Susan Green

I don’t know what we were talking about, but some part of our conversation spurred a friend to lend me Elizabeth Jane Howard’s autobiography, Slipstream. That was on Sunday afternoon – I’ve just finished it. You could say I devoured it; you know when you have other things to do but you just can’t wait to get back to your book.
It was very moving and rather sad; a long life, many books, but not a lot of love and happiness. She was married three times – her first husband was Peter Scott, the son of Scott of the Antarctic, a war hero and wild-life artist; her third was the writer Kingsley Amis – but she described herself as a “bolter”, and it was usually with other people’s husbands.
She didn’t flinch from revealing her many, many mistakes – her failures to love, to communicate, to discriminate, to stand up for herself – and  the way she repeated them again and again (“A slow learner”was another self-description).What was so moving was her painful struggle to actually learn and change. She credits therapy and especially a women’s group, late in her life, with that, and she was able to reconcile with her daughter. She published her last book last year. She was 90.

When I turned to the internet – as you do – to find out a little more about her, I found out that she’s just died. There’s an obituary here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/02/elizabeth-jane-howard-dies-90

On the last Saturday of 2013, with  head-cold (probably caught while seeing Hobbit 2 at a very air-conditioned cinema on Boxing Day), I lay and watched a DVD. I ended up even snottier than I started, and in floods of tears. The film was a documentary about the Ballets Russes.

I bought it because I have a strong connection to the Ballets Russes. Not the real ballet, of course – it had ceased to exist by the late 1950s – but ballet via two old books of my mother’s. They were called The Balletomane’s Album and The Balletomane’s Scrapbook, both by Arnold L Haskell, and when I was little I pored over them. The ballerinas were as beautiful as fairy tale princesses; in fact, some of the time they were fairy tale princesses in ballets like Sleeping Beauty. There was one photograph that I adored; it was the beautiful, dark-haired Tamara Toumanova gazing soulfully at the camera. Being dark myself, I was very sensitive to the  real lack of dark-haired fairy tale princesses, Snow White excluded.
The caption called Toumanova “Black Pearl of the Russian Ballet”; isn’t that a wondeful name? She’d been made up to within an inch of her life, with long false-eyelashes and a ton of lipstick,  and she looks lovely but artificial. On the internet I found some wonderful old film footage of her dancing at the edge of the surf, looking completely natural, wild and happy and free. It was lovely to see.)

I practised looking soulful in the mirror; I  pointed my feet and tottered around on tippy-toes; I briefly attended dance classes(but there were no tutus so it was no good at all) and often entertained(?) my family by dancing The Dying Swan dressed in a frilly white petticoat and a singlet. Since I was a plump little creature, it was probably more like The Dead Duck, but I thought I was exquisitely sad.

My mother had these two books because she was a teenager in 1938-39 when the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo toured Australia. She was a fan –  a balletomane – and in the documentary, the narrator says that though at first dismayed to be going to the end of the earth (so uncivilised!) the company was delighted and moved by the warmth of their Australian welcome. They stayed for more than six months;my mother went to see them as often as she could.

After the Russian Revolution, there was an  exodus of Russian artists to Paris. The Ballets Russes formed out of the really truly original Russian ballet (Pavlova, Nijinsky!) that emerged in the early 20th century under Serge Diaghilev.  They danced to music by Stravinsky and Debussy; costumes and sets were designed by Matisse, Picasso and Coco Chanel. This film doesn’t go back to the very beginning; it concentrates on the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo of Colonel de Basil and its rival, The Original Ballets Russes. We are shown the beautiful young dancers in their prime. And then, wonderfully, some of those same dancers grown old are interviewed in the film.
They are still beautiful. They are still dancing – teaching dancing, passing on what they know. It’s not technique that she wants them to develop, one of them tells us. It’s warmth.

The film closes to the finale from Shostakovich’s Firebird; Alicia Markova saying that her life in the ballet was so rich… and the ghosts of the Ballets Russes in grainy old movie footage dancing once again. Immensely moving. Sigh. Sob.

