Tirra Lirra by the River (21 page)

Later, I remember that there was a voice, too, with rolling r’s.

‘A fine ceremony, madam! A verrry fine ceremony!’

I think it consoled me, a little. I think ceremony always has, a little.

First, a confession. I am not coming to this novel fresh, as an adult reader with a hard-won but mostly stable sense of self from which to survey the world, written and real. I read
Tirra Lirra by the River
at school thirty years ago. It entered my blood in such a way that I cannot remember a ‘self’ before this book was part of it.

From the vantage point of my now forty-seven years, it seems to me that the ages between, say, thirteen and twenty-three are particularly dangerous in a duckling kind of way for the retaining of impressions, the unknown setting of patterns, that are then, apparently instinctively, followed. We form our tastes, especially literary and sexual, by what we come across—or what comes across us—in those years.

And, though this dangerous decade can seem like a time of unbounded possibility—most of life, after all, being still to come—these are also years in which some of the imprinting sets limits to our sense of what is possible.

Tirra Lirra by the River
is a novel that examines in brutally, beautifully honest detail the patterns etched on a soul at this formative time. And it shows how, late in life—however well, or less well, you might think that has turned out—there may be some satisfaction to be had by recognizing these patterns, and
what they have made of us. Nora Porteous is an old woman who has come home and she is looking for what it was that made her, and trying to account for what she then made of herself. These are confronting questions to unravel, and ones that the novel, in some small way, also poses for me now.

In the mid-1980s,
Tirra Lirra by the River
was a set text for secondary school students in Melbourne, Australia, along with Christina Stead’s masterpiece
The Man Who Loved Children
, and Carson McCullers’s sublime
The Member of the Wedding
. These books have stayed with me in a way so deep that I cannot unravel them from the writer, or the woman, I have become.

All three books are about extraordinary teenage misfits: the genius Louie and the ‘freak’ Frankie—who inhabit the extraordinary writers Stead and McCullers—and Jessica Anderson’s Nora, wry and brave. When I reread them now, I see that they are a trifecta of high art and terror and truth almost too powerful to give to teenagers, which is to say exactly what they crave and need (as opposed to ‘relevant’ books about ‘issues’ which are ‘resolved’ in candy-floss epiphanies and ‘growth and change moments’).

Still, a small part of me—perhaps the part that is now mother to preteen girls—does wonder if this stunning, toxic cocktail that formed me was not too strong. Did it feed a monster? Comfort or encourage something that should have been put in a sack and sunk? Who knows: life, especially a single life, is both the control and the experiment. What did they think would happen to us, back in a suburban girls’ school in the lost, pre-grunge, hair-gelled 1980s?

I’ve no idea what I would have been like without these books. Except more lost.

But why did this novel mean so much? After all, it was about the struggles of a woman to live a life in which she can
create works of art, fully seventy years earlier. Hadn’t the world changed radically for the better by the time it was published in 1978? We’d had another wave of feminism in the Western world, and, in Australia, the extraordinary Whitlam Labor government’s social reforms: universal free health care, free university education, no-fault divorce, the single mother’s pension, the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, antidiscrimination laws, multicultural policy and so on. As a teenager I blithely considered myself a beneficiary of this new, just, well-funded world. I could get sick, educated, divorced, raise my children alone and have all my future novels (in which I could out myself without recrimination as whatever I liked) funded on the public purse. But no amount of teen dreaming or government subsidy can resolve the questions of how to find a form of life that suits you, and how to be an artist. These questions of sex and art are at the heart of
Tirra Lirra by the River
.

‘When my worst expectations are met,’ Nora confides in the first pages, ‘I frequently find alleviation in detaching myself from the action, as it were, the better to appreciate … the pattern of doom, or comedy, or whatever you like to call it.’

What if we liked to call ‘the pattern of doom, or comedy, or whatever’ a novel—indeed this novel?
Tirra Lirra by the River
is an intricate tissue of reminiscence woven by an old woman as she examines her life, pulling threads through it and tying loose ends to their long-ago beginnings. Because Nora is someone compelled to make things—beautiful, useless things, but things the making of which is absolutely necessary to her—her struggles are the struggles of an artist. There are two of them. First, to find some form of life which allows her to work
and
to have a personal, sexual life (not easy for anyone, especially a woman, and most especially a woman of Nora’s time and place). And
then there’s the struggle involved in the act of making art—of imposing form on her material, finding ‘the pattern of doom, or comedy, or whatever’ in it.

Looked at this way, Anderson’s novel is an enactment of what it is about, as, more obviously, Ian McEwan’s novel
Atonement
is itself the act of atonement for its narrator. Or, perhaps, in the self-referentially startling way that an Escher drawing is a drawing of the hand that made the drawing, in the act of making it. We are in the narrator Nora’s mind as she makes her work, and we discern, or imagine we do, the Escher-like hand of Jessica Anderson enacting her own much more successful struggle, and producing this book.

I was fortunate to be able to speak with Anderson’s daughter, the eminent screenwriter Laura Jones (
Oscar and Lucinda, The Portrait of a Lady, An Angel at My Table
). Jones told me her mother’s belief was that truly terrible subjects become bearable to us in art, because the art itself—the beauty of form—offers a kind of consolation. Form is the pattern imposed on material or, as the critic Kenneth Burke had it, ‘the satisfaction of an expectation.’

The satisfactions—or consolations—of art in
Tirra Lirra by the River
are profound. Possibly they are so profound that they can distract us from the story itself, a story which, on one reading at least, is a tragedy of ‘vile wastage, vile wastage’: the waste of an artist’s talent.

