However much the past may rise up before us, and however much its ghosts may sit at our tables, however much it may haunt us at varying times, however much it may be present, it is also the past. And the more distant, the more mysterious. A closed door of an old house that occasionally opens, revealing different things at different times to different visitors. A house long locked up that we occasionally enter, sniffing out its smells, finding in the long-abandoned furniture, photographs and newspapers hints of what might have happened there: of who may have breathed their first or their last there. Hints of who its occupants were, before they upped and left and walked into history. Into the recent past. Then the distant past. Ghosts that we try to give substance and weight to, but who, in their inner selves, elude us, and remain ghosts and shadows all the same.
The thing to do is to make her up, the egg from which everything came, just as she made herself up. Just as she gave herself a story between two dates, a story that life never gave her – but could have.
Lightheaded with tiredness, Michael floats along the crowded platform, noting his fellow travellers: among them a young woman, seated on a suitcase, immersed in the morning ritual of her breakfast of a croissant and coffee. In the rising noise of the station, amid the movement and the announcements, she is still. Oblivious of the world, immersed in hers.
He stops at the engine, the tip of the arrow, contemplating its tinted windows, noting how far removed this silver capsule is from the steam and diesel engines of his youth. But, at the same time, guessing that his father would have had little trouble communicating, through the language of engine driving, with the French driver concealed behind the tinted windows. And he would have been familiar, within a few minutes, with the workings of the engine. Some things don’t change.
But some things must be discovered anew and so Michael has determined that when he eventually turns his full attention to Maryanne, he will not even try to present her as fact. For the core of her, the heart of her, he will never know. And he will not even pretend to enter her times. For the times are too distant. He must release her from history, release the times themselves from history, and discover her and them anew: the heart of her, the heart of them. He must look past the duplicity of photographs, the unreliability of family tales, and the shifting meanings of written records. To his Maryanne. To his 1917. It will require, he decides, taking in the hum of the busy station, a leap into what he imagines to be her world, into a Maryanne of sorts, who probably never existed but who just might have.
So, where will the leap land him? Where does he begin? With her bearing. The way she carries herself. Why not? A simple defining feature. A beginning. A place from which to leap again. Tall, that’s how she looks. But she’s not. It’s the bearing . . .
And the times, the spectacle of the city that she gazes upon. A heaving crowd, many but one, rising and falling on the waves of history. A time of ghosts and monsters: of the beast of storybook, scales glinting in the sun and the moonlight, stepping out of a dark fairytale and into the streets and houses of the everyday, the very spirit of the times, craving that something final that death delivers. Like stepping back three hundred years. Or three thousand years. Or three hundred thousand. To a time when beasts and monsters stalked the earth: all-powerful one day; skulking back into the swamp of creation and destruction the next, into long-craved oblivion, returning to simple matter. The same swamp from which the beast will emerge once again at varying times in history, summoned up by the death wish of deadly times, conjured up by magicians of darkness.
That is the city she looks upon day after day. A Maryanne who stays removed and separate, who has an egg to nurture and a family history to give birth to, which will flow down through the years, shaping the lives of those she will never even meet.
It is a beginning. And the end? Maryanne died in that suburb, built on that flat, dry land of Scotch thistle and scrub she glimpsed from the train on the way back from the foundling home: a suburb of stick houses and dirt streets. She died there, in Michael’s room. He slept on the back porch: an adventure, glimpsing the summer stars above him before drifting off, while she quietly died in his old room. A white-haired old lady; his father, Vic, sitting by her side night after night whenever he wasn’t driving engines, occasionally calling her Mama, and gently mopping her forehead in the heat. Michael barely noticed. His days were spent hurling a red ball into his back fence; day after day, eventually shattering the fence. Speed, he was chasing speed, while she embraced slowness: drifting in and out of consciousness, occasionally snapped out of her slumber by the crack of the ball on the fence. Then she was gone, the room was disinfected and became his again. Maryanne died in that suburb, in that room, and was buried in a pauper’s grave on a hill. An anonymous mound.
The crack of the ball, the pursuit of speed, went on. He barely noticed the last of Maryanne. Time speeds on, bends, collapses into slowness, then moves again, taking us with it. We all end up there, in a future cluttered with the past, drifting in and out of consciousness, half-lucid, half-gaga, drifting into that something final, once so remote, but suddenly imminent.
Michael looks back along the platform. The young woman has finished her breakfast and sits, still holding her cardboard cup, staring at the scene, the milling crowd around her, as if only just noticing it. The young woman, like Maryanne, one of those who have the gift of passing through their times and their worlds without appearing to be touched by them. Separate from the heaving beast, but, all the same, rising and falling on the waves of history. Waves that have continued beyond those distant days of the beast. Waves that are still felt clear into Michael’s times of silver jets and air-conditioned trains that speed into the countryside as if speeding into the future. And even though the children of that future will look back on the days of the beast, the days of the First World War, the great war for civilisation, in the same way that people at that very time would have looked back on the Battle of Waterloo (too distant to matter), the reverberations of those times will pass through them, and they too will rise and fall on the waves of distant history.
