Metropolitan Opera, Tosca

By Giacomo Pucini (music), Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica (libretti)

Luc Bondy (Director), James Levine (Conductor), Karita Mattila (Tosca), Marcelo Álvarez (Cavaradosi), George Gagnidze (Scarpia), Lincoln Center, New York, October 6 2009

I went to see the much maligned Metropolitan Opera production of Tosca in New York on October 6 2009. That was my birthday treat.  I took one of the last seats that was for sale and it was in the director's box, so I hung over the side of the auditorium (taking care not to fall, unlike Tosca) and had a wonderful time. It had its own little sitting room behind it, and a narrow corridor which was separated from the auditorium by a velvet curtain with PRIVATE inscribed on the pelmet.

What can be said about Tosca that has not been said before? It was brilliant. How could it be otherwise? Anyone who loves the "shabby little shocker" could enjoy it performed anywhere and anyhow. I’ve seen a few productions, firstly in Tasmania in 1967 with my cousin Mavis Brinckman as Tosca, then at the Sydney Opera House with Eva Marton in 1984, the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in upstate New York in 1998 and now at the Metropolitan Opera. But I have also enjoyed a version delivered by a solo street busker at the Cafe de la Paix in Kings Cross, Sydney, and nothing can compare with the performance of Act 2 by two octogenarians, residents of the Casa di Verdi home for retired opera singers, in Daniel Schmid's famous film Il Bacio di Tosca (1984).

Yet the New York audience, led by the increasingly conservative city newspaper critics, hated this new production and booed the director. The New York Times called it "a kinky take on a classic" because the staging of Act 2 introduced ogling prostitutes to Scarpia's den and, furthermore, deprived the audience of the spooky moment when Tosca arranges the candles and crucifix on and around Scarpia's remains (she lolls in shock on a sofa instead).  In a discussion at the New York Public Library two days after this performance (see the video below) Luc Bondy, having been forced by hostile critics to defend himself, said "I did not realise that Tosca is like the Bible in New York."

The audience booed because they love the old Franco Zefirelli production, in the same way as they love The Nutcracker at Christmas. Luc Bondy’s sets and staging are as new and crisp as Zefirelli's were old and fussy, yet the Te Deum was as spine chilling as ever as were all the famous, anticipated hair-raising moments. Floria’s demise was actually more dramatic than usual; instead of skipping off a three foot high battlement onto the old stuffed mattress hidden in the wings, she plunged face-first from a vertiginous bell tower, in full view of the audience.

It doesn’t really matter. All performances of Tosca are good. It's the kind of opera that just makes people want to scream, or cry, or die, or boo.

Watch Luc Bondy defend his new production of Tosca:

Snowdon, The Biography

By Anne De Courcy

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, 404 pages, ISBN 0297844873, 9780297844877

Apart from his photographs, there's not much about the Earl of Snowdon that is intrinsically interesting except for his sex life or, more specifically, the microscopic portion of it which he shared with his wives.

After decades of discretion on the subject of Princess Margaret's sexual promiscuity and alcohol abuse, Anne de Courcy has blown the lid and the greatest burst of steam comes from none other than Lord Snowdon himself. He details not only his late wife's infidelities and addictions but also his own.

He is probably much less kind to himself than he is to his former wife, but the point remains that in co-operating with this book he displays his egocentricity more than his compassion.  As a result, reading the biography is an intense experience, involving hour after hour of voyeurism as the dirty linen of London's high society and the Royal Family is washed, scoured, scrubbed and dried in plain sight (of all who wish to watch, that is).

It’s impossible to imagine that H.M. The Queen, hitherto Lord Snowdon’s good friend, will have been greatly pleased by this book, but she has forgiven the Earl’s rakishness before and so she might again.

Somewhere along the line Anne de Courcy fell in love with Lord Snowdon.  This works well for the book as her feelings intensify rather than compromise her desire to tell all.  In fact, her fascination with the Earl seems to cause her to draw more attention to his less appealing actions and qualities than to any others.

This does not reflect favourably on her subject, and it is disgusting for the reader who is nevertheless well - entertained.

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

By Nicola Beauman

Persephone Classics, Persephone Books, London, 2009, 444 pages, ISBN 1906462100, 9781906462109

Elizabeth Taylor was despised by the literary establishment in Britain, and she still is. This biography helps to draw attention to her genious not only by accounting for her life but by describing it in the context of a literary analysis of Taylor's work.

It's a fascinating account of a sharp eyed observer who turned all she saw into some of the most brilliant fiction of the twentieth century. Despite recent re-publication of her novels and short stories, she remains unpopular and disregarded.

Even her own family opposed the publication of this book, which is brilliantly informed and studious and places Elizabeh Taylor in the firmament of literary stars where she belongs.

August 2009

Frances Partridge, The Biography

By Anne Chisholm

Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2009, 36 pages, ISBN 0297646737, 9780297646730

Everyone who loved reading Frances Partridge's diaries waited for this book with the sort of greed which could only be rewarded with a stomach ache. 

It was widely expected that many of the tantalising gaps Partridge had deliberately left in her published diaries would be filled by the author's access to previously unreleased papers and letters, as well as Frances Partridge's friends and acquaintances and to Frances herself, who co-operated with the writing of the book for several years, until she died in 2004.

