The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  With the biographer of great figures in our culture, women and men, more so than with the novelist, there is formed, in Mme Yourcenar’s words, ‘a circle of kindred spirits, moved by the same interests and sympathies, or concerned with the same problems’. Hazel was of that circle of kindred spirits in the arenas of the lives of her subjects, all people who had drawn to themselves and their work over the decades a vast circle of devoted scholars and readers. Rereading her books these last few weeks I have known myself to be in the presence of Hazel’s great humanity. My love for her is undiminished. Friendship is for life. Her great books are for life. To read a great book a second time, just as to listen to a great piece of music for the hundredth time, is to be in the presence of a new creation.

  2013

  Sophie’s Choice

  I’ve been greatly affected by the book Romulus, My Father, and by my friendship with Raimond Gaita, in ways I will probably never adequately express. Both have been late gifts in my life. The impression of the book which has persisted with me most strongly is of Rai’s mother’s unhappy life and her tragic death, when her beginnings had seemed to me to have been so promising. Indeed the influence of Romulus and of my deepening friendship with Rai continue to play an evolving and increasingly important part in my life.

  After revisiting Rai’s childhood home, Frogmore, recently with Rai and Col McLennan, a Murri friend from Queensland, to whom Rai was showing his country, I wrote to Rai in an email:

  It was very moving walking behind you across the wheat field coming down from the abandoned house yesterday evening. I had a deeper sense of the tragic beauty of that landscape and your childhood as a part of it than I’ve ever had before.

  And I thought to myself how wonderful it is that you’ve made sense of that past of your parents and your father’s friends and given it a real presence. I think it is a truly heroic thing you have done, and I mean this in the old sense of the way in which shiftless peoples and tribes founded their stories of their own pasts in order to cherish their forebears and celebrate their lives and deeds, and by doing so gave a deeper meaning to their own existence in the present. The creation of story. It is magical and beautiful. And to think of you as a young boy writing that story of the struggle between good and evil in the guise of your hero Elvis. It is as if you were announcing your own future—the old people, and I mean our own old people of the North, would have said the gods gave you the gift of the story. And none of this would have been so if you had flinched from the whole truth of your family’s history at Frogmore, terrible and frightening though so much of that history was. I have never before understood quite so clearly as I did yesterday evening why you had to reveal all the deeply private pain of that time. But that is what all the great foundation stories do. They tell of the irredeemable tragedy as well as the triumph of life. And that is what makes them great, and gives to them the lasting significance they have for all of us.

  When Rai told me he had titled his essay on his mother (published in the collection After Romulus) ‘An Unassuageable Longing’—Helen Garner’s expression for her sense of Rai’s emotional state as a result of the loss of the nourishment of his mother’s love at an early age—I thought of Emily Dickinson’s image: ‘The craving is upon the child like a claw it cannot remove.’

  This paper is a personal reflection on Rai and our friendship, and it also looks at the effect on me of Romulus and of Rai’s essay on his mother. I’ve titled it Sophie’s Choice because it is in the circumstances of their beginnings that friendships, and indeed all our relationships, establish the enduring qualities of their character. It is in the inception of relationships that we most often experience the earliest nurturing of something enduring within ourselves, something which forms a deep connection that remains with us—the deepest of all these emotional beginnings for us is, of course, in our mothering. To find a friend is often to find something in oneself that one was not fully conscious of before, something which the friendship brings more fully into the light—something that is the result of the nurturing acknowledgment of the other.

  If it had not been for Sophie Halakas I might never have met Rai and my life would have been the poorer for that. Rai’s influence on me has been immense. Sometime—I’m not good with dates—after my wife Stephanie and I moved to Castlemaine ten years ago, Sophie Halakas, the owner of our local fruit shop and the matriarch of her large Greek Australian family, asked me if I had met Raimond Gaita. I told her I had read his books and that I greatly admired his work, but I hadn’t met him. In admitting this to Sophie I felt as if I were admitting a fault. ‘You should give him a call,’ she said with a quiet insistence that confirmed my sense of being in the wrong for not having met Rai already. ‘You are both writers,’ she said, ‘and you would like each other.’

  Sophie spoke to me, a stranger, with more than a hint of reprimand that day, in a tone that implied, This situation is not as it should be and we had better set it to rights as soon as possible. Charles Dickens would have put her in a novel. You can’t know Sophie for long—a day or two at most—before also knowing she is actively concerned about the moral quality of the community she lives in, and has every intention of seeing to it that her community reflects her own sense of what is right. In this, as in a number of other ways—though with a very different delivery and style—Sophie holds a number of values in common with Rai. As I left her shop that day, with my bag of beans and potatoes, I said to myself, Well, I’d better get in touch with Rai Gaita before I go in there again.

