tinged with pale gold

Bengala was published in 1860 but it is set about twenty years in the past, before the gold rush changed the nature of the Australian colony from a gentle accumulation of people and farms into a site of hectic immigration; the general view of history lessons today is brutality followed by gold, but, reading books set in that period, I see a different point of view, a soft progress with guilty tussles to and fro about the abuse of the indigenous people and the use of convicts who were, for the length of their sentences, as good as enslaved to their farmer-masters -- this arrangement was corrupted or interrupted forever by the interior penetration of outside longings: rapid township diggings going up, the phasing-out of free land for retired military, the phasing out of transportation as well -- a free trip to Australia was not a punishment any more -- a blindsiding eruption of other manners, like the skin of a bubble being pierced, though that upper-middle life did not vanish and it's there in Martin Boyd's Langton Quartet which was published between 1952 and 1962, and the people in his books (with their picnics, their parties, their enjoyment of life) are recenter versions of the ones in Vidal but bohemian and Melburnian whereas Vidal's people are living in country New South Wales.

They are the same species, which is the lunch-eating species.

It all seemed very remote to her, as she sat with Wolfie at lunch on the verandah, while the winter sunlight gleamed on the hock bottle and tinged with pale gold the far purple forests of Gippsland.

(Martin Boyd, Outbreak of Love)

Patrick White goes to that class for characters as well, looking at the extreme uppers and extreme lowers, the people living in manors and the people living in shacks (The Riders in the Chariot), and food has a regular integrated walk-on part in all of his books though slimy when he writes about it (wet caramels pushed into mouths: The Vivisector): still: food: grossness, lowness, farts, and then the elevation of a character having an insight, the Vivisector son struggling for transcendent paintings, or Miss Hare in the Chariot.

Vidal never makes a fart, nor does she make an ecstasy.

However she does have agony and madness.

Harry Heseltine describes the milieu of Vidal's book like this in the introduction: "Bengala does not sit easily within the conventions of Austenesque realism, colonial romance nor melodrama, though it has elements of all three; and it links contemporary English literary, moral and religious debates with social life in Australia during the short period when hopes were entertained for the creation of a colony fit for English ladies and gentlemen."

So there was a phantom nation in the collective mind, and this country may remain forever in the future, which is the place where we are not and have never been.

a pie, meat sludge

At the back of this U.S. copy of The Broken Shore they've put a glossary to delineate chook, bludger, ambo, dill, and other words that don't seem to contain their own explanations, chicken not leading naturally to chook unless you know the path already, but there's no guide to the words like "big boss-woman" that look as if they explain themselves -- a sort of vague woman somewhere dictating policy, assumes the reader in the United States who has never heard of Christine Nixon because she is not local, and maybe some part of them decides with an instant reflex, see, political correctness, the author is throwing the words "boss-woman" in there because they think they need to be PC, this is so artificial -- feeling actively alienated by the presence of this totem -- and they flit too, over the significance of one character "eating a pie, meat sludge" not picturing the thing that the Australian reader probably pictures (they are not picturing it because such a pie does not exist in the United States in any kind of popular way, chicken pot pie being the closest, size-wise, but chicken pot pie is white cardboard in grey drench, not the sludge and slurry of the pie the character without doubt was eating in the brain of the author), which might even be a Four 'n' Twenty pie, specifically, as I mystically sensed it, in a cellophane packet, and behind that an atmosphere of meat pies, pies at the footy, pies in the hands of children, pie ads on the sides of shops, even the pie in Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm which I mentioned -- months ago, several posts, hell I bore myself -- one of the characters there eating a pie as well, also meat sludge -- not described with the word sludge but the meaning around the pie would have admitted that very word and Temple's word sludge would have accepted the scene in White's book, the character Basil eating some sort of mess and wiping all fingers on his foulard, though Temple's pie does not admit White's disgusted comparisons with deep filth, dirtiness, foulness, the humiliation of Basil's sister as her brother sits there with this lower-class thing -- all of this is alien to Temple's meat pie, even though the word "sludge" could have supplied a link if he had wanted to draw those conclusions and could even have been a reference if he had extended the idea there, paying some sort of homage to the meat pie in Eye of the Storm, the police officer in his Broken Shore eating a homage before he drops his packet in the bin and goes away to arrest a group of murder suspects.

The Patrick White foulness-idea here maybe having something to do with impurity in the Victorian police force, Temple being interested in that, but not in a White-way, which is high-strung, the prose spitting with its hands clenched and the nails digging into the palm. Temple is dry and tired with hardboiled crime novel tiredness, everybody corrupt, nobody trustworthy, or very few, maybe the swaggie-character in his shed.

The novel ends with extra stabs of betrayal thrown at the character to show that betrayal doesn't end just because the temporary case has ended; betrayal can lie low for years and erupt by chance, nothing is eternal but betrayal. None of White's ecstatic moments for Temple's characters, only relief when things don't go completely wrong, or the sound of a recorded opera on CD. "Callas, Bergonzi and Gobbi always helped."

Peter Temple's police officer with the meat pie could have been called Baz, for the sake of White's Basil, and Baz wipes his fingers afterwards on a paper tissue out of his shirt pocket (reference to the foulard); then the rest of the book would have to be reconfigured to admit this sort of reference, there would have to be more references (to cue us to this one) and a reason, in The Broken Shore, for that abrupt and weird reference to The Eye of the Storm to be useful; it would have to be a different book, but it is not a different book, and so the pie is as it is and not any other way, it is not a reference to Patrick White; even the tiniest element is singing in tune with the corpus, and not being all that it could be, which is the price it has to pay to be there at all.

the skin on the table

But what I was going to point out, when I started that second-to-last post, is that White appears to be an idealist and Zoshchenko seems not to be an idealist; the people in his satires are squabbling over small things but what else do they have to think about? Nothing, nothing, nothing, I don't think he ever even suggests that there might be something there for them to miss out on; he looks at the spot where White sees something elevated and he sees the word "Love" written in letters, he asks the real world to show him proof that this idealistic situation exists and the world gives him a man biting a woman in the nose. Chaos, he writes in his autobiography. A baby is surrounded by chaos. How does the baby navigate? I was happy until I was in my teens, then I was in anguish, and I have been miserable ever since, says Zoshchenko. He is a depressive clown. Where is the source of his misery? He believes in sources. He must have seen something. He will follow back, using reason and logic; he will try to remember his earliest memories. So he does and early memories are not the solution. Dreams are the solution. Perhaps dreams. Water dreams. He has a sort of Freudian-Pavlovian-scientific theory mixed up with the ideas of other mental practitioners who are not Freud or Pavlov. Now he is not being funny any more because he is trying to work out what these ideas are so that he can take them seriously. He explains them carefully in order.