I also, stupidly as it turns out, decided to knit the collar of a cardigan that I didn’t quite finish over the winter. Well, I ended up with tendonitis in my wrist, didn’t I? And I couldn’t use the keyboard. Help!!!
My tech-y husband to the rescue. He installed a program called DragonDictate, so I now I can talk to the computer screen and find my spoken words magically transformed to text. It does get things wrong – varicose veins, for instance, were turned into the quite lovely ‘very cosy tale’. But it really is magic, and even when the wrist fixes itself up again I’ll use it to do messy drafts in the stream of consciousness style. Though it’s stream of self-consciousness when someone else is nearby. I really do feel incredibly silly talking  to myself; I need PRIVATE – KEEP OUT – GO AWAY on the door.

My last book of 2013 was Sheila. I quote the blurb; ‘She wedded earls and barons (only one of each, actually), bedded a future king, was feted by London and New York society for 40 years, and when she died she was a Russian princess (no, the wife of a Russian prince).’ I read it to the bitter end and wondered why I bothered. She may have bewitched the Prince of Wales but she didn’t do a lot for me. But I don’t want to begin the year on a snarky note, so I will finish up with some cheering statistics.

I tallied up my score of books for the year and found that I’d read 72. That’s – I had to get the calculator out – 1.38461538 books per week. I read the most books in December and  October. The leanest reading months were March and June. 58.3% of my total reading was fiction. Of that, two thirds was adult fiction. The remaining third was overwhelmingly junior fiction; I read only 3 YA novels (Must do better this year). Of the non-fiction, the largest category would be shelved in the bookshop where I work in the Self-Help/Religion/Spirituality section. My perpetual hypochondria (they call it health anxiety now; much nicer) plus an end-of-year Buddhist binge no doubt upped those figures.

Now for the awards. Best new novel was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Best classic was Anna Karenina. Best fiction discovery was Margaret Drabble. Best non-fiction discovery was Robert MacFarlane. Best kid’s book was Cicada Summer by Kate Constable. Scooping up the Karma award by a mile was Stephen Batchelor for Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Laugh Out Loud trophy went to David Lodge for Thinks…  Book I Loved That I Didn’t Think I Would was Lola Bensky by Lily Brett. Bolstered Self-Esteem Gold Cup was won by Susan Cain for her lovely defence of introversion, Quiet. And I could go on, because almost everything I read this year gave me something – even Sheila.

Happy New Year!

I’m not morbid or sad or depressed, but I like cemeteries. I like the combination of park and sculpture and masonry and history. I find names and bits of story that inspire and interest and intrigue. I also find peace and tranquility and consolation – which is a bit odd, perhaps, when surrounded by graves and – let’s face it – a whole lot of dead bodies under the earth. It is perhaps the sense that after all the struggle and busyness of life, it all comes to this…wind in dry grass, a magpie on a gravestone, lichen growing on carving and that carving slowly crumbling away by weather and time.

When I lived in Campbell’s Creek as a kid in 1966-7, I used to play in the cemetery. My friend and I used to take little picnics to eat. I also (and I’m ashamed of this now) used to steal the white ceramic doves and hands from the smashed glass domes. It was very wild back then – in high summer you could just see the headstones and rusted railings above the long grass and thickets of roses and blackberries.  The further back you walked, the older the graves. Some of them were still standing straight but others were fallen over,  tip-tilted, sunken, or even – and this had a shivery, ghost-story quality – split in two by lightning. I loved the place. I loved the peace and the past; I loved the busy life of plants and animals going on among the  houses of the dead.

When I was 11, we moved back to the city – to Chelsea on the bay, and with a back gate opening right onto the beach – but I mourned my country life and my special place. Though at that stage I hadn’t heard of Thomas Grey and his Elegy, I have in front of me a long poem I wrote in 1970. I poured into it all my feelings of loss and longing and I’ll have to say that at the time I thought it was pretty damn good. It is much too embarrassing to reproduce in full, mainly because I hadn’t yet cottoned on to the idea of less is more and laid on bathos, cliches and especially adjectives with a shovel – but here are the first and last sections.

