Tag Archives: The Memory Trap

AN UNRELIABLE MARRIAGE. The writer’s life and the life of the work

Flaubert said: ‘Emma Bovary, c’est moi.’ Can he be trusted? Should he be trusted? And if it were true, does it enhance the reading of Madame Bovary?

We live in the Age of the Individual. Personal experience reigns supreme. Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, has become I AMTHEREFORE I AM.

One need look no further than memoir for evidence that the self and the individual have become the project par excellence. Memoir is thriving, and not just for those with a public life: anyone can and is co-opting the form. Publishers love memoirs – because memoirs sell. It seems that in these days of Facebook and the like, we can’t get enough of other people’s private lives.

Without a societal focus on the individual, without a significance accorded to the ‘truth’ of individual lives, the issue of author biography and its relationship to the author’s fiction and/or poetry, would probably not arise.*

Like many others, I believe that a poem or a novel needs to be able to stand alone, separate from its author, otherwise it will have no life. A glance at the work that has survived down the years: Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, both Eliots George and T.S., Keats, Coleridge, the Brontës, it is clear it is the work that matters. After all how many readers know about Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet who died at the age of ten? How many readers know about T.S’s conversion and his treatment of his wife Vivienne, and George’s sinful life with a married man? How many know about Coleridge’s opium habit and the Brontës difficult dad? And does it matter? This work lives on, the work thriveswithout knowledge of the author’s life.

The fact is, we humans have not fundamentally changed in the past 4 millennium – since we started writing things down. And those works that endure are those which explore and tap into fundamental – and enduring – human qualities: love, jealousy, joy, revenge, envy.

And yet there are certain classics in which knowledge of the author does help, and certain others wherein biographical fixing is essential for any significant understanding.

Much of Henry James’s work centres on wealthy and naïve Americans lost in the clutches of old Europe. It can enrich a reading of Henry James to know he was an anglophile and ex-patriot American – but it’s not essential.

It deepens understanding when reading Animal Farmand 1984to know that Orwell was a socialist, ardently and critically opposed to Soviet communism. It further helps to know that the left was polarised between Communists and anti-Communists. Of course, reading Orwell’s marvellous essays would provide all the information required.

It helps, in reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, to know that Mann opposed the Nazi regime and was forced into exile because of it.

In contrast, there ARE certain works in which the author biography is essential.

Much of Sylvia Plath’s work, for example, although in some instances the biography has overwhelmed the art.

And Proust. All those heated, sexless, obsessive loves with girls in A la recherche du temps perdu, these make a lot more sense when informed by Proust’s homosexuality. And this novel, deeply concerned with the aristocracy and social class, acquires greater meaning when Proust’s Jewishness is taken into account.

And Oscar Wilde’s DEPROFUNDISmakes no sense whatsoever without the biographical details (Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, the terrible trial and Wilde’s subsequent imprisonment).

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT

Rather than specific biographical detail, often what is required in deriving the most from a novel or poem is a knowledge of the social and political context surrounding the author. Pasternak and the other great 20thC Russian writers writing within the strictures of Stalin’s regime are prime examples; Dante’s Divine Comedy, with all those notable C14th Italians confined for all eternity in the circles of hell, is another; Coetzee’s Disgraceand Justin Cartwright’s White Lightning, make little sense if unaware of South African Apartheid and the post-apartheid period; an understanding of the poetry of Paul Celan requires a knowledge of the Nazi atrocities; the work of Kamila Shamsie and Mohsin Hamid makes little sense without a knowledge of the widespread persecution of Muslims; and full appreciation of books from indigenous Australians like Melissa Lucashenko and Tara June Winch requires a knowledge of the history of dispossession and discrimination against aboriginal Australians. Beyond the world of print, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ and Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ symphony (premiered during the siege of Leningrad) as two works whose meaning is firmly attached to the prevailing social and political context.

But history is in trouble at the moment.

We live in an ever-present. The present shouts at us 24 hours a day. There’s the 24-hour news cycle. There’s Twitter. There’s an avalanche of notifications. A knowledge of history was, not so long ago, considered to be crucial for the well-rounded, well-educated person, but not any more. The phone is now the beating heart of the 21^stcentury individual.

What history remains is often, blatantly, in service to the present. I know I am not alone in the irritation engendered by all those period TV series, more concerned with today’s mores than any sort of verisimilitude, depicting aristocratic dinner tables with black people sitting as equals with the white lords and ladies. We moderns might well wish it did happen like that back then – I certainly do – but it didn’t, and indeed, in some parts of the world it still does not happen. (It’s interesting to note that Britain was supporting slavery when many of these period dramas were set.)

Yet so many of the works of the past, if they are to be appreciated fully, require some sort of social and political context.

So, rather than Orwell’s life, a knowledge of the times in which he wrote, the ardent communists and the equally ardent anti-communists, the pervasive influence of the Russian Revolution, the demise of imperial Britain, these flesh out his work immeasurably.

A good deal of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry makes much more sense when you know about his persecution and exile, when you know what the Soviet regime demanded of its artists – its most creative citizens.

Take, for example, Mandelstam’s famous poem about Stalin, for which the poet was cruelly punished. The poem makes no sense at all without the historical details. The ‘Kremlin Mountaineer’ in the poem, who comes from Ossetia, a region in Georgia, is Stalin.

MANDELSTAM POEM ON STALIN (NOVEMBER 1933)

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

But where there’s so much as half a conversation
The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders –
fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.

FROM THE CLASSICS TO THE MODERNS: and the new issue of CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

My second novel, Modern Interiors, was published when I was 41 – though, at the time, I could have passed for a good deal younger. The central character of that novel is 62-year-old Philippa Finemore. On several occasions when I gave talks or readings, people would come up to me afterwards and say how surprised they were to discover how young as I was.

The implication was clear: readers assumed that Philippa Finemore was based on the author’s life/experience. Why would a youngish woman be writing about a much older one?

The answer involves curiosity, exploration of certain ideas and the wonderful imaginative ride that is fiction.

Fiction is a work of the imagination – that’s what makes it fiction. To write about Caesar one does not have to be Caesar. A novelist has 2 or 3 or 4 years to write a book, which is ample time (and a gift, too) to explore what is not known or particularly familiar. However, the contemporary issue of cultural appropriation undercuts this fundamental quality of fiction.

Fiction and poetry are works of the imagination. They are made up. If a writer were forced to write from her own life and her own personal characteristics: white, Australian, Jewish, childless, sexually slippery – how dull and boring this would be. Fiction provides an opportunity both for the writer and the reader to go places they have never been, to enter the hearts and minds of people (characters) they would never meet, to time travel. That’s what fiction does.

The cultural appropriation argument puts the imagination in lockdown, it starves fiction and poetry of its essential fuel. As a writer I don’t want to be confined in this way. Currently I am writing a character from a Pentecostal family. Some Pentecostals might think I have no right. I would disagree: within the context of the novel, the Pentecostal character serves a narrative purpose. In my last novel, Invented Lives, the central character was Russian – I’m not. I created her family background through the Stalin years. I made her an immigrant to Australia – I’m not. I gave her the experience of exile – I have never experienced this sort dislocation. Fiction draws on the imagination.

I am less sure about this standpoint when it comes to writing from the point of view of a character who is an aboriginal Australian. As aboriginal writers have made clear to me, when you’ve been silenced for so long, when not simply your voices but your culture has been appropriated for reasons not yours, then a white Australian writer would be perpetuating old wrongs if she were to write an ‘aboriginal’ novel. And yet, as a writer whose novels are mainly set in contemporary Australia, I do not want aboriginal people to be absent from my books. (As I do not want Jews to be absent, and back in the days when being gay was still a criminal offence in some Australian states, I wanted gays in my books too.)

