David Malouf in Conversation with Morag Fraser

Introduction

Shane Carmody, Director of Collections and Access, State Library of Victoria

Good evening everybody, welcome to the State Library of Victoria, my name is Shane Carmody and it’s my privilege to be the Director of Collections and Access at the State Library and my special privilege this evening to welcome you to this event with our great friends and partners Reader’s Feast.

Earlier this year I had the privilege to go to Dublin and spend some time there with Mary Dalmau, in a house that has a great association with Irish literature and with the work of James Joyce. It’s the house in the which the story, The Dead, was set and I can tell you that Dublin’s early summer weather was not unlike Melbourne’s early Spring this evening, it was very cold. However, the warmth of the welcome more than outweighed that and I hope it does this evening for you.

We are very delighted to have this evening one of Australia’s greatest authors and no stranger to this library and no stranger indeed to events and activities here in Melbourne. David Malouf I’m sure will entertain, engage, interest you, and inspire you to go out and buy many copies of his books, which is what Mary would like you to do and of course we have our great friend Morag Fraser. But I would just like to welcome you very much to the library and hope you come back on many occasions and come and visit our exhibitions our beautifully restored reading rooms, by all means read a book but Mary would rather prefer that you bought one from her. At that point, I would like to hand over to Mary, thank you.

Mary Dalmau, Reader's Feast

Good evening everyone, and I just want to reiterate the welcome that Shane has already extended to you. We are great friends with the library and that comes from a life time ago when I was studying librarianship and at that time there was talk of the library perhaps altering things like the reading room being closed and I was horrified. It’s actually something dear to my heart to support the State Library of Victoria and we have great friends here and it was an easy thing to think that we would like to include them in this wonderful opportunity that we’ve been given to have David in conversation with Morag tonight.

David once said to me that I turn up at every event that he’s at in Melbourne and I do. Over the years he is without doubt my favourite Australia author and while we were in Dublin earlier this year I was waxing lyric then about David’s writing to all and sundry. I’d like to just take the opportunity to thank you all for supporting Reader’s Feast, I’d like to thank Karen Reed of Random House for making this possible, Giovanna of the State Library and Mahina, who is my colleague and organises all of these events.

Morag is a great friend to Reader’s Feast and as I say, I’m sure you will enjoy this evening and enjoy the wonderful conversation between them both. Thank you Morag, thank you David.

Conversation

Morag Fraser

Thank you Mary very much. Ideally, I think you should all just leave now and go and buy the book and go home and read it because it’s a splendid work. Short stories that are like long stories, like novellas that will take you places that you’ve never been into, head spaces you’ve never been and David’s been talking assiduously about this book for days and days and days, but if he’ll indulge us because there are things that I would really like to know and I’m sure there are things that you would really like to know. We’ll talk about it a bit but please do what you should do with it, take it away and move into the quiet space that you have to when you are reading David. I came to this book after a lot of travelling and fussiness like that and I had to deep breath about a half a day before I could actually get into the mode that his prose draws you into and it was such a great thing to do, so thank you David. They’re very long short stories, they’re wonderfully long, they are almost novellas and you’ve done this before you like the form don’t you?

David Malouf

Yeah I love that form in which a story has a chance to open up and move to places that you are not expecting. I really like to do something where, when you are introduced to a character you may be puzzled. The more puzzled really perhaps why I’ve taken them up because they don’t immediately seem as if they might be interesting and I like then to lead myself as the writer to discovering what is in them that makes them unique to themselves and hope that the reader then finds something there that they didn’t expect when they first began. I also like to take the characters through time so they have time to discover things themselves that they didn’t know were there and to reach places that perhaps they didn’t ever think they were going to go.

Morag Fraser

Which is not exactly what you expect of a short story is it, that travel through time?

David Malouf

No I think - well the archetypal short story I suppose is the story that Chekhov absolutely perfected, which is the story of a moment and a mood in which we get the sharpest glimpse into lives and then have to ourselves think what else there is and sometimes they’re puzzling stories because they’re quite mysterious. I quite like - I mean if I had to name the people’s who stories I think I would be most influenced by it would be someone like Tolstoy because I love those long stories of Tolstoy and Conrad. Long stories again...

