Stranger in his land
By THOR KAH HOONGA friend has not been able to stomach the frivolity of television entertainment the past couple of weeks, her teary eyes focused on news channels flooded with items on the devastating ripples of a crack/force in the Earth’s mantle.
By chance, I picked Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (Penguin) to re-read. And was stopped by the following passage eight pages into the novel:
“...the breathing of a decrepit child that grew deeper as the tide rose, until the nocturnal harp of the wind silenced the cicadas and their fiddling and a broad big sea wave swept through the streets of the ancient city of viceroys and buccaneers and poured into government house through all the windows like a tremendous August Saturday that caused barnacles to grow on the mirrors and left the reception room at the mercy of the sharks and it rose higher than the highest levels of prehistoric oceans and overflowed the face of the land and space and time, and only he remained floating face down on the lunar water of his dreams of a solitary drowned man...”
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Because I want to take another detour and share a phrase rich in meaning, pitch-perfect in sound. After the 1848 revolution in France, the provisional government recruited murderers and thieves for the garde mobile, mobs of opposition-head-bashers, legal lethal thugs. Marx referred to them as les gens sans feu et sans aveu, people without fire or faith. Les gens sans feu et sans aveu – c’mon, try it with your best Depardieu mumble; sounds great, doesn’t it?
One more, one more detour, last one before I get to Patrick White. Read about Grace O’Malley, an Irish pirate who should have a prominent position in anyone’s gallery of difficult women.
O’Malley and her men preyed on English ships returning from the New World, including on one occasion Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind. Queen Elizabeth opted for diplomacy, woman to woman, and had O’Malley brought to court to discuss a less taxing occupation for her.
As a gift, Queen Elizabeth handed O’Malley a little dog, you know, one of those yappy little furry rodents with sharp teeth that some people think are so cute, yes, in comparison to their pudgy spouses maybe, but which I think should be skewered by German Shepherds.
O’Malley hadn’t a clue what to do with the hairy creature. She was told it was a lap dog, she should hold it and pet it.
The pirate said she’d never sat down long enough to have a lap and handed it back to Queen Elizabeth.
Now that’s one woman I, cutlass gripped between my teeth, would have boarded galleons for.
All right, no more detours. Patrick White. As in what he says of himself.
A childhood exiled to the Australian interior, an asthmatic assaulted in the pollen-rich wetness of the coast.
“Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.”
Connection. I know the feelings. My dad suffered from severe asthma all his life from the time he was a teenager during the Jap occupation. There were signs that I might have taken on the gasper too but, nope, the signs disappeared.
What got me was a tonsils op at seven, a cure-all for persistent juvenile ill-health in the medically innocent days of the 1950s, and two years later, bedridden for three months because the old family doctor did not know that the new wonder drug of penicillin was not a wonder to everyone. Come to think of it, it was a wonder to me and my parents. We certainly didn’t expect such a cure. I spent three months lying in bed, while my leg-bones slowly softened to bend in ridiculous curves that left me for a few years looking like I had just dismounted from my horse after riding herd over 2,000 miles of desert. I would have been a bad goalkeeper.
The killer one was my lips – for three months they decided to be raw meat, blood seeping out and hardening into encrusted layers like lava beds, a night’s uneasy sleep requiring my mother, a lot of patience and a wet towel, until the thick scab could be washed partially away to allow milk or porridge to be spooned in.
Couldn’t talk much. Lots of time to read. Think. Make up stories. Though in my case, my first publication, in the school magazine when I was nine, was about a Blyton Secret Seven story.
At 13, White was uprooted to England because mum believed English was best.
White refers to it as “my English prison? four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school”.
On school holidays, his parents would take him on trips to Europe, including Scandinavia. What I meant last week by flashes of character while White is laying out biographical details could be seen in the following:
“Norway and Sweden made a particular impression on me as I had discovered Ibsen and Strindberg in my early teens – a taste my English housemaster deplored: ‘You have a morbid kink I mean to stamp out’; and he then proceeded to stamp it deeper in.”
Again, connection, I know that feeling. From the perspective of my parents and teachers, I was being stubborn, stiff-necked in the dialect of my home.
At 18, White tried working out on the land. White took on the unforgiving lifestyle, endured drought and flood. “The life in itself was not uncongenial, but the talk was endlessly of wool and weather.” The limited talk drove White to writing novels.
More tellingly, just as he suffered the stigma of being a colonial in school in England, that English stint stigmatised him as a “Pom” in the ears and eyes of his countrymen. So it was back to England to enrol in Cambridge.
It is clear that White never felt totally at home in Australia. When his novel, The Aunt’s Story, was published just after the war, it was considered unreadable and White “had never felt such a foreigner”.
This sense of alienation was underlined when The Tree of Man was heralded in England and the United States, but scorned in Australia. White was made to feel “at best a dubious Australian”. Voss, his novel of a megalomaniac German explorer in 19th-century Australia, was reviewed by an Australian newspaper under the headline “Australia’s most unreadable novelist”. Again, White felt like “a foreigner in my own country”.
White is wryly disparaging when he notes that only with the publication of The Solid Mandala did Australians accept “I might be something they had to put up with”.
Not in Malaysia though. In over a decade as a bookshop-keeper, I cannot remember anybody coming into the store and buying a Patrick White novel. Shame. He is not easy reading and I won’t be tempted to re-read several of his novels, but works like Riders in the Chariot have rich rewards for the persistent reader.
Next week, my focus will be on Italian poet Eugenio Montale, since I’m clueless about Nordic writers Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson who won the Nobel in 1974.
Thor Kah Hoong is a lecturer, actor, playwright, theatre director and bookstore owner (Skoob Books at Mutiara Majestic, Old Town Petaling Jaya; 03-7770 2500; e-mail: skoobkl@pd.jaring.my).
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