INTERVIEW NOVEMBER 2013

Carmel Bird – Interviewed by Madeleine Watts, November 2013

MW: One of the phrases I loved best in your essay was when you wrote, “Storytelling is a mechanism for reflecting on what it is to be human in time and space”. Why do you think the compulsion to tell stories about ourselves is so universal?

CB: The way I see it, the narrative response to life is a characteristic of being human. As a baby develops memory and language, it begins to realise and organize its place in the world by sorting out the characters, plots and settings of its sensual experiences. It realizes pretty early on that one of the great joys of being alive is the power to tell the story of how it is to be alive. Quite quickly the beauty of speculation and fabrication enters, and the stories take a leap into fiction. Little children love to invent parts of the detail of their daily lives, filling in the spaces with characters and ideas that have a flimsy relationship to ordinary reality. Fiction is still telling the teller and the audience the narrative of what it is to be human, even when the details no longer have a human face or an earthly setting. In families some of the stories of family life take hold and are repeated over and over again – and so it is with tribes and national groups – some tales give such delight, or tell such important truths, that they become enshrined in the traditions of the people. I think it is no mistake that ‘fairy tales’ (and other classes of tale such as myth, legend, parable, fable) are widely associated with the child. They sit close to the open minds and hearts of innocence, taking the listener back to a state in which all things are possible, to a place where good and evil are clear and vivid, and where important truths are spoken in ways that are hard to forget. I think of Greek myths, Persian fairy tales, Norse sagas.

MW: You’re an extremely prolific writer, with many novels and short story collections to your name. You’ve also edited several anthologies of essays and stories. How does the practice of writing interact with your work as an editor, particularly given that you’ve co-edited Griffith REVIEW 42 with Julianne?

CB: I love writing fiction, and also essays, and I enjoy very much reflecting on writing, my own and the work of other writers. I also enjoy teaching writing, and editing other people’s work. One task more or less flows into another. Working with Julianne (and also Nicholas Bray) was a terrific experience, one that I have not had before, working in concert. The back and forth and discussion and co-operation were all very stimulating, and the result is really very satisfying and I am proud of my part in the current journal.

MW: You co-edited this edition of Griffith REVIEW, and your opening essay really frames the entire edition, focusing the lens on the central ideas, as it were. What was it about this subject that caught your interest, and how did your ideas come together? For instance, you mention in the essay that the bicentenary of the publication of the Brothers Grimm fairytales gave you cause for reflection.

CB: The subject of the fairy tale has been one of my favourites since childhood, and I have a nice collection of books, both of stories and of scholarship on the subject. Yes, fairy tales have fascinated me for ages. One of the books I have is Mirror Mirror on the Wall, a collection of essays on fairy tales, collected by Kate Bernheimer. Late in 2012, when readers all over the world were celebrating the 200^th anniversary of the Grimms, I was re-reading this book, which is American. It sits on the bookshelf next to From the Beast to the Blonde, a book ‘on fairy tales and their tellers’ by Marina Warner, who is English. I had an idle thought that I didn’t have a book on the topic written in Australia. Just then, Charlotte Wood published a short reflection on fairy tales in a weekend newspaper. The idea of a collection of essays on the subject, with an Australian slant, came to me. I developed a proposal which was universally rejected by Australian publishers who felt that there was no interest in the topic in this country. I realized I would have to think a bit laterally. What about a journal instead of a book? Helen Hopcroft suggested I try Griffith Review. The visionary Julianne Schultz decided to go with it – and what a joy it was when Chong at Text Publishing came up with the fabulous cover image of the mermaid in the desert, enclosed in a magic mirror. In looking at fabulations in Australia, it was not possible to confine matters to what might be classified strictly as ‘fairy tales’. So in the editing of the journal Julianne and I (with a great deal of help from Nicholas) moved across the different genres of myth etc.

MW:Your own fiction has often brushed up against themes of colonialism and the legacy of the past. You touch on those aspects of Australian myth and storytelling in your essay, but I wonder what you find so interesting in those themes, what draws you back to them?

CB:  Just as children and families tell stories about themselves, hence establishing a place in the world, so peoples fix on key moments across time in a process of fashioning identity – something that gives shape and meaning, and promises possibility. And those moments – say, the story of Ned Kelly – move into myth that in turn shapes who the people are. The history of non-Aboriginal Australia is so short – myth can take a long time to make itself – and so folk storytelling in Australia is I think unlike such telling in older cultures. The German tales of the Brothers Grimm reference German history – for instance, Hansel and Gretel is, at one level, a famine story. So the colonial story of Australia is vital to me as a writer, even when I might be writing about the present day. The past casts its shadows – think of the forever rippling effects of, for one thing, the First World War. The centre of the novel I am working on now is a dark secret from over half a century back.  

MW: You point out that what makes Australian storytelling different from that of other places is the fact that Aboriginal place was telling itself for tens of thousands of years before European settlement, while from the outside, from the other side of the world, people were dreaming about it. That the difference comes from the meeting of these two legacies of myth. I wonder if you’d be able to speak a little more about that?