I had an aboriginal character in The Memory Trap. She’s a uniting church minister. She’s strong, her experience of grief is illuminating, it’s a positive portrayal. She has an important role to play in the context of the novel. I was comfortable writing her, and there’s been no criticism.

THE MAJOR PERSONAL CONNECTION WITH A BOOK, IS THAT BETWEEN BOOK AND READER – NOT AUTHOR AND READER.

A poem or a novel must connect with the reader’s biography, their sensibility, their memories, their experiences, their longings and hopes, and the issues that are compelling their attention at the time of reading. Otherwise the book will have no impact. With this in mind, knowing an author’s biography can actually intrude and diminish the power of the work for the reader. We don’t want to fill in all the spaces, after all every reading is an act of freedom – and for every reader it is an act of the imagination.

We’ve all had the experience of picking up a novel and putting it down again. It simply does not connect. But three years later you pick up the same novel and it takes hold of you. And the reverse: novels that claimed us in our twenties but fall flat decades later.

Reading is a great intimacy. While you are reading there is the world of the book and your active imagination. It can be and often is an illuminating experience. And because different readers bring to the book different memories, different longings, different knowledge, different beliefs, so there are many different readings of the same novel. This connection between novel and reader, or poem and reader is the one that matters.

So why this drive to know about authors, indeed, any artist, or great scientist, for that matter. Why isn’t the work enough?

When it comes to the best work, the work is enough. But I think there is, as well, a desire to understand the creative mind, how it emerges, how it works. There were two books when I was young that I particularly loved. One was titled something like THE CHILDHOOD OF ARTISTS, and the other: THE CHILDHOOD OF SCIENTISTS. I read both these books over and over again. I wanted to know the soil of exceptionality, I wanted to understand the roots of genius, and I expect as an eight-year-old I wanted to grow up to be a great artist or scientist.

My ambitions might have changed, but my curiosity about exceptional people has not. I read biographies, I want to know about the people, these creators whose work I admire. But I don’t think that knowing the life changes the work for me, I’m not sure it even enhances it. But I do learn about creative lives, their highs and lows, the fits and starts, the exhilaration and the despair – and the mistakes both in the life and the art. (There’s a sense that if a famous person can act foolishly, then I should perhaps be more forgiving of my own similar sins.)

Or is this just high-falutin justification for what is essentially a desire to know the gossip and shenanigans? Is my interest nothing more than a desire to peep through the keyholes of those who are creative and intellectually exceptional rather than the rich and famous like actors and rock stars?

Or perhaps there is some innate hunger to know the other, but know it in safety, through the pages of a biography. The ‘meetings’ in a biography, satisfy our curiosity without demanding that we be witty and intellectually playful ourselves.

CAN THE AUTHOR BE FOUND IN THE WORK?

During the covid-19 shutdown, I had reason to reach for a biography of Thomas Mann. His opposition to Hitler and the Nazi regime had been briefly alluded to in a book I’d just finished and I wanted to know more. About three years ago I started reading a biography of Mann, one that filled its pages searching out Mann’s homoerotic tendencies in his novels. I put aside that biography in disgust. I know that often novels are effective disguises for who you are – so don’t go searching there for the author. This time I reached for another biography, by a German writer that had been well-received. Fortunately, there was no particular focus on Mann’s homoerotic sensibility, but nonetheless, this biographer still chose to portray Mann’s life through an analysis of the work. I did not finish that book either.

Of course, the author’s biography infuses the work to some extent. In my own case, the themes I choose to explore in my novels are autobiographical.

Around the time I turned fifty, I found myself reconnecting with friends from my childhood. We had gone our own way during the previous 25 years, they to making families and me doing what I did; but by the time we reached 50, many of the differences had lessened, and, crucially, I was far less judgmental than I had been. This change in my life started me thinking about the nature of enduring friendship. Reunion, published in 2009, reflects this.

The Memory Trap, a novel that explores the complexity of memory, a novel that has at its centre a character who is an international consultant on memorial projects, was written in the years immediately following the death of my partner. The connection is obvious. And Invented Lives, a novel that explores exile in all its manifestations, was written during a time when Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers was uppermost in my mind.

The themes are autobiographical. But, as I want to keep my friends and family, the characters are made up, the situations are made up, the narrative is made up.

THE CASE OF HELEN DEMIDENKO

It can be dangerous looking for an author in a novel, and in the case of Helen Darville-Demidenko, back in the mid 1990s, it can be downright destructive.

In 1993 the Australian Vogel award for an unpublished novel written by an author under 35 was won by Helen Demidenko for The Hand that Signed the Paper. Two years later, the novel won the most prestigious literary prize in Australia: The Miles Franklin Award. It was after the Miles was announced that the controversy began. It was long and heated and it divided the literary community.

Helen Demidenko purported to be the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants. Her family, so she said, had suffered in Stalin’s dread famine of the early 1930s; her family had also been involved in the massacre of Jews during WW2. She fictionalised these events in her award-winning novel. Crucially, the judges referred to the significance of her biography in their appreciation of the novel.

Much was said and written about the book, most of it critical: about the quality of the writing, about the impoverished sense of history, whether the book was anti-Semitic and/or anti-Ukrainian, and much much more. But there have been controversies about winners of prizes before, and it probably would have died down. Except that after winning the Miles, it was revealed, by the principle of Helen’s old school that far from being Helen Demidenko of Ukrainian descent she was, in fact, Helen Darville, daughter of British immigrants. (And why her origins remained secret for so long, why someone had not spoken out earlier, is mystifying.)

If the book had been worthy of acclaim, if the author’s purported biography had not been co-opted in enhancing the book, the deception would not have mattered.

I spoke and wrote against this book. I thought it was poorly written, I thought the history in the book read more like propaganda; the emotional flatness of the characters echoed the moral barrenness of the book, and, significantly, far too much was made of the author’s purported biography when the book, this apparent work of fiction, was being praised (and awarded prizes).

Below is an excerpt from an article I wrote at the time:

‘From the time The Hand that Signed the Paperwas awarded the Vogel, judgments of its worth have been inseparable from the biography of the author. When it was awarded the Miles Franklin, the judges made much of the multicultural significance of the book. If this novel had been written by a Helen Darville with no Ukrainian ancestry, on the judges current criteria, it would not have won. When historical inaccuracies in were highlighted, the author resorted to her family history to defend the book. Her grandfather, she says, was murdered by Jewish Bolsheviks – hard to argue against that….Whenever moral issues were raised, the author defended her work as a personal quest to come to terms with her family history.

‘A novel should stand apart from its author, yet Darville-Demidenko has consistently drawn on a family history – now shown to be false – to defend the book, and both she and her supporters have used what now emerges as false biographical data to bolster the book’s significance. Separate the author from this book, as the recent revelations have done, and what is left is the work: … a novel of questionable literary merit with severe moral and historical flaws.’

THE CASE OF HEATHER MORRIS AND HER BOOKS THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZAND CILKA’S JOURNEY.

Here the biography in question is not the author’s but the central characters, who were real people: Lali Sokolov, the Tattooist, and Cecilia Klein in Cilka’s Journey. Morris herself refers to both books as novels, novels based on real people, and actual events. Events she tampered with – with fictional abandon.

