The White Body of Evening
Page 30
The children who hung around the shop looked upon these two mysterious women with awe, envisaging them floating in the sooty half-light of the arcade like a pair of radiant apparitions, their feet barely touching the flagstones. Nobody doubted that, had they wanted to, the two of them could have drifted right through the glass to the counter where Mr Walters sat, sullenly clinging to a bag of old tricks.
“Perhaps I’ll go to Europe,” he’d mutter to himself. “I can always go back to Europe.”
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The verse at the beginning of the book comes from “Sunsets” by Richard Aldington as found in The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington (London: Allan Wingate, 1948). It is reproduced here with kind permission from the Estate of Richard Aldington.
The Karl Kraus essay discussed in Chapter 18 is ‘Der Prozeß Riehl’ in Die Fackel 211, November 1906 pp 1–28, quoted in Edward Timms’s Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp 84–5.
The newspaper article describing the Gun Alley murder that appears in Chapter 23 was excerpted from an article originally published in the Weekly Times, 7 January 1922.
In addition, there are a number of historical reference works that have helped me a great deal in the course of writing this book. They are Gerhard Fischer’s Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914–1920 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989); Mel Gordon’s The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (New York: Da Capo Books, 1997); James Grant and Geoffrey Serle’s The Melbourne Scene, 1803–1956 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1957); Susan Priestley’s South Melbourne: a History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995); Alan Sharpe’s Crimes that Shocked Australia (Milson’s Point: Currawong Press, 1982); Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); Jüngen Tampke’s Wunderbar Country: Germans Look at Australia, 1850–1914 (Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1982) and Edward Timms’s Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
Finally, Siegfried Kracauer’s wonderful essay “Abschied von der Lindenpassage”, in Stra?en in Berlin und anderswo (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964), has shaped my view of Melbourne’s arcades for so long that I’d be hard pressed to know exactly where the Lindenpassage ended and the Eastern Arcade began.
A number of people have been very generous with their support and expertise throughout the completion of this book. I would like to thank Rod Morrison, not only for his initial faith in the manuscript, but for his constant and careful attention to its editing and production. Belinda Lee and Carl Harrison-Ford also read the manuscript and contributed valuable editorial advice. Finally, without the support (patient and impatient) of Rachel and Rosa, my own fragile ego might not have stood up to it all. I owe them the greatest debt.
About the Author
A.L. McCann completed a PhD at Cornell University in 1996 and has since taught English literature at the University of Queensland and, currently, at the University of Melbourne. As an academic he has written widely on British and Australian literature. He lives in Melbourne with his wife and daughter.
The White Body of Evening is his first novel.
Copyright
Excerpt from “Sunsets” © The Estate of Richard Aldington.
Reproduced with kind permission.
Flamingo
First published in Australia in 2002
This edition published in 2011
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
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www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © A. L. McCann 2002
The right of A. L. McCann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
McCann, Andrew Lachlan, 1966–
The white body of evening: a novel. / McCann A. L.
ISBN: 978-0-7322-7733-8 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-0-7304-9360-0 (ePub)
I.Title.
A823.4