CB: I love trying to think about the great stretch of time during which the First Peoples have been in Australia. And the storytelling on rocks and in dance and spoken word. I grew up in Tasmania, and from a very early age I was aware that different people had been there, and didn’t seem to be there any more. In The Bluebird Café and also in Cape Grimm (two of my novels) there are hauntings by Aboriginal characters in Tasmania. And it has always thrilled me strangely somehow that while life was going on here over the many centuries, people in Europe were trying to imagine what it must be like here, trying to imagine that here even existed. Early on people brought the European folk and fairy tales here, and they have of course survived in the culture, been added to by the many many other different peoples who now make up the population, but there is, I sense, a deep well of stories that are somehow indelibly etched into the land. I am struggling here to explain what I mean. I have always had a sense that there is an Aboriginal presence everywhere here. Just about everywhere here anyway. Certainly in Tasmania. Also a convict presence there. Don’t get me started. As we edited the journal I became more aware of how the Aboriginal stories and the other stories (literary and historical) seemed to be, however subtly, merging. I had a go at expressing it in the essay – I’m not sure how successful I was. Perhaps this was happening only in my own mind? I suppose stories are a process, and there is a long way to go.

MW: I thought it was interesting that you ended your essay on a question. You sketch all the permutations of myth and storytelling in Australia, without giving any aspect more weight than the other. It’s a very open-ended piece, which I think leaves the reader with many questions and serves as a wonderful introduction to the rest of the edition. Was it your intention to structure the piece in that way?

CB: That’s quite funny – because I just ended the last response to your penultimate question with a little question.  

Oh I knew my essay had to be open-ended, as you describe it. I’m pleased you see that I was not giving one element more weight than another. I wanted to invite readers into the discussion, and to lead them to read joyfully the responses of the contributors. Sometimes I was (and am) overwhelmed by the vastness of the topic – the fairy tale in Australia?? (Two question marks – and I don’t really like question marks.) The Annotated Brothers Grimm edited by Maria Tatar lists 237 books as ‘Further Reading on Fairy Tales’ – and that’s nothing to do with Australia at all. The title for my essay ‘Dreaming the Place’ occurred to me after I had written the piece, and it sums up for me the link between ‘place’ which is so very important in Australia, and storytelling which is ultimately a product of the imagination. One of my favourite characters in the story of Australia is Archbishop Moran who (I believe) taught his flock that the New Jerusalem was established in Queensland in 1605. Now there’s a myth to conjure with.

One of the most interesting and powerful myth-making events in my lifetime was the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain. Simply put, a wild dog abducted a baby girl from a sleeping tent in central Australia, at the Aboriginal sacred site of Ularu – the big red rock. The public and media response to this event chose to characterize the baby’s mother as the bad mother who had killed her own baby. So a motif from folklore drove the unfolding story. And today, the whole terrible saga of the lost child, the wrongfully punished mother has become (as how could it not) a tale set firmly in the lexicon of Australian myths.

For myths (and fairy tales) do not always have happy outcomes, even though the expression ‘fairy tale ending’ means happy ending. In common speech when the term ‘fairy tale’ is invoked, the meaning is generally ‘wondrous, marvelous, good beyond reality.’ And fairy tales have their share of truly horrible moments – the shock of cannibalism in ‘The Juniper Tree’ or the moment with the huntsman in ‘Snow White’. Now there were two wicked (step) mothers. Who knows where those tales really originated? They are more or less set in their own formulas now, their origins lost in time. Whereas the story of Azaria is still part of recent history, her parents and brothers still living. It is, I suppose, an Australian fairy tale in the making. It has a moral. I think you know what it is.

The modern communication media have made a difference (huge) to the way stories are made. Hansel and Gretel would have developed from human to human – there are still humans, but oh, how much farther, how much faster  they can reach.

Am I being open-ended again? 

DEAR WRITER REVISITED 2013

Dear Writer Revisited (2013) is the updated version of the classic Dear Writer which has been inspiring writers since 1988. Go to https://www.facebook.com/DearWriterRevisited
Read comments on http://janefriedman.com/2013/09/10/understatement/

The Life and Times of a Book

Dear Writer Revisited

In the history of the world, 1988 is not so very long ago; in the history of publishing, it’s forever.  My writing manual Dear Writer was first published by McPhee Gribble in 1988, and was also published by Virago. It was revised, and republished by Random House in 1996. There was a time just before the 1996 publication when Monash students needed copies so I had a limited edition printed by Wild and Woolley. It has also been published in Indonesian. Three years ago, by which time the world of books and publishing had undergone the revolution that is continuing, Dear Writer needed a new revision. I was unable to interest publishers in this idea. I let it rest for a while, and then – about eighteen months ago, I decided I would publish it as an ebook.

Ah – easier said than done.

So the first thing to do was to get the manuscript on file. I didn’t have it. I would have to scan the book and create a file. It so happened that I had only one copy of the (1996) book, the one I needed. I was reluctant to destroy that lone copy, so I tried to buy one, but this was impossible. Then one lovely day when I was visiting children’s author Glenda Millard I saw on the bookshelf her battered copy of Dear Writer. I told her the story of why my need was greater than hers, and she gave me her copy.

