True Stories (18 page)

In short, it was everything the daylight me wanted, as a style, and could not have.

So, when I started working on what was eventually published as
Cosmo Cosmolino
, one thing I wanted was to find a way of incorporating dream into the writing.

I say ‘into the writing' rather than ‘into the story' on purpose. It's easy enough to put a dream into a story—that is, to make a character have a dream. (One writer I know says he's suspicious of dreams in novels. ‘As soon as someone in what I'm reading has a dream,' he says, ‘I either skip it or put the book down.' He thinks that to make your character dream is a kind of cheating.)

What I tried to do, in
Cosmo Cosmolino
, was to enrich the texture of the story, to get beyond the fairly simple psychological realism I'd been writing previously and out into a more wondrous world that would still stubbornly be
this
world. I wanted to write something that had all the squalid panic, the wild swerves of narrative, the radiant emblematic objects and the passages of swooning bliss that I had found in dreams.

It was not easy.

But I found another source—the Bible. I began to read it, partly, I think, because one of my characters was a fundamentalist Christian, and I wanted to become familiar with his territory before I tackled him. But it was also because—

At this point I recognise a false tone in what I am saying. I mean the sort of not quite lies but not quite truth either that a writer can slide into when speaking about her own work. I am starting to talk
as if
I
knew what I was doing
when I wrote the book. In retrospect, one starts to take credit for things in the work which, at the time of writing, were desperate stabs, blind lurchings, or steps off cliffs into thin air. The truth is that I forget why I started to read the Bible. What makes us pick up one book and not another? I do remember buying for a dollar a battered old copy of a 1950s translation of the New Testament in the Cat Protection Society op shop on my way along Enmore Road to work. I remember taking it to my work room, reading a few pages, then deciding—
because my writing was going so badly—
to get hold of the King James Version and the Jerusalem Bible as well, to go back to Genesis, to sit there and read the whole damn thing. I remember realising it would take months, and deciding that since I had a two-year Literature Board grant it was the perfect time to do it.

I also remember being relieved at having set myself a serious task that would remove for several months my appalling attacks of guilt at not being able to write the novel I was trying to write—that I had been given
taxpayers' money
to write.

I remember being astonished at the intensity of the reading pleasure I got as a writer from the Bible—I mean technically. It would be too neat to say that I found in it something approximating to the style my half-waking self commanded but which was beyond the range of my daylight self. But there were passages of narrative in the Bible that made my hair stand on end—with horror, bliss, and
technical awe.
The Book of Tobit, for example. Chapter 5, verse 16: ‘The boy left with the angel, and the dog followed behind.' This is a story in which an angel just stands about casually in a doorway; a man unwittingly
hires
an angel ‘at a drachma a day'. I found, too, certain brilliant ways of
launching
a story, of grabbing the reader's sleeve and commanding his attention: ‘A man had two daughters' or ‘Consider a carpenter, who…' This blunt, urgent address reminded me of fairytales.

And I recognised, often, the emblematic objects of my dreams: things that seem to radiate a tremendous, mysterious meaning: the cloak that Elijah throws over the ploughboy's shoulder; the hem of Jesus' garment, through which the ‘virtue' runs out of him when the sick woman touches it; the staff that puts forth shoots and leaves; a little pancake; the details of sewing and carpentry in the building of the temple.

(I took notes, and later, when I did find a way into writing
Cosmo Cosmolino
, I shamelessly borrowed and stole.)

Dreams and the Bible have certain things in common. One is violence. Some days I'd come out of my workroom white and shaking after reading one of those hideous tales of rape and butchery that the Old Testament is sprinkled with—just as we wake from certain dreams in a lather of horror. What could be a more practical gift, to a writer of my age who has been brought up in a civilised, peaceful country, a member of a generation that has not had to go to war?

When I compare
Cosmo Cosmolino
with the half-waking dream-writing I still do, I see the very wide gap that lies between my waking, working self and the unselfconscious scribbler sitting up in bed.
Cosmo Cosmolino
got away from me, somehow. It went into the purple. I had a huge amount of fun with it, slinging the clauses this way and that; but I didn't come within cooee of my longed-for dream-style, with its simple urgency and directness. Still—at least I figured out how to get dream into the texture of the story. And I got far enough past my pragmatic Australian inhibitions to find the nerve to write a world in which angels stand about casually in doorways, or steal money, or accept a massage, or fly away straight after breakfast.

A few mornings ago my husband said to me when we woke up, ‘You talked in your sleep last night. I noted it down. Look-here's what you said:
IS IT SPECIAL LOOKING?—DOES IT REALLY
EXIST?'
If I was talking about my wonderful dream-writing, I believe it is special-looking, and it does exist—but I haven't found it yet. I'm still searching.

1992

Elizabeth Jolley's War

‘
IN THE MIDDLE
of the journey of our life', when we start to feel the weight of the crimes we are hauling behind us, we might turn to literature for wisdom. It is not readily available, but I have always found it in Elizabeth Jolley, even before I knew what I was looking for. The Old Testament, in one of its great hymns to wisdom, calls it (among other things) ‘manifold, subtil, lively, clear, undefiled, plain…' and adds that its ‘conversation hath no bitterness'. All these things apply.

I picked up
My Father's Moon
with eagerness.
^*
; I had noticed over the preceding year or so the appearance in magazines and anthologies of new stories by Jolley which entered territory her work had hinted at before but not yet fully broached: in particular, the world of nursing, and not the shonky little rip-off nursing home of
Mr Scobie
'
s Riddle
, but a big British training institution, a military hospital in wartime.

