The White Body of Evening (21 page)
October 9, 1911
Dear Hamish,
I have read the family archive from start to finish. I don’t know how you managed to part with it, but I must thank you again for doing so. There is much to be frightened of here, though of course it is difficult to know where to draw the line between fact and fiction. I doubt that my father was a pervert, at least not a real one, though the manner of his death might tell us something on that account. Anyway, I’m not about to indict someone for his fantasies. We all live in various degrees of evasion, desperately (or maybe just lazily) clutching at the surface of things, which stops us from going to “the other side”. I suppose spewing it all out like that is one way of being with oneself. I mean living with oneself, of getting beyond the illusion. Maybe there are people who already embrace their own horror as a matter of course, like criminals or the insane. Short of that, art is the language in which the self unfolds and I suppose it’s the best we can do to have some inkling of ourselves.
Being at sea leads one to think in this vein. There’s nothing else to do. Travel is a kind of blankness, between the place one is escaping from and the place one is fleeing to. Put like that it seems a waste of time really, and bound to end in disappointment. I don’t know what it would have taken for me to stay in Melbourne. A good old-fashioned plague perhaps. I often think that I’d be happy in a plague town (perhaps that’s what I think I’m going to find over there). It’s the kind of thing that occurs to me late at night, when I’m having trouble sleeping. Wet cobblestones, dead rats underfoot, the stench of something rank, bodies torn open by pustules and thrown into the street. There wouldn’t be much point in going through with the formalities then, would there? It would be “come as you are”. But then I suppose the disappointment would be that nothing much would change, that people have been coming as they are all along, and there’s simply not much there.
Paul broke off from his letter, thinking of something he had read in his father’s writing. Is the child on the beach – the child and the “filthy streets of her sex” – Ondine? He remembered a day when they were all on the sand and his father was looking around, distracted. Ondine was mucking about in the seaweed and then he was staring at her, talking about how he could smell sewage leaking somewhere. Paul recognised the smell. It was the smell of the bay: seaweed and shellfish, the ocean mingling with the corruption of a port town. He saw his father look at his sister as if he were smelling her. Perhaps he’d write that poem out and send it to her, Paul thought. God knows what she’d make of it now. He imagined his sister had changed, but maybe it was simply that he never knew her. At the pier as they had said their farewells, all he could see when he looked at Ondine were the traces of his incursions – Matthews’s – imprinted on her body. Afterwards, when the port had receded from view, he lay awake listening to the waves, imagining her in her husband’s arms, wondering whether she still looked chaste.
He dismissed the thought and returned to the letter.
The Whitehead book has also been a revelation to me. The whole thing is thick with the atmosphere of hallucination. The streets, the ghost of the wife, the nightmare of alcohol, poverty and failure. Of course Whitehead, though I suppose he really lived like that, is Collins himself. The two are doubles of each other. Perhaps you could write
The Tragedy of Christopher Leslie Collins
and make it an epic of modern Melbourne. God knows, that is what the city is short on — its own myth-makers.
But what can you expect from a place that seems to be ending before it has even really begun? That’s the true tragedy of Australia — a country arrives at the moment in world history when the very concept of the nation has almost run out of steam. What is left to it but clichés and jingoism? Perhaps the odd blood sacrifice. National identity in Australia is already a layer of dead tissue. You probably don’t quite agree and I may be exaggerating. If I ever come back I suppose I’ll have to swallow my words. Will post from Fremantle.
Yours, Paul
October 20,1911
Dear Hamish,
If you get a chance, look in on my sister and tell me what you find. I’m curious. I suppose I would like to know whether she is in good hands or about to let her rootlessness get the better of her and jump on a ship as well. I have visions of Matthews abusing her, taking his coveted riding whip to her and breaking her indomitable spirit as if she were one of his colts. He seems the type to me — an old-style sadist or a military man in uniform strolling brashly through a public garden with the smooth, clean look of a wife-beater. But I’m probably underestimating my sister. She is no doubt his equal in pride, strength and imperiousness. Perhaps it is she who has taken the riding whip to him.
