This was in Brisbane, in the first share house after uni. It was a good time. We didn't so much get on as get into the discovery of each other which really worked for a while. We even knew our neighbours, a trio of girls our age. It was like a sitcom.
Anyway, it was after uni and my band had disintegrated over the summer break so I had to put my mind to other things like get back into reading things other than Cahiers du cinema (not that I had been), building up my record collection to reflect a few influences I'd got back into while in the band (medieval and eastern ... should be a genre by itself). And it occurred to me that becoming a film director was a lot less probable than I wanted it to be. Even great conductors of orchestras get to their purposeful flailing through a lot of education and discipline. One way to attain the standing of a major new voice in the cinema of the late twentieth century was to start making tea and running messages on the sets of tv ads until my break came one day when the director was run over by the catering truck and I happened to be on the scene. I think I just never liked the idea of putting the hours in.
Writing stories didn't seem like work. I began by a few experimental pieces. In Requiem (I'd bought Colin Davis' recording of Mozart's) an old woman narrates her final days as though moving through the phases of the mass. In Marmalade Ghost an office worker is troubled by a flash of memory and follows it until he realises it was something he saw as the son of a concentration camp commandant (got that from Sophie's Choice). In Easy Listening, a woman tries to block out the fact of her daughter's kidnapping by absorbing the sounds around her. That kind of thing. And then they started ... changing...
I wrote a piece directly from one of my own memories, something I didn't fully grasp but felt strongly. In the memory I'm on the beach at Pallarenda, playing in the sand. My sister Anita is sitting by Mum who is reading. We're alone on the whole beach. And then we aren't. There's a man. He's black, not Aboriginal, and I remember thinking he was American. I stare at him. He nods and I go back to my sand sculpting as though a teacher or older brother has allowed me to. Suddenly Mum gets up and gathers our things and calls me over. We're going. We only just got there. She and Anita wonder loudly if Grandad Harry and the others have caught any fish. I ask them what they're talking about and they shush me. They are smiling.
Talking about it much later with Mum I learned that the stranger was more like an Islander, was dressed in meatworkers' whites (I remembered naval fatigues) and gumboots. She had been afraid. He was arrested not long after for rape.
I masked all that back to fiction, imagining a mysterious figure that the younger Marty and his friend would follow when they went to the beach. I called it after its setting: Pallarenda. (I eventually won a competition with a redraft of that story and bought a futon with the prize money: my back now thanks a beach in Townsville.) Then I read Dubliners.
Dubliners is a book of short stories by James Joyce. He links them by the setting but also by the progressive age of the characters, going from a boy wondering at an old man's death to The Dead, a story about a mature man revisiting his home town after success overseas. It's an extraordinary book and a good idea which I imposed on what became a project.
In mine (no, not called Townsvillites) I limit the common characters to a boy and a girl and go from 1971 when Gail wonders at the power of Cyclone Althea to 1979 when Marty and Gail face approaching adulthood among friends at a holiday on Magnetic Island.
It was called The Monsoons and ended with a novella-length story of that title which also served for the title of the last chapter and the final words.
To thieve from Tolstoy: all happy households are alike but all unhappy households are unhappy in their own fashion. Not strictly true as the things that break up share houses are always the same things: love and money. As there was no love left all we had to fight about was money and so it went. I eventually moved out to a different city and when I did I took my big bursting manuscript with me and typed it out, saving future publishers the trouble of hiring a pharmacist to read it. And I sought my fortune in cooler climes.
Well, yes and no. I started frisbee-ing short stories around to any outlet I could send an envelope to and set about writing the introduction for the big book. But when I did ...
The Monsoons goes like this: Gail waits on the jetty for her boyfriend to turn up on the next boat. He doesn't. She goes back humiliated to her friends. They sympathise. Eighty pages later, after even more vaguely described adventures, it ends.
So I started redrafting. And redrafting. Between starting the project and all this rewriting I'd read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and a good third of Finnegans Wake (assisted by the exegetic bliss of Anthony Burgess) and, quite seriously considered myself a Joycean writer carrying the flame of literary innovation into the late twentieth century. So every redraft turned the pale and lean prose of the first into a mudbath that weighed more than France. If I'd chosen to be more influenced by Peter Carey (whose work I also admired) it might have been a lot easier for everyone.
Long story short the act of redrafting became an end in itself and I could go on about it for several rounds at any Fitzroy pub that would have me. Pints of Guinness and hours of stifling self promotion. Who needs to write when talking about it achieves the desired result and at a very real, local level. At some point I put it down and left it there.
Then, years later, cleaning out my studio I came across it again. I was having trouble finishing Hysteria #3 and needed something to clear my mind of its problems. I found the big bloated archfile with all the drafting and yellow typed pages of The Monsoons. I almost said aloud to this object: ok, you have one last chance -- if I don't like what I read now I'm throwing you in the bin.
Well, I didn't. The story itself was stilted and timidly told with a lead character I'd avoid in real life for sheer snootiness. But I liked the setting and some of the more fantastic elements only hinted at and started trying to draw it. That started working. For which see the previous post.
No comments:
Post a Comment