(This is the most boring part of the autobiography. The earlier parts are more interesting because he will tell you his memories in the form of short stories, like this:

I am sitting in a high chair. I am drinking warm milk. I get some skin from the milk in my mouth. I spit. I roar. I smear the skin on the table.

Behind the door someone cries out in a terrible voice.

Mama comes. She is crying. Kissing me, she says, "Uncle Sasha is dying."

After smearing the skin on the table, I begin drinking my milk again.

And there is a terrible cry from behind the door.

(all still being translated by Hugh McLean)

In every other part of his work he makes fun of the future, he makes fun of the present, he makes fun of the government's improvements and the overpowered lightbulbs they've given to their people. He is kinder to his petty-bourgeoisie than Patrick White is to his, but he is kind by default and out of misery; they are not capable of aspiring to the world of sensitivity and art and sacrifice, not because they are thick, but because that area of the world isn't there.

Patrick White observes that a higher life is possible, he creates Miss Hare in chapter one of Riders so that she can be this finer thing, then he can be cruel and kick his villains because they are insensitive, and they are letting down the human race with their sodden spitey dumbness, but Zoshchenko, seeing no possibilities, has no villains, and his people flail of course, they flail like Miss Hare's father in White's Riders (a man who senses the ideal-world and tries to enter it by building a mansion -- the wrong way to go -- becomes surly, uncharitable, unhappy), but he can't condemn them, and this is not even (going back to that word) kindness, it's because he can't, not in the environment he has made for them to inhabit. What stops him? His own construction. He tries to explain dream-water-theories with a straight face: he is boring, the reader shuts the pages, the prose environment has turned on its progenitor. It says, "I am being misused." It suspects that it comes from his misery and his confusion. If he cures himself will he still be able to write? The prose isn't taking any chances. Prudently it strangles him.

in your opinion, was the nose bitten off for savory satisfaction?

Different people dwell alert or blind in front of the same phenomenon: I read Patrick White, patrician, Australian, disgusted on paper by the material aspirations of the petit bourgeoisie, and then Mikhail Zoshchenko, Russian, expensive childhood undone by the Communist revolution and his own itches (dropped out of university; restless), non-patrician, scraper-by, writer of very short pieces, his satires peopled with that same materialist bourgeoisie group (a different nationality, Russian not Australian, but the desire for plumbing and clothing stays intact): he sees them grasping pathetically for tiny things, sees them squabbling over paltries, the author does not redeem the paltries, the author sees that they are greedy, and yet the author is different. Where are the White-lessons in spirituality? Where are the characters like the suffering intellectual Holocaust survivor in Riders? Where is the sensitive mystic employer and her mosaic goat?

Nowhere, not in the sample of his work translated by Hugh McLean anyway, and published as Nervous People and Other Satires by Indiana University Press, a collection that contains forty-seven of his very short satirical pieces as well as skinnied-down versions of his novellas and the autobiography he never finished, the Party finally catching up with him in the mid-late 1940s during a crackdown, sending his publishing career into the wilderness, allowing him back eventually but too late: the author never got his wheels back on the rails after that disaster and died in 1958.

I am going to write about love he says at the start of one of the novellas (a good love is sacred in White -- Voss -- love-telepathy --), and he looks for an example of love to show you what he means when he writes the word: the first example he can find is grotesque.

The author read recently in Pravda of a young barber's apprentice who, out of jealousy, bit off the nose of a girl citizen. Isn't that love? ... Or, in your opinion, was the nose bitten off for savory satisfaction? You can go to hell! The author has no wish to upset himself and stir up his blood. He still has to finish writing this story. Then he has to take a train for Moscow and make some unpleasant calls on several literary critics to ask them to take their time about writing critical articles and essays about this story. Well then -- Love!

And his story about love is made of these digressions, the writer letting you know how prudent he is -- he is ridiculously practical -- he is nonsensically practical -- he is practical with the kind of scrupulous selectivity that nonsense is, he decides that it is a waste of time to describe the hero because if he does that now, then "the son-of-a-bitch will grow up by the time this story is published." The ordinary housekeeping parts of a novel, character descriptions, motivations, all of this evades him; he goes to do it and the world turns him into a liar -- yah -- he seems to say -- I would describe it for you if it would stand still for once but it never does. If I describe that then I have to describe this. I write the word "love," I think about your reaction to that word, I defend the idea, three pages go by, and now I'm in a worse mess than before, we've got noses bitten off and appeals to the Party and oh god I'm just a harmless nice man trying to get through a basic plot.

The subject of this story: chaos: the idea of romance is a contrast to chaos, the ideal gets put down in the world and, look, it's bent and kicked, you wouldn't even recognise it if he wasn't there using the word "romance" to remind you, the circumstances are grubby, the people are not handsome or interesting, they get distracted, the author is ignorant, and time keeps passing and wrecking everything, chaos wins, there is a stupid argument, the hero spits on his fiancée's mother, chaos is stronger than the power of storytelling, it's stronger than Zoshchenko the author: he lets it in by trying to be good and truthful (describing the hero would be dishonest) and it undermines him. So much for good deeds.

Miles away in Germany Robert Walser was having the same problem; he would decide to describe a couple sitting on a bench and then the objects around them wanted to be described as well, a snail, a snake, he would tear himself away from the snake and some other digression would push its way in, he would end up describing an angel; the story would ask for an interesting touch so he would insert a military man in a hat, then confess immediately that the military man was irrelevant, he was only there to give you, the reader, a handsome surprise, which he, the author, had just ruined by explaining everything.

extra bloodshed was useless

So the action in Dorothy Dunnett's world is not the action of her language, the imagined world is described but it is not present in the souls of the words, it is not sympathised with by its materials, the atom-word fights against its role, this fight was clawing at me, and my princess was offended by her pea.

Dunnett must have read over her books before she sent them to the publisher and the feelings that came between myself and her book must have never have struck her, instead she saw the substance of her language being the substance of her plot's action, and the same with the person who told me to read her work; they did not see a split between the language and the action, they were rapt and stayed up past their bedtime with the Lymond Chronicles. The queen gave her an OBE; there was an International Dorothy Dunnett Day in 2011 with another Day planned for this year, and people travel to the places whose names she has used in her books though probably not Timbuktu at the moment due to the fighting and the destruction of monuments.

