The Dressmaker's Daughter (28 page)

Our time in this new house was short-lived. Soon after, to finish the affair with Thomas once and for all, I packed my daughter’s clothes and books and some household linen into cases and a tea chest and took her to live with me in an old house with a pink veranda looking over the sea at Balmoral Beach in Sydney.

O
nce, long ago, I read an essay by a man who said that when he ran up the steps of the Prado he felt complete and utter happiness. It stayed in my mind, because I had never been to see the Prado. It stayed with me also because that is how I feel when I walk down the road on my way to the opening day of Adelaide Writers’ Week.

The week opens before me like the sea and all I have to do is to enter. What this entrancement is, I don’t exactly know. But from the first event I ever attended in 1962 I was electrified. The Russian composer Katchachurian said that when he was taken at the age of twelve by his parents to hear a symphony orchestra play for the first time, he was completely overwhelmed with joy and he knew that this was what he wanted to do. To spend his life making music. But hypnotised and enthralled though I was by my first experience of Writers’
Week, I can’t say that I felt I wanted to be allowed to enter the world of literature. It was far from my mind, and so impossible to imagine, that it never occurred to me that I might be a writer.

To listen to writers talking to readers – that was the source of the pleasure for me, and, from then onward, I could not get enough of this sort of talk.

I think it is true that no matter what it is that you find beguiling, if you attend to it often enough, you will become part of the world that it creates. It is merely a matter of attention. But to have that amount of attention you need to have something almost mystical that pulls you to it and ties you to it for many years. Obsession helps.

It is a terrible thing to have a mild obsession. The great thing is to have a complete obsession because it guards against the danger of becoming a dilettante. The arts are full of dilettantes and they can be happy, but in the main they are not because to do anything significant you need to be utterly obsessed. Look at Baudelaire, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Proust and the rest. (This is why I do not agree with Drusilla Modjeska who, writing in her book
Stravinsky’s Lunch,
takes issue with the fact that the family had to be quiet at lunchtime when the composer was in the middle of a work. What’s wrong with that? If quiet was what was needed, it is not unreasonable, especially as it was the music that was being composed that put the food on the table.)

Until I was five months pregnant with my first child
and some neighbours invited me to the opening of Writers’ Week, I’d never met a writer, nor did I think of becoming one. The talk was held in a lecture theatre at the University of Adelaide.

It was night and I had left my husband at home to go with the people who had invited me, Catherine and Gil Ponder. At that time it was important not to show that you were pregnant. I was crimped into a pink shirtmaker frock with a wide belt that I had worn as my ‘going away’ dress after my wedding. By dint of a starvation diet, women like me could hide their pregnancy until after six months by using the twenty-eight inch notch in their belt.

At the lectern was a novelist from Perth who began a talk about the failings of the Literature Board. His name was Thomas Hungerford and he was a man in a rage. He spoke about people behaving like rabbits fornicating. He was not very far into his speech when a man began to call out ‘Why?’ from the back of the theatre. Tom would stop, explain what he meant and go on. The man called again. After a while, it was clear that this was not going to stop. It went on for the entire speech. It was Hal Porter, with his white floppy hair, calling out. Catherine, amused, explained, ‘Not sober.’

I was very taken with the proceedings and afterwards went up to Tom and invited him home to meet my husband. I explained that he couldn’t be there because he was a quadriplegic and that Richard would be very
interested to meet him. Bathed in naïvety, I was completely confident that this was a marvellous idea. Tom agreed to come the next day to morning tea.

Thinking about what a person who was away from home might like to eat, I decided he’d like something homely. I made scones. The morning went well. We sat in the living-room behind our drycleaning shop and talked until lunchtime. Tom stood up and said something that intrigued me. ‘Well, much as I’d like to, I can’t stay here chewing the fat all day.’ Chewing the fat! I had never heard that expression before.

Two years later, more events were held. I went along. Something about it excited me. I was entranced. Sitting with Hugh on the lawn outside the Adelaide Museum listening to a big man in khaki overalls read poetry in a breathless way, I began to rock my son in my arms to keep him quiet and still. (A woman came up to me and said, ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ I said that I hadn’t learnt it anywhere; it was just something I did to keep this vigorous little boy quiet.) The man reading turned out to be Les Murray. He was the first poet I had laid eyes on and I had a sense that he wasn’t typical.

