by Helen Garner
For a while I kept expecting Austen to tell me what things looked like. Then I remembered that Joseph Conrad was exasperated by her novels: he couldn’t see anything and it drove him crazy. I accepted that the appearance of things is not what she cares about, though Elizabeth’s ‘weary ancles and dirty stockings’, and later an army camp with ‘its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines’, gave me a furtive visual thrill.
Elizabeth and her adorable elder sister Jane, who is plainly going to wind up marrying Bingley, no matter what obstacles Austen might throw in their path, have cornered the brains, sweetness and decency of their family. Anyone who’s ever read a book can see that Darcy will have to be brought to heel as much by the rules of narrative as by Elizabeth’s admirable character and rigorous self-command.
Yet a source of chaos is needed to disrupt and delay the graceful blossoming of the plot. Austen has it covered. Younger sisters three and four, Lydia and Kitty, are ‘vain, ignorant, idle and uncontrouled’. A militia regiment arrives in the neighbourhood. The place swarms with officers. A highly appealing fellow by the name of Wickham strolls on to the stage, eclipsing (even for Elizabeth) the snobbish Darcy.
I am no Janeite, but I knew Wickham’s type. His charm is too rapid and shallow, too easy, for a heroine of Elizabeth’s calibre. She falls for it, though, and takes at face value his tales of Darcy’s treacherous dealings.
I lowered the blinds against the heat, unplugged the phone and moved operations to my sopha, where, dispos’d among charmingly group’d cushions, I settled in for the duration.
In order to keep my eye on how Austen was actually doing things, I was having to work hard against the seduction of her endlessly modulating, psychologically piercing narrative voice, her striding mastery of the free indirect mode.
‘To interrupt a silence which might make him fancy her affected by what had passed…’
‘Their indifference restored Elizabeth to the enjoyment of all her original dislike.’
‘It was a wonderful instance of advice being given without being resented.’
So it came as a surprise to me that Mr Darcy makes Elizabeth his first proposal—which she repels in a scene of breathtaking muscle and spark—on page 210. Wasn’t this rather premature? Had she hung out the flags of love too soon? I tilted the book and examined its profile. Exactly halfway! The cunning minx! She was going to make me wait another 218 pages for a resolution! Torn between despair and violent longing, I was obliged to rise from my sopha and take a turn around the drawing room.
Darcy, rejected and mortally offended, lurks in the garden. He emerges from behind a hedge and gives Elizabeth a letter, an elegantly written disclosure of Wickham’s ‘vicious propensities’, his ‘life of idleness and dissipation’, and his corrupt behaviour towards Darcy’s innocent younger sister. Elizabeth is thrown back upon herself in a most bracing manner.
Here Austen gives us five enthralling pages of Elizabeth thinking. She reasons like a lawyer, or rather, like a jury, weighing up evidence, assertion, argument. She turns on herself the cool, unsparing light of her moral intelligence, and finds herself wanting.
Yet Austen never lets us, or Elizabeth, off the hook of her own detached wit: ‘Not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.’ And in the sobering facts and reasoning that stream through this chapter, in which Elizabeth is forced to acknowledge to herself the ghastliness of her own family and the rightness of Darcy’s dislike of them, I almost missed the pained and gentle last line of his farewell letter: ‘I will only add, God bless you.’
Lydia Bennet, at sixteen, is a piece of trash. She earns our contempt not by eloping, but by jeering at a social inferior, an innocent waiter who has just served her: ‘But he is such an ugly fellow! I never saw such a long chin in my life.’
We don’t need Austen to explain how Lydia’s coarse behaviour risks destroying her sisters’ marriageability. A line of dominos will topple whispering to the ground if she is not reined in. And Austen does not scruple to sheet home Lydia’s awfulness to her ill-matched parents. Instead of putting up a sturdy resistance to his wife’s idiotic indulgence, Mr Bennet has retired to his study and his sarcasm, and left his younger daughters to their own devices.