So I feel like a person who swears they have seen a ghost when everyone else says, "There is no ghost," and I am Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, frantic over ribands.

Seeing the differences between myself and her I want to fill this gap out with a piece of reasoning to settle myself down, and I would like to decide that she was using her language unconsciously and not consciously, and that those well-mannered words she put directly into Macbeth's thoughts, one would hope ("He was sensible enough, one would hope, to realise that extra bloodshed was useless") were noises that came to her without shyness or premeditation; it must have seemed normal to her that a person should say that phrase, any person of any class or race, and this middle class formality in the mouth of a royal thug would never have seemed strange, never mind if she had read her draft a hundred times, though even when I remember that it is a modern translation of the imagined speech of an eleventh-century Briton (with the emphasis on translation) it still seems strange to me, this niceness, under the circumstances, which are bloody, and in the mouth of a man brought up among ancient Orkney sheep and hideous rocks.

She is everywhere in the book but she seems asleep, she seems to be using phrases because they are familiar. Patrick White -- going back to Riders in the Chariot -- seems alert in everything, and arch, alive, frustrated; not only does he have an opinion everywhere but he is aware of that opinion, and pushes it hard, often with disgust; every time he writes "brick houses" he is disgusted, and bristles with disgust. He is filled with force-points. The black goat is a force-point, he charges it with Mrs Jolley's foot, with the shock of that attack, the sudden cruelty, which is an emphasis, a Decadent technique, this violence, this sadism, and then maintains the shock with tension in the conversation that comes afterwards, about the goat, the aggression in the sentences, aggression generated between the characters but not released -- the goat is a multiple symbol but tension holds it tight, it does not dissipate. White's style is the fist-style. He likes diffusion but not dissipation. He places his opinion, you are never allowed to forget what he thinks of the brick houses, and his eyes exist throughout the book, his opinion looking out at you and pressing itself home in the arch placement of words; he writes a panopticon, you are always under surveillance, and the books crush in on you. "White ... does more than get under your skin; in his best work, he flays the reader bare," wrote Nicholas Shakespeare in the Telegraph on the nineteenth of October. I'm going to throw this in: he wants to make you hysterical.

Meanwhile the countryside in a book by Freya Stark or Ernestine Hill is filled with surprise performances, vaudeville acts, announcements, somersaults, nothing is completely expected, and at any moment another person might come on and entertain you with some strange behaviour. The right response (in the language of the books) is not hatred or disgust but it should include some kind of applause, in other words a description, which is evidence of the writer's attentiveness to this thing that is even more decisively not herself as she describes it. Ernestine Hill can see the man staring at a chicken and figure out his mental state from a distance, therefore she is not that man, and when she records him speaking to her then she is doubly not him. A sign of unity in these books would be silence.

thereof came the likeness

There is an H.P. Lovecraft character called Shub-Niggurath, or "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young " -- black goat -- but it didn't occur to me, when I was writing the last post, that I should draw a connection between the mosaic in Patrick White's floor and Lovecraft's Goat. I have an impression of Lovecraft and an impression of Patrick White and the possibility that White might have been thinking of the Elder God from The Last Test and The Mound sounds ridiculous; that possibility was rejected so immediately that I didn't even feel it being rejected, and yet the words, "black goat," if they prompted me to write about paganism, and see goats under olive trees, and think of scapegoats, and fly around looking for legitimate connections, why shouldn't I believe that those words tested the knob on the doorway of this illegitimate connection and discovered it was locked? I never felt their hands on the door, no nerves there, a dead spot detected by rational thought now, and not by instant touch.

Mrs Jolley is "evil," quote, unquote, states the book, saying it not shyly but openly. She drives her employer terrified and frantic, and Lovecraft has his evils as well, that drive people mad, like the evil of the housekeeper, which seems to be an indigenous thing, not the result of poverty or of rough parents in White's depiction of her, but an innate quality, as the indifference of the Elder Gods is likewise beyond explanation. Characters who are good or at least harmless like to recoil from both of them -- you'd think this connection between the two goats would be obvious -- but it isn't, I believe it's pointless, and the more congruous I argue it the more I want to point out that I do in fact think it is incongruous, while the connection between the mosaic goat and classical pagan Greece seems obvious; it was a deduction that leapt up naturally and immediately.

Patrick White would have known the pagan goat (I must have said this to myself without thinking about it), and not have known H. P. Lovecraft's goat, or not have wanted to make a reference to that Goat even if H. P. Lovecraft's stories had been his favourite bedtime reading.

He would talk about good and evil in other terms, I say to myself, classical terms with references to works of art whose importance is supported by years of influence and consideration, and witness the chariot in the title, the merkabah, mentioned in Ezekiel, with four animals to correspond to White's four martyred main characters ("Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man," Ezekiel 1:5), though, now, reading the Shub-Niggurath page at Wikipedia to remind myself of the spelling I see that Lovecraft's Goat might have been inspired, like White's black mosaic, by Pan, or perhaps both Pan and Satan: "we may believe that here Lovecraft was inspired by the traditional Christian depiction of the Baphomet Goat, an image of Satan harking back to the pre-Christian woodland deity Pan," wrote the theologian Robert M. Price, quoted there at Wikipedia.

Satan! I think, and a new word occurs to me: the housekeeper's evil is demonic, in the sense that it is indigenous, as a demon's evil is indigenous. And I start to think, "She is kicking the mosaic in two ways. She gets rid of the things she doesn't like but which she isn't, the scapegoat part, for instance, and she denies the things she is, the black demon of her." It is a kick in several dimensions. The evil Mrs Jolley comes from Melbourne and misses the trams, as do I, though the automated ticketing system is stiff and the inspectors in their bundly dark coats look like Paddington Bears.

the animals that see

That news is all extraneous to Patrick White's book and no use to you in understanding the novel and no use to me in understanding it either, though it might in some way help me to think about something else, not a thing about novels but a thing about brains, and yet this thing is a thing that I have thought before and am perhaps only retreading, or re-emphasising to myself, driving the groove deeper, and creating an idea-shaped sore or perhaps moat, or else let me go up not down and call the moat a wall or barrier, between myself and other of the world's citizens who think in different ways, or, to give you one example, a man the other day told me that crop circles were not caused by aliens, as the History Channel mistakenly believes, but by fallen angels, a statement that assumed the shape of a gulf between himself and me in my mind, though apparently no gulf whatsoever in his for he told me confidentially that the History Channel people are materialists, hence their reliance on the alien theory and their rejection of the angelic, saying this in a tone of voice that let me know that he believed I now shared with him this fallen-angel-crop-circle picture of the world. Then he asked me if I would like to go to the circus. "Do other people have experiences like this or is it just me?" I asked M., who confirmed that other people in the world did indeed have similar experiences, and that he was personally acquainted with a Taylor Swift impersonator who had been invited out by a hunchback.