Then page by page I scanned it. This was a very tedious process. Even more tedious was the business of converting the scans into a Word file. But then I had the enormous pleasure of doing the big re-write. I realised that although the world of writing – creative writing courses, festivals, book publishing, web publishing, blogs, tweets, ebooks and so forth – had undergone a revolution and was still evolving, the basics of writing fiction had not changed, and the human beings whose imaginations created the stories had not changed either. So the core of Dear Writer was constant. However I needed to acknowledge the changed environment. The exciting thing I did was to allow myself, the author of the book, to intervene in the narrative, to speak to the reader as myself.

I included short comments throughout the text, signalling them with ‘Author’s Note 2013’. These interventions give the whole thing a new dimension, a kind of post-post-modern tone. Letters – and this is a book written in letters from a writing teacher to a new writer – are not something a writing teacher of 2013 would be sending by mail to a student. So the core of Dear Writer Revisited is in the quaint old narrative of the letters, while the reader of the work is conscious that there is a presence, this time ‘Author’ who is owning up to running the show.

All very nice, then. So I have the manuscript of the transformed text. But it isn’t an ebook, is it? Enter Simon Groth of if-books – the Institute for the Future of the Book. Out of the blue he asked me to write an essay on my recent use of technology. So I wrote up the story of Dear Writer thus far. Simon directed me to websites on the production of an ebook.

It was at this point I realised the project was not something I could do alone. I didn’t have the skills to follow the directions, and it would take me a long time, I could see, to acquire those skills.

I asked Bronwyn Mehan at Spineless Wonders if she would help me, advise me, or perhaps take on the production of the ebook. Yes she would take on the production, clever woman. And furthermore, she would like to publish the book, or should I say the pbook. Dear Writer Revisted will be published as a book and as an ebook in October 2013. 

