breaking away into the wide world

“[W]e have been homesick practically all the time.” Thirty years homesick: why is she here, Ada Cambridge? Richer, she would have gone home. De Quincey doesn’t imagine that his other self in Canada is homesick; it is difficult to picture when you are not in it; being like the true temperature of snow. “Doubtless, if we had settled in an English parish, we should have bewailed our narrow lot,” Cambridge writes, “should have had everlasting regrets for missing the chance of breaking away into the wide world.” You can’t believe it, reading the rest of this chapter. Writing doubtless, she means, I doubt. Now she remembers the place where she would have lived with her clergyman if they had stayed, a “beflowered house,” “a tiny hamlet of a parish […] that haven of dignified peace and ease.” “[M]an is content with his lot; harmony is achieved,” says Virginia Woolf while she is describing the life of the Rev. James Woodforde of Weston Longueville in her Two Parsons essay, from The Common Reader: Second Series, 1935.

Surely, surely, then, here is one of the breathing-spaces in human affairs — here in Norfolk at the end of the eighteenth century at the Parsonage. For once man is content with his lot; harmony is achieved; his house fits him; a tree is a tree; a chair is a chair; each knows its office and fulfils it. Looking through the eyes of Parson Woodforde, the different lives of men seem orderly and settled. Far away guns roar; a King falls; but the sound is not loud enough to scare the rooks here in Norfolk. The proportions of things are different. The Continent is so distant that it looks a mere blur; America scarcely exists; Australia is unknown. But a magnifying glass is laid upon the fields of Norfolk. Every blade of grass is visible there. We see every lane and every field; the ruts on the roads and the peasants’ faces.

“[O]ur parishioners dropped curtseys to us on the road,” recalls Cambridge, ”and” – not straight-faced – or straight and not at the same time – “felt honoured beyond measure when we went to see them.” In de Quincey, “Profound solitude cannot now be had in any part of Great Britain […] in England it is possible to forget that we live amongst greater agencies than those of men and human institutions. Man, in fact, ‘too much man,’ as Timon complained most reasonably in Athens, was then, and is now, our greatest grievance in England. Man is a weed everywhere too rank. A strange place must that be with us from which the sight of a hundred men is not before us, or the sound of a thousand about us.” His islands are noisy with humans, but the birds in Australia are either quiet or crying out inhumanly, if songs can be taken as, in some way, human.

They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds;
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable Summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.

That poem is the source of the songless birds and scentless flowers in the first chapter of Cambridge's book. It is A Dedication: to the Author of ‘Holmby House’,* by Adam Lindsay Gordon, whose marble bust is in Westminster Abbey and whose old cottage features an extensive variety of local craft work of the highest quality in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens near Lake Wendouree. If The Boscombe Valley Mystery was published in 1891 and Gordon died in 1870, then it is possible that he lived in Ballarat at the same time as the murderer Black Jack. “His only daughter died while he was in Ballarat and although a daredevil on a horse and an accomplished rider he led a tragic life. His poetry with its rolling rhythm survives him,” states the webpage for the Adam Lindsay Gordon Cottage at visitvictoria.com. In 1889 Banjo Paterson wrote a patriotic poem against Gordon’s birds and flowers.

"A land where dull Despair is king
O'er scentless flower and songless bird!"
But we have heard the bell-birds ring
Their silver bells at eventide,
Like fairies on the mountain side,
The sweetest note man ever heard.

Song of the Future. See also, CJ Dennis, The Golden Whistler, 1933. “Literary nationalists have always been indignant with Adam Lindsay Gordon for referring, inaccurately, to Australia’s ‘bright birds’ as songless:” Roger Covell, Australia’s Music, 1967. The Cambridges migrated in the same year that A Dedication was published, in Gordon’s book Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, which was also the year of his death, at the age of thirty-seven, on the day after publication, when he went away privately with a gun and killed himself in a grove of bayside tea-trees. “At last, one morning in December 1839, the Rector took his gun, walked into the beech wood near his home, and shot himself dead,” Woolf wrote in Two Parsons. The parson in that sentence of course is not Woodforde. Whenever I think of that essay I remember the words, “and shot himself.” Ada Cambridge sailed overseas in April; Bush Ballads was printed on the 23rd of June (and A Dedication had not been printed before, because it was the actual dedication page of the book) meaning that Cambridge did not come to Australia believing that the birds would not be able to sing, even though the first chapter of Thirty Years in Australia leads you to believe that she did. Her corrective statement, “none of which, actually, is the rule,” is not a record of a discovery, it is a mode of alignment with pro-Australian literary forces.





*Holmby House: a Tale of Old Northamptonshire, 1860, was written by G. J. Whyte-Melville, 1821-1878. One of Gordon's favourite writers, according to Henry Kendall's A Memoir of the Life of Adam Lindsay Gordon: the Laureate of the Centaurs, 1892. When Gordon mailed Whyte-Melville a copy of his book Sea Spray and Smoke Drift, 1867, the other man sent a letter to say that if he rode as well as he wrote then he would "put him up in any steeplechase for which I had a likely winner."

the everlasting sense of living amongst forms

When Ada Cambridge in the fin de siecle writes, “Geoffrey Hamlyn was my sheet anchor, but did not seem to be supported by the scraps of prosaic history obtainable,” she is remembering how it was before she migrated to Australia in 1870 with her husband, who was being sent to a position in a southeast country town. His friend had written them a letter “reporting the place not wild at all, but quite like home,” though this friend had seen nothing outside Melbourne (two hundred and thirty kms from the place where they would be living) and knew “no more than we of the mysterious Bush, which I thought of as a vast shrubbery, with occasional spears hurtling through it.” Her retrospective conclusion is analogous to that of Weitemeyer, the poor Hamburg carpenter. “When we had assimilated all the information available, our theory of the life before us was still shapeless. However, we were young and trusting, and prepared to take things as they came.” De Quincey in his Autobiography Continued From 1803 – 1808, 1835, describes his own migration to “the woods of Lower Canada” where he saw himself in his late teens living in a spot he had already picked out, “a cottage and a considerable library, about seventeen miles from Quebec.”

My object [in planning the migration] was simply profound solitude, such as cannot now be had in any part of Great Britain--with two accessary advantages, also peculiar to countries situated in the circumstances and under the climate of Canada: viz. the exalting presence in an under-consciousness of forests endless and silent, the everlasting sense of living amongst forms so ennobling and impressive, together with the pleasure attached to natural agencies, such as frost, more powerfully manifested than in English latitudes, and for a much longer period. I hope there is nothing fanciful in all this. It is certain that in England, and in all moderate climates, we are too slightly reminded of nature or the forces of nature. Great heats, or great colds (and in Canada there are both), or great hurricanes, as in the West Indian latitudes, recall us continually to the sense of a powerful presence, investing our paths on every side …