The families of the central characters in both these books, who assisted Morris in her research, believe their relative has been used and abused. Additionally, people (and/or their descendents) who were involved in the same events, Jews who survived Auschwitz for example, feel wronged, abused, but even worse, experience something akin to a denial of their horrendous experience. From their point of view, events that have scarred their lives have been distorted for entertainment, for material gain, and fame.

The problem here is a problem that besets most so-called FACTION. You can’t have it both ways: this hybrid form rarely does justice to history or to fiction. Morris has justified what she did by referring to her ‘composite’ characters. She takes no responsibility either to the families, who were generous informants, or to Lali Sokolov, the Tattooist, or Cilka/Cecilia.

When it comes to Heather Morris, the only aspect of her biography that interests me, is what it is about her that made her a ‘fabulist’ of other lives not once, but twice. I’m interested in this type of person, I’m not interested in her work at all.

Truth and fiction have had a long and successful co-operation. Many years ago, the biographer and novelist, Peter Ackroyd, when asked about the two different strands to his work said that he leaves his truths for fiction. This is something every novelist knows. I can explore complex truths using a variety of characters and differing points of view. Furthermore I can flesh out these truths by choosing particular narrative lines, particular scenes, particular setting. Truth and fiction work well together. But truth and fact are not the same.

As a reader, I also look for my truths in fiction – MY truths, not the author’s truths. I trust myself as a reader. And I will continue to read biographies, yes, in search of the springs of creativity, but also for prurient entertainment too. Diaries? Rare is the person who starts a diary entry: I’m so happy today. As someone once said to me about her own diaries, they were the site for emotional sewerage. But letters, they’re in a category of their own, straddling as they do the private and the public. I love reading letters of famous people. Letters are so revealing. They are generally written quickly and without undergoing several drafts. There’s lots to be found there about both the life and the work – and an intimacy often lacking in the rest of life.

__________________________

* In this discussion, I will be concerned specifically with fiction and poetry. Clearly an author’s life is essential to autobiography and memoir. And modern history too, when that history occurs within the lifetime of the author, e.g. a history of the Vietnam War written by a veteran.

BRING ME FICTION

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Recently, while on a wilderness expedition with several others, I found myself talking with a man, a counselling psychologist. Apropos of nothing in particular, he said that when it came to novels he always read the last few pages first. It sounded like he was bragging. At this point, another member of our group told him I was a writer, a novelist.

‘What sort of novels do you write?’ he asked, not the least embarrassed.

I described them as contemporary fiction, character based, that while they told a story they also explored ideas.

‘Like what?’

‘The book I’ve just finished, Invented Lives, explores the notion of exile, the one before, The Memory Trap, looked at the complexities memory.’

He said he wouldn’t like my books. ‘They sound like too much hard work.’

I asked him who he liked to read. He said Dan Brown.

‘So you like plot,’ I said. ‘You like a fast-paced story.’

He nodded.

‘But still you read the end first.’

He nodded and smiled. Very self-satisfied he was.

‘You’re clearly not a man to take risks,’ I said, letting politeness off the leash. ‘You want to know the destination before you embark on the adventure.’ It was a comment made sharper by the fact that we were currently on a real-life adventure.

The barb missed its target. He was happy with his performance, indeed, he seemed a man entirely contented with himself. If he was aware of having insulted me, he didn’t care. It was hard to see him as a counselling psychologist.

I would be appalled if someone accused me of being risk-averse. It conjures up a warm-water-bath life, the years mounting up into decades of sameness. And I was appalled as a writer. Writers spend years shaping the journey, and this Dan Brown reader basically says, ‘Fuck you’ when he goes to the last page.

I was relating this incident to a friend of mine, one of Australia’s finest writers. D said she often consults the end of a novel first, in order to get the plot out of the way. She wants to savour the journey, and not be swept along in plot’s white water. She wants to linger in the language and the evolving fictional world. This is a desire I understand – and share. But I choose a different approach: I’ll succumb to the pull of the narrative on a first reading and return for the language and the nuances on a second – at least that’s the plan, but with so many books waiting to be read, the second reading is often little more than a cursory glance.

I suppose I should have been grateful that the counselling psychologist at least read fiction. Many men don’t. They read non-fiction and news sources, books and periodicals, but not fiction. They admit this not as some sort of shameful confession, but rather as a boast, as if to say ‘I am above the fluff of fiction. My time is too important to waste on stories.’ Their not reading fiction is not a fault in them, but a fault in fiction.

It is true that many women do not read fiction either, but in their case, they’ll announce – generally apologetically – that they are not really readers. They don’t read fiction because they don’t read anything.

At a cursory glance fiction can appear to be a curious anachronism in the fast-paced, multi-tasking digital age. The long, slow immersion in fiction, spending a weekend with Christina Stead or Julian Barnes becomes increasingly unlikely when 24/7 connection is the measure of not simply one’s place in the world, but of identity itself – a shockingly frail sense of identity, it must be said, one that can soar or collapse with a battery of likes/dislikes. And gauging others in this fast-paced world is similarly fraught when confronted with an avalanche of ever-changing data; it seems that the kitbag of tools once available for making considered judgements is emptying fast. We follow people like us; we visit sites that confirm our opinions; if we read news outlets (and most of us don’t) it will confirm our political views. The whole world is just a swipe or tap away, and yet for many people the day-to-day world seems to be getting smaller.

I’ve long believed that fiction makes the reader more understanding, more tolerant. The reason is obvious. Through fiction, you are exposed to characters – people – who are different to yourself: different life experiences, different family circumstances, different culture, different eras. For 12, 15 or 20 hours you are immersed in a world not your own, seeing it from the point of view of people who are not yourself, actually experiencing it from beneath the skin of strangers who are no longer strange. The other becomes a familiar through the process of reading a novel. This is an intense learning experience: it’s also an intensely enjoyable and stimulating experience, one that exercises concentration and attention and memory. There is no other activity that exposes a person to such a diversity of human experience in so concentrated and economical way.

So many works of fiction appear in lists of great books: The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, all of Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Wuthering Heights, Moby Dick, to mention only a few. Fiction exposes our complex human longings, it shows anxieties, jealousies, cruelties; it reveals shame, anger, joy and love. Fiction provides a context for understanding what drives us, what tempts us, what destroys and uplifts us. Fiction stops the flashing lights and flabby noise of our on-on-on lives and allows for reflection and understanding.

Imagine it: an hour at the end of every day, after work and before the night begins. You make yourself a coffee (or tea, or pour a glass of your favourite tipple), collect your novel and adjourn to the couch. You kick off your shoes, settle into its cushions; the dog (cat) jumps up, lies down next to you head on your thigh. Your phone is out of reach, in fact, it is out of hearing. You open your book, remind yourself where you are up to, and slip quickly and easily into a world of other people. This is bliss.

IN PRAISE OF FORGETTING

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I have always been captivated by the idea of memory. While it has been a theme in all my novels it was THE theme in The Memory Trap. In this novel, memory in all its forms – personal biographical memory, national collective memory, memory and obsession, mementoes and memorials – was explored through the lives of the characters.

The American writer and film-maker, David Rieff, has made memory the subject of his past two books. I have reviewed his latest for ABR and reproduce it below

This month’s ABR has a stunning cover to accompany the announcement of the 2016 Calibre essay prize to Michael Winkler. Check out the issue at

http://www.australianbookreview.com.au

IN PRAISE OF FORGETTING
David Rieff
Yale University Press, $36.95 hb, 145pp.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18279-8

Over the past three decades, and particularly since the prime ministership of John Howard, there has been an extraordinary growth in the number of young Australians making the pilgrimage to Gallipoli. Most of these people have no ancestors among the ‘fallen’, but rather are following what has become a rite of passage for patriotic young Australians.

