the shortness of the time left me no opportunity for deliberation

Here's a quick idea: a plot is a question made larger with stories, or a story is a question made larger with plots.

The word "compelled" in the Olga Masters paragraph is a door to a side-story but that door never fully opens, which is an author's way of saying that it can't fully open, because if anything can be done in their book then they will be the ones who do it -- why does the aunt feel compelled? -- why does the ordinary desire to look at someone who is irritating you deserve this strangely powerful word? I can't get off the subject; it niggles at me.

I don't know how Masters (over years and years) came up with the tone of voice that brought her to the moment, raw and flaming, when she decided that "compelled" was going to be the perfect word to use there, with nothing else to support it in its work except hints: compelled would carry the main weight, compelled had to be strong.

There might even have been a time in her life when she would have thought about using the Charles Maturin approach to "compelled," which I've quoted before: "The precipitate vigour of Juan's movements seemed to impel me without my own concurrance, and as the shortness of the time left me no opportunity for deliberation, it left me also with none for choice." Maturin opens the side-story door wider without pretending to have opened it all the way, ie, without pretending to have explained everything about the character's compulsion, ie, he writes a long explanation but uses the word "seemed" to let you know that he isn't pretending to interpret, exactly, only to hint or sketch, or dramatise without commitment -- a tone that Gothic literature seems to like, I muse, remembering that none of the ghosts in Udolpho are genuine and that the ending of that book is a Scooby Doo or Hitchcock's Psycho, an entry in the annals of science-minded characters sitting down at the end of a tale to explain away its mysteries, because, you see, they say, sighing, strangers happen to enjoy wandering through the forest just there with sheets over their heads every night at three a.m., screaming and playing a lyre, and so everything is logical, your fear is due to ignorance, and if you knew everything down to the habits of the local amateur lyre-playing collective, then there would be no mysteries in the world; if we lived long enough to learn everything then Gothic literature would be impossible, and therefore Ann Radcliffe is uncontroversial proof of human mortality, not only in the fact that she is dead but also because she wrote as she did, with the ideas she did, and the horrors she did. Without death we would have to find different horrors.

Masters might have decided that Maturin was trying to pin compulsion down too hard, "untruthfully," she might have thought: "A person who believes they can separate an emotion into its component parts like that is not being honest. I won't play these old games," she thought, "I won't pretend that I can do the impossible, I will be honest." I think this same frame of mind could be one of the inner differences between the work of John Kinsella and Les Murray, both Australian poets, though they separate themselves onto different sides of the continent. Murray, in his poetry, often inhabits another creature, or travels imaginatively inside a mountain but Kinsella's voice tends to stay in his own human throat, he doesn't often occupy the brains of animals, or put words in the mouths of creatures besides himself -- this is my impression, although I should point out that I haven't read a lot of Kinsella.

There is rectitude in Masters, there is rectitude in Kinsella too. The novelist in her rectitude omits any explanation except hints, she writes without splurge. And Kinsella too writes without splurge, but Murray splurges, and he even wrote a poem about splurge.

Argue that Masters' "compelled" might be the result of self-doubt. Thinking she can't do it, she doesn't do it. It's a shy literature, and the hints punctured by a blurt are shyness speaking, first withdrawn, sampling the sound of its own voice, then rushing forward awkwardly with too much power. The point of Maturin's long sentence is crushed down to "compelled," which swells there like a balloon crammed with helium because it is really three lines' worth of sentence stuffed into nine letters.

Here is a fantasy story. Every word in Masters' book is the severely compressed equivalent of a sentence in Maturin's. They are the same book.

lyft hit vp

A plot is a prompt followed by a prompt. The aunt who looks at Amy and wonders if her employer gave her an outfit for free, is one piece of a machine that Olga Masters builds for her book, a machine that you can call the sub-plot of Amy and Lance, a little drum she touches now and again until the reader is ready to see a conclusion, hoping that the effort that writer and reader have put into this construction doesn't go to waste. They anticipate that Amy will either tell Lance never to come near her again or else the two of them will date, and then other events will come out of that.

The question people ask when they see a strange machine is, What does it do?

