Author Archives: Andrea Goldsmith

ESSENTIALLY HUMAN (2)

ESSENTIALLY HUMAN.

Memory, Imagination and creativity.

When I was eight years old, I had three ambitions. The first was to be a ballerina – more a matter of wishful thinking than creative passion, given I wanted to be tall and slim, I was keen to wear a tutu, and I longed to be borne aloft by men who resembled fairy-tale princes. That ambition soon disappeared, snuffed out by common sense and a maturing aesthetic. The second ambition was to be a novelist. For as long as I could remember, novels had provided a refuge from the crush and uncertainty of my child’s life – a very necessary refuge given that childhood and I were not an easy fit. Filled with anxiety that I was getting the child role wrong, and ever alert to any tools that might help me navigate those perilous years, I studied other children in order to learn the ropes. The price of such vigilance was inexhaustible exhaustion. I was watchful during the day, and the nights were spent analysing the previous day’s mistakes and planning protective strategies for the next. The most reliable respite I had from this anxiety was not sleep (with so much to do I was a poor sleeper) but novels. I would slip into other lives and other places and relieved of my deficient yet demanding self, I would feel stimulated, invigorated, engaged, even happy – although like Samuel Beckett, I discovered that happiness was not as lively as I would have thought. Fiction supported me through the seemingly endless years of childhood, and from a young age I was determined to become a novelist.

That I had decided to be a writer of novels could be explained in terms of the pleasure principle, self-preservation and escape. But I couldn’t escape all the time so what I needed was a reliable means of holding life in place. This need shaped my third ambition, namely, to have a perfect memory, the sort of memory that could learn poems by heart, that could reel off a page of numbers briefly glimpsed, that never forgot a person, place, event or story. If I could remember everything that had ever happened to me in the past, I would better manage the troubles that plagued my present, and gain a grip on the uncertain future.

My concept of memory in those long-ago days was akin to memorising. And I did so love memorising – poems, psalms, one year the entire geography book (I disliked geography but memorising the book as I walked around a deserted tennis court had a pleasing, hypnotic effect). In one respect, memorising was similar to reading in that both activities, by capturing my entire attention, removed me from the trials of childhood and my burdensome self. But that was the only similarity. Reading invigorated me, it sparked my imagination; I would travel to times and places not my own, and mix with people not to be found anywhere in suburban Melbourne. In contrast, my childhood memorising filled the time with a vaguely narcotic calm – like doing Lego or jigsaws or painting by numbers.^[1]

To be a novelist and to have perfect memory: two linked ambitions to help steer me through the bewildering world in which I found myself, and through primary and secondary school they sustained me well. It was during my first year at university that I realised my dual ambitions were incompatible. I read The Mind of a Mnemonist, written by the great Russian neurologist, A.R. Luria, a book detailing the extraordinary memory of a man called ‘S’. This was followed a couple of months later by Borges’s Labyrinths, most especially, the short story, ‘Funes the Memorious’. Funes, an ordinary man in most respects, remembered everything; he could neither select nor forget. Beset by details, filled with details, Funes’s imagination was stifled. He was a man incapable of ideas or insight.

‘S’ and Funes demonstrated extraordinary feats of memory, like remembering pages of numbers or lists of nonsense syllables or poems in foreign languages, or the foreign language itself. Funes, for example, learned Latin in a week by memorising the Latin of Pliny the Elder as written in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. But in both cases this sort of memorising blocked the free-ranging imagination so essential to the novelist; it was a memory confined to particulars – a type of memory that excludes reflection and reason, inspiration and illumination.

Novelists require a versatile, athletic imagination, one that can leap and loiter in the uncertainties of an emerging narrative. The novelist’s imagination is an explorer and thrill seeker. Perfect memory of the sort to which my childhood self had aspired is in service to safety and certainty; it is memory without imagination, it is memory at odds with metaphor, it is a memory as discreet and as immoveable as a picket fence.

The memory that fuels human life and endeavour is far more creative than this. If I remember an event, say the breakup of an affair, it is not identical to the actual break-up. My recollection is overlaid with other experiences, other understandings, conversations, desires. Memory relies upon the recruitment of an entire cognitive landscape – experience, study, conversations, other memories. Just as Magritte’s painting of a pipe, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, so too my memory of the break-up, or, indeed, any memory. Memories are created, and what they recall is re-created differently with each recollection.

This notion of memory is fluid and often illuminating. It is also unpredictable: we cannot determine beforehand what knowledge and experience will be pulled into play during recollection, nor the ideas that will emerge from the mix. And it is unreliable, too. As a photo is not the whole story, that there is, as Barthes wrote, a ‘blind field beyond the frame’; so too with memory. All memory involves partial forgetting, but what is forgotten is not erased, indeed, it is a common occurrence that, triggered by an experience in the present, a formerly forgotten element rises to consciousness. In addition to being unpredictable and unreliable, memory is not neutral. We select what is to be remembered, and depending on current circumstances, what is selected this year will be different from what will be selected next year or in ten years time. Memory is in service to the present far more than the past event it purports to preserve. Far from being solid and immutable, this memory we trust is both delicate and infinitely corruptible, it is also free-ranging and expansive, linking with a swill of experience, desire, emotion, understanding, doubts, values and attitudes. This notion of memory, this fertile and changing memory, this creative and illuminating memory, is one dependent on the imagination and in turn constructing it.^[2]

We draw on memory to make sense of ourselves as we trek through daily life. It is memory that fuels imaginings of the future, it is memory that helps plan for it. It is memory that feeds the hopes and desires that drive us to seek out this person and abruptly turn from another. It is memory that seeds great art, composes memorable music, writes heart-stopping poetry and life-changing novels. A life without imagined, creative memory has been described by great neuroscientists like Luria, and it is a life confined in an ever-present where nothing much changes and art is indistinguishable from dust. A life without imagined, creative memory would be, for most of us, unbearable.

And yet it seems we are heading straight into that darkness.

Memory, imagination and creativity require a few simple conditions: uninterrupted time, solitude, no external distractions and the ability to sustain attention and focus.

In the digital age, for many, perhaps most people, simple factual memory – recall – of a name, a book or a film, has been rendered vestigial by web searches. Stop, I say, when someone reaches for their phone because they can’t remember the name of a book, an actor, a film. Stop, I say, give your mind time, give it space, the name will come to you. Mostly the person does not stop, does not wait. What would be the point? they imply, with a nod at their phone. Indeed, we have adapted so quickly to having information at our fingertips that when we want to know something, we want to know it now, whether it be the closest bagel shop (with pictures to show if the bagels are authentic), or a video clip of the admirable Jonas Kauffman singing Andrea Chenier (there is); it doesn’t matter what the nature of the information, we expect to have it immediately.

Skills, which once were ubiquitous, have been lost. It would be a rare millennial or post-millennial who could read a map, but neither would they regard this as a loss Why bother, when they have GPS? And simple mathematical calculations – multiplying, division, percentages – these calculations would be beyond many people. But again, why bother, when you always have a calculator in reach?

The history of human progress is also the history of lost skills. Few people these days would know how to rub sticks together to produce fire. Few people would know how to build a fire in a grate; quite a few people would not know what a grate is. And who would know how to read a sundial these days? But the loss of fire-making skills or telling the time by the sun, or reading a map, or doing simple maths do not diminish our humanness: they do not fundamentally alter what it is to be human.

Creativity is in a different sphere, creativity is essentially human. In our switched-on, digital world, sustained attention on a single idea, problem or issue has been lost to the dings and clicks of social media, news feeds, email, texts. Turn off notifications and that little screen still flashes. Solitude has being shoved aside by the need for constant connection and approbation. Checking a phone every few minutes is akin to laboratory rats pressing a lever for food, knowing that eventually they will be rewarded. So, too, with social media.

