long time to look directly at all the images of her lodged in the undulations of my brain— for years I was stuck on a single, painful frame of her standing at the rim of Vesuvius, a fumarole within its core gently steaming behind her. That was the ending. In writing about her I am finally able to think instead of our beginning. All I need now is a receptive reader.

Perhaps you might like to do something similar for me and dig around in your own past, get rid of whatever it is that blocks you. Forgive me for saying it, but time is running out for you too. I have waited patiently until now for you to fulfill your early artistic promise. Under the right conditions, I believe it is still within your power to alchemize that potential into actual art. The rewards will be worth it; you know they always are with me. I am, if nothing else, an expert listener, something else we have in common.

Yours, Royce

My last voluntary contact with you, seventeen years ago – you could not have forgotten – was a letter saying I never wanted to hear from you again. A request you chose to ignore. I could not afford to vanish entirely, and risk losing those bonus cheques with your spidery signature that arrived every two years like clockwork. So there was never a clean break, you always knew where to find me.

Once the cheques stopped arriving, exactly ten years after my graduation, the birthday cards continued, asking if I was flourishing.

You’re not of a generation to have these reminders automated. I imagine you still keep a paper diary, ordered 5

‘There, you see, we can fill in each other’s gaps and somewhere between us may lie the truth of ourselves.’ – Royce

from the alumni association of our alma mater, with a dark maroon cover and the crest discreetly embossed on the top right corner. Only those in the know would recognise it: three open books, the Latin for ‘truth’ split into syllables across their pages.

These things mattered to you a great deal, I mean the signifiers of a person’s educational lineage. I recall your college class ring – class of ’71? ’72? – most clearly.

I’d seen those clunky gold rings on the pinkies of my male classmates, markers of East Coast boarding schools, modern-day royal seals. They were useful as beacons of what kind of boy to avoid. On your hand the sight of the ring filled me with pity. Those boys were parading their power in the present, but you were still clinging to old symbols, old associations, to tell you who you were.

I understand what you’re asking of me. Mutual confession, the inside view.

I’m open to the idea, but for reasons of my own.

Vita

How wonderful to get you in stereo again, Vita. Rudely, I’ve not asked the basics. Are you well? Are your parents well? Are you still living in Mudgee, on the olive farm?

I write this from a very humid Boston. I have hardly left my air-conditioned townhouse this summer. Usually I escape to the house in Vermont, but the various commitments of dying—of what it does not matter—have kept me sweating it out here instead.

The only respite from the heat outside comes late in the evening. If my energy permits I go walking on the Common, past the illuminated softball fields, all the way up to the spray pool at Frog Pond. A breeze comes off the river, or from the sea, it’s hard to tell. Almost every night there’s music drifting across the grass from the Bandstand.

Yesterday evening I felt so revived by my walk that I decided to treat myself to a late restaurant dinner. Since it’s rare for me to have an appetite these days, I no longer mind dining out alone. The waitstaff were extra attentive.

The sommelier spent time taking me through the cellar offerings. I couldn’t manage dessert but I did have a glass of Sauternes, my favorite, as you know.

It made me think of our very first dinner together. Do 6

you remember? I had ordered a bottle of Château d’Yquem to go with the warm pear sabayon. It was produced on Montaigne’s family estate in Bordeaux, though in his day they amassed their fortune not from sweet wine but from salted fish, similar to the local delicacy Kitty and I used to eat in new Pompei.

You mentioned that you happened to be reading Montaigne’s ‘On Cannibals’ in your social theory class, his reflections on a long-ago tribe’s tradition of roasting and eating their enemies, even sending portions of the meal to absent friends and family members.

‘Jungle takeout!’ I laughed, and you looked uncomfortable. Montaigne, you told me, was the father of cultural relativism and recommended we suspend judgment of those cannibals. You paraphrased him: while we quite rightly judge their faults we are blind to our own.

Even then it gave me a little chill of recognition.

The sommelier arrived at our table, and poured a neat spiral of wine for you to taste. I must have bored you to tears, going on about the two types of Botrytis cinerea infection in the grapes of the Bordeaux region.

Gray rot, which ruins the grapes, and noble rot, which partially raisins the grapes and gives the dessert wine its concentrated flavor. Yet you made me feel as if it were the most interesting thing you’d ever heard.

Partially raisined is an apt description of my own appearance these days. I would like to think that, as with all humans who have not been blessed with good looks, my own rot is noble rather than gray. I have had less to lose to old age.

I am indeed still in Mudgee. My parents have passed away (cancer, heartbreak). I see your old habits of surveillance die hard, but I am almost flattered by such conscientious snooping, for who else would care?

Our first dinner in old Boston. You ordered me the halibut, made a fuss of telling me that its name derived from being eaten on ancient holy days, and it arrived before me glistening with tarragon beurre blanc. I had to disguise how little I liked it.

You were bald, or at least balding, or maybe only going grey. Tall. A mild squint. Or am I remembering you as uglier than is reasonable? Back then I saw you as nothing but

middle-aged: I was looking at the world as a 21-year-old does, in thrall to my own immortality.

Near the end of the meal, you recounted the story of your last visit to your father in Vermont before his death, when you were still at college yourself. How you’d known that he loved you because he left a glass of milk in the fridge for your midnight snack, as he had when you were younger.

I’d wondered why you couldn’t pour it yourself, whether this was a tic peculiar to your relationship with him or some important clue to the entire culture. America and its traditions still mystified me, even in the fall of my senior year, when I could no longer claim to be a fresh transplant from other parts of the New World.

‘Why do adults drink so much milk here?’ I asked. In my dining hall, I’d watched grown men drink glass after glass of milk at dinner to wash down heaped plates of fried food.

But it was the wrong question, a rare slip-up for me. I was the queen of questions, unfailingly pitching them at the proper emotional register. Questions as presents to be opened.

You stirred in your seat, and a waiter appeared like a wraith to replace the linen napkin that had dropped to the floor. You would have preferred that I ask about your father. So I did.

I didn’t have to fake my interest – I was interested, in your father, in you, in everything and everyone around me. Anything you can say about America is true, someone once said. You can never get to the bottom of the place, you can never pin the people down. Whatever it is you’re up to here, Royce, you are still true to type in that regard.

And so am I – an ever curious observer.

A touching detail, the glass of milk my father used to pour for me. I had forgotten it. There, you see, we can fill in each other’s gaps and somewhere between us may lie the truth of ourselves.

Our memories are always imperfect, Kitty used to say.

We have to leave ourselves clues—photos, scrapbooks, journals—or our very own pasts become inaccessible, though we lived through every moment. What hope, then, of deciphering somebody else’s past, let alone the history of an ancient civilization? She didn’t mean by this

that we shouldn’t try, but she did understand that in her work she would always be on the losing side of the battle against oblivion.

In the mail today was a save-the-date for my college class’s fiftieth reunion next year. Fifty years. The received wisdom is that you should only attend a reunion if you’ve been a spectacular success or a spectacular failure, these being the states most attractive to others. The worst is to get stuck in the middling no-man’s-land. That wisdom has held true in my experience, at least until my fortyfifth reunion a few years ago, when people seemed to have come full circle. They no longer cared what they had or hadn’t made of their lives. Wealth was hardly mentioned—the sheen of it had worn off. Conversations were open, honest. Even those who had previously turned their backs on their college experience now felt wistful about those years.

At the Friday night barbecue several classmates, newly bereaved, asked my advice on how to live alone. We were being served lamb koftas by undergraduates working the reunions, just as you once did. In the courtyard lit with lanterns, I yearned for Kitty. Each time somebody tapped me on the shoulder I held my breath and hoped it might be her forever youthful ghost.

