WRITING FAMILY SKELETON
“Suddenly a White Rabbit with
pink eyes ran close to her. Burning with
curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it
pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment, down went
Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was going to get
out again.”
You all know that story – how
Alice entered the world of the imagination. And the rabbit-hole long ago
entered the language. So it’s a kind of cliché to say that writing fiction can
be for the writer a journey down the rabbit-hole. The surprise of the rabbit,
the chase, the entrance into another world, another set of circumstances, led
on by curiosity – and a rabbit. I wondered in fact whether the expression
originated with Lewis Carroll, or whether it was older, but as far as I can
tell, he made it up. “Down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.”
I don’t always have a particular
rabbit and rabbit-hole that I can identify as the beginning of a novel, as the
inspiration that set my imagination going. But with Family Skeleton I am able
to identify the moment.
I was on a bus driving through
bushland when I saw, not wildlife, but an Edwardian funeral hearse slowly
emerging, almost sailing, out from a track between the trees, onto the road. I
suppose I saw it for about half a minute, and possibly my imagination instantly
embellished the vision. It was elegant, regal, gleaming. Eerie. Romantic. Ominous.
The windows were etched. There were silver knobs. It was the gift that
stimulated my imagination, that put in motion the story that became Family
Skeleton. I followed the hearse. Well, figuratively, I followed the hearse.
I knew at once that it was the
impetus, the heart of a novel. I am in the habit of writing fiction. I don’t
suppose anyone else on the bus went home and started a novel as the result of
the apparition of the hearse. I could be wrong about that. I am trying to
explain to you how these things happen for me, and I think I can best do it by giving
you another example.
The rabbit-hole for my novel
Child of the Twilight was a small news item in the paper. I mean small small.
It told the story of the theft of a miraculous religious statue from a church
in Rome. I had seen the statue years before. I wondered how you would steal it,
and why. Then I wondered what you would do with it. Incidentally, the statue is
still missing. In its place in the church there’s a copy, and it seems to
perform the same function as the real one anyway. But the theft was the
beginning of the writing of the novel.
I think a fiction writer is
always naturally alert to these prompts, these objects or occasions that set
things in motion. It’s often a small thing. Sometimes I can’t even remember
what got me started. But whatever it is, it raises urgent questions for me, and
the novel in its construction and its characters is a form of answer or answers
to the questions. I have to tell you I am not the kind of writer who begins
with a written plan. Some do, some don’t. I don’t. I would not find it
possible, as I begin to write a novel, to set out a detailed plot outline, to
write the details of the characters, or to do any of the other things I often see
described in books about writing fiction. When I have finished a novel, then I
can analyse the parts, can tell you the plot and discuss the characters and so
forth, but for me everything develops as I write – the characters along with
the plot and structure. This is a personal matter – I’m not saying one way is
right or better than another, I’m just saying this is how I do it. I believe
that the Spanish novelist Victor del Arbol (The Heart Tastes Bitter) is the
opposite of this – he does a complete plan, and also has detailed biographies of
all his characters before he begins writing. I also do biographies of my
characters, and in particular I do a lot of timelines and dates – but nothing
like what someone such as Victor del Arbol does.
But to return to Family Skeleton
– before I knew it, there was a dead body in the Edwardian hearse, and I knew
who it was – the matriarch of an influential family, but I didn’t know how she
had died. However almost at once, she was the matriarch of a family of funeral
directors. Where did they come from? I realise now that there are points and
elements in my life from way back that inform the narrative. Probably a key
element is the fact that when I was a teenager I had a boyfriend whose family
were funeral directors. So I had quite vivid insights into that world. The
family in the novel call their place of business ‘the box office’, as those
people did. And the boyfriend occasionally was permitted to use a hearse for
social purposes. These details are the same for the people in the novel. When I
came to prepare this talk for you, I realized that the funeral and the
graveyard and so forth are threaded, woven throughout the course of my own
life.
Maybe to begin with, my great
grandfather, who came to Tasmania from Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth
century, became a tree feller and timber miller, and he also bred horses. Part
of his business with the horses was training black horses for the funeral
industry. My grandfather followed the same career, and was known as a horse
whisperer, training the horses for funerals across the state. As a child I
found this pretty interesting.
