by David Malouf
Author’s Afterword
✧✧✧
In 1972, on the fifth floor at number 24 Piazza Pitti, in the apartment of my Florentine friend Carlo Olivieri, I began what was to be the final version of a book I had been trying to write for nearly ten years. I had a six months’ sabbatical from Sydney University; I was alone, I had no other work to do, I knew no one in Florence except Carlo, who was away working in another city, and his mother, who had gone for a month to Geneva — the conditions were ideal. If I didn’t get it right this time I never would.
The apartment was low-ceilinged but cool, and at number 23 next door (there was a plaque) Dostoevski, exactly a century before, had written The Idiot, looking out on the same view of the grand, rusticated front of the Pitti Palace, the cypress tops of the Boboli Gardens, and on the ridge above, airily theatrical against the Tuscan sky, the lemon-pale, villa-like facade of Forte Belvedere. If Dostoevski, closing his outward eye on these splendid evocations of Italy, could imagine so darkly the snowbound avenues of St Petersburg and the swarming bridges across the Neva, surely I could look in the same direction, I thought, and catch a view of Brisbane, my weatherboard, subtropical hometown, with its mangrove-choked river, rain-swollen and sluggish, and on every hilltop the unmistakable outline of bunya and hoop-pines. Florence did perhaps have its influence, in the ironic nickname I found for my otherwise nameless narrator, but in every other respect it absented itself, though I believe now that I came to see more clearly, for having to shut out the obvious, because European, poetry of the place I was in, the more elusive, as yet non-existent poetry (since it had not yet made its appearance in any book) of the place where I had grown up. So I began.
All my previous attempts had foundered because I was trying to be “clever”. It was a way, I saw now, of not facing up to the subject. This time, falling back on the open, undefended tone of poems I had written nearly a decade before, I began with a plain statement of fact: “My father was one of the fittest men I have ever known”. By the end of the first paragraph I had a death on my hands and a way of catching myself out, and the reader too, I hoped, with another, and it was this second death, which had haunted me for nearly ten years, that I wanted to deal with: the death, by accident or design, of an old schoolfriend, John Milliner, who in 1962, in the last of many puzzling disappearances, had managed to drown himself in the Condamine, at a place and in a depth of water where no one could drown. I had already written about it in a poem, “The Judas Touch”, whose title suggests something of my uneasy sense of having failed or betrayed him. But poems are glancing affairs and I wanted to commit myself now to the steady gaze. To face up, as rigorously as I could, to what I might discover about myself, my role in Johnny’s suicide, if that is what it was, and about the world that had made us both, a world he had violently rejected, though he never quite escaped it, and about which I, in my usual way of not wanting to come to conclusions — the writers way, I would not call it — remained undecided, ambivalent.
So for two hours each morning I turned my back on the view and working with a fountain pen and sheets of loose writing-paper, produced five or six hundred words, then went out to shop or sightsee, or simply to put myself back for a time among the shifting crowds. After lunch I corrected what I had written and typed it up, laying the typed sheets face down where each morning, when I set myself anew to the task, they made a pleasing and growing pile. I liked to count them before I began — just to reassure myself that I was finally on the way. Without knowing it, I had established a pattern that was to sustain me through the writing of all the books to come. The month passed, Carlo’s mother came back, and I took myself off, secure now in my routine, to the cheapest hotel I could find, the Albergo Duomo (it no longer exists) in the Corso, and plunged on.
At night the girls from the street (there were three of them) clattered up and down the stairs with their clients, but by day, except for the obliging but rather sinister proprietor and an ancient housemaid who three or four times, between nine o’clock and two, perhaps to expiate the sins of the establishment, scurried across to the church opposite to say a prayer or two at one of its dingy side-altars, I had the place to myself, and wrote even more happily in my big, well-like room with its shutters and stone floors, than I had at the Piazza Pitti.
What I was writing turned out to be something different — less in some respects, more in others — than I had planned; perhaps because I had planned nothing at all. I remembered things I did not know I knew, I invented, I let the writing itself direct me. It was all lighter, more playful than I expected. I found myself crossing from one to the other of my central characters, Dante and Johnno, in ways I found surprising and more illuminating than if I had stuck to a “real” representation of either Johnny or myself, and which told me more, I felt, about both of us. Becoming both of us, at least in imagination, that is, exploring contrary sides of myself, took me a long way towards discovering why, for all our difference, we had been so strongly attached. When August came I felt free to set my work aside and take the train, via Trieste, to Athens, where I met Carlo for a three week trip to Santorini and Crete. I finished the book in Turin, at the kitchen bench in Carlo’s flat at the Residenza while he was out at work. Then I put it away for two years. It was published at last, by the University of Queensland Press, in 1975.