CREATING CHARACTERS  Once, after watching a poignant TV miniseries called The Lost Prince – I went to my bookshelf to look for information on this tragic boy, Prince John. I found there a memoir by the Duke of Windsor, one of John’s brothers. John gets but two passing mentions in the text which is a book I bought at a church fete. On the flyleaf the price – twenty cents – is written in pencil. The thing that drew my eye was the handwriting and the name of the original owner. In a fat and fluent uncontrolled almost-copperplate she has written her name in dark blue biro – Valda Goldbloom. I lost interest in poor little Prince John and went off on a search for Valda. In the Melbourne phone book there were two V. Goldblooms. Perhaps one or even both of these are Valdas. And Valda did not then have a presence on the world wide web. She is there now, although which of the web manifestations, if any, is my Valda, remains to be seen. Perhaps someone here in the audience is her niece or grandson. What’s the connection between Valda and the Duke of Windsor? Where are Valda’s love letters? Not that I have any real desire to see Valda or to speak to Valda. Her name, discovered on the yellowing page of an old Pan paperback, is a delicious source of inspiration, a bright invitation to give her a childhood, a romance, a large family of amazing children, a secret lover, a fondness for a particular shade of pistachio, a deadly vice, a winning smile, a garden in the Open Garden scheme, a career in television – well maybe not a career in television – but you see once I have been gripped by the notion of her, she is mine and I can make her. Did I find her or invent her? In a funny kind of way I think I was gifted with her. I feel that she came to me, trailing quite a bit of context and mood. She is somehow mingled with the exquisite nostalgic doom of the miniseries, with the battered old book, with the church fete (how did a Goldbloom book end up on the stall at St Barnabas – how did I end up at St Barnabas for that matter). Mind you Valda has only come as far as the Blue Marquee at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, but give the woman time, she needs to buy a wardrobe and have her hair done and maybe get a PhD in Business Management. Or a facelift. Not only do I love to feel a character stirring like this, but I also revel in the invention and/or discovery of titles for fiction – such as ‘Valda Goldbloom in the Blue Marquee’. That has a certain appeal. You see, perhaps as I speak Valda is sitting beside you, not knowing which way to look.   Maybe she breeds cocker spaniels. I chose cocker spaniels because there are many other breeds of dog I can’t confidently spell. Her husband is an orthodontist dedicated to Valda and to the accumulation of wealth. Valda is so depressed that she is contemplating leaping from the top of a tall building. How did Valda get into this mess? Well, I think that is for her creator to discover in the process of her creation. I will have to get on with the process of making Valda up – for that is what she is now – made up. That’s what fiction is – a made up story with its own life. Whatever the inspiration, whatever the ingredients, the final thing is an invention of the writer’s making.   I sometimes hear students and teachers of writing complain that lectures and workshops and text books purporting to be guides to writing fiction do not actually explain how to create a character. They do not reveal the secret and the rules. Now I suspect that there is something here that can not really be reduced to rules. And if there is a secret, it is like one of those secrets that can only be revealed to the seeker by the seeker. It’s Zen. Like most aspects and elements of writing fiction, there seems to me to be no straight answer to the question of how it is done. It is not exactly technical – it’s – well, kind of spiritual. If you listen to the many writers speaking at this festival, I think you will find that every now and again one of them will say something that hints at the fact that way back behind the stories there lies a certain attitude or disposition – the writer is a person who constructs fictions, fables, narratives – whatever you call them – and the writer sits at a particular angle to the world, with a particular kind of alertness to the shape and possibilities of people and events and experiences, with a keen eye and ear for the way things work, the way things might work, the way a character and a series of events might intersect and work together and unravel and wind up and so forth. I sometimes think that maybe the fiction writer lives half in reality and half in fantasy, forever playing with the elements of so-called real life and consciously or even unconsciously constructing new narratives – just in the course of everyday life. The writer’s pleasure is then to translate all that into written language for the pleasure of readers. And so as the writer writes, the characters form and develop. The whole process is in a sense on-going – so that when a character emerges in a story, the plot, the character, the mood, the meaning – these are all mixed up together, all part of each other.   The critics and the reviewers often come at the thing from another angle again. They say – this character is convincing, or flat, or tragic, or hilarious – or whatever. They are not so interested in how any of it came about, as in what the final effect was on them as readers. Which is of course fair enough. But behind all this, behind the reader, the reviewer, the wondering would-be writer – at the back of the fiction is the writer. How did the writer create the character? Found, invented? Well, I think bits of them are found, bits are invented – maybe the point is that the writer is there at the centre of it all, or at the back of it all – with that particular attitude, that state of mind, that readiness and willingness to fabricate the fiction – maybe that is what matters. I really am saying that I don’t think there are rules and formulas for this. All I think you can do is examine what other writers have done with characters in order to nourish your own process of the creation (and finding) of characters in your fiction.  I think it is so important to realise that the characters are part of the fabric of the fiction. Sometimes writers speak of characters who have arrived all by themselves in the narrative, and have proceeded to take over, leaving the writer wondering and marvelling and following as if from a distance. That does happen, it happens often, and it is truly one of the joys of writing fiction. You think you are writing such and such a story with such and such a set of characters, and then suddenly you find yourself typing something that is said or done by a character you had not thought of, and all at once that character starts to speak and act and change the direction of things. This is part of the glorious magic of writing fiction. Perhaps the most fun incidence of this in my own case was the appearance of Vanessa the talking cat in my two thrillers – Unholy Writ and Open For Inspection. I certainly never set out with a talking cat in mind. I might write a third book in the series, this one written by Vanessa. Another example in my work is the character of Virginia O’Day who wrote all the letters in Dear Writer. Another way of looking at this is to say that there might be a lot of me in Vanessa and Virginia, but because they are their own characters I don’t have to take full responsibility for what they might say or do. So they are very liberating for me.   Fiction is of course very bound up with the real world, and when characters are created they may have their genesis in who knows what part of reality, but then they take on their own being. Recently I read that Tom Keneally was inspired by a real live journalist called Caroline, and he created a character called Alice . Apparently he said that as soon as she became Alice she ceased to be Caroline, he forgot she had been inspired by Caroline, and she took on a life of her own. Tom made Alice up. Maybe Caroline doesn’t think so. But Tom thinks so. Who is in charge here? Well, that’s another matter for debate. Actually, I sometimes think at this point, of the legal questions of the algebra of a baby’s genetic heritage. Let X equal a baby Let A equal a woman Let B equal a man Let C equal a woman   Let D equal a man Let the egg of C and the sperm of D be hatched in the uterus of A to form X Let X be fed and clothed by B What is the value of X? So who owns that story?   Above my desk hangs this picture of Charles Dickens sitting in his chair surrounded by his characters who float about in the air. Are they the creatures of his dreams? Or are they spirits who have arrived from some unknown world of the imagination, spirits who have decided to visit Dickens for the purpose of becoming flesh as his creations. Or are they fragments of the life, the experience of Dickens, transformed by his heart, by his imagination – these are all such inexact terms – created, in the end by the use of words, by the music of his language.   I don’t actually think there is any answer to the question posed to the panel – not that that matters of course. I think the creating of characters is a truly mysterious process bound up with the mystery at the heart of storytelling. People love to hear stories. People love to tell stories, and yes, stories are inhabited by characters, but the music that is a story is so complex, so thrilling, that it seems to me it does not easily tease out into its parts. Not from the inside, anyway. You can take Wuthering Heights and examine the characters from the outside in all their amazing diversity and drama. But you won’t ever know where Emily got them from, and I doubt that Emily could have told you. They are integral to the thing the writer was doing. They are part of her gift to the reader. And the readers, all the millions of readers of Wuthering Heights make the characters again as they read. So perhaps there is not only the question of where they might come from, but the matter of where they are going.   My Heathcliff probably is not your Heathcliff. My baby X is not your baby X. As I read I make over the characters again and again, and so do you. And so does Valda Goldbloom. Bless her.