As a teenager I used to sometimes
spend the afternoon at a place not far from our house in Launceston. It was a
disused old grave yard, called the Caledonian Cemetery. I used to ride my bike there,
and take a book to read and also a notebook for writing and drawing. Many of
the graves were sepulchres, rooms dug into the side of the hill, with wrought
iron doors. Everything was broken down and overgrown. There was a view that
stretched far down to the centre of the town, and in the foreground I could see
a formal Chinese garden where a man in a coolie hat worked among the
vegetables, like something in a painting or a myth.
I think they are the three main
elements I can point to as feeding my choice of a family of funeral directors
for Family Skeleton. But there are also more pieces of evidence for my being a
novelist who would write about this stuff. When I lived in Los Angeles for a
year in the sixties, I visited three cemeteries of the Forest Lawn Memorial
Park chain. I had read Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, and Jessica Mitford’s
American Way of Death. These days there are six of these privately owned
cemeteries. These places were the
antithesis of the old Caledonian Cemetery in Tasmania. The first idea was to
eliminate upright grave-markers and feature works of art such as sculpture and
stained glass. They were not called cemeteries, they were funeral homes and
memorial parks. When I visited them they were in fact sparkling, manicured parks
where flowers bloomed in glorious profusion, where recordings of birds played
in the trees, where the atmosphere was dreamy, sentimental, full of fantasy,
and serenity. The memorial parks were described by management as ‘A first step
up toward Heaven’. Copies of famous statues and paintings – Leonardo’s Last
Supper is a stained glass window in the wall of the vast marble Memorial Court
of Honor in the Glendale location, the first one to be built. Glendale began as
22 hectares (might be bigger now, I don’t know, probably is) on which there are
churches and lakes and places of meditation. You can be married there if you
like – in the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. There are sections called Babyland,
Vesperland, Dawn of Tomorrow and Inspiration Slope. I like the sound of
Inspiration Slope. When I looked recently at the lavish book I bought at
Glendale in the sixties, I see that there is a photo of the Council of Regents
of the Memorial Court of Honor and they are all old white men in scarlet robes.
I thought at the time that the photo was horrifying – today it seems even more
ghastly and full of dread.
So anyway, Forest Lawn was an
inspiration for the private cemeteries owned by the family in the novel. I take
matters further and satirise them, making them closer to theme parks where
there are ghost rides and such. This brings me to the tone of the novel.
At some point, and I am sorry but
I can’t tell you how this happened, because I don’t really know, it became
clear to me that the narrator was in fact a presence – it was the truth-teller,
the skeleton in the wardrobe. I’ll read you the prologue:
Prologue
by the Storyteller
“Imagine you have a talking
skeleton in the wardrobe. That’s me. I still have my own teeth.
Once upon a time, in the years
between the great wars, there was born a baby girl named Margaret. This happened in the artistic atmosphere of
Eltham in the shire of Nillumbik, twenty kilometres to the north-east of
Melbourne. Margaret’s childhood was happy, although during some of it the whole
world was at war for the second time. When Margaret grew up she married Edmund
who was a very distant cousin, and she went to live in the wealthy atmosphere
of Toorak in the city of Stonnington, five kilometres to the south-east of the
Melbourne Town Hall. And lived happily ever after. You think so? There was
happy and there was sad. Life’s like that. Even Cinderella died in the end.
Margaret and Edmund had four children, and in the way of things, before he was
quite seventy years old, Edmund died. So Margaret lived alone in the lovely old
house built by Edmund’s father. She was known as a philanthropist and patron of
the arts, and people from the news media would sometimes come round with
various recording devices and would then tell stories about her and her good
works and her pretty family life in Toorak. These stories didn’t get very far
beneath the surface. How could she possibly be as good as she seemed? One
morning she said to her faithful housekeeper, Lillian: ‘I think I’ll write my
memoirs.’
Now we’re getting somewhere.”
