Susan Green

Here is the cover for the new Verity novel, which is due to be released in August this year.

I’ve just finished The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. I wish I’d read it when I was a child, along with Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. Because most of it – the most interesting part – like those books, is about a the childhood and young adulthood of a girl with talent.  And unlike Jo March and Anne Shirley (and lot of the other talented young girls in fiction whose stories I loved when I was in my early teens) Thea Kronborg and her gift are taken seriously.

Thea’s gift is music; she plays the piano; she sings. More than a gift, it’s the core of her being. So music is not something she does, it’s something she is. Her first teacher, the alcoholic failed old German Wunsch, ponders.

What was it about the child that one believed in? Was it her dogged industry, so unusual in this free-and-easy country? Was it her imagination? More likely it was because she had both imagination and a stubborn will, curiously balancing and interpenetrating each other. There was something unconscious and unawakened about her, that tempted curiosity. She had a kind of seriousness that he had not met with in a pupil before. She hated difficult things, and yet she could never pass one by. They seemed to challenge her; she had no peace until she mastered them. She had the power to make a great effort, to lift a weight heavier than herself. Wunsch hoped he would always remember her as she stood by the track, looking up at him; her broad eager face, so fair in color, with its high cheek bones, yellow eyebrows and greenish-hazel eyes. It was a face full of light and energy, of the unquestioning hopefulness of first youth. Yes, she was a flower full of sun, but not the soft German flowers of his childhood. He had it now, the comparison he had absently reached for before: she was like the yellow prickly pear blossoms that open there in the desert: thornier and sturdier than the maiden flowers he remembered; not so sweet, but wonderful.

At the end of the book, she is a famous opera singer. Her story isn’t romantic; there’s no overnight success. It’s work – sometimes joyful, sometimes slog and struggle. Through her childhood in the harsh and beautiful mining Colorado mining town of Moonstone and her unhappy, lonely student years in Chicago Thea works, works, works at her music. It’s like oxygen or food. She can’t not.

She’s lucky, too. There are people around her who see the intensity of her desire.

She is talking to her second teacher, Sandor Harsanyi.

“…what you want more than anything else in the world is to be an artist; is that true?”

She turned her face away from him and looked down at the keyboard. Her answer came in a thickened voice. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“When did you first feel that you wanted to be an artist?”

“I don’t know. There was always – something.”

“Did you never think that you were going to sing?”

“Yes.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Always, until I came to you. It was you who made me want to play the piano.” Her voice trembled. “Before, I tried to think I did, but I was pretending.”

Harsanyi reached out and caught the hand that was hanging at her side. He pressed it as if to give her something. “Can’t you see, my dear girl, that was only because I happened to be the first artist you have ever known? If I had been a trombone player, it would have been the same; you would have wanted to play trombone. But all the while you have been working with such good-will, something has been struggling against me … (He tapped the piano) … your gift, and the woman you were meant to be. When you find your way to that gift and to that woman, you will be at peace. In the beginning it was an artist that you wanted to be; well, you may be an artist, always.”

Willa Cather was a literary writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize, for goodness sake! and so perhaps she’d have been insulted to be grouped with Louisa May Alcott or L.M. Montgomery. Grouped only in “Subject Matter – Talented Girls.” For, as I said, Cather takes Thea seriously. She allows her to to become the artist she was meant to be  – and to succeed.

I’ve been reading:
Goodbye Sweetheart by Marion Halligan
The FitzOsbornes in Exile by Michelle Cooper

I’m damaged at present – but it’s my left arm and only temporary. I fell over in the garden whilst trying to move some rocks – by jumping on them. I thought that the two rocks would fall straight forward but instead, they parted company and sent my sprawling onto yet another rock. This was very stupid and I probably don’t deserve the outpouring of sympathy I’ve been given. Though that may be because I’ve had a perverse pride in displaying the grotesquely swollen and multi-coloured thing hanging off my elbow. No one has actually vomited or fainted, but most wince and avert their eyes.
“It looks painful.” is the usual comment.
“It is,” I reply. I’m not even attempting to be stoic. But – as happened when I had a baby in a pram – it gives you an insight into what it would be like to have a disability.
A very, very tiny insight. Once, at an inner city railway station, I saw a young African man with both arms missing from just below the elbow…

Anyway, on the bright side, I now know that I must have good strong bones. Which reminds my of my parents saying, when I was little and cut myself, “Good red blood – that means you’re healthy!” in a cheering tone. I didn’t know then that  blood only came in red.