Machines are expected to help, to gratify, to entertain, to comfort, to exaggerate speed or finesse or skill, and in this they are like people, how will this machine assist me or annoy me, a person wonders, how will this person assist me or assail me they wonder when a stranger appears in the room, how can I graft them to me, can we make an android together, and be useful? Ruskin was wroth in his diaries when people at a dinner party engaged themselves in small talk and wouldn't tell him any practical facts that he could use -- pointless, he complained: a waste of my time. He wanted them to teach him about geology, or any piece of science. That was what he would respond to; he'd react and a conversation would begin. He was a writer, he knew the opening he wanted, and he was rigid; his wife complained; he stood by the mantlepiece at parties.

Two parts, two beings, teacher and pupil together are a centaur, the mechanical arm fixed to the living shoulder is half an android, the centaur is an android and the android is a centaur, the reader and writer together are both. Olga Masters in the 1980s is screwing the pieces together for her mechanical arm or horse body. The appearance of a machine creates anticipation. The reader lifts the front cover and looks inside, ready to set this contraption going. The Green Knight rides into King Arthur's court where the men and ladies are eating a Christmas lunch of dere mete and he suggests that someone should chop his head off for fun, then, after that, if he survives, they can visit him at home and he will chop their head off in retaliation, a good game, he says, a fantastic entertainment, for these were the days before television.

With that the quest asserts itself, the Knight is strange and aggressive to heighten the mood, and of course he survives the decapitation otherwise this would be a majestically short poem and the story would end there, which it can't, the blood of storytelling itself will not let it end there, on page whatever -- say page five, I don't have the book on me, but early is the point I'm making -- the Knight is forced to survive, the muscle of storytelling gets into his eyes and makes them blink on the detrunked head as it rolls across the floor under the Christmas dining table, getting kicked and spraying gore, then the cruel momentum of the story makes him "lyft hit vp," this head, which is squirting red against his green clothes, and put it back on his shoulders "as non vnhap had hym ayled."

He leaves efficiently and grandly. The story is triumphant, it has manhandled itself into existence, it secures the head on the neck, and the horse gallops out of the dining hall, through whatever architecture leads it to the front door of Arthur's castle. We have to picture this part for ourselves, the exit of the horse from the castle, the horse managing to get through doorways, the horse leaving the building, the Knight looking around to work out how to make his way home from here, he consults an internal map, he guesses the right direction immediately because the story has no reason to let him go astray, therefore it won't stand in his way, trip him over, or slow him down with adventures, rainstorms, mountains, wolves, or anything else, the scenery is indistinct ahead of him, it is colourless, there is no village or building anywhere nearby, there is no grass, there are no trees, there is nothing that resembles countryside or sky, and the journey between Arthur's court and his far distant Green Chapel will not present him with any of the obstacles that confront Gawain when he rides out a year later to find this Knight again, because the camera-eye of the poet will be sitting on Gawain's shoulder, while the Knight has nothing now, he has left that eye behind at the lunch table, so with that he fades, and is no longer there.

impel me without my own concurrance

The word "compelled" in the sentence I quoted a few posts ago, from Olga Masters' book Amy's Children, puts Amy's aunt in the category of characters who have felt, at different times in the history of literature, strangely driven to do this or that thing; they are the woman in the horror movie who hears a noise in the haunted woods and finds herself strolling out the door insanely in her filmy nightie shouting, "Hello, hello, is anybody out there, hello," into trees that she absolutely knows are filled with demons.

That hello-hello dementia stopped seeming unbelievable one night last week when there were gunshots down the street and everybody around me fled outside to look at this strange and dangerous event. No one was happier or more confident than the man who knew what gauge it was, although I didn't hear the number.

Compelled to look at Amy, the aunt fills her time contemplating the niece's clothes. What compels her? "The power of dislike," the reader says, maybe: it seems to be the explanation. Masters doesn't tell you clearly but she hints. The dislike is a mixture of emotions, you deduce, an alchemical mix that produced this bit of gold -- every description of an emotion is a recipe for that emotion -- an untested recipe with a hopeful cook, and the ingredients, Spinzoa said, were always desire, joy, and sadness, reasoning that these three could be manipulated and diluted into as many combinations as the human race would require -- maybe the aunt is driven by habit; she might be a woman who always looks down on other women who are well dressed, or women who work under a male employer as Amy does, and perhaps that aunt maintains her morsel of selfhood in the face of all nieces; it is this stubborn cupidity that gives Dickens the seeds of his characters, who will not be moved; the aunt is this cupidity diffuse, a Miss Murdstone is the same quality solidified.