  When it came to making the call, however, I was shy about picking up the phone and out of the blue ringing the author of such imposing masterpieces as Romulus, My Father, The Philosopher’s Dog, A Common Humanity and the intimidatingly dense and scholarly work Good and Evil. Why would this writer and thinker, who I also knew to be the Professor of Moral Philosophy at London University, and whose essays and public statements had given him a commanding presence in the intellectual life of Australia, want to hear from me? Surely he would already be far too busy with the pressing demands of a richly elaborate international private and public life? How should I seem to casually break in on this? Would I say, ‘Hi, Rai. Sophie from the fruit shop told me to call you’?

  I am a coward about these things so I avoided the fruit shop for as long as I could. But we needed fruit and vegetables, and eventually I could avoid it no longer and I went in. Sophie, who was not always there, was at the counter that day. She greeted me as I came through the door. ‘Hello, Alex,’ she said. ‘We haven’t seen you for a while.’ Her gaze followed me around the shop and when I arrived at the counter with my basket of vegetables, she weighed and packed my things in silence. Only when I’d paid and she was handing me my change did she at last look directly into my eyes. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Did you get in touch with Rai Gaita?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll call him today. I promise.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I think you should.’

  After this encounter I was more intimidated by the thought of fronting Sophie again than I was by the thought of calling Rai, so I phoned him. He said that for some time Sophie had been urging him to call me. We arranged to meet for a coffee. I can’t remember what we talked about at our first meeting, but on my way home I wondered why I’d thought Rai Gaita would not be as his books are. What had made me think that the man who had written about Jack the cockatoo and Gypsy the dog would be a haughty and difficult highbrow and not the warm, humane, caring person he is in his books? A man, that is, motivated by a modest but passionate determination, not so very different from Sophie Halakas’s, to see to it that, in so far as he is able to influence these things, the community he lives in is a decent one; is a community, in other words, in which people and animals, and indeed all things, are respected simply for what they are and because they are, because they share with us our being-in-this-world. Rai Gaita, I realised after our first meeting in the cafe, was a practical philosopher for whom the congested moral qualities
of the life we live from day to day provide the principal focus and ground not only of his thinking but of his actions. As I walked home from the cafe I knew that I had met a man who was not only a very great writer (something I had already discovered for myself) but who was also a great human being.

  I’m not a Christian, and dislike all varieties of proselytising religion, but I’d be a fool to imagine that my thought has not been influenced by the imprint left on me and on the culture I inhabit by two thousand years of Christianity; by the shaping conviction, that is, that the struggle between good and evil is the principal moral focus of human society and the rule of the good the measure of its moral health. Though Rai would almost certainly not express it as I do here, from my reading of his books and essays I knew him to have spent his most serious intellectual energies in dealing head on, as it were, with this subject, and I knew that his judgments on questions of good and evil would always be nuanced and complex. I did not expect my own judgments to be as keen as his, even though as a novelist I’d been concerned my entire writing life with the intricate dilemmas of private and social morality. Would our views on these things be at odds? I wondered. I had liked Rai at once and was anxious to discover that we shared some deep common ground so that our friendship might flourish. I was, of course, looking in the wrong place.

  After my meeting with Rai I couldn’t wait to go into the fruit shop again. But Sophie was too quick for me. Before I could deliver my punchline, she said, ‘Rai was in just now, Alex. He said how much he enjoyed meeting you.’

  I realised it wasn’t Dickens, after all, but was Trollope who would have put her straight into a novel. Her manner assured me that arrangements in Castlemaine had been adjusted a significant step closer to her ideal. It wasn’t long after this that Rai and I were shovelling gravel together at his country home, Shalvah, and walking in the rain over his old childhood country around Baringhup. He was telling me of his childhood and taking me to his sacred sites, showing me the implements his father had used, the beautiful wrought-iron gates he had made and the old shed on the farm where his father had worked and where as a boy Rai himself had turned the handle of the homemade tool for twisting the hot straps of iron. These were scenes that reminded me of my own early years as a farm labourer in England when I had become joyfully intimate with the skills and the hand tools of those days. I was very aware while shovelling gravel with him and visiting his father’s old work sites with Rai (these events occurred on different days but were of the same feeling) that he and I both loved physical work and the peculiar quality of mental contentment and wellbeing that came with it. There was a connection between us in this that was deeply important to me and which I knew also to be deeply important to Rai. We might not agree on every social and moral question, but we would both delight in shovelling gravel and loading his ute with firewood for my Rayburn. I knew I could rely on that. I knew I could rely on him.