Now here is the novel and it richly rewards the wait. All the elements of Jolley's previous work, its familiar (even obsessive) moods, motifs and subject matters, are swung into balance with each other. It becomes clear that it was this early experience of training as a nurse in wartime England which, though she held back so many years from tackling it directly, was all the while sending waves of subdued power through everything she wrote, imbuing it with a personal and particularly female authority of tone—the authority of someone who has bitten the bullet, learnt to bear things and to be useful—an authority sometimes missed, or misread as whimsical headmistressliness, by those unmoved by her simple statements of pain and stoicism, or untickled by her crooked, skidding humour.

It is sad when senses of humour fail to meet, for nothing can be done about this, and how tedious the straight-faced must find it to be told of the spasms of enfeebling hilarity her work can provoke—something like the wild laughter of nurses, or nuns. But when one reviewer disobligingly remarked that the book reminded him of Rachmaninov, I was astonished. If there's any composer Jolley brings to mind, it's not a grandiose tear-jerker of a Russian but someone more like Satie—always resolutely human in scale, modest, thoughtful, quirkily melodic, with flashes of oblique humour and a light touch.

The plot, if it were wrenched against its weave into a rough chronological form, would go like this: Vera, a plain, naive girl with a German-speaking mother (social and patriotic embarrassment) and an English father, is sent away to a Quaker boarding school then on to train as a nurse during World War II; at the hospital she does well at work and study but is socially a flop, resorting to dobbing, sucking-up and petty sabotage, until she is taken up by a reputedly promiscuous doctor and his gushy wife; she falls in love with him, gets pregnant, is abandoned (the doctor vanishes as the war ends: ‘dead or believed missing') and, rejecting her parents' offer to take on the illegitimate child, stubbornly drags the little girl away into a dismal life of privation and precarious survival.

Vera's first-person narrating voice shifts back and forth in time among these events with a suppleness that keeps us hovering several inches above the ground. Its loftiest vantage-point, the brief
now
which encloses the story, is that of the middle-aged Vera who sees on a train a woman she believes to be a nursing companion from that wartime hospital: Ramsden, a slightly senior nurse, also slightly superior in social class, who, though Vera at the time was too proud and too ashamed to accept what the older girl offered her, has remained a symbolic focus of unconditional generosity and grace throughout Vera's memories of that world without comfort in which she struggled.

A sentence that stays with me from one of Elizabeth Jolley's earlier books is this: ‘It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.' In
My Father
'
s Moon
, too, certain remarks resound like quietly struck chords.

The strong feeling of love which goes from the parent to the child does not seem a part of the child which can be given back to the parent.

There is something hopeless in being hopeful that one person can actually match and replace another. It is not possible.

However much a person resembles another person, and it is not that person, it is not of any use.

If, as Emerson says, prayer is ‘the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view', these remarks, still showing in their hesitant or repetitive syntax the effort that has gone into their formulation, function as prayers, and for me they have the same calming, if not comforting, power.

She said…that love was infinite. That it was possible, if a person loved, to believe in the spiritual understanding of truths which were not fully understood intellectually. She said that the person you loved was not an end in itself, was not something you came to the end of, but was the beginning of discoveries which could be made because of loving someone.

Stendhal, in his charming if not very helpful book on love, declares that there are some things which even the most resourceful and experienced woman would not be able to face: for example, ‘just how beastly a wound can be'. Later came nurses. Perhaps Jolley has been working her way back, all these years, gaining skill as she went, towards something she needed to write about a soldier, hardly more than a boy, whose legs have been amputated above the knee and who also has a terrific wound in his stomach. He begs the nurse to put the crucifix from around his neck into the wound: the prim Quaker girl, gold-medal nurse, refuses ‘because it isn't sterile'.

I brush something small and white out of his bed. It seems to roll up like a soft bread crumb. As I swab the wound it seems something is moving in it. It is a maggot. I pick it out quickly with the forceps trying not to show my shock. Suddenly I see there are maggots everywhere. It's as though he is being eaten alive. They are crawling from under his other bandages and in and out of his shirt and the sheets. I lean over him to try to stop him seeing and I ring the bell, three rings for emergency…I try to cover him but the maggots have spilled on to the floor and he has seen them. I see the horror of it in his eyes.

The charge nurse comes around the screens straight away. ‘Fetch a dustpan and brush nurse,' she says to me, ‘and ring for the RSO.' As I go I hear her raised voice as she tries to restrain him and to say words of comfort—that the maggots have been put there on purpose, that they have cleaned his wounds and yes of course she'll put the gold cross wherever he wants it—yes, she'll put it there now…

What is the detail that screws this scene into its tightest focus? Isn't it the comically humble dustpan and brush?

The book's surreal quality undercuts me whenever I start a sentence that is even faintly psychological or sociological. Yes, Vera is isolated and cramped by class, the story is riddled with it, but how can I soberly examine this when the characters who outclass Vera are nurses with names like Diamond and Snorter who ‘never wear uniform and…sing and laugh and come into theatre in whatever they happened to be wearing—backless dinner dresses, tennis shorts or their night-gowns'? The book itself will laugh if I become pompous about it: it ranges so liberally, it's so
flexible.

There are striking passages about the actual process of learning. ‘It's like poetry, I want to tell them, this anatomy, this usefulness of the pelvis… “Describe the acetabulum, and do it without looking at the book”. “A deep, cup-shaped cavity, formed by the union of three bones…” ' The acetabulum, when I look it up, is the socket of the thigh-bone, and in Latin means ‘vinegar cup'.

Under a sequence about study, the pleasure of hearing the pennies dropping, bubbles the half-hysterical meanness of schoolgirls:

As I write the essay, the staff and the patients and the wards of St Cuthberts seem to unfold about me and I begin to understand what I am trying to do in this hospital. I rewrite the essay collecting the complete working of a hospital ward into two sheets of paper. When it is read aloud to the other nurses, Ferguson stares at me and does not take her eyes off me all through the nursing lecture which follows.