As far as Natasha was concerned, though, at the back of my mind was the fear that she wanted to marry me and get out. Marriage only really started to seem attractive to me once I got back to Australia in late 1967, back to the bungalows, backyards, family cars and furnishing departments in well-stocked department stores. Falling in love, marrying, building a house, children, family Christmases—it was a plot, a folk-tale I could imagine falling in with once back in Canberra. And I did, although I didn’t quite get to the end of the story.
One night in 1968 I fell in love instantly and for about twelve years. I was showing slides of the Soviet Union to a group of students in a friend’s flat. It was exotic in those days to have travelled to Samarkand and Tbilisi, Kiev and Tallinn and to have lived in Moscow for a year without being a fellow-traveller. At about eight o’clock the wire back-door opened and Elizabeth walked in. Before the door had even clicked shut again, I was in love. Totally and until about 1980. I still remember the door snapping shut after the bolt of obsessive love had struck. By midnight, at home again, drinking tea heavily, I’d determined to marry this Elizabeth, this beautiful, fragile, glassy-edged churchman’s daughter. And I did, eighteen months later, in the little Anglican church on the hill overlooking the sea at Gerringong, where Tom was still living, now a widower. Tom thought Elizabeth was a princess. Her father married us. I suppose it was a mistake in some sense, at least from Elizabeth’s point of view. But I’m not sure what ‘mistake’ really means in this context. I don’t regret it for a single second.
What can I put my instantaneous obsession down to, except some sort of Rorschach effect? I can’t think of any other explanation. Slowly, over years, some sort of inky blob runs and dries, runs and dries in your mind, bulging here because of some Pepsi ad, trickling down there because of someone you saw on a bus, zigzagging here wildly because of an overpoweringly erotic experience when you were twelve, turning pink there because of all those nineteenth-century Russian novels you’d read and so on. Gradually, over twenty years, if you’re basically introverted, darting in and out of the world only to borrow books and meet others in highly constructed situations, this blob becomes your object of desire. So, if a door opens and this blob appears, walks in and smiles at you, you’re thunderstruck, instantly attached, desperate to merge with, fit around this blob and stay there for all eternity. It’s pathetic, really. It’s also like being struck with lightning and surviving, unable to comprehend your astounding good fortune, your billion-to-one against-the-odds survival.
And you’re always busy, too, because the actual woman or man never really fits the blob in every detail. So the obsessive can spend years on a daily basis chipping away at the disparities, remoulding here, thinking wishfully there, squashing this bit in and pretending that bit isn’t there at all. You, the obsessed, don’t have to change. It’s not so much that you are perfect (so sniping on that score misses the mark), it’s more that you’re not there at all. You’re a ravenous eye on the alert for quiverings of change in your beloved, for any sign that blob and beloved are not one. As an eye you’re seen by others as single-minded and self-centred, but to itself the eye is just an eye, a focus of experience. It doesn’t occur to you, as an eye, that you have to do anything. It’s madness.
And so, years after we were married, I’d still find myself at home some afternoons, waiting for Elizabeth to drive round the curve in the road and up our drive and be home, almost unable to breathe until she got there. I’d stand and stare out the window up the empty Canberra street, feeling somehow unplugged until she got home and turned the switch and I could observe again. To this day I feel faintly sick at heart when I hear a car’s tyres crunching on a gravel drive.
We did do things, naturally. We built a house in a new suburb of Canberra with a wonderful sharp-edged view across to the Brindabellas, a view I wrote my first published poem about, after filtering it through Mandelstam. We holidayed on a house-boat in Kashmir and we lived in Moscow together for six months, in one tiny room at Moscow University with only a single bed for both of us. The question of a double bed seemed to embarrass the authorities into blank silence. We lived for a while in Vapaaniemi on the forested, snowy edges of Helsinki while I read in the library; we lived in Paris for six months, again while I read in the library; we caught trains around Europe—Bulgaria, Rumania, Berlin, Sweden, Turkey, Poland, we were very mobile. Some would say it was an interesting, even exciting life. I didn’t drink or run after other women, we shared the household chores, we talked a lot and read and had nice educated friends and pottered in the garden and never had flaming rows. But in the end I didn’t fit Elizabeth’s Rorschach blob, not by a long shot, and never had. So she’d never been in love with me. It’s heart-wrenching to have to acknowledge that—it cuts you to the quick.
