by Luke Carman
Intimate Antipathies
Intimate Antipathies
Luke Carman
First published in 2019
from the Writing and Society Research Centre
at Western Sydney University
by the Giramondo Publishing Company
PO Box 752
Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia
www.giramondopublishing.com
© Luke Carman 2019
Designed by Harry Williamson
Typeset by Andrew Davies
in 11.25/14 pt Garamond 3
Printed and bound by Ligare Book Printers
Distributed in Australia by NewSouth Books
A catalogue record for this
book is available from the
National Library of Australia
ISBN: 978-1-925818-12-3 (pbk)
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Leroy
That ‘writers write’ is meant to be self-evident.
People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true.
Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers
sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.
RENATA ADLER , Speedboat (1976)
Contents
My Blue Inferno
Getting Square in a Jerking Circle
Diabolus In Festum
A Northern Rivers Romance
An Intimate Antipathy
Father and Son
The Whistleblower’s Lament
A Portrait of the Artist in Residence
Dreams in the Daylight Country
The Cult of Western Sydney
In the Room with Gerald Murnane
MY BLUE INFERNO
In the beginning I made the mistake of wanting to be what some people call a writer. This was a great disappointment to my father, who argued God had given him a handsome and well-formed child who ought to show his gratitude for those blessings by becoming a Kmart catalogue model. Many occasions were spent in my father’s kitchen, each of us leaning against the sink, poring over the winter range of plaid vests and bomber jackets, and he would slap the pages and say, ‘What did I tell you! This could have been you!’ But it is the duty of every decent son to frustrate his father’s wishes, and as art and literature seek to teach us, homeopathic parricide is the path to self-discovery.
Refusing to deal with the strange vanity of the life my father had picked out for me, I spent my time with books instead, in the dim light of my room, prone on the bed, eschewing all other dimensions of life, with its flashing passions and its baser seductions. I lived a life of ascetic unreality, all the while consoling myself for the wretchedness of my condition, with the sanctimonious air of a zealot, that my destiny was to be an inhabitant of the richer realms of the imaginative plains – and one day to be paid to write books in some squalid darkness, a room of my own and some fifty pounds – and to remain a stranger to the trappings the normies on the streets outside would never quit their fretting over.
Of course this was the fever dream of naïvety. The literary world, as it has been revealed to me in snatches at author panels, at lectures in university chambers, in conversation with poets in empty auditoriums, and while sitting quietly in psychiatrists’ waiting rooms, is a public engagement, where the dim spotlight is always indifferently fixed, and the crowd around the gloom is made of pleasant faces and critics and other young writers who look on with a tame, cannibalistic attention. It’s not so bad, not a heavy burden, but having met with some small success, I found I’d soon acquired all the trappings of a normal life: a wife, a home, a child, and an amount of respect, all of which I had not the faintest idea what to do with once they had come into being. Having failed at avoiding life and all its accessories, having discovered my dream of a wretched hermitude was an illusion, some lodestar of my mind decided it was time to collapse, and I found myself suffering from an active case of going nuts.
Having since recovered, after taking my pills and walking the line for a while, I went with my friend Tom to a café were poets were set to read, to celebrate being well again. People were knitting at tables in the dim candlelight, drinking wine and facing a microphone. I was drinking the wine in large gulps to avoid the taste, and several times before reaching my seat returned to the bar to have the glass refilled. I kept asking Tom if he could use another drink himself, but he was too busy fiddling with a packet of sugar and frowning at the poets on the stage, his red hair curled tight in the darkness.
‘This poem is about softboys,’ the short woman on stage, whose tattoo ran down her thigh like an oil slick into her socks, announced to the darkness. She began to read her softboy poem from a chapbook folded open in her hands, but the wine was making it hard to hear, and Tom was frowning so loudly, and my glass was empty.
At that moment, a great fat woman walking past the event with a lugubriously loose gait stopped before the glass of the café front and plonked her head against it, peering in at us and holding up her hands like fleshy apertures. Other people continued to pass her by on the street, but she stayed there, her plump hands up to the glass, her heavy breath casting a halo of fog around her face, as the poet, oblivious to this distracting inquisition, continued to deliver her delicate internal rhymes.
‘Hey!’ The big stranger’s voice, booming through the glass cut across the poetry, ‘What are you cunts doing?’ she demanded. A nervous giggle wormed its way through the dark room. The short poet was turned almost in knots with her paper and legs and head in an array of directions, frozen in uncertainty. The large woman, her dignity hurt by the laughter, lifted up her top, and slammed her enormous breasts against the window, swirling them about in a windmill motion she had doubtless deployed in other such scenarios, as she screamed ‘Get a load of these!’ The atmosphere, as they say when a performance is elevated, was electric – no one dared to breathe lest they miss a moment – and as suddenly as it was done the woman bounced off the window and into the night, leaving a smear of circles behind, her great buttocks high and proud as she wrestled her showstoppers back under cover. With perfect timing, the audience still in their shock and awe, Fiona Wright, a famous poet who was sitting at a table in the back of the room, dropped the needle back into the event by calling out, ‘and they say Newtown has gentrified!’