The mobile phone is the metaphorical heart beat of the modern individual. We sleep with it, run with it, eat with it. It accompanies us to the bathroom, it’s in reach while we have sex. It is a common sight to see two people seated together in a café each occupied with their phone, the only communication occurring when one shares their screen with the other. With WIFI blanketing the earth, even in wilderness landscapes the digital heart beats strongly. There is no repose. There is no time to mull in your own thoughts, to reach into the troughs of forgetting, there is no time for the imagination to flourish.

Multi-tasking has inflamed the situation. Attention spans have not shortened in the digital age, but the nature of attention has changed. Juggling several tasks simultaneously is counter-productive to the singular attention – the obsessiveness –that creative work requires. With solitude and privacy under assault, and sustained attention of the sort the imagination requires fast going the way of the typewriter and the tape cassette, the conditions for creative work are being steadily eroded.

Creative skills are surprisingly frail. As a writer, I know that when I return to my desk after just a few weeks away, the words don’t come so easily, the ideas are sluggish or, worse, non-existent. It takes a few days for the creative skills to muscle up again. The imagination, if neglected, readily becomes dormant; if it is not nurtured, it can actually decay. Muscles that are unused become stiff and painful and thereby draw attention to themselves. Unfortunately, the imagination goes far more quietly.

Running alongside this assault on human creative processes is the vast and increasingly complex advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence. Generative AI has been designed with the capacity to learn and develop new data from its own actions/work, while Artificial General Intelligence is human-level intelligence that can do everything the human mind can do – and more.

An example of Generative AI was portrayed in a 2016 Go tournament between Lee Sedol, the world champion at the time, and the computer programme AlphaGo. Demis Hassabis, the scientist who produced the early work linking the neurological substrates of imagination and memory, was the primary creator of AlphaGo.^[3]

There were good reasons to choose Go to test the limits of the AlphaGo computer. There had been many AI-versus-human chess tournaments, but Go is far more complex than chess and, for seasoned players, creativity and intuition play a role. Many players speak about the game in quasi-spiritual terms. This spiritual dimension combined with the role of intuition underscore Go as a distinctly human-grounded game.

AlphaGo demonstrated a level of self-learning in the tournament with Lee Sedol that even surprised its creators. One particular move, move 37 in the second game, was described by one Go Master as ‘not a human move’ but ‘beautiful, so beautiful’. This move had not been a part of AlphaGo’s programmed memory, rather the machine had created it.

Sedol lost the tournament 4 to 1 and, not long after, he resigned from the professional circuit. Since then other programs to play Go have been developed that are even more capable than AlphaGo.

Generative AI is already with us, and artificial general intelligence with its open-ended creative skills is fast developing. There are daily warnings of the dangers of AI, including some from the founders in the field.^[4] There are worries expressed over AI-written student essays and AI-generated novels, but there are far more serious concerns over the possibility of AI surpassing human intelligence and subjugating we humans.

Whatever the future brings, it has already begun, and running in parallel has been the erosion of the very skills needed to maintain control of our human future. In our eagerness to embrace all the digital world has to offer, we have neglected to take stock of what we have complacently relinquished. Human imaginative work runs the risk of dying out, and with artificial general intelligence, creativity will become the province of the machines that human imagination and ingenuity produced. In short, we are creating the conditions of our own demise. AI isn’t taking over human creative endeavour, we have already ceded the territory.

^[1] This childhood memorising is very different from the memorising of my adult years when, consciously and fully alert, I have worked to absorb poems and quotable quotes into the fabric of mind. As George Steiner memorably wrote: ‘To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an in-dwelling clarity and life-force…What is committed to memory and susceptible of recall constitutes the ballast of the self.’ (Steiner. Real Presences. pp 9-10).

^[2] In recent years, the correlation between memory and the imagination has been given a neuroscientific basis. Demis Hassabis, neuroscientist, all-round genius, and winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize of Chemistry, published a paper in 2007 in which he linked memory and the imagination. He revealed that similar brain activity occurred during tasks employing memory of the past and tasks requiring an imagining of the future, and both were grounded in the hippocampus. Since then, much further work has been done in the neurological connections of memory and the imagination.

^[3] An excellent account of the tournament is the documentary, AlphaGo, directed by Greg Kohs, and available on YouTube. Also Benjamin Labatut in his brilliant, unorthodox novel MANIAC, devotes the last chapters to the game of Go, in particular, this tournament between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo.

^[4] In his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari analyses recent advances in AI and what they may mean for the future of humankind. The book was published in 2016, developments (some would prefer the term ‘progress’) since then are cause for far greater concern.

Faustian Pacts

RELICS FROM THE PAST

3 Replies

(Published in THE MONTHLY, September, 2025)

On an Autumn day in Melbourne not so long ago, while travelling home on the train, I was caught by a scent. It wafted over from a woman seated across the aisle. Her hair was short and blow-waved neat, her coat was buttoned, her handbag was upright against her hip; she was a woman in her middle years, occupied with her phone. I willed her not to disembark until I had found the memory of the smell. It was teasingly familiar, yet I knew it lodged in the distant past. I inhaled more deeply and felt a flush of happiness. A moment later, the happiness was swamped by a wave of anxiety and longing.

What was that smell? I rummaged through memory, but despite the powerful feelings it engendered, the original source remained out of reach.

The woman slipped her phone into her bag, stood up and moved to the door; soon she would be gone. I wanted to grab her, hold her back till the scent revealed itself. The train slowed, the platform of the station appeared, then, just before the doors opened, it came to me: it was hairspray, the Elnett hairspray my mother used to helmet her hair back in the 1960s. (I would normally avoid turning a noun into a verb, but the hairspray did, in fact, make of her hair a helmet, and it did so actively enough to warrant a verb.)

I had solved the mystery of the smell, but I was curious about its emotional baggage.

My mother died in 2012. Twenty years earlier, while in her mid-sixties, her cognitive skills began to dwindle. In the last eight years of her life, she recognised none of her family; in the last three years of her life, she could neither walk nor talk. Before the dementia, and probably because I was more like her than were my sister and brother, my relationship with my mother was not easy. I spent my childhood trying to win her approval, or perhaps, more simply, her attention. I would stand beside her as she sat at her dressing table, one of those old-fashioned ones with a central mirror and two side wing mirrors – three versions of my mother as she teased her thin hair and stiffened it with Elnett hairspray. The last element of her beauty regime was to apply perfume to her neck and behind her ears – it was Je Reviens by Worth in a small round blue bottle – then she would turn to me, silent and desperately hopeful, and dab some of the perfume behind my ears. The anxiety and longing disappeared in a moment of pure happiness.

Smells and memory, such a powerful, yet mysterious coupling. I can bring to mind something visual, I can imagine a voice or a piece of music from the past, but I cannot imagine a smell – nor, with a nod to Proust, taste. But perhaps such considerations are moot, given the capriciousness and capaciousness and plain bloody-mindedness of memory. After all, each time memory summons up a particular past it produces a different version. The life since the event changes the perspective on the past event, as do the reasons for wanting to recall it. Memory is always in service, first and foremost, to the present and not the event it seeks to restore. I may not be able to recall a smell or taste in the way I can a picture, a face or a piece of music, but the fact is, no memory is faithful to the past.

And yet, there was that raw longing, that look-at-me ache, conjoined with the Elnett hairspray. It was primitive, juvenile, it served no purpose, so I wanted to believe, to the adult I have become. It was of then, and it trespassed into my now.

I was nineteen or twenty when I first came across Sartre’s 1964 memoir of his childhood, Words (Les Paroles). I was immediately drawn to it because of the cover of my Penguin edition. Instead of the usual image, the cover carries a quote from the book in a huge font: ‘I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it…’

I shared this sentiment – I still do, although with a little less vehemence than Sartre. But what most appealed was that a very famous person dared contradict the assumed innocence and care-free quality that defined childhood.