Some of the gaps are filled, such as the deaths of her husband and her son (painful events which Frances Partridge edited out of her published diaries), but most are not.  It's impossible not to wonder why or to conclude that the author decided not to include material which would dismay Frances Partridge or her many friends and aquaintances still living.

Ultimately, the biography adds little to the diaries; in fact, it relies heavily on them for content and this defeats its purpose.  Considering Frances Partridge's almost uniquely privileged position as an accute observer of British art, literature, music and society throughout the entire twentieth century, and Anne Chisholm's access to her during the last ears of her life, this biography is cause for significant disappointment.

July 2009

The Letters of Noel Coward

Barry Day (ed.)

Random House Inc., New York, 2007, Hardcover, 800 pages, $37.50, ISBN: 978-0-375-42303-1 (0-375-42303-6)

It's no surprise to that Noel Coward not only wrote notes and letters compulsively, but that he meticulously kept copies of them in a well organized archive so that he could be sure we would have the benefit of reading them decades later.

The trouble is, many of them (in fact most of them) are not worth reading.  Until she died in the 1950s his mother was the main object of his letters and his affections and it is impossible to read the letters to her without feeling slightly nauseated. It's a relief when now and again she attacks him for being pompous or patronising, because in the main he is, not only to her but to, well, almost everyone.

The editor's decision to 'stream' some of the letters into subject matter channels makes the book complicated because this interrupts the chronology, but sometimes this also saves one flipping back and forth to the index to find the next letter dealing with a particular subject. The tale of Coward's friendship with Marlene Dietrich is a good example. We are able to read of her unhappy affair with Yule Brynner without pausing to pant and fumble through the index to find the next lurid instalment (and it is lurid). But this approach destabilises the book's essential continuity.

The non-chronological approach frustrated me less than the inconsistent standard of the letters themselves.  Most are neither intrinsically interesting nor of a publishable standard. To the die hard fans such as the editor is (he has written or edited all of the authoritative works on Noel Coward) this would be no deterrent to enjoyment, but to those of us who love good letters more than we love Noel Coward it is a bore to have to wade through so much of so little consequence.

In Tasmania: Adventures at the End of the World

By Nicholas Shakespeare

I read this book while I was in Tasmania in March, 2009, staying at my late grandparents’ shack at Marion Bay, so found myself in the places Shakespeare was writing about, up the East Coast and around Swansea.

I enjoyed its casual narratives in the way that it is fascinating to read about a place you know well but I remained distant from the narrator.

Shakespeare accumulates no end of contradictions, paradoxes, and missing pieces as he drives about the island exploring its history and gossip. Although he engages plenty of weathered, shrewd and atavistic locals in discussions, he doesn’t pursue to conclusion any of the hints they make about the facts behind their histories, but leaves the stories as they are, enigmatically colourful.

Ultimately the book is a vast collection of pithy observations and leading questions, which remain unresolved. After writing it, Shakespeare decided to move permanently from London to Tasmania, to a house in a remote location beyond Swansea on the south east coast. I wasn't really surprised to find that he remained a visitor and has since moved back to the UK

Anyone who grew up in Tasmania knows there actually are solutions to the riddles for which Shakespeare finds no answers and I certainly doubted that he would want to stay in Tasmania once he’d worked them out for himself.

March 2009

Life With My Sister Madonna

By Christopher Ciccone

Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008, hardcover, 352 pages, ISBN-10: 1416587624, ISBN-13: 9781416587620

Reading this book is like watching an obese man complaining about his weight while stuffing himself at an "all you can eat" buffet.

Evidently Christopher Ciccone did not know that, in the wild, siblings slaughter each other.  When he was fourteen and his big sister Madonna started telling him what to do, he assumed she knew what she was talking about, and he obeyed her.  He's been doing this ever since and now he wonders why he is in trouble with his career, finances and identity.  Naturally, when he followed Madonna’s every instruction and made himself available whenever she wanted him, he became a bore and Madonna fired him.

Poor Christopher is still trying to work it out. He won’t of course, until like the man at the buffet he steps away from the table.  But in the meantime he hangs in the purgatory he shares with all of Madonna's ex family and friends, waiting for the call to return to duty.

Diaries: 1939-1972, Frances Partridge

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, ISBN 0297646664, 9780297646662, 715 pages

Frances Partridge, who died a few weeks short of her 104th birthday in 2004, kept diaries throughout her whole life, and reading them propels you into a parallel universe from which there is no escape until they have all been devoured.

She was acquainted with the entire Bloomsbury Group, but she knew almost everyone else who played a leading role in British writing, music, theatre, dance, cinema and painting throughout the 20th century, and her diaries lead the reader into what feels like an intimate acquaintance with them all.

The diaries continued for thirty years after the last published volume so we addicts are waiting for more (quite soon, please).

Listen to Frances Partridge on the BBC Women's Hour

December, 2009

Wodehouse, A Life

By Robert McCrum

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2004 530 pages, $27.95, ISBN: 0393051595

Reviewed in Good Reading, the Magazine for Book Lovers, ABN 38003 750 150, October 2005

Good Reading Magazine

Like millions of others I had an early attachment to P.G. Wodehouse’s books having read them in omnibus version through four years of Scripture at Prospect High School in Launceston. Although I have returned to them over and over I’ve always had the impression that Wodehouse was born old and boring.