“[T]he silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart.” Radcliffe, Udolpho, 1794. Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam had the same sensation at a ski resort. Reacting against Great Britain, de Quincey imagines the rewards of the migration logically existing; the opposition engenders the picture, not knowledge, because he does not know Canada, never migrated, knows neither “great colds” nor “great heats,” and is in the same state of ignorance as a tourist who thinks they can walk from the Mandalay Bay to the Wynn in the middle of June without a hat. “These things we did believe in, because all our authorities mentioned them,” says Cambridge, remembering the books she once read about “the physical characteristics of the country, there were but the scentless flowers, the songless birds, the cherries with their stones outside (none of which, actually, is the rule, and I have found nothing to resemble the description of the latter), and the kangaroo that carries its family in a breast-pocket” – she believed in it, as de Quincey can still believe, as he writes his memoir, that the migration might have been as he imagines it, and somewhere a Cambridge who has never migrated is imagining her own migration to the land where the “strange contrasts to the rest of the world which it affords [are] enumerated and commented upon--its cherries with their stones growing outside--its trees, which shed their bark instead of their leaves--its strange animals--its still stranger population--its mushroom cities--and, finally, the fact that the approach to human habitations is not announced by the barking of dogs, but by the barking of trees” – quoted from John Lort Stokes’, Discoveries in Australia, With An Account Of The Coasts And Rivers Explored And Surveyed During the Voyage Of H.M.S. Beagle, In The Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43 by Command Of The Lords Commissioners Of The Admiralty, 1846 – Stokes the original source of the cherries rumour -- though he tell us that he already knew “from the best authorities” before he landed on the continent that “within the heart of Australia, nature seems to delight in contradiction” – and so expected the things that he saw, not the precise forms, but the nature of them: the contradictions.

The birds we observed were common to other parts of the continent, being a few screaming cockatoos, parrots, and quails, and near the water a small white egret. There was nothing of interest to recall our memories to this first visit to a new part of Australia, save a very large ant's nest, measuring twenty feet in height. This object is always the first that presents itself whenever my thoughts wander to that locality.

seized with a great trembling

"[I]t is the dictum of nature, who is the mother of all wisdom." Thus the book closes (A Humble Enterprise), and maybe all the fixed finities in the world are threats of an ending; the cannibals in Fugitive Anne might decide, let me imagine, not to doubt Anne's godhood, ever, no matter what she does, and by doing that they will fasten her in that role, keeping her there, and Anne, married at the start of the book, might have been trapped with her bullocky husband forever if she hadn't escaped from her ship's cabin, and then, when she is the priestess of the Permanently Ancient Mayans (who are known as the Aca if I'm remembering that rightly), she might have been stuck with them in their caves for the rest of her life if the same bullock driver husband hadn't come along through the bush looking for her. "Then, seized with a great trembling, she swayed dizzily, and might have fallen, but for Semaara's sustaining arm." Soon they are trying to feed her to the holy tortoise or throw her into the volcano, as is the Ancient Mayan way.

She is always being shunted into these positions (wife or priestess or god) that could have immobilised her indefinitely (kept in a cave as the goddess, kept in convent or temple as the priestess) if some change and shock had not been allowed to enter the story, whereupon she is no longer a goddess, no longer a priestess, not really a wife, so forced to move on into another state of discovery, where she will be pushed, eventually, yet again, into a further cul-de-sac, until she reaches the one the author was looking for, which is the Albert Hall and the British aristocracy. There she is allowed to rest. Yes yes, says the author, I'll let you stay in this one.

Fugitive Anne is made out of periods of stasis broken by violent disturbances that Rosa Praed, through her characters, dreads, and yet nonetheless she needs them if her adventure story is going to get anywhere. She likes to write those paragraphs of frozen stage scenery (I've mentioned them before), the heroine standing in front of the rock face with her chin tilted up, her grey clothes, "delicate aquiline nose," etc, an aesthetic photograph, the details perfect, the effect perfect, then movement thwarts it, "a spear, hurled down with unerring aim, struck the ground a few paces from the outskirts of the mob."

Stiffness in her scenes, so why not the liquid tremblingness that I recall when I think of stage-scenes in Mervyn Peake -- the setting of the scene around the lake at the end of Titus Groan, with the reflective drop -- why -- as if it is all in abeyance only temporarily and ready to move again -- then why does Praed seem static and eternal, as if Anne's chin could have stayed up there forever with the same perfect tilt?

a living martyrdom, is better than none

Ada Cambridge (going back a few posts) decides that nature wanted her characters to marry. "She says that even an unlucky marriage, which is a living martyrdom, is better than none." Why should nature have any impact on book characters or any opinion of them: they are not natural but we are pretending, and if the sentences say that they eat like real people then the sentences can also say that nature wants them to get married like real people (the sentences can say anything they like), which means that we could add this faked Nature to the other impulses that we might see moving them or approving of them, elsewhere, earlier, in the same book.

Does nature want them to do other things, I wonder; did she want the protagonist to go for a walk on St Kilda pier in the evening, and did she make hints to the driver of the train that killed the father in the opening paragraph? Does nature enjoy the death of the father because the characters would never have been married if he hadn't died?

Other questions. Does nature like romance novels better than other novels? Is nature discriminating, or does style and characterisation not matter, as long as the characters get married? Does nature judge a novel solely by the number of characters who marry inside the novel? What is nature's favourite book? Can nature read? If not, why does Ada Cambridge care? Has she, by having the characters marry, missed her chance to defy nature without nature knowing about it?

Does Ada Cambridge believe that nature can read her mind?

Is she in fact correct, and is nature at this moment reading billions of books simultaneously by detecting the motions of our thoughts? Are the electrical discharges making its filaments twitch? Are our reading brains playing on nature like fingers on a piano? If so, then does nature understand Ada Cambridge's book as if it is a song? Why don't books have choruses?

Does nature prefer The Pirates of Penzance to any other piece of theatre?

he cared for any manner of spectacle

Cockroaches in Las Vegas will appear in the middles of walls, though the thrips sit on the windowsills and at the edges of things; the cockroaches, however, arrive at the centre of a white space with no evidence of their approach, they are always just there at the centre, appearing, as if they have come via spaceships, invisible chairlifts, and so on, in the same way that Ruskin has appeared here suddenly, and I know (as the cockroach knows how it got there) that he is appearing because Tom at Wuthering Expectations and Scott G.F. Bailey at Six Words for a Hat were discussing him a short while ago.

I am still thinking, then, of the way that the attention of a writer expands and contracts in different areas until literature is a sea creature opening and closing its valves, Cambridge expanding into the area of touch, Praed expanding into the area of sight; Cambridge not expanding massively into mood-landscape, and Catherine Martin, however, happy to expand into that area (paragraphs from one, a line or two from the other), Ruskin expanding in Modern Painters when he comes to mountains, and then contracting in Ariadne Florentina when he comes to the Indian artwork, "a black god with a hundred arms, with a green god on one side of him and a red god on the other," contracting down to the word "damnable," and those variations on damnable, "pestilential" and "loathsome," his whole self snapping shut at the sight of an Indian god.

(He has had the same opinion of Indian artwork everywhere I've seen him mention it.)

