It's A Dog's Life

On a bad day — like today – I will empty a saucepan of reheated-one-too-many-times gone-cold again coffee into a dirt trough just outside my door. There must be quite a few bad days like this because the house dogs have started gathering regularly at around 5pm, waiting for their chance to slurp up an espresso with dirt and leaves. It seems to make them very active at night.

I’m throwing the old coffee away because I am making a new pot. I have got it into my head that the evening will be more rewarding. Throw caffeine in the blood, throw sleep to the angels. And sing like a dog to the moon.

I am, of course, a writer.

And I have chosen the path many find necessary when working on a book project: complete and utter seclusion.

In my case this means retreating from the city of Sydney where I live to a small country town of some 500 people called Millthorpe, a good three to four hours drive over the Blue Mountains out in what’s called the ‘Central West’. Holed up out the back of a friend’s garden, I do my best to emanate monkish dedication to the task at hand. Here I have a one-room shack with a wood stove, a stereo for company, a computer and about half my library along to stop me going insane. There is no running water, so I do the dishes in a steel tub, which I fill from a tap down at the main house. In this environment I feel rustic, authentic, Zen, native, humble, etcetera, all those mortifying things that might somehow prepare me for the divine act of work itself.

By comparison, my city life is filled with corruption: I go out too much, I drink too much, I enjoy too many things and too easily as often as possible. Amid such circumstances and temptations it is hard to keep my mind still for very long. Especially still enough to draw in my energy and give out the sustained focus that a book requires.

So it is that I’ve been out here — on and off, all right, I’ll admit it! — indulging in a stripped-down life since the start of the year, trying to immerse myself in the task at hand. As I write I am currently in that nether region between half done and almost finished that could go on forever (like Borges’s proverbial “book of sand”).

But my withdrawal from social life brings with it other concerns beyond actually finishing the project at hand. It also raises fears and thoughts that go right to the heart of what it means to be a writer. Most obviously, the process of sitting down alone, separating oneself totally from the world — often for long stretches of time — in order to communicate again with the world. A strangely circular and evasive way to make a living, you must agree.

More deeply, there is that dialogue with the self, that interrogation, which writing demands. It is not always a pleasant or happy conversation. I have always been haunted by the fearful lessons inside George Johnston's My Brother Jack. An apparently entertaining period piece about growing up in between-the-wars Melbourne, My Brother Jack descends into a picture of mid-life crisis and cruel suburban entrapment, and the awful reality that this particular Australian writer is more honest in his “fiction” than his life. A very unpleasant place to be.

J.M. Coetzee discussed something similar in the New York Review of Books a few years ago. The famed South African author was responding to a book called Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999) by William H. Gass. Coetzee quoted a perception by Gass that went straight to the heart of Rainer Maria Rilke’s creative existence: that the German poet was an artist whose writing was “the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength.”

It’s no surprise that Coetzee should have been disturbed by that description. His Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace is ostensibly the story of a South African university professor accused of sexual harassment. As Coetzee’s novel twists and turns through a father-daughter relationship, racial tension and a rationalising futility that can never come up with satisfying answers, it’s all too easy to see that Disgrace is marked by the same condition Coetzee took note of in Gass’s book: an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it takes its strength.

If Disgrace has redemptive power beyond that, it lies in the antagonist’s surrender to his fate, his belated self-recognition. This deep and terrible humility — and the detachment with which it Coetzee observes it — makes Disgrace a magnificent work. With the context of South African contemporary history set behind it like a shadow, you are drawn in as a witness to the unsettling, even cold power of a man’s genuflection into sadness.

These understandings have always led me to fear some intrinsic part of my own identity as a writer: notably, that perverse desire to be apart from the world in order to communicate with it. Even more distressing is that eternal inner struggle with honesty — as an artist and as man. How seemingly easy the former can be; how elusive the latter.

Forthrightness on the page = silence in life. That can sometimes be the equation for a writer. A commitment of that kind to one’s art is rather like dying slowly, letting oneself leak away from living and take up complete occupation on the page. And I, for one, do not like the existential gulf within that, or wish to surrender to, let alone celebrate it.

How to bridge it is the question that plagues me now.

In “Goofing Off While The Muse Recharges” (The New York Times, 8 September, 1999), Richard Ford writes about these contradictions with typically laconic wisdom. He discusses writer friends who are constantly absorbed in their working process, observing, somewhat amusingly, “as if god abhors a motionless pencil.”