When I was searching for how to think of this novel, what came to mind was something small and made of material denser than we usually find—like a rock of previously unknown qualities from another planet. Or perhaps a Leonardo painting, in which behind the mysteriously smiling girl there is a landscape with a castle, in the window of which is an artist painting a smiling girl in a landscape with a castle behind her, in the window of which … and so on. There is so much surreptitiously packed
into these pages. And yet, on its surface, this novel achieves the apparent simplicity its narrator recognizes as the hard-won achievement of a great artist.

Anderson was in her early sixties when
Tirra Lirra by the River
was published. It was rapturously received in Australia, and won the nation’s most prestigious prize for fiction, the Miles Franklin. Readers loved it, no doubt responding to all kinds of truths in it, to the point where they assumed events it described to be literally true. Laura Jones told me that, when interviewed, her mother would insist that the book could not be autobiographical, since ‘Nora was born at the turn of the century. [
Pause
.] I was born in 1916 …’ ‘As if,’ Jones said with a smile, ‘that settled it.’

When readers assume the literal truth of fiction, it can give a writer a double-edged feeling. In a way, it’s a compliment: they have found this art to ring true. At the same time, to assume a one-to-one correspondence to the writer’s life is to doubt the artist’s powers to invent. Worse, it is to imagine an open window, even an invitation, to climb in and rummage through the writer’s private life, looking for evidence to tie them to their fictions. Jones says her mother reacted testily, as well one might, to the assumption of literal parallels with Nora. ‘See?’ Anderson would say, lifting her hair back off her face. ‘No scars. No facelift.’ With one startling gesture she defended both her private self and the primacy of her imagination.

The book begins in the late 1970s, with Nora coming back to Brisbane. Her life, in one view, has been a series of escapes from constraints on full personhood for a woman: most notably from Australia, and from marriage. As a young woman she escaped Brisbane’s ‘rawness and weak gentility, its innocence and deep deceptions’ for marriage and Sydney. Then she escaped
the latter for some forty years in London. Nora has come back only because she has run out of options.

Now she is old. As she enters her childhood home, left to her after the death of her sister Grace, she sees ‘a shape pass’ in the hallway mirror. ‘It is the shape of an old woman who began to call herself old before she really was, partly to get in first and partly out of a fastidiousness about the word “elderly”, but who is now really old. She has allowed her shoulders to slump. I press back my shoulders and make first for the living room.’

From the first pages, it is clear that we are in the hands, or the mind, of someone of great, humorous self-consciousness, who can see herself from almost every angle, 360 degrees around: ‘I’ and ‘she’ at close quarters.

Nora enters the living room, a room of which she has strange expectations—of exaltation, mysterious bliss—that she fully expects to be dashed. ‘Things are turning out so badly,’ she thinks, ‘that I am filled again with my perverse contentment.’ This ‘perverse contentment’ I recognize in a deep way from home, from early imprinting of my own. I associate it, possibly irrationally, with the Irish-Australian heritage that Anderson and I, in part, share. It is the foretelling of misfortune as the underdog’s pale triumph. At least, the thinking goes, if the worst does come to pass, you’ll have the grim satisfaction of having been right: the universe might disappoint you, but it could not prove you wrong. I associate it with my mother and her downtrodden forebears; a mind-set bent on pulling wry, self-righteous satisfaction from oppression or mishap. (It works, in my observation, until the end really
is
nigh, when the fact that you predicted it turns out to be no consolation at all.)

But Nora is looking for something important, something close to the beginning of it all—and she finds it. It is the picture
made by the distortion in the ‘cheap thick glass,’ in the living room window, ‘a miniature landscape of mountains and valleys with a tiny castle, weird and ruined, set on one slope.’ In her childhood she had been ‘deeply engrossed by those miniature landscapes, green, wet, romantic, with silver serpentine rivulets, and flashing lakes, and castles moulded out of any old stick or stone. I believe they enchanted me.’ Later, in her teen years, when she reads
The Lady of Shalott
, she discovers that her fantasy place already had a name: Camelot.

And then he comes:

Tennyson’s poem is a romance in which longing for a man causes a woman artist to abandon her work, which brings down
a curse upon her and she dies. When we meet her, the Lady sits in her tower. Like Nora, she makes weavings, and like Nora, she is under some kind of spell that keeps her apart from life. Though she ‘knows not what the curse may be,’ the Lady must stay put, looking only in the mirror ‘that hangs before her all the year’ in which the ‘shadows of the world appear.’ So she sits out her life, making her work. The Lady must not break the spell by leaving her tower to try to get to Camelot.

But isolation, even if it is necessary for artistic work, cannot be sustained against the longing for love and the real world.

If the verse Nora remembers reflects her desire for Lancelot—as lover, or father—it is the next verse of Tennyson’s poem, not in the novel, which seems to encompass its action:

The Lady is cursed when she dares go after life and love. She gets in a boat and quietly expires, floating down to Camelot. The curse is twofold. It is the specific curse of the artist, who must remain apart from the world in order to represent it. And
it is the general one, hoary and old and unfathomable as patriarchy, in which a woman passively submits to parameters she cannot choose, and so a tragedy—operatic or poetic or novelistic—can be made of her exquisite, fated succumbing. (If it were Lancelot who left the tower, lay down in a boat and died, there would be no poem, because there would simply be no action. For some—again hoary and old and unfathomable—reason, as we know, large tracts of Western art are founded on women’s fantasized tragic passivity.)