Masters' "compelled" is very naked, but I suspect that the progress of literary compulsionism is evolutionary, and that earlier extrapolations prepared future generation to accept that brevity. "The precipitate vigour of Juan's movements seemed to impel me without my own concurrance, and as the shortness of the time left me no opportunity for deliberation, it left me also with none for choice," is a decompression of her single word, and it was published by Charles Maturin in 1820.

Trust me, begged Maturin and other earlier authors, proving with their busy sentences that they could explain themselves, and the generations of readers passed down that trust like heirloom blankets knitted by themselves so that later authors could take that trust for granted and made themselves cosy under it, is my suspicion, realising that they could discard Maturin's "seemed to" etc etc, or they decided that the blankets were too hot and now they wanted to explain compulsion in words less blatant, feeling the crusty past pushing them and believing that they were compelled to write in a new way; it was their new duty, it was the duty of Amy's aunt to look at Amy, it is the duty of Maturin's narrator to follow Juan, and it is the duty of the woman in the nightie to walk into the woods and die; a belief in irresistible compulsions covers a lot, for example, modernism, postmodernism, the romantics, Young Werther, suicide, gambling, and the way I keep clicking away from this post to look at newspaper headlines in the Age.

There is something mysterious about this compulsion. It seems to me that the characters would always have done something else if that unexpected flood of emotion hadn't been introduced to shove them on (emotion is an invisible force and it has to be an invisible force here because the story hasn't provided a visible prod that would take the place of that mystery, eg, a gun pointed at the left ear, a ceiling collapsing, nothing exterior to them is adequate so they have to do the work internally) but the emotion can never be completely explained, Maturin the Gothic romantic keeps his "seemed" (which is a word that says, "I can't explain why"), treasuring it, excess of sensibility necessary to his genre, there is a strange completeness in the compulsion's victory over the character's mind, the character pursuing their action with a vehemence that seems unusual, or unusually complete; Amy's aunt is "compelled" to stare at her niece until all the details the author needs have been absorbed.

Here is a lantern labelled "Amy's aunt" and the author picks it up and points it at a patch of the darkness that occupies so much more of every book than it will ever be able to illuminate, although, scratch that: any part of a book that hasn't been illuminated with prose is not the book, not lighted, not unlighted, but nonexistent. The aunt is the writer's guide, she is a temporary god-power, bringing into being all the world just then, though she is also nothing, she is the author showing the author a surprise, she is the unseen leading the writer from one word to another, she is the force that produces prose, which may be compulsion; and some writers when they are interviewed will praise compulsion, saying, I can hear my characters talk to me, I can see them so clearly, I only take dictation.

is a monsoon

So Marguerite Young puts her characters together out of contradictions but the element of stability is there in each of them; always a contrast-element in the middle of those stormy fights (detecting fight in the work of the poet Allen Tate: "Tate the truth-seeker of no imperial truth possible or given, explores the richness of contraries and propositions which, each taken to be true, would nullify each other except for their continued presence as a subject of conflict.") Cousin Hannah is the one who climbs mountains, no matter what else she is, and Miss MacIntosh is the one who walks along the beach. Catherine Cartwheel lies in bed. If one of Young's characters meets an obstacle then that obstacle never destroys them or alters them any more than the storm of research destroys the classic novel; the obstacle joins the hurricane and gives the author a new window through which to shine a light at the stable anchor or ground-rooted pole -- on our own sun there are whirlwinds of transparent gas, and if there are no solid objects in the whirlwinds then science can't see them but once a solid is involved then the invisible can be detected -- the same in literature here -- fictional events are solids in the whirlwinds, obstacles are solids, they unveil the contours of winds, they refine the appearances of characters -- the nature of Marguerite Young's book makes these obstacles benevolent -- but Olga Masters doesn't work like that in Amy's Children; her people aren't classical books, and obstacles throw them off course, they swerve, they're impressionable.