So the ironic tone has been set. There
are sections of the text where the matriarch Margaret tells her version of
things in her Book of Revelation. And sections where the family skeleton tells
his (I think of it as a he, but it’s never clarified) version. He has access to
everything that’s going on – I think that’s often called omniscient – but he
has a particular perspective, and always has his mildly amused ironic tone. And
his vanity, by the way. His own teeth. Of course all omniscient narrators have
to select what they report – nobody can ever tell the whole truth and nothing
but the truth, can they? I think I’m right in saying that.
I recently heard from a friend in
a book group that she was the only person in her group who liked the book they
were reading, and that the other people hated the book because they didn’t like
any of the characters. This gave me pause for thought. I didn’t really know
that people – in this case the whole group but one – read fiction in that way. I
wonder if those people would like any of the characters in Family Skeleton??
Would they dismiss the novel because they didn’t LIKE the characters. Surely it
doesn’t it all come down to just liking characters? And for that matter, what
does ‘liking the characters really mean?’
I put my mind to some of the
characters in Family Skeleton – and I decided that I for one like the skeleton.
And I decided that even though many of the characters are pretty awful people,
and do pretty awful things, I think that in the case of the main ones at least
there are compassionate insights into them. Does this make them likeable? Would
they pass muster at the book group? Possibly not.
But as I thought these things, I
thought also about the first requirement for a piece of fiction. Lean in close.
The first job for the writer is to make the reader CARE. Maybe you disagree.
But that’s my belief based on my reading and my writing. The clue, maybe the
little hook in the Prologue, is the bit that says the stories about Margaret in
the media ‘didn’t get very far beneath the surface’. Will the Book of
Revelation go deeper for the reader. The reader hopes so.
So the writer is suggesting,
promising really, to the reader that the text is going to go beneath the
surface and reveal truths. Of course a skeleton in the wardrobe, or cupboard,
or closet, is a secret, isn’t it? So even the title of the novel is suggesting
that secrets are going to be uncovered. If you go back to the epigraph at the
front of the book – between the title and the prologue – it says: “The
storyteller knows what the story teller knows; the storyteller tells what the
storyteller tells.” So the skeleton knows – but he might not tell you
everything.
Going back to what I said before
about planning and not planning – the things I have just said about tone and
narration and so forth – I didn’t, couldn’t, plan any of that. It all happened
in the telling and in the writing – each element influenced the other – the
characters and the plot and the structure and the tone – all this developed in
concert. Perhaps this is due to years of practice in writing and in reading. I
must stress my belief in the importance of reading, careful, close, attentive
reading of other writers.
As the characters and plot
develop, the writer’s own interests and concerns also become part of the fabric
of the whole thing. Subject matter. Sometimes the subject matter of a novel is
a huge dramatic topic, a current burning issue such as racial inequality or
climate change. My novels are not like that. The subject matter of Family
Skeleton is, in a sense, death. It approaches this via the life of one woman,
Margaret, and how the events that happen on the surface of the everyday
ultimately pull her to her destruction – so that she ends up in the
aforementioned Edwardian hearse. She would have died anyway – as the skeleton
says in the prologue, everybody dies in the end, even Cinderella. But to begin
with Margaret is set up as a wealthy Toorak widow with a family to dominate,
and the reader can tell from the prologue that she is going to come to a bad
end – but how will this be managed? This is the matter the reader cares about.
And before long there is in fact a mystery – the woman visiting from Florida
has disappeared.
The narrator has an ironic and
satirical slant on human folly, and the family of the undertakers is rich
pickings.
There are some key elements to
the writing of fiction that I haven’t yet mentioned. There’s language and
rhythm. Choice of words and attention to music. The melody of the sentence. The
harmonies and discords set up by the structure. The attention to punctuation
and paragraphing.
In a few sentences, I can’t
really tell you how any of that is done, but if you are alert to those things
as you read, you can become practised in them as you write.
I said the novel is about death –
but it also plays with death’s close relative, sex. I will read you a little
sex bit. It’s told by the skeleton, and it is about a young man called Edmond
and a schoolgirl called Cecelia, known as Sissy. They have been playing tennis
at the family home of the funeral people. Edmund O’Day is the eldest son.