READING CHARLES DICKENS – first presented as a talk at Evensong in Christ Church Castlemaine July First 2012

Reading fiction has always been one of my greatest pleasures. I can trace my interest in the novels of Charles Dickens from when I was six. My sister was older than I was and she had borrowed The Pickwick Papers from the local Children’s Library. She would laugh as she read the stories, and sometimes she read out bits of them to me. I became desperate to borrow stories by Charles Dickens from the library. But – you had to be seven before you could take out books. So my father said he would take me to the adult library where I could borrow a book on his card. He led me away from the Children’s Library which was on street level, and where there was a tank of goldfish, round the corner to a yellow Georgian building. (This building, in Launceston Tasmania, no longer exists. It was lovely.) At some point inside he led me up up up a narrow spiral staircase that wound through shelves and shelves of books. My memory of them is that they were all rich brown and gold. Perhaps this is a true memory, or perhaps it is invested with the magic of the occasion. I searched long and lovingly among the Dickens novels for the one that I would take. I decided on Barnaby Rudge because it had delightful illustrations of a character called Dolly Varden. She wasn’t one of the alarming and vigorous imp-like caricatures, but a pretty girl in a bonnet. I also knew her name from a kind of cake, and also from a kind of figure that was often embroidered on tablecloths. So in a mood of quiet ecstasy I took home Barnaby Rudge. I am not really sure why my father let me do all this – perhaps I was impossible. Anyway.

Now I had a reasonable grip on reading, but when I set about reading this book I found that although I could often get the words, I generally couldn’t make any sense out of them. The sentences! Oh the sentences. Far from chuckling away at jokes that might have been in the narrative, I turned the pages slowly, weeping with a terrible frustration and despair.

For the record, here is how Dolly Varden, daughter of the locksmith, is described:

‘A face lighted up with loveliest pair of sparkling eyes – the face of a pretty, laughing girl, dimpled, fresh, and healthful – in a smart little cherry-coloured mantle, with a hood of the same drawn over her head, and on the top of that hood, a little straw hat, with cherry-coloured ribbons, and worn the merest trifle on one side – a cruel little muff, and a heartrending pair of shoes.’

I could see this from the pictures, but it was to be a few years before I could begin to comprehend the text. However this terrible beginning didn’t put me off, and I gradually collected my own copies of many of the books. In fact I became so devoted to them that from when I was about ten I used to write little dramas based on events in Dickens. I lived in Tasmania – this was before television, and entertainment was limited. So something people used to do was have eisteddfods where people – lots of them children – competed as singers and musicians – and so on. And it was possible to write little dramas and act them out with another child. I wrote up Pip and Estella from Great Expectations, also Miss Havisham and Pip. Another girl was Pip. I wrote up Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. I was the Dodger. Also Oliver and Fagin. Also Mrs Squeers and some of the boys from Nicholas Nickleby, and a monologue as Ebenezer Scrooge. We had costumes and scenery and sound effects. All this took place in a beautiful old theatre. This sounds a bit strange now – but in fact I think that the exercise of working, as it were, from Dickens, gave me some understanding of how a lot of it functioned. I came to love the sentences which had defeated me in the first place. And many of them have remained in my memory. In fact when I watched the recent TV production of Great Expectations I couldn’t understand why they made up new dialogue instead of sticking to the words Dickens had written.

Going back to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol – it was the name Scrooge that alerted me to the fact that some of the delicious and idiosyncratic names of Dickens’ characters had taken on lives of their own, and had gone into the language itself. My father used to read Disney comics to my brother, and I used to like to listen. There in the Donald Duck comics suddenly was the miser, Scrooge McDuck. The name of the Dickens character had come, longsince, to mean ‘miser’, and here he was – conflated with the Scottish stereotype of the penny pincher.

Just as the name Gamp, being Sarah Gamp,  the vividly terrible nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, became a word for ‘umbrella’, Mrs Gamp’s umbrella being her signature. Havisham. Oliver Twist. Fagin. Then there is the eternal optimist Micawber in David Copperfield – he is sure something will turn up. It’s from him that you get the quote:

‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’ You don’t have to understand old English money to understand that this is a warning against the global financial crisis. The characters, while being hilarious or terrifying or tragic or moving, are forever offering pearls of wisdom.

Dickens is well known as a social reformer, not only because of the effect of his fiction, but also because in everyday life he campaigned for change in areas of moral, social and economic matters. His early novels expose isolated abuses and shortcomings of individual people, whereas his later novels contain a bitter diagnosis of the condition of England. Just one example – in Nicholas Nickleby where he describes the children abandoned to the care of Wackford Squeers in the school, Dotheboys Hall:

Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!

And of course there is a dimension of Christian faith to the narratives, one brief example of this being in Dombey and Son. In the closing chapters Dickens invokes the presence of God, being: ‘that higher Father who does not reject his children’s love.’

Micawber’s story ended well, as he migrated to Australia where he prospered. In fact Dickens wrote a lot of essays about life in Australia – sailors, convicts, miners, bushrangers – and it features quite often as a place of hope and refuge in the novels.