The number of events that might occur in this world at any moment is very large and on some future fantasy day I might have to abandon the word "unexpected" because I will have learnt not to be surprised by anything, reaching this state of mind via a system of mathematics combined with an infinite knowledge of objects and actions; in an instant I have multiplied everything and in that way I am never astonished because this thing that has been presented to me is always the answer to one of my million million instant and automatic calculations.

Mrs Jolley in White's book is not like Mrs Flack in that she is poor where Mrs Flack owns her own brick house, but Mrs Jolley is also physically vicious where Mrs Flack is I think solely verbal, and when Mrs Jolley sees a picture of a goat in the mosaic on her unwordly employer's bathroom floor she decides to kick it apart, making a symbolic assault on the anti-philistine sensibilities that White's educated contemporaries attributed to the pagan era (with its mosaics and Mediterranean goats: see: shaggy Pan), denying also truth, clarity, honesty (because the sensitive employer Mrs Hare says, "Goats are perhaps the animals that see truth most clearly"), and additionally killing a scapegoat (the book has character-scapegoats, all this ties in); she is wrecking art and attacking the aesthetic longing that made the sensitive Mrs Hare's father bring Italian craftsmen to Australia so that they could install a goat in his floor, and, then, because the goat is black, she is being a symbolic bigot, the hue black associating itself with the main black thing in the book, the character sometimes nicknamed "the blackfellow," the Aboriginal painter Alf Dubbo.

She is attacking the mansion as well, because it is antithetical to the sharp new houses she prefers, she hates this house on a gut level, and on the most basic level of the story she is behaving like a villain, cruel woman, damaging an object that someone else loves and preferring plumbing to romance. Any Patrick White character who likes domestic convenience is going to be a philistine. It is like a law of nature in his books. It is like weather.

of that relationship

Separation between people in Matthews' poem comes down to shame -- without shame they wouldn't have to camouflage themselves so secretly -- "A shared culture offers camouflage | behind which we can tend the covert fires | we feed our shames to" -- which reminds me that this idea of a sharp split between the inner and outer worlds of the person has been used by other writers; I've read it recently in Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot, "Where the road sloped down she ran, disturbing stones, her body quite agitated as it accompanied her, but her inner self by now quite joyfully serene. The anomaly of that relationship never failed to mystify ..." -- and why the word inner and why the word outer, and why only two: that's a question, though note that White is an author who likes strong divisions, and he likes to clash them against one another, so that when a sensitive unworldly woman in Riders decides to hire a housekeeper you see that she is really importing a cactus to scar herself against.

Everybody scratches one another in that book, all the characters have some angular difference, and even when they are representing the same general idea they will come at it from different directions, until each example proves something different about the idea; and the martyrdom of the Jewish character in Riders is not the same as the martyrdom of the painter, and the philistinism of the housekeeper Mrs Jolley is not the philistinism of her friend Mrs Flack.

When I see the name "Mrs Jolley" of course I think of Elizabeth Jolley, the author of Lovesong and Mr Scobie's Riddle, and I remember that White often argued with people, but Chariot came out in 1961 from Eyre & Spottiswoode, which is too early for anyone in literature to start feuds with Elizabeth Jolley, who didn't publish a novel until 1980, yet, still, even knowing that, I have trouble reading the name "Mrs Jolley" in this book without imagining a photograph I know of Elizabeth Jolley's face, very black and white with herself coming into the frame diagonally. I do not think that the character looks like this photograph, I only imagine the photograph. Mrs Jolley is not an imaginary woman who looks like Elizabeth Jolley, she is, simultaneously, a line of dialogue on a page and a photograph of Elizabeth Jolley's head and neck inside a rectangular border, which somehow moves around, associating itself with the name Jolley and representing itself in an imaginarily visual sense inside my idea of the sensitive employer's mansion, in the foyer by the staircase with bannisters (this is a picture of a house from some other source; I don't remember if this foyer or these bannisters appear in White's book), but remaining aloof from the housekeeper's beliefs, for those beliefs are not represented anywhere in the works of Elizabeth Jolley, in a way that would make me think that she supported them, and in fact the opposite; she was like White in that she wrote, also, about people scarring one another, and about their imaginations.

in and out of the game

I like Freya Stark's romantic singularity more than Matthiessen's primal hugging and why I prefer it is a thing I might one day sit down and think about, though it may have been Peake when I was younger, helping to teach me, yet I believe it may have been my own sense of privacy, standing foremost, fitting me to like Peake's books, and also, recently, Vilette, with its protagonist who loves her interior, her loneliness, and her thoughts. I looked at a copy of Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot and remembered one nurse in The Eye of the Storm running through a paragraph of thought while she's alone in, I think, the garden.

Walt Whitman makes me uneasy whenever he decides that he is large, he contains multitudes, he sees all of America, "The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, | I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen," this big web he says he is, this interconnection, this human being as a spy camera never letting you away, or me; all of us his grist, but then I remember that he says

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

and that the conglomerate poem is made of discrete pieces, two-line verses, aphorisms, and other independent units: it contains antisocial elements, and people will normally remember a line or two or a scrap, but rarely the whole poem at once: the isolated reserves itself, and is a mark of mortality. The isolated is the thing that stops.

And I wonder if the removal in Song of Myself is less the removal of a door between the narrator and other people ("Unscrew the locks from the doors! | Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!") than it is the imaginary removal of the door between imagination and life, for if he is "hauling my boat down the shallow river, | Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter" then he is living an imaginary life, he is his imaginary life, and he is only doing and being the things that Walt Whitman has heard about in his private brain, from books he's read or papers he's heard, or lessons he's had, these bits of news about Egyptian gods, ships, horses, and buck hunting, but anything he does not mention I assume he does not, in his role as a singular and absolutely disconnected nineteenth-century North American person, know. He has assembled a primary set of sources; he arranges them so that they radiate out from him. He is a little adventure-story writer, and all lives are adventure-story lives, all imagined, as the person takes the available information and dreams up boundarylines and relationships -- Whitman dreaming heavily of both, and having both, being the sensual unit and the universal object at the same time, an ambiguity, as Peake's characters in Gormenghast are hampered by the society of the castle and yet the author tells us that they are "themselves;" they are coherent, as no reader in their modern choice-world will ever be. The Countess Gertrude, buttocking up the ladder in the seared library, is expressed beautifully by her bottom, but my bottom has never done the same for me.