In a letter of shattering selfishness that Lydia dashes off to her married friend, merrily telling her that she and Wickham have run away, she sends a message to a servant: ‘I wish you would tell Sally to mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown.’
If the story had not by now become so dark, this joltingly sexual image would have made me laugh out loud. And what can mend the great slit that Lydia has torn in the story? While Darcy, using all his wealth and power behind the scenes, is picking up the pieces left by her heedless rampage, Austen will not allow Lydia to redeem herself. She pushes the girl’s narcissism so far that it becomes grotesque, hilarious; yet I laughed with heart in mouth.
I writhed with joy on my sopha when Elizabeth takes it right up to Mr Darcy’s aunt, the monstrous Lady de Bourgh, who intends her sickly daughter to marry Darcy. Under their parasols, in the copse, the two women go several savage rounds. The domineering old hag fails to lay a glove on our nimble, steely heroine.
But around page 387 I started to feel restless. All the loose ends were being tidied up and put away. It was a wrap. Wouldn’t any ragged threads be left hanging, for me to be going on with?
And here she comes again, the relentless Lydia. Three pages before the end she writes the newly married Elizabeth a truly outrageous letter: ‘I am sure Wickham would like a place at court very much…Any place would do, of about three or four hundred a year; but however, do not speak to Mr Darcy about it, if you had rather not. Your’s, &c.’
I sprang off my sopha at last, strode to the freezer for a slug of Absolut, and raised my glass in silent respect. A toast to the Empress, Jane Austen. God bless Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, and the current of deep, warm erotic attraction that flows between them. And long live the Lydias of this world, the slack molls who provide the grit in the engine of the marriage plot; for without them it would run so smoothly that the rest of us would fall into despair.
2013
X-ray of a Pianist at Work
Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould
J. S. Bach is God, as far as I’m concerned, and the pianist Glenn Gould was one of his major prophets. Prophets, we know, come from the desert, but Gould—who died in 1982 aged only fifty—was a Canadian, and the desert that haunted him was ‘the idea of north’—vast, unpopulated fields of snow. In the opening shot of this memorable work, a black speck appears on a white screen. As it moves towards us, growing legs, becoming a man tramping across snow, the soundtrack emerges tentatively out of silence: the whisper of a note, as if imagined, then a phrase, and then we are in the aria, meditative and slow, of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
This movie could narrowly be classed as documentary, but we’re in 1994, and young Québécois director François Girard skips and slides nimbly among modes, using talking-head interviews, abstract animation, acted sequences he wrote himself, contemplations of the machinery of a grand piano, even an X-ray sequence of a pianist at work. The scope of the film has an attractive freedom, as if Girard were roving over a field of information and impression so rich that he could never exhaust it or his own ideas about it; but because the bottom line is always Bach’s music, there is also in the film a satisfying sense of structure—that the thing is making sense, as it unfolds, on a level somewhere underneath your feet, so that you can trust it not to get lost in its constant changes, or wander away in whim.
Gould was a child prodigy. He became a cranky, nerdish, brilliant, verbose, pill-popping, hypochondriacal, introverted control freak, who conducted his most intimate relationships by telephone, and played the piano crouched on a specially doctored chair, contorting his body, uttering rapt murmuring hums, and fantastically conducting with whichever hand was free. He drove s
ome critics and audiences insane, but many more to flights of joyous hyperbole. The friends he had were madly loyal to him, to the point of staying on the end of the phone, when he would call to rave in the middle of the night, till they fell asleep; children would find their father stretched out on the rug at first light, Gould’s voice still rabbiting on in his oblivious ear.
At the peak of his fame as a concert performer he gave it up. He hated travel, feared planes; the life excruciated him, it made him sick. So he retired to the recording studio, where he could exercise a degree of control over his production of music which, when you first grasp its obsessiveness and daring, administers a sharp shock to any listener still clinging to a romantic ideal of performance as bounded by the limits of human ability in time.