Obsession makes marriage impossible, I admit. It can add dramatic punch and narrative thrust to an affair, but it bogs a marriage down in repetition, circling, movement inwards towards a point where sacred stories are retold over and over again in a private language whose syntax allows no deviation. You panic at any sign that your object of desire is not conforming to the Ur-blob—scorns aspects of your spiritual system, for example, likes drinking wine, dislikes some of your close friends (perfectly decent, right-thinking people), has fears and anxieties about silly things like sickness and ageing and the pointlessness of everything, things you’ve explained the answers to a thousand times. And so you’re seen as intolerant, while all the time you see yourself as just seeing.
And because your blob-beloved fills your whole field of vision twenty-four hours a day—gives meaning to making toast (she’ll smell it and eat it), missing a bus (half an hour lost from your time with her), filling the car with petrol (for her to drive around in, lighting up the city as she passes—no, truly)—because, like sun-worship, nothing you do is ever unrelated to this central fact of your existence, a terrifying burden settles on your love.
As if the burden of my obsessive love were not nightmare enough, there was another burden Elizabeth, fragile but with hard edges, had to bear after Jean and Tom had died. To the introvert, incessantly aware of no-father, no-mother, no-brother, no-sister (I don’t know how else to put it—you’re aware of a very specific kind of absence), a wife is called upon to be, as well as lover and companion, an understanding, monitoring mother (approached with gooey baby words when very insecure), sister (unquestioningly bound to you, not to be penetrated, partner in pranks) and loyal friend—a distasteful combination, when you think about it.
This particular burden was made heavier by Jean’s incarceration and death in 1969, while we were living in Sydney, courting—that is, seeing each other almost every day and experimenting with our sexual tastes. I suppose that’s what courting means, or perhaps it was more a matter of my wooing her. Jean’s was a dreadful, gruelling death—I’d rather be shot or starve to death than die like that.
She’d been getting dottier and gaunter for years. When I came back from a month’s hiking holiday in New Zealand in 1964, she seemed convinced I’d been gone two years. ‘Why did you stay away so long?’ she asked reproachfully, tears in her voice. ‘Why did you never write, never get in touch with us? And we love you so very much!’ In fact I’d written almost every day—Tom wrapped all my letters and cards up in a little bundle which I’ve kept to this day. Tom and I largely pretended nothing was happening. Apart from anything else, I’ve always been a coward where madness is concerned. I can smell it in a room, I can smell it getting on a bus to choose a seat across the aisle. It always infuriated me to hear clever young things with a couple of French philosophers under their belt seriously suggesting it was we who were mad and the sane who were locked up in asylums, it being all an oppressive social construct. Asylums have always been used to lock up the subversive and peculiar, of course, definitions of madness have always been adapted to suit the reigning ideology and how we use the word ‘mad’ shifts according to the time and place. But it’s not just a social construct. Liv
ing with Jean was living with madness and it became unbearable.
Our intolerance had other roots, though, it wasn’t just cowardice. It was also ignorance and fear. Jean had, after all, had that nervous breakdown before I was born, spending two years virtually locked inside the house, standing at the sink washing her hands until they were raw and swollen. So she was flawed. Then when they moved to Gerringong, a small village on the coast south of Wollongong, while I was in Russia, Jean started writing me heart-wrenching letters, the lines veering off at mad angles towards the corners of the pages, calmly panic-stricken letters, misspelt, sometimes with no signature. She felt, I think, that she’d washed up, after a life of minor humiliations, like a piece of rubbish on a deserted beach. You couldn’t talk to Tom about it. He was nearly eighty, blissfully at peace with himself and the world. His days were filled with winning chook raffles at the bowling club and ambling up the green hill to the shop with the dog, the ocean shining and thudding behind his back. He loved to mag, as Carmel Bird would say, over the fence to the neighbours or sit on the front verandah in his Hawaiian shirt with Marlborough’s French Phrase Book or the morning newspaper in his lap, tossing jocular remarks at passers-by. ‘He became a popular resident through his most jovial personality,’ as the obituary in the local newspaper worded it, ‘and his kindness and friendliness as a neighbour.’