(This idea of being "yourself" is a strange one now that I come to think of it; what does it mean?

In Titus Groan and Gormenghast it seems to mean that you are consumed in yourself, your nature dictates everything you do, and even your features, your nose, your feet, your hair, will be examined by an author who wants to know whether this part of yourself suits you or not; you behave absolutely in the way that the thing that is you should behave (you're not only never out of character, you're always reinforcing that character), you do not let anything else distract you; you are solitary in the ongoing consummation of yourself, you are a vacuum into which anything of you disappears if it does not express that character.

I see commentators who say that Peake's characters have been damaged by their setting; I do not often see one who points out that they have brutally been perfected by it.)

eat it, I'll know you

[continued]


Why should the women cook? The author has made their home a symbol of hospitality in her book and this man is counting on her to stand by her symbol. His joke depends on the reliability of his god. But aside from that, why don't they tell the strangers to go away? I look in M.'s secondhand copy of the 1965 Farm Journal's Complete Pie Cookbook and feel as if I'm holding evidence of a complicated answer in my hands. From beginning to end, the author, who is nameless, and probably a committee, tells women to cook and men to eat. That arrangement is described several times clearly in the introduction.* If a man isn't present then the food can be aimed at friends, family, guests, or children. (Chocolate Crinkle Cups are "Party dessert for the Junior High set.") But the idea is that the person who bakes must be a woman and that the woman must give her cooking away.

The assembling of the ingredients and the baking of a pie is not the complete action of a cook. The cook is expected to bake, then distribute, then receive gratitude. This is the life cycle of cooking. One excerpt: "To a farmer, an apple tree covered with blossoms is a lovely sight [...] But you can bet he also has thoughts of a juicy wedge of apple pie. We predict that any of the apple pie recipes in this cookbook will bring you his compliments. Try them all to find his very favorite!" The worth of a pie can be measured by the enthusiasm with which other people receive it. "One time I made 25 of these pies for a men's dinner," says the inventor of the Harvest Apple-Cranberry Pie on page fifty-five. "I served them with cheese slices and the pies really made a hit." That is how she sells it.**

Anything can be co-opted into a bid for power, suggests Christina Stead; the man in Dogs can turn the women's habit of generosity against them, and the host in House of All Nations can force the guest to eat even when that visitor is so stuffed and faint he's asking her to open a window. The exercise of her "strange feminine instinct" seems imperative. And I suspect that this word "instinct" is Stead's way of saying that the same information that passed from the wider world so naturally and easily into the language of the Complete Pie Cookbook (where it is taken for granted like an ancient folk myth) has affected Mme Haller so profoundly that the power to feed and receive compliments feels like her native right. "If you don't eat it, I'll know you don't like it," she says, and the guest eats.

(Contemplating that scene, I realise for the first time that the Pie Cookbook never tells you how to cope if your guest doesn't want your pie, although "Try them all to find his very favorite," and similar sentences should provide you with a solution that the authors don't explicitly state -- the answer is, of course, that you should offer them another pie. The natural life cycle of the pie would be interrupted if the guest said No forever; you might as well cut down a rainforest and expect the monkeys to go on living. But that problem never comes up in the Cookbook, where all the people who aren't cooks, are vacuums of lubricious greed.)

It's true that the food in Stead is not a pie, but the dynamic in the book is identical, ie, the cook expects to give her food away and other people expect to receive it. Stead's point, or my point, since I'm the one comparing the two books, not her, is that a mass of different manipulations can be built around this elementary armature, and White, too, packs multiple ideas around the skeleton verb of eating. Dorothy and Basil both have a meat pie but Dorothy's eating is not like Basil's eating, and the reader has seen enough of their mother Elizabeth by now in the book to know that her meat pie eating would be different again, and her nurse (who is one of three, I don't think I've mentioned the other two), would be different as well, and this situation would pertain even if each of them had exactly the same kind of pie, same size, same shape, containing the same sort of meat, bought from the same shop, for the same price.

People will always wage power struggles, demonstrates Christina Stead: whatever tools they have they'll use, even generosity is a tool. Human beings are innocent animals; the parasite vine grips the tree trunk without hatred, a snake uses the venom it's given. Four decades after 1965 the language around pies has changed only slightly, just enough to stop Ken Haedrich's Pie (The Harvard Common Press, 2004) telling you that one sex should do all the cooking and the other sex should do all the eating. But the language that encourages you to give your productions away has endured. ("Serve this to your family and friends and see if they can guess what's in it.") And the people who read the book use the same language -- it has to be cultural, I think, this pie-language, this vocabulary that goes with the atmosphere of North American pie. Here's an online review by someone named Sheree from Illinois: "The joy a fresh baked pie gives to someone makes me feel like I am making a difference. People love getting homemade pies, so much so it almost brings them to tears. My husband's co-workers, people at the gym, employees at stores that I frequent, and neighbors have been the beneficiaries of most of them. The reviews have been outstanding!" Here's her ammo: "during the past month I have made over 20 pies." With House of All Nations between my brain and my ears I hear these "people at the gym, employees at stores that I frequent" grinning, grinning, and uttering the words of Mme Haller's visiting lunch-couple, eyes bubbling, delirious and feeble with nourishment, "Oh, wonderful, wonderful, I wish I could cook like that. How did you learn to be such a wonderful cook? Did you learn it at home?" Surge, surge, confident Sheree, a tank who cannot be stopped: "It is time to make pie!"

The older cookbook has savoury pies and the new one doesn't, so I like the old one better in spite of its assumptions. Here in the US I've learnt that when Americans hear the word "pie" they think of a pie with sweetness in it -- a sweet chiffon, or sweet fruit, or sweetened spiced pumpkin, or sweet-tart lemon -- creams, curds, puffs, and fluffs. But the pies in my mind are closer to the pies in Basil's hand, the meat pie, the steak and kidney, the beef and mushroom -- Four 'n' Twenty puts the cow's anus in there, we used to tell one another at school, innocently bringing Patrick White's connection between the mouth and the arse into our discussions, literati in embryo we were -- my idea of a pie is an object with gravy; a pie without gravy is the thing that appears in the world while the world is waiting for a pie with gravy to arrive; it's a stopgap; and this is the reason I began writing about meat pies in the first place, not so much for Patrick White, or his characters, or his book, or even Christina Stead -- to be honest with you, I want a meat pie.