Also, in Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne, making fun around the idea of expansive deduction itself when, watching a troupe of Japanese jugglers perform on a London stage, he chooses a few impressions out of their act, adds them together, and presents you with a ridiculous patchwork idea of the Japanese -- ridiculous on purpose, because he wants you to understand that the popular entertainment the contemporary theatre gives to its people, is not worthy of them. "There is base joy, and noble joy." He wanted noble joy but London gave him base joy. He went looking for shows on a Thursday and a Friday evening in the February of 1867 and found these jugglers on Thursday and a pantomime on Friday. "These, then, were the two forms of diversion or recreation of my mind possible to me, in two days, when I needed such help, in this metropolis of England. I might, as a rich man, have had better music, if I had so chosen, though, even so, not rational or helpful; but a poor man could only have these, or worse than these, if he cared for any manner of spectacle."

The pantomime was, as I said, 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.' The forty thieves were girls. The forty thieves had forty companions, who were girls. The forty thieves and their forty companions were in some way mixed up with about four hundred and forty fairies, who were girls. There was an Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, in which the Oxford and Cambridge men were girls. There was a transformation scene, with a forest, in which the flowers were girls, and a chandelier, in which the lamps were girls, and a great rainbow which was all of girls.

[...]

Presently after this, came on the forty thieves, who, as I told you, were girls; and, there being no thieving to be presently done, and time hanging heavy on their hands, arms, and legs, the forty thief-girls proceeded to light forty cigars. Whereupon the British public gave them a round of applause. Whereupon I fell a thinking; and saw little more of the piece, except as an ugly and disturbing dream.

Humour here in expansion and contraction hugging together, the contraction of everything into the word girls (and lesserly into the word forty, which links or unlinks rhythmically with girls) and then the expansion that makes the contraction visible (saying it again and again); the potential field in which anything could be mentioned being thwarted by the actual composition of the pantomime, which was the only one given to him in the theatre where he had chosen to sit, and all of life going stop-start, stop-start, little imitations of birth and death if you like, little resurrection comedies. "I am like a man in a box," he explains without saying it. "Whichever way I try to go in the world, all it hands me are these girls along with the number forty." Everything is so strange and arbitrary. Why should it be forty? Because it is Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. But why forty?

etiolating and moderating influences

Critical theory -- from its beginnings in the work of Marx and Nietzsche -- sees the human being as a finite, material body, devoid of ontological access to the eternal or metaphysical. That means that there is no ontological, metaphysical guarantee of success for any human action -- just as there is also no guarantee of failure. Any human action can be at any moment interrupted by death.

(Boris Groys: Under the Gaze of Theory)

I'd argue that Cambridge is a writer who senses and reacts, not a writer who reasons, but she is a prime noticer of interruptions even at the end of A Humble Enterprise when she has spent her book leading up to a marriage, arranging the marriage, getting rid of oppositions to the marriage; now she begins to wonder if she should be happy because she has succeeded. "Also, however well a marriage may begin, nobody can foretell how it will eventually turn out." The marriage could go wrong, everything could go wrong, the world could explode tomorrow; Proust points out that the sun might kill us all next weekend.

People pursue their pleasures from habit without ever thinking, were etiolating and moderating influences to cease, that the proliferation of the infusoria would attain its maximum, that is to say, making a leap of many millions of leagues in a few days and passing from a cubic mili-meter to a mass a million times larger than the sun, at the same time destroying all the oxygen of the substances upon which we live, that there would no longer be any humanity or animals or earth, and, without any notion that an irremediable and quite possible catastrophe might be determined in the ether by the incessant and frantic energy hidden behind the apparent immutability of the sun, they go on with their business, without thinking of these two worlds, one too small, the other too large for them to perceive the cosmic menace which hovers around us.

How is Ada Cambridge going to stop progress, which is the book itself? Calling on "nature, who is the mother of all wisdom" she finally shuts herself up. Nature believes in marriage and nature says that marrying was the best thing the characters could do. An appeal to nature as a fixed finite authority, recognised by everybody, this is how she puts on her brakes, by becoming Rosa Praed for a minute. The spirit of finity is Praed's friend; it has to come to Cambridge, she has to summon it, for once, like a genie that will get her out of trouble.

(I'm going to modify "she doesn't reason" by saying that she does reason (she makes equations out of thoughts, "this plus this plus this") but the expectation that she will come to a conclusion perplexes her; it amazes Ruskin too, when he thinks about it --

Do you suppose I could rightly explain to you the value of a single touch on brass by Finiguerra, or on box by Bewick, unless I had grasp of the great laws of climate and country; and could trace the inherited sirocco or tramontana of thought to which the souls and bodies of the men owed their existence?

-- even though he comes to conclusions constantly and in the same book, Ariadne Florentina, calls an Indian painting "damnable" without any more reasoning than, Because it is:

Giotto or Raphael could not have made the black more resolutely black, (though the whole color of the school of Athens is kept in distinct separation from one black square in it), nor the green more unquestionably green. Yet the whole is pestilent and loathsome [...] entirely damnable art.)

the tale of his marvellous exploits, and those of his wife

When I think about that quote ("They had none of them believed in her voice, till one Sunday, when the Captain held service, she had poured out her glorious contralto in a hymn ...") it strikes me more and more that Praed (in all of the books of hers that I've read) will often write as if you had asked her the question, "How is this character being evaluated by the people around them?" which in Fugitive Anne means that there is a supporting cast of extras who initially disregard the heroine and then change their minds.

There are the passengers who try to ignore her on that ship, and there are the cannibals who are united in a decision to eat her until she sings Ave Maria, which convinces them that she is an earthly representative of Mormodelik, Spirit of the Pleiades. "The warriors continued their dance, but presently stopped too; and now the whole congregation gazed at her as she stood on the raised ledge, her head level with the point of the boulder; her grey habit the colour of the rock itself, falling in straight folds round her; her brown face upraised, with its delicate aquiline nose, its little square chin, and its shining eyes all aglow; her lips tremulous with excitement."

The people on the ship and the cannibals here forming a united group of converted doubters. Later they will be thematically at one with the lost tribe of Ancient Mayans and several nations of Europe. "This was the Danish explorer's first appearance as a public lecturer in England, though in his own country, and in Germany, he has related before several learned societies the tale of his marvellous exploits, and those of his wife the Baroness Marley." (Anne is the Baroness.) "It is an open secret that Lady Marley and Mr Eric Hansen have been received with favour in high places."

The groups notice her, they acknowledge her, she has given them her evidence and they have accepted it, though there is a danger that the cannibals will get tired of her singing and eat her anyway. "In her misery, she wondered whether the time would ever come when she should fail in bringing down rain or in frightening away the tribesmen's enemies; and whether they would then denounce her as a false goddess, and roast and eat her as they were eating the dead warriors of the Pooloongools."

Change here being something you can foresee and dread, whereas in Cambridge you often do not foresee it: the train will arrive suddenly on top of you, or the man you're going to marry will unexpectedly hand you a tray, which is a way of looking at the world that is more in sympathy with a contemporary theorist's point of view than is Praed's appeal to the fixed order of aesthetic appreciation, so firm and universal that even a group of people who have lived far away from Ave Maria can react as if they're acquainted with its reputation, even becoming a congregation: "and now the whole congregation gazed at her." Contemporary theoretical thought in general moving further towards the non-hierarchical, the less-fixed, and the volatility of the self, and Leopardi in the 1820s reasoning that the appreciation of beauty depended on acculturation, the Ethiopian, he said, preferring black beauty to white beauty because relevant experiences had naturally brought them to inhabit that point of view. Praed's cannibals have received experiences that have brought them into the same frame of mind (re. Ave Maria) as the Europeans whose bodies form a component of their nourishment at those times when they are not eating the Pooloongools. Here's the question that comes next: are the rumours about cannibalism's benefits true, and does eating human flesh really let you absorb the abilities-slash-tendencies of your victim?

