tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/diaries-89838/articles
Diaries – The Conversation
2023-12-29T11:42:50Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219274
2023-12-29T11:42:50Z
2023-12-29T11:42:50Z
What COVID diaries have in common with Samuel Pepys’ 17th-century plague diaries
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564815/original/file-20231211-21-68cd8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=319%2C275%2C5432%2C3328&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/halloween-holidays-leisure-concept-close-young-2023057376">Ground Picture/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>People keep diaries for all sorts of reasons – to record events, work through difficult situations, or manage <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1994-38706-001">stress</a> and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/19783166_Disclosure_of_Traumas_and_Immune_Function_Health_Implications_for_Psychotherapy">trauma</a>. The ongoing COVID inquiry shows diaries also have important political and historic significance. The UK’s former chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/20/how-patrick-vallance-explosive-diaries-exposed-covid-chaos-inside-no-10">diaries</a> have been a key source of evidence, exposing the chaos within government at the time. </p>
<p>In my PhD research, I’ve been exploring the COVID diaries of ordinary people, as well as diaries kept during the Great Plague of London in 1665-66. Though centuries apart, these diaries are full of insight into how people react to crises, and have surprising similarities. </p>
<p>From the first lockdown in March 2020, media outlets, archive centres and researchers encouraged people to record their pandemic experiences. Even BBC children’s entertainer <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000jsf3/at-home-with-mr-tumble-series-1-6-diary">Mr Tumble</a> urged young viewers to start a diary. </p>
<p>This has resulted in a large number of COVID diaries being made available in archive collections around the UK, plus many more online in the form of blogs or social media. I’ve been looking specifically at 13 COVID diaries donated to the Borthwick Institute for Archives and the East Riding Archives, both in Yorkshire. Most were originally private documents, offering a more spontaneous, honest and intimate portrayal of pandemic experiences than their online counterparts. </p>
<p>Diaries written during the Great Plague are not so numerous. Of the few available, the most valuable is that of naval administrator Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), whose exceptionally detailed and candid journals form by far the most comprehensive firsthand account of plague-stricken London.</p>
<p>I have been reading Pepys’s diaries alongside the modern COVID diaries, and have been struck by the common themes in how people navigated their pandemic experiences. </p>
<h2>Recording statistics</h2>
<p>Throughout the COVID pandemic, statistics of cases and deaths were everywhere, and were key to how we judged the impact of the virus. As diarist JF wrote on June 5 2020:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was time to watch the Corona Virus update and I was shocked to find that over 40,000 people have now died from the disease in this country and it’s not over yet!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Relatively accurate information was also widely circulated in 17th-century London via the “bills of mortality” – weekly lists of deaths according to cause and location. Pepys wrote on September 7 1665:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sent for the Weekely Bill and find 8252 dead in all, and of them, 6978 of the plague - which is a most dreadful Number - and shows reason to fear that the plague hath got that hold that it will yet continue among us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All of the modern and historical diaries I have looked at include these statistics – some sparingly, others with meticulous regularity.</p>
<h2>The blame game</h2>
<p>As cases rose, restrictions were enforced and the effects of plague and COVID loomed large in the lives of our diarists, narratives shifted to confusion and blame. Pepys was largely sympathetic to the government’s handling of the plague and, in February 1666, criticised those who flouted the rules and endangered others: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the heighth of it, how bold people there were to go in sport to one another’s burials. And in spite to well people, would breathe in the faces … of well people going by.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>COVID diarists reacted to those who didn’t follow guidelines in a very similar way, as DR wrote in March 2020: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not everyone is playing it very well, though, with panic-buying, one last night at the pub and a mass exodus to the coast. Stupid and selfish in equal measure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The response and actions of the UK government, and individual members of parliament, also afforded much attention. An anonymous diarist wrote in May 2020:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>People are being allowed out more but the illness is still out there & there’s no treatment or vaccine yet … There are fewer deaths because of social distancing. If they let everyone get on with the ‘new normal’ surely more people will get sick?</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Staying positive</h2>
<p>A more optimistic theme to emerge in the diaries was the ability to find positivity amid the chaos. Pepys and modern diarists were thankful for the blessings of health, family and security. They praised those who went the extra mile to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on those around them, despite the risk to their own health. An entry from New Year’s Eve in 1665 reads:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My whole family hath been well all this while, and all my friends I know of, saving my aunt Bell, who is dead, and some children of my cozen Sarah’s, of the plague … yet, to our great joy, the town fills apace, and shops begin to open again. Pray God continue the plague’s decrease!</p>
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<p>DW’s diary from April 2020 expressed appreciation for time out in nature, as well as sympathy for others living in more difficult situations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was lovely walking through the wood. The air was filled with birdsong. It made me realise how lucky I am to live in a village where I can walk from my front door into fields and woods along defined paths. It must be awful to live ten floors up in a high rise block with two children, and not be allowed out except for once per day. </p>
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<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A young man sits on the ground in a forest writing in a journal" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564817/original/file-20231211-29-uswlqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564817/original/file-20231211-29-uswlqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564817/original/file-20231211-29-uswlqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564817/original/file-20231211-29-uswlqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564817/original/file-20231211-29-uswlqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564817/original/file-20231211-29-uswlqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564817/original/file-20231211-29-uswlqj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Keeping a diary can be good for wellbeing, as well as recording history.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/focused-man-writing-journal-ideas-enjoying-2240364251">Vergani Fotografia/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Comparing COVID with historical events such as <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-ancient-plagues-pandemics-lessons-society">plague</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200302-coronavirus-what-can-we-learn-from-the-spanish-flu">the Spanish flu epidemic</a> and the <a href="https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/society/25315/expert-comment-the-reality-of-blitz-spirit-during-covid-19">second world war</a> was a core element of the pandemic narrative, and for good reason. History connects.</p>
<p>It is easy to look around us and see the vast differences between the world we live in now, and that which Pepys traversed almost 400 years ago.</p>
<p>But by exploring the innermost thoughts of people with an element of shared experience, we see that fundamental aspects of the human condition endure. When faced with uncertainty and upheaval, our instincts are to record, find answers, and reclaim joy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219274/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mary Rehman receives funding from University of Hull Doctoral College</span></em></p>
Keeping a diary has been a common pandemic pastime throughout history.
Mary Rehman, PhD Researcher, School of Humanities, University of Hull
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/202754
2023-09-14T20:05:15Z
2023-09-14T20:05:15Z
Friday essay: homesick for ourselves – the hidden grief of ageing
<p>Anyone parenting young children will be familiar with the phrase “there’ll be tears before bedtime”. But in a quieter, more private way, the expression seems perfectly pitched to describe the largely hidden grief of ageing. </p>
<p>Not the sharp grief that follows a bereavement (though bereavements do accumulate with the years), but a more elusive emotion. One that is, perhaps, closest to the bone-gnawing sorrow of homesickness.</p>
<p>Sarah Manguso <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781509883295/">evokes</a> this sense of having travelled further from our younger selves than we could ever have imagined:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes I feel a twinge, a memory of youthful promise, and wonder how I got here, of all the places I could have got to.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Historically, the phenomenon of homesickness was identified in 1688 by the Swiss medical student <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/when-nostalgia-was-a-disease/278648/">Johannes Hofer</a>, who named it nostalgia from the Greek <em>nostos</em>, meaning homecoming, and <em>algos</em>, meaning an ache, pain, grief and distress. </p>
<p>It was the disease of soldiers, sailors, convicts and slaves. And it was particularly associated with soldiers of the Swiss army, who served as mercenaries and among whom it was said that a well-known milking song could bring on a fatal longing. (So singing or playing that song was made punishable by death.) Bagpipes stirred the same debilitating nostalgia in Scottish soldiers. </p>
<p>Deaths from homesickness were recorded, but the only effective treatment was to send the afflicted person back to wherever they belonged.</p>
<p>The nostalgia associated with old age, if it occurs, appears incurable, since there can be no possibility of a return to an irrecoverable youth. But as with homesickness, how badly those afflicted suffer seems to depend on how they manage their relationship with the past.</p>
<h2>The phantom was me</h2>
<p>American writer Cheryl Strayed <a href="https://cherylstrayed.substack.com/p/what-you-know-changes">describes</a> deciding to transcribe her old journals. On reading one of them from cover to cover, she is left feeling </p>
<blockquote>
<p>kind of sick for the rest of the day, as if I’d been visited by a phantom who both buoyed and scared the bejesus out of me. And the weirdest of all is that phantom was me! Did I even know her anymore? Where did the woman who’d written those words go? How did she become me?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve experienced a similar rush of bafflement and grief upon opening a letter I’d written some time before I turned 50. My mother had saved it and returned it to me 20 years later. Within its pages I found a younger, more energetic and vibrant self. The realisation this woman who inhabited the letter so vividly was no longer available to me came with a jolt of emotion that felt like a bereavement.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-lament-for-the-lost-art-of-letter-writing-a-radical-art-form-reflecting-the-full-catastrophe-of-life-197420">Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting 'the full catastrophe of life'</a>
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</em>
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<p>I was so knocked off-kilter by this ghost-like encounter that the letter (along with others I had been planning to transcribe) had to be set aside for a day when I might be able to muster the necessary courage and detachment. Whether that day ever comes will depend, I suppose, on how I navigate my own relationship with time, and on reaching a calm acceptance of the distance travelled.</p>
<p>Disbelief at the distance between the young self and the old self is one of the factors in this late-life grieving. At its root, perhaps, is an internalised ageism: innate, or else massaged into us by the culture we spring from. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carol Lefevre found a ‘younger, more energetic and vibrant self’ in old letters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Suzy Hazelwood/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a series of recent conversations with people over 70, I encouraged them to tell their stories and to reflect on the effects of time on their lives. Childhood sometimes emerged as a place they were pleased to have left behind – and occasionally, as a place to be held close.</p>
<p>Trevor emigrated alone to Australia when he was just 18. I asked him how often now, at 75, he thinks about his childhood. “Do you have a sense of who you were back then, and is that person still part of who you are?”</p>
<p>“I think about my childhood quite a lot, especially putting some distance between where I was then and where I am now,” he told me. “I didn’t have a really happy upbringing, and coming to Australia was a way of getting away from home and experiencing a new culture.”</p>
<p>In response to the same question, Jo, at 84, led me to a framed photograph, enlarged to poster-size, which has hung on the wall of both his homes. It shows him aged three, in a garden – a radiant child wearing a plain white shirt and dark shorts, arms out-flung as if to embrace the natural world. He bursts with exuberance, curiosity, and joy.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I relate to that as an idea, as a concept of my life. I want to maintain that freshness, that child-like freshness. You’ve got no responsibilities; every day is a new day. You’re looking at things in a different light, you’re aware of everything around you. That’s what I wanted to maintain, that feeling through my life – I’m talking age-wise. My concept of my ageing is there in that photograph.“</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While older voices are often absent in the media, and in fiction they are too often presented as stereotypes, in conversation what arises can both surprise and inspire.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jo (not pictured) wants to maintain ‘that child-like freshness’ in age.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘How can I be old?’</h2>
<p>As I approached my own 70th birthday, I realised I was about to cross a border. Once I was on the other side, I would be old – no question. Yet the word "old”, especially when coupled with the word “woman”, is carefully avoided in our culture. Old is a country no one wants to visit.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/metamorphosis-9780241514771">Penelope Lively’s</a> novella-length story Metamorphosis, or the Elephant’s Foot, written when Lively was in her mid-eighties, explores this evolution from youth to old age through the character of Harriet Mayfield. As a nine-year-old, Harriet is reprimanded by her mother for not behaving well on a visit to her great-grandmother. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“She’s old,” says Harriet. “I don’t like old.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When her mother points out that one day Harriet, too, will be old, like her great-grandmother, Harriet laughs.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“No, I won’t. You’re just being silly,” says Harriet “how can I be old? I’m me.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Towards the end of the story, Harriet is 82 and must somehow accept that she is “in the departure lounge. Check-in was a very long time ago.” With her equally elderly husband, Charles, Harriet ponders what they can do with the time remaining. Charles decides “it’s a question of resources. What do we have that could be used – exploited?” Harriet replies, “Experience. That’s it. A whole bank of experience.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And experience is versatile stuff. Comes in all shapes and sizes. Personal. Collective. Well, then?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If distance travelled is a factor in late-life grief, so too is a sense of paths not taken: of a younger self, or selves, that never found expression. </p>
<p>In Jessica Au’s recent, much-awarded novella <a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/jessica-au-cold-enough-for-snow/">Cold Enough For Snow</a>, there is a scene where the narrator explains to her mother the existence, in some old paintings, of a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/pentimento-oil-painting">pentimento</a> – an earlier image of something the artist had decided to paint over. “Sometimes, these were as small as an object, or a colour that had been changed, but other times, they could be as significant as a whole figure.”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1465&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1465&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Madame Pierre Gautreau John Singer Sargent.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Art historians, using X-rays and infrared reflectography, have identified pentimenti in many famous paintings, from the adjusted placement of a controversial off-the-shoulder strap in <a href="https://www.virtualartacademy.com/madame-x/">John Singer Sargent</a>’s Portrait of Madam X, to the painted-over figure of a woman nursing a child in Picasso’s <a href="https://www.pablopicasso.org/old-guitarist.jsp">The Old Guitarist</a>, and a man with a bow-tie concealed beneath the brushwork of his work <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Room_(Picasso)">The Blue Room</a>. </p>
<p>Singer Seargent’s adjustment was his response to an outcry at the perceived indecency of Madame X’s lowered shoulder strap, which both the public and art critics of the time declared to be indecent. By contrast, the model’s icy pallor caused only a ripple of interest. </p>
<p>Picasso’s hidden figures <a href="https://www.singulart.com/en/blog/2019/10/29/pablo-picassos-blue-period-and-the-old-guitarist/">are assumed</a> to be the outcome of a shortage of canvas during his <a href="https://www.pablopicasso.org/blue-period.jsp">Blue Period</a>, but shortages aside, the word pentimento, which derives from the Italian verb <em>pentirsi</em>, meaning “to repent”, brings to these lost figures a sense of regret that resonates with the feeling in old age of having lost the younger self, or of carrying traces, deeply buried, of other lives one might have lived. </p>
<p>In Cold Enough for Snow, Au’s narrator remarks of her mother that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Perhaps, over time, she found the past harder and harder to evoke, especially with no-one to remember it with. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The mother’s situation references another source of grief: that of the person who becomes the last of their friends and family still standing. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carol’s interviewees in their 70s all feel the presence of a ‘younger self’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alina Kurson/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In childhood games of this nature there would be a prize for the survivor. But for those who reach an extreme old age, having lost parents, siblings and contemporaries who knew them when they were young, even the presence of children and grandchildren may not entirely erase this “last man standing” loneliness. There is, too, the darkness of a projected future where there is no one still living who remembers us.</p>
<p>In Jessica Au’s book the narrator occasionally speaks of the past as “a time that didn’t really exist at all”. And yet in my recent conversations with people in their seventies and above, every one of them admits to feeling a vivid sense of the past, and of the continuing presence of a younger self. As one of them wistfully remarked: “Sometimes she even seeps through.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-responsibilities-of-being-jessica-aus-precise-poetic-meditation-on-mothers-and-daughters-175632">The responsibilities of being: Jessica Au's precise, poetic meditation on mothers and daughters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Memory and detail</h2>
<p>Perhaps part of the problem is the mass of ordinary detail that disappears from memory on any given day. Life is made up of so many small moments that it’s impossible to hold onto them all – and if we did it might even be damaging. </p>
<p>Imagine someone casually asking how your day had been, and responding with the tsunami of detail those hours actually contained. </p>
<p>After opening your eyes at first light, you’d describe your shower, your breakfast, and how you slipped your keys into your handbag as you left the house; in the street you’d passed two women with a pram, a child with a small white dog on a lead, and an elderly man with a walking stick. And so on. </p>
<p>If our minds swarmed with the trivia of daily life, more important events might be forgotten, and possibly the neural overload would even make us ill. Yet with the realisation of the loss of these minutes and hours arises the anxiety that in time, the things we do want to remember will slither away from us into the dark. </p>
<p>I imagine this fear is what compels people to fill social media with photographs of their breakfasts, and of their relentless selfie-taking. It is surely the impulse behind keeping a journal.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The fear of losing time must be what compels things like ‘relentless selfie-taking’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">RDNE Stock Project/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The anxiety of losing even the passing moments in a day afflicts the author of <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781509883295/">Ongoingness: The End of a Diary</a>. In it, the American writer Sara Manguso describes her compulsive need to document and hold onto her life. “I didn’t want to lose anything. That was my main problem.” </p>
<p>After 25 years of paying attention to the smallest moments, Manguso’s diary is 800,000 words long. “The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.” But despite her continuous effort, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I knew I couldn’t replicate my whole life in language. I knew that most of it would follow my body into oblivion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is it possible that women experience grief around ageing earlier, and more emphatically than men? After all, by the age of 50, the bodies of even those women who remain fit send the implacable signal that things have changed. </p>
<p>In Alice Munro’s story Bardon Bus, from her collection <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-moons-of-jupiter-9780099458364">The Moons of Jupiter</a>, the female narrator endures dinner in the company of a rather malicious man, Dennis, who explains that women are</p>
<blockquote>
<p>forced to live in the world of loss and death! Oh, I know, there’s face-lifting, but how does that really help? The uterus dries up. The vagina dries up.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dennis compares the opportunities open to men as opposed to those available to women. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Specifically, with ageing. Look at you. Think of the way your life would be, if you were a man. The choices you would have. I mean sexual choices. You could start all over. Men do.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When the narrator responds cheerfully that she might resist starting over, even if it were possible, Dennis is quick to retort: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>That’s it, that’s just it, though, you don’t get the opportunity! You’re a woman and life only goes in one direction for a woman.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In another story in the same collection, Labor Day Dinner, Roberta is in the bedroom dressing for an evening out when her lover George comes in and cruelly remarks: “Your armpits are flabby.” Roberta says she will wear something with sleeves, but in her head she hears the </p>
<blockquote>
<p>harsh satisfaction in his voice. The satisfaction of airing disgust. He is disgusted by her aging body. That could have been foreseen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Roberta thinks bitterly that she has always sought to remedy the least sign of deterioration. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Flabby armpits – how can you exercise the armpits? What is to be done? Now the payment is due, and what for? For vanity. Hardly even for that. Just for having those pleasing surfaces once, and letting them speak for you; just for allowing an arrangement of hair and shoulders and breasts to have its effect. You don’t stop in time, don’t know what to do instead; you lay yourself open to humiliation. So thinks Roberta, with self-pity […] She must get away, live alone, wear sleeves.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-love-in-the-time-of-incontinence-why-young-people-dont-have-the-monopoly-on-love-or-even-sex-198416">Friday essay: love in the time of incontinence – why young people don't have the monopoly on love, or even sex</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>As with most emotions that arise around our ageing, it can usually be traced back to a fraught relationship with time. French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/">Henri Bergson</a> <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56852/56852-h/56852-h.htm">says</a>: “Sorrow begins by being nothing more than a facing towards the past.” </p>
<p>For Roberta, as for many of us, it was a past in which we relied on those “pleasing surfaces”, perhaps even took them for granted, until they no longer produced the desired effect. </p>
<p>But the truth is that our bodies are capable of more severe betrayals than mere flabby armpits. In time they may cause us to be exposed in skimpy, front-opening or back-opening hospital gowns under the all-seeing eye of the CT scanner; they may deliver us into the skilled, ruthless hands of a surgeon. Our very blood may speak of things we will not wish to hear.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Our bodies are capable of severe betrayals.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Muskan Anand/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Glimpsing our mortality in middle age</h2>
<p>Middle age is sometimes referred to as The Age of Grief. It’s when we first glimpse our own mortality; we feel youth slipping away into the past, and the young people in our lives begin to assert their independence. </p>
<p>We have our mid-life crises then. We join gyms, and take up running; we speak for the first time of “bucket lists” – the term itself an attempt to diminish the sting of time’s depredations. None of this will save us from the real Age of Grief, which comes later and hits harder because it is largely hidden. And we’ll be expected to endure it in silence.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mid-life crises cause us to take up running and develop ‘bucket lists’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Barbara Olsen/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In my conversations with people aged 70 and older, grief has surfaced from causes other than what might be called “cosmetic” changes. Following a severe stroke, 80-year-old Philippa describes the pain of having had to make the decision to relinquish her home and move into residential care. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s when you lose your garden, which you’ve loved, and you’ve got to walk away from that. I’ve got photos of the house, and I look at them and think, oh, I just love the way I did that room, decorated it, things like that. But change happens.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Somehow change always comes with loss, as well as bringing something new,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied, “I just had to say to myself: you can’t worry about it, and you can’t change it. That sounds hard, but it’s my way of dealing with it.”</p>
<p>Tucked away in residential care homes, largely invisible to those of us lucky enough to still inhabit the outside world, elderly people like Philippa are quietly raising resilience to the level of an art form. </p>
<p>In her poem, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art">One Art</a>, the Canadian poet Elizabeth Bishop advises losing something every day. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Accept the fluster<br>
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.<br>
Lose something every day.<br>
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bishop goes on to list other lost items – her mother’s watch, the next-to-last of three loved houses, lovely cities, two rivers, even a continent. While the losses elderly people commonly accumulate are less grand, they are no less devastating. </p>
<p>One by one, they will relinquish driver’s licenses. For many there will be the loss of the family home and their belongings, save for whatever will fit into a care home’s single room. Perhaps they have already given up the freedom of walking without the aid of a stick, or walker. There may be the dietary restrictions imposed by conditions such as diabetes, and the invisible disabilities of diminished hearing and eyesight. </p>
<p>A failing memory, one would think, must be the final straw. And yet, what seems to be the actual final straw is the situation, reported time and again, where an old person feels “unseen”, or “looked through”, and for indefensible reasons finds themself being “missed” in favour of someone younger. It might, for example, be a moment when they are ignored as they patiently wait their turn at a shop counter. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The final straw, for most older people, is when they feel ‘unseen’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daniel van den Berg/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In my conversation with Philippa, she remarked that old people are often looked through when they are part of a group, or when they are waiting to be served. “I have seen it happen to other older people, as if they don’t exist. I have called out assistants who have done that to other people.”</p>
<p>Surely the least we can do, as fortunate beings of fewer years, is to acknowledge the old people among us. To make them feel seen, and of equal value.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-grey-haired-and-radiant-reimagining-ageing-for-women-182336">Friday essay: grey-haired and radiant – reimagining ageing for women</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Age pride’ and destigmatising ‘old’</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246680/">Ageism, Healthy Life Expectancy and Population Ageing: How Are They Related</a> is a recent survey conducted with more than 83,000 participants from 57 countries. It found that ageism negatively impacts the health of older adults. In the United States, people with a negative attitude towards ageing live 7.5 fewer years than their more positive counterparts. </p>
<p>In Australia, the National Ageing Research Institute has developed an <a href="https://www.nari.net.au/age-positive-language-guide">Age-Positive Language Guide</a> as part of its strategy to combat ageism. </p>
<p>Examples of poor descriptive language include terms such as “old person”, “the elderly”, and even “seniors”. That last term appears on a card Australians receive shortly after turning 60, which enables them to receive various discounts and concessions. Instead, we are encouraged to use “older person”, or “older people”. But this is just another form of age-masking that fools no one. </p>
<p>It would be better to throw the institute’s energy into destigmatising the word “old”. What, after all, is wrong with being old, and saying so? </p>
<p>To begin the process of reclaiming this word from the pejorative territory it currently occupies, old people need to start claiming their years with pride. If other marginalised social groups can do it, why can’t old people? Some activists working against ageism are beginning to mention <a href="https://www.nextavenue.org/how-to-swap-ageism-for-age-pride/">“age pride”</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Old people need to start claiming their years with pride.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tristan Le/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If we become homesick for who we once were as we age, we might remind ourselves of the meaning of <em>nostos</em> and consider old age as a kind of homecoming. </p>
<h2>Narrative identity</h2>
<p>The body we travel in is a vehicle for all the iterations of the self, and the position we currently inhabit is part of an ongoing creative process: the evolving story of the self. From the 1980s, psychologists, philosophers and social theorists have been calling it <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-21882-005">narrative identity</a>. </p>
<p>The process of piecing together a narrative identity begins in late adolescence and evolves across our entire lives. Like opening a Russian doll, from whose hollow shell other dolls emerge, at our centre is a solid core composed of traits and values. It’s also composed of the narrative identity we have put together from all our days – including those we cannot now remember – and from all the selves we have ever been. Perhaps even from the selves we might have been, but chose instead to paint over. </p>
<p>In Metamorphosis, or the Elephant’s Foot, Harriet Mayfield tells her husband, “At this point in life. We are who we are – the outcome of various other incarnations.”</p>
<p>We know our lives, and the lives of others, through fragments. Fragments are all we have. They’re all we’ll ever have. We live in moments, not always in chronological order. But narrative identity helps us make meaning of life. And the vantage point of old age offers the longest view. </p>
<p>The story of the self carries us from the deep past to the present moment. And old age sets us the great life challenge of maintaining balance in the present, while managing the remembered past – with all its joys and griefs – and the joys and griefs of the imagined future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202754/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carol Lefevre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
As we age, it can be hard to fathom the gap between our younger selves and the bodies we inhabit. Carol Lefevre explores this strange form of homesickness.
