Tales of Mystery and Romance Page 3

  C. What the hell does she mean she ‘knows better than to become involved with married men’. A trite ordering of her human relations. A statement so representative of her damn thinking.

  D. She saying ‘yes, come’ – the commander, opening herself physically, at her decision, verbally commanding me. I wanted to be commanded by you. Why is it that you had so much emotional command over me while I considered you so conversationally intolerable?

  E. Monday: arrange for D’s photograph for article.

  Tuesday: invite Sunday guests – Milton?

  Wednesday: inquiry consul re visa?

  Thursday: discussion with Wendy re new issue.

  Friday: lunch Hestia. Jack Kerouac Wake????

  A. Yes, I enjoy the dinner party and the luncheon, now more than I do the party. That’s a very over-thirtyish thing to say. I like wine but although I have what might be called an experienced palate it is not a tutored palate. Your ‘dropping’ down to Majorca for the weekend, so casually, seemed to me here at Backhouse Mountain as unreal as if you said you were lunching with King Arthur. How parochial my life must sound. My letters say Backhouse Mountain, Southern Highlands, New South Wales. Yours say London, Majorca, Lisbon, Madrid. You talk of Sillitoe, Richard Burton, Crossman, and others you’ve met. I talk of Milton, trendy, ambitious associate professor, Thornhill, great unknown film director, Adamson, NSW poet. You’ve come along way from Concord. Backhouse Mountain is, as you know, less than a hundred miles from Concord.

  B. That party at the end of High School. The beer we took to it. The girls said no alcohol – she excepted. Already seeing herself as hard-living or ‘mature’. The girls were High School age but even then adopted the role of Guardians of the Morality. The young warriors wanted to be starting on their time of moral disorder before ‘settling’. The girls forced us to recognise them as the ‘good girls’. They were the girls one settled with –.not ‘bad girls’ with whom you caroused. We should have had bad girls – if we’d known any. She hankered after some anarchy then. Since then I have been driven by concupiscence. Carousing, whoring, debauching. We had to find these things outside Concord.

  C. Nothing.

  D. There in the country perhaps. New England University, a small farm, another child. To gently fuck your pregnant body, your swelling stomach, to fill you with my sperm, to impregnate you, to gently fuck your pregnant body, to sperm your body.

  E. I am writing to confirm arrangements which have been made to have advance payments on the grant paid to my account during May and June as I may be out of the country during those months. The account number is …

  A. You are imprinted on me because we went through everything together the first time. We entered, as it were, together into the real world. We turned to each other for comfort and aid during those prickly, low-ego days of youth. Your letters cause an emotional disturbance in a pleasant way, but the striking thing is that you still affect me. Which is saying no more than that you are emotionally alive for me, which is surprising to me. I am deeply relieved that you hold no ill will. It is surely an indictment of our conditioning that we should be feeling needless guilt, after these years, both of us. Simply because of the breakup of our marriage – guilty of having failed the ‘institution’. For godsake.

  I sometimes shudder at my sexual pig ignorance during those years. But why? Why should I have felt some special responsibility to be sexually sophisticated, sexually informed. We were of the same age, same background, same education. Must have to do with the expectations of the male role. The male should know. Yet we could not talk. And I could not look. I really think that I could not physically look at you naked – I mean, I could not bring myself to look at your breasts as breasts.

  Yes, please keep writing, I find this renewed con tact with you fascinating and warming.

  B. Schwarz and Walker. Damn their souls.

  We read their books together, those Penguins on sex, so foggily inexplicit, so prescriptive, so anti-sexual. The dark fifties. The books stank of fear of sex. Depending on those swine for help in our dumb, bewildered sexual darkness. The sweaty, guilt-twisted clumsiness, trying to break from our timidity but failing and then resorting to lies, sexual noises that lied, the lying grunts and signs, hiding our miserable uncertainties, or eagerness to please, or to be pleased, wanting to be overwhelmed with sensuality which we never seemed to find but pretended we had.

  Schwarz and Walker, those bastards.

  C. I find her sexually evasive in her letters. She won’t meet my statements. But also on other subjects. She talked only once of sex and then used the expression her ‘sexual chemistry’. For godsake, am I creating my own private illusion about her – attributing ‘cosmopolitan’ sophistication to her, trying to tell myself she isn’t the same irritating girl from Concord High but now, in fact, a worldly woman in Lisbon? Does she, for instance, now have taste? Yes, I am creating my private illusions about her. Yes.

  D. Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone. Suspended silence of a breathing presence. Physically out of reach. Removing that adolescent trepidation of intimate closeness, dread of the physically unknown. Yet on the telephone, the reaction in a fly excitingly confined, safe from expectations not understood. Threatless excitation.