Because Writers’ Week was to be held every two years and I was so madly keen on it, I decided Richard and I could not have another child at a time that would keep me away. So we planned our daughter Caro around the
event. When she became the Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival, I said, ‘Oh, how apt! You were conceived around a Writers’ Week.’

At one of the earliest events in a tent, Geoffrey Dutton was making the opening speech. Pio, the Melbourne performance poet, decided to interrupt, calling out in much the same way as Hal Porter had at the first event I ever attended. He was calling, I think, for more justice for the working class. A girl who had recently begun to write and who had taken up with a disgruntled, gap-toothed male poet called out, ‘Get poetry back to the gutter!’ The urbane Geoffrey plugged on.

Down by the River Torrens, one tent became two, which became three, which became four. The crowds grew. Poets read to people on the boat
Popeye,
which cruised up and down the river in the moonlight. I became one of those readers. Hanging on to a post, an open book, and a microphone, I read my poem ‘Eve’ and mistakenly put the last line around the wrong way.

Friendly Street Poets held poetry readings on the opening night of Writers’ Week. One night, a group of rowdy male poets was interrupting me reading on stage. David Malouf tells me that I called out, ‘Give us a go, boys!’ This was a cry from my childhood because, with three brothers, I was always waiting my turn.

Afterwards, at a bar in the Festival Theatre, a hero of mine, the great American poet Galway Kinnell, came
up to me, introduced himself, and said, ‘I want to tell you that you have great charisma on stage. It’s a gift.’ I said, ‘Yes, thank you but I don’t care about that. What I care about is the poetry. What is that like?’ He didn’t reply.

It became a ritual that our house near the parklands was filled with visitors during the Adelaide Festival of Arts, of which Writers’ Week is a part. I’d invite people I met that day home for a meal or, if they had nowhere to stay, home to a bed in our house, which had plenty of room. I’d cook for weeks beforehand and every day would take out from the freezer something to cook that night. I had to be quick – there were only three hours between the events of the day at the tents and a play or concert at night. (Children slept under our dining-room table while their parents left to see a play.) One night I turned to what I thought was the large fish I had left defrosting to find it was a ham bone and ten people were due for dinner within the hour. Rooting around in the deep-freeze, I found the fish, threw onions and tomatoes around it, put it into the oven covered in olive oil and lemons and poured everybody another drink. Nobody knew, but I took more care after that.

After I had published several books of poetry and one of prose in the Eighties, I was invited to be a guest of Writers’ Week. A group of us were taken in a bus to a resort at McLaren Vale to spend three days getting to know each
other. Jan Morris, Victoria Glendinning, Ishiguro and Edmund White were some of the people there.

I met Jan Morris at the bar. She said, ‘I am rather anxious, as I am not very good at this sort of thing.’ Amazed, and to this day I don’t know if she meant it or was just opening the conversation, I told her she could relax; she only need to have a few drinks and people would love her. I regret giving such fatuous advice.

A strange thing was happening as we spoke. I found myself all of a sudden deeply sexually attracted to her. No wonder the Greeks called sexual desire an arrow. The shaft hit. I suddenly thought, ‘Look, you can fool everybody but you can’t fool me. I know that you are a man and I am attracted to you. Sexual frisson is sexual frisson and you can’t call it anything else. And you are flirting with me. Inside, you are one sexy man.’ I didn’t care that she had worn women’s bathers when we went for a swim in the ocean earlier that afternoon; I know a man when I meet a man. I have never felt like that about a woman. Tried to, but failed. Tried harder; failed again.

Later I read her brilliant book
Conundrum
and I realised that Jan Morris never altered her love of women and is still married to her wife. Trust yourself, I say.

That night at dinner, Peter Goldsworthy rushed in late. He said, in one of those inexplicable events that happen when there is a forbidden topic, ‘Sorry I’m late! I’ve been reading the medical description of a sex
change. It is one hell of an operation!’ I gave him a kick as he sat beside me and people went on talking, while I think Jan Morris didn’t hear, or, with her beautiful courtesy, pretended not to.