Young's characters don't swerve, they plough ahead and trust that their personal gravity will deal with the problem, or not plough exactly because they don't move through life in chronological order, the way Masters' characters do. Young's people don't always know who they are or where they are in time, so say that they hover rather than plough; and when Miss MacIntosh tells the narrator that she's going to establish the primacy of good earthbound common sense she does it by asking questions, almost all of them irrelevant -- "What is a monsoon?" "Where is New South Wales?" "Who was King Canute?" "Where is my brother Richard?" -- which are connected only by the fact that they are factual and that they have factual answers: a monsoon is a real event in the real world and you can in fact describe it -- but this is not sense, suggests Marguerite Young, adding the ridiculous extreme about the brother Richard (a question the narrator won't be able to answer, and I might wonder if all of this woman MacIntosh's questions aren't really some kind of armour or proof of existence or some other thing, each question beginning and ending, each question a short book telling you where the author is positioned), this is not sense, says Marguerite Young, this is a facsimile of sense, and maybe she also says that all common sense is an affectation, it is only apparent not actual, and what else in the world might be apparent and not actual?

Olga Masters' characters have been strapped into time with seatbelts, the chronological car trundles forward and they have to go with it, knocking into problems as they arrive. The car bangs over a bump and their heads shoot up and hit the ceiling. They're bruised but the car keeps going. Young's characters don't bruise anywhere: they easily pick the bump off the road and put it around their necks on a string, saying, Look at my new ornament. Masters' characters suffer the bumps the reader would suffer. I am disguising these people as you, says she. Wallpaper my cracks, says she. Wallpaper their ambiguous parts as you have always wallpapered your own. Or else the reader is not expected to be so interested in other people that they care about cracks. The characters look roughly like people, as the flesh and blood people around us look like people, awkwardly defined and mysterious, and we are in the habit of taking people as they come, in pieces; we do it in real life automatically, so too in books, the habit carries over, the instant leap that occurs when a friend draws three dots and a line on a paper plate and we recognise without hesitating, "That is a face."

Or, another idea, the characters are not there to be understood and mistaken for people but to be absorbed into the brain of the reader, Olga Masters seducing her way in with these imitations so that she can be assimilated, lodging inside like ghost or tapeworm, continuing herself like that, dead Olga Masters, who passed away in 1986. Nine years later died Marguerite Young.

no one way to account for everything

Signs of prosperity change over time: a tallow candle would still have you prosperous today but only because we can see you have money to waste on stumps of efflorescent fat; your eyes love the drips, that black draft is romancing your pocket. Some signs of prosperity do not change; when Olga Masters's Amy can move out of her aunt's spare bedroom she is richer than she was when she couldn't, and that same state of affairs pertains today I swear, even among the Irish flag people and the one dressed as Saint Patrick, although for most of the day I thought he was the Pope. Wuthering Expectations has been thinking about the classics, a canon that has been kneaded to the point where, says a poster at Jillian's Classics Club challenge, the word classic can be applied to Harry Potter if you want, and who am I, asks the poster, to argue otherwise? Who am I? Mr Spitzer in Miss MacIntosh asks the same question and he is actually his brother. "There is no unshakeable law of mental life," wrote Marguerite Young in her profile of Marianne Moore. "There is no one way to account for everything," she says, accounting for Marianne Moore in a single way which is hers.

So the Classics Club challenge is not to read a static thing called classic but to read a book that can be described as a classic in words that convince others and maybe yourself. Your job is persuasion. This is democratic and magical. I argue that Amy's Children is a classic of Australian kitchen sink literature, or books published in the 1980s, or books by journalists born in New South Wales, or books about single mothers in Sydney, whatever suits me; I argue that Harry Potter is a classic of modern children's literature, or books set in boarding schools, or serial fiction, or international entertainment phenomenons, take your pick; I argue that Fumiko Enchi's Masks (thinking of this book because I took it off my shelf last night and it had been rubbed with jam) is a classic among Japanese books with words in their titles that can be translated into English as mask, and so is Yukio Mishima's Confessions of Mask. There may be other classics in that genre.