Lest we forget, they intone. But what exactly is being remembered? And to what purpose is it being used? After all, until recently, few young people visited the site of this appalling military failure in which Australians were used as cannon fodder by their colonial masters. For that matter, until recently, flag-waving nationalism and loud-mouthed patriotism played little part in any aspect of Australian life.

Memory and its more structured form as remembrance are considered to be positive and desirable attributes. Personal memory is thought to be the primary vehicle by which individuals define themselves, while collective memory helps define a nation. Collective memories, like Gallipoli, act as the struts and foundations of nationalism, uniting poor and rich, urban and rural populations alike. As for history and memory, they are regarded – if thought about at all – as almost exactly the same, rather like identical twins.

In his excellent new book, In Praise of Forgetting*, David Rieff questions the commonly unquestioned: namely the purposes and effects of collective memory. He shows how easily history can fall prey to morally contingent, proprietorial and emotive memory. Ranging across the Irish troubles, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, Israel and Palestine, Stalin’s Russia, and the Balkans’ internecine battles Rieff reveals how collective memory invariably follows a political and ideological agenda, which is itself underpinned by specific moral imperatives. He makes clear that structured, state-sanctioned memorialising is in thrall to contemporary goals and aspirations and not the past it is purporting to preserve. As well, he points out ‘that exercises in collective historical remembrance far more closely resemble myth on one side and political propaganda on the other [more] than they do history.’ Rieff will always see the elephant in the room.

In advancing his arguments, Rieff draws on a wealth of work about memory and remembrance including that of the great Russian neurologist A.R. Luria, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz, Theodor Adorno’s classic Minima Moralia, and most particularly the Israeli political philosopher Avishai Margalit (The Ethics of Memory) and the social philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (Hope and Memory and Memory as a Remedy of Evil). Rieff sets up a dialogue of sorts with these latter two luminaries in which there is acknowledgement and agreement, as well as argument and disagreement; crucially Rieff extends the analysis of both men. As a thinker, Rieff is fearless and devoid of sentimentality. To take on those you admire is a difficult task, but if done well, as it is in this book, it yields far richer and nuanced arguments than if you were to pit yourself against a thinker with a diametrically opposing view.

Individual memory degrades very quickly while official memorialising is a tool in service to ideological and cultural currents. Rieff refers to Shelley’s pithy ‘Ozymandias’, as well as David Cannadine’s memoir ‘Where Statues Go to Die’ about the ‘inglorious fate’ of colonial monuments in India. My favourite monument story concerns the Bremen Elephant. This ten foot high red brick elephant was erected in 1932 to celebrate Germany’s colonial conquests, especially in Namibia. By the 1980s this particularly brutal colonisation had become a matter of shame; the monument was an embarrassment and there were calls to pull it down. In 1990, when Namibia gained its independence, the Bremen Elephant was re-dedicated as an anti-colonial monument, and in 2009 a new monument was built adjacent to the old to commemorate the lives of those Namibians who perished in the colonisation. Rather than an enduring truth about the past, monuments rise and fall depending on prevailing political and social concerns.

Official remembrance is big business these days. New monuments, memorial gardens, entire museums are popping up all the time. Rieff is rightfully critical of a number of these, including the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, where the atrocities portrayed have been book-ended in kitsch. (For an excellent book on kitsch in memorialising see Marita Sturken’s Tourists of History, 2007.) My complaint with the U.S. Holocaust Museum is in its use of experiential exhibits. The underlying premise of this fashionable trend in museum practice is that by promoting a personal involvement in the (long-past) events being portrayed, visitors will be motivated towards a better understanding. So it happens that on entering the U.S. Holocaust Museum visitors are issued with an identity card of a real person who existed during the Holocaust. As you walk past the displays of horror, as you watch the videos, as you linger in the (real) cattle car, you clutch your identity card wondering if your person – your surrogate self, after all – has survived. You have been inserted into these horrendous events. As for the imagination as a means of understanding, it has fallen out of fashion. What this might mean for memory in general, given that memories involve an imagining of past events, is anyone’s guess.

Rieff, in highlighting past atrocities and the way they have influenced current conflicts, recommends forgetting as a means of facilitating individuals to move on. Many Holocaust survivors did exactly this. They had survived and it was incumbent on them to live fully – not only for themselves but the millions who were denied a future. They did not consult counsellors or psychiatrists, rather they drew on their own resilience and determination to separate from their terrible experiences and steer themselves into the future. In many instances, It was their children and grandchildren who insisted on dragging them back to Auschwitz. It seems that the parents’ very productive forgetting interfered with the children’s demands for remembrance – a peculiarly narcissistic remembrance. The therapeutic has indeed triumphed as the author’s father, the sociologist Philip Rieff, predicted in 1966.

Rieff sees more value in forgiveness than do I. I am of the belief that some acts and the policies that allow them to occur are unforgivable, such as the atrocities under apartheid, those committed by the Nazis, and the slaughter being carried out by ISIS now. Nelson Mandela recognised this when he established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and not a Truth and Forgiveness Commission. There can be understanding and reconciliation, there can be a future where past enemies live together in peace, and this can occur without having to forgive the unforgivable (and thereby act in bad faith).

In Praise of Forgetting explores the powerful and often brutal effects of the seemingly benign and beneficent processes of memory and remembrance. It forces scrutiny of what has long been complacently accepted. Over the past half century or so, there has been a sacralising of memory both at the personal and collective levels. For the former it has often lead to a life of victimhood, for the latter entrenched hatreds and shocking brutality. If remembering truly were so therapeutic then such undesirable outcomes would not occur with such distressing regularity.

___________________

*In Praise of Forgetting grew out of an earlier monograph Against Remembrance (MUP, 2011). I am hoping Rieff is planning a third volume titled ‘Against Forgiveness’.

IRIS MURDOCH

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August has been Festival month here in Australia.

I returned from the Galapagos Islands and almost immediately flew up to northern NSW for the Byron Bay literary festival directed by Jeni Caffin. This is a wonderful festival held under canvas on a grassy promontory bordering the Pacific Ocean. Then the following weekend was the Bendigo Writers’ Festival – only in its second year but already starting to define itself. Making the most of beautiful Bendigo this festival will go from strength to strength. Then the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and two terrific gigs: the first with Andrew Ford broadcasting for The Music Show live from the festival on 31/8/13, during which he focussed on the musical aspects of The Memory Trap, the other a panel with historians Henry Reynolds and Tim Lycett, titled, In Memoriam, exploring memory and memorialisation, in particular what we remember, the need to remember, and the distortions of memory and forgetting. After the session, I was whisked away to a waiting car that sped me to the airport to catch the midday plane to Sydney for an in-conversation with Caroline Baum at the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival. It was a thoughtful and wide-ranging interview that made the interstate dash absolutely worthwhile.

I really enjoy festivals, both the sessions in which I’m involved and the mingling with readers and other writers, but I would never want month after month of the performance circuit, and indeed, halfway through August I found myself in need of something to ameliorate the effects of so public a life. Thus it happened that I found myself reaching for familiar books, a sort of comfort reading akin to comfort food. Somerset Maugham was perfect, and Nabokov’s Speak Memory, and — Iris Murdoch.