I still remember the jolt I felt when a musician friend explained to me that Gould recorded the two hands separately. But—but—isn’t that a swiz? Gould was blatant about this. He called it ‘creative cheating’ and it was an article of faith: you and the technology put yourselves at the service of the music. To him, his studio performance didn’t end when he stood up from the instrument: it had barely begun. And this is why, when you listen to Gould’s records, you never get the sense (as you do at times with just about any other keyboard player, however great, playing, say, one of Bach’s massive fugues) that for a couple of seconds he’s lost the map of the voices, that the thing has blurred into a forest without tracks. The perfectionism of the editing gives Gould’s versions the gorgeous clarity, the three-dimensionality in which Bach’s architecture is revealed.
Does this make Gould sound like only a brilliant machine? In one of this movie’s thirty-two little hymns to the pianist, Girard cuts back and forth between a bunch of recording technicians in their lit booth, squabbling about whether black or white coffee is worse for you, and a darkened, cathedral-like space where Gould (played by actor Colm Feore) is listening to the playback of what he has just recorded. He is on his feet. His white shirt is bunched round his gawky torso, crushed and hanging out of his pants. His cuffs are unbuttoned and his sleeves are loose. His hair is on end. And he is dancing by himself in the dark, slowly, like a crazy angel in a white robe. His neck is on angles of ecstasy, his eyes are closed, his arms are high, his face melts in an expression of almost sexual transport. It’s an image of bliss—and of the most intense solitude.
This movie is not meant to be biography. You can find out more facts about Gould by reading a book. What Girard has made is an original tribute to an extraordinary musician—and he has put the music first, even before the character. He has used the music as the film’s defining formal principle. You will rush out of the cinema and straight to the nearest record shop, your nerves still zinging with the electric charge that Gould gets out of those fugues, those two- and three-part inventions—and later, when the adrenalin rush subsides, with the gratitude that comes after you have listened to him play this music.
1994
Gall and Barefaced Daring
I WAS well into my forties when I came upon Barbara Baynton’s story ‘The Chosen Vessel’, and I have never got over it. It is shocking, and dreadful: a lone woman huddles with a tiny baby in an undefendable bush house at night, while a tramp armed with a knife slinks around it in the dark, seeking a way in. The terror Baynton evokes is elemental, sexual, unabashedly female in a way one hardly expects to read in literature of her time. Under the title ‘The Tramp’, the story appeared in the Bulletin in 1896. It was the first she ever published. She was thirty-nine.
A century later, I wrote an essay about a winter night I had spent alone in a shack on the edge of a forest. A male writer I showed it to was irritated by my anxious fantasies of marauding men, and by the mental manoeuvres I had had to perform in order to calm myself for sleep. I suppose he saw it as a piece of crude feminism. I have never got over this, either; and whenever I re-read ‘The Chosen Vessel’ I experience a deep solidarity with both its main character and its writer.
Baynton’s best-known story is probably ‘Squeaker’s Mate’. Here the bush woman is stripped of every vestige of femininity. She is childless, even ‘barren’ —a tough, skilled timber-getter who smokes a pipe and always carries ‘the heavy end of the log’. Somehow this tireless worker has taken up with Squeaker, a bloke whom even the other men recognise as a whingeing bludger: to them, ‘her tolerance was one of the mysteries’. A falling tree terribly wounds her. The story is an account of a power struggle between the feckless man and the silent, devastated woman whom he leaves to lie in a corner of their shack, attended only by her dog. Every time I read it I am astonished by Baynton’s gall, the barefaced daring of the thing. It’s driven by a contained, contemptuous rage that no woman of spirit can fail to recognise, or to share.
Baynton was born a decade before Henry Lawson, but by the time she began to publish he was already a famous writer. Determined as she was to write from deep within a woman’s point of view, in her best work she can leave him sounding almost sentimental. Yes, Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is a great story. We fear for the hardworking, faithful, level-headed mother. We shed tears for her gutsy little son, for the brave dog, for the ‘sickly daylight’ that breaks over the bush. The story is what people nowadays call ‘iconic’. We can safely admire it. We no longer even need to read it: everyone knows what it stands for.
