The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  When I was writing my third novel, The Ancestor Game, in the late eighties—it was published in 1992—I quoted from Colin MacInnes’s essay from the Nolan monograph: Australia is an Asiatic island that Europeans inhabited by accident … Everything about Australia is bizarre. I read until I lost interest in the writer’s insistence on a uniquely eccentric nature for Australia and for the ‘kingly race’ of Europeans who inhabited the continent. These were views of Australia current among the intelligentsia of the time when the book was published, at the beginning of the sixties. They were views that The Ancestor Game challenges and which a subsequent generation of Australians has discarded. By the early nineties, Nolan, and our interpretation of his work, however, remained important in what we might call the process of Australian cultural history making. Cultural change is continuous and is generational. Each generation rewrites history for itself, but while historical texts become outmoded in this process, the art and literature of the nation continues to be the stuff of reinterpretation. Culturally we are not yet done with Nolan and his art any more than we are done with the poetry of Judith Wright or the novels of Patrick White. Nolan’s art is as much a part of Australian history as the defeat at Gallipoli, and we will surely continue to reinterpret its significance for us till the cows come home.

  Barrett Reid at the launch of The Ancestor Game, Melbourne, 1992

  When my first novel, The Tivington Nott, was distributed in Australia—I’d been unable to find a publisher for it here—Sidney Nolan’s old friend the poet Barrett Reid wrote to tell me he thought highly of the book and that he wished to meet me. Barrie, as his friends knew him, lived at Heide, the home of the Reeds, where Nolan’s art had found its first and most important champion in Sunday Reed. When I told Barrie about the inspiration of the book given me by the Australian in Somerset all those years ago, it was Barrie who told me it was Nolan’s photos I’d been looking at. On more than one occasion during the years of our friendship Barrie suggested to me that I write a novel based on Nolan’s life. The project did not greatly appeal to me at the time and I did nothing about it. But it was Barrett Reid who sowed the seeds of the idea with me.

  Barrie revealed Nolan’s art to me in a way I could not have done for myself and he educated me about its sources and the life of art Nolan had lived at Heide in his early years as an artist. Barrie remained a dedicated friend and champion of Sunday Reed to the end of his life.

  In Autumn Laing, the resident poet laureate of the group of artists whose work is favoured at Old Farm is Barnaby. Like Barrie, Barnaby was born and raised on a cattle station in the Central Highlands of Queensland (where I had also worked as a boy). Barnaby is my private homage to a dear friend who is no longer with us. The connection of Nolan and the Queensland cattle station that I made through my friendship with Barrett Reid was a compelling one that was rich in those emotions that make us feel we not only belong to a certain place but that we are in some sense fated to belong to it. Sooner or later I knew I would attempt to write about Nolan. What I have written in Autumn Laing is not, however, what I expected to write. Novels are a kind of dream for the novelist. Although they are most often based on observations of reality, the writer is not in control and must follow the compelling prompts of imagination. For me it has never been possible to plot or plan a novel beyond a few very basic elements. The story reveals itself to me as I proceed with a book and is nearly always a surprise. This book, Autumn Laing, was no exception.

  I first wrote what is now chapter two, Autumn’s (realist) portrait of the artist’s first wife, Edith. After writing this chapter I had to leave the book while I spent a month on tour in the UK with my previous novel, Lovesong. At the end of the tour (the end of September 2010) I was sitting on a bench in Holland Park watching squirrels and remembering my boyhood in London’s parks when the idea for the present form of the book suddenly occurred to me. I hadn’t given the book a thought for a month. As I was sitting there that lovely September afternoon, watching the squirrels diving about among the ivy, I suddenly heard the voice of Autumn Laing. ‘They are all dead,’ she said, ‘and I am old and skeleton-gaunt …’ It was a realisation. The realisation that the character I had originally based on Sunday Reed, Nolan’s muse and lover and his greatest supporter during his early years, might have lived on until the age of eighty-six, alone, deserted and with a deep sense of having been betrayed. The woman whose voice I heard that day was no longer the Sunday Reed of history but was my own fiction, a prompt from my imagination, a fiction of how such a person might have become had she lived another ten years and had she decided to tell her story, telling it at a time of her life when she had nothing left to lose. Autumn has nothing left to lose but everything to gain morally by telling her story. She quotes Tennyson, ‘Let me shrive me clean and die. None of us,’ she says, ‘willingly dies unclean. Religious or not, to seek confession and absolution is surely an essential moral imperative of the human conscience, isn’t it? To absolve means to set free, and that is what we yearn for, freedom. Young or old, it’s what we dream of and fight for. We never really know what we mean by it.’ And so she tells the story of their youthful passions, their betrayals and their terrible judgments. What is youth for, she says, but to commit the great follies? And they do.