All I could recommend to my classmates as a tonic for loneliness was travel, but if you’re not used to it, the vertigo of being in a strange place can make you feel as if you’ve paid for a seat in the boat on the River Styx and are heading toward the underworld’s marshlands. Journeys need a point, a narrative arc. I was always traveling to be near Kitty, or to catch a glimpse of you.

I won’t make it to my reunion next year. I’ve been agonizing over what to write as my personal entry for the yearbook. It will be my last message to my peers, yet when I think of what to say I keep lapsing into cliché. If I submit anything at all, perhaps it should be a sketch I once made of a mosaic skeleton on the wall of a villa outside Pompeii. The skeleton is reclining with a lurid, toothy grin as if at a feast, cup full. The Latin inscription reads Enjoy your life. Which made Kitty and me laugh at the time. How self-evident! But it is the only good advice the old have to give.

Extracted from In the Garden of the Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey. Hamish Hamilton, March 2018.

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A BRIEF GUIDE TO...

PETER CAREY

Grasping the Thistle In the forty-plus years since the publication of his first story collection, The Fat Man in History, Peter Carey has become one of the world’s most celebrated literary voices. One of only three authors to win two Man Booker Prizes, he has also twice won the illustrious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and has been awarded three Miles Franklins. Add to this dozens of other local and international awards and nominations, film and stage adaptations, multiple honorary degrees and fellowships, recognition as an Officer of the Order of Australia, and even an appearance on a postage stamp, and you assemble a picture of one of the most internationally recognised Australian authors of a generation.

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Carey has also been a resident of New York City for three decades.

But through the settings, characters and themes of many of his fourteen novels to date, he demonstrates a deeply interrogative sense of, and affinity for, his country of birth.

1985’s Illywhacker followed deceitful trickster Herbert Badgery around the continent; 1988’s Oscar and Lucinda brought to life late-nineteenth-century New South Wales; 2000’s True History of the Kelly Gang gave voice to the infamous Victorian bushranger; 2014’s Amnesia drew lines between historical events and our modern identity.

Through these stories and others, Carey has continually drawn attention

to the nuances and irreverence of Australianness. But behind the largerthan-life characters, ripping yarns and unmistakable landscapes simmer the oft-unspoken consequences and contradictions of our history. Not only is Illywhacker a rascally romp, but it also exposes a modern white Australia built on lies. Not only is Oscar and Lucinda an awkward love story, but it also explores the impacts of Christianity on this country’s stories. Not only is Kelly Gang a classic outlaw tale, but it also examines the failings of postcolonial Australia to break free from racist, imperial traditions. And so on…

With his latest work, A Long Way from Home, this son of a Bacchus

PHOTO: MATT COLLINS

Peter Carey continues to tackle the conflicts at the heart of being Australian.

Marsh car salesman interrogates an Australia that bears close resemblance to that of his 1950s childhood.

Yes, there are laughs and moments of frivolity. But on this wild ride around the country, by way of the famous Redex Car Trial, Carey conjures a vivid novel that cuts to the heart of the crimes committed as Europeans took possession of a timeless culture.

‘This is the novel I spent my whole life not knowing how to write,’ Carey says. ‘To finally confront our secret history was like waking up in blood-stained sheets, to realise that everything I had – my land, my comfort, my way of life – was only possible because my British ancestors had tried to break a 50,000-year-old culture. I was the beneficiary of a genocide.

‘The business of writers is to imagine what it is like to be someone else. It is a daily exercise in empathy.

If we can’t imagine what it is to be someone else then we can’t fulfil our role in society. So the question is: how are you going to write about someone else, someone with a different life experience, different values, different language, and do it in such a way that those people – who you’re presuming to represent on the page – feel happy with it, or don’t feel insulted or slighted or misunderstood by it?

‘There are four books I’m very proud of, those where ambition and ability met, and this is one of them.

My hope is that this will now prove the best thing I have ever done, but even if I have failed I am pleased to have lived long enough to have grasped the thistle.’

Here we offer an extract of A Long Way from Home, and revisit a handful of Carey’s novels that triumphantly kick up the red dust of home.

unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Herbert Badgery might very well be the embodiment of Australia’s national character, especially in its fondness for tall stories and questionable history. As this charming scoundrel traverses the continent and a century’s worth of outlandish encounters – not least with a genteel dowager fending off madness with an electric belt, and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts – one truth emerges: Badgery may in fact be the king of all con men.

OSCAR AND LUCINDA 1988

Oscar Hopkins, the hydrophobic, noisy-kneed son of a preacher, renounces his father’s stern religion in favour of the Anglican Church.

Lucinda Leplastrier, a frizzy-haired heiress, impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser.

When the two finally meet, on board a ship to New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for gambling and risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming mutual affection. Love will prove to be their ultimate gamble.

Oscar and Lucinda won Carey his first Booker Prize, as well as the Miles Franklin Award. Of the book, acclaimed author and Guardian reviewer Angela Carter said, ‘It fills me with wild, savage envy, and no novelist could say fairer than that’; while Victoria Glendinning of The Times (London) declared, ‘To say he’s Australia’s Dickens is to classify him, like fossil. He’s Australia’s Peter Carey, and ours.’

ILLYWHACKER 1985

TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG 2000

Carey’s hilarious, Booker Prizeshortlisted Illywhacker is the novel that brought him to international attention.

In Australian slang, an ‘Illywhacker’ is a country-fair con man, an

As he flees the police, Ned Kelly scribbles his story in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose. To his pursuers he is a thief and a murderer.

To his own people he’s a hero for opposing the English. Kelly, who

saw his first prison cell at fifteen, has become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over towns and defying authority.

True History of the Kelly Gang is a classic outlaw tale. There are no sentences like these in all Australian literature and yet they could only have grown from our soil. For the book, Carey won his second Booker Prize. In a review for the Bulletin, Australian author and critic James Bradley labelled the work as, ‘A novel that is by turns rambunctious and tender, teeming with life and incident, and whose plainspoken surfaces conceal a strange and prismatic book, richly imagined, ambivalent and passionate.’

A LONG WAY FROM HOME 2017

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher, Willie Bachhuber.

Set in the 1950s, amid the consequences of the age of empires, this thrilling romp is often funny, the more so as the trio move further away from the lily-white Australia they know so well. But beneath the high-speed drama emerge themes of highest consequence, as Carey reconceives the atrocities at the darkest heart of Australian history. In his review in the Australian, Geordie Williamson commented, ‘A Long Way from Home reminds us that great novels are not ideological – neither exploitative nor excessively well-meaning – but tough-minded, complex admissions of failure, guilt and confusion. A Lutheran pastor says as much to Irene: “There is no right thing… there are just many, many wrong things and sometimes we can do no better than pray to be forgiven.”’

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EXTRACT

A Long Way from Home

BY PETER CAREY

For a girl to defeat one father is a challenge, but there were two standing between me and what I wanted, which was – not to fiddle-faddle – a lovely little fellow named Titch Bobs.

The first father was my own. When he discovered that I, his teeny Irene, his little mouse, his petite sized mademoiselle, had, all by herself, proposed matrimony to a man of five foot three, he spat his Wheaties in his plate.

Titch’s father was number two. He came out of the gate at a gallop, one hundred percent in favour. I was a beauty, a bobby-dazzler until, in the hallway by the coat stand, he gave me cause to slap his face.