Ford then talks about the idle pleasures he takes in not writing — indeed, the necessity to stop altogether for a while. He finally reflects back on the act of writing and says, “What’s most demanding is to believe in my own contrivances and to think that unknown others with time on their hands will also be persuaded. To do that, it helps a lot to know what bright allures lie just outside your room and beyond the pale of your illusion.”

Such encouraging words for his fellow writers. Such fine, human advice.

I should confess right now, however, that I am hardly the obsessed, workaholic genius steeped in a constant fever of scribbling! I will dodge the obligation of writing for as long as possible — until pressure sits upon my shoulders like the great weight of Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) and I finally bow down to the act itself.

Hopefully, there will be some burst of inspiration already outlined on the page — a rough sketch, a brilliant opening gambit, an elemental trace that might be worth following. What Michael Ondaatje so brilliantly described in the opening to his memoir Running in the Family: “the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hang onto”.

Even if there is something wonderful like that bone, it will certainly be a struggle to hold it. Writing is usually hard, slow work. An act of inspiration supported by days on end of effort and trudge, the mental toil that finally supports the lit and pulsing traffic of life that you hope to capture in a completed story.

Thus my self-imposed exile. Here, almost inevitably, I still find myself distracted, thinking about all these other ideas.

I see that what I am experiencing is a moral ache. That this ache comes out of the act of reflection and even silence itself. That this act of reflection is, of course, important for finding some temporary grace as a writer. But that grace, fully realised, comes from living and not just reflecting in isolation.

It has been a bad day today. So I make a new batch of coffee and hope to do better tonight with these jumbled thoughts and words of advice passed down to me. Outside, the dogs are barking at the moon again. I feel something in their inarticulate, wild yelps — a little of myself reaching out through words to live again. They remind me of how I miss the city and its busy heart. They remind me of how I miss my writer’s life.

- Mark Mordue

* Essay first published in Australian Author, 2002.

M Ward - The American Friend

Matt Ward looks like a boy, much younger than his 29 years. Though he says, without too much drama and maybe just the slightest smile, "Sometimes I think I'm an old man."

The singer-songwriter who operates under the vaguely anonymous moniker of 'M. Ward' evokes those contradictorily aged and reborn qualities on all three of his solo recordings, mixing blues, folk and country influences with an offbeat and dream-ridden approach that places him deep inside the arcanum of an underground American music scene lately obsessed with categories like 'Alt Country', 'Lo-Fi' and 'Post Rock'.

In the end what these sub-genres suggest is a link between all manner of roots American music and the punk and grunge movements of more recent times - and what might best be described as a renewed quest for authenticity that encourages a romantic, even outlaw view of the artist as an experimental faux-primitive. It's no surprise Neil Young, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan are all name-checked again and again as bridging points between an aesthetically rich American musical past and this new attempt, so distinctly American and 'grass roots', to move forward into the future and build on that past, progressively, regretfully and somewhat Puritanically. One could locate this cultivation of an American voice, and the reverence beneath it, in everything from the writings of Mark Twain to the rural, history-haunted mysticism of The Band. What remains is some final sense of mystery, the American Dream at its most genuine, bound up in notions of transcendence, landscape, nationhood and common feeling, as distinguished by an often singular, if not downright dissident and perhaps prophetic voice. This is the American democratic project par excellence and it refuses to die even in such cynical times as ours.

Seeing Ward walk on stage at the Hopetoun Hotel in Sydney during his 2003 Australian tour is like watching an early Bob Dylan reconfigured for the present day, the first show a pin-drop enchantment, the second a struggle with the downbeat fragilities Ward floats and dives through like a featherweight shadowboxing with himself (it's ultimately a bit of failure). Ward's not there yet; but he has that something quality, a subdued confidence that gives off the aura of a man on his way to a date with destiny.

Meeting M. Ward afterwards there's a feeling he doesn't want to let you have too much, as if the likelihood might cause him long-term harm. This makes shaking hands with him and saying hello a little clumsy and ridiculous - 'Hi... er I'm sorry I don't know your first name?' 'It's Matt, Matt, Matt...' - while the whispery reserve that characterizes his singing and conversation calls him back to privacy whenever you edge in too close for a revealingly personal moment. I get the feeling this line of defence will intensify rather than fall away as time passes, that in some way it's good to be here now.

Ward's latest recording Transfiguration of Vincent is undoubtedly his most beautiful and defined yet despite his inclination to mix it up with so many musical ghosts, turning heads with its surprisingly classic and enduring feel, signposting all the aforementioned artists in one way or another and fitting proudly beside the best they have to offer.