I wanted to pack childhood away as soon as it was finished, but childhood will not go so quietly; indeed, I’ve come to believe that childhood claims the better part of memory for itself. Miserable or happy, privileged or deprived, pivotal aspects of childhood are tenaciously entrenched. Yet, as my experience with the Elnett hairspray demonstrates, these memories can hibernate beyond conscious reach for years, even decades, only to bombard as you make your way through maturity.

There’s nothing new about this: a century ago, Freud revealed that the ignored past, the forgotten past, the past of which you are unconscious, can nonetheless exert a powerful effect on who you are and how you behave. And yet we live, most of the time, as if unaware of being tethered to the past, and when old events gate-crash the present they result in surprise and shock, they can readily throw you off balance.

These thoughts led me back to Walter Benjamin’s essay on Proust. Benjamin writes of ‘purposive remembering’ with its strenuous efforts to recollect and, in the case of A la recherche du temps perdu, to imaginatively restore the past. ‘Purposive remembering’ suggests that a reconstruction of the past is possible. But it’s not, and why imagination is essential to memory – not simply to fill in the gaps, but also to provide the multi-dimensions of lived experience: the facts, the movements, the emotions, the smells and tastes

In the days following the Elnett hairspray event, I mulled over the liquid connections between imagination and memory. Joyce wrote that ‘Imagination is memory’; I would propose the reverse: that memory is imagination – not the entire infinite stretch of the imagination but rather memory is a process of the imagination.^[1] The idea that memory is fused with the imagination, that all memories are distilled in the imagination, provides for the malleability of memory. The fact is that when I focus my mind on the child standing at her mother’s dressing table now, I understand the situation slightly differently than I did just a few weeks ago, feel it differently, and know it differently, too.

There was a postscript to the Elnett hairspray incident. Driven by nostalgia (definitely not curiosity) I went on-line and discovered that the perfume my mother used, Worth’s Je Reviens, was still being produced and was available from a shop in the Melbourne CBD. (As to why the perfume and not the hairspray: I use perfume every day, but have no need for hairspray). I caught the train to the city, I went to the shop. The perfume came in two sizes, each sealed in the familiar blue box. I bought the large bottle – far better value, according to the woman in the perfume shop, but that was not what convinced me: I assumed my mother, who used the perfume every day, would have used the large version (even though in my memory the round blue bottle was quite small). But I was wrong. When I removed the perfume from the box the bottle was the right shape and the familiar rich blue colour, but it was far too big. My mother used the small size – which, I expect, was the only size available back in those long-ago days. I was so disappointed, I was wanting exactly the same, I was wanting to revisit exactly that old scene. To experience it again. Fortunately, the scent had not changed. I put some on my wrists, I wanted to keep smelling it, smelling the better part of a difficult childhood.

The headache began almost immediately, first the shadow that presages the pain, then the pain itself which, in most instances will morph into migraine. There are many perfumes that do this to me, but surely not Je Reviens.

I persisted – I so wanted to wear this perfume – but so did the migraine. I gave the bottle to my sister. And the memory? It has changed again.

^[1] in 2007, a team led by Demis Hassabis published a paper in which memory and the imagination were linked. They showed that similar brain activity occurred during tasks employing memory of the past and tasks requiring an imagining of the future, both being grounded in the hippocampus. Since then, much further work has been done on the neurological connections of memory and the imagination.

OF WONDERS WILD AND NEW

1 Reply

(From poem at the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)

I must have been in need of a role model when first I heard of Eve and her transgressions in the garden of Eden, because from the beginning I disagreed with the interpretation promulgated both by my Methodist school and my Jewish background. Feed off the tree of knowledge and suffer for all eternity? It made no sense. Without curiosity and its rewards, childhood, with its trials and expections, would be unbearable. God’s Eve might have been bad and disobedient, but my Eve was rebellious and dismissive of parental authority. She’d had no say in the Adam’s rib business, but her response to the snake revealed her to be curious and confident and courageous. Thereafter, she flaunted her independence and showed Adam who ought to be boss.

‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened…’ (Genesis 3:6-7. King James Authorized Version).

Later, when I read Milton’s Paradise Lost, my admiration for Eve only increased. Milton is no 17^th century feminist. His Satan locates authority, intelligence and valour in man, and ‘coy submission’, beauty and grace in woman. But how is this demonstrated? Eve acts, while Adam only responds. Eve defies authority, and does so with determination. Milton proves my case, not his – nor God’s for that matter.

As for curiosity, it is the greatest of the human passions – not that I was aware of this as a child. I embraced curiosity because it worked for me. The family is a crowded place; I shared a bedroom with my sister and the living room was communal space, but curiosity was private. It was fed and satisfied by books and thoughts, and it opened up endless possibilities located far away from suburban Melbourne. And that was the wonder of it: one question led to other questions, and you’d find yourself in imagined terrain that was fabulously interesting and sparking with risk. And given you didn’t need to leave home, you didn’t even need to leave your chair or the nook at the end of the garden, you were entirely safe – an important consideration for a child so anxious that even sleeping was a threat. Crucially, curiosity removed me from the daily terrors of being a child, and at the same time, it made solitude a most desirable state. I was rarely bored during the interminable years of childhood, nor was I decades later during the seemingly endless covid lockdowns. With curiosity powering the imagination and stirring the currents of memory, no one need ever be bored.

* * * *

There’s an epidemic of loneliness and boredom in societies like ours, yet it seems we’ve never been busier. Frenzied digital connection from unlimited Wordles to compulsive checking of social media to fevered on-line shopping and mesmerising doom scrolling distract from the boredom and loneliness while, at the same time, being a symptom of these, and probably further feeding them.

So much activity with so little to show for it, accompanied by a pervasive dissatisfaction that seems unappeasable. As for the smart-phone: sometimes it feels like the phone controls you and not the other way around, a bit like the oppressive partner you know you should leave but you can’t bring yourself to do it. The solution is not constant, mind-numbing activity, but active, ceaseless curiosity. This is not a quick google search for the name of a film, a song, a place, a date, that’s not curiosity, that’s just a quick-fix for frustration over a forgotten fact. Curiosity is the determined search for new understandings, a hunger for new experiences, new people and places; it’s invigorating and productive, it starts at one point and shoots off vectors in all directions. With curiosity in full flight, boredom and loneliness don’t get a look-in.

An active curiosity is like the ardent traveller: implicit to both is the notion of search, of a journey into the unknown. You spend a day wandering in x direction, the next day you change course. You gather knowledge and understanding from both the forward movement and the wrong turns, and when you arrive back at the starting point, you are filled with new understandings and, as T.S. Eliot famously wrote, you return to where you began and know it for the first time.

Most significantly, given the prominence accorded to the self in the digital age; curiosity turns you away from yourself towards the world, towards new places and other eras, and into the lives of people very different from you. Curiosity could make humanitarians of us all.

Surrounded as we are in constant noise and an avalanche of information, this greatest of the passions, this resource for living has been left to moulder away in a dark corner of mind. It is hard to think of another resource that costs nothing and is available to all human beings. You can activate it while cooking, or changing the bed-sheets, or watching your child play footy; you can slip into it while travelling to work, delivering noodles, ploughing a field, while walking the dog. The major requirements of curiosity are time and privacy and solitude. Turn off the music, resist your favourite podcasts, don’t call your sister/mother/son/best friend. Put your phone in a drawer or put it on silent and go mental wandering – curiosity by another name.

Which leads me to Trump, as most musings do these days. Even though we know his power is hinged to having our attention, his being plastered across the news and social media, filling podcasts in umpteen different languages makes it is so difficult to ignore him, to turn him off. And besides, for many of us, there is a macabre fascination with this man who has colonised the hearts and minds of millions, who has turned the Republican Congress into a forelock-tugging bunch of lackeys, a man who, either deliberately or simply shuttered within his massive ego, is upending the world order. This man, so loved by his MAGA followers, is seen as a dangerous narcissist by his detractors, a man who disregards anything that does not enhance himself and his power. This is a man so satisfied with himself, not only does not demonstrate curiosity, he has no need for it.