This biography indicates that I might have been right about that. Half way through the book there is an entire chapter on tax returns and during the first half of the book Mr. McCrum cranks the reader's flagging interest with frequent promises of more excitement during the chapters covering World War Two.

It appears, despite McCrum’s apologia, that Wodehouse was an outright collaborator except that unlike some others he was directly commissioned and sponsored by the Nazis. Previously I had always thought he was an innocent victim of circumstance who richly deserved the knighthood so remarkably bestowed in his last year (the Queen Mother was a fan).

The book is well written and easy to read though it hasn't much to say as, when not writing, Wodehouse seems to have spent all his time watching cricket, having a martini before dinner and going to bed. If he did anything else (apart from collaborate with Nazis that is) there is little evidence of it in this book.

There is much to enjoy in McCrum’s valuable and informed enthusiasm about Wodehouse’s writing, but he tends to dismiss the rest of Wodehouse’s life by saying what an odd person he was - oh and a Nazi collaborator, but lets draw a veil over that.

After reading Allan Jefferson’s 1996 biography of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in which it was proved that she was a willing member of the Nazi Party, I was never able to listen to her music again and having failed to give away her CDs I threw them out. After reading "Wodehouse, A Life" I honestly doubt that I will ever read another Wodehouse book again (don’t hold me to that) or have one in the house (ditto).

The Blue Piano and Other Stories

By Carol Montparker

Amadeus Press, New York, 2004, hardvover, 30 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1-57467-087-5

Review published in Good Reading, the Magazine for Book Lovers, ABN 38 003 750 150, March 2005

Good Reading Magazine

The Blue Piano describes the experiences and people Carol Montparker encountered as she made her way to the top as a concert pianist and teacher of renown. As she did this on her own terms there is nothing Cinderella-like about this story, and the author’s ability to balance the consequences of human frailty with an erudite if obstinate optimism make this book untiringly readable.

The real horrors of her first marriage are off-set by her second husbband's kindness and generosity; the pomposity of parochial concert organizers is syncopated with the delicious bitchiness with which the author refuses to let them have their own way; the poignant description of the decline and death of a great mentor is enhanced by its treatment as a comedy of manners, and the meretriciousness of the author’s erstwhile country neighbors runs counterpoint to the spontaneous kindness of strangers (a recurring theme).

More about this book

The angst involved in the story about an impossible search for a lifetime’s journal and sketch book (accidentally left in a taxi by her well meaning husband) has one breathless for a happy ending, the elusiveness of which also defines the brutal yet moving story of a prodigiously talented student for whom success remains just beyond reach.

The Blue Piano And Other Stories powerfully conveys the endogenous talent and self discipline required to succeed as a professional artist. Yet the author communicates the positive value of all of her experiences so entertainingly that it’s not so much her success as a concert pianist that the reader admires as her understanding, her talent for witty observation and her enviable peace of mind.

The Extraordinary Operatic Adventures of Blanche Arral

By Blanche Arral, Translated by Ira Glackens, William R. Moran, Editor.

Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 2002, hardcover, 14 illustrations, $24.95, 352 pages,
ISBN 1-57467-077-8

Reviewed in Good Reading, the Magazine for Book Lovers, ABN 38 003 750 150, May, 2005


Good Reading Magazine

Any opera lover or anyone who has enshrined their copies of Beaton’s "My Royal Life" and Dennis’ "Little Me" simply has to have this book. But, unlike the stories of Beaton’s faux family and Belle Poitrine's misadventures for love, this story is real. Blanche Arral really did grow up in a well to do Belgian home, become a famous opera star in the Paris of the Gay Nineties, sustain an international career for many decades, and die the wife of a New Jersey dentist in the 1940s.

"Extraordinary” hardly begins to describe her adventures. After becoming an opera star despite her family’s better intentions, she married a Russian Prince, held court in St. Petersburg, and lost her husband in a mysterious manner in the early stages of the Russian Revolution. While searching for him in Constantinople she was imprisoned by the Sultan and literally had to escape from the seraglio (does this sound familiar? Keep reading).

Having resumed her career on the international opera circuit she was rescued from opera - loving rebels in Latin America, stole Melba’s concert audiences in Melbourne by virtue of superior marketing and escaped a tsunami in Thailand by clinging to a Louis Quinze chimney piece. She eventually found haven in the USA where, while singing Carmen, she was literally stabbed by her leading man who used a real knife instead of the one with the collapsible blade.

After her hair was burned off in a freak accident she made some of Edison’s first voice recordings and took to wearing the loaf-like wig in which she concluded her "extraordinary" life in New Jersey.

More about this book

These are just some of her adventures. Only their impossible circumstances and the history of the manuscript (there are several prefaces, the result of an amanuensis’ draft being passed from one intergenerational protégé to another) lead to the delicious yet unfounded suspicions about this biography. 

If it were not for the existence of historically proven photograhs and recordings which support many of the extraordinary facts set out in this book it would be far too tempting to supect that Blanche is yet another fabulous creation of a clever and very funny mind.

