Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 6, Issue 5

by Alex Miller

  There will be a dozen messages waiting for her when she gets home tonight, all claiming to be urgent. Her dean, Geoffrey Chaucer (for God’s sake!) will have discovered several problems for her to sort out before their eight-thirty meeting in the morning, all brought about, according to him, by her own inefficiency. She has begun to think of Chaucer as a malign presence in her life, cruelly determined to grind her into helplessness and see her fail, all in the service of his own twisted ambitions (she hardly dares imagine what he and the vice-chancellor say about her when they are alone). Chaucer is horrible to her. It’s as simple as that. She can put it no other way. If she knew a hit man she would ask him to kill the dean, no matter what it cost her. Bring me his head! Anyway, a really nice hit man would surely do it for her for nothing. A chivalrous hit man. There must be some around, surely? A Sir Galahad of a hit man.

  David waves at her and says softly, ‘Ellen! Dear Ellen!’ Gently reproving her for having let her thoughts stray from him to herself. And isn’t he also reminding her of how fond he is of her? Isn’t he doing this too? Being kind? After all, he isn’t a cynic. It has been the depiction of his fellow human beings that has made him famous (not as famous as he would like to be, of course, but somewhat famous). The singular subject to which he has devoted his tormented vision, his great energies and, some have said, his incomparable genius, since he was little more than a boy. Depictions of the terrible and the damned, the angelic and the merciful among his fellow humans. The twisted insanity of human appetites, the cruelty and the ugliness, the fierce masks of the depraved and the helplessness of their victims. His greatness is widely disputed and rests principally, but uneasily, on his cycle of paintings, The People I Have Met. A banal title which he regrets but which sticks to him. When the series was first shown the Melbourne vice squad moved in to the gallery on the morning of the second day and closed it down on the orders of the premier. Which guaranteed an instant notoriety to the name David Davoser and the pictures in his exhibition. It was the rape that upset them. The men in the quivering light with rooster’s heads, the woman in her blood, the vivid viridian greens and the streaked flashes of rose madder sliding with slippery and uneasy motion into the encompassing blackness from where the flashes of watching eyes, her eyes white with terror. Its title not The Rape but Someone is Always Watching. People were shocked. It felt sinister. People didn’t like it. The premier and his police closed the show down and called it obscene and un-Australian. ‘Good,’ David said. ‘Of course it’s un-Australian. They’re right.’ He and his supporters got drunk on the satisfying notoriety of the show. 1963. The years of the new repression. Then four years later they hung the last man to be hung in Melbourne. The last man to be hung in the whole of Australia. David’s series of that event upset them too, the swaying crowd at Melbourne University moaning and crying out for mercy, lifting their hands in supplication to the speaker haranguing them. And that other one, the one of the man swinging gently in the eerie twilight beneath the gallows, his pink tongue, the fowled crutch of his trousers, his eyes popped from his sideways skull, as if he made a childish face at the warders looking on with their emu heads, the man who had murdered their brother and now they had hung him. (That was the trouble with Davoser, it always had to be sinister. Where were his sunny pictures? His Australian pictures? His landscapes for God’s sake? Not a one.) Davoser’s Melbourne is not mine, cried the critics. They knew the good people of Melbourne didn’t like this kind of thing. And Davoser didn’t even title the series in a straight-forward and honest way but seemed to be mocking them with The Dark Side of the Moon. What were visitors to this country going to think about it all? The good people of Melbourne and their moral guardians, the Premier and his Chief Secretary wouldn’t have minded so much if Davoser had romanticised the events just a little, or made them seem comic, as the playwrights did, but Davoser gave it to them cold and hard. Celebrate the bush! They screamed at him. He was deaf to them. What he gave them wasn’t at all what they wanted from their artists. Why couldn’t Davoser celebrate the Australian landscape like all the real Australian artists did? The spiritual landscape of Australia with its unique flora and fauna, that was the proper province of art, not the hidden dark places of the suburban jungle. Why is he always picking out the horrible things? Horrible things happen all over the world. Australia is not uniquely horrible. The critics said, Davoser is a sensationalist. His art is inauthentic. And (the coup de grâce of the nationalists, intended to put David out of his misery for once and for all), Davoser’s art is un-Australian. The more strident among them said, His work should be banned (the therefore was implied). Ellen wasn’t there, of course. When Ryan was hung she was still catching the school bus on misty mornings along the Gippsland byroads with her mates in Grade Four at the Drouin South Primary School.