I don’t believe I’ve ever known Trump to ask a question – and not surprising in a man convinced of his own perfection, his own greatness, his rightness. He does not seek advice from his advisors (given the lack of appropriate skills and experience of most of them, this could be seen as an unexpected benefit), he seeks confirmation only for what he already thinks/wants/believes/needs, which is to say, himself, Donald J. Trump and the web of his selfhood.

There’s nothing special about Trump’s narcissism; like any narcissism it is incompatible with curiosity about people and events and places beyond his personal domain. Indeed, if Trump’s minions fail to stroke his ego, they find themselves unemployed, and, in many cases, unemployable. This man, entrusted with the lives and fate of not just Americans, but much of the rest of the world, lacks the fundamental passion of what makes us human; this saviour of the working American, this nasty narcissist does not give a damn about his adoring followers, nor all those drooling republican congressman, and he certainly does not give a damn about the conflicts in the wider world (unless, of course, he can insert himself as the fixer-saviour). This narcissist, inoculated as he is against curiosity, is, simply, not interested.

UNSPOKEN DESIRE, UNREQUITED LOVE

1 Reply

(published in The Weekend Australian, March 1st, 2025)

Desire is so…desirable. How bland and static life would be without it. And there’s so much to recommend it. It comes in a great many varieties – no chance of boredom – and it’s so portable: where I go, so, too, my desires. But the feature that most appeals to me is that desires can remain private. Most desires are created by the mind, and there they can stay – no need to subject them to reality to enjoy their pleasures and enlightenment. This is a very good thing, because when they are exposed, it can be a disturbing, even distressing experience.

There was a teacher I admired during my high school years, admired and adored; I shaped my behaviour to win her approval, I owned beliefs because I knew they were hers; this teacher inspired a clutch of desires and was, in turn, enhanced by them. A couple of years ago, while artist-in-residence at an organisation of which my former teacher was a member, she and I attended the same lunch function. Decades had passed, yet I felt all the tremors of youth when I caught sight of her. Emboldened by my position as artist-in-residence, I found the courage to greet this woman who had exerted such an influence in my adolescence. I approached her table and stood by her chair; she looked vaguely at me. I said my name: there was no recognition. I fumbled a few more facts and when there was still no recognition, I mentioned the name of my best friend at school, and immediately her face lit up: an exceptional girl, my former teacher said, one who would go far. My friend was remembered, but I had been forgotten; worse, it was if I had never existed. There were flyers throughout the building displaying my photo, my name, a brief biography, and still I was a total stranger to this woman who had meant so much to me during those impressionable years. All those private desires that had channelled me through high school, desires that attached to ambition, to ideas, to music, desires that had remained polished and private throughout my adolescence and beyond, and she did not know me.

I wish I’d not seen her. Desire, imagined desire, untainted by reality is never disappointed.

In my latest novel, The Buried Life, there is a romance between a forty-three-year-old man, Adrian, and a fifty-seven-year-old woman, Laura. Adrian is not at all bothered by the age difference, it is Laura who worries. She’s self-conscious about her ageing body, the newly-acquire flab on her abdomen and thighs, the beginnings of crepe in the underside of her arms, but it is mostly desire itself that is on her mind, and in this instance it is the intensity of her sexual desire for Adrian Her thirty-year-old self, even her forty-year-old self would have said that anyone approaching sixty would be beyond such feelings. Perhaps one never was, perhaps at that very moment there were nonagenarians rolling around in an erotic frenzy at their aged-care facility.

And perhaps there are, but I doubt it. Though I would like to think that rampant desires – artistic, sporting, intellectual, epicurean – are filling the minds of the aged-care residents. As the body ages, it becomes irritating, intrusive, burdensome, but, in the absence of cognitive decline, the imagination, that crucible of desire, goes from strength to strength. This is one of the great benefits of advancing age.

Imagined desire, there’s little to equal it and, aside from reality, nothing to stop it. Imagined desire is bold, curious, energetic. And imagined desire – private desire – can also be very productive.

I have enjoyed an unrequited love of more than thirty years duration, a passion that ripples with many kinds of desire. This man is a similar age to me, I’ll call him P (not his initial, but with that whispered plosive, /P/ is my favourite letter). P was beautiful, brainy and bookish when first I met him, and so he remains. We meet very occasionally, always with eager anticipation and always with outward decorum. But even though it has never been acknowledged, I am sure P harbours a secret passion for me, too.

And such a satisfying love mine has been. I’ve orchestrated long and complex conversations with him; no idea, no book, no topic is beyond us. P has fired up sexual desires both for me and for my characters. I can spend time with P when I look a mess, when I’m grumpy at the end of a tiring day, when I’ve gained weight. And P, himself, has no downside, no qualities to spoil his perfection. He may be less bookish and brainy than my desires require him to be, but it doesn’t matter. If he scatters his clothes across the floor, I don’t see it. If he has a sour odour in the mornings, I don’t smell it. If he complains about this relative or that colleague, I don’t hear it. Any faults, and I expect he has a few, are outside the realm of my P.

I can imagine every embrace with P, every sexual act (including those I’ve never tried but wish I had), and I can make use of these, have made use of them in the books I have written. Indeed, for most of my nine novels any satisfying and sexy relationship has been fuelled by P. And it doesn’t stop at sexual desire. I have crafted conversations with him while taking solitary walks or while idling at my desk – rigorous, referenced, and ranging over a variety of topics. These conversations can occur almost daily if I am trying to get to the nub of a particularly knotty conundrum.

Reality would not simply spoil this, it would stop it altogether.

In the early drafts of The Buried Life, I made Laura’s desire for Adrian unrequited. But an unrequited love like mine, so satisfying in real life produced narrative tedium in the novel. And besides, at fifty-seven, and caught within a long marriage, Laura deserved some good sex and stimulating conversation.

But for me, I would always choose my long, intense, unrequited and unacknowledged love with its bottomless well of desires. Wholly satisfying and forever untainted, it remains ageless and reliable.

THE BURIED LIFE

5 Replies

The Buried Life, my new novel, is about to be released (Transit Lounge, March). It will be launched by Mark Rubbo of Readings Books on March 11th, at the Abbotsford Convent Melbourne. In addition to the conversation with Mark, Frances Atkins, will play music from Mahler. (Mahler’s music figures in the novel.)

Bookings for the launch can be made through the Readings website, click onto events.

The Buried Life began with a desire to explore that great taboo, death. It has always surprised me that a human event which happens to us all inspires so much fear. As for dying as a process, it strikes me as oxymoronic. One LIVES right up until the time one dies. I have sat with 4 people in the hours before each of them died, and they lived, even unconscious they lived up until their breath stopped. Epicurus expressed it best: Where life is, death is not. And where death is, life is not. As for suffering a death, it is suffered by the living, by those who are left behind.

This is not to suggest there’s no mystery in death. An abundant cache of poetry and music, samples of which are included in The Buried Life, is testimony to death’s enduring mysteries.

I have a 9-page document of death books and poems. Here are a few of my favourites.
Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle.
Neruda: The Dead Woman (this was quoted in the film Truly Madly Deeply)
Larkin: Aubade
Ted Hughes: The Crow Poems and Birthday Letters
Tennyson: In Memoriam A.H.H. (Arthur Hallam)
Hölderin: The Death of Empedocles (on Etna) (Also Matthew Arnold’s version)
Edward Hirsch: Gabriel
Douglas Dunne: Elegies

It’s not surprising that the first character of The Buried Life to emerge was Adrian Moore, 43 years old, a scholar of the social and cultural aspects of death. His life has been shaped by the early deaths of his parents – although he would strenuously deny this.

His closest friend is Keziah, Kezi, 28 years old and estranged from her family and the fundamentalist community in which she was raised. She would like to bury her past in the way Adrian has, but it refuses to let her go.

