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?

earth denied

But Doris, fascinated by death, is not alone, Catherine Martin is not alone; the idea of death recurs in the colonial-era writers I've been reading, death is an atmosphere around them, especially the poets, who often kill their characters in the narrative poems --

The bell-bird called to its tardy lover,
The grebe clouds all to the west had sped,
But the river of death had a soul crossed over,
The man with the swag on the bank was dead.


(from The Lonely Crossing by Louisa Lawson -- I suspect that the writer went through the effort of killing this man just for the pleasure of writing about the bell-bird and the grebe cloud and the rhyme of "sped" and "dead" -- the irrefutable neatness of that tump-ta-tump -- and I would suggest, too, that the potential creation of that irrefutability, which is a small mimickry of immortality -- a species of immobility so strongly heavy that it puts the brakes on time itself -- might have been a large part of the poem's demand on the poet's imagination, and that any kind of pity for the possible internal physical or mental strife of the fictional swaggie played no role, though he is "A silent man, on the road alone" )

-- or the narrator tells themselves that life is done but heaven will be happy (Happy Days by Mary Hannay Foott: "And, -- in horizons hidden yet,-- | There shall be happy days") -- there are poems of suicide-longing long before them: "To see God only, I goe out of sight ; |And to scape stormy days, I chuse | An Everlasting night" (Donne, A Hymn to Christ); "O for that Night ! where I in Him | Might live invisible and dim!" (Henry Vaughan, The Night) -- the ancestors of Doris.

Then Caroline Leakey (1827-1881), author of Lyra Australis, or Attempts to Sing in a Strange Land, a book of poems in which almost every page mentions death or else God, who in Leakey's formulation is more or less the same thing by implication because she believes you have to die to seriously enjoy Him, which you will want to do since life is miserable after you have finished childhood (A Young Mother to her Infant: "But, oh! sweet babe, a time is there, | A time of joy for thee, | Ere yet the withering touch of Care | Hath chilled thy young heart's glee;" other poems about careworn adults, "unconscious children in their play," and

The subtle toil,
And shameful soil
Of sorrow, sin, and strife
Cannot out blot
The purer lot
With which it started into life;
And not wholly is destroyed,
But with baser dross alloyed


from To the Evening Star).

Death is an aim, not an obstacle; it cures life.

"What earth denied, -- a father's tear-sought love, --
She now has found in perfectness above:"

from Dora

In 1847 Caroline Leakey boarded a ship for Tasmania where her sister had preceded her, in 1853 she returned to England and the poems she had written for her own satisfaction in the southern hemisphere were published, first in London, then the following year in Hobart, which in those days was Hobart Town but the end part of the name was declared redundant like everything eventually, horses, hand-knitted socks, night soil men, the word "Town" too, and maybe other parts of other words, no set of letters sacrosanct, no phrase utterly safe, a century of transformation for the area, convicts then no convicts, the solid stone roads they built remaining for the time being yet surely not forever, though the one near the Prosser River in Orford (named for Horace Walpole, who was the Third Earl of Orford) on the east coast is "in a remarkably well preserved state. Very easy to find," providing "a delightful and authentic historical walk from Orford along the northern riverbank ... and takes you to the ruins of the Paradise Probation Station."

It was her friend Francis Nixon, the first Bishop of Tasmania, who told her to approach a publisher. These are good, he must have said, reading about the death of a woman named Mabel. "The winds were bleak -- they smote her, and she dropp'd."

The Bishop's mansion lasted less long than the convict road, it's gone; the Quakers built a school there.

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."

drain it, and make a little colony

Then I tell myself I have recognised another piece of Catherine Martin's personality to go with the fear of explaining herself too clearly, and I think, Perhaps she was a perfectionist, perhaps she was afraid of being wrong, perhaps she was afraid of fog, and these observations begin to represent themselves like clues, which is a tendency I might want to suppress, O this understanding that seems too easy, and Catherine Martin so dead so lost so long, forgive me I suppose, and not many biographical details of her in circulation: a regressive writer who published The Explorers under her initials only, M.C., and An Australian Girl anonymously, and then The Silent Sea as Mrs Alick MacLeod (she was not Mrs Alick MacLeod, her husband was an accountant named Frederick), until Dale Spender in 1988 looks at these names and says that possibly "she wrote even more but that it has not -- as yet -- been attributed to her" (Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers).

