Susan Green

The pen scratches across the page rebel hump rebel hump rebel hump*. What do these words mean, asks the pen. I don’t know, replies the wrist. These are the words forming and the writer, stationed at Dolina Charlotty, in a valley in northern Poland, will decide later. Charlotty, a name evoking the porcelain face of a doll, left in the grass by a child so that she might go off to pick wild berries. Not for very long, but long enough to be forgotten, and through the passing of time the abandoned doll becomes Charlotty in the rain, Charlotty in the snow, Charlotty pulled apart by a playful dog. Her porcelain head swathed in the shadows of beech trees growing higher through seasons of snow, of red then dead leaves. Seasons of sun fade the pink of her cheeks yet fail to subdue the impassive intensity of her marble eyes.

I never really got into Patti Smith. Back in the mid 1970’s, when my friends were into the Sex Pistols, I was more likely to be listening to Sam Cooke. So despite a strong memory of seeing Horses, Patti Smith’s breakout debut album, amongst the share house collection, I couldn’t really bring her music strongly to mind. It wasn’t part of my personal soundtrack, the ’70’s mixtape of my young adult years.

Therefore, my interest in Bread of Angels was limited, and when a friend gave it to me – ‘Borrow this, you’ll like it’ – I thought they were wrong. Reader, I was wrong. I loved this memoir. From the first paragraph (above), it’s intriguing and enthralling. I found myself transported to a late 1940’s American childhood that was nevertheless almost Dickensian in its poverty and hardship. But this is no misery memoir, it’s more like her very own ‘Song of Innocence and Experience’, as she renders those early years magical, rich and very strange as filtered through her wildly poetic sensibility.

The middle section of the book, which bounces through her early career, were less fascinating for me; I’ve read that these years are dealt with more fully in her other memoirs. Readers may or may not admire her refusal to compromise, to become a product instead of an artist but I was cheering her on. She left her band, her career, at its height to follow her heart. Her account of marriage to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, the eccentric home they made together on the shores of a lake in Michigan, the life they shared, the creativity they encouraged in each other, was made more moving by his early death. Her progress through inconsolable grief into a later blooming creative phase seems magnificent. Art, love, life. Bravo Patti.

*Rebel hump? Misfit child that she was, Patti Smith imagined that she had ‘a miniature Quasimodo trapped inside an awkward child’s body’ – but she turned the disability or disfigurement – the hump of the hunchback – into a kind of secret strength.

Minoru Aose is a middle-aged architect, single, divorced, and with only monthly visits with his teenage daughter. When he’s asked to replicate his famous ‘Y residence’ for some new clients, he decides to visit it for the first time since he handed over the keys to the finished house. He’s puzzled, upset and saddened to find it’s empty apart from a single chair, which has been placed in a room facing the north light. It seems the family he designed it for never moved in. Why not? Were they unhappy with his design? Or did something happen to them?
Trying to answer these questions (and more), he goes on a journey of discovery. What initially seems like simple detective work ends as an inquiry into the nature of art, ambition, work and creativity, of home and families and love. When he finds the answers to his questions, he discovers he too is part of a complex and unexpected story.

Well, I tried not to give away too much by talking about the plot – but I’m not sure I managed to convey how brilliant this book is. I loved it! It’s lively, intriguing, enthralling, multi-layered, and I couldn’t put it down. I haven’t read a lot of Japanese literature but I recognise (and enjoy) the characteristic flavour of tradition blended with modernity. There’s a strong streak of neuroticism that seems uniquely Japanese, too. I can’t recommend this one highly enough.

Being a good person, or at least becoming a better person, became part of my Stoic journey because it was one of the only three things that were under my complete control. Forget about trying to change other people to become good. You can become a role model or instruct and persuade other people to be good, but it is ultimately not within your control as to whether someone is good or bad, or behaving well or poorly. As Marcus Aurelius advised: teach them, or learn to bear them.

