I am a traveller. But I do not appear to be getting anywhere recently. I am in a small town where many of the voices and faces are familiar to me—and occasionally speak my language. Or say things that I can understand. One day when I am in the hotel I hear a joke that, later, during an evening joke contest, no one is able to recall because it is told in a language no one in the town recognises. I stand up to tell the joke as best I can. It is helpful, at least, that there are visual aids in the contest—a picture appears in the centre of the room: two very tall couples and two very large cases, red, on the ground beside the couples, the two couples facing each other. I start to tell the joke but don’t know the language it is told in, so I simply imitate the sound of the telling of it—a bit like the way people speak Finnish in comedies. This seems to go on for a very long time, at least until the humor of expressing the appearance of a joke runs out and there is nothing left but to admit that I don’t know how the joke ends, begins, or even what was in the middle. Of course, I am a bit disappointed by all this—but no one else seems to be disappointed. Indeed, someone in the hotel, someone I know, Barry Ladbrook, pokes his head forward and says, “Go on, Stephen, tell them about how the two couples are actually porn stars!” Then, of course, without even knowing what the joke is, it all makes sense, strangely, especially the part about the luggage. So, I make a second, weak attempt to get the joke out, finally—in Finnish, in my Finnish voice. Still, it doesn’t seem to be working. It is really a kind of torture. However, it is over quickly because the scene in the hotel suddenly changes into a courtroom where a rather sickly, old drunk has been accused of a terrible crime. The old drunk drags himself into the dock to give evidence as I hear people in the court say “No doubt he will give the old excuse…” He looks up out of his pathetic, worn-out face, skin hanging off him so he looks like an apple strudel stuffed into a white shirt and dinner jacket—and says, “What can I tell you, for my sins, that might save me from the fire of perdition? Perhaps, I am your friend, and that may be enough.” It is.
Category: Writing
Writing posts.
-
Literary-hetero-potentates Rule, OK?
Robert Dessaix (ed.): Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing; An Anthology (Oxford University Press).
The title is wrong, of course, and the stupid scandal, which the book’s promoters no doubt thought a coup, could have been avoided, if anyone wanted to avoid it, by naming the book honestly. Not an anthology of gay and lesbian writing, this is a collection of writing about gays and lesbians. And, either way you look at it, an inadequate one.
The “literary association of homosexuality”, Dessaix writes in his introduction, “with an abnormal closed social system [of Australia’s convict period] has given Australian writers the freedom to explore homosexuality by locating it inside other kinds of microcosms — in particular prisons, boarding-schools, ships, the armed-services and hospitals.” I don’t get it. What sort of “freedom” is that? A literary association with the abnormal and the closed gives writers a freedom to explore homosexuality by locating it in other kinds of microcosms, which also happen to be (it can’t be by chance!) abnormal and closed systems. This freedom, which does not look to me like a freedom at all, is apparently the same sort of freedom that allows Dessaix to put Patrick White and Elizabeth Jolley into the same category of “mainstream writers, none of whom would have identified themselves as ‘gay’…” The problem with White is that, although his homosexuality was not his ‘identification’, he did not hide it; he is the prime example of a ‘gay’ writer whose subject matter does not line up neatly behind his sexuality.
And that is Dessaix’s — and his anthology’s — problem. This anthology is a demonstration of how narrow the concerns of gay writers can seem if one starts with the (unspoken) premise that gay writers are writers who write from the position of their sexual preference about matters relating to that preference. The truth is, of course, that gay writers and their writing in Australia are not limited in this way; and White is only one of the proofs of this.
It would not have been hard to construct an anthology of writing by gay writers, men and women, that included work about heterosexual relationships and everything else. Such an anthology would have had the double advantage of showing that gay writers write about more than sex and their own sexuality, and of being a true anthology of gay writing. Instead, Dessaix retells the big lie: when gay writers write about sex they are writing about sex; when straight writers write about sex they are writing about life.
This first major error leads Dessaix into others, equally damaging. He asks, for example, since much gay writing (by men) is short and fragmentary (so he claims), whether the form of the novel is “inherently heterosexual, unconsciously based on heterosexual paradigms about the generation of meaning through heterosexual coupling and reproduction …” David Leavitt, who provides a blurb for the book, might have thought this funny, if he read it at all. At least four important Australian novelists might at any time wander onstage and spoil Dessaix’s fantasy. Literature, after all, is the business of stating untestable truths; but I am not so sure we should allow anthologists the same licence.