Slipped inside the cover of one of my Iris’s was a copy of the article that forms the bulk of this posting, an article I wrote back in 2003 for a series published in the Australian Newspaper on INSPIRATIONS. Ten years on, I’m as grateful to Iris Murdoch as I’ve ever been.

INSPIRATIONS: IRIS MURDOCH

It’s December 1965 and I’m not having a great time. I’m surrounded by friends and family but I’m convinced I’m alone. I write copious poems of the obscure pathetic variety which do little to placate my adolescent furies. All rush and throb, I feel that at any time I might break through my skin. Of course I tell no one: life is hard enough without people knowing there’s an alien in their midst.

Then one Saturday morning with the house to myself, I take from my mother’s book-case Iris Murdoch’s Flight from the Enchanter and I begin to read. Page after page, and gradually my alien skins slip away. Page by page, and I am immersed ever more deeply in a world I didn’t even know I was searching for. By the halfway mark I’m struck with wonder that someone, this Iris Murdoch, can tramp through my mind leaving behind a trail of sense.

Murdoch’s first novel was published in 1954, so by the time I discovered her I was well in arrears. After Flight from the Enchanter I read her first novel, Under the Net, followed quickly by her third, The Bell. I decided that if I were heading for the insane asylum, Iris Murdoch and all her characters were coming with me. Iris showed me there was more to life than being slimmer than I was, more to life than pretending an interest in football, and much more to love than the flirtations on the tram I rode to and from school. She taught me there was no shame in preferring the workings of my imagination to my left-footed attempts at compulsory sport. Iris Murdoch revealed to me a world where my private yearnings found a home – including my secret desire to be a novelist.

Her books were full of wondrous people, strange and seductive people, people heavy with knowledge about a world well beyond the reach of an Australian teenager. These were amazingly literate people who had conversations the likes of which never happened in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. They rarely had children, and if a child did enter a Murdoch novel he or she was like no child who travelled to school with me on the 69 tram. Indeed families were largely absent in her novels. There were no warring siblings or white-faced parents, no fighting over the front seat in the car or pinching your mother’s lipstick because she wouldn’t let you have your own. Most of her characters never married, they had affairs instead. And there were homosexuals in her novels – an extraordinary thing given homosexuals did not officially exist in Australia at that time.

Childhood, in my experience, was never as happy and carefree as it was supposed up to be, and adolescence was proving to be nothing more than a rocky outpost on the way to somewhere better – particularly in the 1960s when there was so much happening and I was too young to join in. Iris Murdoch provided me with an escape from a life and times, and a geography too, that was so constricting.

I loved her characters. Tuan, Chloe, Sebastian, Tristan, Mischa, Clement, Rainborough, with not a whiff of a Lynette or a Maureen or a Bruce. And along with the exotic names came exotic lives. Murdoch’s characters were writers and artists, scholars and philosophers who lived in London or Oxford or on a windswept cliff. And they lived so passionately, so at a pitch, hurtling from exhilaration to despair in a half page of narrative. And risks, they took such risks. They would fall in love wonderfully but disastrously, or cause someone else’s ruin while they blindly pursued their own artistic goals. And these all-too-human people were never ashamed of admitting their flaws – a quality unknown in the adults I knew. For a bookish teenager in 1960s Australia, paradise was being inside an Iris Murdoch novel.

Each year at the end of the final exams, I would treat myself to a new Iris Murdoch. And there always was a new one, either one published that year or an old one I’d not yet read. In my twenties I started to read her philosophy too, and from there I spiralled out to other philosophers and thinkers. By this time I had started to write in earnest: not the dreadful angst-ridden poetry of my adolescence, but fiction at last.

Iris Murdoch’s novels did for me what good fiction has always done: they hooked hard and fast into my imagination and transported me to places and people and ideas I longed to know. Iris (I’ve long been on such familiar terms with her) taught me the power of fiction. I loved her books – rich, fleshy novels of characterisation and ideas, the sort of fiction I wanted to write myself.

I continued to read her books as soon as they appeared. And then, in 1995, came Jackson’s Dilemma, her 26th novel. I read it within days of its being published, approaching it with the same excitement and sense of impending wonder I had brought to all her work. By this stage I was well aware of the typical faults in an Iris Murdoch’s novel – the talking heads’ dialogue, the almost surreal characters that seemed parodies of Murdochian characters, the over-abundance of inexplicable fallings in love – but the faults with Jackson’s Dilemma were of quite a different order. This novel had no centre, much less one that would hold. Jackson’s Dilemma wasn’t simply ‘not one of her best’ – and Iris has written a number of these – it was a mess, and for this Iris devotee, distressing to read. Three months after the novel was published, it was announced that Iris Murdoch had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. In February 1999 she died.

I loved Iris Murdoch’s work, and I suppose I had come to love her. In the two years following her death when, as the subject of of John Bayley’s memoirs and a mainstream film, Iris Murdoch became widely known as a once-famous woman with Alzheimers, I was appalled at what was being done to her. She had inspired me to trust my imagination, she had inspired me as a reader and she had provided much of the early fuel for my desire to be a novelist. I was ready to mount the ramparts to defend her genius. And in fact I did. I lashed out at Bayley’s books in coffee shops and bars, in writing classes and lectures, once even to strangers on a city tram.

My anger has cooled now that Vintage has re-published so many of her novels. I know there are people reading her work for the first time, even some who are reading her as the inspiration and lifeline so familiar to me.

Descartes named wonder as the first of the passions. That breath-stealing rush when confronted with something new and strange and totally captivating. Fiction is infused with wonder. Fiction has the power to take you to places and times and into the hearts and minds of people who are not yourself but have the power to illuminate your life. As a teenager growing up in suburban Melbourne, it was Iris Murdoch above all who gave me the experience of wonder. She gave meaning to my secret life and yearnings, she gave me solace, she gave me a future, and she revealed to me the pleasures of the text, both as a reader and a writer.

Postscript: and she still does.

STARTING ALL OVER AGAIN

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My seventh novel, The Memory Trap, was published last week, although my work on the book finished some months ago. It was then that I corrected the third proof pages and sent them back to my publisher. Four years of work completed, four years of life passed. I should have settled back and savoured the moment, instead I was assaulted by a battery of not-unfamiliar questions. Will I ever write another novel? Do I want to write another novel? And if I don’t write another novel, how then to make the days pass? I felt emptied out, not a spark of an idea. Not a spark. So terrified was I of the void, I found myself in a panicky riffling through the piles of unread books which had mounted up in the previous four years. I needed to fill up, I needed to know there’d be another novel.

I began with a biography of the poet Rilke and then moved on to the memoirs of the remarkable Lou Andreas-Salomé, writer, psychologist, lover of Rilke and Nietzsche, close friend of Freud. At this filling-up stage when a novel is finished, I select books on the slightest provocation and never reflect much on the process; I assume that some logic will emerge which will help shape the next novel. So when I found myself in a frantic searching for every possible translation of one of Rilke’s love poems to Lou, ‘Blot out My Eyes and I’ll still See You’, I plunged ahead without question. I was rummaging around in passionate territory. Perhaps my next novel would centre around a big, unconventional love – or several loves. I reached for my pen, scribbled a couple of sentences, but the ideas were drivel and I put the notebook down. Far too soon for sensible words of my own.