The libraries of the world are full of classics, anything is a classic, we have enriched ourselves, here is one way in which the changing conditions of our understanding have encouraged the production of certain things and discouraged the production of others, namely, books that could never be called classics of anything, lost books, lost by the lack of imagination in their owners, who can't think of a reason why this book, whatever it is, could be called a classic of something, when, I swear, there is a category small enough to fit anything, a category small as a blue hair ribbon -- look at St Patrick's Day -- a day represented by the colour green -- which allows it to amass any concrete object in the world. No romantic extrapolation is denied. I can walk the streets in a jade cape and people will understand. I can wear a bowler hat with a shamrock in the band. The shamrock can be covered with glitter. It can be six feet tall. The hat can have a drawbridge. I can wear a frog costume and on the stomach of the frog I have sewn the outline of a marijuana plant. Lovely comprehension sweeps through the crowd because it is the seventeenth of March. A category is a thing that can amass. A book is a category: it can amass. Amy's ability to amass is limited; she doesn't have a lot of money and she doesn't show an interest in things that can be amassed without money; she is not like the old woman I noticed in the dumpster behind the block of flats this afternoon holding one arm over her head with the wrist cocked and the hand held flat like the head of a shower. I don't know what she was collecting but it was free. Spring is coming. The largest category on earth is light although blind cave fishes stay evasive; alternatively dark.

to observe her there in her pale green blouse

St Patrick's Day on the Strip: I walked there past the hotels and the rosemary bushes. Half of everybody was wearing green t-shirts and the other half was wearing green hats, an overlap wore both; there were also green shorts, green socks, green bow ties, green straight ties, green wigs, green coats, green headbands with green globes on them or top hats on them or shamrocks on them, everything shone green, everything fluttered green, green face-paint, green necklaces, green tattoos, green capes, a single pair of green soft sequinned gloves waving above a crowd of hats, fur hats with frog eyes, white shirts with green slogans that read Kiss Me I'm Irish, other slogans that read Check Out These Shamrocks (with a shamrock on either side of the chest; no man wore them), green ribbons, green beads, skin-tight bodysuits striped like Irish flags -- and one man dressed in Catholic robes and being Saint Patrick with a mitre on his hair -- the Nine Fine Irishmen pub at the New York New York had a band playing I'll Tell My Ma when I walked past, and the casino had coloured its moat as green as jelly; at night the Venetian and the Palazzo made their white signs ripple green, people were drinking green beer out of foot-long green plastic mugs shaped like simple trumpets, the MacDonalds had a Shamrock Shake, the Rock House was serving five-dollar Car Bombs outside the Imperial Palace or Eye Pea as it's known; the pavement there was so wet that people were skating on it and a man fell over. Outside Margaritaville the tiles were so sticky that my soles wouldn't move without going Platch. Platch plotch I went toward O'Shea's, where they were holding a swansong St Patrick's Day block party before the establishment, with its plaque by the bar remembering a dead patron named Joey Burr "whose favorite Vegas casino was O'Shea's," is shunted away and replaced with a shopping plaza and a ferris wheel. At twelve o'clock the regional manager of Caesars Entertainment played beer pong with a leprechaun.

The Irish pub at Caesars' Palace put corned beef and cabbage on the menu; the British pub at the back of the Crystal modified its patriotic allegiance. A woman came through the crowd holding a swivelling pint in each hand with her elbows out, saying, "I'm sorry, they only had Guinness." Three days later I saw Alexander Waugh, great-grandson of his obvious forebear, and he told us a funny story about a "lunatic" from Ireland who had phoned one morning and invited himself to Alexander Waugh's house because, said the lunatic, my family lived in your house some two or three hundred years ago and I want to look at it. You don't know me but I'll be on the railway platform at half past four wearing a white suit with a small bag in my hand.

Once I was home after the talk I realised that Alexander Waugh's lunatic was Desmond Guinness, son of the brewery. He has written books about old houses and possibly that's how he made his way to the house of Alexander Waugh.