* For example: "Some young men still refer to their homes as 'the pie house' -- a tribute to their mothers' baking skills." "And some Farm Journal readers tell us they bake birthday pies for their husbands by request." "Young women, as recently as a generation ago, practiced to bake pretty pies of exceptional quality for pie-supper auctions in one-room country schoolhouses [...] [the auctioneer] hinted who baked the pie he held, removing the lid of the box just enough to give the tantalized young beaux a glimpse of the treat within." "Remember that pies please men. Since men are the great pie eaters and promoters, let's give a rancher friend the last word ..."

**According to both books, the cook can anticipate at least four different categories or types of praise. Type 1: Surprise and delight at the physical presence of the pie, its dimensions and colouring. Type 2: Explicit reference to the taste of the pie. Type 3: Requests for the volume of the gift to be increased, eg, I'd love another slice. Type 4: Attempts to discern the origins of the pie, its Eden, eg, Did you make that yourself, Oh I must have the recipe.

After I'd finished typing that post I came across this conversation in Leonora Carrington's Hearing Trumpet, and thought; ha; coincidence.

Mrs. Gambit thought, no doubt, that I was getting too familiar, so she changed the subject of the conversation. "We have cooking classes once a week," she said. "People can practise self-control by making sweetmeats for everyone else, without tasting any of their own cooking."

Though neither Pie nor the Pie Cookbook expects the cook to starve. "This is the best cheese pie you've ever made or tasted," they say: etc.

(Edit: Tom from Wuthering Expectations's said some friendly things about this post on Twitter. Much appreciated.

Second edit: I don't know if anyone remembers the muttering some months ago when the current owner of Boongarre (which was one of Stead's childhood homes), decided to add redevelopments to the place, but now he's selling it. That listing will vanish eventually, and the link will go dead, but for now the property blurb looks like this:

History, charm, absolute waterfront

Sydneys most privileged waterfront locale on the tip of Watsons Bay peninsula in the heart of exclusive Camp Cove. "Boongarre" nestles within Sydney Harbour National Park, Green Point Reserve and the waters of Sydney Harbour, on 1214sqm land (approx). Its 270 degree exquisite views, with all that is Watsons Bay at the forefront and Sydney CBD on the near horizon.

Originally built in the 1870s, its original features are still very much in evidence and these integrate harmoniously with an aesthetically faithful restoration and renovation. It has both the allure of an easygoing 4/5 bedroom family retreat and the grace of an architecturally significant Australian residence. It was the childhood home of renowned author, Christina Stead, and owned by the Stead family from 1918-1980.

Both the elegant lounge on ground level and the gracious master on the floor above are fronted by bay window clusters that overlook its own huge stretch of private gardens and the vast spread of Sydney Harbour beyond. Leafy stone courtyards extend all major ground floor rooms. One of these edges an early extension that provides an extra large casual family room or a teenage retreat with ensuite.

A babys room links conveniently to the master through its ensuite. The 3 car lock-up garage spreads to a generous workroom, and there is forecourt parking for 2-4 more cars.

Property ID: 2009546006)

join the mess round her mouth

Patrick White often gives his characters food and he often lets them fart. Both ends of the alimentary canal are allowed to have their say, and I even wonder if he found himself doing it, for the first time, because he wanted to be fair: imagine that one end of the relevant tube made its appearance in a story he was writing, and by its presence it invoked, like magic, the other end. After that he couldn't leave that other end out. It was pressing to get into existence, so he let it through. Elizabeth Hunter in his Eye of the Storm, is provided with a pineapple, and she drops, too, stony pellets into a commode. "Naus-e-ating!" says Elizabeth's daughter Dorothy when her brother Basil gives her a meat pie. "She could feel the tears hurtling hot down her cheek to join the mess round her mouth." White's characters are often disgusted by their food, or the author will be disgusted for them, they're left grubby, and eating is dirty and babyish. "Basil has swallowed his last mouthful. He was wiping fingers on his breast-pocket foulard." Basil fouls his foulard* and gravy runs from the pie down his chin, he speaks and "sprays the windscreen with several fragments of gristle."

Dorothy loathes the meat pie, and not the pie on its own, but herself in the act of eating: "her unwillingness and contempt turned to loathing; worse on discovering something loathsome in herself: she was filled with a guilty voluptuousness as though biting into her own flesh." A person has to open a mouth in order to eat, and Dorothy would rather not open herself for anything; her way of coping with awkward moments is to open her handbag and look inside seriously for nothing in particular, then snap it closed. Sometimes I read her like this: The world has tried to open me up? I take my revenge with this bag. I open it, I look inside. I make a little mimicry of the world's assault on me. Revenge in miniature. I'll be the prosecutor here. (There are other ways to look at the bag. I won't go into them.) But she can't live without "biting into her own flesh." She has to eat.

She is sensitive and hysterical, and so is her author. His prose is screwed so tightly to a point, and the implications he draws are so large and supernatural (Elizabeth Hunter opening her eyes slightly in my last post and her nurse perceiving, all of a sudden, beauty, death, a pure spirit world, and a goddess), he describes incomprehensible eternity pressed into small physical events, like big feet in small shoes, repeated events -- and eating and the eviction of morsels and gases, what's that but the epitome of compulsory repeated events? Here is pressure and sadism carried out in a routine way: the dismemberment, torture, and crushing of food.

In life he liked to cook, he liked to eat with friends, and ate a meal with Christina Stead on more than one occasion. Stead's character Sam Pollit forcing chewed banana between his lips into the mouth of his daughter has a mirror image in literature, and that mirror image appears in Patrick White, during the early chapters of The Vivisector, as Hurtle Duffield's mother pushes soft chocolates from her mouth into the mouth of her son.

There is food-warfare in White and food-warfare in Stead, and they are two different styles of warfare. Food in White is personal and invasive, the characters smear themselves, they betray themselves with food (we see Basil's thoughts about the pie and he looks like a poseur), they become dirty with food, the food attacks anything ethereal in them, the act of being in the world is plain and grubby, this grubbiness is a reminder that they exist. The nightmare of this book is the opposite of a sleeping nightmare, that dissolving and slippery evanescence: the nightmare in Storm is to be helplessly embodied, awake and trapped in flesh, to be Samuel Beckett's Unnamable, a consciousness revolving on top of a tower of carcass.