I read Richard Holmes’s Age of Wonder, a marvellous idiosyncratic plunge into the hearts and minds of 19^th century scientists, those romantics geniuses who were captivated by the new worlds they were in the process of revealing. I read about William Herschel’s telescopes and his discovery of Uranus, and Caroline Herschel’s extraordinary mapping of the distant skies. Then to the early balloonists for whom discovery was far more powerful than danger, and Mungo Parks, the deeply humane adventurer and explorer into deepest darkest Africa. Holmes, who knows more than most about the romantic novelists and poets, explores the new mechanical age through Mary Shelley’s profound and poignant novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. I love Richard Holmes’s book. Descartes named wonder as the first of the passions; I am filled with wonder as I read about these men and women who, inspired by wonder pushed against the boundaries of knowledge and understanding. Such lives they enjoyed.

As for my own life, despite having received the advance copies of The Memory Trap, things were pretty drab. There’s the foreboding about reviews, and the quiet niggle of a book before the publicity has taken hold, and of course the bruising absence of my beloved. I long for the conversations of the past. I plan topics for discussion, I rehearse ideas and arguments, I talk aloud in the empty rooms. All of it is cruelly unsatisfying. Better, I think, to confine the discussion to my imagination. I make side-trips to Yehudi Amichai’s blood-boiling poetry and to a couple of early Iris Murdoch novels. I curse Peter Conradi yet again for being so bloody coy and disingenuous in his biography about her. And I reach for Jane Austen as I have done before in extremis: Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility are entirely satisfying.

On May 1^st, the official publication date of The Memory Trap, I open After the Victorians by A.N. Wilson, a book I’ve had sitting on my shelf for years. (Incidentally, I far prefer Wilson’s messy book about Iris Murdoch to Conradi’s smug production.) Like The Age of Wonder, A.N. Wilson’s After the Victorians is another idiosyncratic history, and like the Holmes, it revels in art and literature. Wilson’s book stops in the early fifties, the period when my own life began.

And suddenly it all comes rushing back. Those taut years of childhood and the books which laid down tracks in the nervy terrain of my mind. Books which inspired a secret, parallel life to that expected of a middle-class, Jewish girl growing up in suburban Melbourne, books which provided me with passions far removed from the soppy intrigues of the playground. Indeed, I was still in primary school when it first occurred to me that all the interesting people were either dead or existed only in novels.

There were three books that were particular childhood favourites. Firstly, a grey hardcover volume of Lives of Famous Scientists, a chapter per famous scientist, each headed up by a glossy, black and white photograph. I loved those scientists; so much more reliable and interesting than my friends, they provided me with a satisfying brew of stimulation and solace. My favourite was Marie Curie, the only woman in the collection, so passionate and tragic. At the age of nine, I wanted to be her – although would prefer to swap Pierre with Ricky Nelson, my favourite singer at the time. I spent hours, years, trying to work out what I could discover which had not yet been discovered. It was when I was becoming quite discouraged – after all, if I could think of something to be discovered, clearly it already had been – that I found on my mother’s bookshelves Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian and other Writings.

In a Jewish household, the answer to Russell’s title was perfectly obvious, but the curiosity about a book premised on such an enquiry was overwhelming. Included in the book was a debate between Russell and a churchman, and it was here that I came upon what I regarded as Russell’s tour de force: If God made the world, who made God? I was delighted with the simplicity of his argument, the indisputable proof, as it seemed to my now 12-year-old self, and with lives of famous scientists in easy reach, I decided that whatever existed could be understood, and whatever could be understood must in some way exist. The world suddenly became less threatening and I stopped believing in God.

The third childhood favourite, also from my mother’s bookshelves and also discovered at the age of twelve, was Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Not for imagined worlds, and certainly not for a group of children with whom I might have identified, but for the marvellous, lyrical language. I would leap from one italicised section to the next for the sheer delight of those words. How they drowned out the mundane utterances of the real world.

Now decades later, sitting in my study with Rilke, Lou, Holmes, and the whole of Virginia Woolf within easy reach, I am struck by the similarities between the 60+ novelist and the 12-year-old child. Both depend on books to fill up, to feel alive, to kick start an imagination which for various reasons is tired out. Both use books to fly into an imagined world when the real world is too hard, or too dull, or just too empty. And through books both find people to talk to, to argue with, people who provide sanctuary to both and start-up fuel for the novelist.

As I read Wilson’s book about the figures and events in Britain of the first half of the twentieth century questions spring unbidden to mind: Is it possible to be good? How much should one risk in experiencing all that life has to offer? What extent of compromise is acceptable to do the work one is driven to do? Is passion always its own defence? And war: is it ever justified? And the press: its power and its responsibilities. I linger in Wilson’s section on Northcliffe, Beaverbrook and Rothermere and the rise of the popular press in England. It is fascinating and I’m surprised to find it so fascinating. And the 1950s, the point where Wilson finishes his book, I find myself thinking of that time, the layers of secrets that supported so many lives, women’s lives in particular.

Henry James went into society and found his stories. I enter the absences of my life, spice them with other people’s words and feel my own imagination begin to stir. All novels are autobiographical in one respect only, not in the storyline nor the characters, but in why the author wrote that particular novel at that particular time.

Therein lies a truth.

And as ideas open before me – the press, the 1950s, secrets – I am gaining confidence there will be another novel.

IMAGINATION SOUP. How novels begin.

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It was 2009, a bright day in early spring, when I took the afternoon off work and made my way to Heidi Gallery and gardens. The gardens were in bud, there was a shadow of brilliant green on the deciduous trees, the river seemed less brown than usual in the sharp white light. And the birds! A rowdy party of magpies, peewees, and rainbow lorikeets flapped through the still air. I meandered around until the lengthening shadows made it uncomfortably cool and then made my way to the gallery itself. There I found an exhibition of the work of Kathy Temin. I’d never neard of her, knew nothing of her art or her background, so I entered the long room of the main exhibit with no expectations. I found myself in a forest of white trees constructed out of white fake fur and soft stuffing. Some trees were stocky, others were slender; there were trees formed from squashed soft spheres piled one on top of the other, there were cone-shaped trees and slender cylindrical ones; some trees were not much more than a metre tall, others stretched to two or three metres.

As I moved among these soft white structures, I was simultaneously silenced by them, dwarfed by them and swaddled by them. I couldn’t have left if I wanted to. For reasons I could not explain, nor at the time did I want to explain, being immersed in Kathy Temin’s sculptural landscape had transported me back to Auschwitz. It was not Auschwitz 1, so nicely spruced up for the visitors with its famous gates and infamous words, Arbeit macht frei, but Auschwitz 2, Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its equally famous peaked gatehouse under which the trains entered the camp, stopping a moment later at the long platform where a clipped Teutonic nod decided who would die and who would live a little longer.

Kathy Temin’s white fake fur trees took me back to Auschwitz.

In November, 1999, Dot and I spent an afternoon walking the paths and woodlands of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It’s a huge area and apart from a few locals taking a short-cut via the old death camp and a small group of bored Polish schoolboys, we were alone. We wandered the pretty woodlands still rosy with late autumn colour where over half a century earlier Jews were amassed at the peak times, waiting their turn for the gas chambers. We stood silently in the ruins of Crematoria 2, 3, 4 and 5 where hundreds of thousands of murdered men, women and children were reduced to ash. We wandered the umpteen columns and rows of wooden huts. We stood in front of those tiered bunk benches each about 3 metres wide where as many as 12 Jews were crammed in together, the sick, the dying, and the steadfastly-surviving.

At the end of the railway tracks and situated between the ruins of Crematoria 2 and 3 is the International Monument to the Victims of Auschwitz. Built in 1967 in Soviet brutalism style, it consists of huge cement blocks in a geometric pile with plaques set in the brick work under foot. It’s big this monument, but it had no effect on me. The place, this Auschwitz-Birkenau, was monument enough.