My sister was older and more ‘experienced’. She could not see why I would want so small a husband. Did I plan to breed a team of mice? Ha bloody ha. Beverly was five foot two and a half, and always breaking off engagements to lanky Lurch or gigantic Dino, or the famous football player whose name I am not ignorant enough to mention.

I would have been afraid to shake his hand, forget the other business.

Beverly made her bed and got what you might expect i.e. thirty-hour labours and heads as big as pumpkins. My own children were as tiny and perfect as their daddy, ideal in their proportions, in the lovely co-ordination of their limbs, in the pink appley cheeks they inherited from Titch, the smile they got from me. My sister could not abide my happiness. She would spend years looking for evidence that it was ‘fake’. When the first husband ran away to New Zealand she wrote me a spiteful letter saying I was more interested in my husband than in my kiddies. She said her boys were everything to her. She knew, she wrote, I only married Titch because of the money I could get from him. She was upset, of course. Why wouldn’t she be? She had married a bastard. She was divorced ‘without 10

a penny’ so could she please go and live in the childhood home we had both inherited and whose sale she had always managed to impede? Could Titch and I have used the money? She didn’t ask. Would it have changed our lives? Of course. I agreed on a peppercorn rent and kept my feelings to myself.

Beverly liked to say that I was wilful, which was an idea she had got from Mum. But Mum liked me being wilful. She got a real kick from seeing how I got my way.

Of course she was a bit the same, Mum, and she was blessed with such neat level teeth and cheekbones, you would do anything to see her smile, even if you had to buy her a washing machine to make her do it. She got Dad to purchase the Ford which was what brought Titch to our door in Geelong, Victoria, Australia. It was Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945.

No-one will ever know how Mum planned to utilise the Ford. Drive down to Colac and see her sister after church?

That was one story not even Dad could swallow. Didn’t matter. He went on and wrote the cheque to the salesman, Dan Bobst who, as I discovered when I opened the front door on V-E Day, had thrown in ‘free’ driving lessons which would be supplied by his sonny. Oh Lord, what a sight that sonny was, there on our front porch with his cardboard suitcase on a Tuesday morning. I learned he was to stay with us.

Poor Mum, alas, she never got to put the key in the ignition and everyone was so upset and busy with the funeral, no-one told the young man that he should leave.

He had nowhere else to stay, so he unpacked his ‘port’ and ‘awaited instructions’ as he later liked to say. The Ford was parked in our drive, with no sign that it was now part of the deceased estate.

My mum was in the Mount Duneed Cemetery and the

‘My sister was older and more “experienced”. She could not see why I would want so small a husband.

Did I plan to breed a team of mice? Ha bloody ha.’

new boarder was the only one who helped me go through her things. He said nothing about the car or about the lessons he had been expecting to give to the deceased. He asked me if I knew how to drive. I told him that if he could be home by six at night he could have tea with us.

In the midst of all the sadness the pretty red-cheeked man was a great comfort I could not do without. I held my breath. I cooked for him and he scraped his plate clean and helped with the drying up. He was neat. When I cried, he comforted me. He left talcum powder on the bathroom floor.

In the nights at Western Beach, when you could hear the forlorn anchor chains of the old warships anchored in Corio Bay, he told me stories of his father which he thought were funny. These were more important than I knew. In any case my eyes stung hot to hear that the lovely boy had broken his arm swinging the prop of the wretched father’s monoplane, and that the old bully had taught him to land by sitting behind him in the navigator’s seat and thumping his slender back with his fist until he pushed the stick down sufficiently, that he abandoned him to stay with a pair of old Irish bachelors at Bullengarook until they had learned to drive their purchase. The sonny was named Titch although he was sometimes Zac which was what they called a sixpence and a zac was therefore half a shilling or half a bob, which was, of course, his father’s name. Forget it. He was always Titch, God Jesus, and it seemed I was put on earth to love your tortured body and your impy joyous soul.

How could I predict, dear Beverly, what sort of life my heart’s desire would lead me to? Our dad was still alive on the day I first set eyes on Titch. My babies were not yet born. I couldn’t drive a car. We had not yet arrived at the era of Holden Versus Ford. There was not even a

Redex Around Australia Reliability Trial although that, the greatest Australian car race of the century, is the story I will get to in the end.

I was married the same day I got my driving licence. I drove us a hundred miles to Warragul myself. After that we moved to Sale, then Bairnsdale and Titch sold Fords for his father who always short-changed him on commission. My new husband was ideal in almost every way, and I knew that even before I understood his genius, which was the last thing you’d look for in a car salesman. He did not know how to lie, or so it seemed. He never exaggerated, unless to make a joke. He was funny, he was cheeky. He told me he had perfected the art of not being hit which was just as well, seeing the bars he did business in.

We lived in boarding houses and rented rooms and ate whole flocks of mutton but incredibly we were happy, even if his dad was in the room next door. Sometimes we made ourselves sick with laughing, rolling round the carpet on a Sunday afternoon. That should have been enough for anyone.

My father-in-law was always lurking. I did not tell Titch the disgusting things he had suggested to me. He never heard them, thank the Lord. Nor did my husband seem to notice the insults against himself. Dan Bobs was not a handsome fellow but he preened with his comb so constantly he finally lost his hair. Titch was blind to the vanity. He would sit and listen as the scoundrel bragged endlessly about his exploits. I endured all this for years until the old man found a Melbourne woman who would tolerate him. When he announced his retirement in the Warragul Express, I did not dare believe it.

Dan had a lifetime of cuttings in his scrapbook. He had the first pilot’s licence in Australia. He had flown planes and got reported when he crashed them. He had raced 11

‘The sonny was named Titch although he was sometimes Zac which was what they called a sixpence and a zac was therefore half a shilling or half a bob, which was, of course, his father’s name.’

Fords from Melbourne to Sydney. He had sold cars from farm to farm in the muddy dairy district of Gippsland and flat volcanic plains of Sunbury where he did business in the old-school style, that is, left his son behind to give the driving lessons. Was he giving up the game? Or was this ‘retirement’ just another chance to be written up?

Edith was already seven. Ronnie had just been born. I tucked him in his pram so I could help shift his grandfather’s possessions into his trailer. Ronnie woke up dirty and hungry but I would not go to him until I had lashed a tarpaulin over Dan’s oily junk. Even then I waited, watching that red tail-light turn the corner by the Lodge.

Soon we had a postcard from ‘Mrs Donaldson’ who introduced herself as the old man’s ‘housekeeper’. Then there came an envelope containing a clipping from the Mordialloc Advertiser. He had set himself up as a scrap dealer. Mrs Donaldson said they had a ‘grand’ backyard.

‘Danny’ had put a sign over the front gate: THE OLDEST AIRMAN IN THE WORLD. He sold war disposals and the occasional used car. He made another sign: IF YOU CAN’T FIND IT HERE, IT DOESN’T EXIST ON EARTH. A photograph was delivered: we saw he had ‘modified’ the front verandah so it was now held up by aeroplane propellers.

AVIATOR RETIRES TO WATTLE STREET. Dan would never ask us direct for money. He would, instead, turn up with, say, a water pump for a ’46 Ford.

Titch did not need it, but I could never get him to refuse his dad.

Beverly would say I always got my own way, but it was Beverly who got her way, refusing to get a job, or budge from our Geelong house. There was enough money locked up there to start a dealership, but Titch never 12

questioned me, never argued, never insisted.

When Dan had left us to bully Mrs Donaldson I found a property for rent in Bacchus Marsh, a small town in a rural district Titch was long familiar with. Titch had hopes to build up a used car business so we could finally be Ford dealers. I chose the house with this in mind. It had a huge yard and a big shed spanning the width of the back fence. Titch was tickled pink.