Carol Lefevre, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/206190
2023-06-22T20:07:05Z
2023-06-22T20:07:05Z
Friday essay: ‘the problem is that my success seems to get in his way’ – the fraught terrain of literary marriages
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533324/original/file-20230622-17-5mqmny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1000%2C667&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anna McGahan as Charmian Clift in the State Theatre Company's Hydra. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby/State Theatre Company</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“It’s true to say that writers are selfish people,” the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard once said. “But it’s not quite enough of an excuse.” </p>
<p>Howard was married to British author <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/1995/oct/23/fiction.kingsleyamis">Kingsley Amis</a>. Novelist <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-pre-eminent-novelist-critic-of-his-generation-martin-amiss-pyrotechnic-prose-captured-lifes-destructive-energies-206069">Martin Amis</a>, Kingsley’s son, credited his stepmother for encouraging his own writing career – not his father. But exhausted by the biggest child in the house – Kingsley – Howard often felt “too worn down by insecurity and fatigue to write”.
“He got up and wrote,” Howard recalled. “Then he ate lunch, had a walk or sleep, and then he wrote again.” </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532651/original/file-20230619-20-zgkszc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Writes Carmela Ciuraru, in her book <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780062356918/lives-of-the-wives/">Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages</a>: “It was an idyllic existence – for him.” Howard, she notes, published three novels in the 18-year marriage; Amis published nearly 20.</p>
<p><a href="https://pushkinpress.com/our-authors/elsa-morante/">Elsa Morante</a>, the Italian author who inspired <a href="https://overland.org.au/2016/10/her-real-name-on-the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante/">Elena Ferrante</a>, once wrote, “literary couples are a plague”. Married to novelist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/27/obituaries/alberto-moravia-novelist-is-dead-at-82.html">Alberto Moravia</a>, her partnership (like that of Howard and Amis) is chronicled in Ciuraru’s book – along with <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-man-behind-matilda-what-roald-dahl-was-really-like-62810">Roald Dahl</a> and actor <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/06/patricia-neal-interview-roald-dahl-1971">Patricia Neal</a>, sculptor and translator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Una_Vincenzo,_Lady_Troubridge">Una Troubridge</a> and author <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radclyffe_Hall">Radclyffe Hall</a>, and author <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/books/10dundy.html">Elaine Dundy</a>, married to British theatre critic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/arts/critic/feature/0,,567652,00.html">Kenneth Tynan</a>. </p>
<p>When both people in a relationship are writers, creative space is a faultline. So are matters such as who looks after the kids, inspiration turf wars, and yes, jealousy about success. As Ciaruru shows, it’s often the wives who ultimately choose writing over wedded bliss.</p>
<h2>Rooms – or tables – of their own</h2>
<p>The tension starts with writing space. Virginia Woolf famously observed that money and time is required for <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolfs-feminist-call-to-arms-145398">a room of one’s own</a>. At Monk House, Woolf built a new writing lodge after she was irritated by her publisher husband Leonard and their dog. “The little noise upsets me; I can’t think what I was going to say.” </p>
<p>Most writing couples don’t have Monk House and its grounds to divide, especially in the early years. Instead they scrap over who gets the dining room table, or share it – as <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-remembering-the-australian-writer-charmian-clift-50-years-on-117322">Charmian Clift</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/johnston-george-2277">George Johnston</a> did while writing <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2760144-the-sponge-divers?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=NCm9r8O0XL&rank=1">The Sponge Divers</a> together on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the early 1950s. They later upgraded to a shared home studio on the island of Hydra. </p>
<p>Clift’s biographer, <a href="http://nadiawheatley.com/the-life-and-myth-of-charmian-clift">Nadia Wheatley</a>, writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The image of Charmian and George writing together is a potent one: two people bashing away at two typewriters on the one table. Stacks of typescript – his spilling over into hers; hers ending up in the middle of his – the air wreathed in cigarette smoke […]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Novelist <a href="https://kristinwilliamson.com.au/">Kristin Williamson</a> and her playwright husband David also started out table sharing, less harmoniously. In her biography of David, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21949734-david-williamson">Behind the Scenes</a>, she remembers that compared to David’s typing, she felt like a “slug on tranquilisers”. They since always ensured each has a room of their own in later houses. But as Kristin <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/under-the-covers-20040724-gdjen8.html">quips</a>, “David’s is larger. His rooms always have been.”</p>
<p>When Australian authors <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/04/ruth-park-brings-sydneys-past-to-life-more-than-any-other-writer">Ruth Park</a> (originally a New Zealander) and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/niland-darcy-francis-11242">D’Arcy Niland</a> lived in a rented inner-city room in Sydney’s Surry Hills, the suburb that inspired her novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1855153.The_Harp_in_the_South?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=mnZ7pblm10&rank=1">The Harp in the South</a> (1948), they wrote story ideas on each other’s palms in bed. Park recalls that when they finally moved into a flat that had more room, Niland:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>made a beeline for the dining room table, excitedly opened the typewriter, and spread out his dictionaries, papers, and reference books. “Look!” he cried. “I’ve a proper place to work at last”. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Park tried to share the table. But “gradually his papers encroached, files ostentatiously fell to the floor; the carriage of my typewriter constantly hit things […]” She gave up. Park reflects in her second memoir, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2859274-fishing-in-the-styx">Fishing in the Styx</a>, that she should have fought harder for space to write, but “the ironing board was a minuscule price to pay for all the good things in his character and our relationship”. They eventually moved into a large but decaying house.</p>
<p>Kenneth Tynan, by contrast, made his wife plain uncomfortable when she turned from acting to writing after they married in 1951. Observes Ciuraru, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whereas he had his study as a refuge […] Elaine (Dundy) wrote each day “slowly but steadily” on the living room sofa with a typewriter propped up on her knees. Her back hurt.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Space causes friction between established writers too. Murray Bail demanded total solitude while writing <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319480.Eucalyptus?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=DQpHGaub4s&rank=1">Eucalyptus</a> (1998). Garner diarised her exile from their apartment that was his workspace in the third volume of her published diaries, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/how-to-end-a-story-diaries-1995-1998">How to End a Story</a>. </p>
<p>Garner felt forced to rent a bland office. Even on weekends, or with the flu, she felt unwelcome at home:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With a friend who is married to a painter, I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands […] Like me she is expected to run the house, do the shopping and cooking, and keep the home fires burning, all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours. I saw in her face my unhappiness. We did not know whether, or how, we could go tolerating their regimes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She fears she will “wither away with loneliness”. After the office lease ends, Garner moves out to a new apartment of her own, and separation.</p>
<p>Separate spaces, however, kept the Morante-Moravia union together. Morante, who died in 1985, published four Italian novels, including the acclaimed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Liars">House of Liars</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27isola_di_Arturo">Arturo’s Island</a>, and volumes of essays, short stories and poetry. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532642/original/file-20230619-15-lh6e2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=864&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Elsa Morante.</span>
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<p>Her husband said: “Writing was her life”; she called her characters “my people”. Morante preferred cats, who did not criticise her work or interrupt her. </p>
<p>Moravia was an Italian literary lion after his 1929 debut, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/sk/book/show/67145">The Time of Indifference</a>. She and Morante hid in a one-room hut in the mountains for nine months during World War II (which later inspired Moravia’s 1957 novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67143.Two_Women">Two Women</a>.) </p>
<p>Ciaruru quotes Moravia as recalling this time together as “their greatest intimacy”. After the war, Moravia bought Morante a small apartment to use as a writing studio, largely funded by his bestselling novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12250543-the-woman-of-rome">The Woman of Rome</a> (1947).</p>
<p>“She says I am too noisy, too nervous, that she needs privacy,” he said. “I can write in a hotel lobby or with someone playing (the bass) in the chair near me.”</p>
<p>Morante admitted she was a “a little ashamed” about insisting on solitude. But, “if I had to write near Alberto I probably would not write at all. And I would be unhappy.” Moravia understood, and was happy and prolific amid his noise in their villa, publishing classics including <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67146.The_Conformist">The Conformist</a> (1951), <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/movie-review-bernardo-bertoluccis-the-conformist-returns.html">adapted into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci</a> in 1970.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-sex-swimming-and-smudgy-louvres-watching-monkey-grip-40-years-on-187625">Friday essay: sex, swimming and smudgy louvres – watching Monkey Grip 40 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Domestic tensions</h2>
<p>If kids come along, things get more fraught. Pregnant again in 1948, with her first child only seven months old, Clift was frustrated. She and Johnston had just won a Sydney Morning Herald novel prize for their collaboration, <a href="https://www.charmianclift.com.au/high-valley">High Valley</a>. Clift recalled: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>At this point I should have taken wings and started to fly but […] I was involved in having children […] I think those are terribly difficult years for any young woman and for a young woman who wants to write or paint or anything else, even more so. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>After they moved to Kalymnos in 1954, she gratefully paid a local woman to help. She did the same on Hydra, when their third child was born on the island. Later, back in Australia, Clift applied for a literary grant for “domestic help”. </p>
<p>Something has to give – and it’s the housework or childcare, not writing, if they can afford it.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532644/original/file-20230619-25-8r9ua9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1258&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">D'Arcy Niland and Ruth Park.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Others muddle through. A single mother, Garner grabbed precious school hours at a library to write her debut novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634141.Monkey_Grip">Monkey Grip</a>. </p>
<p>It is telling that Ruth Park wrote Harp in the South while visiting her parents in New Zealand, so had family help. Soon after its release, back in Sydney, her husband left for a research trip for his novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625198.The_Shiralee?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9CeitNq8gc&rank=1">The Shiralee</a>, and she was left with the three children and no mother to help – Park couldn’t afford childcare, despite her success.</p>
<p>She then devised the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muddle-Headed_Wombat">Muddle-Headed Wombat</a> series while her now five children had chicken pox and D’Arcy was on another research trip. Park recalls, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I again pondered bitterly the question of which one of us it was who carried the Shiralee, which I now understood meant burden. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Domestic tensions are not restricted to childcare. Elaine Dundy’s daughter, Tracy, had a nanny but Elaine still declined invitations to attend opening nights with her critic husband. Instead, she would stay home to write her novels. In response, Tynan was “embarrassed and angered” that his wife put her writing before appearances to support his work. </p>
<p>Garner writes that she was upset Bail did not welcome her now-adult daughter and fiancee at their home, seeing their presence as another imposition on his writing life. Nor did she feel free to “be messing around at home”.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elizabeth Jane Howard.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Prior to meeting Kingsley Amis, Howard, an established novelist, had left her first husband and daughter, Nicola, as she was “selfishly determined to be a writer”. Nicola called her mother “a very beautiful stranger” in her childhood. </p>
<p>Ironically, Amis’s own selfishness overwhelmed Howard’s. She managed his moods and meals. She was his secretary and chauffeur and regularly catered dinner parties for up to 12 people where Amis could hold court, as well being a stepmother to her two stepsons, who lived with them.</p>
<p>Her complaints were met with Amis’s decree, “I’m older, heavier and earn more money”.</p>
<p>Morante did not have children, though Ciuraru suggests this was not by choice. While she adored children, Ciararu wonders if the reality would have been challenging given “daily life made her lose patience and become difficult”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-remembering-the-australian-writer-charmian-clift-50-years-on-117322">'A woman ahead of her time': remembering the Australian writer Charmian Clift, 50 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Literary ambition</h2>
<p>Fights over space and the kids set the scene for the most ferocious faultline: literary ambition. Ciaruru sums up the creative competition when describing Amis and Howard: “both were ambitious writers, only one could achieve success”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532647/original/file-20230619-23-siyemc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>Tynan’s toxic jealousy fully emerged after the successful release of Dundy’s debut novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1059856.The_Dud_Avocado">The Dud Avocado</a>, in 1958. “He confronted Elaine, warning if she ever dared to write another book, he would divorce her.” She began writing a new novel the next morning. They divorced four years later in 1964. </p>
<p>Some literary couples share success – to a point. Though possessive of the table, Niland encouraged Park to write Harp in the South. Wheatley notes of Clift-Johnston: “one of the common misconceptions about the relationship was that Charmian was perennially jealous of George’s output and success.” </p>
<p>Similarly, Wheatley recounts that Johnston “recognised [his wife] as a fellow writer, and indeed for many years he even publicly acknowledged that by literary standards she was a better writer than he was.”</p>
<p>According to Ciuraru, Moravia “spoke often and admiringly of Elsa’s genius, no matter the state of their marriage”, which he described as “a man and a woman in a very difficult, very personal relationship”. </p>
<p>But sharing in success has its limits. After the Sponge Divers collaboration, Clift carved creative space of her own:</p>
<p>“Actually of course, [The Sponge Divers] was a phoney [sic] collaboration because I was beyond the stage where I could collaborate any longer. I wanted to work in my own way. This was probably very egotistical, but most writers have this.”</p>
<p>As well as her Island memoirs and essays, Clift later published a novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4600900-honours-mimic">Honour’s Mimic</a>, under her own name.</p>
<p>Williamson, the author of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6936173-tanglewood">Tanglewood</a> and other novels, quotes David’s reaction to her turning to creative writing from journalism: “Hey, this is my patch. But after I saw the work she was doing I was very impressed.” She qualifies, “I was writing novels rather than plays – imagine If I had dared to write a play!”</p>
<p>But Kristin declares that she first thought of the idea for David’s play, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9789009-siren">Siren</a>, borne out of his affair: she planned to write it as a novel. The couple fought over the idea, arguing it was both their “lived experience”. Kristin capitulated, but “felt somewhat bitter about it for a while”. David later publicly gave her credit, and their marriage survived the literary explosion.</p>
<h2>Vacating the field</h2>
<p>Not so Garner and Bail. Her fifth work of fiction <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/cosmo-cosmolino">Cosmo Cosmolino</a>, was published the year she and Bail married (1992). But during the marriage she published her first book-length work of non-fiction, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2738022-the-first-stone">The First Stone</a>, and the anthology, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35576146">True Stories</a>. </p>
<p>As Bail wrote his novel, in her diary, Garner realises:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All this jabber I carry on with lately, about how I’m heading for non-fiction, leaving fiction behind […] suddenly it strikes me that what I’m doing is vacating the field. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Garner adds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He is generous as he can possibly be about my book and its success, but if I had success like that with a novel there’d be serious trouble […] Maybe it is true then. A woman artist who wants to develop as far as she can needs to live alone […] The problem is that my success seems to get in his way. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The marriage ended in 1998, after <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/eucalyptus">Eucalyptus</a> was published. Garner returned to fiction in 2008 with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20895311.The_Spare_Room">The Spare Room.</a>.</p>
<p>After divorcing Tynan, Dundy wrote two novels, as well as biographies of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63328055-elvis-and-gladys">Elvis Presley’s mother</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/272578.Finch_Bloody_Finch">Peter Finch</a>. Howard’s literary output also rocketed after divorcing Amis in 1983. She was encouraged by her stepson, Martin Amis, to write <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/fiction/cazalet-chronicles-books-in-order">The Cazalet Chronicles</a>, a series of novels that drew on her family story,that were later adapted for television as The Cazalets.</p>
<p>With all these faultlines, it’s no wonder married authors keep their own names for continuous identity within and beyond a marriage. Morante “could not stand being called by her married name”, and could not fathom how other women “could tolerate this elision of their identity”.</p>
<p>Asked once in an interview if Moravia had influenced her work, Morante stiffened. “No,” she said. “He has an identity and I have an identity. <em>Basta</em>.” </p>
<p>She stopped the interview.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206190/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerrie Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
‘Literary couples are a plague,’ wrote Elsa Morante, married to Alberto Moravia. They’re one of the couples in this lively exploration of what happens when two writers share loves and lives.