Brigid Delaney’s book is subtitled How to be Stoic in Chaotic Times. Stoic philosophy has a long history going all the way back to ancient Rome and of course, as she points out, life was pretty chaotic then too. But we have our own particular challenges at this rather dark phase of 21st century life – social media, misinformation, the use of AI all spring to mind.  She set out to write a practical guide to applying Stoic philosophy to our lives, and I think she’s done it very well.

The ‘control test’, above all, is a very useful tool. It’s come down to us from the philosopher Epictetus who, nearly 2,000 years ago, asked ‘what can we directly control in our lives?’ Not much, it seems. Stoics would say that we control only our character, our reactions (and some of our actions though we cannot control outcomes) and the way we treat people. Three things! So don’t worry about the rest. I have been fretting a lot recently. Toxic politics, Gaza, the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the climate; the health worries of family members, some sticky issues with friends; weeds in the garden, stalled progress on my book, not enough exercise. Stoic advice would be: concentrate on what you can control.  Get weeding, writing, walking. Inform myself judiciously (no doom scrolling). I can also donate, volunteer, participate and try be a useful community member. I can agitate for change. But my worrying doesn’t fix or solve anything, and just makes me feel awful.
This was the right book at the right time for me.

How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that happens in life!

The right book at the right time is a wonderful thing. In 1991 I decided to travel far, far away from Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, to spread my wings and try to get over a broken heart. New skies, new people, new challenges. I thought that the end of March would be Spring in Quebec. It was, but not as we know it. There was still melting snow on the ground. Though to the folks of Montreal it was positively balmy, to me it was very, very cold. My friend David was a marvellous host, but he was an actor, and busy with his work so I did a lot of solo wandering around Montreal and Quebec City, and what with the cold, the sense of dislocation and loneliness plus heartache, I was occasionally pretty miserable. One day, in an English-language bookshop, I found a Penguin Classics edition of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; I bought it and Marcus became a valued travelling companion and teacher. I liked to think that this man, all those centuries ago, was also simply a human being who struggled with himself too. Meditations isn’t a manifesto or a sermon, it’s just what he wrote in his private journal. Often just a few sentences on what he had learned along his way through life. There was nothing flashy, though it was often beautifully expressed. There is no ‘Secret’ (remember those best sellers full of promises?) to success, happiness, endless bliss. Who would have known that philosophy could be so sensible?

It’s a little like the search for the perfect handbag. It takes years, decades even. You try and then buy, hoping for the right size and shape with the ideal ratio of pockets, flaps and zips, thinking you have it right but knowing that this will only be revealed in use. At last, you realise that there cannot be an ultimate bag, the one bag that rules them all; you have three or four, and each one is perfect for a particular use, a certain kind of day. You go back to them again and again, always enjoying their particular rightness. But they grow shabby and you are occasionally tempted by other, newer, bags…

And so it is with comfort reading. I go back again and again to the tried and true –  to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Goudge, to classic crime and children’s literature, to my daggy old best-sellers of yesteryear. But I thought it was time I tried a new genre – the contemporary rom-com – and this book was pressed into my hand by an avid fellow-reader who loved it.

The Wedding People tells the story of Phoebe, who arrives at a swish hotel in Newport (no, not the inner Melbourne industrial suburb; this is the one on Rhode Island, USA, home of millionaires and Gilded Age mansions) with no luggage, wearing a green silk dress and gold sandals. She’s come to a momentous decision about her life, but her plans are derailed when she finds the hotel has been taken over by a wedding party. Despite herself she becomes involved and forms an unlikely friendship with the young bride, Lila. The two of them fumble and stumble their way to happy-ish endings. There’s comedy, drama, pathos, sex, romantic confusion and feel-good family vibes as a million dollars is spent on the lavish week-long nuptials.

I read it, quickly. I laughed at the funny bits. I appreciated the skill of the writer. But it didn’t do the trick. I wasn’t comforted, even though I liked it; I didn’t love it, and I wouldn’t read it again. It seems that as with handbags, so with comfort reading. I know what works.

Recently, the wonderful coach and mentor, editor, podcaster, writer, retreatist (?) extraordinaire and lovely human Meg Dunley recorded our conversation about writing, and here it is.