Morag Fraser

Which are mental stories?

David Malouf

I think the Secret Sharing must be almost my favourite of all stories and someone like Kipling who also writes quite long stories.

Morag Fraser

Interesting that you mentioned the Secret Sharing because there is such an atmosphere such a whole world built up in that short story, just the feel of it, the smell and the taste of it.

David Malouf

Yeah, it’s a wonderful story because the small kind act that the man does at the end of the story of offering the man a hat because it’s going to be so hot where he goes in fact saves him in the end because the ship is turned around and he doesn’t know where the sea is and the shore is, but he can see the hat floating in the water as the man swims away. That is a wonderful turn about.

Morag Fraser

You say you like to take us to unexpected places with unexpected characters and I was intrigued that you start Every Move you make, that is the title of one of the stories, but also the title of the book, with Pascal, why not, good - do you want to read it or will I read it?

David Malouf

You can read it.

Morag Fraser

Alright and you’ll read it for us later?

David Malouf

I will, yeah.

Morag Fraser

Okay, this is Pascal, when I consider the brevity of my life swallowed up as it is in the eternity that proceeds and will follow it, the tiny space I occupy and what is visible to me, cast as I am into a vast infinity of spaces that I know nothing of, in which I know nothing of me, I take fright, I’m stunned to find myself here, rather than elsewhere, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there and now rather than then. Who sent me here, by who’s order and under what guiding destiny was this time, this place assigned to me. That seems to me to be what most of these stories are about and I was just intrigued to know what came first, the stories or the epigraph?

David Malouf

Well the stories came first and the stories came quite separately I mean they’re written over quite a long period, I mean my habit is to begin stories and then not know how to finish them. I don’t think I wrote any single one of those stories straight through, I mean they’re stories that I began because something interested me and then I got to a point where maybe like the characters I didn’t really quite know where I was going and then I often waited a very, very long time before I work out how I can finish the story. So the stories don’t all come together either they are put together eventually. I read Pascal a lot and that’s I think most wonderful and modern, it’s useless saying modern because they are questions that belong to absolutely any time. But it’s, that’s written at the beginning of the seventeenth century and I’m sure they’re questions that anybody who finally asks themselves what their life is all about has asked themselves, why me? why now? why here? What does this mean, is it, is it fated and is there a story here, which is just my story or is all this random and accidental. I think I’d probably veer closer than Pascal towards the world of chance and accident but nevertheless we do ask ourselves about meaning, about fate, about choice.

Morag Fraser

This is a question that I was going to ask you later, but I’ll ask it now, talking about chance and accident, one of my favourite stories in here, it’s called 'War Baby'. When you say you take a long while to decide what happens and how the story is going to end, I don’t want to give this away because it’s a story where the end is crucial but it ends with an epiphany, I might say that’s a bit like redemption, was that a long while - please read it I don’t want to spoil it for you by telling you how it goes, but there are lots of things I can say about it, but it’s an extraordinary ending. It takes you to the top of a high building almost and I wondered where that came because there is this sort of - it’s a story about a young man who initially is going to war, goes to Vietnam but you don’t see him in Vietnam and then he comes back and obviously the experience changed him and changed him in a way that you think might be a descending spiral and then this ending, did that take a long while in the coming...

David Malouf

Yeah a long time. That was a story that sat for a very long time and at the point where he’s come back and he’s drifted into a kind of sleep walking state almost where he’s just, or changing the metaphor, sort of treading water and waiting for something to happen and not necessarily believing that anything will happen. And then really nothing happens in him, in the end, something happens that just alerts him to the world of surprise and possibility which somehow, I mean the story plays one of those games that really only language can do. One of the things that interest me most about language is, we’ve all been brought up on film and we’ve all come to believe that film really is the essential modern medium.

Morag Fraser

Have we?