Stella doesn't have the many-sidedness that George Eliot ("Martin also wrote of George Eliot with great admiration, speaking, for example, of Eliot's ‘superb individuality’, her ‘wide culture’ and ‘intellectual grasp’, and of ‘the depth of philosophic thought’ which characterised her works and which ‘marks a new departure in fiction’" -- Rosemary Foxton) gave to Dorothea Brooke, who could have sounded like a prig too if she had not been so naive and sincere that her own ambition makes her into a joke; she runs into a trap because she doesn't know how to recognise it. Then the ambition to live in selfless dedication leads her into an ignoble circumstance.

But Stella is not flawed like that, her refinement does not betray her, the problems come from the outside, they are not within, she meets a villainous woman in a drawing room, her high-mindedness is correct, it is the people around her who work to thwart her; she is not the villain as well as the victim though Dorothea is both those things, and is Don Quixote the clown-knight.

Martin's opinion, in the Mallee chapters, about the land being refurbished to grow fruit and corn, might have been a legacy of Middlemarch. Dorothea makes plans --

"I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work, and all the work should be done well. I should know every one of the people and be their friend"

-- which is close to the position Stella finds herself in at the end of An Australian Girl. "Give me two hundred acres to cut up into little farms --" she says, but the book ends before the plan is allowed to work itself out.

Which could even be understood as a muffled reference to the hymn of the uncompleted life that comes at the end of Eliot's story even though the evidence for that assumption would never be perfect.

Dorothea is a range of characters inside herself; Stella is only one or maybe two. I begin to wonder if priggishness is the faith that you alone in all humanity have only a single flat clear side or dimension.

The prose agrees with Stella's opinions; she believes that Ted is not intelligent and the world provides clues to back her up; she would like to run away from him and the world justifies her feelings by making him an alcoholic. (The alcoholism was not there before. It was born from her desires. It was abrupt.) Her ideas about properness are allowed to structure the material universe and so this universe is a universal strait jacket. Martin hasn't given herself the freedom (does not want the freedom, in her heart of hearts: doesn't desire it, fears it?), the freedom that George Eliot takes for herself, to make her characters despicable, mistaken, or pitiful. Eliot's characters are to blame for their predicaments -- Dorothea is to blame for marrying Casaubon -- she did it, she was the one, but this blame breaks the reader's heart perhaps.

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.

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.

being a barren waste

"[A]s Stella became more intimate with the Mallee Scrub, its nameless attractions grew on her," writes Catherine Martin, noticing the "white immortelles -- those snowy blossoms of the desert," and their "coronals of silky petals round their deep-gold hearts, on brownish dry stalks, with a few slender leaflets" until she finds two good words for them, "pensive radiance." She sees this delicacy; she runs naturally to the idea of destroying it. Farmers should come to the Mallee, she says, they should sink wells for the groundwater and they should cover the earth with fruit trees. "Nature waits to be governed by obedience to her conditions. Dig, and ye shall find; water, and ye shall reap. If the principle that anyone who makes wasteland productive became its owner were enforced, the Mallee Scrub, instead of being a barren waste, even in appearance, might soon become a great granary of fruit and corn."

But won't the flowers die, I wondered, "brilliant little orchids; scarlet and yellow pea-like flowers; the pale lemon blossom of the native clematis; the small purple geraniums,' obviously they would be eradicated if their parched habitat was replaced by shadowing wet fruit trees, oh surely this is clear, but it doesn't occur to her that this is so, and nor does she realise that this idea of hers goes against a set of qualities that she admires in her heroine: a refined aesthetic delicacy, a subtle appreciation of nature, a resistance to mainstream coarse things, all of which should say, Keep the Mallee that has nothing to befool your soul.

There is this impulse to crush in us, I think, a natural impulse; we would build on the sky if we could; we would hoon on the moon.

By the end of the book you have realised that Catherine Martin has a plan for Australia. She would like to see it covered in small farms with a cow and a cottage. She sees the urban poor revitalised. They can come from England, they will have the opportunity to become prosperous at last on their farms. They will have to stop being urban as well as poor. She was not the only one in the 1800s who looked at Australia and saw a cleansing bath for the destitute. So Mr Micawber becomes a magistrate and Mrs Gummidge cheers up. Prostitutes marry into birdlife. Vance Palmer wrote in 1954: "There is no doubt that during the latter half of the last century the Australian people were acutely aware of their isolation, and were determined to turn to account the freedom it gave them by building up something like an earthly paradise for the common man" (The Legend of the Nineties, Melbourne University Press).