(Has it occurred to them that by eating her they might acquire the singing voice?)

Praed dreads; Cambridge does not often dread; it is possibility of a universe of fixed statuses that gives Praed this dread, the expectation that a certain thing should be so (or: should be evaluated so) but what horror if it doesn't, what horror, what high stakes we're playing for as we wait here to get eaten; and the result of the evaluation is not completely under our control, no matter how much evidence we give, our grey habits harmonising with the rock face and our contralto pouring out, yet not enough, maybe.

by the magic of her voice, she had carried each man back

That's the difference between the two authors in a nutshell, there, Praed's characters looking for a stable and idealised place which in her books is obtainable or at least you can graze it (Anne, a singer whose voice enchants the people that the author keeps describing as savages, "in truth ... seemed like some goddess of their own race, suddenly descended incarnate among them"), the plot points arrive like proper plotted plot points (which is radiantly ideal) and so on, while Cambridge does not have those ideas, the opposite of stability is what occurs to her though she likes good butter and I think she'd get along well with the people in Bengala, loving food as she does, as long as she doesn't get started on sex and touching, two things they're not so good at. They stay luxuriously and undangerously in food. "The rest of the party passed in, impatient for tea."

The characters in Cambridge's Humble Enterprise are skilled at food. "Not a pot of ill-made tea nor a defective scone was ever placed before a customer by those conscientious tradeswomen."

The protagonist in Fugitive Anne doesn't descend to the construction of a scone, the food is left up to a designated servant like the food in Pride and Prejudice, and instead the heroic Praeds (divorced from food and elevated) tend to be good at opera or speaking Mayan, or other acknowledged exotica: she depends I think on the acknowledgement of the social, networked or interlaced world, and on the expectation that this world will have trained her readers to think that a character who has a hypersensitive soul (Countess Adrian: "the young lady's soul might well be likened, as in Dryden's metaphor, to a rare and well-tempered blade fretting in its too delicate scabbard") or whose singing can drive the audience into "awe-stricken silence" is automatically interesting.

(Whereas Cambridge will ask the reader to consider the difficulties that they themselves have encountered in their kitchens when they have tried to make perfect scones: this talent exists on the same plane as the reader while opera singing exists on a plane above, as though the character is on a permanent theatrical stage or pedestal inside the book -- I recall the emphasis, in Praed, on the act of looking, which is also an act of presentation, the author occupying both sides of the equation -- showing Anne a dead body and inhabiting her reaction as well. "She understood now. God of mercy! That this thing should be!")

A set of words like "awe-stricken silence" will fill in the gaps for the reader of Praed, they will be entranced -- so that the backbone of the bushland adventure narrative is the existence of urban standards, or, to put it another way, the endurance of a certain subspecies of memory, tradition and love -- or, to put it yet another way, not that at all but something else -- the fear of appearing ignorant because you do not recognise a worthwhile object when you see it -- and in the real world the reader (theoretically) would be entertained by the opera-singing person and respectful of their respectable gifts, so in the book they will respect them too, and pay attention, and decide that they are worthy, though the person on the page is never going to entertain them with even a half a second of actual noise, still the characters who can hear it are clamouring for it.

They had none of them believed in her voice, till one Sunday, when the Captain held service, she had poured out her glorious contralto in a hymn. Afterwards, they gave her no peace till every evening she sang to Eric Hansen's accompaniment on the old cracked piano in the saloon. Then, by the magic of her voice, she had carried each man back to scenes on shore--to opera-nights in Sydney and Melbourne, as she had sung airs from Verdi and Rossini and Bellini ...

(Faced with this not-even-spectral scene the readers will live up to the nonexistent not-even-ghostly standards of the ship's passengers and give the singer their attention, or I believe that's the idea, anyway. Perhaps they will begin to daydream they are her, and perhaps the author is already dreaming the same.)

in her cabin

I wrote that last post because I was still thinking of the opposite situation in Rosa Praed, an author who doesn't care particularly whether her characters touch or not, or whether a thing breaks and decays like the Ormuz or whether it neither breaks nor decays; and instead she thinks through her stories in a series of staging-areas where ideas and scenes execute themselves, a character presenting themselves on that stage with a set of attributes or happiness or sadness and the other characters observing them and reacting to that state, whatever it is.

Her ship in Fugitive Anne is too steady to ever throw anybody out like a ball from a bucket (as in Cambridge); it is a stable location where all of the significant characters have been brought together in a group so that they can be introduced to the reader. Once they are on shore they disperse. The author follows one group and leaves the rest. They come together again at the end of Volume One and again more fully at the end of Volume Two, when the story resolves itself and everyone is famous except for the dead ones and the Ancient Mayans who worship a tortoise.

If the Cambridge ship is an open ship with people in danger on deck then the Praed ship is an enclosure where people are supposed to be in their cabins. Anne has disappeared from her cabin. Everybody gets around to talk about it. "'Come,' said the Captain, 'it's nonsense to take it for granted that Mrs Bedo must have thrown herself overboard, because she isn't in her cabin.'" In Praed's Countess Adrian a character retreats from the deck to her cabin because she is "feeling shivery" even though the weather is "very fine," putting, with this one action, a long distance between her and Cambridge's characters who like to expose themselves to storms.

Praed tells you that her characters are noble, defiant, daring, bold, steady in the face of danger, and so on ("Brave and lighthearted as she was, Anne Bedo knew well enough to what dangers a woman might be exposed in the Bush," "he could well believe that she came of some grand old race, and that there ran in her veins the blood of heroes") -- she gives you these words -- but whenever the characters act or think you know that they'd rather be away in a respectable building somewhere, doing something civilised and fashionable with people admiring them ("it was to be fully expected that the young explorer -- himself a fascinating personality -- should form a centre of attraction for the representatives of fashion, science, and culture, who crowded the Albert Hall last evening"), and that everything else for them is a matter of going through the motions: they do not enjoy their adventures, they put up with them -- cleaning themselves as soon as possible when they find themselves dirty ("I'm dreadfully dirty. I want to bathe") -- so that the reader is like a guest at a party with another guest who wants to leave all the time, and the author is the host who keeps saying, "Just five more minutes," which was the situation at a Christmas party I went to a little while ago, with the guest of honour muttering, "There are only two more hours of daylight. I have no life."

the earth is her habitation

But Ada Cambridge does not behave as if she is agonised, the way butoh dancers often do (or as they are known for doing, with their whitened faces, hands turned back, lips quivering, etc); she writes as if harm is always about to arrive and yet like the storm it invigorates her. "Bee—a—utiful!" In her first autobiography she wants to touch a wrecked ship: "When the Ormuz had that accident in the Rip she so tightly filled the dock that her skeleton bow was almost within my touch. No more do I wonder at what ships can go through, having seen how that giant frame was put together. I went down to the bottom of the dock and held up the great hull in the palms of my hands. It was a strange sensation." Noticing here that she remembers "almost" touching it as well as touching it, and that she had to move to complete the touch. "I went down ..."