  When I got home to Castlemaine from London in early October I wrote for ten hours a day six days a week for five months in the voice that I had heard in Holland Park—the voice of Autumn Laing. It is the longest novel I’ve ever written and the quickest. I loved every minute of it and was sorry when she finally left me. I don’t think I will ever find anyone like her again. She is confident, well informed, passionate, cultivated and very down to earth. She is, in some ways, the personification of a certain type of cultivated Australian woman. She couldn’t possibly be English or French. Like Sunday, Autumn’s commitment was always to Australia and to our art. She was never tempted to live in England or Europe. In her person, my own early life as a stockman in North Queensland is connected to my life as a writer in Melbourne, just as these aspects of my own life were connected for me by my friendship with Barrie Reid, a faithful friend of Sunday Reed until the end, and a faithful admirer and interpreter of the art of his old friend Nolan. It is the experience of the artist and of Autumn in this book while they are visiting Barnaby’s parents’ cattle station in North Queensland that changes them both forever.

  Autumn Laing is a story about the intimate lives of passionate, ambitious and gifted people, it is a story about their loves, their hates and their betrayals, but it is also a story about Australian art and culture and some of the questions and problems Australian art and culture have had to confront and which they continue to confront today. The inspiration for this story may have originated in the model of the relationship of Sidney Nolan and Sunday Reed, but Autumn Laing and Pat Donlon are my own fictional inventions. They are the products of my own dreaming, the presences of my own haunting and my own experience. Anyone looking in this book for the real Sunday Reed or Sidney Nolan will be looking in the wrong place and they will not find them. Autumn Laing is not biography or cultural history, and makes no claim to any such thing. It is fiction. My own fiction, and that is the only sensible claim to be made for it. And there is nothing novel in having based these characters on real people. All my major characters in all my novels have been based on real people. I’ve had only one objection, and that was from the original of the Cap in Lovesong. He is the only one to have disliked his fictional representation.

  But why fiction? Why not cultural history or biography? My only answer can be that my interest is in the currency of the intimate lives of ‘us’, and neither the historian nor the biographer can safely deal in such a currency. Private intimacy is of necessity a language requiring something more than textual and eyewitness sources. One has to make it up. And this is what I most enjoy doing—dwelling among the liberties of the imaginative arena of make-believe. Writing novels. Doing fiction. Making it up. The inner life is where my interest lie
s and for this I have to pretend to understand, to empathise to the best of my abilities, with my characters. Our motives may remain opaque to us even in our most lucid moments; confused, changeable, impenetrable, and interesting only when complex and irreducible. And what interests me is motivation, shadows forever shifting their ground in the partly conscious spaces from where our hopes and fears for ourselves arise, and for those we love and cherish—and equally our hatreds for those we love and our wish at times to see them destroyed. Without this enduring interest there can be no energy for the work, no inspiration to visit the tangled webs of the interior life. Vivid moments of destructive hatred that we reserve for our intimates. Dangerous moments when we are not ourselves. Absurd and irrational behaviours driven by the almost hallucinatory power of lust. Or when we are too much ourselves. It is these private shadow grounds of contradiction and elaboration beyond fact and outward appearance that interest me. Fiction is the only mode with which we can approach this ground in others. As with all modes of writing, we are at liberty to do it well—in which case our readers are convinced and willingly enter into the illusion with us—or to do it badly—in which case they are repelled and abandon us.

