Читать книгу What Poets Need - Finuala Dowling - Страница 11

11.33 pm

Last night, when I finally did get to my own bed, a large mental doorstopper kept my sleep ajar, still linked to waking. The sound of the boats going out, the puk-puk-puk of their engines, is the theme tune of my insomnia.

I know you think of me. Often I feel and even rely on the warmth and steadiness of those thoughts. But I also suspect that I am not completely real to you; that you don’t expect me to respond as a real person who is overpowered by jealousy and urgency. I wonder if, to you, I am a dream, ether-real.

I have been thinking about your mail last month where you said that Theo would probably be joining you when you come to the Kirstenbosch sales, when you go birdwatching up the coast, when you come to town to do your Christmas shopping. You used to do those things alone: we used to be able to see each other under the cover of those expeditions, however briefly. Now you say Theo will accompany you.

I wonder why you say that, write that, and then make no further comment. Because in effect what that letter says is, we may never, probably will never, see each other again, or certainly not “see” as in “touch” – however chastely. I receive the message, express my great regret. You reply, yes, you feel my sadness. Then it’s over and we carry on chatting mindlessly – heartlessly – about our daily routines.

Or am I just slow to pick up a long-extant truth? This is what you meant last year, when you said, after Theo’s discovery, that you had nothing to offer me unless I would join you in unrequited love. You were so remorseful. I thought that once Theo had stopped making you feel guilty, you would write again about an opportunity to meet. But you didn’t; you haven’t.

I think you never look forward, as I do, as a matter of course. You’re happy when things turn out so that we see each other, but quite easily resigned to the other. It is this stupid optimist in me that is the problem. I think: I have this much of Theresa, this three-times-a-year thing, and the letters. It can’t get less than this. And then it does. In fact, it could all go, letters, everything. And I wonder what it really means that Theo goes along with you now. Does it bring you closer, heal things, bring intimacy, trust, happiness? And if it does, you wouldn’t let me know, not because you are deceitful, but because you believe that each relationship is completely separate, autonomous. And I will end up knowing less and less, understanding less and less. As Dylan says, It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. Though writing this, setting it down, has helped me to understand.

Today Sal asked me, “Have you ever been into space, John?” I felt touched that she ranked her uncle among the astronauts. Would I keep something like that from you, I asked.

This exchange was after a day in which she played her first netball match, against the chop-fed giantesses of Laerskool Jan van Niekerk. Sal was supposed to be a reserve, along with the morbidly obese girl in their class, but they each got to play half a match as wing-attack when Harriet’s nerves got the better of her and she decided to stay on the sidelines. Sal loved the newness of netball, the fact that her uncle “lifted”, the freshness of the day, the camaraderie, the bib saying WA, the eminent reportability of the event, the way her opponent said “Kom hiersô” and showed her where the drinks were after the match.

Angie stood on the sidelines in her castration-issue boots, bellowing encouragement at her twins, to no avail. Holy Cross lost 0–16. On the drive back, Sal cheered up the despondent shooter-defence. “At least we went and showed them. We are Holy Cross Girls. We did what we had to do. Even though they’ve been practising for four years and we’ve only been practising for four hours.”

Monica phoned tonight, just as I was tipping the fish fingers onto brown paper to drain. She was in town and would I like to meet for a drink at her hotel and “catch up”? I told her I was babysitting. “Isn’t that what teenagers do for pocket money?” she asked.

There is a James Thurber cartoon that aptly sums up my life with Monica: the little man coming home nervously to a house that is encircled in the arms of a monstrously overbearing housewife. But the same way as you want to shake the little Thurber man and tell him, Get a life!, so I was unformed, waiting for life to happen to me. And Monica was no housewife.