So her characters like to touch as well and important moment in her book are sometimes marked by touching, one character hands another character a tray in A Humble Enterprise and their worlds change: the tray travels, a ship travels in Uncle Piper, the circumstances are altered, the first character goes from poor to rich like the ones in the Tasma book. It takes longer than just the tray-pass, but the tray-pass is the crucial moment. "The world became a changed place to Jenny Liddon from the moment when Anthony Churchill stood up to take her tray." Then she goes to the sea to think about it. "It was absolutely necessary to have the sea to commune with, under the circumstances -- darkness and the sea." She goes to a genuine place, St Kilda pier, or in other words a place that the author could herself touch and probably had touched.

Afterwards, when she has decided to marry Anthony Churchill, she is still invigorated by the weather on the pier at night: "nightly taking her down to St Kilda for that blow on the pier which still refreshed her more than anything."

The touch of a train half-orphaning her in the opening paragraph, and the launch that throws the couple overboard in the opening of Sisters destroying the book that had been building until then and transforming it into another book.

Thinking now of Leopardi in his Zibaldone saying that a state of nature is the happiest state, because it allows for "illusions" whereas reason does not allow for illusions and therefore makes a soul unhappy: the people of his day were unhappy because they had decided to rely on reason instead of nature, they were developing farther from nature with every year, he said, and as I remember him I wonder if he would believe as I think I do, that Cambridge is obliquely in sympathy with that point of view, or not even obliquely when she refers to "the dictum of nature, who is the mother of all wisdom" -- nature in this case advising everybody to get married -- A Humble Enterprise is a book that wants you to marry, which I suppose means that Ada Cambridge, the author of that book, is mistaking herself for nature and that the dictum of nature is in fact the dictum of Cambridge. Nature wants you to marry someone because it will make you enjoy touch: "the husband necessarily makes his wife feel that the earth is her habitation and the clouds of heaven many miles away."

the length of the ship through the spindrift of the gale

Fugitive Anne: a Romance of the Unexplored Bush, by Rosa Praed

This book begins on a ship, as does The Soul of Countess Adrian by the same author, and ships are not rare in the Australian Colonial and just-Federated fiction I've read so far (I want to write so far because the more I read in this area the more I realise how little I've read: the boundaries are slightly more clearly delineated and they are far away).

Examples: everything changes in The Broad Arrow after the characters have crossed the sea in their ship, even the author's approach to her own story (which is not her own story I realise, when that happens, but a contentious collaboration between herself and the activity of writing), and the Rev. Mr Lydiat in Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill can't get on a ship without splitting into two personalities who are so separate that the author can imagine them talking to one another: "That celebrated appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober might have been made with almost equal effect from the Rev. Mr. Lydiat on board ship to the Rev. Mr. Lydiat on land." The characters land in Australia, the rich uncle picks them up, and they have travelled from poverty to luxury.

The people in Ada Cambridge always love ships; their author goes on loving ships after ships have drowned them, and the love of ships and boats in her books is tied to the presence of danger. "I believe," says the narrator in Materfamilias, "we were somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cape when the most noteworthy of our experiences befell us. We were struggling with the chronic "dirty" weather -- absurd adjective for a thing so majestic and inspiring! -- and I was on deck, firmly tied to my chair, and my chair to the mast, dry under oilskins, and only my face exposed to wind and spray, which threatened to take the skin off. I could hardly see the length of the ship through the spindrift of the gale, and the way it shrieked in the rigging was like fiends let loose. Bee -- a -- utiful!" -- which is something like a fictionalisation of George Santanyana's description of the sublime in The Sense of Beauty:

The suggestion of terror makes us withdraw into ourselves: there with the supervening consciousness of safety or indifference comes a rebound, and we have that emotion of detachment and liberation in which the sublime really consists.

Any water vessel in Cambridge is going to behave like an independent animal or an unstable mass of particles jumbling together in a mixture: "a sudden wave struck the launch, and nearly turned her over, and the young wife and husband, holding to nothing but one another, and simply sitting upon an unprotected plank, were tipped out as easily as balls from a capsized basket" (Sisters).

Cambridge is closer to the practice of literary butoh than any of the other authors I've been reading in this -- series I suppose, call it a series -- because her language is so extremely reactive to the sensual world that she imagines. "Listen to the god of weight," wrote Michizo Noiguchi in the 1970s, referring to physical movement, but Cambridge writes as though this physical movement was always taking place within a world that is inside her own prose.

themselves to realise

It is as if the first three volumes (the two Hymns and The Manor House) existed so that Ada Cambridge could turn against them when she wrote the ones that came after them; she was preparing herself, without knowing it, to repudiate her own stated points of view, not denying the words of other people but denying her own words and pressing back against them, "one of those comparatively rare at that time who do their thinking for themselves in regard to these matters," she says decidingly; and then she describes her own thoughts (her pushing-back thoughts) being acted out by Jim as though they are independent actions and not opinions that are attached to her own brain: as though a butoh teacher had said, "Let's be a tree," but in place of a tree they said, "Let's be Ada Cambridge's point of view," and Jim obeys (since actual living people will not behave like that so the fictional must: they are a balloon blown up and tied to the opinion, they are rustling and coloured heliums) -- a clergyman's wife for forty-seven years until her husband died -- much harder not to wonder what her husband's congregation thought, than to wonder it -- the tantalising and useless mental effort quite relentless there, and irresistible, like the Dockers in the semis.

A woman who once spoke to Ada Cambridge at a funeral spends the rest of her life wondering, "Am I Aunt Ellen?"

Then novels, novels, and Caroline Leakey -- I'm coming back to her -- wrote a novel ten years after her book of poems had been published (that same Lyra Australis).

Neither of these authors stopped after one or two books of reiterated shapes (Leakey's rub) but went onward like the cockroaches that try to make themselves houses in the kitchen, or like the people downstairs who broke back into their flat or apartment when they had been locked out -- rent not paid -- the bedroom window grinding down there at two a.m. followed by shoes on the gravel -- evidence that the person has hands and feet -- that same window later smashed and boarded up -- further evidence of their existence, finally the evidence stops when the manager of the apartment complex has a dowel rod inserted in the window runner.

Leakey wrote about the convict system and called her book The Broad Arrow after the convict pheon. Marcus Clarke? She came before Marcus Clarke. He used her book for research. Why do we read his book and not hers; why do the schools teach one and not the other? In Australia I mean. There must be reasons. Her story is more detailed; his story is more exciting. I mean there are more whippings, drownings, failed rescue attempts, etc, "uncontrolled, unbearable brutality," Susanna Hoe writes in her book about Tasmania (Tasmania: Women, History, Books and Places (Of Islands & Women) (2010)): "the contrast could not be more striking between the control and subtlety of the writing in The Broad Arrow and the uncontrolled, unbearable brutality of the treatment of Rufus Dawes."

