The Feel of Steel (6 page)

But in my ignorance I made the mistake of starting out in tetrameters – four-foot lines. After ten pages of this I read it over and realised it was doggerel, so regular in its beat that it was completely rigid. I was overcome with gloom, pointlessness and failure. Then I thought of Alexander Pope.

In Honours English at Melbourne University in the sixties we were supposed to read Pope. I was a gushy adolescent then and found all that eighteenth-century
stuff a tremendous bore – cold and tedious and caked with classical references I didn't understand. (I still don't understand them but at least now I have the nous to read the footnotes). Then in the eighties, when I was a television critic for three weeks, I used to watch a show called
Six Centuries of British Verse
. The night they read the opening lines of ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot' I was electrified.

Shut, shut the door, good John! (fatigued, I said),
Tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead.
The Dog Star rages! nay, 'tis past a doubt
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:
Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

So when I bogged down poetically, I rushed to the shelf for my Norton's anthology. My God, Pope is the goods. Those silken pentameters! They can sound as smooth and as real as somebody talking, but with that light starch of formality – I nearly died of admiration and envy. I looked at my clunking lawn-mower of a poem and saw I had to start all over again. Each line needed five beats, not a measly four. Four were closed-off and nailed down, like what had happened inside me. But five, the way Pope handled them, were free and flexible, flowing and flowing onwards, always opening out, springing surprises, forever under control, but with a light and brilliant touch.

I spent the summer slaving over my so-called poem. In the end I abandoned it, with relief. It's still crap, and I'll never even show it to anyone, let alone try to publish it – but I came out of the attempt filled with the deepest respect for poets. They're crazy and mean, always squabbling and forming cliques and putting shit on each other, but what they're doing when they're working is radiantly worth the trouble.

Back in the sixties at Melbourne University I encountered plenty of poems which I was too young to understand. Now I'm old enough to know what William Butler Yeats, in a poem called ‘Friends', is talking about. He's a man remembering three women who shaped his life; but anyone, male or female, who's had a life at all will be grateful, I think, that someone has managed to get into words this complex night-haunting, this sudden flood of gratitude, in thirty very short lines.

Now must I these three praise –
Three women that have wrought
What joy is in my days:
One because no thought,
Nor those unpassing cares,
No, not in these fifteen
Many-times-troubled years,
Could ever come between
Mind and delighted mind;
And one because her hand
Had strength that could unbind
What none can understand,
What none can have and thrive,
Youth's dreamy load, till she
So changed me that I live
Labouring in ecstasy.
And what of her that took
All till my youth was gone
With scarce a pitying look?
How could I praise that one?
When day begins to break
I count my good and bad,
Being wakeful for her sake,
Remembering what she had,
What eagle look still shows,
While up from my heart's root
So great a sweetness flows
I shake from head to foot
.

Tower Diary

B
ellevue Hill. A sunny flat five floors up, in a building that looks eastward from the crest of a hill. Another marriage wrecked. Three times I've failed.

It's very still. Voices, faint and far off. Someone's hammering, someone's using a saw. Someone plants his foot and an engine surges. The sea from my bedroom window, miles over there beyond Bondi, is a blue-grey line, ruled with authority. Leaves, way below me, move gently. Two white butterflies flit by, as fine and as tiny as scraps of tissue paper, but driven just the same to pair, copulate and die.

Whole days pass without sight or sound of another human. My voice gets rusty. I never want to go anywhere,
but occasionally I force myself – and when I do, I soon find myself obsessively thinking about my new mattress. White sheets and pillow cases and doona cloud my mind. A soft, weak, sinking tiredness overwhelms me. I go home and lie on the bed, whether it's night or day, and fall asleep. I dream great twisted sagas of abandonment, jealousy, savage revenge. I wake from them dully. I eat a small thing. I'm like a razor blade: turn it sideways and it disappears.

Disappointment in my famous view. I look at it, expecting my spirits to rise, but they stay low, and the prospect is empty of meaning. Sometimes, through the windows smeared by salt from the sea wind, it even looks . . . ugly. Ungiving. Unforgiving. No use to me at all. It's a drain on me – one more thing at which I fail.

I take a bus and a train to Global Gossip in Kings Cross to pick up my email. Macleay Street is swarming with people whose suffering is unconcealed. People who are scarred and scabby, ugly, mad, bleeding, desperate, and they can't hide it. They don't even try.

But I like keeping a diary. For the quiet pleasure of it. A few words each day. No longer a driven, raging, blow-by-blow account of betrayal.

A quiet, soft, grey morning. Slender lines of streetlamps wander up the valley slopes to Dover Heights. When they flick on in the evening, or when their frail light still shows at sunrise, they seem an image of gentle order and civic care.

In the city I pick up my new multifocal glasses. I put them on and walk into the surging mass of Friday lunchtime on George Street. The shock of sharp focus: pores of skin, hair texture, lines, and expressions – naked emotion and experience on every face. The faces drive themselves through the air, urgently going somewhere, carrying their wounded, anxious psyches on the surface with which they most intimately greet the world.
Marks of weakness, marks of woe
– but also of effort, purpose, even hope. How dull my vision had grown, without my realising it.

All day I cry at the slightest thing – a person who bumps me in the street, a cloudy sky, an empty letterbox. But in the evening I go with Ann and Angelo to the Rocks to hear a Cretan band – three stiff-faced boys in black-bobbled head scarves. Two lutes at first, the playing a little tentative, then Platyrrahos lays down his lute, picks up the lyra and draws his bow across the strings. A sound almost human soars out of the little instrument – a cry of pain and beauty. The young man's singing voice warms, strengthens, gains a harsh power. And then half a dozen young hipsters jump to their feet and dance – unsmiling boys, splendid girls with profiles off coins. One man, in a black T-shirt and black jeans, has huge, gym-muscled, tattooed arms. He trips and leaps, master of the complicated steppings. The line moves smoothly, pauses for its complex footwork, then surges on again, always rippling and flowing. The leader of the dance leaps and bounds, slaps ankle and thigh, twists his torso one way and his legs the other – an explosion of life – then drops to a standstill, lets go the person next in line who's been supporting his gyrations, and strolls away, examining his fingernails, to take a modest place further down the row.

‘Yes,' says A.G. later, ‘but I've seen women doing the supporting. You see them –' (she mimics a small person, teeth gritted, eyes squinting, shoulders bent sideways under a weight) ‘– while the bloke –' (mimes a carefree, vain, casual frolicking and leaping). ‘It's an image of the whole man/woman thing, in Greece.'

Not only in Greece.