  E. The telephone account at Backhouse 94 is now overdue.

  A. To be frank, I consider your going to a fortune teller to be a form of hysteria. It certainly conveys to me that you are not as self-contained, as in control, as you present yourself. It is a resort to the non-rational. It is the first break I’ve seen in your coping image. I have a double reaction to it. I see it as hysterical and it worries me for what it says about your condition. But at another perspective I am prepared in all scientific humility to grant that there are, so far, unexplained aspects to ESP and that para-psychology may have something marginal to offer. More, that some people have highly developed antennae and hypersensitive insight. But as a way of either looking to the future, or as a way of ordering one’s life, or producing solutions to crises – bunk. Maybe a good fortune teller would be perceptively acute enough to permit ‘projections’ on the sort of data which the acuteness would provide about your personality. Let’s face it, women in times of emotional stress, and I’m not being sexist here, simply descriptive, tend to superstition. To seek irrational solutions. Men have different types of irrationality. I have had my Tarot cards read and have talked with the guy who did the reading. It seems, firstly, that to be a good Tarot card reader, or fortune teller, you need out-of-the-ordinary perception, a sensitivity to personality clues and signals and to be able, also, to collect and process these minute reactions to key words like ‘death’ and so on. Secondly, there is a proneness to believe on the part of the person having his fortune told, especially if it offers relief from a dilemma. These cause the person to screen out the wrong guess, and the misperceptions, and to seize and elaborate the near guesses and vaguely accurate perceptions, and generally true observations. There is, I’m sure, a secondary elaboration, a filling out of the generalised and vague statements of the fortune teller, an investing of these with explicit personal meaning. There is, of course, a need for the person who sought this sort of intellectually disreputable assistance, to justify it by making exaggerated claims for the experience. I don’t think this is conscious lying – it is more an unconscious cover-up. I suppose it could be of value, in that it is usually only one small part of an overall response, at a time of crisis, to find data about our selves and situation and to gain resolution of the crisis. I suspect that it is a dramatisation of the decisions and the self-insights already gained miserably. A supernatural confirmation of something the unconscious has already formulated. It is also perhaps a relief from the hopeless inadequacy of ‘rationality’ in times of personal crisis.

  I don’t mean to be hard on you, but my reaction comes from pained disappointment at the crack which has appeared in your ‘level-headed’ control.

  B. We had bought a new car; in the first week
she ran into another car. She cried with self failure and with distress at having damaged our bright new possession, so important in our minds and lives at the time. I’d been in a rage and refused to comfort her. Feeling, maybe, that this was ‘women’s treachery’. I have since experienced, myself, that peculiar high anxiety which comes from a car accident, especially a minor accident when there is no numbing from physical pain or shock. It involves some sense of psychic hurt, the car as extension of self. We had much tension expressed through the car. I suffer retrospective guilt for having not comforted her. For having withheld love, using the situation to punish her. I want to say that all that car tension was so foolishly wasteful of our feelings and time. I want to say this to her in intimacy and to absolve all the rancid guilt, burnt like black grease into the rim of my memory.

  C. Really, what about this incredible fortune telling nonsense? How can I buy that? She is a nut. How did a girl from Concord High School, a teenage atheist, a rebel, end up at a fortune teller. Her only mysticism has been a smattering of Church of England Sunday school. How could such a commonsense girl end up in a darkened room of a Portuguese gypsy seeking supernatural insight into the future.

  How could I ever mystify myself sufficiently, blind myself enough, to enter back into confident, laughing intimacy with this woman? It is inconceivable.

  D. Nothing.

  E. For Sunday ten steaks. Ten dozen oysters. Hestia will do the salads. What about the Kerouac Wake?

  A. Well, looking back over the thousands of words we’ve written to each other in recent months, we certainly have, over the years, created all sorts of distance between us. Since we first made love together in our school uniforms at Concord High in Room 17. This distance is inevitable, but it is also true that we can communicate in some sort of sense, but more importantly, that we want to communicate. That is strange. Perhaps the disparity between us, our lives in the last ten years, the levels of thinking (not meant offensively) simply means that we are distinct people and that this is a generator of fascination. It occurs to me, though, that we might not bother with each other if we met as strangers. Would we want to get off with each other? But we can never meet as strangers. We have a special experience which bonds us above and beyond those sorts of reactions. Our shared suburban childhood and adolescence and early adulthood puts our relationship outside those sorting tests which people use to select friends, acquaintances, lovers. We are imprinted on each other.

  B. We had lived for the first year in a house, too large and in the grip of an over-run garden, the former house of a circus owner. It had outhouses smelling of animals, the private pets of the former owner. The odour of fleece, hide and manure, the animal body smells which still hung there, would come through our noses and into our bodies on hot nights when we lay together rutting.

  C. This should really be stopped – this correspondence, these fantasies. It is feeding the wild, caged fantasies with which I should have nothing to do. It is bad enough them growling in the night. Incompatibility is blatant but these foolish childhood yearnings override it, like some gleeful, uncontrollable eight-year-old. If I did go to Portugal and it didn’t work out, what heart ache and gut ache and wasted psychic energy. ‘If I went to Portugal’ – there’s the whole craziness. I think it has to do with being up here at Backhouse Mountain, isolated and brooding, talking to a note-book. The drift from reality, idle imagination, self-deceptions, all enticed along by erotic memories. You’ve been courting her, Christ, since the first letter. Those ambiguous expressions like ‘emotionally alive’, ‘imprinted on each other’. And the rest. All the time moulding a virtue from ingredients which should render the relationship unworkable. Calling ‘incompatibility’ ‘ego-automomy’ – neutralising the emotional acid with another language system. Setting up special measurements so that the nostalgic remnants could be passed as ‘relationship’. All that exists is a series of letters, commonplace letters, which you’ve used to set up a screaming white sound of illusion until both of us have been tuned out, listening to the wild white sound. Badly imagined innocence. Rationalisation of a relationship which was an already well-tested failure.