It’s hard to say what it was exactly that caused it, but something about this commotion inspired Tom to leave without saying a word, his head probably strained by the effort of frowning. Eventually the man at the bar refused to serve me, so I left too. I caught the slow train back to the mountains on my own, watching the blurred shape of Sydney unwinding its high-rises, the lights on top of cranes like little fires on a distant hill, watching the legs of people at the stations flash in and out of the train at each stop, listening to kids talk their new codes for old things, the smell of grease and sweat and wine in the carriage, all the way up into the quiet, empty mountain air, where my breath trailed beyond me up the stairs of the station and onto the street. I needed to see if it was too late to get a beer at the pub, my blood was beginning to lose its drink, and that awful throb of sobriety was building in my temples.
The pub was dark, the lights were on in the car park but the doors were barred. A tall man in a black jacket appeared, charging towards me from around the other side of the street. ‘Gimme your fucking wallet!’ he demanded. I took a step back with my hands out in the international gesture for ‘Oh!’ He told me again to give up the wallet, and as he came closer I had nowhere to go but back ont
o the empty highway. I suppose I was thinking, ‘He can’t rob me on the road – it’s too dangerous!’, and for a moment this strategy seemed to work. He stopped at the edge of the gutter, his face contorted with rage and his shoulders flared. Then it occurred to me, strange to say, that he was hardly a man at all, probably just eighteen. I walked back towards the man in the jacket, his fearsome face still frozen into a mask of rage, but he retreated a few steps, as if he needed to maintain the distance between us. I started to laugh, and under an orange streetlight by the window of the bar I felt an enormous rush come into me. Through the throb in my temples and the last drop of drink in my blood and some reptilian part of the brain came some flux of spontaneous speech. I cursed him, belittled him, told him that he was the worst thief I’d ever met, mocked his stupid jacket and his soft face and his laughable attempts at robbery. He stepped backwards as if stunned, looked down at the ground for a moment, then sat down. He put his hands to his head and started to weep. I could not believe my eyes, the lad was crying in the gutter, but I could not restrain myself, or take pity on him – some wild power of words was erupting out of me into the night. I stood over him and put my face near his, and carried on ranting and raving. He was sobbing, and from my belly to my mouth there now came an electric current of abuse and sermonising that might have gone on forever had not a group of young men come running over from the pub car park and chased me away from the thief, thinking maybe that I must have attacked him. I walked away, and they did not chase, but stood around their new companion in a strange circle of confusion.
The words, however, would not cease, I walked home, become one of those people you sometimes hear passing your house in the dead of night, who are possessed by some spirit to rant and rave at the stars and the black trees moving in the midnight breeze over fences and the cars that go by. When I reached home, I stood at the doorway and went quiet. There was, I decided, finally nothing left to say. At that moment, an email appeared on my phone. It was from the editor of a long-standing literary journal. It read, ‘I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the life of a writer?’ As it happens, I did. I went inside, and began to write this odd book.
GETTING SQUARE IN A JERKING CIRCLE
When asked to explain why he had dedicated his long life to American letters, Gore Vidal hypothesised the existence of two distinct sub-genres of ‘writer’. The first he described as operating in the Henry James caste: a writer obsessed – for no discernible reason – with perfecting the subtle arts of written language. Someone for whom, as James himself put it, ‘there is only one recipe – to care a great deal for the cookery’. For these writers, their body of work represents an ongoing experiment with the vast frontiers of language. They live in search of the flawless scene, a numinous sentence – they wander intoxicated by belief in a transcendental sublimity obscured behind the dead space of everyday speech. Enquiring for motives from these linguistically possessed individuals is futile – they are as unable to reveal the source of the desire behind their odd impulses as the moth might be said to understand the allure of the flame.
The second category Vidal proposed was that of the unhappy soul who, at some pivotal point in their infancy, suffered psychic injury – an intolerable wounding of the self – for which the only remedy was the consoling prosthesis of imagination. Whatever enigmatic computational process in the human mind is charged with the interpretation of the world through language, in these benighted psychic cripples the system has been rerouted to conjure up alternate ontologies in which life’s injustices can be undone, and remade. Such a crutch, Vidal suggested, becomes so necessary for the subject – and the processes involved so dominant – that the individual ultimately exists in a schismatic state between the unforgiving world of the real and the seductive realm of their own private fictions. To be so torn is to be a permanent émigré between states: to live an excess of lives, all of them in a kind of impoverished ‘not quite’ present. To experience the self as ‘complex and many’ is to be no one and nowhere in a sense; to reside in envious relation to the unity of the ‘one and simple’. Those who inhabit the in-between world of their own imaginations typically make second-rate citizens in those unmalleable parameters we colloquially refer to as ‘reality’. They lack the consistency, the focus and the commitment to thrive in most daylight vocations. The only suitable recourse open to such ‘complicated’ unfortunates is to scratch a living from exploiting their fantastical reflexes.