You could say that’s where the story starts, at the site of our planned business, observed by the next door neighbour, a fair-haired bachelor with a strong jaw and absent bottom, cinched in trousers, crumply face, deep frown marks on his forehead. He found me in my overalls with a spanner in my hand. Himself, he held a colander, some sort of gift, and I saw the sad fond way he had with the kids and I thought it might be a bad idea to be too kind to him, for everything in life begins with kindness.

We had no plan to take advantage of him.

Extracted from A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey.

Hamish Hamilton, November 2017.

INSIGHT ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

The Long Unspoken

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

Armistead Maupin waits for a voice from the bottom of the well.

For 30 years, Armistead Maupin captured hearts and imaginations with his San Franciscan adventures of Mary Ann Singleton and the eccentric residents of 28 Barbary Lane.

Originally featured as a newspaper serial, and later transformed into nine bestselling novels, Tales of the City tapped into the stories at the heart of the zeitgeist of the time, including the AIDS epidemic and thinly veiled celebrity plotlines.

In his new memoir, Logical Family, Maupin explains his own incredible story of how a conservative son of the Old South became a gay rights pioneer whose novels have inspired millions. It is a journey that leads him from the racism and misogyny

of mid-century North Carolina to a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam; from an awkward conversation about girls with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s. In this passage, Maupin connects the dots between two formative writing experiences – decades apart, but inextricably linked.

My mother helped me with my very first effort at writing. We were living in a duplex in Raleigh [North Carolina], on Forest Road, near the new shopping center. Out in

California a three-year-old girl had fallen down an abandoned well, and I was determined to console her. I was only a few years older than this child, so my mother must have taken dictation. I couldn’t begin to tell what I said. What could I have said?

I’m sorry you fell down a well.

Please don’t be sad.

I hope they get you out soon.

What I do remember is how I’d pictured this letter being delivered: someone dropping it directly into the well, like a wishful coin consigned to a fountain, before it drifted down through the clammy darkness into the little girl’s outstretched hands. I figured she would be expecting the letter, awaiting my words of comfort.

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And my words, if I just chose them carefully enough, would save her in the end.

I suppose my mother must have heard a mailing address on the radio, one provided by the family. Either that or she never mailed the letter at all, intending it only as an exercise in empathy, a homemade remedy for her heartsick, overimaginative child.

The point is: I remember nothing, happy or sad, about the fate of Little Kathy Fiscus. A quick Googling reveals her name and the fact that her attempted rescue in 1949 was one of the first calamities ever to be broadcast live on television. I know now that the well was only eighteen inches wide and that the rescuers recovered Kathy’s body a hundred feet beneath the field where she’d been playing three days earlier. The doctor who broke the news to thousands of rapt onlookers said she had died of suffocation only hours after “the last time her voice was heard.” A haunting detail, but one I don’t remember. I would surely have remembered that voice.

My mother must have changed the subject as soon as the truth was known, distracting me with a Little Golden Book or an antiques store.

(I enjoyed antiquing at a revealingly early age.) My mother spent most of 14

her life withholding things, shielding her children and her husband from uncomfortable truths. I’m sure she must have learned this at the feet of her own mother, an English suffragette who had a few doozies of her own to hide. Still, my mother believed in the curative power of letters. She must have written thousands over the years. When she wasn’t at The Bargain Box, selling used clothes for the Junior League, or hosting a radio panel show for teenagers, you could hear her writing in her den, clattering away on a millipede of a typewriter that popped out of a desk like a Victorian magic act.

I remember the letters she sent me at summer camp and how I reread them daily like a soldier at the front.

There were four or five pages sometimes, covering the front and the back, the type inevitably crawling up the margins to a sideways ballpoint finale. Love, Mummie. That signature was my undoing at camp.

Another boy spotted it, and since no kid in his right mind called his mother Mummie, there were immediate taunts about moldy pharaohs in their tombs, complete with bedsheet impersonations. My mother, who called her own mother Mummie, never knew of my humiliation. By the time I was a teenager I had decided

to call her Mither, a name that struck me as elegant and ironic, so the joke could not possibly be on me. I did the same thing with my father who became Pap after years of being called Daddy, a name only children would use. I was learning to build my manly armor with words, being careful, so careful, like my mother.

Her letters were my only balm at Camp Seagull. Those were days of random self-disgrace in the prickly Carolina heat, days of capsized sailboats and fumbled baseballs and arrows landing short of their mark. There was one other kid who felt like a friend, another miserable ectomorph, but he bunked in another cabin, so our time together was limited. Sometimes we would meet up at twilight to walk along the shore of the Neuse River, away from our torturers, swapping notes on the universe as we poked in the sand for sharks’ teeth. (What was his name, goddammit? He looked me up in San Francisco in the early eighties, when a few published novels and a listed phone number made me easy to find. He told me he was gay like me but not very good at it. He liked my books, he said. He seemed so profoundly sad. I’m wondering if he ever made it past the plague, or if he lives with the virus, or if he died

‘My mother must have known who I was even then.

She called me her little Ferdinand, the Disney bull who sat in the pasture and smelled the flowers rather than go out and fight in the ring. It took me another quarter of a century to level with her.’

in one of the other ways, or if he’s on Facebook right now, like so many people I never expected to hear from again, posting videos of cute interspecies friendships.)

When he wasn’t around, this nameless boy, I would linger in the mess hall after supper and vanish into the comforting whir and flicker of a movie. They were usually war movies, my least favorite kind, but there was always a moment when the gunfire stopped and a lady appeared, a wife or a girlfriend, speaking softly amid soft music. How I craved a woman’s gentleness in that all-boy bedlam. I even considered sharing my anguish with Miss Lil, the wife of Cap’n Wyatt, the camp director. She was the only lady around, and not nearly as glamorous as my mother, but she bore a passing resemblance to Dale Evans and might be a sympathetic ear.

I never worked up the nerve. Nor did I share my homesickness with my mother, though she seemed to sense it from afar. Her letters soothed me with detailed visions of my imminent deliverance: “We’ll put a mattress in the back of the Country Squire so you can stretch out and read to your heart’s content. I’ll have all your favorites, darling—lots of Little Lulus and Uncle Scrooges. Don’t say I don’t

mollycoddle you!” I never said that, never even used the word. It was Daddy who believed that sensitive boys could be permanently warped by sympathy. What was the point in making a man out of me if my mother unraveled it with her love?

On the way back to Raleigh, battling in the back of the station wagon with my brother and sister, I felt the sweet relief of our family made whole again. When we played Cow Poker or read aloud the Burma Shave signs, or, in the case of Mummie and me, lobbied my father passionately for a stop at a flea market, it was easy enough to believe that life could always be like this. It was easy to forget that camp had made me glimpse the hardest truth of all: that my mother’s absence would one day be permanent. I had done the arithmetic more than once, lying in bed after taps. She was in her late thirties; in another fifty years she would be dead.

As it turned out my figures were off considerably.

My mother must have known who I was even then. She called me her little Ferdinand, the Disney bull who sat in the pasture and smelled the flowers rather than go out and fight in the ring. It took me another quarter of a century to level with her.

It makes sense that I chose to do so in a letter, getting the words exactly right, the way she had taught me. My letter was a work of fiction addressed to a fictional character in “Tales of the City,” but I had poured my heart into it with such naked intimacy that I knew she would realize that the message was meant for her.

I waited for a response, but none came. Not a letter or a phone call that might speak to the long unspoken.

Though what right had I, really, to expect an answer? The letter had appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, where millions of people could see it, including my parents in Raleigh, who subscribed to the paper because of my work, but it could hardly be described as an act of bravery. I had avoided the chance of rejection by addressing my message to everyone and no one.