My father seems to have had a fanciful sense of geography. He writes about South Melbourne Beach and St Kilda as if they were in North Africa, the Yarra River as if it were a Venetian canal, and the Block Arcade as if it were in Paris. He reconstructed virtually the entire city as a phantasmagoria of exotic possibilities, as if he were constantly in flight from it and living in his imagination.
Melbourne is a place given over to fantasy anyway. The streets are lined with oaks, elms and plane trees, and native plants have been carefully removed, creating the atmosphere of a northern city, or at least one that is not specifically Australian. Of course, when the last shadows of winter dry up and the place is drenched in sunlight, choking on dust and infested with blowflies, where else could it be but the south (and not the south that Keats imagined)? Even the most intense fantasies wither in such heat. The place is unwilling to confront its natural habitat, its antipodean reality, and would go to any lengths not to have to look inland at the grey, hacked-up earth. It seems futile really, and a bit infantile.
But then all those stolid realists who want to embrace the harsh spirit of the land are living in a dream as well, imagining that a few generations of frontier violence could be the basis of a robust national identity. They can’t smell the blood on their own hands. Better to throw the whole thing in, if you ask me, and start again with the freedom of not having to be bound to a place at all.
But I suppose the sea is the epitome of this freedom, and it is monotony itself. On calm days one can look out on one side of the ship and see an eternity of still, flat water, and think that here is an image of one’s own exile and homelessness. It makes me feel slightly nauseous, the light and the gentle, persistent swaying of that great, empty expanse. You long for a good bit of earth to pound your feet upon, something with a stable point of gravity, a city of brick and stone. In Fremantle I went ashore for a day and spent most of it in a drab Italian café, trying to avoid the sun. I must have smoked a packet of cigarettes, and watched the smoke of each of them drift on the blades of sunlight that pierced the tattered curtains. It was a relief to be still for a while, but by the evening I was anxious to be back on board the
Abendstern
and moving again, feeling as if the dry heat and the still streets were working their way into me and hollowing me out as surely as the ocean had.
My fellow passengers all seem to be suffering from this malaise. Perhaps this accounts for their dullness. There are some members of a scientific party from Freiburg who have been in Queensland studying the Lamington Plateau. The poor fellows are red as beetroots and about as interesting. There are some vaudeville performers heading for Cape Town, a couple of newlyweds who keep to themselves as if they were fugitives fleeing a scandalous past, and a woman from somewhere near Colac taking her gawky daughter on a grand tour to see the great galleries of Europe. There is also a funny little man from Adelaide, Arthur Hume, who claims to be an antiquarian book collector. He had me in his cabin the other night drinking sherry and talking about Byron’s love of young Greek boys. The whole thing was a bit distasteful, but a distraction from the usual round of dinner, drinks and cards, or worse, an evening in the ship’s casino wondering when the shoddily made wheel of fortune will come spinning off its bearings.
I have no love for travel. In fact I detest the farcical conversations one becomes inured to, the triviality of non–space, where the best one can hope for is to be mildly amused and forgetful of the tedium. What else can one do? Of course there is a limit to the amount one can read. Since Fremantle I’ve read Hoffmann’s
Die Elixiere des Teufels,
hoping to revive my German, as well as Poe, Melville and Clarke — but I won’t bore you with a reading list. We will be docking in Cape Town in about a week or so.
Yours, Paul
On a warm morning in early November, Paul sat on the deck of the
Abendstern
resting an unfinished letter in his lap, watching the coast of Africa glide by. Opposite him sat Laura Thomas, the girl from Colac way, and her mother, Eleanor. His eyes wandered back to them every so often as he puzzled over how he might describe the pair to his friend in Melbourne. He tapped his pen lightly on his knee and re-read his last few sentences: “The daughter’s name is Laura. She’s seventeen and is shaped like a gazelle. Or do I mean a giraffe? I don’t know. Awkward but not unsightly. She’s taken by the fact that I’m off to study art, and thinks it the height of romance.”
In the company of this pair, Paul had found himself drawn out into endless discussions about European splendour based on the prosaic guidebook the two of them had memorised. Because he was going to study art they wanted to defer to him on every conceivable matter of taste that might confront the eager tourist. Did he have a preference for the Impressionists? Would he bother with the provinces? How long in Paris? Where in Italy? The questions were never–ending.