A musical love letter to a friend who has passed away - as Ward puts it in the sleeve notes, "this record was designed to keep the loss alive and behind me" - Transfiguration of Vincent is a song cycle about death in the most life affirming of ways, with a powerful metaphysical current that seems to be about the power of acceptance and the nature of how you let go of pain and even give it some form of grace.

"How do you let go?" Ward repeats the words. "That's definitely a good question. Part of the initial inspiration for the record was a memorial service for John Fahey [the legendary blues artist to whom Ward's acoustic guitar playing style is most often compared]. He had lots of fellow musicians there of course, who only had a few minutes to say what they wanted to say. It's not like they have an hour or anything. And it's not an entertainment performance that's required. But all these people were playing these beautiful John Fahey's songs that brought him back into the room. It made me wonder what the memorial service for Beethoven was like? How that would have made you feel when you heard his music if you had known him?"

It was this experience along with the death of Vincent O'Brien, one of Ward's closest friends, which inspired Transfiguration of Vincent. "To celebrate and to mourn, and to hopefully have a little bit of humour to tell the whole story, these are things that should be part of a service. It seemed amusing to me to put that on a whole album. The most important thing, of course, is that your heart is in the right place when you do that. Then it all makes sense. And that's love."

Ward wont be drawn on who Vincent O'Brien was, or how he died. "The best way to answer that would be to keep it in the music," he says to me. "I'm keeping all the questions about him in the songs. It's easier to express him more precisely in music than in an interview. It's like the way it's sometimes harder to talk about God than to sing about it," he laughs. "Singing about God is easy."

Raised in southern California to an American father and a Mexican mother, he implies a musically passionate, Spanish Baptist family background before moving uncomfortably away from the subject. As a teenager Ward says he loved the music of The Smiths and Sonic Youth. "My dad turned me on to Johnny Cash and gospel. Mum preferred classical music. And my sister used to listen to KROQ-FM out of L.A. a lot, which was a pretty famous radio station [pioneering new wave music, then the early hip hop music scene]."

I mention a Kim Gordon quote to him, something she said about how we pay to see performers be free for us. Ward agrees with that notion, though he sees what he calls "the isolating effect of it. There's not many jobs like that around. I think the old story about Icarus is a good one. The boy who flew too close to the sun with wings held together by glue."

Isn't that exactly what you want to do? "No," he says. "When I think of that story I think of those members of the musical arena who seek status or who want to be looked at differently or in some higher way to those around them. But I don't look for that in music.

"It's the same though in every business, I guess," he acknowledges. "Success, especially where money is involved, changes your priorities. It scares me a little."

There's an internalized quality to Ward's live show that makes me wonder if he's nervous about performing, but he doesn't quite agree with that. He admits, nonetheless, "performing is not my first instinct. I like recording a lot. And my main passion is the instrument and learning how to play it. I feel employed by the instrument and that's a good feeling to have."

This attitude reminds me of flamenco guitarists who sometimes raise their guitars above their heads to show an audience that the applause should be for their instrument, whom they merely serve, rather than them. Ward likes the idea a lot. I suddenly see in the fresh blackness to his eyes and hair, in the looks inherited from his mother, something of those Spanish bloodlines and the corridos edge that subtly, perhaps even unconsciously, affects his musical style. Qualities that were present, if only in punkish attitude, in his first group Rodriguez, a San Luis Obispo, Californian three piece whose indie folk energy caught the attention of Granddaddy's Jason Lytle. As Ward moved towards a solo career he found another champion in Giant Sands Howe Gelb, with whom he still sometimes records.

So can you remember when you first knew you wanted to be a musician? The question amuses him. Ward says, "It's never been one of my big dreams. All the dreams I had were really layman's dreams. Like owning a house with a fireplace. Those were the kind of dreams I had rather than this is a career I want."

Married last year, it seems as if he can now have both, though Ward shyly says, "we're only renting". "Ownership isn't something I crave" he hastens to add. " But for some reason owning a house and some land appeals. I don't know why I have that dream," he says, embarrassed, "but I do."

Based now in Portland, Oregon, he admits it has had a big impact on his music. "I think understanding your place is another one of those big questions that interests me. Where do I belong? Where should I live? They're important questions. Portland is a middle-of-nowhere place, really, in the western part of America. There's a lot of things going in San Francisco [nearby], but living in a town where very little happens gives you a different perspective on the trends that come and go. It makes visiting cities more interesting, touring like I do. And it makes it nice to come home to a place that's traveling in first gear, unlike all these other places that are in fifth gear."