Meg is so easy to talk to, and I had a lot of fun. However, I’ve watched most of Meg’s interviews with artists and writers, and I seem to have used the most ‘ums’ of anyone. It is instructive/interesting/dismaying to watch yourself talking. My face is very mobile, I see. And my hands also. But my voice isn’t what I think it is, and certainly not what I hear when I talk. Not just the ‘ums’, but the…is it the tone, or the timbre?

Our internet connection that day was not good, and so the picture quality isn’t the best, which is a salve for my vanity. Double chins! My official ‘author pic’, taken by my dear husband, is several years old and rather flattering.

Could I use this author pic, taken in 1980 by a photographer friend, instead? Actually, I would not want to turn back time and be 22 again. I like the view from here – nearly 70 – so much better, though not the creaky joints. I was indeed the very serious young person I appear to be, intent on writing very, very literary short stories. My goddesses at the time were Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. I wonder what I would have said about my writing practice then? It was pretty scatty. Lots of beginnings. Lots of notes and first pages and then…nothing. My problem was that I rarely finished anything because of the unpleasant, carping, bitching, negative person in my head telling me that my writing was – basically – crap. My biggest breakthrough in writing was when I realised I could tell that voice that yes, it’s true, it’s crap – but I will finish it anyway. I took all the effort of fighting that nasty critic, stepped sideways and out of sight, and kept going. And these days I recognise that the nasty critic was simply doing its job, trying to protect me from disappointment of rejection.

For a writer (this writer, anyway) hearing other writers talk about writing is fascinating. We all work so differently, and I know I have changed a great deal over the 4o odd years of my career. Right now, I am concerned with enjoying my work. Not flogging myself about productivity. Having a schedule loose enough to fit in the unexpected, but not so loose that nothing gets done. A couple of weeks ago I hustled to get 10,000 words ready to submit to Varuna for one of their residencies. I’ve had 2 before, and both have led to finished books I’m proud of, and to publication. Three’s a charm? It would be lovely to go to Varuna again, but not essential. It was just good to push myself a little.

And note to self: read the submission requirements properly next time. I spent a couple of days writing a 1,000 word synopsis. My husband, reading and re-reading it, did comment that it seemed an unusually long synopsis… It turned out to be 1,000 characters required, not words. Bugger!

And here’s the link to Meg’s site. Well worth a look, and a listen.

The courtyard led through an archway onto Lenin Avenue, one of the city’s busiest streets. Ancient tin buses wheezed past carrying workers to outlying factories. Trams and trolley buses trundled up and down. Heavy black Russian tourers threaded their way through the traffic, the drivers’ hands on the horn. Like all the avenues and parks and squares here, Lenin Avenue was generously planned. Beneath the plane trees, on the wide pavements, old women with shawls wound across their mouths sold carnations and sunflower seeds in newspaper cones. Shops like cupboards carved into the gracious tufa facades sold newspapers and cigarettes. The signs on street corners, above doorways, on bus fronts, Cyrillic or Armenian, were indecipherable to Edith. She was illiterate here. The street ran on beyond the haze of petrol fumes to the city’s gaunt surrounding hills.

I would never have picked Gilgamesh from the library shelves, but a member of my Wine and Cheese Book Group did, and I loved it. A fairy-tale, an epic, a coming-of-age story, an adventure, a drama of love and war, even a spy thriller – it has elements of all these. I couldn’t put it down.

The beginning, a sort of prologue, is set in 1918, at the end of the First World War. Australian soldier Frank marries Englishwoman Ada and takes her with him to a soldier settler block in Nanderup, a small town in Western Australia. They are both unsuited to the life and the farm fails to prosper. With their daughters Frances and Edith, they live a hard, isolated and impoverished life.
1937, Frank has died, and Ada and her daughters are still living on the farm. Seventeen-year-old Edith brings some money into the house by waiting on tables and cleaning at a nearby guest house. Suddenly, exotic visitors arrive. They are Leopold, Ada’s half-Russian, half-English nephew, an archaeologist; and Aram, once Leopold’s driver and now his friend. Aram talks to Edith about his tragic homeland of Armenia; Leopold tells the story of the Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh and his friend, the wild man Enkidu. For Edith they bring with them fun, friendship, affection, news, stories, ideas, histories and myths, intimations of a much wider world than Nanderup.
And then, two years late, in 1939 and on the cusp of another war, Edith and her little son Jim set out on their own adventure, by ship and train and overland, seeking Aram in Armenia.