The Unknown Callas: The Greek Years

by Nicholas Petsalis-Diomidis, with a foreword by the Earl of Harewood

Amadeus: Timber. (Opera Biography, No. 14). Portland, Oregon, 2001. c.600p. illus. bibliog. index., $40, LC 00-040155. ISBN 1-57467-059-X


Like the fans of James Dean, Jean Harlowe, Jim Morrison, Diana Princess of Wales, and others, Maria Callas’s fans remain grief-stricken 29 years after her death, her annual record sales amount to almost one million dollars and her underwear is publicly offered to souvenir hunters at auction.

This book takes the prolonged post mortem one step further by focusing on Maria Callas’ early years before she acquired the fame, which gave her immortality, about which almost nothing has been previously written. As an investigative work it is staggering, involving minute detail of the years she spent in occupied Athens during World War 2. It’s a major task to read, and it’s with a sense of enhanced, sad understanding rather than factual enlightenment that one finishes the book and gazes once more on the Callas recordings and authorized iconography which the singer would probably have preferred as her memorial.

Still, the legitimate research behind the book counts for much, and it may be for this reason that the distinguished Earl of Harewood, regarded as a trusted friend of Maria Callas, wrote the preface. The strength of the book is the work the author did to find and interview witnesses, many now dead, whose observations are presented with apparent caution and respect for their reluctance to talk on the record at all.

This strength is also the book’s weakness, as few are willing or able to make authoritative remarks. It’s touching to see how many of her unknown former acquaintances and colleagues were unwilling to make adverse comments about Maria Callas or to recall events, which were painful to her and to them. In the absence of their precise confirmation of the facts on which they are asked to comment, the author presents the information anyway, subject to sufficient caveats to protect the integrity of the text and, in some cases, enhanced by his own opinions.

His attention to detail leads Mr. Petsalis-Diomedes to reinforce some of the well-known stories that usually appear in discussions of the singer’s life before she became successful and beautiful. Those that predominate in this book concern her youthful ugliness, greed, nastiness to others, and susceptibility to enemy aliens during the occupation of Greece, the approximate date of the loss of her virginity, and her relationship with the “wobble” in her upper register. These are part of the Callas legend and do no particular damage, but as Mr. Petsalis-Diomedes announces at the beginning of the book that he is going to avoid them it is bemusing to find oneself reading so much about them.

The book ends with the young Maria’s departure from Greece for her career abroad, but the author adds as one of several appendices a discussion of Maria’s famous break with her mother. No other book, except perhaps Litsa’s own silly book published in 1967, makes such a case of perfidy against Litsa Kaloyeropoulou. The author with relish presents previously unpublished letters between the husband, mother and father and Maria’s mother emerges as a giant amongst those self obsessed child/mothers who never allow their children to ignore them while simultaneously failing to give of themselves. For this reason alone the book is fun to read, but the discussion hardly amounts to the most perfect case of objective historicity.

In setting out to be the witness of truth to Maria Callas’ early years the author has succeeded in exposing many authentic (and minute) details of the child who metamorphosed into what the author calls “the miracle that was Maria Callas.” However Maria’s ability to be eponymous was too great to allow him to succeed completely. Like her underwear, which was bought and burned by the Athenian municipal council, this book shows, by a serious and mostly scholarly effort to find them, that Maria’s secrets are no longer available. Too much was not said and too many have kept their silence. For those who try to speak for her, this means everything.

Stranger than Fiction

A Clean Slate

by 

 

Marc Ellis

Published in Redoubt, Volume 13, University of Canberra, 1992, ISSN 1030-4932


The deal had been clinched soon after.

You must not judge me, he had said to her. It is not necessary. I will not repeat your experiences for you.

He was calling his own bluff.

She had prepared him for this. Bad previous experiences and all that was associated with them were revealed, laid out on the table.

It was not him, he must understand. It was her. She knew that.

The deal had been clinched soon after.

I promise you. It will not happen.

It was too risky. She wished to die away, to fade, to find a wall to flatten against, to find a place with no echoes.

It is not necessary to repeat your experience, he had said to her. He would make sure of this.

I promise you, he had said, it will not happen. You must not pre-judge me. It is not necessary. I will not repeat your experiences for you. You can be too alone.

She had prepared him.

It was not him he must understand. It was her.

She knew that.

***

The river succumbed to a race of long - tailed taxis and a party of Americans came down to the hotel’s landing steps to board them.

I want another spritzer snared a Brooklyn accent, and I want it pretty quick.

There was a flash of white coats and a mop of clean black hair leaned into the boat. He could imagine a blonde old girl in tight pants.

George. This is warm. Get me another one.

Just a moment, he would say, brushing his fingers against red fingertips as he took the glass away, her sorrowful demanding pout passed on to his lips. She would have her spritzer, and pretty quick too.

***

The travel bag lies on the fake satin bedspread, lacerated by its zipper. Outside, the traffic of Bangkok completes another silent lap of Silom Road. He hitches up his trousers and smoothes out the shadow of the slim, square case he has removed from one pocket. The noise of the shower falling onto the putty-framed tiles provides applause. The digital clock watched him from the bedhead. Four fifteen am. The avalanches of shower water fall less frequently than before, and more heavily. The washing of hair.

It could seem a pity, he thinks.

He eases his arm into her suitcase and places the cigarette case next to her pill boxes and jars, then eases his back - clad arm from the hole evenly.