Kathy Temin’s sculpture was called My Monument: White Forest. I did not learn the title until I was back home reading the exhibition catalogue. Sue Cramer, one of the curators of the exhibition wrote: ‘If not for the title of Kathy Temin’s sculptural environment My Monument: White Forest, we might not at first recognise this maze-like arrangement of furry white, oddly shaped trees as a monument.’

I knew it immediately.

Cramer continued: ‘Temin describes the work as a “memorial garden, an attempt to translate the feeling I had when visiting memorial sites in Eastern Europe.”’

Touché.

Monuments are an art form designed to convey people, places and events from the past, as well as abstract qualities of courage, goodness, freedom – even memory itself.

At the time of Temin’s exhibition I had only vague thoughts about the novel that would become The Memory Trap. I saw My Monument: White Forest and soon after, emerging from the imagination’s soup, came the character of Nina Jameson, an international consultant on memorial projects. And so the novel began – nothing about Auschwitz, nothing about the horrors of war (the loose-limbed imagination doesn’t work that way), rather four main characters with a shared childhood in seventies Melbourne, four people whose hopes and yearnings, whose loves and obsessions, whose uses and abuses of memory have all shaped the course of their adult lives. There are monuments in The Memory Trap, but as well there’s music and marriage and a swag of very human mistakes.

I’m fascinated by the imagination, I’m gripped by its loiterings and lurchings, but most important of all, I am grateful for it.

NOTHING LIKE CHILDBIRTH

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It is nothing like childbirth. Joyce Carol Oates has done it more than twenty times, so too, did Iris Murdoch. Patrick White notched up around a dozen, as has John Coetzee. Childless the lot of them.

I am, of course, speaking about books: writing and publishing books.

I’ve published 7 novels. With each one I have been asked by otherwise sensible people if it’s like a birth, or perhaps the grown child leaving home. The answer is a simple, obdurate: NO.

— No messy communion with another in order to get the project started.

— No incessant consultation with another as the project progresses.

— No constant negotiation with the object itself for the next twenty or thirty years.

THIS IS HOW IT IS.

There are the delights of lolling around in your imagination for two or three or four years, until you’ve got the project into perfect shape.

There’s the pleasure of solitude, of working in isolation, of reading and writing – just you and the emerging project and the best minds that have ever put pen to paper.

There are the regular frustrations and irritations and challenges that serve to remind you that being human is all about the necessity – and the discomforts – of change.

There’s the knowledge that eventually you’ll hone this mess of ideas and characters into a form that makes sense to other people, a form that’s sufficiently elegant to meet your own hard-to-satisfy standards.

Writers can be sloppy in every aspect of human existence except writing. As Cynthia Ozick wrote in her essay, ‘The Seam of the Snail’ (Metaphor and Memory, 1989):

I attend to crabbed minutiae and am self-trammeled through taking pains. I am a kind of human snail, locked in and condemned by my own nature. The ancients believed that the moist track left by the snail as it crept was the snail’s own essence, depleting its body little by little; the farther the snail toiled, the smaller it became, until it finally rubbed itself out. That is how we perfectionists are. Say to us Excellence, and we will show you how we use up our substance and wear ourselves away, while making scarcely any progress at all. The fact that I am a perfectionist in a narrow strait only, and nowhere else, is hardly to the point, since nothing matters to me so much as a comely and muscular sentence. It is my narrow strait, this snail’s road; the track of the sentence I am writing now; and when I have eked out the wet substance, ink or blood, that is its mark, I will begin the next sentence. Only in treading out sentences am I perfectionist; but then there is nothing else I know how to do, or take much interest in.

Not the sort of approach recommended in the raising of a child.

You write, you read, you revise, you read and write some more, you shape and reshape, you lop off the juts and bumps, you sand the rough surfaces, you send it to your agent who sends it to your publisher, there’s more work to be done (but she loves it, you tell yourself, my publisher says she loves it) and then it goes into production. There are proofs and more proofs and cover roughs, then the novel is with the printer and there is nothing more to be done.

***********

Two days ago a delivery man arrives with a box from HarperCollins. My delighted surprise must have been writ unambiguously across my face (I’d not expected this parcel for another week). The young man asks about the contents of the box. Advance copies of my new novel, I say. Now he is looking pretty excited too. Are you a reader? I ask. It turns out he is, so I invite him to share my joy.

Picture it, the two of us on my narrow porch opening the box, burying through the padding, and then the book in my hand, the two of us poring over that very first copy. He agrees it looks splendid, that there is mystery in the cover. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I’d want to read it.’ He particularly likes the rainbow lorikeet flying among the pillars of the neoclassical building depicted on the front. We flip through to make sure the pages aren’t blank (one of the writer’s nightmares). All is well. When the young man turns to leave, he addresses me by name: ‘Goodbye, Andrea,’ he says, ‘and congratulations.’ It is a lovely and unexpected connection.

I carry the box inside. My dog, a literary canine in the tradition of Flush, recognises the significance of the occasion. In the living room I withdraw each book one by one. No matter how many times this happens – the arrival of first copies – the magic never diminishes. Nor the excitement, nor the pleasure. The thing, fully formed, bearing the authority of print, the public cladding of a cover, your own name written on the front – not that that strikes you, or at least not me: the book is a thing in itself, not simply mine any more.

This household was for a many years a two-writer household. The same ritual was observed every time advance copies arrived. I now prop the books side by side, covers facing out, on the shelf above the TV and l study them. I see how the light plays on the print – how the letters shine against the matt finish of the cover image – how the title, THE MEMORY TRAP, large and silvered in certain light actually seems to lure the observer in. I focus on the image itself that could well be the colonnade of the British Museum, and the flash of a rainbow lorikeet between the columns; the orange on the parrot’s breast is the same colour as the umbrella carried by the woman walking down the colonnade. And there in the colonnade’s shadows is a man in a suit.

I had minimal involvement with the creation of the cover, I can, therefore, admire it whole-heartedly. It is, I decide, perfect.

I take down a copy – as one would in a bookshop – there’s another rainbow lorikeet on the spine – and then to the back. I’m oddly nervous about reading the blurb even though I wrote it myself, even though I’ve read it about three thousand times. It’s as if its placement in situ might somehow disrupt the flow of words. I force myself to read it. No alchemy has occurred. And Rai’s generous words – in gold, the same colour they’ve used for the author name on the front. I like that.

I open the book. There are surprises here – good surprises – but I cannot read the text, not yet. If I find mistakes, if I find sentences that fall over there’s nothing I can do about them now. Later, I’ll read it. For the moment I’ll just enjoy the object.

It’s nothing like a birth. My work is done. And until the reviews begin, I can indulge myself in the pleasure of the thing itself and the wonder that fiction inspires.

STITCHING TIME

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Jenny Diski, in a recent LRB blog, writes about her discovery of the pleasures of knitting. She’s a novice knitter, and there are holes – three – in the striped rug she is making for her soon-to-arrive grandson. But she doesn’t care, she’s far too wrapped up in the joys of knitting – and of hearing too, but that’s another blog.

(It suddenly occurs to me that JD and I have much in common. We are of similar age, Jewish, both of us are writers, have been to Antarctica, we each have a hearing loss modified by judicious use of very expensive hearing aids, and we both like knitting.)