I did get my husband to photograph my damaged arm but really it’s too revolting to post. So here are a couple of marble hands from the beautiful lake-side gardens in Ballarat. And a foot, too, complete with moth.

I’ve been reading:
The House in France by Gully Wells
The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
The Desert Pilgrim by Mary Swander
 

…a lot, as usual. Scrappy and disorganised hot-weather reading, for the most part. Pictures are good when the temperature is high, and so there have been lots of gardening books.

After years of yearning for beds full of flowers – roses! roses! roses! – I thought I’d got real at last. Mediterranean climate…Mediterranean garden… I devoured gorgeous coffee table books and dreamed of olive, quince and pomegranite, potted lemons, a pair of dark sentinel cypress trees, and everywhere aromatic clumps of rosemary and lavender and thyme.
But after serious study, I realised I had to get a bit more real. This is not Provence or Tuscany. It’s Central Victoria, our garden is mostly sited on reef and made from rubble and dry sandy soil with a huge old grey box sucking up all the moisture it can get its roots on. In the last few year, I’ve ripped out so many dead and dying plants (including lavender and rosemary – the thyme is hanging on) that there are dusty bare patches everywhere. This Autumn, I plan to go on a planting spree. I will get a pomegranite and a quince, but I’m going to try something I’ve never really fancied before. Native. Local. Bird and insect attractors. The library’s copy of Indigenous Plants of Bendigo; A Gardener’s Guide to Growing and Protecting Local Plants has become very well-thumbed. I’m planning on Violet Honey-myrtle, Slaty Sheoak, Sweet Bursaria, Billy Buttons and Lemon Beauty Heads. The names aren’t as evocative or poetic to me as olive, quince and company, but perhaps they will be, in time – if they grow.

Penelope Lively has long been a favourite of mine. An inspiration, too. A writer of children’s and adult novels, exploring again and again the themes of past and present, memory and time, history and biography large-scale and small that fascinate me. She’s 80 and still working. This not-quite-memoir was published in 2013.

She writes that in old age,
…I find myself thinking less about that happened to me but interested in this lifetime context, in the times of my life. I have the great sustaining ballast of memory; we all do, and hope to hang on to it. I am interested in the way memory works, in what we do with it and what it does with us. And when I look around my cluttered house -more ballast, material ballast – I can see myself oddly identified and defined by what is in it: my life charted out on the bookshelves, my concerns illuminated by a range of objects.
These, then, are the prompts for this book: age, memory, time, and this curious physical evidence I find all around me as to what I have been up to – how reading has fed into writing, how ways of thinking have been nailed.

The curious physical evidence… how reading has fed into writing…
That’s something to explore. Maybe my theme for 2015?

Walking around my dry garden this morning, I found some parrot feathers. Mine were blue, but they reminded me of Lorraine Marwood’s poem, ‘A Gift”. It’s from Guinea Pig Town and Other Animal Poems (Walker Books Australia 2013).

I found a gift in my garden,
a feather
fresh from a parrot –  a small, grey, fluffy section
growing close to the skin flesh,
then the yellow middle
and the tip dipped in brightest orange
to show all the world
that every day has its own sparkle.

I have little collections of such gifts all over the house and garden. I rarely come back from a walk empty handed; something usually catches my eye. It may be rocks and pebbles, or shells and beach glass. There are fragments of broken pottery (blue and white always seems to stand out), seed pods, leaves and feathers.

I think I inherited this habit from my parents, who were both great picker-uppers (they  had a tiny jug in which they placed fallen cat’s whiskers from our old cat Andrew!). I have a few fragments of Roman glass that they found when they were on their honeymoon in Italy in the 1950s.  My early childhood was spent in a house by the beach, so beach-combing became part of my nature and even though I am very short-sighted I am very good at spotting things on the ground.