Catherine Martin is in the strange position of being able to see the scrubland and not see it. Or not strange: it must have been affecting a lot of people. So it is only commonly strange. She can write about the landscape as if she is enraptured and she can also hold the contradicting theoretical view that it will be better in the future if people destroy it. The Mallee is worth describing carefully with paragraphs of words, it is precious, and then another set of words arrives, and she uses the word "waste" to dismiss the scrub, though "desolation" just a short way before was not dismissive, it was used with respect because the austerity of the desolation had made her calm and stricken.

Now a new set of words has arrived from somewhere else, a different compartment of the brain, however you'd divide it, or conceive of it -- this set of cuckoo-baby words that comes into the nest of the other words, mimics them and wants to kick them out, not because the cuckoos are vindictive but because it is their nature to behave like thugs. The force of tooth and claw is at work in the ink world. The shapes of nature repeating themselves, repeat themselves, and the behaviour that it detectably living presents itself in the unalive object.

The tenor of her mind alters; the alteration is in the language. The observed landscape that depends on colours and objects and enumerations (it is only a "few" leaflets and they are "slender," and the hearts of the immortelles are not gold but "deep-gold") and also on the longer vowel sounds ("snowy," "deep") is displaced by a swift appeal to tradition ("Dig and ye shall find ..." with its "-ig" "-ind," "-eap") -- the businesslike tone of someone addressing a known quantity -- a quote, a book, a commercial enterprise, the peopling and the tenor of a nation, which had been on everybody's minds since the mass of gold-hunters had arrived in the 1850s to displace the pastoralists from their role as Australia's nouveau riche.

She is not searching and finding, as she was doing in the sentences about "the pale lemon blossom of the native clematis; the small purple geraniums", locating and observing each flower. She is pre-empting and deciding.

Geographically her prose is infected by two different areas, one, the area of the Mallee where the writer observes and is uplifted and humble, and, two, the interior of parliament or another room where people in power construct their abstract decisions of government, and where humility is not an asset.

She is trying to provoke the reader's agreement with a tone that is the opposite of her previous relaxed exactitude of fact.

(They did farm the Mallee eventually but the land does not produce the "fruit and corn" she wanted, instead the farms grow primarily wheat, barley, canola, lentils, chickpeas, vetch -- dryland crops -- with some sheep and cattle.)

through the sombre mass

Doris is drawn into a dry landscape, Catherine Martin is drawn also to these landscapes; her first publication was a book of poetry with a meditation on Burke and Wills who died in bleak countryside (this meditation shaped by the Lusiads, "its descriptive power and 'juxtaposition of contrasted episodes,'" states Kevin Gidding); her last book was the story of two Arunta woman crossing spinifex and rocks to find a son who'd been abducted; the protagonist of An Australian Girl (1890) goes to the Mallee. Her name is Stella and here she will relax severely and clear her mind. (Restraint is a theme throughout Martin's work. Her two Arunta women can be grossly summarised as "the restrained one" and "the impulsive one.") "These vast parched domains, lying in all their nakedness under a sunless sky, have nothing to befool the soul."

During winter in the early mornings the sky is often one unbroken mass of gray clouds. As the sullen red in the east that proclaims sunrise dies away, there is no tint or suggestion of colour anywhere visible in heaven or earth. All around, without break or alloy, are the uniform monotonous tones of sand and gray-green bushes; above is the more sombre gray of clouds, in which the eye vainly loses itself, seeking for a lighter tinge. They are so austere and thickly piled -- those clouds that promise rain, but pass away oftentimes week after week without a shower. They hide the blue of heaven, and the sunshine, and rigidly shroud the horizons, as if to make the picture more ineffaceable -- an arid, formless mass above a sombre, colourless desolation. It is as though one came upon the rigid skeleton of a spent world, or upon a living presentment of primeval chaos, when the earth was without form and void.

I notice the line about rigidity making the picture more ineffaceable because Martin behaves towards her characters as if she believes that this is true not only for the Mallee landscape but true for them as well: she treats them rigidly, she tries to sharpen them in monotone.

No wakening breeze swept through the sombre mass
Of foliage, which on the hueless grass,
Cast but a blurred uncertain shade


-- in the Burke and Wills poem, The Explorers (1874).