No spoilers after this; read it yourself. Gilgamesh is beautifully written, the language poetic but at the same time to the point. I loved every word. Every character, too; the section set in Soviet-controlled Armenia, where Edith becomes part of the ill-assorted household of the trader Hagop, could have been a novel in itself. The action moves across the map with intense, evocative descriptions: London, tiny Nanderup in the Australian bush, Istanbul, Armenia, the Middle East in wartime, and then back home to Nanderup.  As the story moves in a circle, you can feel Edith learn, survive, become strong, become herself. She’s the heroine of her own epic.

The distant wireless roar of the ocean, the cries of the cockatoos released in the wind, came straight from childhood. Everything Edith saw moved her, the slow clouds, the olive-green headlands, the great bowl of the sea. She knew everything that met her eye in every direction. The space and light could make her dizzy with happiness. Whatever the terrors and mysteries of childhood, she thought, she must have known happiness here.

Dad died in February 1999. A few years after his death, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the National Gallery of Victoria. Almost all of his paintings were displayed in the exhibition. He was ‘speaking’ to us in his paintings. He was also speaking to us in grey font printed directly onto the wall: ‘What I paint is what interests me most, that is, people; the human condition.’

A pang of anger hit me as I read those words. I wanted to say, ‘You might have painted pictures of your four daughters but what would you know of the human condition of any one of us?’

Clara Brack has been writing this moving and sad book for the past 20 years, and I think I can understand why it took so long. Coming to terms with who your parents were – and weren’t – can be a hard and slow road.

Brack is the oldest daughter of artists John Brack and Helen Maudsley. Her father was famous – even if you don’t know much about Australian art, you might recognise his painting Collins St 5pm. You might even have studied it at school. Her mother took her role as ‘artist’s wife’ and all that entailed of supporting him and assisting with his career, very seriously. She also had what amounted to sole responsibility for the running of a house and caring for their four daughters, so she painted in what little time was available to her. No wonder her work is less well known.

The family life Clara experienced was nothing like the happy riot of domesticity described in this commentary on his ‘Four Daughters’ series of prints. John Brack comes out of this book as a difficult, troubled and driven man. He came from a working class family, and he knew about poverty and lack of opportunity; though he was awarded a scholarship to a private school, the family didn’t have enough money for the uniform. His mother passionately wished him to ‘better himself’ – perhaps enter one of the professions –  but he chose to become an artist. He became estranged from both his parents, and in turn, he was a distant and critical father.

I was fearful of his criticism, but I also wished to protect him. Deeply within him one sensed a vulnerability, a fragility, a void. It felt to me that a sense of dark precariousness hung over the family, exuding an ominousness that could never be referred to. I was not aware of it until I left home.

As Clara describes her childhood, while her father was either painting or teaching, her mother was busy fulfilling her various roles of artist’s wife, housewife, mother and artist. There was always a sense of distance – perhaps it was her mother’s ‘establishment’ background (her father was a prominent psychiatrist, and president of the Melbourne Club), or perhaps it was simply the era. One of her maxims was ‘private is private’, and Clara wrote this book with the knowledge that her mother would find the revelations –  about John Brack’s alcoholism and eventual slide into dementia, the unhappy family life, Clara’s own childhood trauma – difficult. She held off publication of the book for many years, but as her mother is now close to 100 and suffering cognitive decline, The Secret Landscapes can’t effect her.