  ‘Sorry,’ Ellen says. ‘I was just thinking about the early days. When you used to sit there in that armchair telling me about your life with Kathleen and how much simpler it was for both of you then, before you and your work were well known. And for me too. For us,’ she corrects herself and smiles (she is aware that his early days are much earlier than her early days). She knows he’s not interested in the past and that all she is doing by mentioning Kathleen and the past is confessing her present unhappiness to him. He will not want to hear it. He has something to tell her and it is this that preoccupies him. Surely the biographer’s most intractable difficulty is a subject who will not willingly talk about his past, and yet who wishes that past to be celebrated in great detail (but only the detail he and his wife permit to slip through the sieve of their calculation). Nothing about any of this project has ever been straightforward. The project, that is, of getting at the truth about David Davoser. An epigraph for her book might well be Marguerite Yourcenar’s He who seeks passionately for truth, or at least for accuracy, is frequently the one best able to perceive, like Pilate, that truth is not absolute or pure. The job she set herself when she ditched her ambition to become Australia’s principal authority on women artists in order to take on David’s life was to arrive at the truth of it. She doesn’t regret that decision exactly, but she sometimes does look back at the clarity of her earlier vision with nostalgia. It probably serves her right, she sometimes thinks, for swerving from her ideal course and abandoning the lives of the women. Truth and David Davoser, however, are not of the same world. Truth doesn’t matter to him. He never thinks of it.

  He sets his whisky glass on the broad arm of his chair and reaches up with both his hands, lifting his arms, as if he wants to be helped from his chair. It is a gesture rather like that of the Pope at his window reaching out over the assembled believers in the square below and delivering his blessing on their heads. Except that David is deeply embraced by Gotto’s yellowed old armchair, so the effect of having his arms raised in front of him is more that of a man sinking into quicksand and reaching out for help than it is of someone bestowing his blessing on the faithful. He says, ‘You must feel it too, Ellen!’ He speaks with passion. ‘You must, surely. You’re a creative woman. You…’

  Irritated with this, she interrupts him. ‘I’m not creative, David. I just want to get it right. I just want to get the facts and set them in their right order and find the way your story can best be told and illustrated by your work.’

  ‘O, no! No!’ He won’t have it. ‘You must feel it too.’ His arms reach up towards her, towards the ceiling, towards Heaven, beseeching. He frowns and contorts his lips. ‘I’ve always been striving after it and it’s always been out there, the masterpiece, beyond my reach, promising but not in my grasp. You know?’ He appeals to her.

  She watches him, surprised, and says nothing, her features empty of expression, withheld. What on earth is he on about?

  ‘You know? Like a…’ But he can’t find the word he wants. He appeals to her for the word, ‘In the desert when you think you see water and it’s not water? It’s a… What is it?’ She won’t give it to him. She is fascinated by the block he has encounter
ed with this ordinary word. She watches him. The masterpiece? What’s he talking about?

  ‘Like a… Like a…’ But he can’t get it. ‘Like one of those fucking things when you think you can see water in the desert but it’s not water. What the fuck is it, Ellen? I’m always hoping to paint that imposing masterpiece that is unarguable. That is there forever and always ever after. The one that silences those bastards and wakes them up once and for all.’ He grabs his glass and skulls the whisky and sits glaring at her. ‘That’s what I’ve never told you.’ He knows his revelation is banal and has created a sense of anticlimax between them. ‘You’re disappointed, aren’t you?’

  She doesn’t know what to say. He’s going to make it seem like it’s her fault. He suddenly seems not very bright. Even a bit stupid to say such a thing. The masterpiece? She says, ‘What, like Rembrandt’s The Night Watch? Picasso’s Guernica? Cezanne’s Women Bathing? What are we talking about here, David?’

  His hands rest in his lap and he looks down at his empty whisky glass, his mouth turned down like a little boy who has been reprimanded. He looks up at her. ‘You’re angry. Why are you angry? Don’t you understand? I just want to have done with it. Half this country thinks I’m a fraud and the other half thinks I’m a genius. I want to settle it. I want to make it impossible for anyone to doubt my work. Those artists you mentioned, no one doubts their work. Not any more. Can’t you understand that?’ He heaves himself up out of the chair and falls back then heaves himself up again and makes it this time. ‘I’m getting too old for Gotto’s chair.’ He stands looking down at her. ‘Time to go home. What have I said? It’s upset you. It’s disappointed you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m just tired,’ she says. She gets up. ‘And I’ve got lots to do before I can go to bed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘Let me see you out.’