Just prior to that, on the same page, she (Hoe) has quoted a woman who lived at Port Arthur with her husband from 1846 to 1850. "There has been a great deal of exaggeration about Port Arthur and the way the prisoners were treated there, but you have only to look at the numbers of them who came on and did well for themselves to realise that it was not so bad after all [...] They were not the depraved nearly maniac creatures you may have read about, at all. Some of them had been sent out for trifles, and never broke the law again," which, if you want to consider it as an emotional shape exposed by language, is similar to the article that David G. Schwartz published in Las Vegas Seven on September 3rd when he wanted to describe The Green Felt Jungle (1963) as a "pack of fabrications, half-truths and tall tales." His article is called The Book That Tried to End Las Vegas. "Reid and Demaris vacuumed up just about every stray anecdote they found and passed it on without verifying a word. And it's no surprise that the city's reputation suffered." "And while people living in Las Vegas knew much of the book was, at best, exaggerated, those who didn't had no way to distinguish fact from fiction."

Las Vegas feels that it suffers like this often, old Tasmania too, certainly other places: very easy it is to feel misunderstood, very tempting to write correctives.

appropriate to the then state of affairs

The poet who wrote The Shadow is closer to the prose writer who wrote Ada Cambridge's books than she is to the poet who wrote the earlier, orthodox religious poems that praise churchgoing people (The Silence in the Church from The Manor House, for example, or everything in the two Hymns) -- since the prose writer says in her first autobiography (Thirty Years in Australia, 1903) that attending church went "much against the grain sometimes," and her comments about the church as an institution are almost completely critical, her fictional clergymen are insensitive and pleased with themselves (the Rev. Goldsworthy in Sisters (1904) is a sponger who would rather eat soup than help you, "Just now the doings of the Redford cook were of more concern to him than Mary's doings," the shipboard clergymen in Not All In Vain (1892) are a pair of small business owners eyeing the competition and measuring their customer base), and in an article she wrote for the North American Review she says: "Church-going in theory is the most direct incentive to goodness, but in practical result I have not found that it has the slightest effect upon conduct, while its effects on character seem often harmful" (The Haunted House, 1918).

She had held that point of view for more than two decades. From Not All In Vain:

Later, when the dreadful business was over, one and another attempted the impossible task of "comforting" the mourner. Aunt Ellen proffered her own particular Bible, full of folded corners and slips of paper; Mrs. Hammond came down with " The Gates Ajar"; Mr. Brand with his red-leaved "Priests' Prayer Book," out of which to "read the service" (as if it were an incantation) exactly appropriate to the then state of affairs; and others, stuffed full of texts and pious platitudes, did their little best in the way of what they conceived to be their duty at such a time.

Observance makes you too knowing, you "conceive" your "duty" too easily; you have surrendered your independence, your thinking is quiescent, you become glib.

Jim had too much delicacy to intrude upon her, as he had too much reverence for the mystery involving them to handle it in the vulgar manner. He was one of those comparatively rare at that time who do their thinking for themselves in regard to these matters, and his thinking, resulting in the inevitable recognition of more things than are dreamt of in the philosophy of those who don't think, had made him humble. He didn't know what life and death and sorrow meant (like Aunt Ellen and the rest); he only knew what they didn't mean. So he held his tongue.

"And the rest" after "Aunt Ellen" I think is a spurn.

A picture of Ada Cambridge renouncing knowingness then, renouncing it in subject matter and in the language, getting rid of the authority she'd borrowed with thee and thy, and the hymn form, and the Robert Browning cadences in A Dream of Venice from The Manor House, allowing herself to have the normal authority of an author (the authority to say that the Marquis went out at five o'clock, not challenging that) but writing with an everyday vocabulary; the poet who had written with Browning's cadences (1875) is dying, the author of A Mere Chance (1882) has barely read Browning; the author who writes Materfamilias (1898) hasn't read him ever and the people in that fictional church are grousing at each other: "Mary Welshman and her husband wanted to make out that it was -- this, however, was merely a bit of revenge for some strictures I had passed upon that disreputable brother of hers -- and they took upon themselves to such an extent that I resigned my sitting in the church and stopped all my subscriptions." Mary Welshman's husband is the Reverend.

is it there we go?

Leakey has found her ending, she has discovered her conclusion, it rhymes, it is neat, it has the unnatural and satisfactory appearance of accuracy, it is helplessly correct. And she has stuck to established ideas in her language, the "sunny smile of innocence," the word "merry" associated with the laughter of childhood, the "joyous songs of birds;" it is too late to find a radical conclusion now, or it is too easy not to. She has set herself up to discover or write an idea that has been used before. She enters the cul de sac and parks.

She is reinforcing a textbook, she is not forging a path, she does not want to forge one, she has no wish, etc. Here is a fact or form of history: she repeats it, she makes that lesson-shape again, she carries on a pattern, she grinds it slightly deeper into the world, she is a rub, and any unhappiness or happiness she wanted to speak about can conceal itself inside that rub and closed inside that closet of accepted shapes: what octopus is it that lives under this stone.

But she is mentioned anyway, in footnotes, a pioneer of poetry via one act: she published a book of her poems when no other woman in Australia, even if they had written poetry, was publishing it in volumes. They sent it to newspapers or magazines where it was published singly.

So there was her and everyone after her, the lumpy stone of disguise becomes the tissue'd curtain of selective exposure, and her name can be associated with other people if you use the asphalt of this fact which may or may not be true, abridging the gravel together, Mary Hannay Foott (1846 --1918) who wrote Where the Pelican Builds, and Marie Pitt (1869 --1948), whose poems sometimes have a hectic rhythmic muscle that was not usual in her peers, what I've read of them ("The fierce red horses, my horses, follow | With flanks to the faint earth flung," A Gallop of Fire, which is a shorter beat than Banjo Paterson in The Man From Snowy River, for instance) and it's there even in the more formal Ave Australia that won the ABC's National Lyric Contest in 1945 ("Fling out her flag to the world and the wrong in it!" "Quarried her quick soul from matrix and clod"); there was Lesbia Harford (1891–1927) who wrote about the Blouse Machinist who was sitting near her in the factory ("She's nice to watch when her machine-belt breaks. | She has such delicate hands | And arms, it takes | Ages for her to mend it"), there was Gwen Harwood (1920 - 1995) in a century that Leakey never saw; and before her there was Ada Cambridge (the same Ada Cambridge), with two books of hymn lyrics (Hymns on the Litany (1865), Hymns on the Holy Communion (1866)), then The Manor House: and Other Poems in 1875, Unspoken Thoughts in 1887 and The Hand in the Dark: and Other Poems in 1913, the verse or hymnal form compelling her at first to write with thou and thee and o'er but then she overcomes the thee and thou; her attachment to the flesh asserts itself and thee retreats, still there but less so, these two things happening together in Unspoken Thoughts, the thee and thy appearing while she's approaching one of her key points then disappearing when she makes it:

22.
Whence did we come? And is it there we go?
We look behind -- night hides our place of birth;
The blank before hides heaven, for aught we know.
But what is heaven to us, whose home is earth?


23.
Flesh may be gross -- the husk that holds the seed --
And gold and gems worth more than common bread;
But flesh is us, and bread is what we need,
And, changed and glorious, we should still be dead.