Jean started saying ‘pass the boot’ instead of ‘pass the butter’, trying to cook in the refrigerator, forgetting how to do up buttons, mistaking me for Tom and other things that made you weep. I still dream, to this very day, of Jean coming to the table in the morning, the sea gleaming like a metal sheet through the venetians, and saying ‘pass the butter, please’ and finding all her words fall into place and all of us laughing until we cry from joy.
Eventually, Jean had to be ‘looked after’. Well, I suppose she really did. Tom was emotionally out of his depth and, eighty now (but quite rotund and lively), he could not be expected to bathe and dress and feed his ever madder wife and sit with her all day staring out through the venetians. He never read, apart from French grammars and phrase-books, occasionally an old dictionary flattened silverfish used to drop out of, and the newspaper. So Jean was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Sydney. Since I was living there, teaching Russian, a half-hour’s drive away on the other side of the harbour, it was left to me to visit her. Elizabeth very often came with me. I think Tom only saw her once during the nine months or so she took to die.
I used to go five or six times a week. When I lost my driving-licence for sliding down a slippery wet hill into the back of another car, I started going on the bus, an hour each way, sitting upstairs at the front teaching myself Polish to pass the time. I suppose I went because I wanted to protect her as best I could from any sense of being abandoned or left unloved. I think that scarifying final scene in The Cherry Orchard was lurking in my mind, too. If you’ve ever seen the play, you’ll remember it—it’s the archetypally horrifying ending: Firs the decrepit family retainer is left locked up and forgotten in the house when Ranevskaya and her self-indulgent entourage pack up and leave forever. When I got to Gladesville, Jean would be propped up like a scarecrow in a washed-out nightie in a large, bare room with other lunatics, perhaps eating if I was a little late. The sick and mad in our society, as you’ll have noticed, are always fed early, like children, and then dropped into the yawning night to confront their fears alone, constantly a few hours out of kilter with the normal world. Sometimes she’d know who I was and we’d have a kind of lurching conversation about this and that, sometimes she’d take me for Tom or her brother or not know me at all and get petulant. Sometimes she seemed to be all too aware of this ultimate humiliation in her life, this final debasement of what was fine in her. She’d pick at her grubby hospital nightie and say to me: ‘I look like a clown, don’t I?’ It made my throat burn with tears and I couldn’t speak. One afternoon when I got to Gladesville she wasn’t there at all. Without a word to anyone (except, perhaps, ‘Jean, we’re taking you on a little trip, dear—won’t that be nice?’) she’d been removed to the asylum at Callan Park for some experiments. Almost numb with anxiety I caught a bus to Callan Park (taxis in those days being only for taking luggage to the station). Jean was lying in appalling pain—from what? she wasn’t sick—fretting like an animal for … I don’t know what for. Love, succour, comfort, care—no word is intense enough. And all I could do was stroke her and weep, I couldn’t reach into her with what she ached for. Then one day she was gone from there, too. Back to Gladesville. They’d finished.
One Sunday afternoon I was sitting with her in her little, white room with its barred window, listening to the clanging and shrieking and the mad piano banging deeper inside the building, not saying much—what was there to say? She was lying chalk-white on her bed by the window. Her breathing seemed to go awry and then she missed a breath and then there was no more breathing. Inside you every fibre of your being starts to scream against the stillness on the bed. But Jean was a story no one ever listened to. And once she’d gone I doubt a single human being ever remembered, or only fleetingly, its being told.