Readers of a later and more knowing time have taken this to be a gay novel in disguise. It is not. If I had meant to write a gay novel I would have done so. If there was more to tell about these characters I would have told it.
Johnno’s occasional experience in that way is frankly admitted, so is Dante’s relationship with his “boy from Sarina”, but they do not see themselves as being defined by these involvements and they are not. Nor do they see them as reflecting in any important way on their relations with one another. If Dante continues to be puzzled and frustrated by Johnno it is not because he is naive, or because he is deluding himself about their real relationship, but because the words to name what he feels are hard to find and the feelings themselves not easy to pin down. The intensity of the thing, the many misunderstandings between them, Johnno’s self-dramatising and manipulation of Dante, their movements towards and away from one another, are not manifestations of physical attraction, even a latent or unrecognised one, though they are no less disturbing for that and no less tricky to negotiate. What they arise from is something altogether simpler: an attachment, not at all uncommon between young men at a certain stage of their development, that has to do with the fluidity, at that time of our lives, of what we call “character”, a condition that appears again in Dante’s notion of parallel lives, alternative fates, and in his recognition, through the old men at the Library, of an openness in the fabric of things through which it might be easy to fall. A sense of opposing possibilities, the trying on of roles, the indulgence in extravagant fantasies and folies a deux — these are ways of feeling out, in likeness and contrast to others, the lines of what we are. Johnno is a book about reading and interpretation, which is what links it with much else that I have written; about how we read and misread words, events, feelings, people, including ourselves, and how we are shaped not only by what happens to us but by what we have read; as if fiction, rather than being a mirror of life reorganised, were a blueprint for how lives themselves may be shaped.
Other books play an important part here. Not because this is a first book and looks to others, as many first books do, for instruction and company, but because the two central characters are in their different ways so bookish. Especially Johnno, who for all his commitment to Dionysian excess, to experience in the moment and in the flesh, is forever directing Dante, as a measure of the tepidness and mean provincialism of the world they have inherited, to the more passionate world of Literature, to Dostoevski and Nietzsche and Lermontov.
This business of turning to literature as a guide to the passionate life and finding ordinary life, life at home, by comparison thin and inauthentic, was a very Australian pastime
when I was growing up, and still is, perhaps, but not uniquely Australian. It is one of the great themes of a certain kind of writing, this conviction on the part of young men with a taste for reading, that their lives and the very nature of what they feel would be transformed if they could only get from Grenoble or Angoulême to Paris, or from Minneapolis to New York. As for places, cities, even the cities we grew up in, there is a sense in which they only become real to us when they appear in books. By the time I began Johnno I already knew this. The cities we know from books, the London of Dickens, Balzac’s Paris, that are so real to our senses that we believe we could find our way in them, street by street, are cities of the imagination. They never existed anywhere but in the mind — first of the writer, then, because he put them there, in the mind of his readers. I wanted to do that, even with the most unlikely material (but such material, till it has been remade in the imagination, is always unlikely) for the city I had in mind, poor, shabby, unromantic Brisbane. But in doing so I was sharing with my narrator the belief that it could be done, and this was just one of the ways we parted company, he and I, with the character called Johnno. There is no way Johnno can recognise the reality of Brisbane without being, as he is in the end, destroyed by it. So a book that begins for Dante as an attempt at reparation ends up as yet another and last act of betrayal, one that is no less discomforting because it is also, for him, a step, a necessary one, in the direction of life. The irony is that he can only make it by taking a step, to him equally “necessary”, in the direction of Literature.
Campagnatico/Sydney
May 1997
First published 1975 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted with corrections 1989
Reprinted 1998, 2000, 2004
www.uqp.com.au
© David Malouf
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any foram or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset by University of Queensland Press
Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Malouf, David
Johnno
I. Title.
A823.3
ISBN 978 0 7022 3496 6 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5802 2 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5803 9 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5804 6 (kindle)