Right now in Sydney I see that Ward is making his way through a very fat paperback called TEXAS, its worn pages sitting beside his guitar case as we speak. I give him a copy of a book I wrote called Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip, a collection of travel stories that he gets him excited about the lines between fiction and non-fiction and where they merge. "I think that fiction sometimes tells a truer story than non fiction," he says, "but sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. A lot of memory is actually fiction, or an aggrandizement of what happened, don't you think?"

Wouldn't he say his own work, intensely personal as it, qualifies as non-fiction? "In the end I'm not sure anything can be completely non-fiction," he admits. "But I don't see my work as autobiographical. I view it much more as fiction in the sense that I put this character out there in the song and see where he stumbles."

"It's like Mark Twain says at the start of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that it's 'mostly a true book, with some stretchers'. That's the best way of looking at non-fiction for me. I love the idea Errol Morris can make such great films about real people and it's like a Hollywood movie. Then you see someone like Mike Leigh's films, which are more like non fiction and closer to reality than what a lot of documentary makers ever achieve."

This interest in reality and unreality weaves through all through Ward's songs, along with a cinematic quality that allows you to 'see' them in your mind's eye, with a somewhat silvery, wavering tone to it all that signals both the lost and the cherished, the act of remembering as something highly conscious and apart from the experiences he summons up.

I ask him if his Baptist background had affected the spiritual nature of what he did on Transfiguration of Vincent? Ward turns his head down. "I consider myself a religious person. I have a firm belief in God. But I don't have a strict adherence to any particular religion. I'm taking baby steps in all of them," he adds.

"I'm still asking myself all those kind of questions though," he says. "I feel like music often used to ask those bigger questions. But in the last few decades people seem to have stopped asking those bigger questions, or maybe the audience for those questions has just grown smaller. I don't know. I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing. But I guess I am haunted by where I came from and where I'm going."

"Juxtaposing songs about death and love and loss and how you deal with it...." The words taper off before Ward says strongly, "You can't ignore it. It's like September 11. It doesn't seem right to ignore it. But at the same time it's not right to revenge either."

He sighs and starts to talk about George Bush before he retracts the words and says, "I don't want to get into that. My mind wasn't on September 11 when I made this record. It's much more personal. But maybe in America a lot of people are asking themselves the same kind of question: what do we do now that the loss has occurred."

- Mark Mordue

* Story first published at 12gauge.com (USA) in 2003.

Burning

We go under dark stars
and call it a long night.
We go under dark stars
and say the moon is bright.

We go under dark stars
to find a sleep that’s light.
We go under dark stars
into rain that’s made of glass.

We go under dark stars
on a road that’s shining black.
We go under dark stars,
they’re in our eyes, they burn our heart.


- Mark Mordue

Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach

ON CHESIL BEACH
by Ian McEwan
(Jonathan Cape, 166pp, Hardback)


“They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy.”

So Ian McEwan begins his latest novel, a short but highly charged work of only 166 pages. The year is 1962 and the newlyweds are Edward and Florence, names that reek of an old world the ‘60s will soon transform.

When the book opens they are being served dinner in their hotel room on the Dorset coast of England by two trussed-up local lads who seem as awkward with the occasion as they are. In the distance the waves of Chesil Beach can be heard breaking, a sound of “gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles”.

Initially McEwan’s writing is restrained and formal, a quintessentially British tone befitting the time in which it set. One thinks of old BBC radio plays, and ‘hears’ the story being told. It would be easy to mistake this as tame fare indeed, but for a sly humour and confidence percolating beneath McEwan’s voice:

“This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated by a glazed cherry… It would not have crossed Edward’s mind to have ordered a red.”

McEwan’s intent, however, is not drawing room comedy. Ominous descriptive traces like the “hissing against the pebbles” and far rawer feelings are pulsing within a few pages. The internal mechanics of the book quickly reveal themselves as we discover who Edward and Florence are (he an aspiring historian, she a young violinist), diving into their thought patterns and family memories, reliving the romance between them, and returning to the events of the wedding night as seen through each of their eyes.

Virtually everything that happens in On Chesil Beach occurs during this one evening, and the tidal intensity, the back and forth between Edward and Florence, is palpable as it leads us down, finally, to the beach itself and the book’s climactic scene.