I had thrown it down a well, and there was no voice from the bottom.

Logical Family by Armistead Maupin.

Doubleday, October 2017.

15

EXTRACT

The Only Story

BY JULIAN BARNES

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

You may point out – correctly – that it isn’t a real question.

Because we don’t have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories.

But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.

But here’s the first problem. If this is your only story, then it’s the one you have most often told and retold, even if – as is the case here – mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away? I’m not sure. One test might be whether, as the years pass, you come out better from your own story, or worse. To come out worse might indicate that you are being more truthful. On the other hand, there is the danger of being retrospectively anti-heroic: making yourself out to have behaved worse than you actually did can be a form of selfpraise. So I shall have to be careful. Well, I have learned to become careful over the years. As careful now as I was careless then. Or do I mean carefree? Can a word have two opposites?

The time, the place, the social milieu? I’m not sure how important they are in stories about love. Perhaps in the old 16

days, in the classics, where there are battles between love and duty, love and religion, love and family, love and the state. This isn’t one of those stories. But still, if you insist.

The time: more than fifty years ago. The place: about fifteen miles south of London. The milieu: stockbroker belt, as they called it – not that I ever met a stockbroker in all my years there. Detached houses, some half-timbered, some tile-hung. Hedges of privet, laurel and beech. Roads with gutters as yet unencumbered by yellow lines and residents’ parking bays. This was a time when you could drive up to London and park almost anywhere. Our particular zone of suburban sprawl was cutely known as ‘The Village’, and decades previously it might possibly have counted as one. Now it contained a station from which suited men went up to London Monday to Friday, and some for an extra half-day on Saturday. There was a Green Line busstop; a zebra crossing with Belisha beacons; a post office; a church unoriginally named after St Michael; a pub, a general store, chemist, hairdresser; a petrol station which did elementary car repairs. In the mornings, you heard the electric whine of milk floats – choose between Express and United Dairies; in the evenings, and at weekends (though never on a Sunday morning) the chug of petroldriven lawnmowers.

Vocal, incompetent cricket was played on the Village green; there was a golf course and a tennis club. The soil was sandy enough to please gardeners; London clay didn’t reach this far out. Recently, a delicatessen had opened, which some thought subversive in its offerings of European goods: smoked cheeses, and knobbly sausages hanging like donkey cocks in their string webbing. But the Village’s younger wives were beginning to cook more adventurously, and their husbands mainly approved. Of the two available TV channels, BBC was watched more than ITV, while alcohol was generally

‘The one thing I was not going to do with my existence was end up in suburbia with a tennis wife and 2.4 children, and watch them in turn find their mates at the club, and so on, down some echoing enfilade of mirrors, into an endless, privet-and-laurel future.’

drunk only at weekends. The chemist would sell verruca plasters and dry shampoo in little puffer bottles, but not contraceptives; the general store sold the narcoleptic local Advertiser & Gazette, but not even the mildest girlie mag. For sexual items, you had to travel up to London. None of this bothered me for most of my time there.

Right, that’s my estate agent’s duties concluded (there was a real one ten miles away). And one other thing: don’t ask me about the weather. I don’t much remember what the weather has been like during my life. True, I can remember how hot sun gave greater impetus to sex; how sudden snow delighted, and how cold, damp days set off those early symptoms that eventually led to a double hip replacement. But nothing significant in my life ever happened during, let alone because of, weather. So if you don’t mind, meteorology will play no part in my story.

Though you are free to deduce, when I am found playing grass-court tennis, that it was neither raining nor snowing at the time.

The tennis club: who would have thought it might begin there? Growing up, I regarded the place as merely an outdoor branch of the Young Conservatives. I owned a racket and had played a bit, just as I could bowl a few useful overs of off-spin, and turn out as a goalkeeper of solid yet occasionally reckless temperament. I was competitive at sport without being unduly talented.

At the end of my first year at university, I was at home for three months, visibly and unrepentantly bored. Those of the same age today will find it hard to imagine the laboriousness of communication back then. Most of my friends were far-flung, and – by some unexpressed but clear parental mandate – use of the telephone was

discouraged. A letter, and then a letter in reply. It was all slow-paced, and lonely.

My mother, perhaps hoping that I would meet a nice blonde Christine, or a sparky, black-ringleted Virginia – in either case, one of reliable, if not too pronounced, Conservative tendencies – suggested that I might like to join the tennis club. She would even sub me for it. I laughed silently at the motivation: the one thing I was not going to do with my existence was end up in suburbia with a tennis wife and 2.4 children, and watch them in turn find their mates at the club, and so on, down some echoing enfilade of mirrors, into an endless, privet-andlaurel future. When I accepted my mother’s offer, it was in a spirit of nothing but satire.

I went along, and was invited to ‘play in’. This was a test in which not just my tennis game but my general deportment and social suitability would be quietly examined in a decorous English way. If I failed to display negatives, then positives would be assumed: this was how it worked. My mother had ensured that my whites were laundered, and the creases in my shorts both evident and parallel; I reminded myself not to swear, burp or fart on court. My game was wristy, optimistic and largely self-taught; I played as they would have expected me to play, leaving out the shit-shots I most enjoyed, and never hitting straight at an opponent’s body. Serve, in to the net, volley, second volley, drop shot, lob, while quick to show appreciation of the opponent – ‘Too good!’ – and proper concern for the partner – ‘Mine!’ I was modest after a good shot, quietly pleased at the winning of a game, head-shakingly rueful at the ultimate loss of a set. I could feign all that stuff, and so was welcomed as a summer member, joining the year-round Hugos and Carolines.

17

‘As we went our separate ways to shower, I said, “Would you like a lift? I’ve got a car.” She looked at me sideways. “Well, I wouldn’t want a lift if you haven’t got a car. That would be counterproductive.”’

The Hugos liked to tell me that I had raised the club’s average IQ while lowering its average age; one insisted on calling me Clever Clogs and Herr Professor in deft allusion to my having completed one year at Sussex University. The Carolines were friendly enough, but wary; they knew better where they stood with the Hugos. When I was among this tribe, I felt my natural competitiveness leach away. I tried to play my best shots, but winning didn’t engage me. I even used to practise reverse cheating.

If a ball fell a couple of inches out, I would give a running thumbs up to the opponent, and a shout of ‘Too good!’

Similarly, a serve pushed an inch or so too long or too wide would produce a slow nod of assent, and a trudge across to receive the next serve. ‘Decent cove, that Paul fellow,’ I once overheard a Hugo admit to another Hugo.

When shaking hands after a defeat, I would deliberately praise some aspect of their game. ‘That kicker of a serve to the backhand – gave me a lot of trouble,’ I would candidly admit. I was only there for a couple of months, and did not want them to know me.

After three weeks or so of my temporary membership, there was a Lucky Dip Mixed Doubles tournament. The pairings were drawn by lot. Later, I remember thinking: lot is another name for destiny, isn’t it? I was paired with Mrs Susan Macleod, who was clearly not a Caroline. She was, I guessed, somewhere in her forties, with her hair pulled back by a ribbon, revealing her ears, which I failed to notice at the time. A white tennis dress with green trim, and a line of green buttons down the front of the bodice.

She was almost exactly my height, which is five feet nine if I am lying and adding an inch.

‘Which side do you prefer?’ she asked.

‘Side?’

‘Forehand or backhand?’

18

‘Sorry. I don’t really mind.’

‘You take the forehand to begin with, then.’