The platform is moving. People are pouring into the train. Michael joins them. The girl with the croissant and coffee cup has disappeared. Gone to wherever she will. He takes his seat. Slowly, almost surreptitiously, the train begins to move, quickly building to its maximum speed. Soon Michael is looking through his window onto the deep green fields of the French countryside, while bringing with him a picture of his Maryanne, looking directly back at him through the ages, resolute and independent, defying him to read her expression.
Notes for a Novel
This essay was written two years before The Year of the Beast was published, and appeared in Meanjin, vol. 76, issue 4, 2017
In the late 1990s I had a vivid dream about my old street in Glenroy where I grew up. In the dream my father (who is now dead), my mother and I were standing on the street, pausing in front of a vacant paddock and staring at the swaying grass. I knew, the way we know things in dreams, that it was summer. That it was a Saturday night in 1957 and from the colour of the sky that it was early evening. We all had our best clothes on: my father in a starched, white shirt, my mother in her best summer dress, and me in a striped shirt with a button-down collar that I’d forgotten all about until the dream retrieved it.
The dream was what we would now call virtual in its reality, the three of us a kind of tableau vivant that I felt I could walk around as I would a sculpture. The vividness and the urgency of the dream prompted a novel that, over three drafts, eventually became The Art of the Engine Driver.
I was convinced it would be a one-off book and would finally get this Glenroy thing off my chest: that my old street and my old patch of Glenroy, a rectangle of land about a mile long and a half mile wide, could yield only one book.
Almost twenty years and five Glenroy novels later I am half-way through the sixth and final novel in the sequence. When finished the six novels will span sixty tumultuous years of Australian his
tory, from 1917 to 1977. EM Forster talks of different types of time in his classic Aspects of the Novel. There is basically everyday time that watches and clocks measure, and something that he calls time measured by value: by which he means those intense experiences that blur our sense of passing time and defy the clocks. Those sixty years that the novels cover – World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two, the tumult of the post-war diaspora, the Cold War, the Menzies ascendency and the rise and fall of Whitlam – is time measured by value.
They were written in no particular order, and, I think, can be read in any order. I started in the middle, went forward for the next two, doubled back to 1946 for another, then jumped forward to 1977. The novel I’m writing now, although the last of the six, chronologically speaking is the first in the sequence.
It is set in Melbourne in the last months of 1917, during the second conscription referendum. We call them referendums, but, in fact, they were plebiscites. The central character is a woman called Maryanne. She is forty, single and seven months pregnant. The child she is carrying is Vic, the engine driver, and pivotal character, in the whole sequence.
It is, like much of the series, drawn from family history. Or, more accurately, family mythology. My grandmother was Maryanne Carroll. She brought up my father, her only child, by herself. My father never knew his father. The family name, Carroll, comes down through the matriarchal line. Strictly speaking, our name should have been, and the spellings are various, Deuschke: my father’s father, as best we understand, being German, from a small town in Prussia.
He was an absent father, a common phenomenon at the time. He was for many years an absence in the family history, and, to a large extent, still is. Although modern ways of tracing family history are continually shedding new light on things.
The task of fiction, however, is not to replicate the past but to reinvent it. One’s loyalty is always with the novel itself, and the hope that what you create, although diverging from history, will contain a truth of its own. The constant challenge throughout all of the Glenroy novels has been to recreate the past and to find a style that does not simply repeat social realism, the style so often associated with working class, suburban tales.
This novel, however, like Spirit of Progress, is set before the suburb was born. So it not so much taps into the history of the suburb, as its pre-history. The events I describe in this novel take place in a Melbourne that existed exactly one hundred years ago. In The Art of the Engine Driver I knew the place and time intimately because I lived through it. The place and the time were at my fingertips. Not so Melbourne, 1917. That place and time are as foreign to me as revolutionary Paris or Dickens’ London. And I made the decision right from the start that I would not even pretend to enter Melbourne in 1917: not to even pretend that I was leading the reader into anything resembling a faithful creation of that place and time. It would not only be false, it would be boring. Let the reader know right from the outset that this is an imagined Melbourne and an imagined 1917, and hope that it all rings true as fiction – not as social history. The novel is, above all, a work of the imagination. Martin Cruz Smith had never been to Moscow when he wrote Gorky Park. Borges never went to London; the London he writes about is drawn from Dickens. Novelists need to trust their imaginations and take those flights of fancy that are intrinsic to creating what you hope is a resonant imagined world that may as well be what it pretends to depict, and hopefully contains a kind of truth all its own.
For this reason, and because this is the way I work, I have chosen to do virtually no research while writing the first draft. I have done some, but very little. Research at this stage can be confining and deadening. The mind and imagination need to free, not weighed down by facts – most of which will prove to be irrelevant or unimportant in the end anyway. It is far more important at this stage to get the story rolling and the characters taking shape. Story, character and one informing, over-arching idea will hopefully give me the first draft. After that, I can go back and mine the history books, letters and newspapers of the age: when the story feels like it has taken on a life, and the characters are standing.