David Malouf

Well I mean, I’m more interested, I’m more influenced by film probably deep down probably than any piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. But there is things that film can’t do and that prose can do, prose in a single sentence can shift time the way film can’t and a sentence can say, ten years ago he would not have thought that now, or it can say, there would be a time twenty years from now when he would see that. Film can’t do that and what happens in this story at the end really the guy is simply had his mood changed in a way that makes him believe that there is possibility and that it’s done with a shift of tense like that. It says that when he looked back at this moment he sees a turning point but he doesn’t know what it was in the situation or what it was in him that created, turned that into - made that a turning point.

Morag Fraser

Some sort of sudden accession of grace almost.

David Malouf

But I had a very, very long time to wait, I really had to say to myself, what could happen at the end of this story that would be miraculous but absolutely ordinary. Something that you would recognise as a complete change of mood, like a change of key at the end of a piece of music but would never and would be surprising and unexpected but would also seem absolutely inevitable once it would happen.

Morag Fraser

I’m very glad you waited because the ending is wonderful. It’s a story about war there is a hovering of death and war through many of these stories but what it doesn’t do and what you resolutely don’t do is sort of see more in black, white, it’s a very non judgemental story about war.

David Malouf

Yeah

Morag Fraser

Although war is sort of adumbrated there as a terrible thing but that’s characteristic of these stories I think is it not they’re looking for resolution rather than conflict.

David Malouf

Yeah and I also I decided that I really don’t like writing very much that’s judgemental and I don’t find myself in a position to make judgements of that kind. I mean what I’m interested in is contradiction and doubt and exploring that and leaving it unresolved is really the kind of writing I like. I decided that I just don’t like writing where the characters are either dammed or saved, I don’t believe it anyway, so I could never do it.

Morag Fraser

So is this recent or are you moving into a sort of Shakespearian comedic phase?

David Malouf

No, look I think there’s always been...

Morag Fraser

Oh go on, go on, you can be ambitious.

David Malouf

No, no, I was going to say there has always been that element I think in my writing of - I wish not to make judgements but I think I really want to write things - put it this way when I wrote my last novel, which was Conversations at Curlow Creek. That is a novel in which something is going to happen and a man is going to hang another man because that is his job. I wanted the reader to believe always that a dare would hang Carnie because that is his character. He doesn’t want to do it and he doesn’t believe it will achieve anything but he is the kind of person who would never go against his profession and it’s orders and so there is going to be a tragic ending, that man is going to be hanged. But I think anybody reading that book does not want it to happen and so I really wanted another kind of ending which would allow us to consider the possibility that it hasn’t happened and because it is set in a historical moment, what it dare discovers is that the moment when he allows Carnie to go down into the water and wash, which is really the end of the book - at that moment people out there have created the story for themselves which is a kind of legendary ending to all this in which he allows Carnie to escape and that becomes another ending.

I mean readers are sometimes confused between the two endings. I don’t really mind because I think we ourselves are in two minds, as I always am about one thing and a wished for another thing. That belongs to that world we have created in our culture and maybe in all cultures and certainly in literature. That is that, we know that life is tragic, it always ends in death but we’ve created this alternative form which is a comedy in which the end is not tragic, you know somehow that reality is suspended and so you have those Shakespeare comedies you know where I think the last comedy is where people who we thought were dead are not dead, people who thought they’d committed some terrible crime and murder discover they haven’t, children who are lost are discovered. We need that, we created that form out of need to believe that there is another possibility.

Morag Fraser

I was thinking more of Jeffrey Chaucer than Shakespeare in a way because your characters always seem to have a dimension that is inaccessible to judgement, somehow. Something like Stuart the character in the first story, a wonderful story called 'The Valley of the Lagoons' who should be loathsome really, I mean he does such an awful thing but the writing keeps on taking you further and puzzling and you think, why did he do it. This seems to be characteristic of so many of the stories. Layer after layer peels off so you really can’t make judgement.

David Malouf

I really quite like at the end of that story the fact that the first person narrator who’s eyes we are seeing all this through has created that Stuart character and...

Morag Fraser

He’s demolished him, he takes him apart again doesn’t he?