But Stead's people are not sensitive to that kind of anxiety, they like to know that they exist, in fact they don't want anyone else to forget it, and so they talk and talk (one in Cotters' England talks another character to death), or they make displays of money, the warfare they wage is directed outward, at the social human world which they desire on general principle to overwhelm (as did their creator, proud of the fact that House of All Nations was eight hundred pages long), and food is part of that warfare, an exterior battle, character against character. Henny Pollit's fight against her husband takes many forms and one of them is this: she insists on butter for her table and meat instead of beans. But the most spectacular example of food-warfare comes in the middle of House, when one couple stuffs another couple with so much food that the husband of the other couple nearly faints. His wife discreetly puts a single peach on his plate. The other couple fight back -- they pile him high with fruit and cream. "Some strange feminine instinct prompted Mme Haller to feed that great mountain of flesh till his eyes popped." This is a hostile generosity, this hospitality is greed reversed; greed is an idea that Stead pursues through this book -- the idea of overfeeding. A man in The People With the Dogs decides to play a prank on a women, so he puts up a sign, inviting strangers into the house for all-you-can-eat steaks and potato, cooked by this women. A mob of passers-by arrives demanding food. The women as a group are taken off-guard. They feel compelled to cook.

[to be continued.]







* I don't think White uses this word anywhere else in the book, which makes the placement here seem deliberate, the foul in foulard brought out by the foul scene around it -- the spraying gristle, the hot liquid running down Dorothy's face -- here is the precise naming of a clothing item in partnership with floppy gross sloppery; accuracy mating with a sewer, which is a common kind of sadism in White's language.

You can look in David Marr's Patrick White, a Life for stories about the man's cooking.

from which comes congruence, and the harmony of dissident parts

(The first paragraph of this post refers here and there to earlier posts. If you haven't read them then don't worry, it should all clear up by paragraph two.)







But your knowledge of gardens isn't confined to only two examples, you know they're not defined solely by what can be excluded from them, the conclusion at the end of the last post was based on minimal evidence, madness, madness, and yet if that was all you had, then why wouldn't it seem convincing? Ideas about plants, trees, beautiful flower beds, whatever else strangers imagine when they think of gardens, none of that reaches you. The idea of gardens solidifies around the idea of exclusion and your brain starts to provide you with a logical shape for this garden that can keep things out, it explains to you, your brain does, this -- a high wall, spikes, invisible force fields, signs erected, unspoken social understandings, children scolded, spy cameras, laws to protect the desires of garden owners, and so on, a society and shape builds up inside you, and humbly you live there for a while. My brain was linking one thing to another eagerly again yesterday when, as I was reading The Eye of the Storm, I came across a character who was (and as I write this I wonder what I mean when I say that a character is something, but how else do I phrase that thought) a married woman's French great-aunt named Eulalie. There is a Eulalie in Proust as well, not an aunt herself, but a friend of an aunt, and the words "Eulalie" and "aunt" so close together put my brain into a state where, when, later, Patrick White brought a couch into the story, I had the impression very vividly that the character in his book was going to sleep on the same couch that Proust's Narrator gave away to a brothel.

It seemed so convincing that I only dreamishly wondered how the characters had made their way into a brothel since they hadn't been in one a moment earlier. (When I say "dreamishly" I mean that my mind coped with the question automatically, as it does in dreams whenever anything impossible happens.)

When one of White's nurses on page one hundred and eleven tries to imagine "beauty, such as you had longed for, but had so far failed to grasp" I saw (prompted by the appearance of the word "beauty" and the idea of failing to grasp it) that she was going through the same dilemma as Julian in Lawrence Durrell's Revolt of Aphrodite. They should get together -- I thought immediately -- it would be mutually beneficial, and I congratulated myself on this brilliant thought, wondering if there was any way of somehow getting a message through to one of them, to let them know how much better their lives would be if they followed my advice, which would only be a suggestion, nothing pushy, just a good idea in which they might be interested.

Furthermore, I could point out, not only are both of you thinking about grasping beauty, you're also both inspired by a woman who is like an "idol" and who has blue eyes. The dying Elizabeth Hunter in Storm had eyes like sapphires when she was younger, while Iolanthe in Aphrodite has a pair "bluer than any stone." Julian wants to find an example of a beautiful woman because he believes that an experience of beauty will introduce people to a distinct and valuable definition of freedom. He explains, "But the only road to freedom of such a kind lies through an aesthetic of some kind. Beauty, from which comes congruence, and the harmony of dissident parts and which echoes back the great contrivances of nature." Elizabeth Hunter's nurse has already had a vision of a state that might be the freedom Julian is envisaging. Her patient opens her eyes and "one of the rare coruscations occurred, in which the original sapphire buried under the opalescence" forcefully appears. "Momentarily at least this fright of an idol became the goddess hidden inside: of life which you longed for, but hadn't yet dared embrace; of beauty such as you imagined, but had so far failed to grasp (with which Col grappled, you bitterly suspected, somewhere in the interminably agitated depths of music); and finally, of death, which hadn't concerned you, except as something to be tidied away, till now you were faced with the vision of it." And Julian's plan for Iolanthe reaches one of its crucial moments when she opens her eyes: "with a long delicious inspiration the lady woke; the two eyes, bluer than any stone, inspected first the clean white ceiling, and then travelled slowly down to take in our own surrounding faces; recognition dawned."

At the end of Storm a character looks into a genuine sapphire and goes into a rapture, his chest becomes painful, "flesh was translated into light," and when, confronted, he accidentally drops the gem he is "temporarily blinded:" he has mislaid his eyes.

So in these stories there is the idea that there is a thing that can work like a shock or, in Julian's word, "congruence," leaving you disembodied and freed, or with an idea of disembodiment and freedom. (Though you know as soon as they start describing this state of freedom, that every attempt to reach it has to fail: what else could happen?) There is probably some way I could compare that to the experience of being freed (or not freed but shaken loose) from the book, when I thought that Storm had shifted magically into the same brothel that appears in Lost Time, the identical brothel, and we were in Paris even though we were also in Sydney, where most of Storm is set.