Kerrie Davies, Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205297
2023-06-11T20:52:36Z
2023-06-11T20:52:36Z
‘When my thoughts would stray over the sea’: reading the 19th century diaries of girls migrating to Australia
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529698/original/file-20230602-29-8wjczk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C2374%2C2992&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tom Roberts, Coming South, 1886</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Victoria</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the digital age our lives are constantly being recorded. Yet, the deliberate act of recording – what we want to remember and how we want to remember – remains popular. Diaries allow us to journal our thoughts and feelings, to work through the challenges we face every day.</p>
<p>This practice is older than you may think. As I write in my <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2023.2200802">recent journal article</a>, some British and Irish girls and young women who migrated to Australia in the mid-1800s used diaries to record their day-to-day lives, document their travel experiences and navigate their emotions. </p>
<p>In the 19th century, around <a href="https://museumsvictoria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/resources/journeys-to-australia/">1.5 million people</a> migrated to Australia, including <a href="https://museumsvictoria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/resources/immigrant-stories/girlhood/">large numbers of girls</a> who were defined as under the age of 15, and young women in their late teens and early 20s. </p>
<p>Unless she was married, a girl had little other option than to accompany her family to the colonies. </p>
<p>Though few diaries from this demographic survive (I examine only 13 extant sources of about 850 known to survive), they divulge the intricate emotions of migration. </p>
<p>Today, a 24-hour flight from Britain to Australia feels like an eternity, but in the 19th century it took around three months to sail to the continent. Removed from the demands of everyday life, passengers had a lot of time on their hands. Some wrote journals to while away the long days.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529702/original/file-20230602-21-933y42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529702/original/file-20230602-21-933y42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529702/original/file-20230602-21-933y42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529702/original/file-20230602-21-933y42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529702/original/file-20230602-21-933y42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529702/original/file-20230602-21-933y42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529702/original/file-20230602-21-933y42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529702/original/file-20230602-21-933y42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An emigrant’s thoughts of home, 1859, Marshall Claxton.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Victoria</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/young-womens-memoirs-of-migration-dispossession-and-australian-unbelonging-demand-to-be-heard-182223">Young women's memoirs of migration, dispossession and Australian 'unbelonging' demand to be heard</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A difficult experience</h2>
<p>Migration could be a difficult experience. Passengers endured months at sea in cramped conditions, often fearing for their safety and health, missed those left behind and worried about their futures in a new land. </p>
<p>It is such thoughts and emotions that can be found in surviving migrant girls’ diaries.</p>
<p>Aboard the Great Victoria in 1864, 22-year-old <a href="https://www.historyvictoria.org.au/ehive-object-details/753376/">Isabella Adcock</a> had to share cramped cabins with strangers and complained about it in her journal. She had “feelings repugnance to the sleeping accommodations and indeed almost everything in the ship”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529699/original/file-20230602-19-dr6a04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529699/original/file-20230602-19-dr6a04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529699/original/file-20230602-19-dr6a04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529699/original/file-20230602-19-dr6a04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529699/original/file-20230602-19-dr6a04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529699/original/file-20230602-19-dr6a04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529699/original/file-20230602-19-dr6a04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529699/original/file-20230602-19-dr6a04.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A cabin on board the barque Mary Harrison and ashore in Australia, 1852-54, sketched by T. Warre Harriott.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of New South Wales</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Diaries were sometimes a mechanism to cope with boredom and frustration. <a href="https://find.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/61SLV_INST/1sev8ar/alma9916362193607636">Jane Swan</a>, 13, was impatient to reach Australia in 1853. She was sick of the “very long voyage” and felt “to see the same things, and the same faces, becomes very tiresome”. </p>
<p>Working-class girls were subject to strict conditions. On her voyage to Brisbane in 1863, 14-year-old Welsh girl <a href="https://onesearch.slq.qld.gov.au/permalink/61SLQ_INST/tqqf2h/alma99195703402061">Maria Steley</a> noted in her diary the “young women are put Down every night at six O clock” and “are not Allowed to speak to the young men”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529700/original/file-20230602-29-933y42.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529700/original/file-20230602-29-933y42.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529700/original/file-20230602-29-933y42.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529700/original/file-20230602-29-933y42.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529700/original/file-20230602-29-933y42.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529700/original/file-20230602-29-933y42.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529700/original/file-20230602-29-933y42.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529700/original/file-20230602-29-933y42.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Diary of Maria Steley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a working-class teenager, Maria was separated from her family and housed with the single women. Wealthier girls would stay with their families in private cabins. </p>
<p>Among such shared conditions, girls could also make friends. Maria wrote she and her new pals “have many bits of fun more than i thought we would” by “singing and Dancing and playing eney thing we like untill 10 O clock then we go to bed we Play four howrs after we are Loch Down”. </p>
<p>But shipboard travel generated loneliness for many girls. Working-class Scottish woman <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn719785">Mary Maclean</a>, who was 22 when she voyaged to Sydney in 1865, experienced homesickness, often “Sheding a tear and often Wonder if thay miss one at Home”. </p>
<h2>Joy and sadness</h2>
<p>Girls also used diaries to record their fears. <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3428157">Illness</a> could tear through the close confines of a ship. </p>
<p><a href="https://find.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/61SLV_INST/1sev8ar/alma9916355823607636">Sarah Raws</a>, 15 when she sailed to Melbourne in 1854, was preoccupied with the proximity of death, including that of two infant boys and the “very sudden” death of a lady in Sarah’s own cabin. </p>
<p><a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1563391">Emily Braine</a>, ten years old when she embarked in 1854, was “frightened” by large waves and rough seas. The risk of shipwreck <a href="https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/SSSC/article/view/8135">was low</a>, but the possibility played on Emily’s mind. </p>
<p>Towards the end of their journey, some girls were excited to disembark. Sarah Raws rejoiced “"when we first saw land” from the ship’s deck. But others experienced a resurgence of homesickness and doubt. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526368/original/file-20230516-19-jv9t75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526368/original/file-20230516-19-jv9t75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526368/original/file-20230516-19-jv9t75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526368/original/file-20230516-19-jv9t75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526368/original/file-20230516-19-jv9t75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526368/original/file-20230516-19-jv9t75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526368/original/file-20230516-19-jv9t75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526368/original/file-20230516-19-jv9t75.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ally Heathcote’s diary from aboard the, s.s. Northumberland, 1874.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Museums Victoria</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nearing Melbourne in 1874, 19-year-old <a href="https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/272753">Ally Heathcote</a> had feelings “of a mingled character, joy and sadness”. She felt torn between her old life in England and her new life in Victoria. </p>
<p>Ally’s writings helped her deal with these “mingled” feelings. Her diary, she wrote,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>has helped to keep me employed during the passage and many times I have turned to it when my thoughts would stray over the sea, and have written the account of the day’s proceedings when otherwise I should have begun to mope. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Most girls concluded their diaries at the end of their voyage before they started on a new life. Some made copies and sent the account “home” to Britain for family and friends to peruse. </p>
<p>The diary became a record and a keepsake of a life-changing journey. </p>
<p>Girls’ shipboard diaries reveal the complex and varied emotions of people from the past and provide insight into the human experience of migration. These sources centre girls in the migration narrative, giving a voice to an often-overlooked group.</p>
<p>It is a shame so few survive. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/handwritten-diaries-may-feel-old-fashioned-but-they-offer-insights-that-digital-diaries-just-cant-match-187508">Handwritten diaries may feel old fashioned, but they offer insights that digital diaries just can’t match</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205297/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Gay does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
British and Irish girls and young women who migrated to Australia in the mid-1800s used diaries to record their day-to-day lives, document their travel experiences and navigate their emotions.
Catherine Gay, PhD Candidate in History, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/196573
2023-06-08T20:06:50Z
2023-06-08T20:06:50Z
Friday essay: ‘All I am is literature’ – Franz Kafka’s diaries were the forge of his writing
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527915/original/file-20230524-29-g3pkhd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4000%2C2000&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Franz Kafka (1923).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Picture the scene. It is the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Great War changed such scenes forever. A young man with sound prospects is to meet his fiancée’s father for the first time. </p>
<p>The convention of the day would require him to lay out his credentials and his family’s pedigree for the match to proceed agreeably. But in response to the imagined and real interrogation, both of which generate feelings of guilt and shame about his intentions, the young man instead declares to his prospective father-in-law, by way of a letter: “All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.” </p>
<hr>
<p><em>The Diaries – Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin (Shocken)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Franz Kafka (1884-1924) was nearly 30 years old and engaged to Felice Bauer when he made this exorbitant claim. It was the first of three engagements: twice to Felice and later, quite briefly, to Julie Wohryzek. The decision to put his thoughts in a letter was entirely consistent with the epistolary nature of his relationship with Felice. They saw each other infrequently during their four years together. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519697/original/file-20230405-22-qwccg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519697/original/file-20230405-22-qwccg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519697/original/file-20230405-22-qwccg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519697/original/file-20230405-22-qwccg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519697/original/file-20230405-22-qwccg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519697/original/file-20230405-22-qwccg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519697/original/file-20230405-22-qwccg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519697/original/file-20230405-22-qwccg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Franz Kafka in 1910.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Notably, Franz did not declare to Herr Bauer: “I am a lawyer working for a workers’ insurance company, but my real passion is fiction writing.” Nor did he say: “I have a responsible and reasonably well-paying day job, but spend my nights writing stories in my parents’ apartment in Prague where I live.” Missing was the schmoozing of: “Literature is my primary interest – along with your daughter, of course.” </p>
<p>Each of these statements would have been true, although none would have struck the same kind of truth as his actual declaration – to himself as much as to his addressee – that he was, as he wrote in his diary, “nothing but literature”. </p>
<p>The letter to Herr Bauer never arrived. Felice intercepted it. </p>
<h2>Uncanny writing</h2>
<p>What Kafka expresses in the letter is a commitment to something other than a life to be lived and shared with Felice, something other than what today would be called a lifestyle. As his dairies repeatedly show, Kafka’s life, his existence, <em>was</em> literature, and that existence was not shareable as a “lived experience”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517583/original/file-20230327-20-ant9ns.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517583/original/file-20230327-20-ant9ns.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517583/original/file-20230327-20-ant9ns.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517583/original/file-20230327-20-ant9ns.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517583/original/file-20230327-20-ant9ns.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517583/original/file-20230327-20-ant9ns.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1177&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517583/original/file-20230327-20-ant9ns.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1177&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517583/original/file-20230327-20-ant9ns.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1177&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>He was often in pain, fatigued, or simply distressed by his body’s puniness. He despaired of the obligations of family life, the noisiness and nosiness of his parents and siblings. He was deeply conflicted by the necessity to undertake the paid work that sapped his energy. Each of these things he saw as challenges, counter forces, to his writing. </p>
<p>Yet this hardworking, clever, funny and eventually chronically ill young man was not a hermit. He had friends, admirers, colleagues and lovers aplenty.</p>
<p>Kafka’s sensibility was aslant to the conventions of bourgeois life, but it chimed with a certain European modernity that was, around that time, expressing its disenchantment with the world. His existence was entirely directed towards what was, for him, both the necessary and the uncanny nature of writing. </p>
<p>For Kafka, writing was a strange way of thinking and being in the world. It was a force to which he could only submit, an existence that joined up with and tore away from his own. It was so much more than a mode of expression. It was more than an activity undertaken to build the kind of literary legacy that his friend and fellow writer Max Brod (1884-1968) desired for him. </p>
<p>Felice and her father each recognised this paradoxical relation to life in Kafka. In his diaries, describing the “tribunal” where his engagement to Felice was broken for the first time, Kafka noted: “Her father grasps it correctly from all sides.”</p>
<h2>Kafka’s literary legacy</h2>
<p>In 1917, Kafka was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him just before his 41st birthday. The small number of stories he published during his lifetime amounted to no more than 300 or so pages. The most well-known are The Judgement (1913), The Stoker (1913), The Metamorphosis (1915) and In the Penal Colony (1919). </p>
<p>Brod became Kafka’s literary executor. He managed the posthumous publication of his friend’s three incomplete novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and The Man Who Disappeared (1927) – also known by the title Amerika. He also took possession of the 12 notebooks that constitute Kafka’s “diaries”, bundles of papers, and some letters. </p>
<p>Kafka’s instructions were to burn the lot. Brod’s refusal has long been the subject of speculation. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519708/original/file-20230406-28-outdce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519708/original/file-20230406-28-outdce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519708/original/file-20230406-28-outdce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=676&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519708/original/file-20230406-28-outdce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=676&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519708/original/file-20230406-28-outdce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=676&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519708/original/file-20230406-28-outdce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519708/original/file-20230406-28-outdce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519708/original/file-20230406-28-outdce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod in 1914.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Perhaps more than those of any other published writer, the diaries of Franz Kafka have a special value in providing insight into his modest but profound literary output. Ross Benjamin’s new translation of Kafka’s dairies makes available the German critical edition published in 1990, which corrected the elisions, amendments and misrepresentations in the edition Brod published as two volumes in 1948 and 1949. </p>
<p>What a joy it is to read Kafka disentangled from Brod’s oversight. But why was he entangled in the first place? Kafka was hardly a household name during the mere 15 years he was publishing, beginning with The Aeroplanes at Brescia, which appeared in the Prague newspaper Bohemia in 1909. It was another four years before his short fiction began to appear in print. </p>
<p>Kafka was aware of the limited interest in his writing beyond a small group of loyal supporters, at the centre of which was Brod. This was confirmed in an embarrassing episode when the well-known Czech writer Carl Sternheim, with whom Kafka shared a publisher, was awarded a literary prize, but directed his publisher to hand the prize money over to Kafka on the presumption that Kafka was impoverished. </p>
<p>Kafka initially refused the money because he felt it was being bestowed by someone unfamiliar with his work to avoid the bad optics of the prize going to an already wealthy author during wartime. Publicly, he said he was not as poor as the poorest eligible writer. Privately, he called it an act of misplaced charity, although he did eventually accept the money. Without any immediate need of it, he invested it in war bonds. It was the only literary honour Kafka would receive during his lifetime. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522506/original/file-20230424-18-m4e9jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522506/original/file-20230424-18-m4e9jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522506/original/file-20230424-18-m4e9jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522506/original/file-20230424-18-m4e9jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522506/original/file-20230424-18-m4e9jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522506/original/file-20230424-18-m4e9jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522506/original/file-20230424-18-m4e9jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522506/original/file-20230424-18-m4e9jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Kafka’s publisher Kurt Wolff was a keen supporter of his writing. But when war broke out in 1914 – just as Kafka’s writing was hitting its straps – Wolff enlisted.</p>
<p>The publisher to whom Wolff handed the management of his business, Georg Heinrich Meyer, was also enthusiastic about Kafka’s writing. But according to Kafka’s biographer Reiner Stach, Meyer was probably quite ignorant of its real worth. Meyer had a background in the business side of publishing; he showed little interest in cultivating relationships with authors or discussing the literary content of their work.</p>
<p>It thus fell to Brod to establish Kafka’s posthumous legacy as a literary genius. He ensured that few would now question Kafka’s place in the pantheon of modernist writers. But in doing so he tightly entwined his own literary reputation with that of his friend. </p>
<p>He did this in his own writing, first in a fictionalised account of their friendship, The Kingdom of Love (1928), in which Kafka is figured by the character Richard and Brod by the character Christof. Brod also wrote an “objective” biography of Kafka (1937), in which he states: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I lived still with my unforgettable friend […] I asked him questions and could answer myself in his name.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Brod’s writings about their friendship established a mythologised Kafka, who lived on, fictionally and biographically, through Brod’s name. His influence over Kafka’s estate was not simply one of editorially securing the works’ publication. In a short story collection, Brod included an appendix guiding readers on how to interpret the stories, believing only he held the key to unlocking the meaning of the genius’s work. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/kafkas-modest-output-had-an-outsized-impact-on-modern-culture-198852">Kafka's modest output had an outsized impact on modern culture</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A forge for sentences</h2>
<p>Ross Benjamin acknowledges that Brod’s relationship with Kafka was valuable in securing an international reputation, beyond the small and enthusiastic readership he had while he was alive. But this also meant Kafka’s reception was influenced too heavily by Brod’s concern with his own reputation. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522507/original/file-20230424-26-lksybg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522507/original/file-20230424-26-lksybg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522507/original/file-20230424-26-lksybg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522507/original/file-20230424-26-lksybg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522507/original/file-20230424-26-lksybg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522507/original/file-20230424-26-lksybg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522507/original/file-20230424-26-lksybg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522507/original/file-20230424-26-lksybg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Benjamin’s new translation of Kafka’s diaries, in their presentation and arrangement, enables English readers to see them, for the first time, as the forge of his craft. It builds on the German critical edition, as well as decades of work by many scholars. We can now read in the diaries Kafka the writer rather than Kafka the author. </p>
<p>Restored is the sentence craft as it was being forged, smithy-like, across the 12 quarto and octavo notebooks that Kafka called his <em>Tagebücher</em> (diaries), written between 1909 and 1923. Restored are the frequently ungrammatical and sometimes half-legible sentences that Brod often completed or replaced with the syntax of High German. Restored are the homoerotic observations, descriptions of visits to brothels, and negative comments about well-known people, including the odd barb directed at Brod himself. </p>
<p>Most pleasurably, the new translation restores our sense of proximity to the pen and ink. It allows us to experience the falling off and starting again of sentences, the sometimes awkwardly expressed passages, the unreadable words due to ripped notebook pages, and the arresting effect of marooned and perfectly complete passages that are reforged across several pages. </p>
<p>Consider the following being hammered and shaped in the early drafting of the story Description of a Struggle:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You I said and gave him a little push with my knee (with this sudden burst of speech some saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen) don’t fall asleep.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The same sentence is repeated, word for word, many entries later. But on that same notebook page quotation marks are toyed with and a sentence is added: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You” I said and gave him a little push with my knee (with this sudden burst of speech some saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen). I haven’t forgotten about you he said and shook his head even while opening his eyes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In an entry that begins “He seduced a girl in a small town in Isergebirge”, we learn from the critical note attached to it – one of 1,400 meticulously detailed notes – that the passage is likely crafted from direct observation during one of Kafka’s work travels, and that it possibly builds upon an actual liaison he had with a young woman (referred to as G or W, the notes tell us) during those same travels. A little later, we read: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nothing, nothing. In this way I make ghosts for myself. I was involved, even if only slightly, solely in the passage […] For a moment I thought I saw something real in the description of the landscape.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What matters more than the status of the seduction passage – whether it is a sliver of fiction or a sliver of Kafka’s life – is the feeling we have of being just behind Kafka’s shoulder watching him re-read and re-evaluate what he has written. </p>
<p>The diaries include writing in a variety of genres: descriptions of theatrical performances, recollections of dreams, fiction tryouts, reviews, observations of other people, annotations of other writers’ work, essays on various topics. Combined with the lack of signposting, the effect is that the writer’s “I” is disaggregated and distanced from the writing. Notice the displacement in this entry, for example: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A person who has no diary is in a false position in the face of a diary. When, for example, he reads in Goethe’s diary that on 11 January 1797 the latter was busy at home all day with various arrangements, it seems to this person that he himself has never done so little.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is often unclear in the notebooks whether the “I” or the “he” that announces itself on the page is Kafka, or one of his characters, or someone he is ventriloquising. The dairies require us to suspend our familiar habit of asking who is speaking and trying to place who is being referred to. Instead, it becomes necessary to focus on the image the passage brings alive. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-wonder-of-joyces-ulysses-79417">Friday essay: the wonder of Joyce's Ulysses</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The law of the diary</h2>
<p>It is striking to hold the two editions of Kafka’s diaries alongside each other to see how the new translation, in reclaiming the liveliness of the writing, also produces the occasional discombobulation that results from his writing practices. </p>
<p>Kafka frequently returned to old notebooks to make entries after new ones had been started. This criss-crossing is reproduced in the new edition, which is organised by notebook, not by year as in the Brod edition. </p>
<p>Reading naturally goes forward. This parallels the way we habitually think of the movement of a life and its recording in a journal. With the criss-crossing of entries across the notebooks, however, the reader’s attention needs to be sharp. Where a life or a book might move in a one-way direction, the craft of writing does not. Kafka’s notebooks reflect the flux of writing, faithfully restored in the new translation. </p>
<p>Maurice Blanchot tells us the only “formidable law” of the diary is that it must respect the calendar. To note the date, Blanchot says, is to record the passing of time and provide the illusion that the writer lives twice: once by warding off forgetfulness and the despair of having nothing to write; twice by noting that they are writing in their diary about having nothing to write. </p>
<p>Frequently, Kafka abides by this law: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wrote nothing […] Wrote almost nothing […] Awful. Wrote nothing today. No time tomorrow. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Within a few weeks, however: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This story “The Judgment” I wrote at one stretch. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And later still: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It has become very necessary to keep a diary again. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the notebooks start increasing, the dating falls away, transgressing Blanchot’s law completely. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524811/original/file-20230508-195023-xf5q0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524811/original/file-20230508-195023-xf5q0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524811/original/file-20230508-195023-xf5q0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524811/original/file-20230508-195023-xf5q0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524811/original/file-20230508-195023-xf5q0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524811/original/file-20230508-195023-xf5q0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524811/original/file-20230508-195023-xf5q0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524811/original/file-20230508-195023-xf5q0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pages from one of Kafka’s notebooks with words in German and Hebrew.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library at Givat Ram, Jerusalem/Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-is-this-the-end-of-translation-156375">Friday essay: is this the end of translation?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A new literature</h2>
<p>Kafka’s occasional reflections on his diary-keeping are less about the personal insights, or what might be called the conscience, of the writer. They are not defined by their confessional sincerity. Rather, they enable him to self-display. The diary entries provide him with a visualisation of the movement of his thoughts and their alignment on the page. </p>
<p>The diaries act not only as a forge for Kafka’s writing; they also forge a new possibility for the diary’s place within literature. In several entries, Kafka comments on his intention to start an autobiography, implying he did not see the writing he was doing in the notebooks as having an autobiographical purpose. </p>
<p>He also makes the allusive suggestion that diary-writing has its analogue in the literature being produced by his Jewish contemporaries in Warsaw and Prague. </p>
<p>This new literature, Kafka says, is united by a Hebrew mother tongue assimilated within the dominant German language culture. It was a literature seeking modes of expression for the effects of that assimilation. Kafka viewed the experimental writing of his peers as a form of literature that can be viewed as the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>diary keeping of a nation, which is something completely different from historiography […] the detailed spiritualization of the extensive public life, the binding of dissatisfied elements. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Diary writing can be seen as a means of self-formation, not only for an individual, but also for a “small nation” of a marginalised language culture. It offers new and uncertain modes of expression. Kafka adds: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>literature is less an affair of literary history than an affair of the people […] everyone must always be prepared to know, to defend the part of literature that falls to him and at least to defend it even if he doesn’t know or bear it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Decades later, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would mine this entry in Kafka’s diary to coin their idea of “minor literature”. They argued that major or dominant languages, such as German and English, not only produce the spoken dialects of the minority cultures they incorporate or colonise; they also enable new modes of literary expression by writers from minor cultures writing within those major languages. </p>
<p>Kafka spoke High German; his writing bore little or no trace of Prague-German. But this diary entry opens up the possibility of a new way of conceptualising the politics and poetics of literary expression. Such an understanding is now central to literary criticism in colonial and postcolonial contexts. </p>
<p>Blanchot tells us there is no law without its transgression. The new version of Kafka’s strange and extraordinary diaries reminds us how diaries are not usually intended for any reader other than their writer, who is usually their only reader. Ross’s translation will continue to ensure the transgression of that law too. </p>
<p>It is just shy of a century since Kafka’s death. What could be more fitting than the appearance of these diaries in a faithful translation, showing them to be much more than an accompaniment to Kafka’s stories or a calendar of his existence? They are an inexhaustible source of literature itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196573/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Linda Daley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
For Franz Kafka, writing was a strange way of thinking and being in the world.