Dad had a life-long fascination with gum leaves. After he died, we found some on which he’d drawn little faces. When I am out walking, and a beautifully coloured or oddly-shaped leaf flutters down in front of me, I always whisper under my breath, “Hello Dad.”

I woke early this morning – just before 5 – and couldn’t get back to sleep. So after a while I got up, made myself a cup of tea and went back to bed, where I sat up and read a cookbook. Very soothing. After about an hour of that, I got up and meditated for 10 minutes (my plan is to work up to 20 or even 30, but I’m stuck on 10 for now) and then I watered the garden in the cool early quiet. The cockies and parrots who’ve been so noisy and destructive were either not up yet or busy elsewhere; the cheeping and peeping and occasional song from the small birds was a gentle accompaniment. Next I tidied the dining table which had been heaped with junk and washed last night’s dishes. I’ve just finished breakfast. Everything around me is now calm and neat and orderly. Breathe, Susan, I tell myself. Breathe.

Because for the rest of the day I know I will barely catch my breath. It’s the maddest, busiest day of the year in the bookshop. For hours at a stretch, I will be a machine – gift wrapping, scanning and using the point-of-sale computer or Eftpos machine, issuing book vouchers, searching for books. It’s exhausting but great fun, and absolutely wonderful to see all those books flying out the door.

Lost in the Christmas rush was a nice little statistic. Our shop sold its 500th copy of The Truth About Verity Sparks on 17th December. Next year I will bake a Verity cake and celebrate. But right now I am preparing for a day of happy retail madness.

Merry Christmas! Happy Reading! And all the best for 2015.

The site of an old gold mine near the main road into town. Mining equipment turned into rusty old junk turned into oddly beautiful objects.  The closer you look, the more you see (isn’t that the way of things?).

All the noise and activity of the mine finished long ago, and what’s left of the machinery is mouldering away in the sun and rain. With the passing years, trees and grass and weeds have softened the harsh red soil that was ripped up and washed down and dug and sieved and sluiced.

You hear crows and the melancholy repetitive call of a bronzewing. You look across the valley to the Chewton hills, covered in scrubby bush now but once bare and swarming with miners. Just up the road is Pennyweight Flat cemetery where many of the graves are small, child-sized. Children on the goldfields had a tough time surviving. Only a few of the graves have names and dates; mostly they’re marked by rough edgings of made of rocks. Gone and forgotten.

But the gold is still somewhere in the world.

Perhaps it’s in my wedding ring.

It’s the time of year for reptiles of all kinds to be out and about, and so I’m being very mindful that the creature rustling in the bushes may be a harmless lizard – or a brown snake. So far they’ve been lizards only. Skinks galore, and a few bluetongues. You can’t really tell, but this fine fellow was huge. I wondered if it was an old one, for I spotted another, much smaller, whose scales were really glossy and shiny and new-looking. We also have geckos – again, one large and one small – who come out at night and cling to the flywire screen at the kitchen window. They’re lying in wait for the moths that come fluttering to the light.
There’s something very endearing about geckos. They have such dear little hands, for a start, and their soft pinkiness seems less coldly reptilian than scalier creatures. Their bodies curve into a variety of graceful gecko poses and their quick dispatch of their prey means there’s no hindquarters and tail half-in and half-out and a sinister bulge as there is with snakes (I speak from experience – my husband used to keep pythons.)

After I finished Little Women, I read one of the many YA new releases that are stacked in piles in our bookshop. There’s a lot of dystopia around, but since I’m feeling fairly depressed at the state of the world as it is (I must stop reading the papers!) I chose Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar.

I was sent here because of a boy. His name was Reeve Maxfield, and I loved him and then he died, and almost a year passed and no one knew what to do with me. Finally it was decided to send me here.

Jam (short for Jamaica), traumatised by her boyfriend’s death, has been sent to The Wooden Barn, a boarding school for ’emotionally fragile, highly intelligent teenagers’.

She finds that she’s been enrolled for a course called Special Topics in English. Jam’s room-mate, DJ – who’d love to do the course – describes it as a ‘legendary’ class. The elderly teacher, Mrs Quenell, only teaches it when she wants to. It’s one semester long. You read only one writer. There are only five or six students. “It’s the smallest, most elite class in the entire school.”