  Our friendship has flourished since then in action and in talk, and we have done a great deal of both. Rai and his wife, Yael, have travelled with me to the Stone Country, in the Central Highlands of Queensland, where they met the dear friends on whom the characters in two of my novels were based. Rai was overcome with emotion and wept when he stood among the stone arrangements of the sacred playgrounds of the Old People, in that strange and mysterious opening in the bendee scrub at the heart of Jangga country, to which Col McLennan, elder of the Jangga, had invited him. And I was reminded that day of the depth of Rai’s love of the country around Shalvah, a place as sacred to him as the stone arrangements in the wild bendee scrub are to Col and his people. Rai and Yael and I lived together, cooked and ate and travelled together in that sublime country for a week during which we came to know each other at an open level of trust and intimacy I have rarely experienced. Although ours is a young friendship in years, it is one of the most important and influential of my life. I quite often feel ambivalent and uncertain about my decision to live away from the city in the quiet country town of Castlemaine (Sophie’s town), but whenever Rai and Yael are at Shalvah I feel reassured and less ambivalent and more aware of having been admitted generously into a special love of country—just as I did when I was first invited by Col McLennan to journey with him through his country in the hinterland of the north. When Stephanie and I moved back to Melbourne for our daughter’s last two years of schooling a few years ago, Rai wrote to me from London, ‘Don’t get too fond of Carlton, mate. I want to grow old with you in the bush.’ It is a thought I too cherish. Not growing old (I think I’ve already done that) but continuing to enjoy our friendship.

  Rai’s complex and deeply passionate attachment to the country of his childhood has its roots not only in his love and admiration for his father but also, and no less deeply, in his longing to reconnect the broken threads of his love for his mother. It is a longing that has been a powerful source of inspiration for him. Without that longing we would not have Romulus, My Father or his courageous and deeply moving essay about his mother, ‘An Unassuageable Longing’.

  During our journey around Rai’s home country he took me to the cottage he rented in Maldon where he wrote Romulus. ‘I wrote it in five weeks,’ he said—he may even have said three. ‘It was already written in my heart,’ he explained. As we sat in the car looking at the cottage I was thinking of Rai’s mother and remembering Colm Toibin’s heartbreaking story ‘A Long Winter’, in which the father and the boy search for the mother who has run away from them, a story pervaded by that sense of guilty responsibility that all children endure for the failure of love in the family, and by a longing to recover the lost love of the mother. The mother is never found, of course, in such stories and we are left with her poignant absence as a powerful presence. Writers are often inspired to write by an irresistible urge to recover what has been lost. This urge may not be fully conscious at the time of writing; it is the process of writing itself that uncovers the poignant, the impossible, and the heartfelt necessity of responding to the longing and makes the longing more immediate, bringing the absence into the presence of the writer. It is Henry James at that pivotal moment in his life, returning to America after thirty years in England and anxious to know if he is going to be able to recover the America of his early years that is to be so important for him.

  The separation of writers from their homelands (their mother country) and their mothers has often been the source of inspiration for masterpieces of literature—and by literature I mean all forms of writing. Romulus is one of the finest examples of this intense lucid masterpiece of family emotion, of love and the failure of love to be enough, in which the author writes above him or herself under the influence of what we once happily called inspiration, and what Rai called writing from the heart.

  Romulus was surely an important part of the beginning of a new chapter, or perhaps more accurately a new stage, in Rai’s return to his home country, in which the move to Shalvah was also an important act of recovery for him. The landscape around Shalvah is not only rich in sites of deeply cherished incident with Rai’s father, but is also rich in sites of sacred significance for Rai’s mother and her tragic history, places intimately associated with her suffering and her final despair. Reading Rai’s essay on his mother it is impossible to believe that his unassuageable longing will not continue to be a powerful prompt of memory and imagination for him, a precious source of energy and inspiration for his writing. The story, I believe, is not over yet. When he began writing Romulus, Rai said to me, he did so wanting to write about his mother, but he was not able to do it at that time. His mother, of course, was to become the great absence of the story, the poignant presence of her despair and loss. Some of the greatest works of literature are about those very things the writer cannot say but which haunt the work with the poignancy of their absence. It was his mother’s tragedy that had most deeply affected me in the book, and had left me with a longing for the resolution of her absence in her son’s life.

  We are only a few pages into Romulus when we enco
unter the young girl of sixteen, sensitive to the cultural values and educated in the ways of the German middle class. She enjoys Shakespeare and opera and is prone to melancholy and asthma. That she falls in love with the intensely romantic blacksmith six years her senior, his unsettling gaze and his hard muscles, the challenge to her values of his contempt for what he considers to be her snobbishness in loving such things as Shakespeare and opera, terrify her parents—they think of Romulus as a gypsy. From their cultural perspective this is just about the most damning thing they could say about him. In the recounting of their meeting the young girl’s doom is foretold, almost in the tones of a classical tragedy. The portent of those few opening pages is as powerful as anything I know in literature. It is what first grips the reader, and it is what holds the reader until the end—or, I should say, which held this reader to the end. Christine dies in chapter eight, two-thirds of the way through the book, but the unresolved conflicts her life and death have left behind remain for me the source of the book’s energy to the very end—the last two words of the book are ‘my mother’: a foreshadowing of the long essay that Rai has at last found himself able to write and an acknowledgment of the presence of the mother’s absence as the guiding spirit of the book that was written in the author’s heart before a word was set on paper.