***

She had stripped naked before him and taken a dress from the open, packed bag on the bed in front of her. She bent when she was naked, using the function of the search for clothes as a reason for covering and hiding herself. Her knees were bent and jammed together, and she kept her head down.

I should have known I’d need a change before the plane.

He had made certain requests and they had been satisfied. The cigarette case was rectangular with a finely - sprung lid. Cloisonné, with an elegant pattern in emerald and ruby. He pressed the lid and felt the small whir of the mechanism release it. The stuff was packed densely and bore the imprint of the lid’s underside. Things had gone smoothly.

***

Their hotel room overlooked Wat Arun. Stuck to each other, they wound their way into the shower where the distilled water fell off their skin and splattered on the porcelain. Only the odd drop survived, trickling and creaking into the cracks between them, cleansing, eroding. The rest rose in furious clouds to blend with the marble walls.

The sun was rising.

The Temple of Dawn he said. He felt his lips move in and against her ear. Multi - coloured mosaics, he said.

She pressed her head back against him and let the water run into her eyes and slide down her nose. It catapulted off her chin and fell onto her breasts, running over his hands and slipping between his fingers.

Porcelain mosaics, he said. Smashed porcelain.

He heard a laugh. She had not read the guidebooks. Setting his shoulders hard against the tiles he edged his feet together, clutched with one hand at her thigh, and pulled her to him.

The sun was moving, illuminating the handbasin, the bidet, and the huge towel which waited for them spread out on the rail, ready to enfold, to comfort, to disguise.

***

Their shopping had been peaceful, desultory. A silk suit off the peg and some scarves; an ounce of perfume and a cloying array of crèmes, moisturiser and soap, all only marginally cheaper than they were at home. Everything had come from the one department store, except for the cigarette case which she had dutifully bought for him at the government jewellery shop.

Now we can just watch, he said, leading her by the arm into the smog of Siam Square. We don’t have to do anything.

At Wat Arun, she ran ahead of him to climb the steps.

It’s easy, he had told her, handing her down from the tuk tuk. They were meant to be climbed. It has a function.

She had already run off, pursuing the smile she had managed to paint on her lips in the taxi. He could hear her laughing ahead, and the souvenir sellers scattered before her at the foot of the stairs.

The porcelain mosaics confused his vision. All he was sure of was the river, the tuk tuk and the high prang ignoring the sun.

She was gone. The souvenir sellers resumed their places. The heat flew with a quiet, steady hum and the taxi driver turned his back and sauntered towards a noodle stall beside the entrance.

She’s gone he said to himself, accepting the slight breeze relayed by the teak trees, hearing the slow thump of the temple bells. A cushion of clean, dry fur floated in the klong, and the grey water lapped at the sharp teeth of a drowned dog.

It fell in, he rationalized, not seeing the souvenir sellers as he mounted the steps.

It was an accident.

***

At the restaurant beside the river they chose their fish from a tank and said how they wanted it.

She agreed with everything he suggested. He could see the agreement welling up within her. Opposite the restaurant was a pink door set in a pink wall. A small, black dot was set in the door, and a compact doorbell was small but prominent below it. As they ate, several men came to the door, rang the doorbell and, after waiting for a few minutes, they were admitted. It was impossible to see who admitted them. The ends of some fingers, unmarked by rings or nail polish, by any indication of sex at all; the curve of the arm as it increased in substance from the wrist, that was all that could be seen.

Open and shut. They were all types, the men who rang the doorbell, and they all stood patiently waiting, indifferent to the calm curiosity of the diners who watched them and ate their fish and pushed the greasy durian around the frosty plates.

Her head was bent sightly forward and she was holding a piece of the foetid green fruit to her reaching lips. Another man was swallowed by the door and the importance of a clean slate, of blamelessness, sang out to him from the silence of the door’s black dot.

She had prepared him for this and he had called his own bluff. Bad previous experiences and all that was associated with them had been revealed, laid on the table, well in advance of this. He stood forewarned. He had been greedy, unable to control himself.

The durian was eaten; the last green smears across the plate they had shared exhausted any opportunities for respite from the decision of which had then informed himself, leaning, looking into her eyes.

Tired? We could walk if you’re up to it.

He took her arm and led her through the hotel arcade to the street, knowing that she would succumb to the first tuk tuk that blocked their path.

***

All ready?

She states this as happily as she can bear, smoothing back her damp, combed hair and putting her palms to her freshly-hydrated cheeks. She holds the towel. She has dressed damply in the bathroom.

All ready he replies, moving towards her. He reaches to take the towel, not going close to her. He throws the towel onto an armchair and zips up the suitcase.

All ready he replies, smiling for a moment tenderly at her.

© Marc Ellis 1992

Stranger than Fiction

Grotesques

by 

 

Marc Ellis

Published in Australian Writing 1988, Outrider Magazine, Manfred Jurgensen and Robert Adamson (eds.), Indooroopilly, Queensland, 1988 (subsequently published in Australian Writing Now, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1988).

click here to purchase from Amazon.com

Inside the abbey, Walter begrudgingly paid ninety pence to a verger and walked through a turnstile. He stood and stared at some tombs for a moment, then settled himself carefully on a fragile chapel chair and let the grotesques mock him from the cornice. They gave him the same feeling as when he woke up to find huge tarantulas staring at him from the top of the wardrobe door.