David Malouf

Well what happens is he thinks of - he’s quite an ordinary sort of guy, the Stuart guy, but he’s extremely narcissistic and he’s turned up - this is back in the fifties, with a little tuft of growth here that has always puzzled the boy because he thinks at first he’s just failed to shave and then realises that it’s deliberate and you can’t imagine this kind of dandy side of him. Then when something else happens at the end of the story he says, he notices again the little tuft and he says, I also thought it was out of character and then he says but who am I to decide what’s in or out of character, what do I know of this man or his character, and to make that kind of glib assumption. I quite like that; I think that’s how we are at our best.

Morag Fraser

You’ll never make a judge David, you’re not going to get onto a bench. So many of these stories are about young men, sometimes young women, but young men on the brink of something, they're initiation rites stories in a way, sometimes they’re about hunting, sometimes they’re about love and they’re so richly imagined it makes me feel that you must be very young inside yourself somewhere. Just the precision with which these young mens’ projections of themselves and their hopes and their wishes and these sort of cliffs that they stand on is rendered.

David Malouf

I think that there is something about writers that if you think of children - children are always - and it’s the only way kids have of getting into the world - they have to be very, very attentive to everything that is going on. They have to keep watching and they have to keep listening and eavesdropping and that’s because they’re always trying to work out why are these people doing this, what is it that they want, what is actually happening and I think that writers are people who kind of never get beyond that stage. I mean they go on being...

Morag Fraser

A good thing.

David Malouf

...puzzled by almost everything and to that, that’s the extent to which they’ve a kind of naivety that sometimes I think puzzles critics. But I think that is part of what, I’m still puzzled but maybe still growing up, left it a bit late.

Morag Fraser

You mean something like what Keats calls negative capability or capacity to be left puzzled...

David Malouf

Yes.

Morag Fraser

...and not have to resolve and that sort of thing.

David Malouf

And to be in a state of doubt without being worried by doubt. Except that children are in fact not like that and maybe writers are not like that either because they’re always trying to resolve their doubt, they’re always trying to solve the puzzle and each time you go to a piece of material and try to make a story or a novel of it - I mean that’s what you are doing, you are trying to get to the heart of the puzzle, and why this particular event, character, or situation keeps tugging at you and saying, understand me or look at me or whatever it is.

Morag Fraser

Good thing you’re not a scientist you wouldn’t want to finish the experiment would you?

David Malouf

But I think that’s...

Morag Fraser

Put the test tubes away.

David Malouf

I think that’s true too of another aspect of writing - the writer never really wants to come to a conclusion in both senses. He doesn’t want the thing to end because the end is to suggest that it’s now resolved and you can put it away. Whereas you can’t; what you do is abandon this attempt and go onto another one.

Morag Fraser

Is that why you so often shift modes, one of the really remarkable things about this book is the mode or the tonal shifts from one story to another. If you start with the first one with that wonderful mellifluous title, 'The Valley of the Lagoons' and then move through to 'Mrs Porter and the Rock', which is - 'The Valley of the Lagoons' is like viola obligato and then you get to Mrs Porter and she’s a bazooka or something - it’s extremely satirical writing. I get the feeling that David stands in front of the mirror and practices different faces and voices and how conscious are those shifts or do the characters dictate the fact that the mode will be satiric there or [inaudible] there.

David Malouf

Yes, I don’t really think that’s quite satiric except that she...

Morag Fraser

She’s not quite, she’s just sitting on the edge of it?

David Malouf

Yes, yes but she’s sort of...

Morag Fraser

She’s a wonderful character - read that one first.

David Malouf

She doesn’t accept any of the explanations that she keeps being offered and she’s I think she’s comic and she is...if she was satirical she would have to be more self conscious about it than she actually is I think. She’s angry a lot of the time because she is continually being told that she doesn’t know anything...

Morag Fraser

Despite...

David Malouf

and doesn't understand anything...by her son...

Morag Fraser

...by her appalling son Donald,and  her appalling husband. Donald takes her to Ayers Rock and her husband took her to Cathedrals and as far as she can see there is not much to choose between them and they’re all terrible.