While Monica was out resolving conflicts between worker organisations and big corporations for increasingly impressive remuneration, I went steadily and unambitiously back and forth to my job at Karoo Books. One year when the company was failing or, rather, doing worse than usual, I even took a cut in salary. Monica never understood my attitude to money, that it wasn’t important. If you think how all the luxuries I enjoyed those years in Johannesburg – meals out at restaurants, weekends in game reserves – were thanks to her job, you’ll see how hypocritical I must have looked.

I met Monica when she was a student of my mother’s. She was writing a thesis on gender in the South African workplace. As she was a graduate student, it was natural for her to stay for tea or drinks or supper after handing in a chapter. My mother and sister both being committed feminists, my father having lived off a tray and then died, I was in many ways the ideal partner for Monica. Because male sexual aggression was so strongly criticised in our house, and because I had been weakened by what happened to me in the Eighties, my only hope was that a woman would make the first move on me. Which Monica did.

Her thesis was very well received, and she was offered work in Johannesburg. I wasn’t doing much – some temporary shifts in the university library and packing books for a local publisher – so I went with her. I wasn’t planning on being her long-term partner – I wasn’t planning on anything at all. I had a vague idea that life began when one left home. Things still seemed pretty unreal to me, after the army stint and all that. I was lucky to find work, being so unambitious. At Karoo Books, as I say, I just plodded along, lost in my own thoughts.

My thoughts were mostly about words. I’d hear or read a new and unusual one, and it would occupy me for days. “Segue”, for example, gave a lot of pleasure.

Monica, on the other hand, lived in the cut and thrust. She was always being flown around the country, put up in top hotels. I’d fetch her from the airport and in between look up recipes to surprise her. She liked complicated food like roulades and terrines. You mustn’t think I was an ace chef or anything. I was – am – just capable of following a method. And I no longer believe in roulades.

I’d try to tell Monica about my words – riparian, egregious – but her vocabulary had been almost completely colonised by the jargon of ballparks, playing fields and nouns made verbs. We talked past each other, took no joy in one another’s discoveries.

But she was appreciative of the food. “Don’t you want to be a TV chef?” she’d ask. “I’ve got contacts I could use.” In Monica’s world, you always acted for an advantage; you never did simple, homely things for local good. It only occurs to me now that my low-level gastronomy was a sublimated creative urge.

Although I always made a big fuss of Monica’s homecomings, I secretly loved being left alone in the house. I never brought work stress home with me because even though Karoo Books hovered on the edge of bankruptcy through the entire time of my employ there, I knew I wouldn’t starve or be homeless if it collapsed. I also didn’t have to do housework, as we had a maid. So I’d come home to the quiet, clean house in the ominous silence that precedes a Highveld thunderstorm, with a clutch of new or uncommon words – animadversion, atavistic, fizgig, recidivist, conurbation, rugose, sacerdotal, caryatid, wayzgoose – and I’d rejoice at my solitude. As night fell, I’d make myself something delicious like a toasted tomato sandwich or a bacon omelette and, without Monica peering inquisitively over my shoulder, I was able to begin work on what was to become The Secret Life of Things.

The Secret Life of Things was a series of poems about everyday objects and the arcane or clandestine stories they hold within themselves. The French clock with its tiny key Monica had inherited from her grandmother, a piece of driftwood I’d picked up on Noordhoek beach as a teenager, an antique Cape Dutch pestle and mortar Mrs Cloete gave me when I graduated, a bicycle bell from my childhood. All these things we did not use, or pray to, or even look at much, yet we kept them because they exerted a power over us. In the fading light I’d sit and stare at each one of them until, myself disappearing, they rendered their account. Those are my best moments, when the lines start to dictate themselves, and I become merely the amanuensis of thoughts that present themselves to me.

I remember a poem by the American Charles Wright, which ends with the lines:

I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear

Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.

It’s phrases like “the upper right-hand corner of things” that we poets live for.

My life felt very small and private compared to Monica’s large and public existence. She was quoted in newspapers, pictured coming out of high-level meetings in fetching suits bought for her by a professional dresser. Colleagues at Karoo Books jokingly referred to my salary cheque as “pin money”.