 The Secret Landscapes is not only a mixture of memoir and biography, but a work of imagination. Clara has given her parents another chance. She’s invented a therapist for her father so that he is able to give up the booze, keep painting and avoid dementia. She could not imagine her mother seeing a therapist, so for her she’s devised a character who becomes a friend and confidante. Both  conversations lead gradually not to some kind of facile fictional ‘healing’, but to a greater understanding of their lives, and hers. There is much painful truth-telling here, but by the time I finished, I understood this book as a gift of love and generosity. And courage.

‘Second Class’, Douglas Green, 1947.

This painting is in the collection of the Warrnambool Art Gallery but for most of my childhood it hung on the wall of our house. My father painted it, and there is a link to Clara Brack’s book. John Brack was the model for the man looking out of the window on the far right, and Helen Maudsley for the woman in yellow in the centre of the painting. My father knew them when they were all art students; in fact, Dad shared a studio with John Brack at one time. Apparently, the three of them spent a day on the relatively quiet Sandringham train line; John and Helen posing, and Dad sketching and drawing. A little bit of art history!

If I had to do a three-word review of Guts, I’d write ‘engaging, illuminating, unsatisfying’.

Engaging, because reading it is like listening to Melissa Leong talk. After no interest whatever in Masterchef, last year we watched the whole thing and developed quite a little addiction. So while we were waiting the for new season, we started to delve into the past and discovered the Melissa Leong, Andy Allen and Jock Zonfrillo triumvirate. They’re such fun to watch. Melissa is expert, expressive, super stylish and seems to genuinely bond with the participants. She seems visibly moved by the meaning and emotion wrapped up in food, especially for the Chinese and South East Asian cooks.

Illuminating, because what you see – of course – is only the accomplished, vivacious host. You don’t see the child of Singaporean Chinese immigrants in Sydney who endured racism and ethnic slurs from the white kids at school, and harsh punishments from her father at home. Or the talented pianist, at who at 16 ended her ambition for a concert career due to RSI pain. Or the chronic anxiety and depression that have dogged her for most of her life. At the time she was starting in her career as a food writer, the industry was (and still is, perhaps) male-dominated. Rock-star chefs, columnists and reviewers – all white men, and so she had a doubly tough time being female and Asian. Sexism was pervasive, and an incident which took years for her to identify as rape had a huge impact on her mental health.

And ultimately unsatisfying because Melissa writes with such reserve about her life on the small screen. It’s what we know her for, after all. It is probably a combination of respect for others and professional good sense, but it does leave gaps and holes in the narrative. Did I just want more gossip, some anecdotes about the Masterchef boys or even some dirt? To my shame, that’s quite possibly the case!

This is my second Masterchef memoir – I read Julie Goodwin’s book a little while ago. As with Julie, I have genuine admiration for how thoughtfully Melissa uses her mental health struggles to help other women. As an Asian woman in that white, male-dominated industry, she’s had an extra load and it’s taken guts to achieve what she has.

Along with many others in analysis, I learned to honor the world of dreams, of active imagination, and begin to ask questions such as “But what is that choice in service to inside?” A simple enough question, but it begins the forensic deepening. The problem with the unconscious is that it is unconscious.
Recently, while in the hospital, I was asked by a nurse what I did for a living.
“How does that work differ from ordinary psychology?” she asked.
“Well, for one thing, we try to evoke a conversation with the unconscious.”
She thought awhile, and replied, “Oh, I get it. You work with folks in a coma.”

This book by James Hollis may well be his last; he’s recently had knee and hip replacements, spinal surgery, deep vein thrombosis and cancer with surgery, radiation and chemo. He and his wife have moved into a retirement cooperative, but he continues to work as a psychoanalyst and to write. He says, ‘…I can only conclude that the work of Carl Jung and psychodynamic psychology continue to animate, direct and feed the life of the soul – at least this soul.’

I’ve read and re-read many books by Hollis. I count him as a mentor, or even a friend in some strange way; many of his ideas and insights have registered so strongly with me that they now form part of the way I think about myself.  And yet –

Now, with this new book, I find myself liking the things he says while not liking the way he says them. Put very, very simply – too many words. Too many big words. Too many winding sentences and (big word alert!) too much circumlocution. My progress through this book has been tediously slow, so slow that the sense of excitement, of learning, of encountering new and helpful insights about later life has drained away. But Living with Borrowed Dust is not a dead loss, not at all. Hollis is truly an elder. As a Jungian analyst in a world of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and quick-fix psychology he stands out as a believer in the human soul, and I love him for that.