David Malouf

The one saving grace is that she says to Donald, when he takes her to Ayers Rock, the husband has taken her to...  he wanted to see Cologne Cathedral and she says he managed to get in six others before he dropped dead. And so they saw seven cathedrals then and Donald insists that she should go and see Ayers Rock, and she says, like you mean before I die. And then they get there and she won't look at it for one thing, but the other thing is she keeps saying, she says to him is there just one of these or are there a whole lot more. She is afraid she is going to be dragged around to another seven.

Morag Fraser

Take her to the Olgas and she might have to count them. There is a lot of intent noticing in - it’s a poet’s noticing I think, just of detail in all of your writing David - it’s very different. Mrs Porter notices what’s in the cupboards or what’s on the floor, or the texture of things and then in some of the other stories what registers is the sound, the sort of cicada hum in the landscape. I wonder sometimes how you refresh the screen of your mind, or whether this detail must press on you?

David Malouf

I don’t know, actually I’ve been surprised, I’ve been reading aloud bits of, the Mrs Porter one and I’ve been surprised myself by the amount of detail in these stories. I think there is a quality of anxiety about that to this extent that I think what happens to writers when they get older is that they get impatient in a way  which means the writing thins out, it stops being as dense, the fabric of it stops being as fully felt in all the senses as it is early and I think I was anxious about that in a way that maybe made me... maybe that produces a lot of that kind of detail. I’ve become more and more...

Morag Fraser

Oh, it doesn’t read like that.

David Malouf

No, I’ve become more and more convinced myself that what all art is really about, both in the production and in our approach to it, is about attention. And I think we mostly, these days, don’t give enough attention to anything, but even to works of art. You go to an art gallery and what you are tempted to do is walk around casting a glance at this masterpiece and that masterpiece and you don’t actually see many people standing for half an hour in front of a painting and some of those paintings demand almost days, a life time’s attention not the casual glance. And in the same way with music I stopped, I’ve never listened to music as a background to anything else, I hate that. But I also notice that I don’t really put records on anymore, unless I was going to absolutely sit down and get my full attention. What I prefer now is to be actually in the presence of the music, in performance and I think that business of attention and presence now seems to me to be the guarantee that we are really there and it’s really there. And I think there is a lot of that about the writing in these stories too; I mean a response to that idea of presence and attention.

Morag Fraser

It is certainly there. I don’t know whether you heard or the people in the audience heard the Director of the Rijksmuseum talking yesterday about how you should go to museums and galleries and this is the Director saying for god's sake don’t go to the whole thing; a room at a time. I think I said before reading these stories, I came in very jangled and had to just slow - well the writing absolutely forces that, you can’t read at anything like the speed and it’s quite a pleasure once you do and I think that is possibly why we don’t read poetry as we did because it just demands of your time that we don’t give. Do you want to read something?

David Malouf

Yeah. I might read the opening pages of 'The Valley of the Lagoons'; I’ve not read it...

Morag Fraser

That would be lovely.

David Malouf

...I’ve not read it, I’ve been reading other things.

Morag Fraser

It’s a lovely story.

David Malouf

I’ve been reading 'Mrs Porter' quite a lot because it’s quite light, but I can read the opening couple of pages of 'The Valley of the Lagoons'.

Morag Fraser

That would be lovely.

David Malouf

This is a place I must say, that I went to in 1955, I’d just finished university and I went to North Queensland for the first time and was staying in a pub up on the Atherton Tableland for a week and the man who owned the pub said, 'Look we’re all going out on a shooting trip into 'The Valley of the Lagoons', would you like to come?' I went, and the Mayor’s son in that case, none of the characters are here but the Mayor’s son who was just my age was being taken out to shoot the pig which we did in exactly the circumstances as here on our way to the bird place. It’s just miles and miles and miles of water lands, crowded with the most amazing birds.