Unlike Diski, I’ve been knitting most of my life. Knitting is one of the few constructive occupations that allows you, simultaneously, to do something else equally constructive. Last winter for example, I knitted a poncho-cloak affair (in a beautiful maroon wool that felt like cashmere) while working my way through a few of the several thousand requiems that have been written in the past four hundred years. A vest for a friend took me through much of Schubert’s piano music. I caught up on a couple of years of podcasts from the CBC’s Big Ideas programme while knitting a perfect little jacket for the two-year-old daughter of Dot’s nephew. I have knitted through classic movies that I don’t want ever to forget, and TV series like Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad – both of which I dumped after the first couple of series: too much blood and too little character for me. Dexter, incidentally, did not produce the same reaction. I knitted through the five seasons of Madmen – very useful given my next novel will be set in the 1950s and sixties, all of West Wing (it was the best way of surviving the Howard years), and more recently Aaron Sorkin’s latest, Newsroom, which, at a time when I increasingly avoid newspapers and TV news and current affairs, reminded me how truly valuable good media can be.

And I have knitted to make life more bearable. When times are tough you just want to get through the hours. Like Margaret Drabble (see her recent book The Pattern in the Carpet) I have turned to jigsaws during bleak periods. But as well, Hollywood romantic schlock like Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle and The Way We Were have proved extremely useful; two or three of these movies and I can cross off another evening and head for bed. But there’s a self-esteem issue with this sort of entertainment: how to justify such a terrible waste of time when there are books to be read and articles to be written?

Knitting has saved me from self-castigation. I watch the romantic drivel and I knit. There’s a completed sleeve to show for the hours during which Richard Gere and Julia Roberts do their Pygmalion, rags-to-riches thing, and if I take into account all the old Meg Ryan movies I’ve watched there’s probably a whole jumper to show for them. Time which might otherwise be crazed with anxiety passes while I knit in front of the screen. And in the process friends and family receive regular gifts of woollies. (One of these friends, when I presented her with a sleeveless cardigan many years ago, said that wearing a hand-knitted gift shows that someone cares about you.)

The Memory Trap will be published in May. Bound proofs are already circulating in the world. The first review – in Bookseller and Publisher and fortunately a good one – has appeared. Instead of squirming in pre-publication anxiety I am knitting a very fetching rug. It’s a log cabin pattern, visually startling and very easy. The squares grow in number, the nights pass, by the time the book comes out I will have a finished rug. I should also be quite sane.

POSTSCRIPT:

The rug is finished, and perfect timing too. Autumn is here bringing cool, rug-suitable nights. And The Memory Trap will be in the shops next week.

BIOGRAPHICAL PLEASURINGS

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In my youth I was in thrall to a lover who derided biography as a form of prurience. This was a long time ago when I was extremely impressionable – particularly when it came to those whom I believed had serious intellectual clout. My lover, I was convinced, had the most serious of intellectual clout; I agreed with everything he said – the nonsense about biography was just the start of it. He was particularly scathing about those who would read the biography of a significant writer without having bothered to read the actual works. (This was during the major VirginiaWoolf-and-her-world excavations, when the Bloomsbury lives were devoured far more eagerly than the Bloomsbury writings.) As far as I can remember – and like many people, I demonstrate a dedicated forgetfulness when it concerns times that reveal me as a fool – he made no mention of the biographies of major non-literary figures: kings and queens, nurses and judges, revolutionary leaders and explorers who never held a pen for long.

‘Prurience,’ he said. And of course he’s right. Where he was wrong and where I was so stupid, was believing there was anything wrong with this.

I have, this very week, finished proofing the pages of my new novel The Memory Trap. The next time I see the novel it will be a book. Between covers – and rather fetching covers I should add, thanks to the art department at HarperCollins. One of the main characters in The Memory Trap is the American, Elliot Wood, a biographer of ‘big women’; Elizabeth Hardwick, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Rhys have been his subjects. At one point in the novel he describes biography as ‘the ultimate peering into closets not your own,’ and at another he reveals the intrinsic satisfactions of the biographer, in particular, the privilege of exploring a whole life intimately. And it’s a very particular intimacy, he says, in that it does not demand that he, Elliot, change and compromise like, for example, the intimacy in his far-from-happy marriage. He loves his big woman of the moment, he can’t get enough of her.

I’m fascinated by people: why they behave as they do, how they come to be as they are. I’m particularly interested in the flaws and frailties of people, including the illusions and delusions that pock-mark any life. But there’s only so much poking into the lives of real people – friends, family, acquaintances – that is acceptable.

Herein lies the great satisfaction of fiction that you can plunge into the thick of the characters’ loves and frailties, their strengths and burdens, their mistakes and delusions, and no one is the least concerned about your prying, or your voracious curiosity. This is the case for all good fiction, both for readers and writers alike. And, in fact, fiction is particularly drawn to characters with deep flaws. It is not by chance that the great figures in fiction include the likes of Macbeth, Faust, Medea – not such a wholesome lot, but brilliant to read about, fascinating to know.

And it’s the case, too, with good biography. I have just finished reading Ray Monk’s biography of Robert J. Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, is often referred to as ‘the father of the bomb’. I’ve read a few biographies about him – I’ve long been drawn to the early nuclear physicists of the first half of the twentieth century, particularly the theorists, of which Oppenheimer was one. While most of these biographies are good, Monk’s is in a category of its own. Monk is interested in the complexities of the man, the seemingly contradictory actions that scored Oppenheimer’s life, and far more interested in these than, say, who he slept with. And Monk is also captivated by the science. This is the peak period of nuclear physics, when discoveries came so thick and fast, that it took the likes of an Oppenheimer to keep pace.

I first read Monk back in 1994. Dot gave me his biography of Wittgenstein as a birthday present. She had inscribed it ‘For A – Who doesn’t read biography, but who I’m hoping will make an exception for this one!!’ I was, at the time, still burdened with a few mad habits from old lovers. This gift for my birthday marked my conversion moment. I read Monk’s Wittgenstein, I couldn’t put it down. I was captivated by the portrayal of this complex man, in the same way as I would be caught by a complex character in a novel. When Monk’s Bertrand Russell came out a few years later – two wonderful volumes on another great and flawed man, I was similarly enthralled.

And now with his Oppenheimer.

What these three subjects have in common is their greatness, their uniqueness in fact, coupled with fundamental human frailties that in the end affected their work and the quality of life itself. Oppenheimer’s great flaw was his desire for acceptance and acknowledgement. This is a common enough desire, but it was its particularly American flavourings in Oppenheimer that unseated him. Oppenheimer’s desire was doused in patriotism – a deeply ironic quality given that the FBI dogged him for more than a decade convinced he was a Russian spy, and the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) finally withdrew his security clearance because of doubts of his loyalty. But in fact it was his loyalty and love for America that lead to his telling the lies that eventually were his undoing.

Oppenheimer is a fascinating man: great and flawed. And like Russell and Wittgenstein, he was an original thinker. This is another pleasure of Monk: he shows such a vigorous enjoyment in the technicalities of these men’s work, and he shares his joys and understandings with us.

Monk’s Oppenheimer, in fact all of his biographies, have started me thinking about great people, people who are at the very top of their profession, who do something they do not need to do – Oppenheimer’s lie about his friend Haakon Chevalier, Lance Armstrong’s taking of performance-enhancing drugs – and I am wondering how this behaviour would be manifest in a woman. What might her work be? Her family circumstances? The lover she has on the side? When and where might she live? I am feeling a strange pull to the 1950s.

I am, I realise, thinking about the next novel.

Ah, the freedom of it all.

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