McEwan exposes the rationalizations and self deceptions we all succumb too, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another, in situations of great emotional uncertainty. In doing so the book takes us deeper and deeper into two people’s lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see.


As the extent of Florence’s fear of sex becomes clear – “her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh… Sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but the price she must pay for it” – we are clued into Edward’s long-standing awareness of her repressive personality. Florence’s genuinely loving affection, along with her passion for playing the violin, has allowed him, however, to deceive himself of what must be “her richly sexual nature” and what he mistakes for simple shyness. Florence, of course, is at pains to make it seem this way. Edward, not entirely insensitive to these tensions and resistances, tries to be understanding, to take their wedding night slowly. By the time she is moaning in disgust at his touch he is interpreting it as the sound of ecstasy.

It’s hard to tell you more than this without giving away the plot to this slender book. Suffice to say the emotions and ideas are profound in what might seem like the narrowest of circumstances. And though the focus remains overwhelmingly intimate – newlyweds in a hotel bedroom, mutual concerns about when will they fuck and how it will it go - McEwan summons up the Cold War atmosphere with textures like the wireless playing downstairs, from where Edward hears the word “Berlin” and to where Florence wishes she could flee, “to pass the time in quiet conversation with the matrons on their floral-patterned sofas while their men leaned seriously into the news, into the gale of history.”

McEwan, of course, has always been a political writer, as demonstrated in works as varied as his film script for The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985), a critique of life in Thatcher’s Britain, or his last brilliant novel, Saturday (2005), an attempt to grapple with the nature of violence and human connectedness in a post September 11 world. His reflections in The Guardian on the events of September 11 still stand out among the best things written at the time. Whether penning an elegy for a deceased author like Saul Bellow or speaking with deep ambivalence about the Iraq War, he remains committed to the engaged notion of a public intellectual rather than ivory tower accomplishments alone.

And yet there’s a provocative, almost mathematical coolness to his writing that undercuts the comforting status of a literary good guy. His debut collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), opened with the tale of a boy telling you, in a bemused tone, how he raped his sister. McEwan’s ability to evoke the psychotic pull of a murderer in The Comfort of Strangers (1981) or a stalker’s obsession in Enduring Love (1997) similarly displayed his taste for evil and violence in ways that appeared irresistible, almost mystical.

This interest in the sexually aberrant, the bizarre and the psychologically unsettling led to McEwan being nicknamed ‘Ian Macabre’ early on in his career. Over time McEwan’s books have become less overtly strange (one of his most acclaimed short stories, ‘Solid Geometry’ deals with a man who discovers how to fold his wife up like a piece of paper and make her disappear) and more everyday or common in their intensities. And yet the same neo-Gothic traits of lives lived in secret and looming darkness infects all his works with elements of threat and fear.

When Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam it was criticized as a lightweight work in a darker and more confronting career, little more than a tightly plotted entertainment satirizing the self-interest of the times. Though done with the intention to amuse, the schematic tightness that can sometimes undermine a McEwan novel – the feeling of being introduced to a character via a resume of attributes and background information, the sleek convenience of circumstance and chance in his narrative engines – was so on display it left many readers empty by the time of Amsterdam’s somewhat vaudeville conclusion.

The general feeling was that McEwan had won the Booker for Amsterdam as compensation for missing out the previous year with what is still widely regarded as his masterpiece, Enduring Love (1997). Amsterdam remains a slight, if witheringly humorous work when compared to the larger novels he has written since then like Saturday, where the same schematic attributes are used and then usurped to create momentum and suspense.

This particular attribute of tension and surprise in McEwan’s work should be noted, as anyone who has read the home invasion scene in Saturday, or his justly celebrated portrayal of a ballooning accident in Enduring Love will attest. On Chesil Beach similarly depends upon this to sustain your agonised involvement to the end, to keep you taking part in what might be described as a terrible closeness.

Like Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach has arrived as an extremely short work in the wake of a set of major novels, in this case Saturday and Atonement (2001). In its depth and resonance, however, On Chesil Beach is far more serious than its thinness might suggest, harking back to the compressed nature of his early and most haunting short stories, as well as McEwan’s long running interest in the random and banal ways ordinary lives can be shattered by so-called ordinary troubles. Proof that no life is completely private or shut off from the world: that we can be victims of ourselves and if we’re unlucky, our historical moment too.


- Mark Mordue


* An edited version of thsi reviews was first published in Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Books on April 6th 2007