(from The Shadow)

A thud on dead, like a brake or anchor, and the opposite of Marie Pitt: her gallop-a gallop-a rhythm of always-renewable triumph.

that unknown incommunicable depth

Doris in The Silent Sea commits herself to death but she is not to blame; the author doesn't weigh the action as if it is an action; the book doesn't treat the action as if it is a conscious piece of willed behaviour undertaken by an actual person or fictional person-representative even though, in the plot, it is in fact that absolute thing; she decides to ride the cart through that scrubland for a reason that should have been an active reason; in another character it would even have been a heroic reason but in her it deflates. With the threat of her own importance coming towards her she shrivels up and dies.

Instead her innocence is stressed, and her hints about death are treated as if they come out of her as passively as wet stool.

Which panics me when I read it; the author has hamstrung her character, she is being kind and killing her, which is so sinister; the actions of the author horribly mimicking a liar.

It is terrible for a woman to be like that, hints Catherine Martin earlier in the book when she has a character write to Doris' mother, "She has been sheltered and reared as within convent walls; and up to a certain age this may be right for girls; but she is now over sixteen," yet the prose itself continues this conventing of her; it describes her Lulu eyes, "confiding wide-eyed gaze of a child," "her slender rose-tipped fingers," her toylike activities, "Doris put down the little pink dress and went to the piano" -- the hero isn't knocked for preferring her; it's treated like a normal fact of nature and he's a healthy man -- the equivalent in Middlemarch would be Rosamond, and the hero's attitude to her is Lydgate's attitude toward Rosamond, "That is what a woman ought to be: she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music."

In Martin: "The face and form, so exquisite in their beauty and innocence, seemed to him a type of that spiritual loveliness which man worships rather than dreams of possessing."

Rosamond Vincy is an efficient animal, which Lydgate cannot see, and there's the disaster waiting for both of them, but Doris doesn't have this trap-jaw part of herself or anything else in its place (references to "that unknown incommunicable depth of inner personality" but no follow-up), she's a death-wish girl, and the hero can see it -- because she keeps talking about it -- and she's placid and gentle, which the hero can also see, and the author doesn't make her anything else.

(Her mask is genuine.

"Doris saw him drawing towards her, she turned to meet him with grave simplicity, without hesitation or embarrassment. ‘I was so sorry, after you had gone on Saturday evening," she said" -- this is all true.)

Martin suggests -- hints -- that the ideal maiden is not ideal -- but she doesn't violate her by psychological-descriptive frottage, the way Eliot treats Rosamond; she leaves her to witter almost unmolested by complexity and then she does her in.

She is a character whose movements all are treated as if they were happening without her, and as if they were brought into her by outside forces until all that was left for her was an opinion about the whiteness of an orchid. "All white flowers are so lovely." Like the death lily. And there are meaningful representative remarks about hothouse flowers compared to "those that grow out in the sunshine, and in the light of the moon and the stars—where the birds sing, and the dawn comes red into the sky over the tops of the trees." These are the words of Doris herself, who might be saying, I prefer not to be this hothouse flower. But she has been exposed to birds singing and dawn coming red into the sky over the trees (growing up in her wilderness garden) so if this is a hint then the hint is muddled; the poetry in "the light of the moon and the stars" has lured the author away from a decisive expression of her point, and even though Martin admired George Eliot for her "depth of philosophic thought" she has not paid her back by following her own thought to the depths or byways.

Ada Cambridge can look at a character behaving in a limp manner and in a straight voice she calls her cowardly; she even considers a difference between innate cowardice and cowardly behaviour: "she was, if not quite a coward, cowardly."

I think this is why I contrast them: here is one author who can state an idea brusquely, bring it out, turn it over, and think about it on the page, then here is another author who seems to be paralysed at the hinting stage: "that unknown incommunicable depth of inner personality" might as well be another standard gesture.

In my mind Doris is so aware of Catherine Martin steering her around that in her despair she has turned limp, she is waiting for the day when the predator will lose interest and let her drop from its jaws, and she is hoping that a reader will identify the cause of her limpness and say to themselves, "This is the waving arm of a kidnap victim signalling to me from the top window of a house while I walk by in the street."

it was often tinged

A character can be "cowardly" (Cambridge's word) and still become her uncondemned protagonist; she would like to say that people are not admirable all of the time, and an author who respects the flesh of humankind will go along with it. It is as if she makes her people the protagonists and only finds their weaknesses afterwards; it is as though she has met them in the street and continued holding conversations with this good-enough person until one day they do something and she thinks, Oh, this one's cowardly.

It is not ideal, for the protagonist, for all of us, it would be better for the character's life if she could have been some other way but the character was not that other way, she was this way, as people are sometimes this way. "And she had, as has been already indicated, that fault which, of all faults, perhaps, is most common to girls, whether nice or otherwise -- that amiable weakness that is more disastrous in its consequences than many a downright vice -- she was, if not quite a coward, cowardly."

If Catherine Martin describes the body then she will do it in detail, once, ("The complexion was very fair and clear, and when she talked it was often tinged with swift delicate rose-pink ..." An Australian Girl, chapter one), then leave it almost alone with only small bits of existence to remind it that it is there ("said Esther, a smile hovering round her lips"), but the cowardly woman in Ada Cambridge falls in love two hundred pages into the book and her body is still wholly there to throb: "Rachel, feeling all her body like one great beating heart, moved away to the door." Nobody in all of Catherine Martin manifests the same level of ordinary flesh-awareness as this character in an early work of Ada Cambridge. Martin takes pleasure in her describing-duty but she limits her pleasure; it is temporary, Cambridge's pleasure goes on.

They are so different but their dates are so close, Martin 1848 – 1937, Cambridge 1844 – 1926. They have different kinds of self-respect.

There is this careful grand style of Catherine Martin, this self-consciousness, the austerity of the Mallee is in her description of Burke and Wills, the men's reserve, their upright behaviour, even the monotone that she would find later in the scrub she finds in them or around them,

His pallid cheek more pallid grows.
In vain he strives to speak a last farewell
In quiet and measured words: his low tones fell
And trembled, and at last he looked away;
But all around was strangely blurred and grey.

and it is in the priggishness of Stella the Australian Girl, her interest in an German academician is presented to the reader like a Girl Scout badge for worthiness: a sinner expecting to be mistaken for a goodness and I am not God.

I'm your reader Stella, not your mother. Go to the bloody races if you like.

You have my full support I assure you.

Doris in the scrubland dreams and hallucinates, even the Arunta women trekking across the desert in The Incredible Journey are affected by smoke and magic, the rigidity in every case "was strangely blurred and grey," there is an element that resists your grasp, and even the brightest sunlight, the desert sunlight, can't abolish manifestations that seem uncanny; it cannot make things clear.

the infrequent and delightful gun

Cambridge's prose muddles mental states together ordinarily, in the cocktail sense. Such is the normal condition of her people.

It is a subtle effect and understated-complex but I think her books are easy to dismiss because she sounds so cuddly (most of the literature-overviews I've read either ignore her or give her a pat on the head); her language is friendly but the events are often terrifying (which makes her even happier; she's entertained when she's narrating a railway accident in A Marriage Ceremony, "most of them screamed horribly"), and at the end of Sisters I see how, with only a slight change of tone, she'd sound nihilistic.