“After the last game everybody
gathered under the oak for lemonade and cakes. Somehow, it seemed to Sissy,
everybody dissolved and she was suddenly alone again with Edmund. She had
longed for this, and dreaded it too. The tingling feeling of the pleasure of
Edmund’s touch filled her body and seemed to spin into her brain. She had to be
back in the boarding house and ready for tea by six-thirty. There was a flutter
of panic in her heart. But Edmund had this time-table well figured in his brain. We are after all dealing with
Edmund here. Sissy would be back in time. But first they must explore the paths
that went round to the outside door, the door to the wine cellar. Edmund
produced a key, and in they went. The door was dark green. It was worn and
dusty. Yes, it squeaked as it opened. The interior was dark as dark can be.
They briefly roamed the gloomy passageways between the rows of bottles. He
showed her wines from Bordeaux that were put down when he was born, that would
be opened when he turned twenty-one. He grasped a dusty old bottle of brandy
and swung it by the neck. She loved the sight of him doing that. And he showed
her the door of the bomb-shelter.
The bomb-shelter. Who had not
heard of the legendary bomb-shelter in the O’Day house? Thirty-nine steps down,
down down below the cellar.
‘Do you want to see? My family
had it built at the beginning of the war. Excavated underneath the cellar. It’s
like a really deep grave.’ He laughed. ‘Or an Egyptian tomb. Do you – want to
see?’ His voice was careless, but with more than a hint of expectation and
sexual excitement. Sissy lifted her face towards him, opened her eyes wide,
slightly pursed her lips while smiling shyly, and nodded. Edmund kissed Sissy
ever so lightly on the cheek. He was an artist in these matters.
There was a steel bar on the
outside of the door, placed there because the door had a habit of swinging open
at inopportune times and hitting anyone who happened to be there for one reason
or another. In truth, few people ever ventured into this remote part of the
wine cellar. Edmund lifted the heavy bar and swung back the door, flicked on a
light, and stood aside to let Sissy go in first. There were cobwebs, and dusty
concrete steps leading down to the underground shelter. Then he followed,
closing the door behind them. They were beautifully sealed off from the outside
world of reality. Never mind the dangers inside the cellar. It was completely
freezing down there, and Edmund plugged in an old electric radiator that had a
centre like a beehive. It was in fact quite effective.
This was Edmund’s special place,
furnished with broken chairs and a sofa, glasses and ashtrays, everything
faintly grimy and covered in a veil of dust. Three gas masks, like the heads of
three terrible insects, hung from a hook high up on the wall. Sissy had heard
of the cellar before, but nobody had ever described it to her. The walls were
covered with maps of the world, resembling in their pastel colours, maps from
the Bible. Empty shelves on one wall, a few comic books lying in a heap on the
floor. An old stained sink with a tap. The air was stale, there being one tiny
clogged-up ventilator high up near the ceiling.
‘A drink?’ he poured them
generous glasses of brandy. Sissy was unused to drinking, and so Edmund watered
it down for her. She gagged a little, then got used to it. They sat on a sofa
and Edmund lit them each a cigarette. Sissy was quite accustomed to smoking, as
it happened. They removed their shoes, and Sissy tucked her feet, still in her
socks, up under the pleats of her tennis frock.
Before long, naturally, they were
lying on the sofa in an embrace. The perfect buttons in their perfect
buttonholes placed by the deft needle of Daphne Feeney give way to the deft
fingers of Edmund O’Day. And Sissy, her head beginning to spin with the brandy,
became a lovely young creature in white socks, chaste white knickers, thick
white bra, gold cross on slender chain around her throat. She still dimly
remembered she was supposed to be a temple of the Holy Ghost, but her will was
in fact, at this stage, growing very weak indeed. The bra and knickers were
gone. She had never really been a particularly devout or religious girl, and
right now her body was feeling simply glorious. She wanted more and more of the
feeling Edmund aroused in her. More and more. She hardly even knew that Edmund
was naked, then in a flash Edmund’s fingers were inside her, and the feeling
was one of almost unbearable pleasure. He was above her. He took her hand and
placed it on himself and she began to stroke him, quite softly, and he
obviously liked that a lot. She was by now drifting in a little ecstasy of
astonishment. He grinned and then he said quietly in her ear, ‘Turn over,’ and
he gently rolled her onto her front. Her backside, remember, was one of her
greatest attractions. ‘Kneel up,’ he whispered and then he pushed himself into
her from behind, and in a few miraculous seconds of wonderfully sharp pain and
a blissful flood of unknown warmth it was all over – with Sissy flat on her
face on the sofa and Edmund lolling back, stretching out full length, obedient
to cliché, lighting two cigarettes. If he, in those few minutes, hurt her, the
pain was the pain of high pleasure. He took a long draw and exhaled, throwing
back his head as he did so. Then he turned Sissy’s face towards him, kissed her
lightly on both cheeks, and put the second cigarette between her lips.