I had been commissioned by a magazine to interview Victoria Glendinning. At the appointed hour, I went to her room with a tape-recorder. She spoke a text and all I had to do was to type it out later. Standing in the late-afternoon sun in the dry, dusty air, Victoria watched as a flock of pink galahs wheeled overhead. ‘Oh, this reminds me of Greece!’ she said. ‘If I were a younger woman, I would come and live here.’

Edmund White at that time had just been diagnosed as HIV positive and was being careful with his health. Whenever anybody lit a cigarette, he stood up, bowed and left. (He is the man who taught me what charm can really be. He must be, I think, the world’s most charming man. He has a genius for it.) He had no idea then how long he would live. But he had an inkling of how many of his friends would die.

Ishiguro said, looking at the photograph on the back of my book
Honey,
‘How long ago was that taken?’ He was a young man then.

I think it is generally agreed that the poetry readings are among the most memorable events of Writers’ Week.

To see a lake of people stretching away up a hill almost to the road while poets read in a packed tent and to hear the hush and the thrill is electrifying.

The first of these poetry readings I heard was in the Town Hall in 1976 and Ted Hughes read with Adrian Mitchell. Hughes read like Moses. It was like the moment between kerosene being poured and the lighting of a match. And Mitchell was a perfect counterbalance with his elegant political wit and jesting.

Now this was the famous night when it is said that feminists called to Hughes that he had murdered Sylvia Plath. I was there and I can only testify that I stayed throughout and heard nothing of this. There were women with banners, they say, but I saw nothing. This is one of those experiences where I think both versions must be accepted as true. I heard a complete hush except for wild applause. And that is how I found out what a great poetry reading can be.

One of the secrets of the success of Adelaide Writers’ Week is that the events are free. Only evening events in the Town Hall have an admission charge. The poorest poet, the single parent in deepest poverty – they can all join in and nobody ever asks them for money. Later, I became one of those single parents. You may sit beside a street person, an English lord, a young couple who have brought their lunch, an old friend; in fact, anybody at all. What they have in common is that they are there to hear the authors.

During the Nineties, somebody had a bad idea. They decided that prose writers should simply stand and read their work. It works with poets, but it rarely works with prose writers. Somebody had got them confused. We were interested in hearing writers’ ideas, aims and ambitions. Some may have liked the readings; most felt cheated. It is easier for the writer, as all they have to do is thrust their nose into the book and begin to read.

‘Come on, we’re leaving!’ my friend Peri, who had come from Sydney, said when David Malouf began to read.

‘Why?’

‘Because we’ve read that book. I wanted to hear him talk.’

Well, so did I. And so we left.

The secret of Writers’ Week’s success is, I think, geography. The size of the city; the climate; the people of the community who host visitors in their own homes; and the sense of gaiety and civic pride all help.

The slow river; the tents; the great trees; the young mothers wearing crisp shirts pushing prams; the older women also in shirts, but these are not tucked in (Adelaide is the home of the shirt); men in Panama hats; birds flitting above in the heat. The authors inside the tents having their day, having their say; the book-signing queue that coils around.

The love affairs. (Coleridge’s great biographer, Richard Holmes, met the novelist Rose Tremaine there
and they are still together.) I have dallied and been late for the launch of my own book. The electricity in the air, the gossip, the laughter. My watch has been returned to me behind a tent because I had left it on a hotel bedside table.

The social revolution the embarrassed pregnant girl in the tight pink belt and the woman who left her watch behind lived through is charted by the years of Writers’ Weeks. What happened during that time that made changes in a life so profound is shown in the literature that the writers have produced. Books on subjects that were not dreamed of at the beginning of this time were published and women whose lives were very circumscribed changed in this period, too. It was, in a word, liberating. Are we better for it? That’s another story.

Wherever I am, I make sure that I am back in Adelaide in time for Writers’ Week. A feeling of complete joy comes over me as I walk down North Terrace on the way to the tents. The day stretches ahead and there is nothing but pleasure to look forward to.