Uriah Heep, also from David Copperfield, is synonymous with hypocrisy – he being the most vile and oily hypocrite who gets his power by pretending to abase himself. And as far as I know the Dolly Vardens who became embroidery designs took their name from the girl in Barnaby Rudge.

In Little Dorrit there is the girls’ companion the snobbish Mrs General – she is engaged to give the girls some social polish. She is forever giving silly words of advice, and is famous for trying to improve the mobility of their lips by suggesting they practice saying the words: papa, potatoes, prunes and prism. Prunes and prism – is a phrase that has gone into the language to signify a prissy manner of speaking.

Many of the wonderful names are obviously invented – the family of Smallweeds in Bleak House. Joshua Smallweed is ‘a leech in his disposition, a screw and a vice in his actions, a snake in his twistings, and a lobster in his claws.’ In such a description you can see the intensity of the vision and sense the momentum that informs the whole story. One of my favourites is that of Pleasant Riderhood, daughter of the pawnbroker in Our Mutual Friend. Pleasant is an unattractive looking girl with a muddy complexion. She marries the taxidermist, Mr Venus who has sallow skin and weak eyes.

The humour in Dickens is so sharp and hysterical, the pathos so melancholy, so sorrowful – and the whole thing comes at you with the power of hallucination, and stays with you forever.

Pickwick was apparently a real name that appealed to Dickens as the name for the genial founder of the Pickwick Club. He sets out on his travels accompanied by Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle. Their destination is the cathedral city of Rochester. Now this is important. Dickens’ early life was spent very happily in Rochester. The terrible times came in later childhood when he had to work in the blacking factory, and when his father was imprisoned for debt. The extremes of good fortune and ill fortune are constantly being played out in the novels. In Pickwick, then, Rochester is a destination of joy and optimism and comedy.

Think now of the title of Dickens’ final and unfinished novel – The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Drood might be a real name – but in any case it is the very opposite of Pickwick. Death and doom and darkness and disaster ring in the name Drood. And again, the destination is Rochester – named in the novel as Cloisterham, it is clearly Rochester. So here at the end of the author’s life, when he was desperately troubled and ill, the scene returns to the place of his joyful childhood, but now it is a place of evil weirdness and terrible hallucination. The journey from Pickwick, through all the magic and drama of the novels, comes finally to Drood, to the tombs and terrors, horrors and opium dens of the last book. This story is imbued with mournful anxiety and an atmosphere of dread and foreboding. Cloisterham is a forgotten town, bypassed by the developing railway and subject to decay and destruction. The eerie Cathedral with its hidden secrets is at the dead centre of Cloisterham. Edwin Drood disappears on Christmas Eve – not the celebratory Christmas of A Christmas Carol, but a dismal evening in the shadowy town. 

Wonderfully, there are, in this creepy murky world, comic characters such as the stonemason Durdles who spends his time tapping the stones of the cathedral to discover the resting places of long dead celebrities. But as always, much of the comedy is in the way Dickens used language. Here is the description of Durdles who was: ‘Chiefly in the gravestone, tomb, and monumental way, and wholly of that colour from head to foot. In a suit of coarse flannel with horn buttons, a yellow neckerchief with draggled ends, an old hat more russet-coloured than black, and laced boots of his stony calling.’

There is the rosy and good minor canon the Reverend Mr Septimus Crisparkle who lives with his mother in Minor Canon Corner. As for his mother: ‘What is prettier than an old lady when her eyes are bright, when her figure is trim and compact, when her face is cheerful and calm, when her dress is as the dress of a china shepherdess.’ Many things would be prettier of course. By contrast is the main love interest, Rosa Bud who is a pupil of Mrs Twinkleton. Rosa as it happens is less vivid than Mrs Crisparkle. She is ‘wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish, wonderfully whimsical.’ As for Mr Crisparkle the minor canon, who equates spiritual health with physical fitness: ‘His radiant features teemed with innocence, and soft-hearted benevolence beamed from his boxing gloves.’

You can quote Dickens forever and ever. But that bit about the boxing gloves was my punch line.

 

REVIEW OF NOVEL CAPE GRIMM

Go to this link to read a review of my novel Cape Grimm.

Review is by Dr Gerardo Rodriguez Salas of the University of Granada

http://www.carmelbird.com/pdf/Review%20Cape%20Grimm%20%20by%20Gerardo%20Rodriguez%20Salas.pdf