Tom died a couple of years later, but with a certain flair. Elizabeth and I were in Turkey on the day. He was mowing the back grass—he always loved getting the Victa into the long kikuyu, cutting long, shining swathes in the moist lawn—and stopped to go up into the house to write us a letter. I expect it was one of those lovingly long, unplaintive letters of his about all manner of daily things: the dog, the cat, the goat from up the road, the heat or his conversations with the Congregational minister about death and other theological matters. He wrote about half a page and in mid-sentence died. I still have the letter upstairs there somewhere, but I can’t read it, so I can’t tell you exactly what he said.
By the time I got back from Turkey, Dad had been buried by his friend the Congregational minister, the house was shut up and only the dog, dazed and wobbly, was there in the empty house to greet me. Neighbours had been feeding it. Sterling Christian folk they were, too, the pillars of some local church or other, and the first thing they did as soon as they saw the blinds were up was to send their mentally retarded son across with a bill for the dog food. The real message was that now Tom had gone I didn’t belong there.
People are so scathing about Canberra, which is where I did belong and lived out my married life in the early ’seventies. They’re scathing about the people they imagine live there, the deathly quiet of the lush suburban streets, the bourgeois comfortableness of the city, its circular streets, the arid new suburbs, its unreality, its lack of a city centre—there’s no end to what they’re scathing about. I must say I loved living there. Like Berlin (which it’s utterly unlike) Canberra appealed to me partly because right there in front of me was a Pure Land in operation—planned, beautiful (lakes, gardens, mountains), ruled by benevolent dictators, not the mob, cleansed of the grosser aspects of capitalism—it was almost classless in a Soviet sort of way (that is, rigidly stratified, but not according to who owned what). The people with status in the community seemed to be members of the intelligentsia—professors and poets and chief librarians, senior civil servants and eminent biologists. God alone knows who built the roads or dug the lake—they just appeared where someone very highly placed had decided they should. Canberra lulled you into thinking all was right with the world. It was the perfect place to be married in.
Homosexuality never really raised its head in Canberra. There was some scandal about a professor taking a young man back to his room in a government hostel, I seem to remember, something about nakedness and violence, but in general it was something that happened in artistic circles elsewhere, amongst the sort of people who read Nation Review. It was certainly no threat to my marriage. I’d tried it once in Paris—a young Frenchman offered to help me read my street-map on the Boulevard de Clichy, we had a coffee, he came back to my hotel—but I’d hated it, it nauseated me even to think about it. I didn’t think it was ‘wrong’, whatever
that meant, or any more ‘wrong’ than any other kind of self-indulgence, I just didn’t enjoy it. And, although I had no theoretical reasoning at my disposal to back my intuition up, I did intuit that to enjoy it was a threat to the social order, to the present comfortable arrangement of happy families with lines of power passing through males to other males right up to the top. It didn’t matter much if you wanted to write books or dance in the corps de ballet, but it did matter if you wanted to find a niche in the power structure.
Not enjoying sex with men did not mean that I was not attracted during those married years to certain men. Desire, I suppose, has something to do with the anguish of incompletion, and my incompletion sneered at me from every billboard, every cinema-screen, every novel, every magazine. I could hardly fail to be anguished and therefore to desire. Real men penetrated, that was the thing. They penetrated with bulldozers, jackhammers, bullets, even pens and telephones, they penetrated goal-posts and cricket-stumps, space in sputniks, the Congo, New Guinea, the Blue Mountains, the line of breakers, they smashed records, barriers, rocks, the established order, the quiet of a suburban afternoon with piercing rock music—and incidentally in passing, they penetrated women. The ideal male body was finely attuned to this task of slicing and penetrating and it appeared more and more everywhere—unsung, in a sense, but depicted and described on television and in books. It was lithe, well-defined, sprang instantly from relaxation into tensile readiness and bore one or two signs of penetrating activity in the past (a scar, perhaps, a broken bone a little crookedly healed, even a very slight limp was acceptably manly).
Mother's Disgrace Page 13