In An Australian Girl she singles each character out almost straight away with a set of signals and after that she does not renovate extensively. When a man likes horse racing then it is a sign that he is not intelligent, when he says he doesn't read poetry it is another sign, but a woman who wants to listen to a German academic will be respectable in the eyes of the prose; these facts of character remove the people into separate boxes, where they stay: the woman who wants to know about poetry is worthy, the man who reads nothing but the newspaper is not meant to be celebrated, and in this respect he is the cousin of people with tidy brickwork houses in Patrick White, or the poor bogan woman who watches television in The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower.

I react badly to this assumption of theirs, that I should want to be invited to their club of judgment, this is always annoying to me and even an affront -- to be delegated so starkly to that role -- their expectation that I will submit to their personal ethos of placement, as the characters are forced to do.

By accepting that bargain I accept myself as the author's character: no.

think of another, because mamma is no longer here

Molloy's mother is absent and unattainable although she isn't: he tells us about their time together, he remembers himself kissing her and naming her Mag, so she's there for us but not for the character, who is not with her and must go to her -- we don't have to of course, as I've said, we've already got her -- we've reached her in the way that readers of books reach the characters, that is, we read about them; and we're as close to her as we are to him.

The author degrades both sides of parenthood, Moran the father as well as Mag the mother, the father from the inside point of view, the mother from the outside, "And I called her Mag because for me, without knowing why, the letter g abolished the syllable Ma and as it were spat on it, better than any other syllable would have done," a name that removes her by one letter from a reasonable and harmless utterance, Meg, or even from the name of Samuel Beckett's own mother, May. A g is so close to a y when you look at it. And her own name is in his, she was May Barclay before she married, he was Samuel Barclay Beckett.

So the character's "Mag" is only slightly wrong, or in other words painfully teasingly wrong, and perhaps excruciating. She is so close to being right. I remember now that Moran is one letter away from Moron. May died in 1950, Molloy was published in 1951, ”I am what her savage loving has made me” (in a letter, October 1937), he goes travelling through a manuscript, giving the names Turd and Balls to the fictional representation of his birthplace Ireland, his mother's burial place, her remains reposed in some exact spot; Doris in The Silent Sea by Catherine Martin goes through her salt brush on a cart and dies because her mother is dead, abolishing the gift of life her mother gave her, destroying with her absence the garden where they lived together -- Doris and her fatal crisis of accurate self-foreshadowment, the garden never visited again after her death, the book ending quickly -- "If you had your choice, would you not sooner be back with your mother?" she hints to her friend Victor, and, "‘I would never have left my mother, never—never," she says when she learns that he has remained in Australia while his mother travels overseas.

‘How strange it would be,’ continued Doris, ‘if one of us two died like that little --’

‘Oh, don't, Doris -- don't speak or think of anything so dreadful!’ said Victor, in an imploring voice.

She was silent for a little time, and then said softly: 'But, Victor, you must think of it one day. Even if we lived here a hundred years, what a tiny speck of time it is compared to the thousands and thousands that have come and gone. Everything and everyone goes away after a little time. That is why I try so often to think what the other world can be like.’

‘But, my own Doris, is not this world enough for you just now? Why think of any other?’

‘I must think of another, because mamma is no longer here,’ she answered, fixing her eyes, wide opened, on his face.

Later she engages in that strange almost-passive wandering in the cart in the brush, the plot guiding her there and herself trailing along with it, not resisting, having asked it to take her there with all these suggestions, Martin's books are much about suggestions, with this result: that the endings puzzle me sometimes because she appears to have aimed for a point, but what is that point? The weight of cumulative hinting events seems too heavy for the small light piece of news with which the narrative finally terminates. There is a twist but it is not dramatic enough to justify everything; it drifts onto the page and the book ends on a descending muffled note or dud fade.

And I come away from her books with the idea that she herself does not see her stories clearly enough to describe them and guide them or that she feels shy when they seem to be confronting her with their concrete existences, and so she withdraws from their society, or goes through them dazed, with vague understated ideas, behaving in some respects like Doris, and believing that if she drops enough hints then she will arrive finally at her destination by nearly unconscious default; that the universe will have pity and take her there, a craftless mystery, I say to myself, but Beckett's mystery is crafted, what are the clues, I say to myself: how did I know, how do I think I detect the author's plans through the page?

accident stamped a character upon places

"Details give charm," writes Charlotte Brontë, placing a Romantic landscape in a room and transforming its details into her domestic items: the serene view is boring, the piqued spots of drama are vital, the grotesque detail is a treasure, the frightening vertigo element, the shocking grotto, or not shocking, it doesn't have to be shocking, it can be cattle and ponies as it is in Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, after she decides that one lake is a disappointment because it has too much uniformity: "there is an uniformity in the lake which, comparing it with other lakes, made it appear tiresome. It has no windings: I should even imagine, although it is so many miles long, that, from some points not very high on the hills, it may be seen from one end to the other."