Books are made of cues and holes, the reader fills those holes, the reader goes to work and patches up the countryside that the writer presents in glimpses, filling out the landscape with a sincere inner anticipation aimed (depending on the book) at trees and paddocks (we approach objects before they are there, suggests Heidegger, we anticipate them so that we can encounter them) or buildings, mountains, city streets, houses by creeks (Christina Stead), sombre forests (Ann Radcliffe), until you're convinced that if a character walked over to the left of their present location they still wouldn't fall into space, even though the author could fling them into space as easily as they could make them stroll into a room -- still, you think they won't, unless the author has already let you know, via examples, that this is the way they prefer to work, booting characters into the stratosphere, dropping them off cliffs in the middle of Bourke Street, tormenting them with vacuums, etc. There are many authors who try to make you forget that evidence in a book is not a law of nature but an author's choice. The narrator of Gerald Murnane's short story When the Mice Failed to Arrive believed, when he was a boy, that a storm overhead meant lightning was going to come in through the classroom window and strike one child dead, specifically, exactly one, so he prayed that it wouldn't be him. When he took an unusual route on his walk home from school he imagined his father searching for him, and when he saw him, the narrator thought, his father would tell him that something terrible had happened and the house had burnt down. There he was, this narrator, walking through a peaceful calm Australian suburb (I don't remember Murnane using the words "peaceful" or "calm," that's my personal polyfilla) believing that a disaster had struck his home and nothing else around it. There were no visible signs of this disaster yet he was sure it had happened; his lying mind was completely convinced.

so quaint and mouthy

It's a funny thing, reading Don Juan after hundreds of pages of Lowes' calling Coleridge a genius. Byron scorns Coleridge, scorns Wordsworth, scorns the contemporary Poet Laureate Robert Southey even more, and thinks that everyone associated with the Lake Poets is a waste of his time.

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy

I found Don Juan at a new branch of our local library system, walking there last Saturday -- I think it opened on Thursday. The book was on a set of shelves labelled Classics. "I see you've found the Classics section," said the librarian when I took my books to the counter. He went on to say that he thought the books in Classics might have been donated by the publisher, which would explain why they were almost all black-spined Penguins, and perhaps also why no one had thought to buy the first two parts of Dante. (I should write them an email. Dear Sir and or Madame. Your library is lovely. Stocking the last part of a trilogy is cruel. Would you treat Tolkien this way? Yours, etc. (A fact sheet about librarians on the wall of our local branch suggests that most of them are High Fantasy enthusiasts. One likes Patrick White's The Tree of Man, which, as I once said on Whispering Gums' blog, is the White for people who don't read White. I believe this in the way that I believe Tale of Two Cities is the Dickens for people who don't read Dickens. Tale is a parched, dead Dickens, compared to the splurge that he wrings out of himself when he's at his most noticing. Some readers object to the splurge -- he writes too much, they say --

he has very very long and boring sentences that keep going on and on

-- complains a poster at LibraryThing. But that splurge is Dickens, it's the bubble that rises in his genius-alembic. And Tree is White coming as close as he ever did to a nice, normal Australian novelist.))

They had three or four shelves of brand-new Lonely Planets, probably donated too. I waved my hands around and yammered at the desk librarian about their new Les Murray Collected Poems. I've been wondering if you would buy this! I said, or something like that. You've had another Murray collection for ages --

Ah -- he named one.

No, I said, a different one, a little Selected, years old, with a white cover --

So. This new Classics section has given me The Diary of Samuel Pepys: a Selection as well as a few other things. And in Poetry they had Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation, and a collected Phillip Larkin. "I am most pleased," as Pepys says. I decanted myself from the library "leaving all things there very gallant and joyful" and stuck my nose into a car boot sale on the way home.

Pepys keeps up a running commentary on the subjects of profit and food, which prompted me to think of Christina Stead, who brings the same two topics into her fiction with the same naturalness. This is one of the things that makes her work seem so lifelike, this realisation that people are interested in money and food, and interested in them in an ongoing and passionate way -- I mean, as if they were the stuff of life, which, in both writers, they very much are. "I'd fight for money to my last drop of blood," says the Man Who Loved Children's Henny to Old Ellen. "Can you live on air?" In 1664 Pepys looks through old papers and discovers "a romance which (under the title of Love a Cheate) I begun ten years ago at Cambridge" but when he's writing for himself he's less interested in romantic Love than in barrels of oysters and bottles of wine and whether his kidney stones have come back or not, and his profit margin. "I bless God with great joy to me; not only from my having made so good a year of profit, as having spent 420l and laid up 540l and upward. But I bless God, I have never been in so good a plight as to my health." This comes before the praise for his "pretty and loving quiet family," which is not storybook love, or Love a Cheate, but closer to steady pleasure, assurance, and comfort.

There are no adventures in the Diary, not in the sense that characters in romance novels have adventures (the ghost in the castle, the battle, the rescued lover) but things happen, things are constantly happening, and the whole book mutters like thick liquid boiling over heat, always moving, not in the sharp forward direction of the romance-adventure, but with an all-over engagement: events appearing, submerging, then coming back again. Pepys is told that his brother is ill, then he is more ill -- this goes on for a little, along with other concerns, then the brother dies, and what, in a planned novel, might be known as the sick brother plotline becomes so important that it takes up nearly all of the diarist's attention. Then there are inheritance problems, some family feuding, and Pepys discovers that his brother had an illegitimate child, who has been sent away to live with another family under a different name. In the planned novel (the one in which this is the sick brother plotline) the discovery of this child would likely lead to the illegitimate daughter plotline -- something would be made of her. Here she vanishes quickly, she is only another fact of life, dealt with, and less interesting than the oysters. And even this sickness and death is tied up with money. After discussing his dying brother's finances with his uncle, who believes the brother "owes a great deal of money," Pepys concludes

And what with that and what he owes my father and me, I doubt he is in a very sad condition; that if he lives he will not be able to show his head -- which will be a very great shame to me.

In the foreground we have Pepys, always, and his concerns, his food, his money, his family, while in the middle ground there are those things a little further away from him, his ties to his Lord, the enmity of a colleague, mentioned a little less often, but always present behind the first lot of things. Beyond that there are those things that history notices, the Restoration of Charles II, which occurred in the first year of the diary, 1660, a war between England and Holland, the Great Fire of London, and the Plague. Pepys in his thoroughness inhabits all of them. His description of London on fire takes in a large view in longshot --

... we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long

-- the historical spectacle of it (with the inclusion of that "about half a mile long" it's Marquez's numbered elephants again) -- and the very close details --

And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.

His intimate life, his life at work, and the greater life of the city and the court, are always with us in the Diary, and here I am going to wind this back to Stead again because The Man Who Loved Children has those same layers in play: the intimate life of the family, the middle ground of Sam's work and Louie's school, and somewhere beyond that, the wider society that keeps women married to husbands who won't let them escape, and the fairyland of Sam's ambitions, his radio show, his tribe of multi-ethnic children, the President he trusts, the whole strange outer foreign world, which is represented by Malaya. Both books bubble.