It seemed less and less appropriate to tell Monica what I was thinking about or engaged in. She accepted with mild interest the few snippets of publishing industry gossip I was able to muster, heard my news from home as relayed in my sister’s letters, and then offloaded about her own troubles. In Monica’s version of events, she was always long-suffering, hard done by, conspired against, maligned, underrated, yet ultimately triumphant and vindicated.

My mother followed Monica’s career in the press. She observed Monica’s increasing bullishness. Eventually she told me that she had “disfellowshipped” Monica from the feminist movement.

When I had about twenty-six poems, I approached the publishing director at Karoo Books for advice. Harry Botha-Reid was kind enough not to laugh out loud. He pointed out that publishing poetry was the most risky venture imaginable. “Now if you’d brought me a nice solid textbook on business management, prescribed at five technical colleges, we would be talking,” he joked.

There were two or three tiny presses which put out poetry collections and I might try them, Harry said. He wrote the names for me: Tertium Quid, Cadmus, Finch. “There’s a whole art to naming publishing houses,” observed Harry drily. “But before you approach them, there are some questions I’d like you to consider. Do you ever buy volumes of local poetry? Do you subscribe to any of the little poetry magazines? Do you go to poetry readings?” I shook my head. “Well, I suggest you start,” said Harry. “You know what I’m saying?”

I knew what he was saying. That I hoped to plant myself in a literary scene that had painstakingly been feeding and tilling a little ground for itself. I put my twenty-six poems away in a drawer and started to haunt the poetry section of Exclusive Books in Hillbrow. I used my “pin money” to buy new poets’ work. I subscribed to Thalia, Night Attack, Sub Divo and even an overseas journal, despite the exchange rate. I attended one public reading at Wits where they passed around a register, after which I happily found myself on the mailing list for poetry launches and the poetry circuit.

At poetry readings I was often bored, yet even the boredom was fascinating. I would sit quietly in small rooms while other introverts whispered their minute observations of lichen on rocks or droned in slow monotones imagined histories of shipwrecks they hadn’t actually been present at themselves. I was engaged in a hopeless struggle to reach someone else’s meaning. I couldn’t seem to connect with the other poets on a simple, conversational level either. I’d stand in the foyer afterwards eating funny little cocktail sticks of cheddar cheese blocks and olives, sipping a glass of bad wine, hoping someone would talk to me.

Then one day at a bookshop reading in Berea, a poet from Cape Town was introduced, Red Moffat. His reading was natural. I mean, you didn’t feel he had a special, portentous voice he reserved for poetry. His topics were immediate, funny, poignant. Best of all, his poems were short. I went up to him afterwards to tell him how marvellous I thought his poetry was. His sunburnt face and washed-out eyes made me homesick.

Red wasn’t staying long in Johannesburg, but he took me to Soweto Stadium to hear Mzwakhe Mbuli. I was completely blown away. The man’s voice was a double bass; his presence on stage – he must be well over six foot five – was utterly commanding. To stand there in a packed stadium and to hear the audience chanting the powerful refrains from memory was to return to the very origin of poetry. “Who is in Lusaka?” he demanded to know. At that stage, who was north of the border, negotiating with the ANC, was practically everyone.

In poetry journals, in threes and fives I published all the poems in The Secret Life of Things, but I didn’t show them to Monica till Finch Press accepted the collection. I had reworked almost all of them, mostly from a technical point of view. I thought that even if the poems didn’t win praise, at least they wouldn’t offend anyone.

I was wrong, of course. Monica read the volume from cover to cover and found it deeply offensive. She read every poem as a sly, veiled criticism of her, and of our life together, particularly “Pestle and Mortar” which she claimed was an unabashed exposé of our sexual problems. All news to me. She said it didn’t surprise her that the book contained not even the smallest love poem to her, nor a dedication, because she’d always suspected that I didn’t love her. I was a weakling, a parasite. I just sat around and did nothing. I should wake up and smell the coffee. Get myself a life, “pull finger”. She wasn’t going to subsidise me any longer.