Among the tall yellow swaying grasses
Stand headstones, tall and gaunt,
Enclosed by rusty railings bent and contorted by age,
All the fancy carving crumbled, the letters blurred and stained by years.
A wild rose climbs a tombstone
Covering the RIP with a sweet sad scent.
A thousand sweetpeas, sown by a coffee jar of flowers
Offered by a loving hand to one so dear and dead
To that one, the tip-tilted one, or that one, split in two…

The bush is creeping closer, claiming what it lost.
Parrots sit on tombstones among rising shrubs and grasses;
A pink and grey blush of galahs swoop overhead;
A kookaburra laughs at a long-forgotten joke,
At the wallaby leaping through the  misty bush.
Dirty grey sheep in stony water-starved pastures
Bleat for the lambs that play among stumps.
By the creek willows weep into the dark water
While the wind teases dry grass and ghosts.

Sob, sob…

The retail sector is hotting up – at least my little part of it is. I work in the local bookshop and it is more than pleasing, it is utterly fantastic and delightful and heart-warming to see that scanner going zip-zip-zip on BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS!

I usually enjoy helping people choose their gifts. Picture books for younger children are usually not much of a problem, but there are lots of parents and especially grandparents all at sea about junior and YA fiction and they’re really grateful for a bit of guidance through the maze of series and genres.
The most difficult are the customers who want to buy books for people who don’t actually read. You have tortured conversations, trying to elicit a tiny bit of information that will help.
What do they usually read?
They don’t.
Well, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m not sure.
What are they interested in?
I don’t know.
Do you think they’d like this? (Cookbook for a woman, book on sport for a man.)
No.
It is then that I suggest a gift voucher. But that’s often rejected as well – people don’t like gift vouchers, I’m told. It looks like you don’t care enough to choose something.
Maybe then I go into the back office for a silent scream.

But much more often, it’s a happy experience a bit like trying on clothes; after two or three goes there will be something that hits the spot. And I always emphasise that if it’s not right, we are  happy to exchange – in fact, we’re open on Boxing Day for that very reason!

As a writer, of course, it behoves me very verily to give books as presents (I’m also giving chocolate) and I am. Last night a quartet of friends gathered at my place for dinner and I gave them each a little cookbook  – Maggie Beer, David Herbert, Karen Martini, Belinda Jeffery – wrapped in a bad-taste tea-towel from the Op Shop. I have already given my husband his book – couldn’t wait – and he’s finished it and now I’ve just (only half an hour ago) finished it too. It was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and it was fantastic…
…a great big juicy novel in which to immerse yourself. I don’t think I will be able to read any  fiction for a little while.

Other books neatly wrapped ready for Christmas Day are The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane, a V&A book on 1950s textile design and small book on drawing – Freehand by Helen Birch –  for my teenage niece and a fancy edition of The Lord of the Rings for my teenage son. I’m also giving The Light Between the Oceans by M L Stedman and The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk and I’m still thinking about something for my eighteen-month-old great nephew.
What does he usually read?
Fiction or non-fiction?
What is he interested in?

I think I’ll just take a punt on a Spot board book.

A few weeks ago FOCAL (Friends of the Castlemaine Library) asked me to talk at their Annual General Meeting. I was happy to accept the invitation for all sorts of reasons. One is that 2013 has been (and is still, for a few more weeks at least) My Year for Saying “Yes”. And another is that I have a long association with the Castlemaine Library. I’ve borrowed hundreds and maybe even thousands of books since had my first library card in 1967.