She loves to set people up as if they're going to be around for the rest of the book and then knock them off like Hitchcock. She spends a chapter describing a woman meeting her fiancé, marrying him, having a baby, "with the bloom of that most beautifying convalescence like a halo about her," looking forward to her new life in a fresh house, getting in a boat for the first trip to the new house, everything innocent with anticipation, "her contented eyes shining like stars," and then there is a long period of pausing in which you know someone is dead or about to die, and it is her. A Humble Enterprise has to start by killing a deaf man with a train.

Joseph Liddon was deaf, and one day, when he was having a holiday in the country, he crossed a curving railway line, and a train, sweeping round the corner when he was looking another way, swept him out of existence. On his shoulder he was carrying the infrequent and delightful gun -- reminiscent of happy days in English coverts and stubble fields -- and in his hand he held a dangling hare, about the cooking of which he was dreaming pleasantly, wondering whether his wife would have it jugged or baked. When they stopped the train and gathered him up, he was as dead as the hare, dissolved into mere formless tatters, and his women-folk were not allowed to see him afterwards.

Such gaity in "mere formless tatters," such a light and happy sound. Mere! formless! tatters! "Mere" goes out when the mouth stretches into a smile on the e, and "tatters" jiggles around on tt-tt-rr. She mixes cocktails even in the language like this: the most terrible things are reported as if they are maybe a bit normally unfortunate though also admittedly terminal. The thoughts she is having about the mutilated human are defiant of death and stillness; they are energetic thoughts, and she is not ignorant of the equilibrium that has been formed between the man and the hare. The difference between them (formerly so striking, "he held a dangling hare" and the mechanism of death to him is "delightful") has been removed with the aid of an as: "as dead as the hare." The hare died recently, now the man who killed it is dead, and death will extend over the entire earth; the driver of the train will die eventually, and so will the womenfolk until they're all as one another, death coming with a smooth swish-swish ("sweeping," "swept") and the formalities of the living going on after they have passed into darkness, all the laws, and officialments and paternalistic decision-making still puttering on in a mechanical way with their predictable manners -- "not allowed to see him afterwards" -- all the physical laws of the universe trundling ruthlessly, the train that killed you still needing to stop before the people on board can come down to pick up your corpse.

Question: what is her subject matter? What does she come back to? Answer: the intractability of the material universe. That's why she has to keep muddling things together. Not as if conscious and planning, but as if brought to it.

she might begin to enjoy herself

I read in An Australian Girl about Ted the clot who brands himself (the author thinks (as if I wouldn't know she's planned it)) by attending horse races and then I read A Mere Chance (1882), an early book by Ada Cambridge, whose heroine goes to a horse race in the bush and is "very glad to have seen it," which was like a breath released in me; and when the horse race is compared to an opera it is like blasphemy after Martin's book, but I like to tell myself that this is something you'd have to experience; that it is not totally possible to explain (without going through the books yourself, through the period of time it would take to read them, and the accumulation of impressions), the high-minded tight contraction of one book and the baby-birdness of the other one, that feeds on everything indiscriminately. "She was inclined to think that -- for once in a way -- it was even better than going to the opera."

The clamour rose, and lulled, and rose again, as for the second time the green circle was traversed and the horses came in sight -- some lagging far behind, some labouring along under the whip, two keeping to the front almost neck and neck, whose names were flung wildly into the air from a hundred mouths.

And then Mr. Thornley, standing quietly with his eye upon the little slip of wood before him, said, "Bluebeard and Jessica -- half a head." And it was over.

Rachel drew a long breath. She was not sorry that it was over, though she was very glad to have seen it. She shook herself, as if to get rid of a painful spell, and felt that she might begin to enjoy herself again.

So that I see Ada Cambridge has had an idea that Catherine Martin did not have, or did not believe in for her books: that the inner state is not dependent on the refined world's beliefs about the outer state, that sensuous excitement is an emotion that can be respected, and that the borderland between this instinctive flesh-excitement and the mindful summarising of those excitements, is a contradictory flux, and those contradictions can be something an author may recognise and acknowledge: the inexpressible inner ecstasy being accessorised with trim measuring language, "felt that she might begin to enjoy herself again," and the different parts muddled together like a cocktail, not divided into pure conditions, simply "brave, fearless, true," like Burke in Martin's Explorers, not even bad or good, but something that becomes necessary after it is stated.

so slender a basis for a lifelong friendship

I want to marry my tutor, thinks Irene Iddesleigh, and so does the title character of another book, Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, a fictional woman who made the name Shirley popular with the parents of real baby girls; those girls burped and farted in their bassinets, two feats that the fictional Shirley would never achieve, never burping herself, never associated by her god-author with the word fart, though she is allowed to claim the words "brilliant, and probably happy," "independent as to property," "surefooted and agile; she could spring like a deer when she chose," and she possesses other features or attributes that the real girls might not have possessed.

Shirley is the second-appearing significant woman in the book; the first is Caroline who lives in the neighbourhood where Shirley has her property. "The very first interchange of slight observations sufficed to give each an idea of what the other was."

It's the same way in Jeannie Gunn's 1908 book, We of the Never-Never, all of her stockmen so taciturn that an "interchange of slight observations" makes them friends for life with the author (not the author but the author's fictional substitute) when she arrives at their cattle station saying "How do you do" -- a stockman coughs and grins -- "It was a most eloquent grinning, making all spoken apology or explanation unnecessary; and by the time it had faded away we thoroughly understood each other, being drawn together by a mutual love of the ridiculous. Only a mutual love of the ridiculous, yet not so slender a basis for a lifelong friendship as appears, and by no means an uncommon one 'out bush.'"

Some of the men are so shy that they dodge her for days or weeks after she gets there but then they talk about horses briefly and the friendship exists: it lasts forever, the mob of them go cattle-mustering, the woman from the city camps under a tree with her swag, her husband owning the place, the cattle, and the trees.

This is almost the only point where I can put together a formula to make the two books touch, Shirley and We of the Never-Never, otherwise they are not alike; Shirley's essence is a pushing-forward movement being thwarted; We of the Never-Never wants its people to stay still, stay still, keep their attributes intact, and display, and reinforce -- "But a Fizzer without news would not have been our Fizzer." It has a deep love of the same event, in other words, nostalgia, the clock hand that always comes back to twelve.

These linkages appear like theorums in bureaucracy or physics, only regarding or explaining the points that coincide with their equations, then lighting a small aura-area around them, the rest of each book is dark matter, obscured even further perhaps if you put several titles together in a genre, listing Shirley next to Irene Iddesleigh in a list called, "Books about women who want to marry their tutors," or you could extend the formula by calling it, "Books about people who marry the teacher-employees in their families," which means you could include Ada Cambridge's Materfamilias, and add the first two lines to your list, explaining that if you cut off the rest of the book these two lines would be a short story by Lydia Davis. "My father in England married a second time when I was about eighteen. She was my governess." It was for the sake of those two lines that you changed the name of the list to get the Lydia Davis comment in there, which you think is a brainwave, then you have doubts, you wonder if it was really a brainwave, you think about changing the name of the list back again but by now you have already spent half an hour hunting down ten more names to justify the new title and you don't want to get rid of them -- anyway -- you think -- maybe somebody will be impressed -- but already you are lugubrious with regret like Eeyore and you haven't even put it out there yet.