A group of tourists entered the abbey, revolving the turnstile steadily like a mill race. Pre-paid vouchers were pinned to their chests with name-tags. Walter slid back in the tiny chair and stared at them, considering what aliens a thirteenth century pilgrim would have made of them. The group hovered then dispersed, like a cloud of dust. Walter stood, stretched, and walked to a row of gaudy royal tombs. “You and I are earth,” proclaimed a plaque. Walter looked at it and felt the soothing hum of the ancient roof stretching to the left and the right of him, surging to and fro since 1225. Vergers circulated ceaselessly, like flies at a picnic, and the tourists stood in clumps, trying simultaneously to watch out for them and to ignore them. There appeared to be no local visitors at all.

Two of the vergers led their gowns towards each other and met at the plaque. After a whispered, business-like conversation, they separated, their robes unveiling the plaque again. Walker noticed that it bore the face of a woman carved in deep relief above the inscription. Her egg-shaped head, its top and sides finely drilled on its ruff, like an ice-cream on its cone. The eyes stared and the mouth, pursed with the expression of confident piety with which the deceased’s beneficiaries armed her for purgatory, looked as unpromising as the spout of a dry fountain.

Stepping up to it, Walter realised that the pupils of the eyes were in fact holes drilled into the eyeballs. Paradoxically this gave the woman a vibrant stare. Placing his hands on his knees, he bent to look into them. “The more you look in,” he observed, “the more she looks out.” In contrast, the realistic detail of the nose proclaimed its artificiality. It had none of the curious liveliness of the eyes. Almost perfectly Roman, a slight suggestion of bulbousness indicated the restraint which had been urged on the sculptor. Walter peered into the face like a rescuer staring at a mound of impenetrable rubble. ”Somewhere back there," he realised, “there were people like me.” For a moment, he was unable to evade the strength of expression in the eyes and to see beyond, to the ribs which had been made by the drill as it was ground into the lump of rock. The sight visited him for a few seconds. “Too clever for his own good.” Walter mourned the sculptor as, with the reassertion of their steady gaze, the eyes shut like a safe door on his glimpse of the artist. Walter stepped backwards and the words “You and I are earth” rose like film credits into his line of vision. “Condescending bitch,” Walter fulminated, “there’s nothing earthly about her at all. She looks as though she was marble all her life.”

Turning from the plaque, Walter discovered that a group of tourists had arrived at the font behind him and were gazing at it with blank intensity, as though they were considering buying it. A verger invaded their circle and flapped to a standstill. “For chrissakes!” he spat. In their astonishment, some of the group smiled and nodded. "Take it off!” he barked, pointing a bony finger at the cloth hat which one of the tourists was wearing. The appalled man stared blankly back at him. Simultaneously a flabby hand slapped onto the hat and slid it from view. The group shuffled in around the victim and gently moved him away.

Walter turned to look at the plaque again, but found that it was concealed from view by a woman who was carefully readjusting the vinyl strap of her travel bag. She wore a navy blue nylon shift over baggy matching trousers. One of her little toes poked out of the strap of her white sandals. Its nail had been painted pink. Her wide hips made her appear slightly diamond-shaped and her big, round head, onto which a pudgy nose and a pair of thick, sausage-like lips had been stuck, appeared to have been popped on top of her at the last minute.  Her hair had been dyed with henna and permed into mean little waterproof curls. The brilliance of her aquamarine eyes was an almost shocking contrast. She was looking expectantly at Walter.

Walter felt a bit trapped. He wondered if she was waiting for his reply to a question he hadn’t heard her ask. “They were worse than that at Notre Dame,” she said, as though giving him some important fact. Her chin, which retracted into the circle of her face when she was silent, identified itself when she spoke by pushing out two folds of flesh at the top of her neck. This created subsidiary creases of such width that she looked as though she said everything with a sarcastic smile. “Oh but this is history,” she said, oblivious to the irrelevance, “this is what I’ve really come to see.” Her eyes turned upwards, racing along the perpendicular lines like trolleys on tracks. Walter noticed that her name tag was stamped “Neeta Featherstone.” Her eyes returned to him, possessively. “It sort of makes it all, you know, worthwhile, doesn’t it?”

Walter felt quite unable to reply. The abbey hardly needed her endorsement, but he was interested to know what it made worthwhile. Neeta smiled at him confidentially. As though they had shared a private joke. Walter had the awful feeling that she was going to tell him something he didn’t already know. As a means of defence, he tried to categorize her, but this proved to be difficult. The group which had been around the font seemed to have completely vanished and, in any case, despite her name tag, Neeta showed no signs of belonging to that particular group at all. There was something about her that made her seem disembodied. Her tourist’s uniform sat on her with indifference, as though it was a fancy - dress costume. Walter smirked at the idea and was annoyed to observe that she noticed. “You know these parts?” she asked, rather abruptly. “No, I’m from Australia too,” he obliged, curling his toes wit impatience. Her response was unexpected. “You must be used t it ten,” she said. Walter, avoiding her eyes, was surprised to realize that this was an accusation. He felt as though he had been asked to explain what he was doing there, as though he had no right to existence at all. “I beg your pardon?” he responded pointedly. He was not confident that he was strong enough for Neeta. “You seem a bit bored,” she explained, smiling, “you young people don’t need to be concerned with the past, not like us old fossils.”