"Tiresome," is a word I have seen used about humans but never scenery, which leaves me with the impression that she is disappointed in this lake as if it is a person that has let her down. It is being that way on purpose. It refuses to give her a winding. An accident would have been enough for her, a cow could have done it. "We passed by many droves of cattle and Shetland ponies," she wrote later about a different landscape, "which accident stamped a character upon places, else unrememberable -- not an individual character, but the soul, the spirit, and solitary simplicity of many a Highland region."

The cattle and ponies chewed the grass; the spirit of Accident had passed through them. They had been manifest Accidents as they were chopping up the daisies. The carriage vanished over a hill. Ann Radcliffe's prose comes across the herd in The Mystery of Udolpho where they fill the same role: they "[stamp] a character upon places, else unrememberable -- not an individual character, but the soul, the spirit, and solitary simplicity" of a country region. Functionally they are the same cattle.

These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose.

The cattle are restful signs of human civilisation, gentle stoics in a paddock; nothing gives scale to a landscape like a sign of human habitation, wrote young Ruskin, though he took it back later when civilisation seemed too industrial for him: these people would not stop at cattle, they'd be in there with factories next. But Dorothy Wordsworth not worried about that, earlier than Ruskin, never anticipating a factory in the field where there is today possibly a supermarket. So she is calm in her pleasure. The Australian women I've been reading -- all born before 1900, all out of copyright -- like to pick up on flowers, I have noted, they tend to see flowers, and they will spend their poems describing flowers.

Bring flowers for the wearied one,
The wearied one of pain;
Bright flowers from the glorious sun,
Will give her joy again.
But, oh! seek them not from gardens,
Nor from the gay parterre,
Wander far into the woodlands,
For blossoms hiding there.

(from VII, in Lyra Australis, or, attempts to sing in a strange land (1854), by Caroline Leakey)

Again above thy fragile flowers
I bend, to bring their perfume nigh;
For only in the evening hours
Thy odors pass thy blossoms by;
But when the ministering day
Deserts thee with the warmth and light
That lulled thee, -- waking thou wilt pay
For these, in sweetness, to the night.

(from To the White Julienne, from Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems (1885), by Mary Hannay Foott)

Myrtle, myrtle lying low,
With the moss about you creeping,
With the torrent round you leaping,
And the grand old mountain keeping
Vigil as the seasons go,
Still to me your music comes
Set in chords august, specific,
When a storm-voice, weird, terrific,
Beats across the waste Pacific
Like the roll of muffled drums.

(from Mountain Myrtle in the The Horses of the Hills (1911), by Marie Pitt)

They write about the larger items of the scenery as well, the cliffs and so on, "strange green hills and the glint of a far bay" (Marie Pitt again, Doherty's Corner) but they're drawn back to the tiny things in that huge continent, the flowers, always the flowers, little items; Leakey writes about violets, she writes about the primrose, she mentions bluebells, not the wattle, not an Australian flower. They miss British things in their colonial or just-Federated lives, they miss the peaceful cattle, they miss the village smoke coming up from chimneys, they want the churchbell but they see the bushland, Ernestine Hill in the 1930s saw the jungle gym of exhydrated cattle around a dead waterhole, and a character in Catherine Martin's Silent Sea wills herself to death in the salt brush because her mother has died. She loves her flowers, gardens of flowers, she cultivates them, she talks about them, she has opinions on the right colours for orchids, then she leaves the pocket of garden her mother has helped her to inhabit, she goes through the salt brush on a cart, she gets ill, she dies, poisoned by a landscape "gray, voiceless, sinister, for ever the same," or without windings, you could say: tiresome.

She could see the sky growing darker, even the sunset flush trembling into wanness, as the dust-storm raged with the fitful wails of a wind that rushes at its own wild caprice over boundless plains, without a solitary wall or hill, or even a line of trees, to impede its course.