Both Adrian and Kezi meet Laura Benady, a town planner in her late fifties, long married to a man Laura believes to be perfect.

As the novel grew, faith and fundamentalism, varieties of love, coercive control and the power of art all surface as Adrian, Laura and Kezi move through their lives – and the life of the novel.

One of the truly magical features of writing fiction – and reading it too – is that the imagination, when allowed time and space, will take you to unexpected places. A novel that began with death evolved to grapple with some of the great complexities and conundrums of life.

THE END OF PARADISE. A forgotten short story.

2 Replies

In the months since I last posted here, I finished my ninth novel, THE BURIED LIFE (to be published March, 2025), I’ve been snow-shoeing in the Arctic, and I’ve been going through old files, jotting ideas for new essays, and working on some existing ones. So – there will be less neglect of this site in the future.
I’ve never considered myself a short story writer even though my first publications were short stories. The long form of the novel suits me better. So I was surprised to discover a forgotten story, THE END OF PARADISE. It was published in the Sunday Age, January 5th, 2003 – still a broadsheet then, in their summer series of fiction, and yes, there was fiction in the newspaper back then.
In the original there was no space between paragraphs and proper indenting – so apologies for the format here.

THE SUNDAY AGE. 5/1/03

Part of the Summer Reading Series

THE END OF PARADISE

Emma Klein’s was the sort of beauty that held your gaze and turned it soft. If Tony Drummond were to capitulate to a shallow moment he would admit her face had been the initial attraction. And while it was joined by others in the time they spent together, the face remained the primary lure.

Of course it would be different now. In the 15 years since their affair, Emma had evolved from beautiful, unknown film student to beautiful, celebrated auteur. With brains and beauty she was, according to Tony’s colleague Jeannette Redi, the full quid. Which explained why Tony was now at his keyboard, pondering what to write to a woman he’d not seen for years, a woman who would not be much interested in him if she’d opted for suburban anonymity, much less an international film career.

The truth was that Tony had done her wrong, so wrong that if his own career prospects were any less precarious he would be leaving Emma Klein undisturbed in his past, neatly shaped by a memory devoted to his own well-being. Unfortunately, this same well-being was now under threat. Hurtling towards 50 and still not a senior lecturer, with no major publications and economic rationalisation ripping through the fibres of higher education, if Tony didn’t come up with a research project soon, it would be a redundancy package and time to kill.

Jeannette Redi had been right.

“You know Emma Klein?” Jeannette had been incredulous. About to leave the Faculty Club where she and Tony had eaten lunch, she settled back at the table and ordered another coffee.

“It was an age ago,” he said, in an attempt to curb her interest. “Long before Sup with the Devil. Long before she was famous.

“But don’t you see, Tony? She’s the answer to your problems. She’s your promotion. At the very least, she’ll save your job.”

Jeannette might have been less enthusiastic if she’d known the whole story. Tony had been a tutor, Emma his brightest student; he had done what tutors did prior to anti-discrimination and sexual harassment laws, she had fallen in love; he had pressed his body, she her devotion; he had provided an A-grade performance in sincerity, she had offered the authentic thing. After she handed in her final assignment he had tried to let her down gently, then less gently, then plain bluntly. He hadn’t asked for her love, he said, and he certainly had no use for it now.

He had behaved badly, no doubt about it, but then he’d always been susceptible to appearances and Emma Klein had appearances down pat. Her black hair flicked around her face, falling thick and touchable over her shoulders. The skin was richly olive, suggesting not-too-distant Sephardic ancestors. Then there were the eyes around which the whole face congregated.

Tony regarded himself as something of an expert in eyes. Not long before he met Emma, he had drafted a paper on the problem of eyes in literature. Eyes, he wrote, had been forced to reveal, hide, deceive, promise, condemn, betray, deny, love, hate, envy, even murder. This was plain absurd: eyes simply did not have such a large and readily interpretable repertoire. But after meeting Emma he had been forced to revise his opinion, although it was clear that most writers had been profligate in their use of what is an uncommonly rare phenomenon. Emma Klein’s eyes were large and shimmery and the colour of charcoal. Tony would imagine entering those eyes, soaking in them, stroking, floating, and finally coming to rest in paradise. Emma Klein’s eyes were explicit and unambiguous, and they expressed sex.

The coffee arrived, and with it, a thoughtful silence.

“She’s perfect,” Jeannette said finally. “Emma Klein is simply perfect. Superb body of work, solid queer credentials –”

“Not when I knew her.”

“I mean her films, Tony. And no critical study of her yet. A public persona but strangely elusive –”

“She never used to be –”

” – and in her prime. Cross Jacques Rivette with Kathy Acker,” Jeannette sucked the dregs from her coffee cup, “and you have tenure.

Believe me, Tony, I know these things.”

About this there could be little dispute, despite Jeannette’s being short on facts in Emma Klein’s case. Ten years younger than Tony, Jeannette Redi had entered the cultural studies department at senior lecturer level and was now in pole position for a professorship. If a career path could be paved with gold, that was Jeannette’s. She was queer before queer became fashionable and a lesbian long before lesbian chic. By the time fashion caught up, people were quite prepared to believe that Jeannette Redi, innovative theorist and charismatic teacher, was responsible for the gender meltdown that characterised queer theory. Being bright rather than brilliant, and with enough ethnicity to make her interesting but not so much as to cause discomfort, Jeannette was equipped with all the accoutrements of the successful academic.

With so much in her favour, and with academics being such envious adders, Jeannette should have been universally hated, particularly in a department so riven with factions that from one month to the next Tony might never find a friend in the staff room. Yet everyone liked her. Even during a brief lunch with a colleague there were smiles to return, hands to shake and comments to be exchanged with an assortment of passing academics, even a couple of physicists. For Jeannette, a room full of people was an orange to be squeezed, and how efficiently, how admirably, did she collect the juice.

Tony settled back into the leather while she finished with the physicists. The leather chair of his Faculty Club, at his university, the university he loved and did not want to leave. But unless he came up with a grant-attracting project and a publishable book, he’d be applying for jobs in god knows what corner of the country. Or, worse still, in New Zealand.

“What do you know about New Zealand?” he asked when the physicists moved off.

“OK to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”

“People say that about Melbourne.”

“Only if they come from Sydney.”

Jeannette leaned forward to remove some fluff from her trousers. Her shirt was white and silky and fell away from her body, revealing the upper curve of her smooth brown breasts.

“Emma Klein, Tony. Or else you might find yourself teaching high school in Tasmania.” Jeannette paused to brush cheeks with the professor of politics. “She’s your promotion. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if you hadn’t admitted to knowing her.”

As he headed back to his office Tony replayed Jeannette’s arguments and realised she was right. Yet what he really wanted to write was a monograph on Shakespeare in film. Or to be precise, King Lear. For, with his own daughter now an incomprehensibly hostile 12-year-old, a critical examination of Lear had acquired a certain urgency.

He had as much interest in queer theory as he had in revisiting Emma Klein. Not that he hadn’t thought Sup With The Devil remarkable. Emma had always plunged into the big pools. She was the only young person Tony had ever met who had read Proust, not for a course requirement, but because she had been told it was the memory equivalent of conquering Everest.

Old and weighty ideas had always attracted her and there were plenty in Sup With The Devil. Such an immensely watchable film – some of the theorists had been suspicious of that – yet traversing the fundamentals of human existence. Evil and love fought it out in the final scenes and while it remained unclear which was the winner, there was a beguiling sense of satisfaction, of fulfilment when the credits started to roll.

That Emma had not done anything as good since had worried certain critics, but not Tony. Years ago he had planned a book about the cultural mismanagement of genius. How, when a work of genius is produced, if it is not immediately followed by another, the very fact of the original work of genius is used as evidence of the author’s failure. It was Tony’s contention that since works of genius, like geniuses themselves, are staggeringly rare, to produce one in a lifetime is to triumph over the odds.