Our first match – the format was single-set knockout – was against one of the thicker Hugos and dumpier Carolines. I scampered around a lot, thinking it my job to take more of the balls; and at first, when at the net, would do a quarter-turn to see how my partner was coping, and if and how the ball was coming back. But it always did come back, with smoothly hit groundstrokes, so I stopped turning, relaxed, and found myself really, really wanting to win. Which we did, 6–2.

As we sat with glasses of lemon barley water, I said, ‘Thanks for saving my arse.’

I was referring to the number of times I had lurched across the net in order to intercept, only to miss the ball and put Mrs Macleod off.

‘The phrase is, “Well played, partner”.’ Her eyes were grey-blue, her smile steady. ‘And try serving from a bit wider. It opens up the angles.’

I nodded, accepting the advice while feeling no jab to my ego, as I would if it had come from a Hugo.

‘Anything else?’

‘The most vulnerable spot in doubles is always down the middle.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Macleod.’

‘Susan.’

‘I’m glad you’re not a Caroline,’ I found myself saying.

She chuckled, as if she knew exactly what I meant. But how could she have?

‘Does your husband play?’

‘My husband? Mr E.P.?’ She laughed. ‘No. Golf’s his game. I think it’s plain unsporting to hit a stationary ball.

Don’t you agree?’

There was too much in this answer for me to unpack at once, so I just gave a nod and a quiet grunt.

The second match was harder, against a couple who kept breaking off to have quiet tactical conversations, as if preparing for marriage. At one point, when Mrs Macleod was serving, I tried the cheap ploy of crouching below the level of the net almost on the centre line, aiming to distract the returner. It worked for a couple of points, but then, at 30–15, I rose too quickly on hearing the thwock of the serve, and the ball hit me square in the back of the head. I keeled over melodramatically and rolled into the bottom of the net. Caroline and Hugo raced forward in a show of concern; while from behind me came only a riot of laughter, and a girlish ‘Shall we play a let?’ which our opponents naturally disputed. Still, we squeaked the set 7–5, and were into the quarter-finals.

‘Trouble up next,’ she warned me. ‘County level. On their way down now, but no free gifts.’

And there weren’t any. We were well beaten, for all my intense scurrying. When I tried to protect us down the middle, the ball went wide; when I covered the angles, it was thumped down the centre line. The two games we got were as much as we deserved.

We sat on a bench and fed our rackets into their presses.

Mine was a Dunlop Maxply; hers a Gray’s.

‘I’m sorry I let you down,’ I said.

‘No one let anyone down.’

‘I think my problem may be that I’m tactically naive.’

Yes, it was a bit pompous, but even so I was surprised by her giggles.

‘You’re a case,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to call you Casey.’

I smiled. I liked the idea of being a case.

As we went our separate ways to shower, I said, ‘Would you like a lift? I’ve got a car.’

She looked at me sideways. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want a lift if you haven’t got a car. That would be counterproductive.’

There was something in the way she said it that made it impossible to take offence. ‘But what about your reputation?’

‘My reputation?’ I answered. ‘I don’t think I’ve got one.’

‘Oh dear. We’ll have to get you one then. Every young man should have a reputation.’

Writing all this down, it seems more knowing than it was at the time. And ‘nothing happened’. I drove Mrs Macleod to her house in Duckers Lane, she got out, I went home, and gave an abbreviated account of the afternoon to my parents. Lucky Dip Mixed Doubles. Partners chosen by lot.

‘Quarter-finals, Paul,’ said my mother. ‘I’d have come along and watched if I’d known.’

I realized that this was probably the last thing in the history of the world that I wanted, or would ever want.

Perhaps you’ve understood a little too quickly; I can hardly blame you. We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a pre-existing category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see – feel – only what is individual and particular to them. We say: how predictable; they say: what a surprise! One of the things I thought about Susan and me – at the time, and now, again, all these years later – is that there often didn’t seem words for our relationship; at least, none that fitted. But perhaps this is an illusion all lovers have about themselves: that they escape both category and description.

Extracted from The Only Story by Julian Barnes.

Jonathan Cape, February 2018.

19

ANNIVERSARY 200 YEARS OF FRANKENSTEIN

Forever Frankensteined In 1818, as the creature at the heart of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus drew first breath, none could have predicted the impression this print run of 500 books would leave on the world.

Begun when Shelley (then Mary Godwin) was just eighteen years old, her chilling Gothic tale has become one of the world’s most famous works of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. But if it wasn’t for a bout of bad weather during an 1816 holiday with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley and poet Lord Byron in Geneva, the story might never 20

have been written. Forced to spend evenings around the fire indoors, Byron proposed a supernatural writing challenge. Days passed, with Shelley unable to think of a story.

Then during what she described as a ‘waking dream’, her terrifying vision of a man in the throes of unhallowed creation took shape.

Most recognisable via the film iconography of the early twentieth century, Frankenstein has influenced almost every imaginable facet of popular culture. The spirit of the story lives on in adaptations, imitations, sequels, films, visual art, musical tributes, parodies, tattoos, songs,

comic books, radio plays, toys and games. Appropriately, the very word ‘Frankenstein’ has undergone its own transmogrification from its nounal beginnings into the realm of verbs.

And most importantly, 200 years on this story of a lonely, misunderstood and – somewhat surprisingly – vegetarian monster (‘I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment’) still ranks highly on the scare-scale. Here we rate five diverse works of horror against, and share an extract of, Shelley’s landmark sciencefiction masterpiece.

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

Two centuries since publication, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still commands a captivating, horrifying magic.

THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU

BY H.G. WELLS

DARK TALES

BY SHIRLEY JACKSON

THE EXORCIST

BY WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

A shipwrecked man finds himself on a lonely tropical island. From a locked enclosure the cries of animals in pain can be heard, and there is a stink of chemicals in the air. Bestial faces stare out of the forests and grotesque, misshaped creatures move in the gloom. In this island paradise, the horrific consequences of the experiments of the infamous Doctor Moreau will soon play out.

An ordinary commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, a loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and a concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. From city streets to country homesteads, small-town apartments to the dark, dark woods, this 2017 collection of Jackson’s classic tales takes readers to the recesses of her deliciously dark imagination, where nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe.

First published in 1971, The Exorcist is the literary phenomenon that inspired one of the most shocking films ever made. The terror begins unobtrusively. Noises in the attic, in the child’s room; an odd smell, displacement of furniture, an icy chill. But when Jesuit priest Father Damien Karras is called in, hell breaks loose on earth with headspinning consequences.

VIVISECTION REVISITED, AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY

DON’T LOOK NOW

BY DAPHNE DU MAURIER

John and Laura move to Venice to try and escape the grief of their young daughter’s death. But when they encounter two old women who claim to have second sight, they find that instead of laying their ghosts to rest, they become caught up in a train of increasingly strange and violent events.

MONSTERS IN THE DEPTHS OF THE HUMAN PSYCHE

DARKNESS CREEPS EVERYWHERE

MORE TERRIFYING THAN THE SCARIEST MOVIE EVER MADE

CALL OF THE CTHULHU & OTHER WEIRD TALES H.P. LOVECRAFT

Things that lurk, things that scurry in the walls, things that move unseen, things that have learnt to walk that ought to crawl, unfathomable blackness, unconquerable evil, inhuman impulses, abnormal bodies, ancient rites, nameless lands best left undiscovered, thoughts best left unspoken, doors best left closed, names best forgotten. You have been warned.

HUMANKIND UNRAVELLING IN A CHAOTIC AND MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE

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EXTRACT

Frankenstein

BY MARY SHELLEY

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.

Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of 22

the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured; and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain: I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed: when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch – the miserable monster whom I had created.

He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in

‘He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.

His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.’

the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.

Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.

I passed the night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness. Mingled with this horror, I felt the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!

Morning, dismal and wet, at length dawned, and discovered to my sleepless and aching eyes the church of Ingolstadt, its white steeple and clock, which indicated the sixth hour. The porter opened the gates of the court, which had that night been my asylum, and I issued into the streets, pacing them with quick steps, as if I sought to

avoid the wretch whom I feared every turning of the street would present to my view. I did not dare return to the apartment which I inhabited, but felt impelled to hurry on, although drenched by the rain which poured from a black and comfortless sky.

I continued walking in this manner for some time, endeavouring by bodily exercise to ease the load that weighed upon my mind. I traversed the streets without any clear conception of where I was or what I was doing.

My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear, and I hurried on with irregular steps, not daring to look about me: Like one, on a lonesome road who, Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turned round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.*

* Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner [author’s footnote] Extracted from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. First published 1 January 1818.

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INSIGHT KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

An Introduction to Everything With trademark precision and mesmerising intensity, in Autumn Karl Ove Knausgaard begins the monumental process of explaining our world to his unborn daughter. In the first entry of his seasonal series, a four-volume personal encyclopaedia, he turns his attentions to the physical, psychological and metaphorical allure of the humble apple.

ILLUSTRATION: ZOË CARACATSANOUDIS

APPLES

For some reason or other, the fruits that grow in the Nordic countries are easily accessible, with only a thin skin that yields readily covering their flesh, this is true for pears and apples as well as for plums, all one needs to do is bite into them and gobble them down, while the fruits that grow further south, like oranges, mandarins, bananas, pomegranates, mangoes and passion fruit, are often covered with thick, inedible skins.

Normally, in accordance with my other preferences in life, I prefer the latter, both because the notion that pleasure must be deserved through prior effort is so strong in me, and because I have always been drawn towards the hidden and the secret.

To bite a piece of the peel from the top of an orange in order to work one’s thumb in between the peel and the flesh of the orange, and feel the bitter taste spurting into one’s mouth for a brief second, and then to loosen piece after piece, sometimes, if the peel is thin, in tiny scraps, other times, when the peel is thick and loosely connected to the flesh, in one long piece, also has a ritual aspect to it. It is almost as if first one is in the temple colonnade and moving slowly towards the innermost room, but there the teeth pierce the thin, shiny membrane and the fruit juice runs into the mouth and fills it with sweetness. Both the labour involved and the fruit’s secretive nature, by which

I mean its inaccessibility, increase the value of the pleasure one experiences.

The apple is an exception to this. All one has to do is reach up a hand, grab the apple and sink one’s teeth into it.

No work, no secret, just straight into pleasure, the almost explosive release of the apple’s sharp, fresh and tart yet always sweet taste into the mouth, which may cause the nerves to twinge and maybe also the facial muscles to contract, as if the distance between man and fruit is just big enough for this shock on a miniature scale to never quite disappear, regardless of how many apples one has eaten in one’s life.

When I was a fairly small child, I began to eat the whole apple. Not just the flesh, but the core with all the pips in it, even the stem. Not because it tasted good, I don’t think, nor because of any idea I might have had that I shouldn’t be wasteful, but because eating the core and the stem presented an obstacle to pleasure. It was work of a kind, even if in reverse order: first the reward, then the effort.

It is still unthinkable for me to throw away an apple core, and when I see my children doing it – sometimes they even throw away half-eaten apples – I am filled with indignation, but I don’t say anything, because I want them to relish life and to have a sense of its abundance. I want them to feel that living is easy. And this is why I’ve changed my attitude towards apples, not through an act of will,

but as a result of having seen and understood more, I think, and now I know that it is never really about the world in itself, merely about our way of relating to it. Against secrecy stands openness, against work stands freedom. Last Sunday we went to the beach about ten kilometres from here, it was one of those early autumn days which summer had stretched into and saturated almost completely with its warmth and calm, yet the tourists had gone home long ago and the beach lay deserted. I took the children for a walk in the forest, which grows all the way down to the edge of the sand, and which for the most part consists of deciduous trees, with the occasional red-trunked pine.

The air was warm and still, the sun hung heavy with light on the faintly dark blue sky. We followed a path in between the trees, and there, in the middle of the wood, stood an apple tree laden with apples. The children were as astonished as I was, apple trees are supposed to grow in gardens, not wild out in the forest.

Can we eat them, they asked. I said yes, go ahead, take as many as you want. In a sudden glimpse, as full of joy as it was of sorrow, I understood what freedom is.

Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Harvill Secker, September 2017.

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EXTRACT

An American Marriage

BY TAYARI JONES

I married Roy Othaniel Hamilton, whom I met for the first time when I was in college. Our connection wasn’t immediate. He considered himself a playboy in those days, and even at age nineteen, I was not one to play with. I’d come to Spelman as a transfer student after the one-year disaster at Howard University in DC. So much for me leaving home. My mother, an alumna herself, insisted that this was where I would cultivate new, bone-deep friendships, but I stuck close with Andre, who was literally the boy next door. We had been close since we were three months old, bathing together in the kitchen sink.

Andre was the one who introduced me to Roy, although it wasn’t quite on purpose. They had been next-door neighbors in Thurman Hall, on the far side of campus.

I often stayed nights in Andre’s room, strictly platonic, although no one believed us. He slept atop the covers, while I huddled under the blankets. None of it makes sense now, but this is how Dre and I always were.

Before Roy and I were properly introduced, a sexbreathy voice on the other side of the wall pronounced his whole name. Roy. Othaniel. Hamilton.

Andre said, “You think he asked her to say that?”

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I snorted. “Othaniel?”

“Doesn’t strike me as a spontaneous utterance.”

We giggled as the twin bed thumped against the wall.

“I think she’s faking it.”

“If she is,” Andre said, “then they all are.”

I didn’t meet Roy in person for another month.

Again, I was in Andre’s room. Roy came by at 10 a.m., trying to hustle up some change to do his laundry. He came in without the courtesy of a knock.

“Oh, excuse me, ma’am,” Roy said in a way that sounded like a surprised question.

“My sister,” Andre said.

“Play sister?” Roy wanted to know, sizing up the dynamic.

“If you want to know who I am, ask me.” I must have looked a sight, wearing Andre’s maroon-and-white T-shirt and my hair tucked beneath a satin bonnet, but I had to speak up for myself.

“Okay, who are you?”

“Celestial Davenport.”

“I’m Roy Hamilton.”

“Roy Othaniel Hamilton, from what I hear through the wall.”

‘The time in the county jail shrank him; the boyish chub of his cheek was gone, revealing a squared-off jaw that I didn’t know he had. Strangely enough, the leanness made him look more powerful than wasted.’

After that, he and I stared at each other, waiting for a cue to show us what type of story this was going to be. Finally, he looked away and asked Andre for a case quarter. I flipped over on my stomach, bent my knees, and crossed my legs at the ankle.

“You something else,” Roy said.

When Roy was gone, Andre said, “You know that Gomer Pyle thing is an act.”

“Clearly,” I said. Something about him was dangerous, and after my experience at Howard, I wanted no part of danger.

I suppose it wasn’t our time because I didn’t speak with or even think about Roy Othaniel Hamilton again for another four years, when college felt like a photo album memory from another era. When we reconnected, it wasn’t that he was so different. It’s just that what felt like peril then now morphed into something that I labeled “realness,” something for which I developed a bottomless appetite.