“Oh, but I’m very interested, “Walter said, earnestly. Her unilateral declaration of intimacy attracted his satirical cooperation. “I’ve always wanted to come here, all my life. It’s a little overwhelming, actually. There’s something about this place what makes you wonder what point there is in being alive.”

Neeta’s eyes gleamed, then travelled back up the perpendicular vaulting. “Oh this is a real treat for me, dear,” she said, “I don't concern myself with all that sort of stuff. I mean we have no choice in the matter, do we?” Walter tried to think of something to say. “Do we?” she repeated, almost imperiously. “No,” he replied, obediently. Her occasional intensity made Walter wonder if she was mad. “How long are you here dear?” she asked with what Walter felt was almost malevolent solicitude. He tried to deflect it by smiling at her. He noticed that the verger had returned to the font and that, although he was staring at him, he was showing no interest in Neeta at all. “A year or two,” he said, warily. The eyes narrowed slightly. Walter watched the verger clasp his hands behind his back, turn a full circle about the font, and disappear. Something made him feel that he had a lot of explaining to do. “Well, you are lucky I must say,” Neeta declared. “We’re on a tour,” she said, eagerly, parking her head at an angle and outing her mouth into gear, preparing to recite. “We’ve been in England for two days and we’re going to Scotland this afternoon. But we were in France last week and we’re going back over there to the continent to Germany Saturday. Then Italy, then Bangkok, then home.” She smiled her congratulations to herself. “We like this sort of thing,” she continued, still smiling purposefully. “Churches tell you so much about yourself; they really bring the past alive, don’t they. I don’t know why, but I feel really comfortable in a church.” Walter felt reproved. “They just go on and on,” she concluded liltingly. “Yeah,” Walter said, a bit gruffly, “but where does that leave us?”

Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.: “Magazine of Art Illustrated” (1878)

“Yeees," Neeta sighed. Her eyes focussed on his very carefully indeed.  Walter felt that she had understood his question. He was curious about why he felt that she was pretending she hadn’t. He wanted to find out who she was, but to ask her seemed ridiculous when she was wearing a name tag. “This is history, dear,” she said, indicating with her head to the left and right. “There’s not a lot we can do about it is there. We're just the meat in the sandwich!” She laughed mechanically and hollowly. Walter observed that all of her sentences concluded with almost perfect cadences, like hymns. He smiled politely and looked about him.

Neeta looked at her wristwatch. “I have to be off,” she said. “Off to everywhere,” sang Walter cheerfully. Neeta looked at him silently and hitched up her bag. Her arm moved automatically, as if it belonged to someone else; its action did not disturb the gaze she had turned on him again. Walter blushed to find himself meeting her brilliant eyes as they bore into him. “There they are,” he said enthusiastically, breaking the spell and rising on his toes to point to the group of tourists standing by the turnstile. A bus - driver was counting them. “Oh, I’m not with them,” said Neeta with a reassuring gush intended to convey her thanks for his trouble. She turned and stepped backwards towards the plaque where Walter had first seen her. Nodding goodbye, Walter turned as casually as possible and studied the font. When he looked back he saw that Neeta had gone.

Over by the turnstile the last of the tourists were trooping out of the abbey, their heads turning to the roof, the walls, the windows, soaking it up, making the most of their visit. Walter felt as though he had been left behind. A verger stood at the turnstile, occasionally nodding a brisk, begrudged farewell. When the last tourist had departed, the verger turned crisply and headed towards the font – towards Walter.

“This week Scotland, Germany, Italy, and Bangkok,” Walter sneered to himself, searching for a fraternal remark to make to the verger. “Get off that grave!” the verger snarled at him. Walter jumped. Looking down, he saw that he had been standing on some writing embedded in faded gilt. The verger rounded on him, “remember this is a church!” he hissed, turning and flapping his sleeves. The writing was everywhere that Walter could see. There was no way that the grave could be avoided.Warm with embarrassment, Walter hopped from place to place, trying to follow in the steps of the verger as he led the way across the plaques to the turnstile, where another group of tourists was streaming in from outside.

©     Marc Ellis, 1987

Stranger Than Fiction

LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland)

Thrashing Slacks

By 

Marc Elllis

First published in LiNQ, Volume. 16,  Number 3,  James Cook University, Townsville, 1988, ISSN 0817-458X


The old woman, she hits me with a stick. She gets it from the woodpile, bends down, and she takes a cough of a breath and puts her hand down on her chest.

“You little bugger,” she says and then she turns her head sideways while she puts her hand into the bottom of the wood pile. “You are going to cop it.” When she turns her head her hair at the back looks like stuff, not like hair. It’s all wound around itself and held on with three copper pins. When she’s down there in the wood pile you always know you could do something terrible to her just by leaning over and flicking those little copper pins out of her brown felty fluff – filled hair. But she’s always in her thrashing slacks. They’re a thick yellow (almost gold) and bottle green tartan. They flip around her ankles and are baggy at the knees and at the thighs, but all of a sudden they’re tight as a balloon around her belly. A big green and yellow tartan balloon.

“I told you. I told you to git out of there,” she says heaving herself up. Her dark brown knotted cardigan has bits of bark on the sleeve where she shoved it into the wood pile. “Go on, git.” She knows what she’s doing but she lets you think it’s going to happen almost like an accident, even as she breaks the stick over her knee. It’s off the old fence. It had been dry in January and the moss fell off. In February it was even drier and it started to fall down. In March we picked it up. We needed all the firewood we could get. The place was chilly. She ways complained about the cold but it never seemed to stop her. She cropped up everywhere. In the cellar, where the dirt floor covered the foundations, you could peek up through the floorboards into the rooms upstairs. There was even a hole stopped with a cork from a claret flagon, and you could see quite a lot through that. The telephone wire went from place to place but you couldn’t really tell where the rooms were. That always came as a surprise. At the front of the cellar you could stand up straight. But as you went back it got lower and lower and darker as well so you had to crawl on your hands and knees until right at the back you were flat on your stomach with your arms out in front of you feeling the way because you couldn’t see a thing. You could hear everything the same as when you slide down into the bath under the water and you can hear the boiler clanking and the walls creaking and when someone shuts a door it’s like a bomb’s gone off. Down in the cellar, you could hear her scissor walk. She wears shoes she can get off quickly. Brown sandals with flat heels or black slippers with a milky lining with grey lines and black spots from her naked foot. She has a pair of jewelled Turkish slippers turned up at the toes. She wears them all with the tartan slacks and it’s the slacks you see when you hear the scissor walk.

Slap slap slap slap slap through the house. Slap slap across the breakfast room lino. Clap clap clap clap clap into the kitchen. Bang bang bang. Bang. She throws the pots and pans about, and the baking dish gongs in agony. From room to room the scissor walk keeps her going about her business. She hates the housework. It’s dangerous to get in her way. And in the garden she hacks away at the oleander bushes crowding the entrance to the laundry and she prunes the waterfall of pigface back until you can see the bare brick of the crumbling walls. The despised rugs are hurled through the hall for a beating on the veranda. The flower pots along the front steps and the courtyard are force - fed from the front hose and the fuchsia petals are forced as they drown to wave goodbye by the bulging tension at the rim.

“Come here you little bugger,” she says, waiting by the wood pile. “Come here and be thrashed.” She’s not smiling at all. I walk towards her and know what is going to happen to me. The stick’s end is uneven. It’s part of the bottom of a paling and about a third of it is crusted with dirt. A rusty sliver of metal lies smoothly against its side. She’s appraising it, moving one hand along the stick to feel how dirty it really is. In wet weather she uses the bigger wooden spoon, which is clean. She doesn’t want to dirty her hands or my corduroy trousers. I step back and let her examine her weapon. I can’t stop seeing the gold and green of her tartan slacks, lines of rich, buttery yellow screaming up and down around the fence paling and going out of control around the bulge at the top of her thighs, crashing into each other and bouncing off again.

She takes too long. A shower of cream blossom falls from the almond tree. She doesn’t look up with me but she wants to. She’s annoyed by the blossom at her feet. She doesn’t know it’s in her hair, she’s like her wedding photo on the sideboard and her lips are as shiny and tight and her eyes are as bare. You’d think I’d pity her standing there with the stick, its prickles in her slacks and her head covered by shards of almond blossom from next door’s tree. But there’s no time even to wonder about it. I never even want it to be over with.

Illustration by Alex Frank

“Come back here,” she says leaving the dirty part of the stick at her end. She’s going to grab me again if I don’t. She has a way of doing that, she stretches out her arm, she keeps me ahead of herm but even then I can sell the lotion on her hands and I can get a closeup look at the rings, mellow gold and dirty opaque diamond, that strangle her finger. Her hands are mottled with flecks of blue, and rubbery green veins are plugged with the deliberate manicure she does in her bedroom. Sometimes when I look up through the wine cork’s hole in the floor she is doing her nails. She has a little pot, white and blue with a gold lid, for the expensive cream, two bottles of fluid that clear your nose just to see them, a bright pink filing board, and a blue scarf. She sits with her legs crossed at her dressing table with the radio on and taps her foot up and down beside the hole in the floor. Sometimes she sings, la la la la la, or she mutters the words at the tunes that are blunt from all the people who have listened to them. She beckons her fingers and holds her hands before atomising the nail, giving its fragments a chance to spin into space before they are turned to dust in the carpet at her feet. She sharpens her nails as she files them and they pinch my ear as she grabs it. “I said come back here,” she says.

Her voice has changed now; she’s pretending to be someone else. It’s not her, and we don’t know each other.

“This is for wilful disobedience,” she says looking at her stick, carefully stating each syllable. I do not ask her to clarify.

She generally gets worked up enough after the first few strokes, but this time it takes quite a while. I tend to hop about, and this makes it worse. But if I stand still it takes her longer to stop. The almond blossom quivers in her hair and falls from her shoulders as we go round and round. She has me by the ear. On one side I can feel the cold rings on her knuckle as she pushes me into her. On the other is the coarse cotton of her slacks, and their leaping yellow lines open up and she pushes me through them, into her belly, trapping me there.

© Marc Ellis, 1988