  2011

  EXCERPT FROM

  Autumn Laing

  We search among the jumble of discarded things, disclosing the layers of the years. Most of it was junk—transistors, toasters, old blankets, yellowed pillows, a rat’s nest or two. I wondered which of us had thought to store bundles of newspapers tied neatly with butcher’s twine? His drawings were not there. I felt betrayed and was convinced someone had visited the loft and stolen them. Something else was there, however. Something I had never expected to see again. Stony handed me Edith’s modest oil of their white cottage and the embroidered field, as if he knew this was what I had really been looking for—had I only known it myself. I had long ago forgotten that Edith insisted Arthur take the picture with him the day of our abortive picnic.

  Propped there on the floor of the loft with my back supported by the bundles of newspapers, my purple shanks stuck out in front of me, I held Edith’s picture across my legs and looked at it. I saw at once that for a young woman of twenty-one it represented an extraordinary level of skill. It is on the kitchen table in front of me now, a pile of books behind it, facing the veranda so that it catches the light. She solved her problem of the oxalis with simplicity and wit, the golden yellow of that wild weed an ironic reference to Monet’s cardinal fields of immemorial poppies. Everything I see in this good light confirms my first impression that Edith’s embroidered hill is a first-rate work. To have been guilty of stealing her husband and destroying her little family was crime enough, but it is clear to me now that I also destroyed her chance of establishing herself as one of the very few truly gifted Australian women artists of her time. And for this surely there can be no redemption.

  2011

  Meanjin

  Eighteen months after writing the story about Max Blatt’s betrayal by his comrade during the Nazi onslaught on Poland, I sold the farm at Araluen and went to live in Paris. When I returned to Melbourne a year later I decided to submit the story for publication under the ironic title ‘Comrade Pawel’. The only literary journal I had even the vaguest connection to at the time was Meanjin Quarterly. I hadn’t published anything in it but Clem Christesen, the founding editor, had encouraged me to write poetry when I was a student at Melbourne University. The other prominent literary journals of the time were Overland, The Bulletin and Quadrant, but as I’d had no connection with their editors I decided to submit the piece to Meanjin.

  A week after sending ‘Comrade Pawel’ to Christesen I had a phone call from the biographer Jim Davidson. Jim told me he was the newly appointed editor of Meanjin and was eager to publish ‘Comrade Pawel’. When he asked to speak to Alex Miller, I said, ‘You’re speaking to him.’ Jim then said, ‘Well it’s probably your father I want to speak to.’ I said my father was dead and that I was the author of the story. He was surprised. The piece seemed to have been written, he said, by someone whose first language wasn’t English; it read almost as if it were a translation. I told him the ‘voice’ I’d adopted for the piece was that of the German Polish friend who had told me the story as an illustration of the culturally embedded nature of anti-Semitism in Poland when he was a young man.

  Jim and I met for lunch in a Carlton pub across the road from Melbourne University to discuss publication of my story and his vision for revitalising the journal, which he did with great success for the next eight years. We became friends and remain firm friends to this day. The publication of ‘Comrade Pawel’ in Jim’s first issue of Meanjin, No. 1, 1975, signalled my beginning as a published writer. To see my work in print alongside such Australian literary luminaries of the time as Jennifer Strauss, Michael Wilding, Humphrey McQueen and Frank Moorhouse was gratifying, but it was also challenging and rather disturbing in a way I hadn’t foreseen. Reading my story in its final printed form in the smart journal, I was no longer able to smugly celebrate its brilliance. Instead, I found myself highly critical of it. All writers will be familiar with this response to their work once it is fixed in a published form. It was my first lesson that nothing we write is ever finished and that our works are not tailor-made suits, stitched to perfection for a particular occasion, but are imperfect experiments abandoned and left to survive as best they can on their own.