And why shouldn’t Australia’s literary-hetero-potentates be allowed to put their shoulders to the wheel of gayness? Supporters implore prospective purchasers to consider their commitment to the higher good of good writing, which is to be enjoyed despite the anthology’s short-comings. Leaving aside the real scandal that would greet an anthology of aboriginal writing that had whities in it, or the realler scandal of an anthology of writing about aboriginals that forgot to include great slabs of beautifully written bigotry — it is true that this anthology contains some fine writing. Dessaix must be praised for that, and for finding and acknowledging Jon Rose’s At the Cross: Growing Up in King’s Cross, Sydney’s Soho, though he does not publish any of it, I suppose because the permissions could not be obtained. He has chosen a good part of Dennis Altman’s The Comfort of Men, a book that is nearly important, and would have been, had it found a good editor. Peter Rose, Dorothy Porter and David Herkt make significant contributions to the weight of the poetry (a good deal of which is slight and clichéd).
There are also mistakes. Dessaix thinks that Nigel Krauth’s novel, JF Was Here, is “brilliant.” I’m not convinced. I laughed out loud when I got to part describing the “club-club of fearful hearts”; and this book is infamous for its crass depiction of how someone dies of AIDS.
Dessaix chooses a non-chronological approach in order to avoid, he would have you believe, the trek from oppression to celebration (as though Dessaix’s battalion of hetero-potentates would know anything about that!). AIDS does not figure in that appallingly simple-minded reckoning. The non-chronological presentation serves the interests of Dessaix’s preference to depict homosexuals as transgressive, asocial outcasts. He has simply left out much of the best new writing available for him to publish.
-
[3 September 1993]
I am building a huge structure that is later to be burned and I am building it with several other people. A great wooden structure. We are standing on top of it, stamping in pieces of wood. But it begins to fall apart. We balance on top of it as it falls apart, thinking how we can escape to the building that is close to it. We begin with a plan of escape, hopping from plank to plank, while the structure wobbles beneath us. But the instability of the structure reaches a critical moment and we are still on top of it. We look at each other. Someone close says, “I’m sorry. There is nothing to do. Try to fall well.” I fall. I fall for a long time. I fall, hoping that I will die. I don’t. Instead, I find that the structure was a kind of prison and that there are thousands, like me, detained in it. The prison is built near a wide river. There are no trees, no riverbank (the grass, neatly trimmed, goes right down to the water). A giant boat comes up the river, turns the bend to approach the building, and people start getting off. I’m amazed. They are foreigners, journalists. We will be able to tell them our story.
-
[Sunday 8 August 1993]
Extravagant preparations are being made for a dinner in a very large, almost palatial home. When the guests arrive, however, there is only one of them—and it is Andrew Daddo (one of the Daddos, anyway). He is wearing oddly coloured trousers and other clothing in an old-fashioned style, probably from the sixties. He and my mother sit down to dinner. I don’t go. Grace is recited. He speaks an overlong, rambling, respectful prayer. I’m not very happy about all this and go off sulking.
-
[Friday 4 June 1993]
[I have been having vivid, melodramatic dreams. This morning] I was at a large poetry reading being run by K———S———, but none of the other faces were familiar. It seemed to be peopled by the kinds of characters I see around St Kilda. There were enormous, mutant prostitutes displaying their deformities as they stood around the edges of the auditorium. Something has upset the program and K——— asks me to read. I make my way, despite great difficulty, all the way around the auditorium (apparently going the wrong way) to the back of the stage, from where I am supposed to make an entrance. But I have taken a long time. As I get out onto the stage it is clear that S——— has asked some other people to start reading. I’m upset by this, and there doesn’t seem any point in going on. I look for my ‘cello and immediately notice that there are many instrument cases around the walls of the hall. It’s incredible, I think, that so many people here are string-players! I spot my instrument and go over to it. It is not in its case. When I get there, some young men, musicians, are near it and want to talk to me. It appears to be resting on a chair or sofa and, before I get to it, the musicians are crawling all over the sofa and, in effect, sitting on the instrument. I complain about this. It doesn’t do any good. They say everything will be all right. However, when they take it out from under them, I am shocked to see that the belly has great gouges in it. Clear, white, deep lines of unstained wood appear from under the varnish. It is ruined. It is resting in a car. I am visibly upset and cover my face with my hands. People in a car parked behind me are watching me. I begin to cry in my sleep. I react to its loss as I would to the loss of a person, a friend. I am not hysterical, but I cannot hold back from the feeling of terrible loss. For a long time the musicians try to console me, but I tell them it was unique and cannot be replaced. [Several people want me to play, but I am thinking that there is not much point because I am no good. But this dream is not about music, or about the ‘cello at all. It is about work, about finding a job. I got a call from a consulting firm yesterday offering me an interview for a job. It is the first interview offer I have had in months. The job, however, is with a public utility located in Dandenong! The woman who called was aware that the location of the job could put many applicants off, and asked if I was still interested. My heart sank when I realised it would be impossible for me to accept such a job unless I moved to live out there. I said that I would think about it but knew, even as I spoke, that I would return her call and turn down the offer of an interview.]
Stephen J. Williams 