And there’s a family connection, too. My mother was one of the movers and shakers behind the establishment of  FOCAL. That was back when that evil Premier of Victoria, Jeffrey Kennett, decided to wave the magic wand of economic rationalism over our fair state and even libraries had to submit themselves to a farce called Compulsory Competitive Tendering. Castlemaine people were and are fiercely protective of their library and FOCAL still thrives twenty years on.
When ill-health kept her housebound, Mum remained (through me and the visiting ‘book lady’) a keen borrower. When she died, my brother Michael had the wonderful idea that, instead of flowers, people donate to our library. Over $1000 was given, and it has been used to buy a subscription to the London Review of Books. I do get a little lump in my throat every time I see the little label saying “in memory of Helen Green”.

I began my talk by saying that, for a proper talk on public libraries, listeners should go online and find Neil Gaiman’s Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Day-Dreaming. He says it all, and better than I ever could. My talk was purely personal, about the libraries in my life, and how important they’ve been.

I was a reader before I was a writer, but I took a while to get going. My early struggles with literacy were compounded by the general unattractiveness and tedium the first ‘reader’ –  John and Betty. I wasn’t allowed to skip ahead or move on until I mastered each page and so the whole enterprise took on the feeling of a terrible punishment.
However, thanks to my mother I did finally crack the code and when I did, I thought I could read anything. There were a few false starts, with attempts at Ulysses by James Joyce (it had a nice cover) and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I was no child genius and couldn’t understand any of either of them. But the breakthrough to avid, bated-breath, addicted reading came from the classroom bookshelf at Campbell’s Creek PS.  It was there I discovered The Secret Seven. I will have no truck with those who have a go at Enid Blyton (and Neil Gaiman has a thing or two to say about her as well). She served to get me hooked on reading, primed for further adventures and other authors.
The first real library of my life was also at Campbell’s Creek. It was a kind of inner sanctum; dark and dim, with lots of wood, a musty smell. My memory’s a bit faded, but = perhaps there was also an Honour Roll or a display of sporting cups. It was there I had the Billabong Revelation.

The Billabong books by Mary Grant Bruce, a dozen or so of them, were set on a pastoral property in Victoria belonging to the Linton family. Norah and her brother Jim, their father David, Jim’s friend Wally, plus the family retainers – fat and comfortable cook, Irish stockman, Chinese gardener, Aboriginal roustabout… It was my first real taste of children’s novels set in Australia. Not just Australia, but Victoria, my home state. And country Victoria, too. I could readily imagine myself there.  I wanted to live there; I wanted to be Norah.
Years later, when I had to re-read a couple of them for my Graduate Diploma of Children’s Literature, I realised that the books were racist, sexist, chauvinistic, jingoistic and – even worse – that Norah was thick as two short planks and a thoroughgoing Philistine to boot. Sometimes, you really can’t go back again.

In 1967 my family moved from Campbell’s  Creek into Castlemaine, and I joined the library. There, I had my first taste of how tactful and non-judgemental is the ideal librarian. There were no comments about my borrowing and re-borrowing and re-re-borrowing of Billabong’s Daughter (that’s the one where the sexless and almost romance-less romance of Wally and Norah comes to a head). The same with the library’s small stock of sex education books. Were the two connected? Probably.

IN 1969 we moved away from Castlemaine; in 1970 I started High School in Frankston. I joined the Frankston Library as a Junior Borrower. So while I could and did borrow all sorts of saucy reading material from school, I had to remain Junior at the public library until I was 14.  Perhaps this enforced junior reading is a factor in my becoming a children’s writer. I read all the fantastic authors of 1960s, and it was a golden era of children’s literature. Joan Aiken, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Patricia Wrightson, Ivan Southall, Eleanor Spence, Hesba Brinsmead, Nan Chauncy… I had an abundance to choose from. That’s the wonderful thing about libraries. There’s none of the anxiety of choosing a book to buy. Borrowed books can be returned, with no hard feelings, if they’re not right. You can take a chance. You can compare and contrast, work out your likes and dislikes, follow an author or a theme or choose by cover. What a luxury that is.