  2015

  Comrade Pawel

  We had dug in before Warsaw. The series of trenches was perhaps sixteen or twenty miles long, running roughly north–south in a more or less even curve. Every few hundred yards or so there were gaps at which the troops of cavalry were stationed. To our front, towards the west, stretched a plain without a single feature to interrupt the distant skyline. It was the end of summer and I remember that it rained almost every day. After the rain a mist would rise off the plain, and for an hour or two the skyline would be obscured.

  It was quiet there, very quiet, and although rumours and counter-rumours circulated among us constantly, they did so without causing us any real alarm. They were a kind of necessary entertainment for us, and they passed among us, were embellished according to our peculiar needs, and passed on. We became attuned to the subtlest nuance of meaning—the exact nervous pitch as it were—of these rumours, and maintaining our ‘ear’ for them soon became our principal preoccupation. You see, although we began there as individual men, each with his own ideas, it was not long before we lost this very personal sense of separateness and became—to use a metaphor—somewhat like a shoal of fish that swerves or dives or is still according to a common sense.

  Towards the end of the third week, and apropos of nothing, Pawel, my usually taciturn companion, said, ‘Ah, you see? So there you are!’ and he smiled ironically.

  ‘Whatever are you talking about?’ I asked him, for his sudden remark seemed to me quite without point.

  ‘The hawk,’ he replied drily. ‘Don’t you see that it’s gone?’ And he spat contemptuously onto the parapet of earth.

  I was startled, and I carefully searched the sky in all directions. But the hawk, which every day hunted about the plain and whose horizon of course lay beyond ours, had indeed departed. But whatever it was that the keen-eyed bird had seen was still hidden from us, for the plain was as silent and empty as ever.

  I turned to Pawel and laughed—not of course because I was amused, but because I was afraid. ‘Really, Pawel,’ I said scornfully, ‘you’re a proper yokel. What old woman’s superstition will you come out with next? Now tell me,’ I went on, in a condescending tone and as if I were speaking to a child, ‘what do you suppose that bird knows about war?’

  Pawel shrugged; he knew nothing of war himself. ‘The bird knew when it was time to run,’ he said, again without in the least attempting to conceal the contempt he felt for my inability to comprehend the obvious. He actually looked at me then and grinned in a peculiarly malicious way. ‘And you, my friend,’ he said, poking me in the chest with his f
inger and leaning close to me so that I smelled his stale breath, ‘will learn something of running when our time comes.’

  Pawel was an illiterate peasant. I, on the other hand, was an educated young man of the new generation, so naturally I pretended to be unimpressed by his foreboding. Even so, I secretly watched the sky in the hope that the hawk would reappear. Nor did I feel sufficiently confident to go on teasing Pawel about it at that moment.

  That night I woke up and lay still, watching the broken clouds above me and listening. I felt that something had woken me, though what it was I couldn’t tell. Off to the south of the line I could hear the quiet clink of hobble chains, and a little behind us and to the north a group of officers were drinking in the back of a truck. The officers’ laughter was coming in uncertain gusts, like fitful wind before a change in the weather. There was nothing in all this to alarm me, yet I continued to feel uneasy and could not get back to sleep.

  I wrapped myself more tightly in my blanket and tried hard to think of something pleasant, for I’d often found this to be an effective cure for insomnia. But as I turned over, searching for a more comfortable position on the lumpy earth, I noticed with a start that Pawel was sitting up. His knees were drawn up tight against his chest and he appeared to be listening.

  ‘Pawel!’ I whispered urgently, not wishing to disturb the other sleepers who lay all around us in the trench. ‘What’s up? What do you hear?’

  It was as if he had not heard me, and for a moment he did not respond. Then, slowly, he turned his face towards me and just looked. I could see his white teeth in the starlight, but the expression in his eyes was hidden by the brim of a woollen cap that he wore. At last, and in a tone of voice which implied that I really was a bit of a fool to ask such a question, he said, ‘I would like to smoke a cigar, eh?’