After reading so many Margery Allingham crime novels, I thought I’d find out about the writer herself. But The Adventures of Margery Allingham is a bit of a misnomer, really. Though in the Albert Campion novels, events move at breakneck speed, Allingham’s life was, basically, work.

She was born in 1904 in Ealing, London, into a literary family. Her father and mother were both writers, as were various other family members. Family magazines, movie magazines, girls’ and boys’ magazines, women’s magazines – they edited, produced articles, answered reader’s letters and wrote serial stories. You could describe them as hacks, but this early training in commercial writing gave Margery the ability to produce stories without any messing around. She was close to her father, who encouraged her, but her mother sounds like a nightmare. Now, we’d probably guess at some undiagnosed mental health condition; she was lively, intelligent and could be charming, but also domineering, attention-seeking, self-absorbed and prone to dramatic shifts in mood and sudden overwhelming passions and enthusiasms.

The family moved from London to a country house in rural Sussex when she was six, and that childhood landscape was one she kept returning to in life and in her fiction. She and her brother were cared for by the servants and their Nurse, because their parents, like most middle-class Edwardians, were not at all hands-on. Besides, they took their professional obligations seriously. She was a lonely child, who lived in her own imagination.

My clearest recollection is my own frustration. I was energetic, affectionate and lonely, and all the interesting people appeared to be on the other side of glass.

In adolescence, she worried about her weight (a thyroid condition was discovered later in life) and became very self-conscious. In 1920, back in London, she studied speech and drama. Which seems an an odd choice for a shy girl, but apparently it cured her stammer and she was able to throw herself into student life, acting, writing plays and monologues, creating costumes, making friends – she loved it all.

Of course, she was always writing. As soon as she could, she did, earning her first fee, at the age of 8, for a story published in her aunt’s magazine.  In 1923, when she was 19, her first book, a historical drama Blackerchief Dick was published. In 1928, there was a mystery, The White Cottage Mystery, and then in 1929 she hit her stride with The Crime at Black Dudley. That marked the first appearance of Albert Campion. He was a minor character, a pale, yellow-haired, bespectacled young man with a vacuous face and a large, lugubrious henchman/minder called Magersfontein Lugg, but something about him insisted that he wasn’t going to be a one-off. Eventually, Allingham wrote 18 Campion novels, numerous stories and novellas, and Campion evolved all the way into the late 1960’s.

As for Margery’s own life, as I said, it was mainly work. She married Philip Youngman Carter in 1927. He was a talented artist and designer and produced Margery’s early covers, but freelance work was sporadic and she was the breadwinner. In fact, it seems that most of her early married life was spent supporting him and later his best friend, who came to join them in their country cottage. Later still, another female friend joined the crew.

WWII changed everything. The household broke up. Her husband joined the army, and Margery was heavily involved in the war effort in their small Essex village. At the same time, she wrote, producing two of the best Campions, Traitor’s Purse and Coroner’s Pidgin, and a memoir of wartime village life, The Oaken Heart.

After the war, Youngman Carter got himself well-paying work and lived mostly in London. Though they remained a couple, it seems that they lived increasingly separate lives.  Youngman Carter was a sociable, lively man, often extravagant, and he loved the good life – which included female companionship. However the couple had regular gatherings of friends at their country house, and were famous for cricket matches and celebrations. All organised, of course, by Margery. And then, when her mother and two other elderly relatives became ill and increasingly dotty, she moved them into a house in the village, and cared for them. She wrote about this experience in a book called The Relay.

She died of breast cancer, with her last Campion book unfinished. She’d been too busy to seek a medical opinion about her symptoms, and it was too far advanced by the time she did.

I do love the imagination, liveliness and wit that Margery channeled onto the page, but now I also think, rather sadly, of her husband and their friends having adventures while she sat and wrote to pay for them.