Linda Daley, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/193721
2023-01-04T19:19:56Z
2023-01-04T19:19:56Z
When Nobel met Booker: Dario Fo, Barry Unsworth, and one shambolic Italian summer
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500897/original/file-20221214-26-pn2xmg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C21%2C3578%2C2432&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dario Fo at the Venice Film Festival, 1985.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gorupdebesanez/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The summer of 1985 is oppressive around the medieval Italian town of Gubbio. Thick heat is held captive in the wooded ravines and the windless slopes that climb and crawl across Umbria and on to the foothills of the Apennines. A short winding drive into the hills behind the town is the Libera Università di Alcatraz, a secluded retreat that is in the process of establishing itself as a gathering place for artists, writers and thinkers – a place where they can escape to nature and create. </p>
<p>In the Italian fashion, not everything is up and operating. Buildings stand half-finished. The swimming pool has been drained so a mural of a dragon can be painted on the bottom. But somehow the place works. Guests commune with their muses during the day, then congregate for meals on the terrace in the still, warm evenings to enjoy rustic fare prepared from local ingredients, washed down with red wine and tales from the assembled creatives. </p>
<p>The enterprise is run by Jacopo Fo, 30 years old and turning his hand to every aspect of the business, including the swimming-pool dragon. Until the artwork is finished, the pool can’t be filled to give the guests some respite from the relentless summer heat.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501745/original/file-20221219-32459-x26wn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501745/original/file-20221219-32459-x26wn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501745/original/file-20221219-32459-x26wn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501745/original/file-20221219-32459-x26wn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501745/original/file-20221219-32459-x26wn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501745/original/file-20221219-32459-x26wn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501745/original/file-20221219-32459-x26wn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501745/original/file-20221219-32459-x26wn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>Amid the dust haze and the fireflies that swarm the air, an unlikely gathering is taking place. Jacopo’s parents are in town: Dario Fo and Franca Rame. They are setting up camp at Jacopo’s enclave to rehearse a new play. </p>
<p>Fo and Rame are Italian cultural royalty. It is still 12 years until actor and playwright Fo will be recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he is already well-established as a national treasure. His groundbreaking work in commedia dell’arte flipped the nature of theatre. His plays present characters as grotesques who directly address the audience. Their anarchic asides are an assault on classical theatre’s embrace of the heroic lead. </p>
<p>Fo’s new play – Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman – will be performed by a drama company from Finland. It is due to premiere at the prestigious Tampere Theatre Festival in a matter of weeks. </p>
<p>The play is incomplete.</p>
<p>Fo speaks no Finnish.</p>
<p>The Finns speak no Italian.</p>
<p>An interpreter is hired to make sense of Fo’s instructions for the actors and the many rewrites that are taking place on a daily basis. Her name is Aira Pohjanvaara-Buffa. And since she is going to be camped out in the Umbrian woods for a month or so, she invites along her new partner. He is a respected but still mostly unknown British novelist by the name of Barry Unsworth.</p>
<p>At this point in his career, Unsworth had attracted a small but enthusiastic readership for his historical fiction. Seven years later, he will win the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, his novel set amid the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.</p>
<p>So, from late June to mid-July of 1985, a future Nobel laureate and a future Booker Prize winner co-exist in the peace and bucolic calm of the Umbrian woods. </p>
<p>The rehearsals are a fiasco. </p>
<p>On the first day, the actors arrive drunk from the airport. The rehearsal stage is still to be built. Fo changes his script daily, hourly – often in the wings as the actors wait for fresh lines to be written for them. There are clashes between the traditional approach of the Finns and the anarchic methods of Fo and Rame. The lead actor is laid low with sunstroke. The director has brought his youthful boyfriend with him, and the young man starts to take an interest in some of the young women of the theatre company. Tempers run short in the unrelenting heat.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501742/original/file-20221219-11129-qmz26j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501742/original/file-20221219-11129-qmz26j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501742/original/file-20221219-11129-qmz26j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501742/original/file-20221219-11129-qmz26j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501742/original/file-20221219-11129-qmz26j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501742/original/file-20221219-11129-qmz26j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1259&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501742/original/file-20221219-11129-qmz26j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1259&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501742/original/file-20221219-11129-qmz26j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1259&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>All the while, Unsworth keeps a meticulous diary, documenting the artistic approach of the enigmatic Fo, as well as the behind-the-scenes shambles of a production that seems destined for disaster. </p>
<p>For decades, the journal was forgotten. Bundled among the author’s papers and correspondence, it eventually found a home in the archives of the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin. The diary is in Box 12, Folder 6 of the Unsworth papers. Its observations are written in clear cursive in what appears to be blue biro, with occasional red annotations.</p>
<p>It makes for sometimes brutal reading.</p>
<p>The journal provides a first person account of the creative process of one of the 20th century’s lions of theatre, in all its chaotic glory. Though it is a simple linear account of events, Unsworth manages to pen a compelling narrative and create fully realised characters.</p>
<h2>Great promise</h2>
<p>As with all such creative ventures, it starts with great promise.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>June 20th – Drove from Rome to the Liberia Università di Alcatraz which is situated some few kilometres from Gubbio, and not far from Perugia. Gentle green hills of Umbria with the darker, higher slopes of Apennines behind. Walled hilltop towns. Scale of nearer hills small enough to be manageable but dramatically steep gorges, often thickly wooded. Alcatraz itself (near to hamlet of Santa Cristina) set in green hilly country 6000 metres above sea level. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But very quickly Unsworth senses some fragility in the foundations of the enterprise that lies ahead.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of the Finnish company met at Rome one was very drunk already – another slightly. They had been drinking on the plane […] They both continued to drink steadily but the tight-featured one remained just short of being staggering drunk while the fair haired – more sensitive one I think – became helplessly drunk by evening, hardly able to talk. </p>
<p>This caused and still causes worry to Willi, who is the director of the Company (They are from Tampere, about 200 miles from Helsinki.) If they are not dealt with severely they could well fall into a pattern of drinking which could make them unfit for work and seriously prejudice progress of the play. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even in his diary, it seems, Unsworth is not averse to a bit of dramatic foreshadowing. The future Booker winner is curious about the legend of Fo and whether the myth of the man measures up against the actuality. His descriptions, both of physique and psyche, are forensic.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Fo himself is not taking over the direction of the play, as his doctor has told him to go very easy. He will do an hour a day, or so he says now – later enthusiasms and involvements remain to be seen. </p>
<p>He is tall – at least six feet I should think – and portly, very carelessly dressed but despite this an imposing figure rather, with natural dignity and ease of manner. He is at first impression almost gubernatorial – almost Roman senatorial – in feature, big-faced, fleshy, with large slightly beaky nose, but this impression soon lost. If his face could be stilled and the smile removed monumental – 2 conditions never fulfilled. There is nothing monumental about the face, it has a refined seriousness and an alternation almost constant of vague abstraction and gentle shrewdness and alertness. </p>
<p>Under the good humour great reserve of firmness and a total dedication to the work. His eyes very bright blue, face florid I think through his recent illness. In contrast to the amazing repertoire and fluidity of movement pose and gesture when on stage, in conversation he is still, not very demonstrative at all (given he is Italian).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unsworth revisits this perplexing nature of Fo’s character many times in the course of the journal. It is fair to say that the author is at first curious, then grows to admiration, and ultimately to great disappointment that the man is not the equal of the art that he produces. Fo’s veneer is as thin as any stage setting, with much the same remit: to paint an image that reminds the audience of something majestic in real life, but which is itself a simulacrum, a construction.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I visit the stage that Fo has had built in the bare hillside, on the crest of the slope, below the dust road that leads to the tower, stairs on the left leading up to a door – Elizabeth’s room. In the background an arched balustrade – I think with a narrow round platform below it. Six identical arches forming an arcaded effect […] not a means of exit or entry but to give the illusion of a palace interior. Right centre a curtained room. A life size horse on wheels. (This is to be improvised here – but needed for commercial production.) </p>
<p>This set does not change throughout the play. They are still working on it as I stand there. Fo moving planks, sweeping dust and debris from the stage area. The workmen with ladders, wheelbarrows, trestles, buckets. </p>
<p>The work is to be finished tomorrow or the day after – ready for rehearsals with the Finns. Not finished but it is an interior already – an enclosure (plank walls delimit it from the rock and scrub all round), something where things that are significant, that have causation or consequences, can be made to happen, presented.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When one artist views another whose work is in a different medium, it is often through the lens of their own craft. In Unsworth’s case, he is fascinated by Fo’s artistry on stage.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>June 21st – The day begins with a talk by Dario on his attitude to theatre in general and then his intentions in this particular play. He speaks about the “classical theatre” so-called, which was an instrument of power because it took no account of day-to-day life and also denied independence to the actors. </p>
<p>Contrasts this with commedia dell’arte from which he draws his models: fixed characters which can represent different aspects of society, different foras in conflict etc. Speaks about the improvised quality in this popular theatre which enabled characters such as the donnazza and fool to comment on the action, to support grotesquely or to undermine values or show true nature of hypocritical positions of “heroic characters”, and also allowed these same characters to address asides or speak to the audience directly thus involving them more closely. </p>
<p>Fo stresses dignity of the individual within, stresses of power and manipulation and the purposes of the state. Explains that in this play “Elizabeth” he is trying to observe the rules and essential form of Italian dramatist of 15th century – unities of place, time, use of traditional characters etc. in order to illuminate the truth underlying platitudes and pieties of what is received as history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The play is set in the court of Elizabeth I, where the Virgin Queen fumes about Shakespeare’s dramas satirising her reign and laments that her love, the Earl of Essex, is conspiring against her. As with much of Fo’s work, it is a treatise on the misapplication of power. His career was founded on his scathing satire of authoritarian regimes, with works such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! (1974), which earned him widespread regard as a champion of the working poor. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501216/original/file-20221215-14-oaoozi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501216/original/file-20221215-14-oaoozi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501216/original/file-20221215-14-oaoozi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501216/original/file-20221215-14-oaoozi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501216/original/file-20221215-14-oaoozi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501216/original/file-20221215-14-oaoozi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501216/original/file-20221215-14-oaoozi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501216/original/file-20221215-14-oaoozi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dario Fo and Franca Rame with their son Jacopo in 1962.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-samuel-becketts-waiting-for-godot-a-tragicomedy-for-our-times-157962">Guide to the Classics: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a tragicomedy for our times</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>God motif</h2>
<p>That night at dinner, the two actors who had been excessively drunk apologise to Fo, and he warns them of the consequences if they transgress again. The play’s director, Arturo Corso, arrives: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a lean restless sort of man with a thin, curiously bird-like face, bird-like or mammal-like? Prominent nose, big eyes, retreating chin. Clever eyes, ready smile, used to delivering himself, I think. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Also newly arrived is Corso’s youthful boyfriend, Alfredo: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>very beautiful – with features bold and well shaped and those eyes of Italian youth, fathomless and shallow at the same time. At dinner Franca asked him (Corso) where Alfredo was sleeping. He said, “With me of course”. He uses the feminine pronoun when referring to Alfredo.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unsworth’s observations of Fo and his methods begin to adjust almost immediately. His diary entry for June 22 notes that the Finns face a tough taskmaster when rehearsals start: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is cold on the terrace in the mornings, out of the sun, but Dario has made up his mind that he will rehearse there. He is autocratic and heedless in matters of this kind. </p>
<p>Now I see in his face, a sort of epicene quality, a potential for collapse […] in contrast with the magisterial quality also there. It is as though in these two casts of his face is symbolised the recurrent theme of his plays, the conflict of power, the holding up and simultaneous undermining of authority. </p>
<p>He has amazing control over voice and face, so that in illustration he can roar with laughter, scream with outrage, without the eyes changing from the seriousness of their intent – and he returns to the normal tone of rehearsal immediately, without pause.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Very quickly, Unsworth settles on a God motif in his observations of Fo at work and at play. He notes the characters in the performance are, through their actions and thoughts, questioning the words of God. Fo’s constant editing and rewriting of his script, even during the course of the readings, is summarised as: “God changing the rules?” </p>
<p>It is at this point in the project that Alfredo reveals himself to be 16 years old. This prompts the journal observation from Unsworth that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>(While the Finns drink, the Italians attempt seductions.) The author/actor is like God because he sets actual physical bodies in motion. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The following day, in a portent of things to come, a hot water bottle is fetched for Franca Rame who has collapsed after the morning’s strenuous rehearsal. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Fo moves through all this, portly, avuncular, curiously heedless in old T-shirt and trousers. God relaxing with his creatures, but still not of them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the midst of rehearsals stretching through long days without a break, Unsworth occasionally separates from the company and enjoys walks through the surrounding hills, heavy with flowering gorse, wild sweet pea, poppies and cornflowers. It is on these sojourns that he starts jotting notes for a possible novel, about an internationally famous playwright and actor, who buys up a sizeable piece of land and builds a theatre in the wilderness: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A long terrace (conservatory), rooms for recalling, rehearsing a big dining room. Swimming pool. He converts old buildings, barns, towers – medieval buildings – into accommodation. The area is beautiful – this is the Garden of Eden and he is God. (God with a flaw?) As consort he has his actress wife. </p>
<p>The assistant director is Christ figure. A troupe of actors arrive to be rehearsed in a new play. Is this a medieval morality, an Elizabethan period play, a foreign play? Is it written or adapted by Playwright? It should be a) a comment on the nature of the Playwright; authority (This could be achieved though directional comment.), on the nature of political power with reference to the England of today, and the relationships within it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ten years later, Unsworth’s novel Morality Play, about a troupe of travelling players in 14th century England, is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501217/original/file-20221215-18-8ssasq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501217/original/file-20221215-18-8ssasq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501217/original/file-20221215-18-8ssasq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501217/original/file-20221215-18-8ssasq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501217/original/file-20221215-18-8ssasq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501217/original/file-20221215-18-8ssasq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501217/original/file-20221215-18-8ssasq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501217/original/file-20221215-18-8ssasq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dario Fo at Gubbio, 1988.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Growing tensions</h2>
<p>By June 24, the growing tensions in the company are becoming obvious. Fo’s constant script revisions and his reluctance to let Corso take on the full directorial role are causing stress among the players. Fo and Rame decide to decamp for a few days and leave Corso in charge.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The big ego reacts to exhaustion by seeking to simplify for itself, with consequent chaos. </p>
<p>Dario is out of this for the most part, though an occasional hovering presence. He shows unwillingness to sunbathe with the others. When he takes off his shirt – which he does at some distance – shows a good deal of sag and distinctly formed, even quite plump breasts, confirming that sense of him as physically feminine. (Though he has a strong male image too.) </p>
<p>Can it be that his unwillingness to sunbathe derives from this? Is our God vain? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>For all of Unsworth’s reservations about Fo’s temperament and his substance, he is an unabashed admirer of his stagecraft. He describes Fo showing the actor playing the role of the Donnazza how to move: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>His demonstration of the Donnazza’s slip – the backward glance, the flounce with the back skirts, the backward bending body, then the skip and slither, the discovery of the piss – the acceptance that there is a wooden horse that pisses – are all absolutely masterly – just as funny every time he does it (everyone laughs every time). For a heavy man he moves about the stage with astonishing lightness and grace – like a dancer, his movements timed and precise. (It is obvious that the space of the stage and the subjects in it are as negotiable for him as a familiar sitting room might be.) </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In God’s kingdom, a word from on high carries a good deal of weight. On June 25, Unsworth records: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dario tells me I have an “intelligent face” – una facia intelligente. In the peculiar circumstances of this place all compliments and comments from him have a binding force somehow, setting the seal on things – even creating the fact that he elects to comment on.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unsworth, however, is not easily guiled with words of praise. His works abound with thematic critiques of the neo-liberalism of the Thatcher years and the devastating impact her government’s policies had on his native north of England. He has a northerner’s disdain of bombast and pretension, and it is with this mindset that Unsworth regards Fo’s everyday manner as being as performative as anything he does on stage: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>One grows oppressed by the performance element. Because Dario is so much at the centre of things, jovial host, object of pilgrimage, author and exemplar and metteur en scene, it sometimes seems he is mediating life for us. Last night we were all called out to admire the sunset, this in the midst of dinner. I resisted the collective invitation for some time but was more or less pulled out by A. It was indeed a beautiful sunset – radiant and roseate, the low western clouds edged with bright gold, the higher ones curled and flung across the sky in great radiant swathes. “Raphaelesque” as Dario describes it. He is proud and rightly of the place, the thing he has created, and this includes the sunset and perhaps the whole of Umbria too. But none the less this sense (on my part) of oppression remains.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the same time, the actors are growing weary of this difficult Zeus-like figure in their ranks. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dario is hovering presence, rather dreaded by the Finns now because of his inevitable habit of changing text (because he sometimes imperfectly remembers it and also because he does not have patience to understand Finns’ difficulties with the style). He grows impatient if they do not immediately get what he means. I think everyone will be relived now when he and Franca leave (tomorrow?)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But even when Fo and Rame depart for a few days, the rehearsals are dogged with troubles. Payments due from Finland do not appear. The performers start drinking again. The actor playing the Donnazza is struck down with sunstroke, and one of the Finns must return home to attend their father’s funeral. Director Corso accidently slashes his eyelid with a sharp thumbnail during an expressive flick of his hand and must conduct rehearsals with a broad bandage wrapped across his face. It is into this domain of instability that Fo and Rame return, only to ratchet up the workload. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Rehearsals begin in the morning now. However warm-hearted these people are their priorities take little account of the feelings of others. If they start once again making textual changes, the driven Finns may finally revolt. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The creative force behind Fo and Rame seems to be one of unending dissatisfaction with the status quo. There is constant tweaking, continual change.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As was to be expected Franca began immediately to amend the text of the monologue, to the silent rage of the Finns. It seems to be an involuntary process this, as natural as breathing to both of them – Dario and Franca. The trouble is that they have each his or her preferred version and depending on which of them is present at the time it is this or that which is preferred. A comedy would be played out it they were both present at the same time and proceeded to quarrel over the text. </p>
<p>Arturo now, after 2 weeks of directing, has to take a back seat again now, which can’t be much of a pleasure to him. I saw him and Dario engaged in what looked like a pretty furious argument, even by Italian standards of vehemence and demonstration. </p>
<p>To watch Franca rehearsing the Finns is a pretty amazing sight anyway. She is acting all the time, from the moment she sets foot on the stage. She acts being a director. Every movement is studied, the walk, the set of the body and head, the languor of waiting for her remarks to be translated, the elaborate patience, the sudden flow into illustrative movement, an almost numbing authoritative lowering of the voice, an unrelenting dominant grip on the proceedings. </p>
<p>Dario’s style is different. He is about the stage all the time, moving in his light but portly manner, breaking occasionally into an amazingly accomplished burst of mime, grammelot or stage business of some kind. Arturo sits and watches, rises and advances to explain and illustrate with his extraordinary virtuosity of gesture (il maesto dilgesto) then returning to his seat again to watch. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Over the weeks, the rehearsals drag on. But there is progress as the date of the festival draws near: Actors begin to fully inhabit their roles; the script is finalised. The show is almost ready, and it is time for Unsworth to make his exit.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the author is left torn between Fo the artist and Fo the man. After a month in the master’s presence, Unsworth leaves Umbria with the inklings of a new novel, an extensive first-hand account of the creative process of one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished playwrights, and a bitter postscript in his journal, written on August 16 1985, five days after the show’s premiere in Tampere: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…imbroglio after I left – the teacher of mime (a Sicilian girl) from the Little Theatre of Milan, in love with Arturo, who in addition to Alfredo has taken up with a Canadian girl – one of the students. (Alfredo himself gets interested in the girls, source of quarrel with Arturo). A party, at which everyone gets drunk and at which Sicilian girl stages dramatic scene, weeping, cursing, smashing things. It seems she gave him up after learning of Arturo’s numerous involvements with boys (Alfredo one among many) then relented – too late, because Arturo now had acquired Canadian girl.</p>
<p>Also disillusioning behaviour of God Dario, after Franca left he had a young girl – various young girls – on his knee, kissing and fondling in public, using position again – I mean his power. Very bad taste. He really doesn’t care much about people, not as individuals at least. Becomes gracious in presence of journalists. Then A. discovered that Sara (one of the girls working there) was actually afraid to tell him about mix up in laundry – he was wearing a tee-shirt with “Memphis” written on it, property of M. So those who work for him are frightened of him – a bad sign. And he is conscious of this and uses it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The demarcation between artist and art will always be disputed territory. Does the strength of the work ever offset the weakness of the creator? Unsworth’s final journal entry seems rooted in disappointment that a man with as much natural talent as Fo could also be capable of such base abuses of power, all the more unfortunate given his career was built on lacerating those who deny freedom to others.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501737/original/file-20221219-15-dcsar9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A recent Turkish production of Dario Fo’s play Elizabeth (2020).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2><em>Fiasko av Dario Fo</em></h2>
<p>As far as can be determined, Unsworth wrote only once for public consumption about his summer in the Umbrian hillside: a piece for the Guardian in December 1985. The article, a preview of a documentary about Fo that was screening on Channel 4 that evening, is a broadly anodyne account of the Italian master’s behaviour that month. It describes the shambles of the rehearsals, but masks Unsworth’s contemporaneously recorded opinion of Fo’s multiple shortcomings. He concludes the Guardian piece with: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It seemed to me that I had witnessed, in the Free University of Alcatraz, an exercise of power and control as unremitting as anything Elizabeth got up to. But some essential human business had been transacted there, under Fo’s benign, impatient patronage, among those hillsides. And I was glad and grateful to have seen it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And the performance itself in Tampere? If Fo’s directing technique was confusing for the Finnish cast, the result on stage was no less confounding for Finnish theatregoers. The review in <em>Hufvudstadsbladet</em>, Finland’s highest circulating Swedish-language newspaper, carried the bold headline: <em>Fiasko av Dario Fo</em> – “Failure of Dario Fo”.</p>
<p>Reviewer Marten Kihlman wrote that despite high expectations for the show, the audience reception was “lukewarm”: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>for my part I have to admit that none of the ten Fo plays I have seen have been nearly as cryptic and so long-winded. </p>
<p>Much has been written (and speculated) about Elizabeth I of England: she has been described as moody, jealous, greedy and much more. However, Fo’s portrayal of the poor Virgin Queen is unlike anything else: in the first Act she is a pathetic hysteric who regularly pees; in the second a kind of cross between Mrs Thatcher and Lady Macbeth. </p>
<p>Now Fo is not interested in the human Elizabeth – she simply represents Power, the given factor in an equation whose outcome is also given: power corrupts, power leads to abuse, power combined with stupidity is an abomination. All this Fo has said before, with greater concentration and sharpness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reviewer does dispense some praise – to the set designer. </p>
<p>And while he is scathing about the acting (“too loud”, “without charm”), he assigns blame in one direction only: “the ensemble should not be blamed for having a fatal theatrical ordeal: they follow Dario Fo’s directive. And even masters sometimes miss.”</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501757/original/file-20221219-27-cxdbkt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193721/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Newsome does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Stifling heat, drunk actors, an unfinished script – in 1985, novelist Barry Unsworth observed the chaotic creative process of playwright Dario Fo.
