Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam (8 page)

Sunbeam
strikes me more and more as a special story; certainly in the sense that it is a story that no-one has written before. It has another claim on me: as a father in love with my children, I understood it instinctively, before I began to half-understand it at a rational level. It seemed, simply, true.

The best stories are often deceptively simple; they speak to us, to our unconscious, in ways that can not be immediately grasped; but we feel the fit, even as we are horrified, or awed.

Stories about the death of children are not new, of course — they are among the oldest, their common tune one of the most easily played for effect. Dickens killed more babies than a minor diphtheria epidemic, and even Oscar Wilde’s famous comment that anyone who could read the death of Little Nell without laughing ‘had a heart of stone’ is surely a defence against his own suppressed sentimentality. Wilde may or may not have convinced himself, but he has helped to convince us: a Dickensian rendering — a rending — of the death of a child is impossible in today’s fictional world. ‘The blood of the children flowed in the streets … like the blood of the children,’ Pablo Neruda wrote in a famous attack on the use of artistic effects, such as simile and metaphor, to describe the unspeakable. Tell it plainly, I assume he was saying. Tell it as it is — at least when speaking of real deaths, real events. But in the world of fiction?

Fiction is a different way of seeing — even its most plain-talking stories operate at a more mythic, universal level. It aims to tell the truth, yes — but in essence, in symbol, in a deeper emotional language that illuminates the particulars.

After Dickens and Wilde — and Hollywood — stories must pluck at our emotions more subtly.

This story has an odd logic — but I hope it is a logic which still locks us in, subtly, and carries us, disbelief suspended, from comforting and loving suburban beginnings into a zone not so much twilight as midnight.

Like crabs in slowly heated water, we find ourselves — I hope — being boiled alive, without noticing how we got there.

Where are we?

Among ancient instincts of sacrifice, and the dark comfort that the dying find in taking others with them, if given a chance, in their pyramids, on their funeral pyres, in their Berlin bunkers. In a world of repressed or sublimated spirituality. In a place where the logic of love has carried us further than it had any right to do. Perhaps.

I’ve added a few pages to the 1993 version which first appeared in the collection
Little Deaths.

What we write is usually too much or too little — or looks that way later. I usually err too much towards too little. I used to think the story was perfect, of course it wasn’t, and still isn’t, but it will probably continue to aspire to perfection when it has the chance.

PETER GOLDSWORTHY 1999

An essay by Peter Goldsworthy

Tell me your favourite jokes, and I will tell you your worst fears.

I sometimes use that line, across late night dinner tables, when conversation flags. It should not be confused with S.J. Perelman’s request: tell me your phobias and I will tell you what you are afraid of — which is, incidentally, one of my favourite jokes.

I once dined with friends at Kinsella’s, a Sydney funeral parlour turned restaurant. We were seated in the inner sanctum, the former chapel. Mid-meal, the poet Elizabeth Riddell recalled that her last visit to Kinsella’s had been fifteen years before, for a funeral.

Her late husband’s coffin, she announced, had occupied the precise spot where our table now stood.

Such ability to look death calmly, even jokily, in the eye, and continue eating, impressed me no end. It also suggested the possibility of finding a narrative tone with which to handle the various stories of death, and grief, and near-death which I had been collecting — or which had been collecting me — for years.

A few weeks before Philip Hodgins death from leukaemia in 1995, I prepared a newspaper obituary after a request from Philip had been passed on through a mutual friend. Philip had finally decided to discontinue the chemotherapy which had caused him much suffering for many years. I sent him the obituary — he was curious to read it — and a few days later received a bottle of his favourite wine, Passing Clouds, accompanied by a congratulatory note: it was ‘an obituary to die for.’

This seems to me one of the great aphorisms, deserving of a place in any collection of aphorisms — and a perfect distillation of Philip’s stoic courage, and style. It’s also a seamless mix of favourite joke and worst fear.

1995 was a bad year for Australian poetry, with the death of Gwen Harwood after a year long battle with what she, also, knew to be a terminal illness. Whatever private demons this forced her to wrestle with, or share with her husband and family, in her letters she remained cheerful and courageous — and as irreverent as ever, her characteristic humour irrepressible.

I can walk (as if on Jupiter) very slowly, I even look like an alien from another planet; moon-faced and swollen from the medications & decorated with magenta blotches. How uninteresting …

This from the last letter I was privileged to receive, a few weeks before her death.

It would be nice to think that we could all face our own ends with the same courage, and dignity, and tough humour.

I often thought I was dying as a child, suffering attacks of asthma at harvest time — but I liked to over-dramatise. I did spend a week in intensive care in my early twenties with a chest full of blood — but I was too drugged to sense any danger, or take proper stock. The days passed in a dream, interrupted only by the worried faces of my parents emerging and vanishing through the fog of narcotics.

What, me worry?

My experience of death has (obviously) been from the outside, looking on — but the experience has been all too frequent.

People often ask how I manage to mix working as a writer with working as a doctor. Or — an interesting wording — which are you ‘really’. Part of me always resents this: why should the two trades be incompatible, or immiscible? Perhaps the surprise that people express at such a mix — writing and medicine — is due to received notions of an Art/Science Great Divide, notions which are much exaggerated, and usually come as a complete surprise to anyone on the science side of the alleged divide, most of whom read novels, watch movies and listen to music avidly.

Sometimes the question comes from the other side, from an opposite set of prejudices: sometimes it’s a logistics question. How can a Busy Doctor Have Time to Write Books? There’s a subtext here, an accusation that harks back to that use of the word ‘really’: the notion that a ‘real’ doctor would not bother with anything so frivolous.

And another, different part of me sympathises with this. It’s a question I often ask myself, as any good Methodist boy would — especially late at night, when the work of Making Up Stories often seems rather silly.

I find it’s useful to quote Anton Chekhov in such circumstances, especially to myself: ‘medicine is my wife, writing is my mistress.’

Writing is my Golf Afternoon? In fact, I suspect that my temperament is more suited to writing than to medicine. Ever since I treated a fractured right leg in my first year out of medical school by putting a plaster on the left leg I’ve had a feeling that life held out something else for me beyond medicine. Fortunately no harm was done, except to my ego. I removed the wet plaster, red-faced, and reapplied it to the other side. Creative medicine? Or gross negligence? I blame a wandering mind, a mind too often occupied elsewhere. I like to jot down ideas between patients in a notebook I keep for that purpose. Recently a chemist around the corner returned a prescription to me with the note that while he enjoyed the poem, he didn’t think it one of my best.

And here is one of the advantages of writing as a career: you don’t need to be particularly alert to succeed. You don’t need to know the difference between a right leg and a left leg for instance. Or if you do, then you’ve got a few weeks or even months to think about it, and make up your mind exactly which is which. If it’s about nothing else, writing is about patience.

But if the literary sensibility offers little help in the practice of medicine — and might even prove a hindrance — what of vice versa?

‘I don’t know a better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession,’ Somerset Maugham, a graduate of the Class of 1897, wrote. Perhaps, perhaps not. Medicine, like any work which involves contact with a lot of human misery — and human stupidity — tends to shrivel the heart. To survive, or at least to sleep peacefully, it quickly becomes essential to put some sort of distance between that world and yourself. I think I was happiest during my student years when working in the Emergency Ward of the hospital in which I trained. Emergency Ward medicine is medicine at its most personally distant, disproportionately removed from the extreme pain and severity of the illnesses and injuries which ambulances disgorge into that ward at all hours of the day and night. It’s a world akin to the Mental Arithmetic tests of primary school (I was good at Mental!), a world of inadequate history taking, too-rapid examinations, forced decisions.