Then of course, when I turned 14, I was able to move into the adult section. This enabled me to take home bizarrely assorted reading matter. A typical weeks borrowing could be a couple of Country Life magazines, a massive compendium on witchcraft and demonology,  the filmology of Joan Crawford and a couple of gothic novels by Victoria Holt.

A word of explanation here. Gothic novels were Jane Eyre-ish numbers where a governess/poor relation/innocent bride comes to a creepy mansion on the moors/castle on the edge of a cliff and discovers a horrible secret or two, nearly loses her life but finds true love with the brooding, moody, terribly good-looking/craggily masculine hero. Yes, this is escapist fiction. It’s romance. And – as with Enid Blyton – it seems some people just can’t stop themselves sneering. Neil Gaiman (again!) has something to stay about escapist fiction, too. How wonderful it is that a low-tech, hand-held device is able to transport, divert, or console. It can take you to a better place than the one you’re in…or simply another place. And we all need that sometimes.

After I finished school and left home, there were libraries to join wherever I lived. I’ll skip over Carringbush in Richmond, Glenferrie in Hawthorn and the tiny little outreach branches in Clunes and Creswick and gallop full speed ahead to the Castlemaine library. And here we are!

I am not as eloquent as Neil Gaiman, but I’d like to say a general thanksgiving for public libraries. This one nurtures my creativity and indulges my curiosity. It’s a place for ideas, pleasure, relaxation, culture high and low, diversion, information. A place for a weekly ritual of choosing books, checking them out at the desk and going on my way with a basketful of possiblities. Though apparently we are shortly to have self-serve kiosks in the library. I’m not sure about that. It will change the atmosphere, I think – and add one more bar-coded transaction to our lives. Books aren’t groceries!  I will continue to go up to the counter so I can chat to the librarian. For what would libraries be without librarians?

Last year, Dennis Commetti, commentating an AFL match, described a particular player as “…creeping round the boundary like a librarian”. I have been longing to use those words, and now I can. He was obviously referring to the fact that librarians are multi-taskers, helpful, considerate, and always in the right spot when they’re needed.

A good year for the roses in my garden.
And here’s Lucy Boston from An Enemy at Green Knowe. Mrs Oldknow is looking at the roses in her garden. I couldn’t have put it better.

The roses opened willingly as the dew evaporated out of them. As soon as they opened, the scent spread around them so pervadingly that the flight of the birds fanned it to her.
    She walked among them in very great contentment. If she herself was old, the sun was not, and the earth would do these wonders for him again and again.
    A passing neighbour called to her over the wall, “Your roses have never been better, Mrs Oldknow. They really are divine.”
    Not a bad word for them, she thought, smiling to herself. The word Rose has lost its old meaning. Now it only means something glossy, that you have, along with cars, washing machines and lovely plastic table tops. It’s only a status symbol.

But the old-fashioined roses have always been a symbol for love, and like all ecstatic things they die and come again. And the flower is simply a cup for the scent and the scent is an offering. But these thoughts she kept to herself.

This stone lion reminds me a little of the lion in The Wizard of Oz. Not scary at all. He’s in the gardens beside Lake Wendouree in Ballarat.

I’ve been sorting and throwing out again. Notebooks, this time. Notebooks – you might call them journals or even diaries – are a habit of mine. I like buying them; I like starting new ones; I like the idea of writing every night or even every week, but it seems my grand days of diary keeping are over. As a teenager I rarely missed a night, and right into my thirties I was a diligent diarist, especially when I was travelling. For several years now I’ve hopefully begun a notebook in the New Year but run out of steam by February or March. Spring has been here for a while, but only now am I spring cleaning, and as well as bags of clothes for the Op Shop – most of which originally came from the Op Shop in the first place – I have been ripping out the used pages from these unused notebooks and re-purposing them. Nearly everything has been put into the fire, but I thought this was worth sharing. I wrote it on the 15th of January this year.