Richard Newsome, Director, postgraduate Writing, Editing and Publishing program, The University of Queensland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/195578
2022-12-27T19:20:14Z
2022-12-27T19:20:14Z
6 non-fiction reads for kids this summer, recommended by kids aged 9 to 11
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499962/original/file-20221209-25000-8w73ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C5607%2C3724&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Drew Perales/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Kids are often gifted books for Christmas, but the trick is to get them to read them! </p>
<p>No one likes nagging their kids to read, though we know <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/education/read-the-room-it-s-time-to-act-on-our-children-s-literacy-20220904-p5bf7w.html">reading is crucial</a> to their <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/au/academic/subjects/education/teacher-training-and-professional-develop/english-and-literacies-learning-how-make-meaning-primary-classrooms">critical and literacy development</a>. </p>
<p>But what do <em>they</em> think about books and reading over the summer? Kids’ voices are often overlooked when it comes to cultural criticism. </p>
<p>For the past two years, I have been facilitating a children’s book club. In our most recent session, I asked the participants – aged 9 to 11 – to share their summer reading recommendations. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/children-and-biography-9781350236370/">My research</a> has found that kids respond positively to non-fiction books in social reading environments. Reading non-fiction impacts positively on their civic and critical literacy. So, we focused on non-fiction recommendations.</p>
<p>These tips – straight from the kids themselves – might help adult readers to know what books to buy this Christmas, or to hunt out at the library over summer.</p>
<hr>
<h2>1. You Don’t Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine by Yeva Skalietska</h2>
<p>This is <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/you-dont-know-what-war-is-9781526660138/">an eye-opening and heart-breaking story</a> about a 12-year-old girl called Yeva Skalierska, living through the Ukraine war of 2022. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499963/original/file-20221209-19531-ygz235.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499963/original/file-20221209-19531-ygz235.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499963/original/file-20221209-19531-ygz235.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499963/original/file-20221209-19531-ygz235.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499963/original/file-20221209-19531-ygz235.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499963/original/file-20221209-19531-ygz235.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499963/original/file-20221209-19531-ygz235.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499963/original/file-20221209-19531-ygz235.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>A normal girl who loves school and spending time with friends, she suddenly goes through shelling and bombing right out the front of her own house. She travelled around Ukraine with her grandmother, and many other Ukrainians, trying to escape the war and danger. This book is Yeva’s personal diary account of the experiences of the war through her eyes. </p>
<p>I found it fascinating that a girl so similar to me can be going through something so drastically different. This is happening at this very moment, not in the history books, which makes me wonder why we have to have more war like this. This is a good book for anyone wanting to understand the impact of war on children and families and to put into perspective the things we might complain about that don’t really matter. </p>
<p><strong>– Chloe, age 11</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/5-must-read-books-about-russia-and-ukraine-our-expert-picks-179832">5 must-read books about Russia and Ukraine: our expert picks</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>2. Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Inspiring Young Changemakers by Jess Harriton and Maithy Vu</h2>
<p>This is <a href="https://www.rebelgirls.com/products/100-inspiring-young-changemakers">the latest book</a> in the amazing <a href="https://www.rebelgirls.com/products/good-night-stories-for-rebel-girls">Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls</a> series. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499964/original/file-20221209-25181-s12rbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499964/original/file-20221209-25181-s12rbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499964/original/file-20221209-25181-s12rbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499964/original/file-20221209-25181-s12rbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499964/original/file-20221209-25181-s12rbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499964/original/file-20221209-25181-s12rbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499964/original/file-20221209-25181-s12rbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499964/original/file-20221209-25181-s12rbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The book contains 100 short stories about young changemakers. A changemaker is someone who has achieved something in the world to make it a little bit better. These changemakers are from all parts of the world with different abilities. </p>
<p>The book is introduced by conservationist Bindi Irwin. The subjects in this book include Greta Thunberg (activist), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Springmuhl_Tejada">Isabella Springmuhl</a> (fashion designer) and Zendaya (actor and singer). </p>
<p>I think this book is wonderful because this Rebel Girls book focuses on young people only. Young girls aren’t usually recognised as having an impact in the world, so that’s what makes this book special. People who read this will see how great young people are at making the world a better place.</p>
<p><strong>– Darcy, age 11</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/empathy-starts-early-5-australian-picture-books-that-celebrate-diversity-153629">Empathy starts early: 5 Australian picture books that celebrate diversity</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>3. Welcome to Your Period by Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes</h2>
<p>This is <a href="https://www.hardiegrant.com/au/publishing/bookfinder/book/welcome-to-your-period-by-yumi-stynes/9781760503512">a very informative book</a> about welcoming you to your period and what is going on with your body as you grow up and start changing into a young woman. The authors are two women that have experienced everything you’re starting to go through and know all the tricks to managing your period. </p>
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<p>They understand what you’re going through and how you may feel about the situation. The book makes you feel as if it’s nothing to worry or be scared about. The authors act like your big sisters; they’ll guide you and teach you everything you need to know about your body. They make you feel comforted, with different alternatives to manage your period to suit your body type, and help you talk to somebody you can trust and help you through that process. </p>
<p>I think that this book is a really great preparation for when you don’t have your period but when you feel like you need to start managing it or talking to a helpful adult who can help you through this tough time.</p>
<p><strong>– Arly, age 10</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-periods-can-come-as-a-shock-5-ways-to-support-your-kid-when-they-get-theirs-177920">First periods can come as a shock. 5 ways to support your kid when they get theirs</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>4. Barefoot Kids by Scott Pape (2022)</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460763650/barefoot-kids/">This book</a> is all about money and how to invest properly. It teaches you about money and how to use it a “smart” way. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499966/original/file-20221209-25362-uu9du9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499966/original/file-20221209-25362-uu9du9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499966/original/file-20221209-25362-uu9du9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499966/original/file-20221209-25362-uu9du9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499966/original/file-20221209-25362-uu9du9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499966/original/file-20221209-25362-uu9du9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499966/original/file-20221209-25362-uu9du9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499966/original/file-20221209-25362-uu9du9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Usually, when I think of a book about money, I think “oh no I’m not reading that!”. But this book was super fun, exciting and interesting. I loved it. It included short interviews of children who started a business and got heaps of money. It was really inspiring and amazing for giving ideas. It had good instructions of what to do to earn money, and I found it interesting that children five and up can have their own business. </p>
<p>I definitely recommend this book to other kids aged nine and up, because I gave it to my cousin who is nine years old, and she loved it. It definitely helps children to be “smarter” with money than most adults. I think it would be very intriguing for kids with a short attention span. </p>
<p>It tells kids that they are the boss, while also telling them to get parents’ permission and help. It tells you how to separate money into four buckets and has apparently changed lives. I give this book a five-star rating.</p>
<p><strong>– Sienna, age 11</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/teaching-kids-about-maths-using-money-can-set-them-up-for-financial-security-85327">Teaching kids about maths using money can set them up for financial security</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>5. How to Speak Dog: a Guide to Decoding Dog Language by Aline Alexander Newman</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780008257910/how-to-speak-dog/">How to Speak Dog</a> is a fantastic book about how to communicate with dogs. This book tells you when your dog is sick, sad, happy or scared. It has many interesting facts about dogs. It even tells you how to deal with an aggressive dog and what to do if a dog attacks you. How to Speak Dog even has some pages on how to train your dog.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499967/original/file-20221209-28456-qh64s7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499967/original/file-20221209-28456-qh64s7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499967/original/file-20221209-28456-qh64s7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499967/original/file-20221209-28456-qh64s7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499967/original/file-20221209-28456-qh64s7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499967/original/file-20221209-28456-qh64s7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499967/original/file-20221209-28456-qh64s7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499967/original/file-20221209-28456-qh64s7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>I think people will like this book because it has lots of information about dogs and dogs are a common pet. They could have a new puppy with some bad habits, and they might need help training their pup. </p>
<p>I have a dog and this book was very helpful to me because I learnt from it that my dog is scared when he shows the whites of his eyes. My favourite thing about this book is that they have funny facts on every page. Facts like: “A dog can smell half a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in an Olympic sized swimming pool.”</p>
<p><strong>– Avery, age 9</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/to-pat-or-not-to-pat-how-to-keep-interactions-between-kids-and-dogs-safe-182419">To pat or not to pat? How to keep interactions between kids and dogs safe</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>6. Against all Odds: Young Readers’ Edition by Richard Harris and Craig Challen</h2>
<p>This is <a href="https://www.phoenixdistribution.com.au/against-all-odds-young-readers-edition">an interesting, educational, and suspenseful</a> book, with exhilarating and thrilling twists all through it. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499968/original/file-20221209-25682-10j1q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499968/original/file-20221209-25682-10j1q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499968/original/file-20221209-25682-10j1q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499968/original/file-20221209-25682-10j1q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499968/original/file-20221209-25682-10j1q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499968/original/file-20221209-25682-10j1q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499968/original/file-20221209-25682-10j1q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499968/original/file-20221209-25682-10j1q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>(Editor’s note: the book tells the inside story of the cave rescue of a boys’ soccer team in Thailand, back in 2018. It’s written by the two Australian cave divers involved in the rescue.)</p>
<p>This book explained everything in great detail, giving the reader a real idea of what’s happening. I liked how they made the book extremely fascinating, and the authors went far to explain everything to an understandable degree. </p>
<p>I disliked how such a large chunk of the book was an autobiography about Craig and Richard. I would recommend this for 10-15 year olds, since younger children may not understand the complex vocabulary used in the book. I would rate it 7.5/10.</p>
<p><strong>– Molly, age 11</strong></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195578/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Douglas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
How can you get your kids to read this summer? Research has found they respond well to reading non-fiction – so we’ve gathered 6 top non-fiction books, recommended by the kids themselves.
Kate Douglas, Professor of English, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/187625
2022-08-11T20:04:32Z
2022-08-11T20:04:32Z
Friday essay: sex, swimming and smudgy louvres – watching Monkey Grip 40 years on
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478246/original/file-20220809-16-p1hk56.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C19%2C673%2C442&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An early poster for Monkey Grip, starring Noni Hazelhurst and Colin Friels.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">MIFF</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The woman’s name is Nora, and she’s getting out of the pool when she goes to look at the guy she’s seeing and sees something better: a sexy stranger, Javo, who radiates a type of bruisy depth. He hangs back near the famous sign, AQUA PROFONDA, while Nora and the guy she’s seeing, Martin, do their thing. He looks like he’ll be trouble, but not the bad kind of trouble; the kind it might be interesting to catch.</p>
<p>Nora learns from a mate that Javo likes heroin, though he seems to have kicked it; the mate is the girlfriend of Nora’s housemate, and in the anything-goes manner of the time, Javo is soon hanging out with Nora and Martin, enough that Javo can ask Martin how “together” they really are, and relay Martin’s evasive response straight to Nora – a canny move for such a cruisy guy.</p>
<p>Soon, she’s taking him to an art show that she has to cover for the small, busy alternative paper for which she writes reviews. Afterwards, she asks him if he’d like to stay the night. “That would be good,” he tells her, and it’s on.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a woman and man, smiling, stand in front of a weathered wall, the side of a house" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=284&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478176/original/file-20220809-19-ffr1dv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Noni Hazelhurst as Nora and Colin Friels as Javo in Ken Cameron’s 1982 film Monkey Grip.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MIFF</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the morning, Nora’s 11-year-old daughter, Gracie, finds out; Martin finds out. After Javo heads off, Nora relaxes in the kitchen and says, “I suppose I’ve done it again” – the wrong thing, the wrong man – but the story we’re talking about, of course, is Ken Cameron’s <a href="https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/monkey-grip-1982/122/">Monkey Grip</a> (1982), and the casting of Noni Hazlehurst is one of its great coups. </p>
<p>Resignation, pleasure, self-satisfaction, concern: it’s all there in the delivery, and it all takes a back seat to a wonderful feeling that it doesn’t matter much at all. She supposes she’s done it again, and you may now grow aware of a disquieting question that is interesting to this movie the way a mouse is interesting to a cat.</p>
<p>Maybe understanding the implications of what you’re doing has little to no bearing on whether or not it’s actually done? And then the inverse – you can be wise enough to know what’s happening to you and have it happen anyway. This suspicion becomes unbearable as the film goes on. Nora’s carefree nature, which can be cruel but is rarely nasty, lifts the viewer and carries them over the movie’s darkest parts, but there’s always the sense that something irrevocable is happening, a little bit past the line of sight, a little way out of control.</p>
<h2>Making a novel into a movie</h2>
<p>The film is based on Helen Garner’s 1977 novel, and Garner and Cameron are listed as co-writers. On the indispensable website Ozmovies, where <a href="https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/monkey-grip-1982/122/">the Monkey Grip entry</a> splices an interview with Cameron by Peter Malone and an account of Cameron’s DVD commentary into a narrative of how the screenplay was written, Cameron explains that he cut up and re-pasted the novel, typed it up “so that it resembled a movie”, then finessed the adaptation in constant conversation with Garner; he has a collection of letters in which she suggests solutions and scenes. </p>
<p>Garner says on the DVD commentary that she saw 14 or 15 drafts of the script, and then was there for the filming because Nora’s daughter, Gracie, is played by her own daughter, Alice, who is a sharp presence through the film, cheery and watchful, and possessed of slightly eerie wisdom.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1DK_GmoxOfI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Garner co-wrote the film Monkey Grip, with director Ken Cameron.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Garner disliked the casting of Colin Friels as Javo, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/bach-to-the-future-20080614-2qob.html">telling</a> The Age’s Peter Wilmoth in 2008, “I just can’t believe they cast Colin Friels as the junkie. [. . .] He was so healthy, a great big bouncing muscly surfing guy.” We all know people like Javo – if not the heroin, then the sulky mood – and it’s true that they’re not Colin Friels. </p>
<p>But I think of a point that a friend once made about a different kind of story, where two impossibly hot people have a meet-cute on a tram. That doesn’t happen in real life, someone at the time complained. But there are people in the world who look like that, my friend explained; when they hook up, it’s often with each other, and it has to happen <em>somewhere</em>. </p>
<p>If Friels’s Javo is not realistic to the story, then neither, perhaps, is Hazlehurst’s Nora, and you have to have someone like Friels to make the viewer believe that someone like Hazlehurst would give him the time of day. Monkey Grip is a movie, and it has to have some glitz. They have to hook up <em>somewhere</em>, and they hook up here.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a woman riding a bike past the Edinburgh Gardens" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478247/original/file-20220809-20-m5kemu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Noni Hazelhurst’s Nora seemed to herald a new era of complex roles for women in 1982.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Umbrella Entertainment</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sex was an issue for this film. At first, nobody liked it, neither the distributors, nor “most of” the Australian Film Commission, which, speculated producer <a href="https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/vale-patricia-lovell">Patricia Lovell</a>, saw it as pornographic. Stratton had interviewed Lovell for his 1990 book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16041149-the-avocado-plantation">The Avocado Plantation</a>, about the turbulent economics of the 1980s in Australian film. The story of Monkey Grip’s production is harrowing. It almost found funding, but “fell over for lack of $150,000”. </p>
<p>Lovell moved on and produced <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082432/">Gallipoli</a> instead; by the time tax breaks made production more viable, other costs had gone up, so it was still a struggle to fund. When it finally got off the ground, some new funding problem meant that it looked like production might delay for two weeks – sending Lovell to hospital, where she spent 48 hours under sedation from nervous exhaustion. </p>
<p>When the film was done, Lovell heard that Gilles Jacob, director of the Cannes Film Festival, had been told “by someone in authority” that “the Australian government would not be pleased if Monkey Grip competed at Cannes” (though it did). Lovell screened the movie for three distributors in Melbourne, all of whom turned it down; one told her, “I loathed it.” Finally, Lovell distributed it herself, and after the first week’s takings offered proof of its heft, it was picked up officially by Roadshow.</p>
<p>Lots of films are incredibly sexy or incredibly sexual (dark, yearning, weird); Monkey Grip is both. It shows the parts of sex that are all about desperation, habit and distraction as much as those that are about intimacy, spontaneity or fun. </p>
<p>The first time Nora has sex with Javo is full-on, but first it’s so tentative that you think it might not happen; they get under the covers and at first you think they might just go to sleep. As soon as it’s happening, you realise that it was silly to think it might not. The eyes are closed, the clothes are off, the facial expressions work very hard; there’s some finger-sucking where the camera doesn’t cut away, and a kiss that’s more sexual than the finger-sucking.</p>
<p>Cameron told Stratton: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had no problem with the actors during the filming of those scenes. I felt it was worth going all the way with them, and I was young enough not to have hang-ups. The atmosphere on the set was a bit funny: in the end, I had the entire crew, myself included, rehearse naked . . . we all believed in the novel and the film, so we felt those scenes had to be done that way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s great, and sex reappears throughout the film as something that’s both absolutely normal – enmeshed in work, time, reading, eating sandwiches, meeting deadlines, having daughters, moving house, writing lyrics, being in bands – and something that’s like Javo: on a spectrum between consuming and impossible.</p>
<h2>On smack</h2>
<p>After Javo behaves oddly at a party, he says to Nora, “You just don’t get it, do you?” When he’d told her he was “stoned” earlier, he meant he was on smack. Nora smiles and kisses him. Javo overdoses. Nora visits him in hospital, where Javo is smoking. He looks at an old man across the room and says, “Jeez, old people give me the shits.”</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a sad-looking woman with shaggy hair looks to the right" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478233/original/file-20220809-22-x5kab1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The film-tie in cover of Monkey Grip.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Abebooks</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Javo comes over to Nora’s share house and finds her in the shower and decides that she will be the one to give him outpatient care. Someone who knows how to inject penicillin comes over to show her how it’s done. Nora gives the injection; Javo is upset. They make jokes about the penicillin injection that are really jokes about junk; Gracie grabs the needle and says, “Don’t do it – you’ll get hooked!” All laugh. Everything in the house appears to settle down. Javo becomes part of the family, presiding over the children Nora lives with and the sharing of gifts.</p>
<p>And then one day Javo’s gone. First there is a false bottom, which presages those to come. He’s gone, and Nora finds him again, in a kind of drab bohemian lair, a large, dark, brick building with an arched window, where he gets to gesture at a traumatic origin. He has sex with Nora. He says – or sort of says; the line is fed by Nora – that his father is the reason women “never hit the mark”. </p>
<p>That night, Nora wakes up and Javo isn’t there. She finds him in another room, in the middle of shooting up, which he finishes doing despite her presence, half meeting her eyes. And then he’s really gone; he’s off to Singapore, with Martin (the guy Nora was seeing at the start – played by Tim Burns). Javo sends Nora a postcard. He wrote it on the plane, so there’s nothing about the trip itself. The world has swallowed him up.</p>
<p>The seasons change; Nora’s place of residence changes. She hears news in the winter that Javo is in Bangkok, in prison for stealing sunglasses (also with Martin). She sends him letters daily. “I miss him a real lot,” she tells a friend she’s hooking up with. “Like a piece of glass stuck in your foot,” the friend suggests.</p>
<p>And then, one sunny day, he’s back – in a garden full of hanging ferns and staghorns, Nora’s new, less-ramshackle share house. They go inside; she touches his face; they have sex slowly. “Now that he was back all the splinters of my life made sense again,” narrates Nora. </p>
<p>But straight away, there are new complications – pasta, women, alternative theatre. Nora takes Javo for coffee and gnocchi with her pension cheque, and Javo ruins it by going to talk to another woman under the obvious pretext that he wants to see what kind of cigarettes they’ve got behind the counter. The woman is Lillian (Candy Raymond), a co-star in a play he’s acting in, and he lurks on the other side of the restaurant chatting her up while the waiter brings the meals out to Nora.</p>
<p>“I mean, she’s too much,” Javo tells Nora; but Nora “feel[s] like she’s lining you up”. Later, the play is staged, in an awful and effective little scene, with Javo as the greasy bartender in a shiny vest, while Lillian is playing a “sight for sore eyes”, a “babe” in a silver slitted dress. </p>
<p>He has to throw up, he leaves the stage but doesn’t quite make it, getting as far as a prop piano bench. Nora runs down from the audience to tend to him, and he keeps speaking his lines while he’s sick.</p>
<h2>A third-act feeling</h2>