But Baynton’s bush wife inhabits a different universe. Weakened by her absent husband’s cold mockery, she is not fighting for her family. No bushcraft, no weary stoicism can save her from sexual attack. She is lost out there in shrieking, existential abandonment. Her tale is never going to be an icon. It is too hair-raising, too hysterical—too close to women’s craziest and most abject suffering.
Like any writer, she is not always at her best. Her sentences can strike the modern ear as clogged and heavy-handed, like Victorian interior decoration. You can feel her sometimes putting on side, striking writerly poses, indulging in misty poeticisms: betimes, she says, or ’twas a dingo; her heart smote her, or ever and ever she smiled. Her desire to convey Australian speech leads her into passages of dialogue so manically phonetic that the only way to traverse them is to read them aloud, when they reveal her superb ear—but at what cost! I long to take the pencil to these extravaganzas, to drag her into my own century and hit her over the head with Elmore Leonard’s dictum: ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’
But, my God, when she hits her straps she can lay down a muscular story.
She drew out the saw, spat on her hands, and with the axe began weakening the inclining side of the tree.
Long and steadily and in secret the worm had been busy in the heart. Suddenly the axe blade sank softly, the tree’s wounded edges closed on it like a vice. There was a ‘settling’ quiver on its top branches, which the woman heard and understood. The man, encouraged by the sounds of the axe, had returned with an armful of sticks for the billy. He shouted gleefully, ‘It’s fallin’, look out.’
But she waited to free the axe.
With a shivering groan the tree fell, and as she sprang aside, a thick worm-eaten branch snapped at a joint and silently she went down under it.
(‘Squeaker’s Mate’)
At their height, her dry, sinewy sentences stride forward powered by simple verbs. She knows how to break off at a breathless moment. She is familiar with labour, fear and abandonment. Her rendering of dogs and their meaning is very fine. She knows the landscape, with its bleak terrors and its occasional beauties. She has observed with a merciless eye the dull stupidity and squalor that poverty brings. She is not going to gussy it up.
Between Two Worlds, the enthralling biography of Baynton written by her great-granddaughter the late Penne Hackforth-Jones, makes it clear that the six stories in Bush Studies, the core of her small output, draw directly on the first half of her life.
She was born Barbara Lawrence in 1857, the seventh of eight children, at Scone in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where her immigrant father was a timber
worker and coffin-maker. She seems to have been a strange, short-sighted, grittily emotional girl, a passionate reader of the few books she could get hold of, and possessed by confused fantasies of escape and adventure.
As a teenager she answered an advertisement for an up-country housekeeper. After a gruelling train trip to the property on the northwestern plains of New South Wales, the naïve girl was coarsely challenged, humiliated and sent packing. A few years later, in her early twenties, with little more than her hard-won literacy and numeracy to recommend her, she was hired as a governess by the Fraters, a Scottish grazing family of impressive style but varying fortunes, whose glamorous son she soon married.
Set up by his disapproving father near Coonamble on the Castlereagh River, the handsome horseman Alex Frater soon showed his true colours. He drank, he gambled, he flirted with girls fresher and prettier than his clever, overworked, furious wife. The property slid into disarray while he went off droving and boozing for months at a time, leaving her and their babies without protection. The theme of a weakened and dependent person alone at night in a flimsy bush dwelling, which occurs again and again in Baynton’s work, surely originates here.
By the time Frater had seduced and impregnated Barbara’s young niece Sarah, who had come to help her with the children, the iron had entered Barbara’s soul. In 1889 she blasted her way out of the marriage, keeping custody of their three children. Her divorce, according to Hackforth-Jones, was ‘the four-hundred-and-fifty-first of the colony’. Throughout her life Barbara liked to deliver a terse piece of advice to her daughter Penelope: ‘If you make yourself a doormat, don’t be surprised if you’re walked on.’
Poor Sarah’s fate enacted this bitter wisdom. She toiled on in wretched poverty, bearing more and more children to the ever-unreliable Frater, until soon after the birth of the ninth she fell into despair, and died in a Sydney mental hospital.