Today, when I took Gus for a walk around the park. I was thinking about the book I’ve been reading. It’s called The Old Ways; A Journey on Foot and it’s by Robert MacFarlane. It is about old roads – so far, I have travelled with him on the Ickneild Way, and along the coast on ‘the deadliest path in England’ (quicksand, tides) and then on ‘sea roads’ in the Hebrides and up a mountain on another Scottish island. I think the writing is beautiful. It’s clear – limpid and lucid are two other (much poncier) words that come to mind – and detailed and discursive and knowledgeable and informed. And in love with words. Perhaps that’s what I’m responding to the most. I’m not sure. I remember when I first read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and fell in love with that kind of nature writing. Adam Nicolson comes to mind, too; and E G Sebald.

Anyway, I thought I would try to apply some of his ideas to this familiar ‘old way’, which I do at least a hundred times a year. And what do I actually see? I often use the time (and I did, a bit, today) to work out ideas for my writing. But I don’t look most of the time – or look only glancingly. Robert MacFarlane could write a whole chapter, I’m sure, on the path around the Gardens. What did I see today?
Most vivid is a part of the walk when two brown butterflies (and I shall try to find out who they were) fluttered in tandem along under the oak trees that line the walking path, in and out of the shade, at times casting a pair of dancing shadows on the ground. The path was crunching with acorns and twigs and leaves lying on the ground after the parrots or cockatoos had raided the trees. That was my experience today – the crunch, and the butterfly dance.
Coming back through the grounds of the old hospital, I saw blackberries making a net over the border garden. Sinuous, prickled, a clever opportunist.

This brought me back to the other book I’m reading, which is Get Yourself Some Headspace by Andy Puddicombe. It fits, doesn’t it? Mindfulness, noticing. Being there. Actually seeing.

The copy I read in January I borrowed from the library – it had the cover pictured above. A few weeks ago I bought a copy for my brother’s birthday – it’s now a paperback, with  a new cover. Now, re-reading my little review, I think I will buy a copy for me. And maybe do some more walking while actually seeing. And maybe start another notebook.

There’s a new bookshop in town – antiquarian and second-hand – called Mount of Alex. Very exciting for the book-hounds of the area. A week ago I called in and asked about Joan Aiken books, because I stupidly gave away or lost all the ones I had bar The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. The owner still had boxes to unpack and said he’d give me a call when he found some more. Lucky me – on Sunday I picked up Black Hearts in Battersea, Nightbirds on Nantucket and The Stolen Lake. I’m not over-the-top about matching sets, but I would have loved to have had Black Hearts with the original Puffin cover (see left) that I had back in the day. Never mind. The story’s the thing.

I had a trip to Melbourne yesterday and my travel time needed beguiling. I started  Black Hearts on the 8.06 train, read it on trams and suburban trains all day and finished it on the Bendigo train before Woodend on the way home. What a roller-coaster ride of a read! What a romp through history!

It’s ‘historical fantasy’ rather than historical fiction – and what fun the writer must have had. I probably haven’t read this or any of the other books (called The Wolves series in the trade, the bookseller told me) for more than forty years and it hit me with a bit of a shock how much they have influenced me as a writer.

It’s the romp thing. I actually set out to write a romp with the first Verity. Define romp? The dictionary says it’s rough, energetic or boisterous play; also ‘an easy victory’ or ‘to proceed without effort’. My definition is a plot that just tumbles along with lots of things happening and doesn’t stop until the last page; a story that’s as full as a Christmas cracker with odd words and funny facts and snippets of information. I felt I could tell that, like me,  Joan Aiken adored her research, treating herself to little games with language and names and historical events and people. Not to mention an insanely complicated plot!

My Verities are for an older age group, and the the characters are deliberately more rounded. They develop along the way, and Verity in particular grows and changes and reflects on her life as her story unfolds. But what a debt I owe to Joan Aiken for my love of the romp. There are more books in the series than I knew – the Mount of Alex bookseller is on the hunt for me – but for the next day or so, I can look forward to the adventures of  Dido Twite (how I love Aiken’s names) in Nightbirds on Nantucket.