WRITING PLOT

Who Put the Overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder? By Carmel Bird Published in Griffith Review number 30 Every working work of fiction, regardless of length or genre, is to some extent a kind of mystery offered to the reader; every work of fiction has its plot. Every work of fiction in some way troubles its reader, and tries to bring some form of solace, whether bitter or sweet. It is its own kind of question and its own kind of answer, taking the reader into itself as part of the fabric, part of the business that fiction has with the world. This year is the sixty-fifth anniversary of Tove Jansson’s first Moomin book. One of the great treasures in my bookcase is a 1953 copy of a picture book called The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My. Moomintroll, in the course of carrying home a can of milk, helps Mymble to discover her lost sister, Little My. There is one episode per page, and the question is, will they find Little My and get the milk home to Mother? You are dealing with a page-turner, since each page ends with the question ‘What do you think happened then?’ Here is plot reduced to its simplest elements. Situation, character, danger, resolution. Not quite the regulation sometimes put forward: situation, complication, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement (which don’t have to happen in that order). But near enough. You get the question and the tension as the answer comes in steps, as new dangers are put in the way. In case you are wondering, they do get home safely, but unfortunately the milk has curdled. As a cute coda, Mother says they will have strawberry juice instead. Always, as it happens. It is the repetition of the question ‘What do you think happened then?’ that often comes back to me when I am thinking about plot in fiction. Because I love the way the reader is involved in the business of it all. And in this particular story, the reader is constantly taken by surprise and thrown off balance by the trademark Jansson mixture of mild terrors and delicious, whimsical beauty. I often find it difficult, analysing fiction in hindsight, to separate plot from other elements, such as character and situation. It is even more difficult when I am the creator of the story, on the other side of the business, to separate them during the process of writing the work. I sometimes talk to groups who are studying the art of writing fiction, and I find that frequently there is a deep-seated notion that fiction writers begin by writing an outline of the plot of their short story or novel. Perhaps some writers do this, and do it successfully, but I am inclined to agree with Stephen King who, in On Writing (2000), expresses a strong opposition to this view. And I think there is much for a student to lose by trying to begin with a plot outline. When the work is finished, it will be possible to look back on it and analyse the plot, if that is something required by teachers and supervisors. But not before. Stephen King speaks of writing fiction as the act of digging out fossils, discovering part of an ‘undiscovered, pre-existing world’. He is vehement, saying that to make plot outlines is ‘clumsy, mechanical, anti-creative’. He points out that writing fiction is not a fully conscious and mechanical process, that much of what goes on is located in the writer’s unconscious. But it is also useful and instructive for a reader (and a prospective writer) to analyse the plots of fiction when the fiction is complete. Hold up the fossil to the light. I mean, you can analyse the things you read, and I also think that in doing so you can gain insight and inspiration for your own Kingean excavations of the fossils from that pre-existing world. An analysis of the psychological horror novel Misery, for example, is instructive in the light of what its author says about plotting. ‘Plotting and the spontaneity of real creation are not compatible.’ But of course there is a plot. He just didn’t put it there – he dug it up from the matrix of his own imagination and let it loose. EM Forster talks about plot in Aspects of the Novel (1927). He is, though, discussing the thing after the event, not what happens in the early stages of the writing process. He explains that there is a difference between ‘story’ and ‘plot’. He says that plot tells what happened and why, and gives meaning to it. But when speaking of ‘story’ his language grows ugly, and he says that story is ‘the chopped-off length of the tapeworm of time’, it is ‘mindless time-killing curiosity’. Ouch. Story, he says: ‘The king died and then the queen died.’ Plot, he says: ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief.’ All he has really done there is show how to make two facts interesting by making the second one consequential, something people do regularly when telling tales anyway. I think Forster was splitting hairs by dividing up story and plot like that; however, his assertion that plot is a ‘writer’s arrangement of events’ that will express that writer’s ‘attitude to the human condition’ is fair enough, I suppose, if a bit grand. Plot can often be boiled down to a very simple question like: Who killed Cock Robin? Who stole the tarts? Will Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr Darcy? This is not plot summary, but rather quick-fix plot essence. Some questions are more complicated than others, some answers more interesting than others. The how and why of the things that happened are what readers (and writers) love to know. Readers love the shocks and surprises, the twists and turns, the magical mystery tour of a well-managed plot as the writer’s ‘attitude to the human condition’ is gradually revealed. Main plots and sub-plots often have fun with each other too. Just as the Moomin line ‘What do you think happened then?’ pleasantly rings in my mind when I think about plot, so does the title of an old song I used to love playing on the pianola when I was a child, ‘Who Put the Overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder?’ See how the situation and the character are beautifully bound up in the question. You want to know, don’t you? You want the terrible mystery solved. The matter arose from the rather horrible fact that Mrs Murphy did her washing and her cooking in the same vessel. She left the overalls in the pot by mistake, and then made the soup, and when she dished it up the overalls were discovered. She had the decency to faint. I speak here of mystery. Plot always, I think, involves mystery, however slightly, and therefore will invite suspense. Satisfaction comes with some form of resolution. NOW THAT I have boiled plot down (influenced perhaps by Mrs Murphy) to a question and an answer, I must speak of the importance of structure in the delivery of the goods. For the simple chronological accounting of the adventures of creatures such as the Moomins will not always do the trick. There will often be more than one question posed, and not all puzzles will necessarily be solved. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) is notorious for leaving several key questions dangling. For some readers these gaps are part of the beauty of the whole; for others they are maddening flaws in the story. If you read du Maurier’s ‘The Rebecca Notebook’ you will see that she did a lot of planning, but the notes really outline her writing process; they are not strictly a plot summary. The structure of a story will provide the real strength. And structure is in any case intricately bound up with the characters and the events, as well as the language and the tone. How does a writer put the elements of the plot before the reader’s mind? Thinking about the structure of The Great Gatsby (1925) is a favourite pastime of mine. Where does the writer begin, at what moment in the sequence of events? And how does the writer organise those events to deliver not only the plot, but also the key ideas which inform the work? Think of how the death of Rebecca, the mystery that drives Rebecca, is woven into the fabric of the narrative, and seeps and spills into the story all along the way. Maybe it doesn’t really matter about the unsolved bits that will forever dangle and tantalise. Because the structure of The Great Gatsby places the death of Gatsby at the beginning, the question is, who was he and why did he die? The hit-run accident that marks the turning point in the plot does not feel accidental, but inevitable. It feels like part of the dreadful heart of the tragic fossil Fitzgerald brought to the surface and held up to the light. By the way, you can dig back into Fitzgerald’s short fiction and find the Gatsby fossil in various stages of revelation: in ‘Winter Dreams’ and ‘Absolution’. KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND Anton Chekhov have been noted for the ‘slightness’ of their plots, although I wouldn’t characterise them in this way. The stories work on the level of metaphor, subtly moving their people into view, revealing their hearts and predicaments with a particular melody that is captured by the reader’s own heart. They don’t appear necessarily to follow the rigid progress from situation to denouement, although often these elements are delicately present within the fabric. Here is the plot of Chekhov’s short story ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, sometimes called ‘An Artist’s Story’. The boiled-down version of the plot is: will the foreign artist marry the younger sister? (From the beginning the reader hopes not.) The narrator is a snobbish romantic French artist who is renting a grand house in a Russian provincial town. He is depressed and uninspired until he meets a family – a mother and two daughters. He falls in love with them and their house. One daughter is fiercely determined to work for the betterment of the peasants, and constantly argues with the artist, while the other, Missy, is clearly falling in love with him. Finally he kisses Missy, and watches the green light in her mezzanine room until it goes out. The next day Missy disappears with her mother. She has told her older sister what has happened, and has been sent away to protect her from the decadent fool of an artist. His response is to leave in a huff. He returns after seven years to learn that the older sister is having a certain success in local politics, and that nobody seems to know what has become of the younger. He admits that he is gradually forgetting the house, but imagines that Missy is waiting for him somewhere. He is just as big a prejudiced fool as he always was. Missy has had a lucky escape. The dramatic success of Missy’s original banishment to her aunt’s house, resulting in her seven-year disappearance from view, is quite brilliant. The power of that older sister. When I had finished reading this story for the first time I kept thinking about it, mentally going back over the details, relishing the success of the tone of voice which delivers the narrator, in his own words, up to the reader as the tedious creature he is. The question is, will he end up with Missy, and the hope is that he won’t. He doesn’t, and he hasn’t learnt anything about anything. Missy is safe somewhere – even, it seems to me, safe in the reader’s heart. (Perhaps incidentally passing on her green light to Jay Gatsby. I like to think so.) It may be a simple question this plot is asking, but it is set within a vivid, highly textured and complex fabric of Russian life in the 1890s. It is a beautiful story of Missy’s lucky escape. The story is finely tuned to itself, working within its own metaphor to trouble and untrouble the reader’s mind and heart. Katherine Mansfield’s ’Miss Brill’ is another little masterpiece whose plot is often described as slight. The question hovers and quivers – a ‘chill from a glass of iced water before you sip’. Working always within her complex and subtle metaphoric fabric, Mansfield has this story quietly pose the question, is Miss Brill dying? Is this afternoon in the park her last? To say that the answer is yes is too crass, really, but the answer is yes. All the story asks you to do is to walk with it, and look deep into Miss Brill’s heart. After reading a story by Mansfield or Chekhov you have a deep sense that something has happened. When I read my first Mansfield story, ‘The Fly’, at fifteen I knew with a jolt that something had happened in the story, almost when I wasn’t looking, and something also happened to me – I was in love with the short-story form. In The Common Reader (1925) Virginia Woolf explained that when you read Mansfield ‘the horizon widens, the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom’. That seems right. ONE OF THE dearest novels on my shelves is Austerlitz (2001), by WG Sebald. You could perhaps think that this book did not have a plot. Oh, but it does. The question is a simple one: who is Austerlitz and what does his life mean? The answer is the whole glittering melancholy hypnotic transcendent cello music of the grand and flowing narrative which enunciates the dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their ultimate destruction. In this novel the writer’s style and the plot are so entwined as to create their own form, but truly the plot is deep and strong and essentially simple. I find it is a nice exercise – boiling stories and novels down to the simple plot questions, and then considering how the questions and their answers are inextricably woven into the other elements of the narrative. The simple questions remain throughout, underneath everything, tapping away at the reader, keeping the reader going, turning the pages to find the answers, taking pleasure in the twist and turns and highs and lows. In a sense every work of working fiction is a puzzle the story poses to the reader. Will the son inherit after all? Will the young man write the great man’s biography? Will Little Dorrit marry Arthur Clennam? Will Jane Eyre find happiness? Who killed Cock Robin?