But what is real? Was it our uneventful first impression?

Or the day in New York, of all places, where we found each other once again? Or did things “get real” when we married, or was it the day that the prosecutor in a little nowhere town declared Roy to be a flight risk? The state declared that though he may have roots in Louisiana, his home was in Atlanta, so he was held without bond or bail.

At this pronouncement, Roy spat out a caustic laugh. “So now roots are irrelevant?”

Our lawyer, friend of my family but paid handsomely just the same, promised me that I wasn’t going to lose my man. Uncle Banks made motions, filed papers, and objected. But still, Roy slept behind bars one hundred nights before he was brought to trial. For one month, I remained in Louisiana, living with my in-laws, sleeping in the room that could have saved us this trouble. I waited and I sewed. I called Andre. I called my parents. When I

sent the mayor his doll, I couldn’t bring myself to seal the flaps on the sturdy cardboard box. Big Roy did it for me and the memory of ripping tape troubled my sleep that night and many nights to come.

“If this doesn’t go the way we want it to,” Roy said the day before his trial, “I don’t want you to wait for me.

Keep making your dolls and doing what you need to do.”

“This is going to work out,” I promised. “You didn’t do it.”

“I’m looking at so much time. I can’t ask you to throw your life away for me.” His words and his eyes were speaking two different languages, like someone saying no while nodding his head yes.

“No one is going to throw anything away,” I said.

I had faith in those days. I believed in things.

Andre showed up for us. He had been a witness at our wedding and a character witness at trial. Dre let me cut his hair, handing me the scissors to saw through the dreads he had been growing for the last four years. At our wedding, they had been rebellious little nubs, but when I cut them off they were finally responding to gravity, pointing toward his collar. When I was done, he walked his fingers through the choppy curls that remained.

The next day we took our seats in the courtroom, costumed to seem as innocent as possible. My parents were there, and Roy’s, too. Olive was dressed for church, and Big Roy sat beside her looking poor-but-honest. Like Andre, my own father groomed himself, and he, for once, appeared to be “equally yoked” to my elegant mother.

Watching Roy, I could see he was an obvious match for us. It wasn’t just the cut of his coat or the break of his hem against the fine leather of his shoes; it was his face, shaven clean, and his eyes, innocent and afraid, unaccustomed to being at the mercy of the state.

The time in the county jail shrank him; the boyish chub of his cheek was gone, revealing a squared-off jaw that I didn’t know he had. Strangely enough, the leanness made him look more powerful than wasted. The only thing that 27

‘When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.’

gave him away as a man on trial, rather than a man on his way to work, was his poor fingers. He’d chewed his nails down to the soft meat and started in on his cuticles.

Sweet Roy. The only thing that my good man ever hurt was his own hands.

What I know is this: they didn’t believe me. Twelve people and not one of them took me at my word. There in front of the room, I explained Roy couldn’t have raped the woman in room 206 because we had been together. I told them about the Magic Fingers that wouldn’t work, about the movie that played on the snowy television. The prosecutor asked me what we had been fighting about.

Rattled, I looked to Roy and to both our mothers. Banks objected, so I didn’t have to answer, but the pause made it appear that I was concealing something rotten at the pit of our very young marriage. Even before I stepped down from the witness stand, I knew that I had failed him. Maybe I wasn’t appealing enough. Not dramatic enough. Too not-from-around-here. Who knows? Uncle Banks, coaching me, said, “Now is not the time to be articulate. Now is the time to give it up. No filter, all heart. No matter what you’re asked, what you want the jury to see is why you married him.”

I tried, but I didn’t know how to be anything other than “well spoken” in front of strangers. I wish I could have brought a selection of my art, the Man Moving series, all images of Roy — the marble, the dolls, and a few watercolors. I would say, “This is who he is to me. Isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he gentle?” But all I had were words, which are as light and flimsy as air. As I took my seat beside Andre, not even the black lady juror would look at me.

It turns out that I watch too much television. I was expecting a scientist to come and testify about DNA. I was looking for a pair of good-looking detectives to burst into the courtroom at the last minute, whispering something urgent to the prosecutor. Everyone would see that this was a big mistake, a major misunderstanding.

We would all be shaken but appeased. I fully believed that 28

I would leave the courtroom with my husband beside me.

Secure in our home, we would tell people how no black man is really safe in America.

Twelve years is what they gave him. We would be forty-three years old when he was released. I couldn’t even imagine myself at such an age. Roy understood that twelve years was an eternity because he sobbed right there at the defendants’ table. His knees gave way, and he fell into his chair. The judge paused and demanded that Roy bear this news on his feet. He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth. When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.

As Roy howled, my fingers kept worrying a rough patch of skin beneath my chin, a souvenir of scar tissue.

When they did what I remember as kicking in the door, what everyone else remembers as opening it with a plastic key, after the door was opened, however it was opened, we were both pulled from the bed. They dragged Roy into the parking lot, and I followed, lunging for him, wearing nothing but the white slip. Somebody pushed me to the ground and my chin hit the pavement. My slip rode up showing my everything to everyone as my tooth sank into the soft of my bottom lip. Roy was on the asphalt beside me, barely beyond my grasp, speaking words that didn’t reach my ears. I don’t know how long we lay there, parallel like burial plots. Husband. Wife. What God has brought together, let no man tear asunder.

Extracted from An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.

Vintage Australia, February 2018.

COLLECTION AUTUMN READING

THERE IT IS AGAIN

BY DON WATSON

Historian, essayist, speechwriter, humourist, anti-cant crusader – Watson has a gift for luring us to the nub of a matter, or at least to a new view of it. From birds to love letters, imagined apologies, mind-numbing management-speak, Oscar Wilde, Anzac Day, strange people and racehorses, in this collection of his writing Watson brings his distinctive voice and perspective to a host of deserving subjects.

NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US

BY STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS

End Notes One of the greatest gifts of reading is to take a break from your own story and tune in to new narratives. Pay attention and you just might discover fresh insights from new perspectives. From real-life revelations to flights of the imagination, here are five books to add richness and colour to your autumn reading.

ILLUSTRATION: ZOË CARACATSANOUDIS

THE MERMAID AND MRS HANCOCK

BY IMOGEN HERMES GOWAR

One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door – one of his captains has sold his ship for a mermaid. As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels, everyone wants to see Mr Hancock’s marvel.

Its arrival spins him out of his ordinary existence, through the doors of high society and into the acquaintance of the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on. But where will their ambitions lead?

JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he re-enters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of segregation is still felt, he’s startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. A riff on The Great Gatsby for Trump’s America, No One Is Coming to Save Us offers a present-day perspective of the so-called American dream.

THE DROVER’S WIFE

BY FRANK MOORHOUSE

RATHER HIS OWN MAN

BY GEOFFREY ROBERTSON

Since Henry Lawson wrote his story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in 1892, Australian writers, painters, performers and photographers have paid tribute in a wonderful tradition of stories, works, adaptations and images. The Russell Drysdale painting from 1945 extended the mythology and it, too, has become an Australian icon.

In what he describes as his ‘monument to the drovers’ wives’, via essays and commentary Moorhouse examines our ongoing fascination with this remarkable story.

In this deliciously gossipy and enthralling memoir, Robertson pays homage to his family and an extraordinary fifty-year career as a lawyer around the world. From the hilarious to the funereal, he writes riveting accounts of his most memorable trials, talks deeply about his personal life, meeting and marrying Kathy Lette, fatherhood and the challenges of bringing up an autistic son. By turns funny, fascinating, compelling and poignant, this is the story of a Bondi baby turned Eastwood boy made good on an international stage.

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