‘There,’ he said. Then, ‘Oh-oh,
there’s a bit of the old blood.’ He handed her a grubby towel. Cecilia stared
in a kind of dumb horror at the sight of her own blood on the towel. She stared
and stared. She was in fact beginning to feel ill.
‘It’s OK, it’s normal you know,’
Edmund said. Is it? Is this normal? Nothing was normal. Everything was shifting
and spinning slowly. Sissy knew very little about the facts of life.
‘Here, have some water,’ and he
handed her a glass of water that was still tainted with the brandy.
There she was, a convent girl
naked except for her socks and her gold cross, bleeding a little, sitting on an
old leather sofa deep underground in a bomb-shelter, gulping down water from a
dirty glass. Where to from here, Cecelia?”
The skeleton has a little habit of asking
questions of the characters. He’s going to do it again in the last piece I will
read. Then you might like to ask me some questions.
Here is a scene between Evan the
psychiatrist who lives next door to the O’Days, and Doria who is the visitor
from Florida who is eventually going to disappear. They are out at one of the
O’Day cemeteries – this one is called Heavenly Days, and it’s a jolly kind of
theme park. Doria is an historian who is doing the O’Day family history. This
is a shorter reading.
I should point out that part of
my technique is to signal for instance the importance of the unconscious mind
in the text by putting a Freudian psychiatrist in the house next door.
“As it happened,
Doria became sort of friendly with Evan Keene, the psychiatrist in the house
next door to Bellevue. The O’Days had very little to do with their neighbours,
but Evan was different. He was in fact a significant part of their lives. He took
Doria shopping in the city and also in Carlton. She seemed to buy nothing at
all – while Evan stocked up on cheeses, wines, and exotic sausage. One
afternoon he drove her, in the pink MGB, out, out to what she called the
boondocks – to Heavenly Days. They roamed the pathways under the spreading
trees where lifelike birds warbled sweetly, and lifelike blooms nestled
permanently among the leaves. This was nothing new to Doria, America being well
stocked with much bigger, wilder, better, stranger death parks than this. They
read a few clean, expensive headstones, and Evan became very quickly bored.
Doria would have kept going – this was an area closely related to her life’s
work, after all. But in the end they gave up and lunched on death-watch beetle
wraps and Blue Bat merlot in the Catacomb Café. Things had begun to look up!
They went on the rides in the theme park. Yes! Evan was like an ecstatic child
on the ferris wheel, while Doria took everything in a strangely solemn mood,
scarcely batting an eyelid, never uttering a sound, let alone a squeal. Inside
the sepulchre that housed the tomb of the unknown zombie Evan grabbed Doria’s hand
in alarm when two zombies, accompanied by threatening music, came slowly
tottering towards them, and Doria said ‘Woah, Evan, it isn’t real!’ But of
course it was; the undead lurched up against Evan’s arm and almost knocked him
over. Doria was unmoved. Evan went to jelly, rushed from the place and had to
sit down on a pile of coffins at the entrance. Still Doria didn’t even crack a
smile. Remember she looks like Andy Warhol – that’s something to think about.
Doria had wanted to take the option of being locked up for five minutes in the
dark with the zombies, but Evan drew the line. Daylight, daylight! He was
almost hysterical. With some relief he went for a ride on the Spooky-Kooky, and
had a grave-robber’s sundae with wiggly worms.
And this man, Doria said to herself, is an eminent psychiatrist. Yes,
Doria, he is. A loony-doctor. What are you to make of that?”
I will conclude
with a quote from Edmund – who is in the habit of making up pithy
sayings:
“The past is a ghost, the future a dream, all we have is now – and the
funeral industry.”