"Not even herds," says Dorothy Wordsworth, passing in a carriage and looking, "it has neither cow nor pony." But Ernestine Hill journalistically struck and solemnly exultant about the hollow animals in the dead land.

justice to the smooth narrow leaf

On Saturday as I was reading the introduction to The Incredible Journey by the Australian author Catherine Martin I copied down part of a paragraph, and on Sunday while the excerpt was still sticky in my mind I found Tom on Wuthering Expectations quoting a piece of speech from The Passionate Pilgrim by Henry James, "Out of England, it's but a garish world," which seemed so contrary to Martin that I added her to the comments on that post, since she said that the English countryside was "strong" and "metallic," and she supported the bushland and the eucalyptus leaf:

Eyes accustomed to the strong -- almost metallic -- verdure of Northern lands, to the picturesquely rent, cleft, furrowed and scalloped leaves of deciduous trees, could not do justice to the smooth narrow leaf, evasive in its hues of grey-green and grey-blue, ranging in shape from the faint crescent of a moon one night old to the round curve of a reaping hook. A leaf exquisite in its grave simplicity as a lotus bud on the shrine of Gotama.

Then she says,

It is as if all the contrasts in the life of European and Australian trees were gathered up in their leaves. Those that slip from their buds in Spring to fall in discoloured clouds in Autumn can well afford to indulge in fantastically ornate edges. But how far other it is with those that often have to face rainless years, to live through droughts that suck the life out of the earth, till it is barren as the sea-shore, bleached and sinister-looking as if overtaken by the fulfilment of the dark prophecy: “on tree and herb shall a blight descend, and the land shall become a desert.”

Deserts -- wrote John C. Van Dyke -- the Southwest American desert -- is beautiful -- and he supported it against the Old World too -- which makes me think that a prejudice against dessicated landscapes is not solely an Australian problem, it is in America, and maybe other places.

True enough, there is much rich color at Venice, at Cairo, at Constantinople. Its beauty need not be denied; and yet it is an artificial, a chemical color, caused by the disintegration of matter -- the decay of stone, wood, and iron torn from the neighboring mountains. It is Nature after a poor fashion -- Nature subordinated to the will of man. Once more ride over the enchanted mesas of Arizona at sunrise or at sunset, with the ragged mountains of Mexico to the south of you and the broken spurs of the great sierra round about you; and all the glory of the old shall be as nothing to the gold and purple and burning crimson of the new world.

(The Desert, 1901)

Myself thinking then of the bushes I've seen while I was travelling through the burning Nevada desert, small bushes, miles of small bushes, brown-green creosote and roughly higher than your knee, sagebrush, sagebrush, spreading across the Big Smoky Valley and around the towns of Goldfield and Beatty on the long way south from Elko to Las Vegas through "a forever geology of heat and shale," to quote the Australian thriller writer Andrew Croome (I'm borrowing that from a post on Whispering Gums), though the portion he describes is fairly short; it runs between the city and the Creech Airforce Base; if he had driven further he would have seen things that were not friendly to a forever geology of heat and shale, he would have seen a pink trailer that is also a brothel, plastic bags on fences, multiple adulterations, for nobody is ever able to leave the desert alone, hurling mattresses into it, skulls of cattle, mine shafts; the small-town casinos where we stopped once, because, as M. pointed out, the handy thing about casinos is that you can use the toilets without anyone asking you to buy. We wee for free.

"Pee" they say instead of "wee" in the musical Urinetown, which had a run with the Nevada Conservatory Theatre in early May -- I think "pee" is the American version of the word -- "It's a privilege to pee," sang Joan Sobel operatically in the role of Pennywise -- she came to town to play Carlotta in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom at the Venetian; the man who played the chief of police had been Pumba in The Lion King at the MGM Grand -- and when I search the internet to make sure I'm getting the name of the company right I discover Carol Cling in the Review-Journal writing, "After all, you can still use a casino restroom without having to ante up in advance," surprising me with the time-delayed unity of our minds: it was an ordinary thought after all.

All the creosote bushes looking fundamentally identical from the window of car or train but if I opened the door and walked through them what differences there, the same with gum leaves. From the car what meditation on sameness, at close range what a zoo of different vegetable ideas, the same and the different under one roof or skin of floral cells, and people stood together in the desert like that might seem the same way.

Loveable singly or unmarshalled
they are merciless in a gang.

That's Les Murray on eucalypts.