<p>Now there’s a third-act feeling; things begin to escalate. But part of what makes it so hard to watch – so like relationships you’ve seen people have, relationships you’ve been in – is that there aren’t any climaxes or moments where peace is restored, there’s just peaks that mean nothing, moments of understanding that distract from other problems, resolutions that will probably be broken. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a woman, mirrored, with a man, mirrored, and two hands gripping each other across the poster" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478232/original/file-20220809-22-hux0f8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ken Cameron found Helen Garner’s novel, Monkey Grip, hard to adapt for film.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Movie Database</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Garner told Wilmoth that Cameron found her novel hard to adapt for film because </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it hasn’t really got a filmic structure. It’s like a long-running TV series . . . it just starts and it goes on and on and eventually it stops.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The film mirrors the novel, which mirrors life, yes, but it also mirrors Javo, whose personal magnetism is all the more striking because the rest of him is staggering, exhausting. Cameron cast him after Doc Neeson, frontman of the Angels, dropped out and Cameron saw Friels at the Sydney Opera House playing Hamlet. For all his gravity he’s also disappointing and ordinary (“Jeez, old people give me the shits”); the story is never allowed to settle around him.</p>
<p>He creeps into Nora’s bed for comfort like a sick kid would. She holds him and kisses him. A needle is left out on the dining room table, in the middle of a household scene where the children are hitting Nora in the head with their dolls and asking her to make them cups of Milo. </p>
<p>“I want to stop,” says Javo, “but I can’t do it now. I can’t stop while the play’s on . . . I can’t perform when I’m coming down.” Nora understands. “When the play’s finished I’ll get off it and we’ll go away somewhere, go up north.” They’ll go to Sydney, see some friends, go to the beach, get a tan. He’ll go cold turkey. “I’m sick of the junk,” he says.</p>
<p>Cut to Javo playing harmonica in the passenger seat of a Mack truck being driven by a stranger, Nora and Gracie in the back. Soon, they’re at a diner just outside of Sydney, facing the kinds of problems faced by families on Australian road trips. They can’t order pies because the diner microwave’s turned off. Perhaps things are going to be all right.</p>
<h2>Filming Sydney as ‘a pretty good Melbourne’</h2>
<p>Although Cameron seems sheepish about the fact that Monkey Grip was filmed largely in Sydney – he explains in the DVD commentary that he was based in Sydney, as were Lovell, the DOP and the production designer, so by the time casting was done (in Sydney) and they’d secured funding, “we’d dug a big hole for ourselves in Sydney” – it’s a great joke of the movie that it does a pretty good Melbourne. </p>
<p>“I would have loved to have made it in Melbourne,” says Cameron, beyond the one week of exteriors he was able to film: “it’s the plaster that you see outside the window, it’s just all sorts of tiny things that you can’t reproduce”. </p>
<p>But when Nora rides her bike down a wide, leafy street, it feels like a suburb of Melbourne where you just haven’t been. Because the film is iconic to Melbourne (as is the novel), it’s satisfying that this seems to have no impact on viewers, as little as knowing that Rear Window <a href="http://movie-locations.com/movies/r/Rear-Window.php">was filmed in LA</a>. It undercuts the seriousness that forms around iconic things; it makes it easier to see the thing itself.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eeRBctkbd7o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Monkey Grip was filmed in Sydney, but here are some of the Melbourne exterior scenes, spliced together.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When they get to Sydney – which scenes were also filmed in Sydney – the house they stay in is all pink light. The bed is “pre-warmed” by a dog. ‘What a good idea!’ says Javo when Gracie jumps in the bed, and they cuddle up together. It’s holiday time. With a clean shirt, Sydney light, and a comb run through his hair, Javo is transformed into a man on the upswing. Nora catches him trying to take money from her purse while she’s napping and says “Jeez, you’re good-looking.” He asks if 20 bucks is okay; he’s “just going to see some friends”.</p>
<p>While he’s out, Gracie consults the I Ching – big part of the novel, small part of the film – about the likelihood that the three of them will be going as planned to Manly tomorrow. The universe responds and says “don’t count on it, sister”. Nora asks Gracie what she thinks of Javo, who acknowledges that he’s a junkie, which of course has its problems, but, “You should be nicer to him, and leave him alone, that’s what I reckon.” When he finally comes home, Nora finds him in the kitchen, suspiciously going to town on a baguette. </p>
<p>“This was supposed to be a holiday,” says Nora. “What are you doing, what do you want?” He says, “I want some Vegemite,” and it’s all downhill from there. He converts a fight about doing smack and making empty promises into a discussion about whether or not he’s understood. If she understood him, would she like him? A good question at the wrong time.</p>
<p>Later on, in bed, he says, “I do this over and over. Whenever I get something good, I destroy it.” But just as he’s really exhausted your patience (you lose patience with both of them), the film finds something new in the couple, which is one of the pleasures of the looser, TV-like structure, where characters don’t have to change and grow; they can surprise you with qualities that disappear, then emerge anew, as if shuffled. </p>
<p>When it’s obvious that they’re done with each other, generosity becomes possible. They have a tender disagreement about which of them is going to leave the trip early and go home to Melbourne. It’s him. They kiss. As he rides away in the cab, he plays a little riff on his harmonica and gifts it to Gracie. Gracie and Nora catch the ferry to Manly. “You’ll get over it,” Gracie advises Nora. The ferry’s nice at night, she observes. While Javo has been happening to Nora, Gracie has been growing up. How often do you get to see this kind of thing on film, the child turning casually into the adult? </p>
<p>In The Avocado Plantation, Stratton points out that Hazlehurst as Nora in 1982 seemed like it would herald a coming age of complex roles for women actors, which the rest of the 1980s turned out to largely squander. He also mentions Wendy Hughes’s role as Vanessa in Carl Schultz’s excellent 1983 movie <a href="https://www.ozmovies.com.au/movie/careful-he-might-hear-you">Careful, He Might Hear You</a>, another adaptation of a well-loved Australian novel. </p>
<p>I got chills when Nora and Gracie went on the Manly Ferry; at the end of Careful, He Might Hear You, Vanessa, who’s a snob, decides for once in her life to cross the Harbour on the Ferry, gets into a collision, and drowns. Over in Melbourne, Hazlehurst’s Nora puts on her lipstick and decides it’s time to give her life a little TLC. Her metaphor is a tub that’s been draining towards Javo; now it’s time to put the plug back in.</p>
<p>She goes to a gig. (It looks like The Corner, but I’m sure it’s in Sydney.) One of the odd surprises of the film is that Chrissy Amphlett, Divinyls frontwoman, plays a muso in Nora’s circle named Angela; at the gig, she plays ‘Boys in Town’ from start to finish, but with actors playing the band (the rest of the Divinyls turned down roles in the film). </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dRuNkBybku0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Chrissy Amphlett plays Nora’s muso friend Angela in Monkey Grip.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nora’s hair is slicked down and tied back; she’s wearing a sleek, feathered dress. She cuts loose, dances, laughs with friends; she reconnects with former housemate Clive (played with warmth by Michael Caton). Nora’s world remains spiky and young but it’s comfy without Javo. Soon, she’s writing in front of an open fire. She’s writing on a tram. She writes a short story addressing her feelings towards Lillian and doesn’t think there’s any particular reason to show it to her before publishing. Her life changes again. She moves house again. There’s the sticky business of telling her housemate, but these things are there to be dealt with.</p>
<p>“I just want it quite clear,” she tells the man she’s moving in with, “that we’re not moving into this house as a couple.” She reads books; she looks up words in the dictionary. Around her, children squabble. The framed picture of Virginia Woolf that Nora transports between residences assumes its place above the new workstation, perpetually stately and sentinel. Then, once again, there he is, in a striped shirt of thin fabric and a ragged, rather fashion-forward open seam. “You look great,” she says. “What happened?”</p>
<p>It’s Javo’s softer side. They go up to her bedroom. He sits in a sunny chair. “I’ve been having a really good time these days,” he says. “I’ve been knocking around a bit. Seen Lillian a couple of times.” Nora lies on the bed looking deeply unimpressed. Unprompted, Javo explains that he never loved Nora; he really needed her when he came back from Thailand, but he’s starting to feel better again. A tear slides down her cheek. “Come on, mate, we can outlast the lot of them,” he says. “We see so little of each other, we’re bound to,” she says, as if that’s the point.</p>
<p>In another room Nora’s housemate sits on the bed, playing guitar in his yellow socks and Volleys. He knows Javo is there but he’s being tactful about it. Later, they all go to a party. Life happens around them. A woman at the party observes that men do not like liberated women. People meet for quiet chats by a trellis adorned with green lights. And then the awful moment: someone’s crying in the dark over a can of Fosters and it turns out, incredibly, they’re crying about you.</p>
<p>It’s Lillian, and she’s now read Nora’s published story, the one she decided not to tell Lillian about. “Events don’t belong to people,” Nora explains. But everyone knows who the characters are, Lillian argues. “Twenty people in Carlton do not constitute everybody!” says Nora. </p>
<p>Lillian accuses Nora of just <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/25/helen-garners-monkey-grip-makes-me-examine-who-i-am">publishing her diaries</a> – a critique that famously dogged Garner at the time, as if, she wrote in an essay in 2001 and was still telling Claudia Karvan in <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-28/books-that-made-us-puts-australian-literature-in-the-spotlight/100645224">an ABC special</a> 20 years later, writing diaries isn’t an interesting, challenging, valuable thing to do. But there’s no time for that discourse; Javo is inside, and look – he’s thrown up on himself again.</p>
<p>“Sorry, Nor!” he says. “Guess the dope’s fucked me liver.”</p>
<p>“Don’t be sorry, people have had to do this for me heaps of times,” she fibs, as she picks him up and hauls him away from the party. </p>
<p>Her housemate goes on tour. She rides her bike; she thinks. She drops a letter round to Lillian’s: “Can you see this gets to Javo?” She keeps riding her bike – one of the skills Hazlehurst had to learn for the film; the other, she told Women’s Weekly, was swimming – and soon she’s at her old share house, where lovely Clive still lives. She cries in his arms. She cries in the arms of a woman she hasn’t met. She leaves the house and cries again in front of the cast-iron fence. Was this scene filmed in Melbourne? Again, if not, it’s a pretty good fake.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="swimmers in the Fitzroy Pool, with the words 'AQUA PROFUNDA' (deep water) on the wall behind them" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478174/original/file-20220809-26-mtzcdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fitzroy Pool, with its famous ‘AQUA PROFONDA’ sign, is an iconic Monkey Grip location: ‘a paradise’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ashton_29">Ash29/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And now we’re back at Fitzroy Pool, and it’s summer again. In the DVD commentary, Alice Garner points out that the scenes at the pool, which were filmed at <a href="https://www.ryde.nsw.gov.au/RALC">Ryde Aquatic Leisure Centre</a>, have done the trick for any Melburnian who’s seen the film, and even Cameron says he’s “quite proud” of the recreation. (When I watched it, I took it as self-sighted gospel that the bleachers at the Fitzroy Pool used to be blue on the verticals.) </p>
<p>Rachel Ang, whose 2018 comic <a href="https://www.glompress.com/swimsuit-by-rachel-ang">Swimsuit</a> was set at Fitzroy Pool, told me they set the comic there because “it’s really an amphitheatre, this stage for all kinds of emotional drama”. Ang, who is also an architect, was struck by the “formal power” of the space where the sun acts as a spotlight and shines on “everything”, the dramas and their social implications. </p>
<p>Victoria Hannan, whose 2020 novel <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/victoria-hannan/kokomo">Kokomo</a> also has a critical scene set at the pool, told me that she did so as a “direct tribute” to Monkey Grip – the scene in the novel where Nora tells Clive, “No-one will understand but this is a paradise.”</p>
<p>I wanted to spend this time with the plot of Monkey Grip because I wanted to try to see, if I could, the thing itself. By the end of the movie, what’s obvious is that the thing itself extends beyond the characters and past the movie’s frame, into the rich shine of the sunshine, the blue soak of the pool. </p>
<p>There are fabulous clothes (Nora wears everything from a fuzzy tangerine sweater to a pair of pedal-pushers in animal print; even Martin, at one point, wears a denim jacket and rope-net shirt). It’s the yeahs, give-it-a-burls, fair-dinkums, I-think-it’s-beauts; a song done well at band practice is described as “very tasty”. It’s the slowness, the detail, the gossip, the repetition. Everyone’s always smoking in front of louvres that are always smudgy, and though the men may look unfathomable, they’re also always there.</p>
<p>At the pool, Nora gossips with another old housemate. Gracie gossips at the water’s edge with the old housemate’s kid. Javo is at the pool, under the AQUA PROFONDA sign. Nora approaches him in possibly the best outfit of the film, a red cap and lemon bomber over a one-piece bathing suit. It makes her happy that Javo’s doing well, but it’s bloody painful, too. It’s like watching a kid grow up and take off. She liked him needing her.</p>
<p>“Mate,” Javo says. “Our relationship’s permanent. Maybe we could go out tonight or something.” But she’s seeing a movie with Gracie. She remembers him the summer before, and it makes her reflect on their world, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>how we thrashed about, swapping and changing partners, like a complicated dance to which the steps hadn’t quite been learned, all of us somehow trying to move gracefully, in spite of our ignorance. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A beautiful score rises, quite heavy with strings. Everything is blue. The credits rise. The movie ends.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This essay is extracted from <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/melbourne-film">Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City</a> (RRP:$34.99), which is published by Melbourne International Film Festival and Black Inc.</em></p>
<p><em>Monkey Grip will screen at MIFF on <a href="https://miff.com.au/program/film/monkey-grip">Sunday 14 August</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187625/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ronnie Scott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Ken Cameron’s film of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip is dark, yearning, weird – and incredibly sexy – writes Ronnie Scott.
Ronnie Scott, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/187508
2022-08-04T12:19:36Z
2022-08-04T12:19:36Z
Handwritten diaries may feel old fashioned, but they offer insights that digital diaries just can’t match
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477020/original/file-20220801-70473-agy1og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C23%2C7951%2C5273&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Handwritten diaries and digital diaries both help preserve experiences and memories, but in different ways.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/woman-writing-in-bed-royalty-free-image/1341823785">luza studios/E+ via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The first time I taught a college course called “The London Diary” for young Americans studying abroad back in 2002, each student ended up with a tangible book of memories, a handwritten record of their semester in London. But when <a href="https://www.grinnell.edu/user/smithp">I</a> taught the course 15 years later, the first question my students asked was whether they could keep their journals online. The question brought home to me how the image of a diary has shifted from words scribbled in a blank book to images and digital text on a screen. </p>
<h2>Why not go digital?</h2>
<p>Even while journaling apps like <a href="https://penzu.com/">Penzu</a> and <a href="https://diaroapp.com/">Diaro</a> become more widely available, <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/430306/notebooks-notepads-manufacturers-sales-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/">estimates</a> and <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/484891/children-writing-diary-by-demographic-uk/">surveys</a> suggest that a <a href="https://notedinstyle.co.uk/blog/2019/06/why-are-paper-diaries-still-so-popular/">sizable number</a> of the world’s diary keepers still keep handwritten diaries.</p>
<p>Fans of digital diaries grant them an edge in convenience, portability, searchability and password protection. Jonathan, one of my 2018 students, described in an essay for class how digital diarists can upload entries to multiple platforms, keeping some portions offline or restricted to a select audience while other parts go completely public. It’s harder to control distribution, encrypt entries or build an index with a journal kept on paper.</p>
<p>I already expected my students to use electronic devices to read course materials, to communicate with me and with their families back home, to write essays for class, and to navigate London. Why not let them keep digital diaries, too?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man writing in journal" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Handwritten journals offer clues into the author’s life that digital diaries may not.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/your-work-ethic-speaks-volumes-about-you-in-royalty-free-image/1278396474">ljubaphoto/E+ via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Diary as artifact</h2>
<p>Poet and literary scholar Anna Jackson was researching the private papers of novelist Katherine Mansfield for her book “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/diary-poetics-form-and-style-in-writers-diaries-1915-1962/oclc/636898151">Diary Poetics</a>” when she made an unexpected discovery. Jackson came across a “piece of the world” that was also an element of Mansfield’s journal – a kowhai flower between two pages in a notebook:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“After all this time, there it still was, still yellow, still between the same two pages Mansfield had placed it between all those years ago. A piece of the world she wrote about was right there as a piece of the world still, not a piece of writing.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jackson’s experience shows the power of holding in your hand the diary as a physical object. What scholars call the manuscript’s “materiality” links writer to reader in an unexpectedly intimate way.</p>
<p>For historians and diary scholars, manuscripts are artifacts. A book’s binding, paper quality and ink can signal an anonymous diarist’s socioeconomic status. Changes in penmanship may show how the writer felt – drowsy, extra careful or agitated – while writing certain passages.</p>
<p>Some clues, like the bit of evidence provided by inserting a memento, relay intentional messages. Others, like crossed-out words, may reveal information the writer did not plan to share.</p>
<p>Physical evidence can also hint at what happened after a text was written. Damaged or missing pages may indicate a strong reaction to the contents. A few years ago, conservators at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, discovered a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/18/secret-unearthed-sailor-17th-century-journal-edward-barlow-national-maritime-museum">concealed entry</a> in the diary of a 17th-century British sailor. In his diary, he originally confessed to committing a rape, but later wrote a different account of the event, pasting the new page so carefully over the original that it went unnoticed for more than 300 years.</p>
<h2>Digital yet material</h2>
<p>Every original mark in a diary reflects an impulse of the moment. As diary instructor Tristine Rainer says in “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/new-diary-how-to-use-a-journal-for-self-guidance-and-expanded-creativity/oclc/1036808266">The New Diary</a>,” “At any time you can change your point of view, your style, your book, the pen you write with, the direction you write on the pages, the language in which you write, the subjects you include. … It’s your book, yours alone.”</p>
<p>With so many convenient features, digital diaries remain a popular choice. This option, we might be surprised to learn, even has its own form of materiality. </p>
<p>In “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/How-to-Read-a-Diary-Critical-Contexts-and-Interpretive-Strategies-for-21st-Century/Henderson/p/book/9780415789189">How to Read a Diary</a>,” literature scholar Desirée Henderson notes that digital diaries, too, are objects, shaped by tools the diarist selects – in this case, software and hardware – to create the diary. The writer’s design choices, such as site structure, networking parameters, embedding of graphics, image and audio files and hyperlinks, offer grist for interpretation not unlike reading the nonverbal signs of a traditional diary.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Young man writing in journal outdoors" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Every diary can be read as an artifact layered with meaning.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/young-male-writing-notes-in-a-notebook-sitting-on-a-royalty-free-image/1340138630?adppopup=true">Cavan Images/Cavan via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Writing into the future</h2>
<p>As I thought about offering my students the online option, I began to imagine them many years from now, coming upon that London diary from their college days. I remembered my first group of students drawing sketches on their pages, attaching a Travelcard, café napkin, or theater ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn’t shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product – even enhanced with multimedia – than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.</p>
<p>In the end, I assigned my students – at least those who were physically able – to create their London diaries by hand. They could still use their phones to capture images or take preliminary notes, but in the end they would produce a material keepsake. </p>
<p>Several students decided to write in their notebooks while also keeping a digital diary. The dual process felt natural to them. To his blog Jonathan posted, “Like many children of the 21st century, I love the idea of keeping everything journaled online. This way I can make notes on my phone as I walk, have them automatically update on my computer, where I can expand with more time. If I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, I don’t need to wake up a roommate with a lamp. However, the course also requires an analog diary.”</p>
<p>Every diary, “analog” or digital, can be read as an artifact layered with meaning – one that conveys clues to its writer’s life and times in both nonverbal signals and words.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187508/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paula Vene Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
As material objects, diaries give scholars an intimate look into their subjects’ lives, including handwriting and mementos. What if diaries in the future are nothing but insubstantial digital ghosts?
Paula Vene Smith, Professor of English, Grinnell College
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/176466
2022-05-16T19:59:36Z
2022-05-16T19:59:36Z
Class, queerness and illness in the ‘post-crisis’ era: rewriting the narrative of HIV
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462919/original/file-20220513-15-56onz3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jonathan Bazzi photo by Claudia Beretta</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I often read a book’s acknowledgments to see who an author thanks for supporting the creation of their work and how they go about thanking them.</p>
<p>Among those mentioned at the end of Jonathan Bazzi’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-eddy-and-why-writing-about-life-can-be-a-dangerous-game-72211">autofiction</a> is the award-winning Italian novelist Viola Di Grado. Bazzi thanks Di Grado for “curbing my wild proliferations of thought”, though frankly it’s hard to fathom a version of this memoir that’s even more wild and proliferating. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Fever by Jonathan Bazzi (Scribe Publications)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/fever-9781922310903">Fever</a>, the 37-year-old Milanese author meditates on illness and <a href="https://theconversation.com/wellness-is-not-womens-friend-its-a-distraction-from-what-really-ails-us-177446">wellness</a>, sex and death, families and their undoing, <a href="https://theconversation.com/love-violence-and-class-wounds-in-thatcher-era-glasgow-what-booker-winner-douglas-stuart-did-next-179095">class</a> and Italianness, mothers and sons, desire, art, education and more. When they land in a psychiatrist’s office, Bazzi is “a river that’s overflowing. I can’t stop.” Their account of growing up poor and queer in Northern Italy and of coming to terms with HIV in the era of undetectable viral counts is a veritable explosion of ideas. </p>
<h2>The story of an illness</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462917/original/file-20220513-110-mha5ii.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462917/original/file-20220513-110-mha5ii.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462917/original/file-20220513-110-mha5ii.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462917/original/file-20220513-110-mha5ii.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462917/original/file-20220513-110-mha5ii.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462917/original/file-20220513-110-mha5ii.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462917/original/file-20220513-110-mha5ii.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462917/original/file-20220513-110-mha5ii.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“Three years ago the fever came over me and never left … One week, two weeks.” Midway through the first page, we’re already months into the story of an illness, plunged into a life of anxious visits to clinics and puzzling test results.