  He takes her arm and they go together to the front door. The door is deadlocked from the inside and she waits while he fumbles with the large bunch of keys he has taken from his pocket. The house is a fortress. Once they had got to know each other well and he had begun to trust her he took her around and showed her his cunning plan to thwart the thieves who he was sure would one day come to take his pictures away from him. ‘Making art,’ he says unhappily, searching for the right key, ‘has been a way for me to avoid suicide.’ He finds the key and holds it up triumphantly. ‘Got you, you little bastard!’ He unlocks the door and they step out into the garden. The light from a street lamp throws the shadows of the erratic foliage of the camphor laurel tree onto the path that curves around the azaleas and the old rhododendron shrubs, some of them nearly as old as the house, their twisted trunks like sculpted stone figures leaning and reclining against each other—the garden is the habitation of gods. David takes to heart all omens and signs. ‘Here is a place of great enchantment,’ he says soberly. ‘A place to be respected and cared for. It was here long before I was born and it will be here long after I’m gone. I tread carefully here, Ellen. It is as dear to me as the forests and fields of the Stafelalp were to Kirchner (his first hero). Here I am defended against the despair of the city.’ He stands in a daze gazing into the deep shadows of the garden. ‘I tried to kill myself once.’ He looks up at her, his teeth white in the darkness of his face as he smiles to soften what he has just said. ‘You know all that. That is when I became a survivor. It was almost immediately after that when Katherine and I found this place. When I walked into this garden through that gate the very first time I felt I was being made welcome by the spirits of this place. I have never felt so at home anywhere as I do here.’ He says with great solemnity, ‘I love this place.’ She wonders if he is going to weep.

  The boys are shouting in the street and the music at the Espy is being carried up the hill in waves of louder then softer, the steady thump of the bass, penetrating and mesmerising. Behind the rhythmic thumping the rumble of thunder out to sea. She can feel the sweat making her forehead clammy. She will have a shower when she gets home. She suddenly wants to be alone at home. Her head is buzzing with the whisky and the fatigue. He is lost in self-contemplation again. She says, ‘Will you please open the gate for me David? I’m exhausted. Sorry. I must go home.’

  He hurries ahead of her along the path to the great iron gate that separates his garden from the world. Once again he takes an age to find the right key. When he has the gate open he puts his hand to her arm. ‘I’ll come with you to your car.’

  ‘No. I’m fine, David. Really. I’m just down there. A minute away. Honestly.’

  He looks out the gate along the road towards the esplanade and the lights of the club and the passing traffic. There are crowds of young people. The reflection of the lightning flickers in the dark placid waters of the bay and in his eyes. ‘Go on then,’ he says. ‘I’ll watch till you get there.’

  A Mute Scream, that goes (like so)

  Erin Ritchie

  Inspired by Clarice Lispector’s short story, ‘Love’

  ‘The trees were laden, and the world was so rich that it was rotting.’ Clarice Lispector, ‘Love’.

  Anna found one day, quite by accident, that if she walked a particular way and leaned in a particular direction, she could feel the universe between her legs. There, it would warm, overheat, burst and then pulsate throughout her body. And like all great secrets, she held onto it with an equal sense of guilt and pleasure. She thought of it as colour. As it had never happened liked this before she had children, Anna assumed that the passing of three little beings through her body had encouraged the inside out, just enough, to expose her sex to her quickening step. And it only happened on days like today, with the sun suspended in midsummer’s intensity, swelling her flesh to the limit.

  Closing her eyes in an extended blink, the sunlight fights her eyelids, drenching her in orange and red and a hint of good darkness. She opens her eyes again and vision snaps like a photograph. The marketplace that has lined the boulevard for a century is shaded by a canopy of trees. In the dark heat, a heavy wetness snatches at her crotch. She must keep walking. If she sits down it may show through the light cotton of her shirtdress. Her breath deepens and slows. She stops to put on her sunglasses and focuses on the details of the marketplace.

  A man sells The Big Issue, calling out the top stories in a tortured accent, punching his voice out, over the passers-by. A woman, dark as chocolate, sings a ballad, holding the bottom of her stomach, projecting a voice wild and tired, pulled from somewhere beyond her own body. Caught in the moment, Anna’s heart collapses into the lull of the woman’s song. Passers-by pull their frustrated children, and push strollers with sleeping babies. An elderly man rocks the wheelchair that holds his mad wife, her head swinging, to its own beat, from side to side. He stops to listen to the song. Through the control of wheelchair handles he gently renegotiates her deranged rhythm, keeping correct time.

  On rickety old chairs, outside a seafood stand, young lovers suck back oysters and swig stinging spirits. A thousand t-shirts on coat hangers sway on cheap wire racks. Among it all are rubbish bins, overflowing with colourful wrappers. Leaves have abandoned life and litter the streets. A composition. Decomposition.

  Anna continues to walk, rubbing her swollen sex together, coming to life within the orgy of the street. She wants to gasp out loud but, instead, keeps her pleasure tucked neatly into herself. In the middle of the busy boulevard it’s an addictive mixture of danger and excitement. She has no idea how she will contain herself when what she can only describe as a Tsunami overwhelms her. Like a generous clap of thunder, with its various stages, it is never over in the instant but reverberates throughout the landscape of her body, dissipating to a lonely echo among the calamity of the street.