When Jam begins the class, she finds that the set text is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. And that it’s a course requirement that, twice a week, the students write in the journals that Mrs Quenell hands to them. They’re red, leather-bound, very old – and magical. Jam finds that when she writes in her journal, she’s transported to another world, a world where Reeve is waiting for her. They talk, they laugh, they lie together on the grass and kiss. And then it’s over. She’s back in her room.

It’s soon clear that each of the students have been to this other place – which they eventually name Belzhar (a play on Plath’s title Bell Jar ) –  and they’re as troubled by it as Jam. Eventually the comforting fantasies and dreams, the wishes and might-have-beens collide with reality. We get to know each student’s story – the shocking events that landed them at The Wooden Barn – but Jam holds out. She only tells us what happened at the very end of the book and I’d better not spoil anything except to reassure you that, though drawing on Plath’s poetry, prose and biography, Belzhar doesn’t end in suicide but in a satisfying resolution and a surprise.

Here’s a little list of the themes touches upon – abduction, adultery, alcoholism, depression, divorce, drug use, eating disorders, obsession, porn, sexual identity… A world away from Little Women –  and nearly 150 years. I was talking to my editor about the two books and she suggested that books for young adults in Alcott’s era were often concerned with transforming yourself (for example, by conquering your faults), while most modern YA authors have a very different message.  The hero’s or heroine’s journey is to authenticity and self-acceptance. I wonder what Louisa Alcott would think.

PS I’m assuming this is the US cover. Different, eh?

More reading about reading. Last week I finished How to be  a Heroine;(Or, What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much) by Samantha Ellis and it got me thinking about the heroines of my childhood. A reader, a bookworm, living much of the time in word worlds, I naturally pictured myself as the heroine of my own story. Doesn’t everyone?

No, apparently. Years ago I made some horrible vain remark to the effect that I was glad I had my ankles are slim, for no heroine ever had thick ankles.
“What on earth are you talking about?” said my friend. She thought I was weird. “Heroines are in books. They’re not real.”

My reading project is still to read something old and something new, but some of the old ones will come from my childhood reading because I’m interested in those heroines that helped form me. This week I re-read Little Women.

First published in 1868, it’s an antique. So is my copy – pictured to the left, with cover and many lovely illustrations by Shirley Hughes. It’s the one I first read when I was around 10 or 11. I wondered if I’d find it unreadable, but I just gobbled it up, finishing the whole thing in two or three sittings. I found the language easy and readable, the characters engaging – especially Jo, of course.  It’s sometimes funny, sometimes touching, and a wee bit sentimental. I shed a little tear when Beth defrosted old Mr Laurence next door and when she caught scarlet fever. The baby died in her arms! And of course Jo, with her intelligence, ambition and wild, coltish energy, is a living, breathing delight. But…

Yes, there’s a but. According to Ellis, it’s ‘unbelievably preachy.’ She reckons that every page ‘is rammed with endless, intrusive moralising’, and writes that ‘I never realised before that in Little Women, each March sister is tamed, one by one, part from Beth, who doesn’t need taming because she is a personality-free doormat. Which apparently is the ideal.’

Not quite. The ideal, stated by Mr March when he comes back from the war, is ‘a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman.’ But I agree with Ellis that there IS lots of very explicit moralising. The Pilgrim’s Progress is mentioned over and over as the model for life’s journey.

Alcott has chapters that deal with Meg’s (pretty harmless, actually) vanity, Jo’s willfulness and temper and Amy’s selfishness. Beth, who is pathologically shy and at 14 still plays with dolls, is quiet, sweet and helpful, but even she gets a harsh lesson when Marmee decides to teach them that all play and no work is no fun either. No one feeds Beth’s canary, and she finds it ‘dead in the cage, with his little claws pathetically extended, as if imploring the food for want of which he had died.’ A bit harsh, Marmee!

What makes Little Women (and many other 19th and early- to mid- 20th century children’s books different to most published today is that Christian morality is front and centre.

But then, I read somewhere that Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was really one long Mormon tract on sexual abstinence.