Having created this dichotomy of the two kinds of essential writers, Vidal placed himself squarely in the latter category. In his case, the reason for retreat into the imagination was an alcoholic mother. Like most of Vidal’s commentary on matters literary, his psychoanalytic conception of a writerly split between the automaton nerd and the diseased dreamer is subtly honed to provoke derision from precisely the sort of literal-minded type who would ask an author such an imponderable question as ‘why did you write?’ in the first place – journalists, rationalists, theorists, pundits, pedants – those peers, in other words, who Vidal seemed to delight in antagonising. It hardly matters if the whole idea is a ponderous nonsense. As Alfred Whitehead recognised, it is more important that an idea be interesting than that it be true.
This essay – though you might not have guessed from its beginning – is an insider’s account of the current state of Australia’s so-called ‘writing culture’. I begin with a long digression on Gore Vidal’s ideas because I’ve always been struck by how strangely they fit the writing world as I’ve known it – and despite possessing nary the semblance of a profile myself, I tell you I’ve known it quite well. If nothing else, I have had the privilege of being in contact with countless young and ‘emerging’ writers over the last decade. For the last ten years I’ve run workshops and tutorials and projects and lectures in dozens of schools, universities and writing centres across the country, attempting to teach what little I know about the subject of literacy and literature to whomever is naïve enough to listen. Simultaneously, I’ve had the strange pleasure of being surrounded by some of our culture’s most celebrated writers, critics and editors. It’s not difficult to do so. The pond is small and the fish are big. Amidst the hopefuls I’ve taught, or the accomplished writers I’ve encountered, there is only a tiny fraction who might belong to Vidal’s first category of the Jamesian word-nerd. From hopeful high-schoolers to venerated Miles Franklin clubbers – the overwhelming majority have been of the basket-case variety. Childhood traumas, mental illnesses, immutable shame, neuroses of every colour and shape, these are the ubiquitous hallmarks of the writer in persona. There have been perhaps one or two exceptions I’ve come across (both of them poets), who seemed more concerned with the shape of their sentences than making themselves whole – but that’s it. If such an imbalance alone was not enough to suggest a flaw in Vidal’s configuration, there is also the hollow ring of a bygone era in his distinctions.
I suspect a new subset of wounded-psyche-driven figures is in ascendance: those who – borrowing again from the categories above – appear to have dealt with their intolerable damage, not by indulging their creative faculties in the consolations of the imagination, but with fantasies of finding a home amidst those who do. Rather than retreating into the fecund vortex of other worlds and parallel realities, these dreamers conjure visions of themselves at play – accepted, affirmed, and celebrated – within a ‘real-world’ community that already exists: their great dream is to be welcomed into the bright and glimmering constellation of the Arts Industry. Crashing against the cruelty and capriciousness of the real, these types – while just as nutty as the poor writer-to-be who has a head full of linguistic ticks and slippages – imagine a kinder, better, softer arena of life awaits them in the open arms and exalted sentences of the arts community.
Of course, the writer-to-be and the arts community dreamer are not mutually excluded from being one and the same person, but when the latter does without the former, it becomes impossible to keep those who want to deal with wor
ds from colliding with those who’ll do whatever it takes to ‘make it’ – and one is far better suited to the clash than the other. The advantage is almost always on the side of the cunning social arts satellite than the demented scribbler. In a culture like ours, one which places so little value on the linguistic traditions and our literary heritage – one in which the education system actively devalues it – those with relatively meagre talents and hopes of escaping into the safe spaces of the arts community often consider the ‘writing’ world as an easy option. Reality TV shows like Australian Idol, X-Factor, The Voice and so on have taught a generation of Australians that to be involved with music requires being humiliated and exposed for any delusions of talent they might have. Acting, likewise, is off-limits to the ugly and uncharismatic, so there are no chances there. The plastic arts require a modicum of ingenuity, the learning of a new and obtuse language, and an absurd level of tenacity, before one can even begin to bluff one’s way into its clubhouse – all far too taxing. The writing world, as Henry James tells us, is a house of not one, but a million windows – and out of each pane stares a deranged shut-in whose fantasy novel about a dystopian post-apocalyptic planet enslaved by telekinetic Tuataras is a mere decade from being self-published online; or a poet who’s just returned from summer in Berlin and is feverishly devising centos derived from official UN reports on Australia’s asylum-seeker policies to be printed in the form of origami birds. These aspiring exiles are legion, and amongst their number are our nation’s future paragons of poetry and prose. Not all of them will make it – exposure, if it comes, will kill more of them than it makes. Nevertheless, I have nothing but love in my heart for each and every one of our literary wannabes – I am one myself, after all, and will likely still be one when I’m laid in the dirt. The wannabe arts dreamers, on the other hand – desirous of making themselves part of this picture but indifferent to its meaning – observe the mosaic of tinkering revenants and their culturally irrelevant obsessions, and see an unguarded hen-house of nervous, leaderless fowls. They goose-step their way through the open borders of the writing culture with nothing on their minds but belonging. And why not? Perceiving themselves as creative, intuitive, passionate people inflamed with a sense of revolutionary zeal born from the resentment they carry in their hearts for those with genuine talent, these promising young things soon hold in their soft little hands the naked flesh of our nation’s literary future.