The genius idea still interested him, and as he settled at the computer, he was tempted to resurrect his old notes, just a brief hesitation before going online and doing a search on Emma Klein. Both genius and Lear would have to wait.

*******************

When the invitation to address students and faculty at her old university had arrived, Emma’s first reaction was to decline. Then she quickly made the correction, reminding herself that old habits endure long past their relevance date, and that her pain over Tony Drummond was not only 15 years old it was also 15 years out of date.

Her agent had offered to accompany her, but Emma had long ago learned that when your past, so foreign to everyone else, catapults into your present it is better to withstand the collision alone. She was met at reception and taken to the conference room. She paused in the doorway, just a fraction of a second, in order to find him before he saw her. And there he was, across the room and turning towards her. And in that first sighting of the man who had seized her young heart and smashed it, a flushing of fear.

After 15 years. Fifteen years, nearly half a lifetime. How tenacious are one’s old pains, she thought, and how shamelessly inappropriate. She forced on herself a composure she did not feel, and by the time he was leaning in to kiss her cheek, she appeared quite calm.

His skin did not feel familiar, which surprised her. For in that typical journey of male maturation, commencing with an almost feminine boyishness in the 20-year-old and ending with the thickened features and coarsened skin of the fully-fledged man, Tony Drummond had been spared. He was, perhaps, a weaker, blurred version of his younger self, but there was still the same softness, the sleek blondness, the same grace that captured her heart all those years ago. Yet in the older man, faintly disturbing. His skin so smooth and unmarked by concentration or determination. No lines about the eyes, no scoring of the brow, no confusion or sorrow or amusement. It was an unlived-in face, she found herself thinking, a man untried and untravelled, as if he had spent the past 15 years cocooned among kind and unchallenging people in whom any extremes of emotion had been nicely dampened, and any failures banished.

He still sported the look of those beautiful young men in BBC dramas set in Oxbridge of the ’20s and ’30s; in fact, many people used to assume he was gay. He once confessed to her that he had actually tried a man, bisexuality being an ideal option for a male with a large sexual appetite in the pre-AIDS era. But it was not for him. Tony Drummond liked the truly effeminate; he liked women.

He was offering her a drink, and although Emma wasn’t thirsty she let him insist. She watched as he crossed the room. He still dressed with casual ease, although instead of the old suede jacket there was now a tailored blazer, and the hand-knitted scarf had been replaced by a Burberry. But the washed-out Levis looked just the same.

As he poured the drinks, his back towards her, a memory surfaced of a day in the country not long before the end of their relationship. Tony had proposed a walk along a narrow bush track he had recently discovered with the woman who was shortly to replace Emma in his extra-curricula affairs. It was, he said, only a 15-minute loop through rainforest and down to a dark, lush palm gully, the sort of limited rural romp with which Emma, a dedicated city girl, could cope.

Whether it was the wrong track or they’d missed a turning, they were still walking an hour later. Yet Emma had not minded. Such pleasure to be found in the movement of his body as she trailed after him along the narrow track. He darted over the rough ground, sure-footed and graceful as a deer. And Emma followed, tripping now and then over obstacles in the path, watching the curve of his buttocks beneath the well-worn denim, the square bulge of notebook in his back pocket, but most of all the dance of his body, a light rhythmic spring – still noticeable in his gait today – and so nimble as he skirted logs and leapt over rocks and roots.

She had commented on his agility, and he had laughed: he’d had plenty of practice avoiding the landmines at the university, he said.

They had by this stage reached the palm gully. It was only mid-afternoon, but dark as dusk and very still. They stood in the thick green undergrowth beneath the canopy of palms. In the distance was the faint whisper of wispy gums in the light afternoon breeze. It was one of those sublime moments, so rare in a life, when you’re not alone but the solitude is complete.

She had draped an arm around him, and her hand grazed his buttocks. The denim was soft and thin and she had felt his muscles tighten, and right there on the narrow track where anyone might have stumbled upon them they made love. Afterwards, as they walked back, she realised she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. He was perfect and she loved him.

Now as she watched him come towards her with their drinks, this man who had once stolen her heart, she was aware of that raw nervy reluctance when long-held beliefs are finally challenged. How willingly are old sufferings transformed into sacred cows, she was thinking, and how mindlessly. And as she took the drink – her hand now quite steady, her heartbeat slow – she felt like a stranger to herself, a sudden brief disorientation, rather like that moment when you first slip into new clothes and before you see how well the style suits you.

She started to laugh; she couldn’t stop herself. It was an explosion of fantastic energy as an old demon became domesticated. One minute she’s a snivelling bundle of fear and the next she’s sharing a drink with him. She’d lived hard and full, she had a son she adored whose father was proving a far better ex-husband than he had ever been a husband, she’d had lovers and she had many friends, she’d worked and travelled, but always that chill spear plunging through her whenever she thought of Tony. And now it was gone. In a flash it was gone.

Emma was about to enquire about his life, disinterest making her courteous, but she was interrupted by Jeannette Redi, the woman who had invited her to the university. Tony slipped away and did not appear again until her presentation was about to begin. He couldn’t wait any longer, he said. He had a proposal: he wanted to write about her and her work.

Emma indicated the waiting audience, this was not the time for discussion, and moved towards the podium. She was astonished: only a fool or a masochist would give herself away cheaply more than once.

The audience settled into silence, a room full of strangers and the one familiar face warmly smiling up at her. She glanced at her notes. The title of her presentation, “My Life in Art”, had suddenly taken on new possibilities.

“When life becomes art,” she began, “then you’ve moved on.”

For half an hour she talked in that confidential, faux-private style common among seasoned performers, while at the same time aware of the nudge and texture of the film she would next make, at first faint but becoming clearer by the minute. It was exhilarating, as the first glimmerings of a new work always are.

In the audience Tony was soaking her up. The mature Emma Klein had all the old attractions and a great deal more. She would be such an asset on the media circuit when his book was published. He’d not been this excited in years. He listened, he looked, he took notes. And when Emma finished, he dashed to her side. But she couldn’t stay, she said, as she slipped his card into her bag, she was already late for another appointment.

Over the next month he waited to hear from her. He rang her agent several times. The agent never returned his calls. He was not discouraged; he was working well. On the day Jeannette buzzed him suggesting a coffee, he was happy to oblige. He had, he believed, mapped out a structure for his Emma Klein book, and the person who deserved to see it first was Jeannette.

When she paid for their coffee and cake he should have been warned. And when she plied him with questions about Emma’s early life he took it as nothing more than her on-going interest in his work. Even when she came to his office again and again over the next few weeks to ask about Emma, he was blind to his role as literary cuckold. It took a hefty ARC grant to Jeannette Redi and a sympathetic graduate student to enlighten him.

***************

The redundancy package was generous – the university was eager to be rid of him – and life in far north Queensland was far more congenial than its reputation among the southern intelligentsia had suggested. The sympathetic graduate student was fortunately less committed to her studies than she was to her supervisor, and separation rather than Shakespeare had been the answer to the problems with his adolescent daughter – with his former wife too.

As for Emma Klein’s new film, The End of Paradise, and the simultaneous release of Jeannette Redi’s new book, distance protected Tony from the gossip and media hype. His well-being, the focus of a lifetime’s ambition, remained intact.

DEAD AND BURIED

WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN. Truth, authenticity and personal allegiance in fact-based film.

4 Replies

Talk given via Zoom, at the invitation of the Film Circle at the Melbourne Lyceum Club, August 18^th, 2020.

It’s a common enough happening: you and a friend have a cinema date. Knowing your friend’s interest in maths, you suggest A Beautiful Mind, the film about the great mathematician, John Nash.

Russell Crowe is in the title role.

Your friend is appalled. ‘Crowe looks nothing like Nash. Come to that, Crowe looks nothing like any Princeton-trained mathematician.’