She was shouting at me, which was not in itself unusual, as she’d frequently lambasted me in the past for my inattentiveness to her long monologues about trade and industry, or for forgetting her dry-cleaning. What was unusual was that on this occasion I answered her back. Once I’d raised my voice, I felt quite exhilarated. So this was how bellicose people felt: the thrill of drowning out your opponent, pumping out abuse. When you’re shouting, you open up a direct vein to all your repressed rancour. It is like being drunk but without losing the power of speech.

I told her that she was a grubbing materialist, a harpy who had betrayed the ideals of feminism by aping the grotesqueries of the male mafia. That she must be mad to think I’d write a love poem to someone who regularly and unblushingly called for the playing fields to be levelled, that I was happiest and always would be happiest when she was out of town.

After we’d said all there was to say, we were quite polite towards each other. In a mutually understood ellipsis, I started to pack my things. Monica even brought a cloth to dust off my suitcase which, unlike hers, hadn’t been anywhere recently. The truths we’d just revealed had left us both as embarrassed as a post-one-night-stand couple. The near decade we’d spent together could be as easily erased as a film of dust on a piece of luggage. Suddenly I was awake, looking around our townhouse in utter surprise. Had I really lived here? Had I padded across these thickly carpeted floors to brush my teeth on those cold tiles more than three thousand times?

I moved into the spare room of a Karoo Books colleague, Martie Oliver. Her house was very messy and full of peculiar little dumb-waiter figurines in colonial dress who seemed always, solicitously, to be offering one a tray to put one’s glass on, as well as some less tangible form of companionship. I found them kind and supportive. Martie seemed genuinely touched by my “Valediction to the Dumb Waiters” poem, with its refrain:

Goodbye, little men –

men of kindly acumen.

Monica didn’t attend the launch of The Secret Life of Things. During Red’s speech, a man stood just outside on the patio talking loudly into a cellphone about his planned camping trip in the Golden Gate National Park, as if he felt it necessary to remind me in this way of how unimportant I was. I wondered for a moment if Monica had sent him, but then came to the unflattering conclusion that Monica simply didn’t care enough about me to be vindictive.

It’s a mark of my naivety that I was completely unprepared for the bad review I got in one of the Sunday papers. “Although ostensibly a study of the ornaments in his home, in The Secret Life of Things John Carson writes about the only thing he knows well: himself, himself, himself.”

I would have thought that one copy of the reflexive pronoun would have been enough. The reviewer had been at the launch. Her name was uneuphonious: Tizzy Clack. She described me as “an incongruous figure in cowboy checks, looking furtively towards the door as if at any moment his favourite calf would come leaping in”. She went on: “As the attention to detail in his poems is almost foppish, one could be forgiven for thinking this flannelled Carson before us was an impostor, a charlatan.” In her closing salvo, she said the collection might appeal to “the sort of people who enjoy crossword puzzle clues that lead them triumphantly to obsolete words like ‘brumal’.”

Lots of people saw the review and they all asked how I felt about it, as if perhaps I might have found it insightful and sartorially useful. It’s true I wear checked shirts. I feel comfortable in them and I don’t consider them worthy of comment.

The review left me indignant. After I’d read it, I went straight to Martie’s loo and scrubbed it with Jik. Martie said, “If only more writers responded to bad reviews like you do.”

As might have been predicted, Red Moffat found both the review and my response to it hilarious. He said Tizzy Clack was a twenty-three-year-old English Master’s graduate who was looking to carve a journalistic niche for herself. “It’s not about you,” said Red. “Never get lost in the illusion of centrality. It’s about her.”

Herself, herself, herself, I quipped.

“That’s the spirit,” said Red.