Is there any relationship between St Patrick's day on the Strip and the events in Amy's Children by Olga Masters, an Australian book published in 1987? There is not. There is no relationship. Amy, who lives in the 1920s and '30s, wishes she could afford a blue hair ribbon and finally after some struggle she affords this new hair ribbon, and it meant so much to her when she was first aspiring, that the author bothers to point out that she is wearing it, to let us know that she has climbed and conquered a certain mountain in her life. But the acquired ribbon is mentioned only briefly and perhaps (the reader thinks, or at least I did) it doesn't mean so much to her now, she is moving on, she has moved to Sydney, she has her eyes on larger treasures, for example, a dressing table made of cane.

The human mind absorbs its former self, the old nourishment is not enough, it goes and goes and the acquisition of a hair ribbon or hair band, which was at one time an active living desire that had an area to itself in the conscious thoughts of its host (and it is still there: turn back X pages and read a sentence and there it is, though now the reader's intelligence has moved on into a later phase of Amy's life, and this sentence will perhaps look like a theoretical fact, no longer a felt one, the timeline of the character's life also tied to ours -- I may be wrong here --) is a nod now to an acquaintance the person briefly knew and doesn't regret leaving -- cruel person, thinks Old Amy about New Amy, I don't shrug off my friends like that, and Toddler Amy's craving for whole meals of ice cream goes unfulfilled forever.

A blue hair ribbon would not invigorate the heart of the St Patrick's Day crowd, this thing so tiny, so simple, so cheap, a scrap you could throw away tomorrow and never remember that you had it, lost to you physically and memorably; the ethos of the crowd was waste; the green plastic balls as fat as skulls will be in the bin by next week, the Irish flag suits might have been purchased just for that afternoon because when else would you wear an Irish flag, and they were not meant to be used frequently or every day. Meanwhile the people in Amy's Children need to make the most of everything, they are housed and they have clothes and so they are not totally poor, but the idea of buying a bodysuit just for one event or even a pair of green plastic eyeglasses would be beyond them; it would seem incredible. When we were in a rented small house once, an old house by the sea, we found in the kitchen a 1930s cookbook that told us how to saw a calf's head in half, but today where would I find the head of a calf detached from the calf? They were richer in calf's heads back then. Now we are richer in plastic sunglasses and also Irish flag costumes. Goods come in cycles, one thing is in great supply, another thing is in small supply, then the one thing goes out of fashion and the condition for the other thing become right and it rises, automatically, naturally, goods swim like salmon, goods signal flux, the community breathes in and out, tallow candles are invented in Europe and for once even the middle class can afford light, Rembrandt taking advantage of this, and other painters as well, so we have first tallow candles and then The Night Watch.

Miss MacIntosh in Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, argues against electric light because it encourages people to look at one another at bedtime when decency should be in darkness; and in former ages, she says, men married men and women married women and none of them knew because they couldn't see the other person undress. One of the secrets of Young's style is this: go to the point of reasonable logic and then add the touch that goes past reasonable logic. Never don't go too far. There is no too. She, like the St Patrick's Day crowd, is alien to the spirit of Olga Masters' people, who, in their brink-of-poverty state, worry that even the reasonable limit is too far and a small set of furniture will summon, like a talisman, bankruptcy.

Loss in Olga Masters is ferrety and desperate, loss in Marguerite Young is a grandiose wash and roar but how can this be any other way when her characters raft around on such a massive pad of words? They lose their wigs or their homes and words pour out of the loss, masses of words, it's impossible to be poor in Miss MacIntosh because you're always rich in prose. But Olga Masters is not lush,* she doesn't give her people much to live on, she gives them a poverty of words to eat and they react by feasting on the spectacle of caneware bedroom furniture. The revellers are out on the Strip while these people scrimp. As I was reading Masters it was difficult or impossible not to be aware that other books were proceeding in a more extravagant fashion.







* She's shortwinded, she likes to collapse a physical description of a character into someone else's thoughts about the character, and she often uses the psychologies of the characters to tie them irresistibly to some action that helps her shift the descriptions along, for example, the "compelled," here: "Her uneasy feeling about Amy increased minute by minute, compelled as she was to observe her there in her pale green blouse, cream jumper and navy skirt. She knew the jumper was one from Lincolns and began to think Lance might have allowed her to take it without paying."

She was a journalist for decades before she began to publish fiction. I wonder if she picked up that shortwindedness from her journalism.