I am currently – late June – thirty-four and half thousand words into what I suspect is about a seventy thousand word novel. I have blocked out, on paper, the key chapters and scenes in the second half of the book. I like to work like this, there is no substitute for knowing where the story is heading and why. This doesn’t mean that the story will go in the direction I have mapped out or that the characters will behave themselves and do what I think they’ll do. It’s good to have narrative foundations, but they must be accommodating. Must be flexible enough to incorporate all the changes that happen along the way because fiction, especially fiction works of novel length, are organic: the conscious and the unconscious, the planned and the un-planned, are constantly interacting. Things go to plan, then all of a sudden, things change.
For example, last week I started writing a section I had been looking forward to writing and building the story up to for some time. But the moment I started writing it everything changed. Maryanne, the central character, was meant to confront the towering figure of archbishop Daniel Mannix at the front gate of his house, Raheen, in Kew. I even drove out there and studied the place in preparation. But nothing of the sort takes place. The moment I started writing the scene the next morning it swerved off in a totally unexpected direction, and it is not Mannix who steps outside that gate on his daily walk from Kew to Saint Patrick’s, but another character altogether. A character that had not even appeared in the book until that moment. But when I looked back I could see that her appearance had been written into the story. I’d plotted it without realising it. The unconscious had been one step ahead of me the whole time.
It’s not entirely true to say that I’ve done no research so far. To an extent, it depends what we call research. The times were tumultuous indeed, the city in the grip of a kind of madness. When Bob Santamaria complained to Mannix one day during the Labor Party split of the mid 1950s, saying that he couldn’t take the constant pressure of the moment any more, Mannix apparently scoffed, saying something like: ‘This is nothing compared to 1917’. The whole country was divided down the middle on conscription. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that this is the closest the nation has ever come to simply falling apart or falling into a kind of civil war within a war. Fights raged on the streets, rallies for ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ faced off against each other on opposing corners. It was an upheaval. So, how to depict this madness? Where to go to find the images I needed? Not history, I decided. I went to fiction. My preparatory reading was Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Balzac’s tales set during the revolution, Milan Kundera’s Prague both in 1948 and during the Soviet invasion, as well as Friedrich Reck’s Diary of a Man in Despair about the mayhem and misery of the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. They gave me swaying crowds, massed madness, mob movement, and individual lives swamped by the waves of history in progress.
But, more than these books, there were two other key works that gave me entrée into my Melbourne, 1917: Sigmund Freud’s brilliant essay Civilisation and its Discontents and Dante’s Inferno. Freud’s book was written in 1929. He makes no mention of the First World War and the death-wish madness it unleashed all over Europe, and the events of the 1930s in post-Weimar Germany are yet to happen. But I think it’s reasonable to suggest that the essay is imbued with the experience of World War One, and pre-figures the outbreak of Nazism. Freud argues, compellingly, that although we may pride ourselves on being civilised and celebrate Progress – civilisation and Progress come at a price. We must supress the pleasure seeking, anarchic, primal part of ourselves or no cooperative social enterprise can be successful. Society would be dead in the swamp. For most of the time though, with the Ego and Super Ego in charge, society holds together, and History and Progress stumble and lurch, more or less, forward. But every now and then there is a mass outbreak of the primal and the Id erupts into pleasure seeking, death desiring l
ife. For death, to the Id – the return of all life to indifferent primal matter – is the Id’s ultimate pleasure: that something final that it craves. So Freud gave me my thematic framework and this is crucial, for we not only need to know what is happening when we are writing a novel, but why. Action, driven by idea, is the best, the most satisfying form of action. And so the crowds, the violent massed meetings across the city, day in day out, are depicted as just such an eruption. A beast, a leviathan made up of the very worst of humanity: a rampant Id. Freud also gave me my [original] title: Festival of the Id [later changed to The Year of the Beast].
But just as I needed an informing idea, I also needed an informing image, one that would hold true throughout the novel. Dante gave me this. Maryanne is seven months pregnant when the novel opens. The city around her, every day, is convulsed in an ecstasy of madness. And it is, to her, like being mad: like descending, every day, into Hell. Every circle of Hell she descends into is a variation on the one before and an intimation of the one to follow. I decided from the start to write the novel from two points of view: Maryanne’s, and hovering above that, the omniscient authorial. The god-like perspective. She thinks of herself as descending into the circles of Hell, and over time I came to see her as a kind of Dante, seven months pregnant, making the perilous journey through the Hell of her city without a Virgil to guide her.
I’m halfway through, I think I know what will follow, and I even think I know how it will all end. Of course, things will change: characters will transform in unexpected ways, say the most unexpected things or not say certain things; the story will take the directions I’ve mapped out, and suddenly swerve off into unexpected directions. To borrow from Stoppard, I feel like a hiker. I know where I’m going, I have my compass and my general points of reference, but what happens along the way is another thing altogether.
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