He couldn’t make up his mind about Laura. He quizzed her about her family’s farm. Her father was dead and her two older brothers were running the big property. Her mother, never entirely content with the country, had implanted in her daughter a gentle disdain for virtually everything about rural life and a longing for whatever lay beyond it. They were travelling to Europe, like so many Australians, to find culture. Her mother considered it an essential part of Laura’s upbringing.
As the ship laboured along the vast, seemingly endless coast of Africa, Paul listened to her chatter on about spiritual quests and aesthetic education. He bristled at the thought of such a wholly unrealistic attitude to things, until he found his own reflection right there in front of him. Then he cringed. How many times had he complained to Hamish about cultural wastelands? He couldn’t condemn Laura without also condemning himself. Unwilling to shatter her illusions, he played along with her romantic notions of European travel.
“Well, you must visit me in Wien,” he said, conscious of the pretentiousness of using the German name.
“Oh, I will. We are certainly going there. Certainly. It’s all arranged. It will be so nice to be shown around by a real artist.”
And on it went. Paul soon felt sorry for her, and a bit sorry for himself too. When she referred to him as “a real artist” the pathos of both their lots was overwhelming.”The whole thing is really a bit of a farce, isn’t it?” he wrote to Hamish later on. “I mean the fantasy of escape – to be an artist. It’s as transparent in its own way as the Thomas family odyssey to discover the treasures of European culture so that the daughter will be better equipped to live out her days in some rural penitentiary. I felt like a mountebank flaunting the magic of these fantasies as if it were snake oil. If I’ve learnt to loathe Australia, I may end up loathing myself more for the self-deception involved in fleeing it.”
He made up his mind to avoid Laura. Lord knows there were enough people on the
Abendstern
to hide behind. He imagined the ship must have packed on the passengers like cattle through a turnstile. But despite his resolution, made over and over again, he invariably found himself sitting beside her on the deck, running up against the same impasse. At times it made him sick and he was gripped by a kind of mental nausea. At others he decided to keep up his end of their childish exchange in the vague hope of forgetting himself for a while and perhaps talking himself into a more optimistic frame of mind.
“We can go to the opera and stroll around the Ringstraße, and I’ll introduce you to my artist friends,” he said cheerily, wondering if she were capable of opening her eyes to the great lie of it all. He willed himself on to more extreme performative excesses, flattered her in German, aware that these days he could barely patch together a sentence, and finally kissed her hand like an idiot. She blushed. Was he falling in love? Or was he merely acting a part? He imagined a comedy of manners performed over high tea on a rickety stage made out of corrugated iron and chicken wire.
“Paul,” Laura said as he stared blankly down at the unfinished letter. Her long face, her light freckles and the dark eyebrows and hair against her fair skin struck him as lovely. Did he really want her to come to Vienna? How could he realise his own grandiose ambitions saddled with her and her mother? He looked up at her.
“Never mind,” she said, returning to her novel, biting her lower lip. “It’s just that I hope we do see each other again.”
If her mother hadn’t been there beside them – eyes peering up from her Baedeker’s guide – he’d have touched her arm to reassure her.
T
hey parted company in Southampton, at which point Laura and her mother were heading to London and then on to Paris. Old Eleanor Thomas spoke longingly about Kensington or wherever it was they had letters of introduction. God help them, Paul thought. Laura kissed him sweetly and promised to come to “Wien” as soon as she could.
As he disembarked in Hamburg a day or so later the girl and her kiss were still with him. The steam of the ships billowed into a grey sky and trailed over the oily water of the port. He pictured a bleak Europe of industrial misery and feared that in it he’d never see her again. He pushed his way through crowds of Russian Jews waiting to sail for America. The sight of so many people clutching suitcases and staring out at the future with such tired expressions filled him with a sense of his own forlornness as he wandered over the wet cobblestones. With his suitcase in his hand he crossed a narrow walking bridge and gazed down a long canal weaving through a congested slum. It must have been low tide. The water had drained away, leaving an unctuous sludge that trailed off into the mist.