Morag Fraser

I’m glad you told me that because I was going to ask you if you’ve ever been hunting, because if you hadn’t it was a prodigious act of imagination, it was the best thing on hunting since I read Marguerite Yourcenar in 'Memoirs of Hadrian' talking about hunting. So I’m glad that it wasn’t just David conjuring something that he couldn’t possibly have done.

David Malouf

It was a very long time ago.

Morag Fraser

Yeah but it must have made a mark.

David Malouf

1954 is a long time ago.

Morag Fraser

Read.

David Malouf

And it’s narrated in the first person by a young boy.

Morag Fraser

Angus.

David Malouf

Yeah. 'When I was in the third grade at primary school, it was the magic of the name itself that drew me. Just five hours of a good dirt highway, it is where all the river systems in our quarter of the state have their rising, the big rain swollen streams that begin in a thousand thread like runnels and falls in the forest of the great divide, then plunge and gather and flow wide banked and muddy watered to the coast. The leisurely watercourses that make their way inland across plains stacked with anthills and run North West and North to the Channel Country where they break up and loose themselves in the mud flats and mangrove swamps of the Gulf. I knew it was there and had been hearing stories about it for as long as I could remember. Three or four hunting parties some of them large went out each year at the start of August and since August was the school holidays a good many among them were my classmates. By the time, he was sixteen my best friend Braddon who is just my age had been going with his father and his two older brothers, Stuart and Glen for the past five years. But it was not marked on the wall map in our third grade classroom and I could not find it in any atlas, which gave it the status of a secret place, accessible only in the winter when the big rains eased off and the tracks that led into it were dry enough for a ute loaded down with tarpaulins, cook pots, carbon lamps, emergency cans of petrol and bags of flour, potatoes, onions and other provisions to get in without sinking to the axel. A thousand square miles of virgin country known only to the few dozen families of our little township and the surrounding cane and dairy farms that made up the shire. It was there but only in our heads, it had a history but only in the telling, in stories I heard from fellows in the playground at school or from their older brother’s at the barbershop or at the edge of an oval or on the bleaches at the town pool. These stories were all of record bags or of the comic mishaps and organised buffoonery of camp life, plus of course the occasional shocking accident but had something more behind them I thought than mere facts. Fellows who went out there were changed. That’s what I saw, kids who had been swaggering and loud were quiet when they spoke of it as if they knew more now than they were ready to let on or had words for or were permitted to tell. This impressed me since it chimed with my own expectations of what I might discover or be led into when I too got there. I stood in the shadows at the edge of what was being told, tuning my ear to the clamour off in the scrub of a wild pig being cornered while a kid no older than I was stood with an old Lee Enfield .303 jammed into the soft of his shoulder, holding his breath. An occasion that was sacred in its way though no one least of all the kid who was now retelling it would ever speak of it that way. All that side of things you had to catch at a glance as you looked away from a slight almost imperceptible warping upwards of a deliberately flattened voice.'

Morag Fraser

Enormous metaphysical weight and freight in all of that, isn’t there.

David Malouf

You try to keep it light as well.

Morag Fraser

[laugh] Which is freight rather than weight...

[Audience questions removed]

Morag Fraser

...There is a fragility I was going to ask you about and I will now. Many of the characters in these stories is as though there are two characters that mean something to one another they are on escalators and there is a brief moment of contact and then it is gone.

David Malouf

Yeah.

Morag Fraser

Is that how you conceive of life?

David Malouf

I think I was more interested here than I’d ever been before in the extent to which people’s real selves and real lives are secret and mysterious and that even in families where people are sharing a house and living in the same conditions that people are so different from one another and there is a kind of a lot of loneliness and separation in places that we think are cohesive, like families, marriages, relationships. I think that is quite a lot of that in the book, about the essential separateness and loneliness of people, but also of the wish we have to get to the centre of other people in some way. I mean that title story, Every Move you make is about a women who passionately wants to know about the man she is living with and he’s continually alludes her to – and she discovers towards the end another fact about him which may explain it but maybe that fact doesn’t explain it either.

Morag Fraser

Yet it’s not tragic the way that story ends at all, it has that loop at the end somehow as they all do.

[Audience questions removed]