The Feel of Steel (5 page)

On
Molchanov
's deck after an outing, I see two men, half in jest, point their cameras at each other. Like two tired cowboys in their penguin-shit-stained wet-weather gear and boots, they thrust their lenses right into each other's faces. Stand-off.

‘Go on – take it!' says one.

‘I'm not taking a shot!' cries the other. ‘I only want to stop
you
from taking one!'

What
is
this thing about cameras? Around them seem to constellate such deep anxieties. In spite of my bravado about going lensless, I've actually got a secret throw-away camera in my cabin, having cracked in Ushuaia ten minutes before we boarded the ship. I want to leave it hidden in a drawer because I am engaged in a battle with the terror of forgetting, which drives people to raise a camera between themselves and everything they
encounter – as if direct experience were unbearable and they had to shield themselves from it, filter it through a machine, store up a silent, odourless version of it for later, rather than endure it now.

But doesn't my wretched notebook (which the wind tore out of my pocket on Hydrurga Rocks; which would have followed the airborne plastic bag if I hadn't stamped on it with my heavy boot in the nick of time) – doesn't a notebook perform the same function? Why can't we let experiences lay themselves down in us like compost, or fall into us like seeds which may put forth a shoot one day, spontaneously, as childhood memories do, in answer to the stimulus of ordinary life?

‘Take it home,' says Greg, ‘and plant it somewhere.'

‘The morning star was over the mountain,' says a man to his wife at dawn on our last day, as
Molchanov
slides back up the flushed glass floor of the Beagle Channel, ‘but I didn't photograph it.'

He is apologising to her for having missed something – but I want to kiss him, I want to shake his hand!

We disembark at Ushuaia in bright morning sun. There's a beech forest high up there behind the town: Greg and another mountaineer jump into a rattly old taxi and make a dash for the trees, to touch and smell foliage briefly before they set out, the same afternoon, back to the Peninsula on the last voyage of the season.

So this is the end. But towards four in the afternoon I get the strangest feeling that I have to go back to the wharf. What nonsense! How sentimental! – yet I can't stay away. I drift down there, furtive in my Patagonia jacket with its penguin motif, and to my surprise I find half a dozen shipmates rambling down to the water as well – only casually strolling, mind you, to get their land legs – merely chancing to be wandering in that direction.

We stand looking up at
Molchanov
's clean side, a bunch of sad dags clustering on the dock. We've said goodbye to everyone in sight but we need to stay right to the end. I can't believe the way my chest muscles are being squeezed by an emotion I don't have a name for. Even hulking Dave the diver owns up to it: we hardly dare look at each other. To see strangers on board our ship, leaning over the rail in a proprietary manner as she edges out and turns to face the glistening channel, is painful – enraging. She was
our
ship, and we've already been replaced.

Woman in a Green Mantle

W
hat if somebody's heart has been broken one time too many? What if this person has become stupid with sadness? If she can't sit still or concentrate for more than twenty seconds at a stretch? If the part of her mind that used to grasp structure and form has suddenly lost its grip? What if the whole world of literature looks like a burnt-out landscape? What use to such a person is the mighty cataract of books that's forever crashing down, blotting out the sunlight and choking the universe? Is there anything she can salvage from what she's read in the past that will be of any use to her whatsoever?

I've been asking around: I knew I couldn't be the only person in the world who's capable of forgetting the contents of a novel only minutes after having closed it. I've found that people bluff when they talk about books. They pretend to remember things that they don't
remember at all. Intense anxiety and guilt cluster round the state of having read. Press the memory of a book, and it goes blurry.

One friend of mine, a keen and discriminating reader of fiction, confessed to me, ‘I even forget the books I've loved the most. And it's not through lack of concentration: I'm completely absorbed by the book as I read it – but afterwards it's like another world that I lived in for a while, and now I've left it behind. I remember how I felt, but not the book itself.'

The books I have personally read and forgotten would fill the drained Fitzroy Baths. I fantasise being like Scrooge McDuck in his money vaults: having miraculously freed myself from guilt and duty, I dive gleefully into the great pool of forgotten volumes, frolicking among their torn pages, tossing them into the air, letting them bounce off my hollow skull. Every now and then a sentence that seems vaguely familiar flashes past my eye – was that something about happy families all being the same? A soldier lying face-down on the field after the battle of Waterloo with a bullet through his heart? A bloke with a daughter on a gumtree plantation? A cloud of torn-up paper scraps being flung out of a closed carriage by a woman's languid hand? Some hippies eating bacon for breakfast every morning of their lives? Now where the hell did I read that?

Once I was a teenager on the beach at Ocean Grove who opened the newspaper every Saturday morning with hands that trembled with excitement. It was the day of the
Age
Literary Supplement! Once again a door
opened a crack on to
THE GREAT WORLD OF BOOKS!
And ignorant, lazy Helen squeaked through! Lately, however, I feel more like the American poet John Berryman when he wrote

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature . . .

. . . And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

I hate writing. Writing is a sickness, a neurosis, a mania. Philip Larkin says somewhere that the urge to preserve is the basis of all art. I've had it up to here with rhetoric about art; but the urge to preserve – I understand that. I've been a captive of it for most of my adult life. I used to keep a diary. I still don't go anywhere
without my so-called writer's notebook. I jot things down in it. I ‘save' them from whatever their fate would be if I didn't jot them down. Maybe they wish I'd let them vanish into the ether, uncollected. Maybe they hate being netted and noted.

What difference would it make to the fate of the universe if I failed to make a note of the fact that behind me in the Woolworths check-out queue in Double Bay one Saturday afternoon a husband and wife muttered, between clenched teeth, the following bitter exchange:

W
IFE
: So. You want me out in the carpark, do you.

H
USBAND
: Do I?

W
IFE
: That's what you intimated.

H
USBAND
: ‘Intimated'! That's a big word for
you
to use.

Will I be sorry if I don't write down that the girl shampooing my hair in a Yarralumla salon said to me with cheerful resignation, ‘There's only 300,000 people
living
in Canberra!'

What about the fact that a friend of mine told me she went into Lincraft to buy a pair of pinking shears to send to her sister-in-law who's gone to Alexandria to marry an Egyptian? ‘Don't they have pinking shears in Alexandria?' What's so noteworthy about that?

I have shelves of battered old notebooks stuffed with inconsequential factoids. It's a madness, a fetish. I have to have special grid-ruled French notebooks with glossy paper or I'm miserable. I never even open them once they're filled and stashed on the shelf: I've got scores of
them, but I can't bring myself to destroy them. As one of Cormac McCarthy's enviably inarticulate modern cowboys says somewhere, ‘You write everythin down, pretty soon you don't remember nothin.'

Writers will insist on
writing
about everything. We are voracious monsters, ravening beasts who roam the world seeking whom and what we may devour. There's hardly a corner or a cranny of life that hasn't been zeroed in on, exposed to the light and relentlessly verbalised by some maniac with a biro and a keyboard.

Words, words – everywhere you look there's words. You stand on top of a cliff. Ah, what beauty! The air, the sea – but someone's hammered a sign into the ground right beside you, forcing on you the detailed history and meaning of that cliff. At South Head in Sydney Harbour there's a veritable forest of little signs around your knees, wherever you wander. One of them actually starts, I swear, with the words
The answer is blowing in the wind
. What the question was I have forgotten.

You go into an art gallery. A picture is hanging on a wall. You step up to have a look – and some bossy curator has typed up a little plaque describing the painting, relating the life story of the artist, fitting it into art history, locating it culturally. I can't resist the little plaques. I don't want them to be there but they are and I'm a print addict. I can't even look at the picture till I've read the plaque – and then I'm all distracted by the information, worrying about whether the bastard tyrannised over his family or died of syphilis. By the time I get round to bending my eye to the actual picture, I'm exhausted. I just want to lie
down on one of those leather benches. Curator, bring me a hot water bottle and a light blanket!

How wonderful it was, the way we read as children. We read while we got dressed in the morning, we read instead of doing our homework, we read long after everyone else in the house was asleep. Reading was a drunkenness. It was bliss and obsession. It was pure. At this stage of life, though, everything has got contaminated. It's hard to concentrate when you're struggling with an obscure feeling that you should be reading something other than the actual pages over which your eyes are smoothly travelling. You're reading something terrific by Joyce Carol Oates, say, but simultaneously you're thinking, Oh God! Shouldn't I be reading Dostoyevsky? Why aren't I tackling Henry James's late novels? When will I get round to E. Annie Proulx? Do I read enough African stuff? Enough local stuff? And does the male/female ratio of my reading reflect credit on my gender politics?

I read much too fast. It's an insane, desperate guzzling. At its worst it gets so that I have to force myself to read each paragraph twice. One morning as I skimmed the news headlines, my stomach knotted with the usual anxiety about whether I would ever, ever be well-informed –
and what if somebody asks me a question about the Republic?
– I noticed an advertisement for a speed reading course. It occurred to me that these courses might make provision for people with the opposite problem. After breakfast I called the number. A pleasant man answered. I outlined my problem and what I needed. His
response was an endless, dumb-struck silence. He must have thought it was a hoax. But surely I can't be the only person who suffers from this malady? There's a niche in the market here. Some smart operator could make a fortune, reconstituting innocence.

I asked a friend in Adelaide what she thought a person could read, with profit or simply without further loss, when her life had fallen apart.

‘I remember,' she replied, ‘being told in a tutorial by a professor of English in 1976 that when we reached the crises of our lives, when we were grappling with the dark night of the soul, we should find and read Tolstoy's
The Death of Ivan Illich
. Now, more than twenty years later, I still haven't read it, because every time I think I've reached the crisis in my life, I decide it would be terrible hubris to assume that things will never get any worse, and to read this book would be to ensure that some worse crisis would ensue, more or less immediately.'

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

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

‘Would Chekhov survive?' I asked anxiously.

‘Oh yes, I think so,' he said.

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

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

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

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

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