Russell Crowe, she’s suggesting, would not be convincing as an intellectual.

Your friend knows very little about Russell Crowe, but she does know a lot about mathematicians. This should have steered you to a safer topic, one in which your friend had less of an interest, less knowledge, less personal investment, but instead you stick with mathematicians and suggest they see The Imitation Game, a biopic of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician, father of the computer and leader of the team that broke the enigma code at Bletchley Park. Your friend is a great admirer of Turing, she would probably say that he, more than any other single person, was instrumental in the allied victory in WW2.

So, off the two of you go to The Imitation Game.

When the film begins you are immediately engrossed, but your enjoyment is short-lived, interrupted as it is by derisive explosions that issue evermore frequently from your friend seated beside you. The interruptions become so frequent and the anger of your friend so palpable, that you suggest she leave the cinema and wait for you outside.

She refuses to leave, someone has to witness this travesty, someone who has a deep admiration and a deep sympathy for Alan Turing.

The two of you have planned a drink and early dinner at Jimmy Watson’s following the film. Given your friend’s behaviour during the film, you know what’s up ahead and really wish you could leave her and just go home. But there’s no escape. She hatedthe film and she can’t wait to tell you why. The film, she said, placed far too much emphasis on Turing’s social awkwardness, it made him out to be hardly a social being at all.

‘We, today, are so fixated on the autism scale, but it didn’t exist back then. Why pathologise the man? He was a genius. Why should we expect a genius, a person exceptional – unique – when it concerned maths and puzzles and probably a whole lot more besides, to be just like the rest of us in the food-and-drink aspects of life?’

The film, she said, was indeed a travesty of the great man. It showed little sympathy for what it was to be a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence. And throughout the film his mathematical genius was completely over-shadowed by his personal and social deficiencies – your friend, of course, did not use the word ‘deficiencies’. There was nothing deficient in her view of the great Alan Turing. The film, she said, portrayed him as a hectoring, immature, insensitive idiot savant, who was often short on savant.

‘And,’ she added, ‘where was his mother? Apart from a couple of brief mentions, she plays no part in the film and yet she was solidly central in his life.’

Your friend is not happy. She seems personally affronted, she IS personally affronted: Turing is, after all, a figure in her pantheon of heroes, and the film has done him wrong.

But, you say, Benedict Cumberbatch was so convincing, he lent authenticity to the role – at least he did from your less-informed point of view.

Your friend grants that Cumberbatch showed himself to be a fine actor, one who would have done Turing proud if he didn’t have to keep proving throughout the film that he was on the autism scale.

You raise the issue of creative licence and film as entertainment, but she will have none of it: if you want to portray a life then you do justice to that life by presenting it accurately. A life is a life.

But, you continue, a film lasts 90 minutes, a life is several decades long, so of course there will be selections, and of course those selections will be made with the mode – film and entertainment – in mind.

Your friend is unmoved: if they have to skew the life out of all recognition in order to make good entertainment, then they should have chosen either a different topic or a different script-writer.

It’s a familiar scene, we’ve all been there. And it’s not just confined to film: novels that are based on true events and/or real people, the so-called faction form (which seems rather a contradictory term) or the new hybrid form, auto-fiction, are susceptible to the same conflicts, the same arguments. As are films based on novels.

Some viewers of fact-based films or films derived from novels say there should be 100% accuracy to the original events or the original novel, but not even a documentary can meet that standard. The fact is that all film selects its scenes from a much larger swag of material available, putting together a 90-minute cohesive narrative of a true story that might have spanned decades.

Film is not reality, it’s an art form, it is a creation, a different form than the life itself; film based on fact provides a certain translationof a life or historical event. And unlike the life or event, film, excluding purely educational and how-to films, must entertain. Even if a film were able to provide 100% accuracy, and given its time limits and the limits on perspective, it can’t, it has to engage the viewer as well, it has to sweep the viewer into a cinematic world and hold them there – separated from their usual life.

There is a film, in my experience that comes close to 100% accuracy, although it does not tell the whole story. That film is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.

Shoahis a 10-hour film about the Holocaust, shown in three parts. Made by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann in 1985, it consists of interviews with survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, and, as well, it enters present-day sites of pivotal locations: the former concentration camp of Treblinka, the now unkempt railway tracks that carried Jews in cattle cars towards the camps. In all the ten hours there is no archival footage: no heaped dead bodies, no skeletal survivors in striped pyjamas standing at barbed wire fences.

The film is slow and repetitive, the experience of those who speak, as well as those who can no longer speak, is imprintedon you. It is far far more powerful, in my opinion than the holocaust museums that have popped up around the world. Lanzmann’s film slows you down, it forces you to focus on singular people, singular messages; it uses certain elements of film-making to powerful and unforgettable effect, e.g. the camera looks directly into the faces of those who are being interviewed. You see every twitch and grimace; sometimes it is as if the scenes they are describing are there on the surface of their face.

Is Lanzmann’s film accurate? As far as it goes I think it is. Is it objective? No, not particularly. Is it comprehensive? Of course not: it reveals only a fraction of the factual horrors and complicities of the murder of Europe’s Jews. However, the film is, I believe, authentic, true to the events it depicts. It is convincing. But no, it does not tell the whole truth, and while it does not lie, a different filmmaker, from a different background, although still using interviews, would produce a different 10-hour film, and provide different perspectives, with different emphases to the viewer, and this film might well be equally authentic. After all, there’s much to be said and more to be understood about genocide.

TRUTH AND AUTHENTICITY

I would suggest that films and novels, too, that are based on real events must be authentic, but this does not necessarily mean truthful. To exemplify this point, one need look no further than politics. Trump lies, his lies now run into the tens of thousands, his avid supporters know he lies, they LIKE that he lies, and that he does it in such a cavalier manner is evidence, to them, of his authenticity. For Trump followers, essential to their view of him is that he is natural – he doesn’t use the same sort of performance as real politicians. Trump can drain the swamp because he’s not part of it. Every lie reinforces his renegade status. Each lie confirms his authenticity – to his supporters.

Authentic means genuine, it can also mean reliable and trustworthy; but it does not mean good. Indeed, authenticity, does not have a moral dimension at all – although common usage has tended to give it one. Trump is authentic: he is genuine (no disguises as far as his supporters are concerned); but is he reliable and trustworthy? Trump thrives on unpredictability, I would say he is predictably unpredictable; as for trustworthy, his followers absolutely trust him, even when they know he is lying. They trust him to be their Trump.

To return then to film based on real events, and the notions of truth and authenticity, what to make of a film like The Favourite? This film is set in the time of Queen Anne and it focuses on the well-documented relationship between the queen, her chief lady-in-waiting, Sarah the first Duchess of Marlborough, and the younger woman, Abigail, who usurps Sarah as Anne’s favourite. It was a bit of a romp this film, even farcical at times; Queen Anne’s large weight was a target, everyone’s unscrupulousness was on view, only Godolphin, in charge of treasury, came off unscathed.

As it happens my oldest friend from school days, Dr Frances Harris, is a world-renowned authority on the relationship between Anne and Sarah. Her life of Sarah, A PASSION FOR GOVERNMENT, is at the forefront of works documenting this period and the court. I thought Frances would hate The Favourite. I thought she would judge it to be a wrongful portrayal not only of the main players, but of the times themselves.