Jonathan, 31. Boyfriend called Marius, two Devon Rex cats, casual job as a yoga instructor. Then, suddenly, a fever that will not subside.</p>
<p>Bazzi’s spare, efficient prose feels urgent, as if narrated by a frank and fast talker who gets intermittently bored. They wrap up one story, only to pick up the thread of another. This pace belies the hours, weeks and months of a life spent in waiting rooms and in bed, languishing in the chronic uncertainty of not knowing what’s wrong. </p>
<p>It also recalls the political urgency of earlier AIDS diaries and <a href="https://theconversation.com/holding-the-man-and-bringing-hiv-aids-in-australia-to-a-mainstream-audience-43250">memoirs</a> from the “plague years”. Although Bazzi will soon understand that they are HIV positive, and that there is a clear – and highly effective – treatment trajectory proceeding from that diagnosis, the body conceals other unsolved mysteries, and so the sense of urgency and uncertainty remains. </p>
<p>Alternating with these breathless chapters of autopathography (a patient’s account of illness) are episodes from Jonathan’s childhood and adolescence in the working-class city of Rozzano. Rozzano is on the “extreme Southern periphery of Milan”, and is peripheral in other ways, too. Women wear nightgowns to the supermarket and kids with fake tans whip past on Vespas. A bit “like the Bronx of Northern Italy”, Rozanno is a place into which “poverty and disadvantage are pumped […] like wastewater.” </p>
<p>The Rozanno effect infuses every facet of Jonathan’s life. Their parents, Tina and Roberto, had a “Rozzano love story” – that is, a relationship that didn’t last long, “a love that quickly soured into hate and spite”. </p>
<p>When teenage Jonathan starts meeting friends and lovers outside the city, they always ask to be dropped off several blocks from home. They don’t want anyone to see the “crumbling plaster façade” or the “appalling inhabitants leering from the balconies” of the public-housing tower in which they live. These “big, drab” towers that dominate the city have basements full of rats where drug users go to shoot up.</p>
<p>It’s a place “full of weirdos”, but not one that celebrates or nurtures them. Gender roles are rigidly policed; “men are made a certain way – they like Vespas, football, pussy – and women are made a different way”. </p>
<p>Jonathan prefers reading and drawing; at school he’s bullied relentlessly. “Rozzano hates me. I have hated Rozanno. Why was I born here?” Developing a stutter and a passionate interest in art doesn’t help, and he eventually drops out.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-beautiful-hiv-positive-community-queer-eyes-jonathan-van-ness-shines-a-spotlight-on-the-changing-face-of-hiv-123993">'The beautiful HIV-positive community': Queer Eye's Jonathan Van Ness shines a spotlight on the changing face of HIV</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The social construction of disease</h2>
<p>“Nothing could be more meaningless than a virus”, wrote Judith Williamson about HIV/AIDS in 1989. “It has no point, no purpose, no plan; it is part of no scheme, carries no inherent significance.” And yet every disease, especially if it is new, mysterious and potentially life-threatening, offers opportunities for storytelling and interpretation. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462923/original/file-20220513-20-unr546.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Grey-haired woman in front of bookselves, wearing a waistcoat over a striped shirt." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462923/original/file-20220513-20-unr546.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462923/original/file-20220513-20-unr546.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=575&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462923/original/file-20220513-20-unr546.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=575&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462923/original/file-20220513-20-unr546.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=575&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462923/original/file-20220513-20-unr546.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462923/original/file-20220513-20-unr546.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462923/original/file-20220513-20-unr546.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Susan Sontag photographed in her home, 1979 ©Lynn Gilbert.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Reflecting on their diagnosis, Bazzi parses the social meanings of HIV: “HIV confirms two things: you’re gay, and you’ve had sex. Maybe too much sex, and in a promiscuous manner.” Another story: HIV is part of a family curse. “Bazzi men are unlucky; they always die young”. </p>
<p>Recalling Susan Sontag’s two famous essays on disease, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/01/26/illness-as-metaphor/">Illness as Metaphor</a> (1978) and <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/10/27/aids-and-its-metaphors/">AIDS and its Metaphors</a> (1988), Bazzi contrasts the metaphors used to understand <a href="https://theconversation.com/goodbye-georgia-blain-a-brave-and-true-chronicler-of-life-70329">cancer</a>, which his father has, and HIV.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Cancer is a crazed proliferation of cells. HIV is cell death. Cancer is internal revolt, the body wanting too much, growing, expanding. HIV is an attack, an invasion, a capitulation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The various stories Bazzi tests out reflect the abundance of social meanings produced in response to disease. </p>
<p>Much like <a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-risks-relying-on-pfizer-and-moderna-for-its-covid-vaccines-3-ways-to-break-free-182147">COVID-19</a>, HIV has never been a simple collection of virological or biomedical facts. HIV/AIDS was the first global pandemic of the media age and since it first came to public attention in 1981, it has been extremely fertile territory for a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4265931/">wild proliferation</a> of stories. </p>
<p>AIDS as a Communist plot to bring down the United States; AIDS as a virus developed in CIA laboratories to kill homosexuals. While compulsively researching online, Bazzi discovers that many of these outlandish ideas continue to circulate: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>HIV is a hoax […] The biggest conspiracy of the twentieth century […] HIV and AIDS were invented by Big Pharma.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The stories we tell about disease, including the supposedly neutral language used by doctors, scientists and public health professionals, give structure and meaning to our understanding of it. </p>
<p>In the case of HIV, the proliferation of stories has been of particular interest to researchers, activists, people living with HIV and many others. Because the way these stories are told – particularly in the public sphere – can influence the way <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-plagues-to-obesity-how-epidemics-have-evolved-96109">epidemics</a> play out, including who does and doesn’t receive appropriate care.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462937/original/file-20220513-15-y0ozfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462937/original/file-20220513-15-y0ozfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462937/original/file-20220513-15-y0ozfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462937/original/file-20220513-15-y0ozfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462937/original/file-20220513-15-y0ozfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462937/original/file-20220513-15-y0ozfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462937/original/file-20220513-15-y0ozfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462937/original/file-20220513-15-y0ozfu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of a series of safe sex posters from an Italian ‘Stop AIDS’ campaign by the AIUTO AIDS Svizzero in collaboration with the Federal Office of Public Health.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Performing illness, from the dramatic to mundane</h2>
<p>“HIV has its own history, its own traditions”, Bazzi writes. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Destinies, statistics, organisations, clinical cases, media stories. A long sequence of narratives that predate me, that I know very little about.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite these claims to ignorance, Fever is particularly illuminating on the social experience of illness – the way a set of rituals and performances play out around the sick body, and how these operate to confer a set of social roles.</p>
<p>At the centre of the plot is the sick body, which provides evidence, clues that propel the narrative of illness along and so must be monitored and traced, described and surveilled. “I am preparing my bodily fluids for examination. My body is invested with new meaning.”</p>
<p>Doctors are the other core protagonists in this drama, and they possess a crucial storytelling role. They are “priest-like”, with the power to assign the sick person “to a community”, allocating them “a narrative, a case study”. And of course, the key setting for such performance is the hospital, “the place where either you’re reborn or you die”. </p>
<p>Despite its urgent pace, Fever is a reminder that the story of sickness isn’t all dramatic climaxes. <a href="https://theconversation.com/people-with-chronic-illness-short-changed-by-fragmented-system-federalism-paper-35393">Chronic illness</a> also involves very mundane and administrative tasks. Appointments, referrals, tests, prescriptions; the keeping and processing of medical records, payments, insurance paperwork. This is the everyday work of being unwell. Bazzi captures it in snatches of conversation overheard in waiting rooms. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Do you have a health insurance card? Excuse me, have you provided a urine sample?”
“That’ll be 27 euros and 80 cents.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Importantly, the dramaturgy of illness creates and re-creates interpersonal roles and relationships. For example, Jonathan’s partner Marius tests negative and this powerfully changes their relationship. </p>
<p>The couple are now <a href="https://www.verywellhealth.com/serodiscordant-couple-3132908">sero-discordant</a> (where one person is HIV-positive, the other HIV-negative): “An asymmetry is established.” Marius’s blood “has been interrogated, and it tells a different story”.</p>
<p>And what if, in spite of existing narratives and social roles, your own illness disregards the established parameters? For Jonathan, HIV is a “catalyst” and their body an “ampitheatre”, but there will be more to the story of their fever before it’s resolved – if indeed it ever can be.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hiv-aids-on-screen-by-focusing-on-history-we-ignore-the-present-28972">HIV/AIDS on screen: by focusing on history, we ignore the present</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The HIV and AIDS memoir</h2>
<p>Fever is being hailed as one of the “first contemporary personal narratives of living with HIV”. In spite of the upwards of 37 million people in the world living with the infection, this is a fair description. </p>
<p>During the 1980s and 90s, a large body of HIV/AIDS diaries and memoirs were published. The most famous were written by white gay men living through extreme physical suffering and often social isolation in the early years of the AIDS crisis. </p>
<p>Among them are works by David Wojnarowicz and Paul Monette in the United States, and Derek Jarman in the United Kingdom. In Australia, there was the extraordinary AIDS diary <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/unbecoming">Unbecoming</a> (1990) by Griffith University anthropology lecturer Eric Michaels. Far better known is Timothy Conigrave’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/holding-the-man-9781742284064">Holding the Man</a> (1995), which was adapted for the stage and eventually the screen.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462918/original/file-20220513-110-gc9eud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An ill man, bald and in pyjamas, sits at breakfast with a healthier looking man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462918/original/file-20220513-110-gc9eud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462918/original/file-20220513-110-gc9eud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=249&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462918/original/file-20220513-110-gc9eud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=249&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462918/original/file-20220513-110-gc9eud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=249&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462918/original/file-20220513-110-gc9eud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462918/original/file-20220513-110-gc9eud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462918/original/file-20220513-110-gc9eud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ryan Corr and Craig Stott in Holding the Man (2015).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>HIV/AIDS was – and remains – a carrier of heavily political meanings and these works served a testimonial function. They offered the experience of an individual but also paid witness to experiences of political abandonment and the failure of state institutions to properly respond to HIV/AIDS. Such testimonies enabled the expression of grief and mourning, but also provided a foundation for activism and political action. </p>
<p>These works also developed new experiential and expressive languages for thinking about illness. In so doing, they helped to transform public understandings of HIV. Alongside incendiary activist campaigns and other forms of cultural production, they played an important role in changing phobic and discriminatory narratives about HIV.</p>
<p>Fever is an inheritor of this tradition, but it’s a story about HIV in the “post-crisis” era. </p>
<p>Today, HIV positive people on treatment have a negligible viral load and largely cannot transmit the virus. Treatments are so significantly advanced that they have fewer and fewer side effects; new developments promise drugs that only need to be taken once a month or every two months. And yet, older ideas about HIV cast a lingering shadow. As Bazzi writes, “people living with the condition are still subject to a toxic blend of invisibility and guilt”. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://theconversation.com/hiv-aids-on-screen-by-focusing-on-history-we-ignore-the-present-28972">lack of conversations and stories</a> addressing the contemporary experience of living with HIV may contribute to and exacerbate this stigma. </p>
<p>Bazzi is explicit in their refusal of this state of affairs, “rejecting the tradition of shame and discretion”. </p>
<p>Fever is indeed a landmark in this sense, because while the stories of the crisis era were prolific across genres and forms, very little media and literature has captured the experience of living with HIV now.</p>
<p>“My HIV diagnosis is an incontrovertible fact”, Bazzi concludes. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have HIV – all that means is I have to see my doctor a lot, and do lots of tests. Like millions of other people in the world, for all kinds of reasons. Everything else is extrinsic. Put there by you, by us.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176466/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dion Kagan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
One of the first contemporary personal narratives about living with HIV in the 21st century, Fever urgently interrogates the social meanings of HIV, and how they’ve evolved in the era of treatment.
Dion Kagan, Research Officer, La Trobe University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/176135
2022-04-25T20:01:10Z
2022-04-25T20:01:10Z
The book that changed me: journeying to the self with Anaïs Nin’s sensual, transgressive diaries
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457343/original/file-20220411-21-en2ikw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C46%2C496%2C497&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anais Nin, left, pictured in 1946.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In a new series, writers nominate a book that changed their life – or at least their thinking.</em></p>
<p>As I combed the library shelves looking for something to read, a 17-year-old girl flush with freedom having escaped the confines of an Australian country convent school, a title caught my eye: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin 1920-1923. </p>
<p>I too wrote diaries, laden with all the angst of a teenager uncertain of their place in the world. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453559/original/file-20220322-21-1raziyh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/453559/original/file-20220322-21-1raziyh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453559/original/file-20220322-21-1raziyh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453559/original/file-20220322-21-1raziyh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453559/original/file-20220322-21-1raziyh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453559/original/file-20220322-21-1raziyh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/453559/original/file-20220322-21-1raziyh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the cover was a demure girl with a slightly quizzical expression. I think I had heard her name somewhere, but wasn’t sure who she was. I checked the book out and took it home. </p>
<p>I was instantly hooked. I had never read a book like this before. It laid out all the doubts and despairs of a girl just my age. This girl was ambitious, already dreaming of becoming a writer.</p>
<p>Anaïs Nin dreamed, in all senses. She dreamed of lives and possibilities. She dreamed in slumber and allowed her dreams to leak into the day. As I regularly committed the cardinal social sin of recounting my dreams over breakfast, she seemed a soulmate across oceans and generations. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-book-that-changed-me-im-a-historian-but-tony-birchs-poetry-opened-my-eyes-to-confronting-truths-about-the-past-177320">The book that changed me: I'm a historian but Tony Birch's poetry opened my eyes to confronting truths about the past</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A Bohemian world</h2>
<p>Nin started her first diary in 1914 at the age of 11. At her death in 1977, the diaries filled around 150 handwritten notebooks. Initially, many of them were edited and published as seven expurgated volumes in the 1960s. Four volumes of her early diaries, written before 1931, were later published in the 1980s. The unexpurgated diaries started to appear in 1986. </p>
<p>In 1920, Nin was also 17, living in New York, adjusting to American life after a childhood in France and Spain. Her father, well-known musician <a href="https://www.pcmsconcerts.org/composer/joaquin-nin/">Joaquin Nin</a>, had abandoned the family to precarious but genteel poverty. She struggled with housework and the mundane expectations of women at the time. </p>
<p>After marriage to the banker <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/11/arts/hugh-guiler-retired-banker.html">Hugh Guiler</a> in 1923, Nin moved to Paris, starting a liaison with the American writer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Miller">Henry Miller</a>. The complex love triangle of Anaïs, Henry and his wife June Miller became the focus of the diaries, later made into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_%26_June">a movie</a>. </p>
<p>As the second world war loomed Nin, Miller and her new lover Gonzalo Moré fled to the US. Here she started practising as a psychoanalyst, set up her own printing press, and published several novels with mysterious, poetic titles: Ladders to Fire, the Four-Chambered Heart, a Spy in the House of Love.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometer</p>
</blockquote>
<p>– The Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1934</p>
<p>Nin and her circle also became famous for writing erotica, which a mysterious “collector” paid for by the page. Her stories were published in the anthologies Little Birds, Delta of Venus, and Auletris.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/playing-and-paying-the-whore-in-little-birds-144345">Playing and paying the whore in Little Birds</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In 1955, she started a bigamous, bi-coastal relationship with first husband Guiler in New York and second husband <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/rupert-pole-87-diarists-duplicate-spouse-dies.html">Rupert Pole</a> in California. The unexpurgated diary leading up to this event has only recently been published.</p>
<p>Although she never achieved the heights of literary success she longed for, Nin spoke to a cultural moment. The style that initially worked against her found its audience in feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. She was celebrated for her rare ability to articulate the distinct voice of women.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IgnRr170ERM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Anais Nin in Kenneth Anger’s 1966 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This fragile woman had the heart of a lion. But in the end her body betrayed her. She died of cervical cancer in 1977, just as I was an 11-year-old entering the convent school as a boarder. </p>
<h2>‘Mensonges vitals’: vital lies</h2>
<p>Nin was unapologetically feminine, revelling in nuance, in texture and emotion. Feelings were not suppressed as female vanity or weakness. They became a resource for self-knowledge, recording the evolution of the self. She found the words to describe inner worlds. </p>
<p>As she wrote of one character in the novel Seduction of the Minotaur,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The farther she travelled into unknown places, unfamiliar places, the more precisely she could find within herself a map showing only the cities of the interior. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457341/original/file-20220411-13-2nsa6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457341/original/file-20220411-13-2nsa6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457341/original/file-20220411-13-2nsa6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457341/original/file-20220411-13-2nsa6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457341/original/file-20220411-13-2nsa6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457341/original/file-20220411-13-2nsa6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457341/original/file-20220411-13-2nsa6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457341/original/file-20220411-13-2nsa6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anais Nin in the 1970s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In her musings on women and art, arising from furious arguments with Henry Miller (who stole her work and published it as his own), she maintained that women could create <a href="https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3692&context=etd">their own subjectivity</a> and elude the male gaze.</p>
<p>I read Nin’s diaries at various stages of my life. The early editions were heavily redacted. In the late 1980s, when I was in my twenties, the uncensored diaries started to be released. </p>
<p>Finally truths hinted at were revealed. And they were shocking. </p>
<p>Most notoriously, Nin seduced her own father and abandoned him in an act of revenge for the abandonment of her childhood. The volume “Incest”, published in 1992, is abhorrent at one level, and yet triumphant and transgressive in a way few writers can dare to be. </p>
<p>The critics, however, seemed to object more to the florid language she used to describe the affair than any moral implications.</p>
<h2>Une être étoilique (a starry being)</h2>
<p>Through Nin’s diaries, I became aware of a universe of other artists and thinkers. They included the experimental film maker <a href="https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/deren-2/">Maya Deren</a>; creator of the Theatre of Cruelty <a href="https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/antonin-artaud-and-the-theatre-of-cruelty">Antonin Artaud</a>, who aimed to disrupt the relationship between performers and audience with “organised anarchy”; and the psychoanalyst <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Rank">Otto Rank</a>, one of Freud’s inner circle. </p>
<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/P592zVGFA0Q" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>When I came to write <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/here-comes-dr-space-junk/">my own book</a> about space archaeology, I wanted to explore the relationship between the inner worlds of human emotions and scientific conceptions of outer space. </p>
<p>I turned to Anaïs Nin for inspiration. In a speech given at Hampshire College in the US in 1972 – the year of the last human mission to the Moon, Apollo 17 – she said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The wider our universe becomes due to science, and the furthest we go – we think we go so far when we go to the Moon – the nearer we need to come to the centre of ourselves in order to interpret this world, in order to find values, in order to give our lives meaning. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nin was romantic, sensual, rebellious, mercurial, perceptive. She committed unpardonable sins yet scaled heights of creativity and imagination. She lived a life in which no pleasure or risk was repudiated. </p>
<p>Her diaries taught that the quality of a life can be an accumulation of small moments of beauty. That one could refuse to be tamed. That one could be many selves, each rich beyond reckoning.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176135/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alice Gorman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
To a 17-year-old girl fresh out of convent school, Anaïs Nin’s diaries were a revelation. Nin found the words to describe inner worlds.
Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/180335
2022-04-14T05:27:49Z
2022-04-14T05:27:49Z
‘Weaponised irony’: after fictionalising Elizabeth Macarthur’s life, Kate Grenville edits her letters
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457048/original/file-20220408-28439-vr5i82.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elizabeth Macarthur [portrait by unknown artist]</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library NSW</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p><em>Do not believe too quickly!</em> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This warning prologue begins Kate Grenville’s novel <a href="https://kategrenville.com.au/books/a-room-made-of-leaves/">A Room Made of Leaves</a> (2021), a purported long-lost secret memoir by Elizabeth Macarthur that Grenville “found” hidden in a roof cavity. </p>
<p>The award-winning novel reinvented Macarthur, from the dutiful colonial wife of John Macarthur to a passionate, intelligent and empathetic queen of sheep. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters – edited by Kate Grenville (Text Publishing)</em></p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457342/original/file-20220411-14-o7r2jo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457342/original/file-20220411-14-o7r2jo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457342/original/file-20220411-14-o7r2jo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457342/original/file-20220411-14-o7r2jo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457342/original/file-20220411-14-o7r2jo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457342/original/file-20220411-14-o7r2jo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457342/original/file-20220411-14-o7r2jo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457342/original/file-20220411-14-o7r2jo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During her reign, Elizabeth Macarthur built a pastoral kingdom, while her Machiavellian husband networked, schemed, and fought court battles in England. The Macarthur name is synonymous with colonialism. </p>
<p>Their first enterprise, <a href="https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/elizabeth-farm">Elizabeth Farm,</a> remains a historic house in Sydney’s Rosehill. Likewise, in the Macarthur region (named after the family) of southwest Sydney, their grand home, surrounded by grazing paddocks that once sustained over 5,000 merino sheep, still stands on <a href="https://www.belgennyfarm.com.au/history/site-history/aboriginal-history-and-camden-park">Dharawal land</a>. </p>
<p>The same cautionary prologue could have opened Grenville’s new companion book to A Room Made of Leaves, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/elizabeth-macarthur-s-letters">Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters,</a>, in which she once again unsettles expectations of truth, this time in non-fiction form. Grenville presents Elizabeth’s edited correspondence as a knowing fiction. <em>Do not believe too quickly</em> Elizabeth’s accounts of her life and feelings, despite the archival evidence of her faded brown calligraphy. </p>
<p>Instead, Grenville suggests we read them as doubleness and concealment. She writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wondering at the disconnect between the letters and the life, I began to think that Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters could be seen as a wonderful piece of fiction, sustained over sixty years. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She pictures Macarthur </p>
<blockquote>
<p>smiling to herself as she wrote sentence after sentence of this fiction, relishing the delicious ironies of saying exactly the opposite of what she really thought. </p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/review-kate-grenvilles-a-room-made-of-leaves-fills-the-silence-of-the-archives-141985">Review: Kate Grenville's A Room Made of Leaves fills the silence of the archives</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Weaponised irony</h2>
<p>Grenville’s theory is that Elizabeth weaponised irony to write her letters, transforming them from solemn, faithful accounts to sophisticated “embroidering”. </p>
<p>She highlights a letter that describes the colony’s crops as having “flourished in a way nearly incredible” – they had miserably failed. In another letter, written after Macarthur’s return from England, Elizabeth wrote, “you may imagine how great was my joy on the arrival of McArthur [sic]”. </p>
<p>Grenville is bolstered by the knowledge that women’s letters and diaries were largely self-censored, with omissions and careful wording. Employing irony and “embroidering” was essential, for letters were the 19th century equivalent of a Facebook post shared among family and friends.</p>
<p><a href="https://womenshistorynetwork.org/silence-in-the-archives-censorship-and-suppression-in-womens-life-writing-in-the-long-nineteenth-century/">Lyndsey Jenkins</a> of the Women’s History Network observes that the truth of a woman’s life at this time lies in what is <em>not</em> said in their neat scrolls. Instead, it is found in the </p>
<blockquote>
<p>torn out pages and scratched out sentences … offering hints and clues to the unspeakable and unacceptable.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457360/original/file-20220411-16-6akytr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457360/original/file-20220411-16-6akytr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457360/original/file-20220411-16-6akytr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457360/original/file-20220411-16-6akytr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457360/original/file-20220411-16-6akytr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457360/original/file-20220411-16-6akytr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457360/original/file-20220411-16-6akytr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457360/original/file-20220411-16-6akytr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emily and Elizabeth Macarthur. Camden, Sydney.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As per a traditional edited book of archival material, Grenville has chronologically arranged these letters, which she “pruned pretty hard”. She explains that the pruning is to remove trivial gossip and family movements, irrelevant to the core of the letters. </p>
<p>She begins with a letter to Elizabeth’s mother in 1789, which Grenville quoted in A Room Made of Leaves, and ends with Elizabeth’s short letter to her son, Edward, in 1849 – the year before her death. </p>
<p>As Grenville acknowledges, she is <a href="http://archival-classic.sl.nsw.gov.au/_transcript/2017/D37898/c05322.html">not the first</a> to publish or transcribe Elizabeth’s letters. But beyond this chronology, the introduction and notes on editing, Grenville departs from convention to deliver a difficult book to a contemporary audience. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-eliza-hamilton-dunlop-the-irish-australian-poet-who-shone-a-light-on-colonial-violence-161592">Hidden women of history: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop — the Irish Australian poet who shone a light on colonial violence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The problem of the contemporary gaze</h2>
<p>In commentaries that precede each letter, Grenville takes a self-searching, subjective approach that reveals the difficulty of bringing problematic historical material into the contemporary cultural gaze. Should Elizabeth be “cancelled” for her descriptions of the First Nations people whose land she and her husband enriched themselves upon? How should we interpret her careless pity for convicts who built their empire? </p>
<p>Author <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/30/white-women-were-colonisers-too-to-move-forward-we-have-to-stop-letting-them-off-the-hook">Ruby Hamad</a> argues that white women as the “virtuous, innocent face of western civilisation”, benefited from colonialism, and enabled it. </p>
<p>As the face of female colonialists, should Elizabeth be exiled back to the archives? Or should her letters be published without censure to remind us of confronting truths that defy <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-national-history-curriculum-should-not-be-used-and-abused-as-an-election-issue-176783">political calls to gloss the national history curriculum? </a></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457361/original/file-20220411-26-c4b540.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a wide house set on a green lawn" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457361/original/file-20220411-26-c4b540.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457361/original/file-20220411-26-c4b540.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=215&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457361/original/file-20220411-26-c4b540.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=215&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457361/original/file-20220411-26-c4b540.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=215&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457361/original/file-20220411-26-c4b540.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=270&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457361/original/file-20220411-26-c4b540.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=270&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457361/original/file-20220411-26-c4b540.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=270&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elizabeth Farm, the home to the pastoralists John and Elizabeth Macarthur, is the oldest surviving European building in Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brian Yap/Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Grenville is obviously in the latter camp, and these questions are softened by the commentary’s disconcertingly breezy, Bridgerton, “Lady Whistledown-of-the-colonies” style, which is apt, given the hit series is set in the same era as Elizabeth’s time in Australia. It reveals Grenville’s contradictory feelings about Elizabeth, as much as the bigger questions around how we re-examine historical figures.</p>
<p>The commentary serves a double purpose as a meta-narrative on A Room Made of Leaves. It gives insight into Grenville’s writing process and narrative decisions. </p>
<p>It also reveals her wobbles as to whether she is right to read Elizabeth as an expert in irony, employed to conceal her dislike of her husband. Perhaps, dear reader, “Elizabeth really was happy with him, as she so strenuously asserts”.</p>
<p>In A Room Made of Leaves, Grenville took Elizabeth’s letters as starting inspiration. She could imagine the woman Elizabeth might have been and who Grenville wanted her to be. In doing so, she could bring Elizabeth into line with contemporary cultural values. But in the Letters, Grenville must instead rely on her own accompanying voice, which is witheringly clear:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reading Elizabeth’s letters, there were times when I found her unattractive – so much that I abandoned the novel more than once … She could have had a more humane perspective, and I wish she had.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180335/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerrie Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Kate Grenville suggests we read Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters as ‘a wonderful piece of fiction, sustained over sixty years’. They were exercises in doubleness, concealment, and delicious irony.
Kerrie Davies, Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/144063
2020-08-30T20:00:50Z
2020-08-30T20:00:50Z
Note to self: a pandemic is a great time to keep a diary, plus 4 tips for success
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354023/original/file-20200821-18-1czt6ka.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=60%2C1256%2C3555%2C3877&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1579017308347-e53e0d2fc5e9?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=1268&q=80">Marcos Paulo Prado/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A search for “Coronavirus Diary” on Google yields 910,000 results. News outlets like the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/14/we-are-witnessing-a-critical-time-in-history-you-should-keep-a-diary">Guardian</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/08/why-are-people-keeping-coronavirus-diaries/614977/">The Atlantic</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/style/coronavirus-diaries-social-history.html">The New York Times</a> have chronicled an increase in personal record-keeping.</p>
<p>Whether for future <a href="https://time.com/5824341/wwii-diaries-coronavirus/">historians</a>, <a href="https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1217&context=honors">self-care</a> or to <a href="https://www.beyondblue.org.au/get-support/online-forums/staying-well/dear-diary-a-day-to-day-look-at-self-isolation-">relieve feelings of isolation</a>, we are in the middle of a diarological moment.</p>
<p>And today’s diaries aren’t just handwritten reflections in bound notebooks. They might be social media posts, video entries or visual collages – so long as they are regularly updated over an extended period and personal in nature, they fit the bill. The secret is in the repetition, and the pledge that drives it.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pOQlE221pmY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Dear diary, what a day it’s been.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/museums-are-losing-millions-every-week-but-they-are-already-working-hard-to-preserve-coronavirus-artefacts-137597">Museums are losing millions every week but they are already working hard to preserve coronavirus artefacts</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>On the look out</h2>
<p>The word diary <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/diary">entered the English language</a> in the late 16th century, via the Latin word, <em>diarium</em>, which comes from <em>dies</em>, meaning day. The diary asks us to attend to <em>this</em> day. </p>
<p>Diary-keeping sharpens observational skills, so it is no wonder then that cultural institutions have begun projects to crowd-source details of what otherwise might be quite banal aspects of our lives. </p>
<p>The State Library of Victoria has a Facebook group, <a href="https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/memorybank">Memory Bank</a>, where posts of shopping lists and sourdough recipes have given way to more melancholy images of closed shops and empty streets in the CBD – a collective chronicle both hyperlocal and universal. </p>
<p>The State Library of New South Wales subtitles its <a href="https://dxlab.sl.nsw.gov.au/diary-files">Diary Files</a> an “online community diary”, and currently contains nearly a thousand entries, searchable by keywords. School, time, home and COVID are among the most commonly written words, and the greatest number of contributions come from Sydneysiders between 10 and 15 years of age. </p>
<p>Video “lockdown” diaries can also be viewed online, via <a href="https://www.bbc.com/reel/playlist/world-in-lockdown">BBC Reel</a>, or listened to through <a href="https://coronadiaries.io/">Corona Diaries</a>, the interactive open source project which collects audio stories from around the world.</p>
<p>Social researchers have identified the diary as a tool to capture the impact of the pandemic on daily life. UK sociologist Michael Ward began his research through <a href="https://theconversation.com/lockdown-diaries-the-everyday-voices-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-138631">CoronaDiaries</a>, where 164 participants ranging in age from 11 to 87 submit entries in a variety of forms. Ward suggests: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>These entries are able to highlight the multiple different lives behind the dreaded numbers we hear announced each day.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rvnBsWSaiYw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Vic Lee self-published a Corona Diary. He sold 2,500 copies and donated some proceeds to charity.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/lockdown-diaries-the-everyday-voices-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-138631">Lockdown diaries: the everyday voices of the coronavirus pandemic</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Famous diary keepers</h2>
<p>Most of us can name some famous literary diarists of history – <a href="https://www.pepysdiary.com/">Samuel Pepys</a>, Virginia Woolf, Adrian Mole. When we stray far beyond this list, it is often the times, rather than the writer, that make the diary notable. </p>
<p>There is Lena Mukhina’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24897358-the-diary-of-lena-mukhina">perspective</a> on the Siege of Leningrad, 13-year-old Anne Frank’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48855.The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=v2KHbVYoMG&rank=1">account</a> of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the poignant scratchings of <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/captain-scotts--diary">Sir Robert Scott</a>’s on the day he perished: “For god’s sake, look after our people”. </p>
<p>Nelson Mandela’s <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/uploads/files/Nelson_Mandelas_Personal_Archives.pdf">desk-calendar notes</a>, kept in prison, speak to extraordinary experiences under extreme conditions. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354021/original/file-20200821-14-1ib2jc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354021/original/file-20200821-14-1ib2jc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354021/original/file-20200821-14-1ib2jc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354021/original/file-20200821-14-1ib2jc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354021/original/file-20200821-14-1ib2jc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354021/original/file-20200821-14-1ib2jc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354021/original/file-20200821-14-1ib2jc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354021/original/file-20200821-14-1ib2jc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://cdn2.penguin.com.au/covers/original/9780140437850.jpg">Penguin</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Diaries from the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-we-can-learn-1918-influenza-diaries-180974614/">1918 influenza pandemic</a> came into their own as more than ephemera for both historians and scientists in 2020. </p>
<p>For a book length account, we can look to Daniel Defoe’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46730.A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year">A Journal of the Plague Year</a>, about life in London in 1665 – bearing in mind the author was only five years old at the height of the epidemic, so it is likely a factual-meets-fictional rendering.</p>
<p>Diary-writing serves broader society, and can help individuals make sense of difficult times. </p>
<p>Interviewed for this story, psychologist <a href="https://www.rmit.edu.au/contact/staff-contacts/academic-staff/m/moffitt-dr-robyn">Robyn Moffitt</a> told us: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>From a psychological perspective, keeping a diary is a really useful (and evidence-based) way to engage in healthy self-monitoring of thoughts, feelings, and behaviour … writing things down as they happen can provide some objective evidence and perspective on the frequency and severity of different events, and we can use this to correct distorted thinking. </p>
<p>The process of writing itself can also be quite therapeutic. It can allow us to process and reconstruct past events, problem-solve, and create new meanings, and in some ways this makes it similar to psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is often referred to as the “talking cure”, and writing can provide similar therapeutic benefits (the “writing cure” perhaps)? </p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/diary-of-samuel-pepys-shows-how-life-under-the-bubonic-plague-mirrored-todays-pandemic-136222">Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today's pandemic</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What makes it a diary?</h2>
<p>The turn of the 21st century <a href="http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue57/Taylor&Munro&Murray.pdf">saw a resurgence</a> of the diary in public reading events such as <a href="https://getmortified.com/">Mortified</a>, <a href="https://salonofshame.com/">Salon of Shame</a> and our own experiments with <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/m17columnist-20170525-gwddvd.html">The Symphony of Awkward</a>. </p>
<p>It might be argued that social media has since overtaken the diary as a means to chronicle one’s life. Indeed, there is crossover in the ways lives are shared and curated across different media, from the handwritten diary to <a href="https://wordpress.com/view/mmmmycorona.wordpress.com">blogs</a>. </p>
<p>The ritualistic structure offered by the personal diary can be repurposed in digital spaces. The notion of publicly committing to post something – an image, a video, a song – every day offers another way of marking out time when every day is <a href="https://lithub.com/days-without-name-on-time-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/">Blursday the fortyteenth of Aprilay</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-groundhog-day-and-my-time-in-a-monastery-taught-me-about-lockdown-143452">What Groundhog Day (and my time in a monastery) taught me about lockdown</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>We have experimented with each recording <a href="https://sonicfield.org/2020/07/sonic-dystonic-kim-munro-peta-murray-and-stayci-taylor/">a sound a day</a>, collected from the few spaces we were still able to inhabit. </p>
<p>A diaristic practice, whether written or not, supports us to stay in the moment, as psychotherapists and life coaches exhort us to do. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354026/original/file-20200821-16-4gjxvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Fountain pen on notebook" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354026/original/file-20200821-16-4gjxvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354026/original/file-20200821-16-4gjxvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354026/original/file-20200821-16-4gjxvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354026/original/file-20200821-16-4gjxvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354026/original/file-20200821-16-4gjxvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354026/original/file-20200821-16-4gjxvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354026/original/file-20200821-16-4gjxvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A favourite pen or notebook can heighten the journal experience.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1462642109801-4ac2971a3a51?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=2166&q=80">Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And it’s never too late to start diarising. Here are some tips: </p>
<h2>1. Decide on your platform</h2>
<p>Digital or analogue? Decide on your medium. The written or spoken word? A photo? A sound? A song? Choose something that pleases you (a special pen, a fancy notebook) to heighten the experience.</p>
<h2>2. Make a vow</h2>
<p>Make an entry every day, or on a set number of days for four weeks. 28 days is said to be a good target if aiming to break or start a habit – though it <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/how-long-it-takes-to-break-a-habit-according-to-science">may take longer</a>.</p>
<h2>3. Make time</h2>
<p>Set aside time at the same hour each day to capture your experience.</p>
<h2>4. Rinse and repeat</h2>
<p><em>Carpe diem</em>. Seize the day!</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The Symphony of Awkward is hosting a <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/what-can-the-diary-offer-in-troubled-times-tickets-117480823305?utm-medium=discovery&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&aff=escb&utm-source=cp&utm-term=listing">free online forum</a> on September 24, 2020 to discuss diary practices.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144063/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peta Murray receives funding from the ARC.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kim Munro and Stayci Taylor do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Dear Diary, keeping a daily journal of these pandemic times can help us process them and follow in some great literary footsteps.
Peta Murray, Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University
Kim Munro, Lecturer, RMIT University
Stayci Taylor, Lecturer, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/141985
2020-07-13T03:12:57Z
2020-07-13T03:12:57Z
Review: Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves fills the silence of the archives
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346782/original/file-20200710-196567-4purzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3538%2C2233&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elizabeth Farm, painted by Joseph Lycett, c1823.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: A Room Made of Leaves, Text Publishing</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some time ago, during the renovation of a historic house in Sydney, a tin box, sealed with wax and wrapped in oiled canvas, was found wedged under a beam in the roof cavity. The house was Elizabeth Farm…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So begins <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50993145-a-room-made-of-leaves">A Room Made of Leaves</a>’ editor’s note, detailing the discovery of the “long lost secret memoirs” of <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/macarthur-elizabeth-2387">Elizabeth Macarthur</a>, wife of colonial wool baron <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/macarthur-john-2390">John Macarthur</a>. The “editor and transcriber” is Kate Grenville, author of the acclaimed colonial novel based on her family history, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/347698.The_Secret_River">The Secret River</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346779/original/file-20200710-87076-tb7oct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346779/original/file-20200710-87076-tb7oct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346779/original/file-20200710-87076-tb7oct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346779/original/file-20200710-87076-tb7oct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346779/original/file-20200710-87076-tb7oct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346779/original/file-20200710-87076-tb7oct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346779/original/file-20200710-87076-tb7oct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1139&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The discovery scenario is irresistibly believable. This month, a WWII diary was <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/family-reunited-with-longlost-wwii-diary-found-in-supermarket/88af8e92-1ca0-4c13-a5fd-f14a7a509d53">found at a Woolworths</a> in Sydney’s North Shore. In 2011, James Bell’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13182863-a-voyage-to-australia">1838 account</a> of his journey to Australia was published after being discovered at a market stall. In 2018, Miles Franklin’s final <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/miles-franklin-s-secret-diary-discovered-20180304-p4z2rk.html">1954 diary</a> was discovered in an old suitcase. </p>
<p>Elizabeth Macarthur’s actual journal detailing her voyage on the Second Fleet was discovered at her daughter’s home in England, extracts of which were published as <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1302011h.html">Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden</a> in 1914.</p>
<p>Grenville’s imaginary memoir of Elizabeth slips into the space between hoax and history, the paradox of purporting to be true while declaring it is not. Grenville openly plays with memoir’s “<a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230287440_9">autobiographical pact</a>”, where the reader unquestionably accepts an autobiography as truth. While a novel requires a suspension of disbelief, Grenville asks the reader to suspend their belief, akin to Peter Carey’s “feat of imposture”, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/110090.True_History_of_the_Kelly_Gang">True History of the Kelly Gang</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/true-history-of-the-kelly-gang-review-an-unheroic-portrait-of-a-violent-unhinged-colonial-punk-128463">True History of the Kelly Gang review: an unheroic portrait of a violent, unhinged, colonial punk</a>
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<p>Grenville so convincingly creates Elizabeth’s voice it is easy to forget her opening warning: “Do not believe too quickly!” </p>
<h2>Remains unsaid</h2>
<p>In Grenville’s telling of Elizabeth’s telling of her marriage to John Macarthur, Elizabeth astutely understands how to manage the patriarchy rather than be a “true helpmate” to her husband as she is introduced in the <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1302011h.html">family history</a>.</p>
<p>She writes of the notoriously difficult John: “He could not be trusted not to destroy our hopes.” Elizabeth believes John is “dangerously unbalanced”. </p>
<p>Through her revision of the Macarthurs’ relationship, Grenville’s imaginary memoir joins the litany of (imaginary and authentic) revisionist biographies of wives <a href="https://theconversation.com/thanksfortyping-the-women-behind-famous-male-writers-75770">overlooked or derided</a> because of their husband’s fame.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/thanksfortyping-the-women-behind-famous-male-writers-75770">#ThanksforTyping: the women behind famous male writers</a>
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<p>Elizabeth’s friendship with <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dawes-william-1968">astronomer William Dawes</a> is the central relationship. Grenville’s 2008 novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4285471-the-lieutenant">The Lieutenant</a> was loosely based on Dawes, and she was inspired to write this imaginary memoir after reading Elizabeth’s passing reference to Dawes in an <a href="https://kategrenville.com.au/books/a-room-made-of-leaves/">actual letter</a> describing her astronomy lessons with the scientist and naval officer: “I blush at my error”. </p>
<p>This blush becomes a motif throughout A Room Made of Leaves: of the true nature of their friendship, and for what remains unsaid. “I blush at my error” was, in Grenville’s eyes, a rare glimpse of Elizabeth’s feelings hidden in what Grenville describes in her editor’s note as otherwise “unrevealing” and “dull” correspondence. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346784/original/file-20200710-26-1hceitx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346784/original/file-20200710-26-1hceitx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346784/original/file-20200710-26-1hceitx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346784/original/file-20200710-26-1hceitx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346784/original/file-20200710-26-1hceitx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346784/original/file-20200710-26-1hceitx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346784/original/file-20200710-26-1hceitx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346784/original/file-20200710-26-1hceitx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Reputedly Elizabeth Macarthur, 1785-1790 - watercolour on ivory miniature.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>As in The Secret River, Grenville once again writes of a brutal history of colonisation and resistance. Sensitive to previous suggestions of whitewashing (which she has <a href="https://kategrenville.com.au/short-pieces/whitewash/">refuted at length</a>), in A Room Made of Leaves Grenville expresses her gratitude to the Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation and the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council for their assistance in writing the book. </p>
<p>After being told of the Battle of Parramatta led by resistance leader, <a href="https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/pemulwuy">Pemulwuy</a>, Elizabeth visits the battle site and alludes to dominant colonial accounts: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was nothing to show what had happened. Only the words of that story, snipped out and pasted onto the air.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Filling the silence</h2>
<p>There is historical precedence for reading Elizabeth’s actual letters with the eye for the unsaid. 18th and 19th century women’s life writing was written with the expectation it was not private and adhered to social conventions of behaviour. Self-censorship and “<a href="https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1643/">silences in the archives</a>” abound. </p>
<p>As Elizabeth, Grenville fills the silences: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I composed a glorious romance about all this for my mother. I would not lie, not outright. I set myself a more interesting path: to make sure that my lies occupied the same space as the truth.</p>
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<p>Michelle Scott Tucker’s referenced biography, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37801628-elizabeth-macarthur">Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World</a> is a tempting companion to come back to reality after reading A Room Made of Leaves. But Grenville’s Elizabeth stays with you. </p>
<p>As you see more curls of truth in Tucker’s biography that appear in Grenville’s imaginary memoir, you wonder about how the real Elizabeth felt — rather than what actually happened.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141985/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerrie Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The newest novel from the author of The Secret River is an imagined diary, detailing the ‘true’ story of Elizabeth Macarthur.
Kerrie Davies, Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.