  The problem is that while she had been for years a psychological presence, in that she had never left my dreaming life, she had never been an operative presence. That is, I didn’t find myself thinking in terms of possibility – she was of dreams and sexual fantasy – not of kitchens and bathrooms.

  Safely away from life, while admittedly, at times, a miserable and intrusive presence, essentially she was an erotic and sentimental recollection. A controllable miserableness, from guilt, which could be used in idle moments as a flicking whip to sting a vaguely felt mood of, say, moroseness. Also I had kept the existence of the child suppressed. Now it became rampant, badgering.

  I had ripped out the emotional wires to avoid being pestered by the calls of lost aspirations, plans and pledges. Now I hover on the point of reconnection. What should have happened is that the letters should have underscored the unreality of possible reunion. The illusions should have been invalidated by the letters. The unbridgeable distance between our personalities should have been measured and confirmed. She chose a blind inner security. I chose something else.

  There is, in me, an advocate for reunion who argues that the reunion would ‘humanise’ me – be my salvation. Domesticity, the child, regularised relations. Bunk. Belong once again in the great mainstream of the conventional river of life. Bunk.

  D. We ran the school newspaper together at Concord High. We both wrote a column called In Concord. We turned to each other in Room 17, hands inky from the Gestetner and kissed, as the light of day faded out. There were no lights in our school. We felt for the first time in our lives another body against our own, felt for the first time free-flowing lust. We kissed on the lips for the first time, and kept kissing until we moved downwards to the floor of the room. A school tunic bunched around her waist. A rigid prick standing out through an unzippered fly. A quick, uncontrolled ejaculation. Our breathing out of cadence. The walk home, trying to keep as close to each other as public decency would allow. Then being unable to disengage, standing physically welded for hours until her mother came to the verandah and said my mother had telephoned looking for me. To touch your black hair and taste your sweet saliva.

  E. Passport ready for collection.

  A. Whatever else we will get from it, at least we will have indulged in boozy memories and boozy sex (maybe), accepting the terms that the visit means nothing of a commitment to any direction, other than to be honestly impulsive, from the moment to the moment, to prevent the development of baseless hopes and private illusions which, anyhow, we are now too mature, have been through the mill too often now, to in any way entertain …

  THE JACK KEROUAC WAKE – THE TRUE STORY

  It was claimed by James Hall in The Australian that Kerouac’s death passed without notice in this country. This piece will refute that. It will also try to elucidate what in fact happened on that night, the night of Jack Kerouac’s Wake – my part in it, the explanation of Milton’s execrable conduct, and his elaborate misrepresentation of my behaviour.

  I do not want to devote excess wordage to the event, to Jack Kerouac’s Wake, or to tip it, as it were, over into legendary proportion. The Wake, literary scholars should record, does not have legendary proportion.

  Firstly, it was not Milton, Nigel, Adamson, or myself who first suggested that we have a Wake for Jack Kerouac. It was an American who made the suggestion – an executive from Coca Cola whose name eludes me. I think he was on with Terri, but that doesn’t seem right.

  Anyhow, I remember the location clearly. It was the Kings Head Hotel. We didn’t usually drink at the Kings Head. It was then a pub for journalists and others from the old Daily Tele graph. Incidently, it was the old Daily Telegraph where I was briefly employed as a cadet journalist before being fired from police rounds. I suspect that I was fired for over-displaying my Baudelaire. Baudelaire was my excuse for not being ver
y good at police rounds. I was, I told senior journalists, a poet. All this is simply authenticating detail.

  The American said, you know, that Kerouac is dead, why don’t some of your writers and Balmain poets by the dozen get together and have a Wake for ‘ole Jack’.

  Milton said alright as long as I don’t have to do all the work. Get the University Arts Seminar Society to do all the work, he said. Milton lives in dread that if he doesn’t maintain tireless vigilance, one by one the people of the world will stop working and he’ll end up doing ‘all the work’ – it comes from having a lazy elder sister.

  I remember, though, plunging my chin into my middy glass with an agony of the spirit at the idea of having a student society organise a Wake for Jack Kerouac. Jack, let’s face it, was not a man of the Academy.

  But what could I have done? It is easy to say, in retrospect, that I could have held out for a spiritually appropriate venue. Say, Adamson’s Ford Customline.

  I was restrained because of Milton, and our attempts to make it as homosexuals. I still believed it was possible.

  I was restrained also because I was a suburban boy who’d left Concord, and who had a reverence for the university. I remember swearing, as an adolescent, that I would always keep my feet tough enough to walk over hot asphalt, on the hottest summer day. I have not kept this promise. But being a barefoot suburban boy who has this reverence for the university, I was unable to oppose the idea by simple reflex.