How wrong I was. I will let Frances speak for herself:

Everyone thought I’d hate The Favourite, but I loved it; actually even before I saw it, which was the first day it was released, having seen the poster, which I now have in my study: a collage of the three main characters, the queen largest, Sarah in trans riding-kit, sitting firmly on her knee and Abigail mutinously on the floor with her lip and her legs stuck out like a discarded doll.….That image, by itself, managed to contain a great deal of truth: i.e. that the queen, pitiable and old and disabled as she was, was the most powerful of the three and determined the status of the other two; could take them up and put them down as she chose, like toys. The fantastic central performance of Olivia Colman helped a lot. Though the film made no attempt at strict historical accuracy, it did get a number of revealing things right which historians don’t usually bother to mention: that Abigail Masham’s husband was actually a toy-boy several years younger than herself, for example; or Sarah saying something like: yes I’m bossy and disrespectful and impossible, but you know I’m also rather gorgeous. I think it’s best seen as a kind of extended Gillray cartoon about the gossip and misrepresentation that always surrounded the queen, that she was too much under the influence of her favourites — an important constitutional issue. Though – as an aside – the favourites didn’t find her easily influenced.

(Gillray – 1756-1815, probably the greatest caricaturists of all time.)

What Frances is saying here is that the film was authentic, although not entirely, or even mostly truthful. It was correct in terms of the TONE AND SENSIBILITY of the times, as well as GENERAL BEHAVIOURS at court, e.g. who was in and who was out, and the excellent performance by Olivia Colman as Queen Anne was crucial to the strength of the film.

FORM AND CONTENT

Back in the halcyon days of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival there was always a lavish festival dinner. One year Faye Weldon happened to be the guest speaker. Some years earlier she had published The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. This novel was typical Weldon: witty, wicked and wise. The BBC made a marvellous mini-series of it with Miriam Margoles in the title role, perfectly cast, with Patricia Hodge also perfectly cast. Some years later, the Americans, wanting to hop on to a successful bandwagon, did as they always do, and remade the film – Americanised it – as if the American viewing public wouldn’t understood and/or appreciate the British version. It was a shocker, all the wit and wisdom was erased to be replaced by heavy-handed humour and plain bloody nonsense, and the cast – Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep (yes, Meryl in the one bad role of her stellar career) – just didn’t convince.

At the festival dinner, Weldon gave an excellent speech then invited questions. Someone asked what she thought about the American version of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. Weldon paused – such an eloquent pause it was – and then with an understated wry smile, replied: a book is a book and a film is a film. (I vaguely remember she also added something about a pleasant trip to the bank.)

She is, of course correct. Novels and films are very different forms indeed. A novel can reveal the inner lives of characters; a novel can show why character X did such and such, it can shift the point of view so we can see the effects of character X’s actions on characters Y and Z. The novel excels with interior lives.

THE POWER OF POINT OF VIEW is well-known to novelists.

In The Memory Trap, I have two characters who behave badly, even brutally – Elliot the biographer and the pianist Ramsay. I did not want them to be ‘baddies’, nor did I want them to alienate reader sympathy, so I gave both of them the point of view at various times in the novel, so a reader can understand why they behave as they do. By giving them the point of view, the reader can get under their skin.

But point of view is not the only powerful tool in the novelist’s toolbox.

As a novelist, if I want to suggest a particular emotion in a scene, I look to certain parts of speech, certain grammatical constructions, I shorten or lengthen sentences depending on the emotion I want to convey.

A novelist uses many techniques like these to convey certain information for certain effect, and this in turn shapes reader response.

While the novelist looks to grammar and sentence length, to metaphor and verbs, to convey emotion, the film maker has music and camera angles and close-ups – these, too, shape viewer response.

To take an example: there’s an argument happening between two characters. Quite a different effect is created if the camera takes a wide view and shoots both players in the one frame, as against the camera shifting from one face to the other, one speaker to the other. The camera angle shapes viewer response, most particularly their emotional response, and so does the background music.

At times this sort of manipulation can be infuriating: when the camera homes in on one character and you want to see what another character is doing, or how they are responding. It can be very frustrating. And similarly suddenly the music ramps up the tension, something bad is about to happen, but you’d prefer NOT to have the warning. (Basically you are saying my journey with this film is not what the director had planned for me.)

TIME AND IMAGINATIVE SPACE.

With a novel you can read a page, and then put the book down and ponder what you’ve read. You can bring in memory and experience and other books, you can consider moral possibilities and ethical dilemmas; when you read a book, you add to it as you go along. YOU add to it. And when you read you go at your own pace – the novelist’s persuasive tools notwithstanding.

With the various streaming services, with so much film now being consumed in the home, we could watch in the same way as we read – but we don’t. The film nearly always sets the pace, and if you don’t like it, you usually throw the film over and search for something else.

The imaginative space is different for film than for a book. Sure we can – and do – reflect on a film once it is over, but it is rarely to the same extent to the thoughts and analysis we give to a book as we are reading. There is, I am suggesting, more of a reader in a book, than a viewer in a film.

Again – this suggests that a film can never accurately replicate a book because our response is so different for the two forms. (Although if it’s replication one is wanting, exactly the same information, why bother with the film at all?)

PERSONAL ALLEGIANCE (STAKEHOLDER) AND CINEMATIC ENTERTAINMENT

Consider all those films set in ancient or medieval times: Spartacus, Troy, Gladiator(a much better role for Russell Crowe), Joan of Arc, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Beloved Infidel. I am sure I’m not alone in admitting that much of my exposure to history came through film and novels. It never bothered me that these works weren’t absolutely accurate, they gave me, at the very least, the bare bones, and if I wanted to know more then I went to the library (today, people would probably go to Wikipedia).

But when a film draws on something I know about, when I have a personal allegiance to the material, a stake in it, then my response is very different. (Like my friend with the Alan Turing film.)

In 1997, an Italian film directed by and starring the comedian Roberto Benigni was released. It was called Life is Beautiful. This was a feel-good film set in Auschwitz, and I hated it. It was intended to be a film about the power of the human spirit, and it might have been, but at the same time it trashed the horrors of Auschwitz, obliterating all the inhumanities that went on there as it was trying to show one father’s humanity. Not only did it not reveal anything new or different about how Auschwitz, it actually hid the facts. Anyone seeing that film with only a little knowledge of the death camps would have come out feeling quite jolly and wondering what the Jews were complaining about.

I, on the other hand, being possessed of detailed knowledge of Auschwitz, I, having known survivors who lost all their family in Auschwitz, I, having trod, literally, that fraught ground, was appalled. I was also personally affronted. A film that had been authentic enough to some people was an affront to history and to me. This film won praise and prizes, this film clearly worked cinematically but it did not work for me – nor did it work for historical truth.

Another example of when personal allegiance affected my response to a film that was considered cinematically successful, was Iris. I started reading Iris Murdoch as a teenager, and even though she’s been dead nearly 20 years, I still read her today. Iris is one of my life’s companions. I have read several memoirs about her, and biographies too. I know Iris, and when she died, I was asked to write about her, and my long engagement with her work. (Article below, published in The Weekend Australian, April 26-27, 2003.)

I hated the books written by her husband John Bayley after her death, so when the film IRIS was produced, based on Bayley’s memoir of the same name, I should have been warned off, I should have had more sense than to see it. The best I can say about the experience is that the session my partner and I went to was largely empty. I cried hysterically through much of the film, I, a woman who prides herself on being emotionally restrained, was a blubbering mess. So much emphasis was placed on the poor old dear with dementia, while the great philosopher that Iris Murdoch was, warranted hardly a mention, similarly her novels – all 24 of them. Instead we see her lying in bed watching ‘Teletubbies’. It was dreadful, it was cruel, it was distressing.

Others liked the film, considered it a sensitive film about dementia. But it wasn’t about dementia, I wanted to shout, it was supposed to be about Iris Murdoch. They were no wiser about the great Iris Murdoch at its conclusion – I can guarantee that.

So a film can lack authenticity and truth and still be considered a successful film. Such films have a cinematic logic to them, the narrative holds together, the film is, in short, entertaining – or informative about dementia – although it clearly was not for me given my personal stake in Dame Iris Murdoch.

Truth, accuracy, authenticity. Story-telling, narrative coherence, entertainment. Values, attitudes, allegiances. All these features are relevant: before the lights go down.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: